“This is about the last sorry-ass-excuse-for-a-meal I’m gonna have, suckers!” Keisha is smiling so hard her face resembles the center of an overgrown farmer’s market sunflower.
“What’re you talking about?” Isabel asks, her mouth full of salad.
“I am leavin’ this hellhole!” Keisha surprises everyone at the lunch table, including, it appears, Sukanya, whose fork pauses for a moment before piercing the next bite of her special-order kosher meal. “I got my walkin’ papers today and I am outta here.”
Isabel feels a knot in her stomach.
How come she gets to leave? She’s barely opened up in group.
“I gotta hand it to my insurance company. It’s like they read my mind or somethin’. Just as I’m getting sick and tired of this place, they send my doctor a letter sayin’ they ain’t coverin’ me anymore. So I get to go home, baby. Home sweet home.” Keisha says this so loudly that a group at the next table stops eating. It is very disturbing for patients to hear about someone going home from Three Breezes. Many are patients for extended periods of time, so to see that someone in their midst is leaving is like restless soldiers hearing of someone going AWOL.
“Keisha, okay, I know what you’re going to say but just hear me out.” Isabel isn’t quite sure what she’s going to say. “Group’s just now getting good and maybe your insurance company will go eighty-twenty with you on coverage. I’m sure your doctor can talk to them about it.”
Keisha gives Isabel a mournful look, but Isabel knows immediately that Keisha is too young to know that even a horrific thing like a mental institution can turn out to be the best thing for you. She knows Keisha is homesick, tired of her fits of rage and her subsequent restraint. She wants her mother and her own bed.
“No way, baby, I’m outta here. No more salad bar that’s been sittin’ here since I was in diapers. No more sharps closet. No more padded cell. Freedom, baby!”
Isabel slumps in her chair. Her bitterness at being left behind is palpable. “How’re you getting home? When are your parents coming?”
“To-morrow night.” Keisha split the word in two. “I just left a message with my sister, Mo, and she’s going to tell my mama to come up right after she gets out of work.”
“What time’s that?”
“‘Bout nine. What’re you, the human dry erase board or somethin’? That reminds me, after tomorrow I ain’t got to sign out no more.”
“Okay, okay. Give us a break for God’s sake.” Lark speaks for the first time since she was released from the soft room following her psychotic break.
“I got to go to the art studio to pick up the vase I made my mama.” Keisha turns to Isabel. “Wanna come?”
“No, thanks.” Isabel avoided the art studio. Her first day at Three Breezes she had been appalled to learn that there really was a place you could weave baskets. She would never sink that low, she told herself. She wanted no souvenir of this place.
“See ya back at the ranch,” Keisha called over her shoulder.
“I know how you’re feeling,” Kristen comforts. “It’s tough when people you like leave. Feels like I’ve been here forever, I’ve seen so many people go.”
You don’t know a thing about me. I don’t give a shit about any of you, that’s how much you know how I feel. You think we’re friends.
Isabel walks on in silence.
“It gets easier, if that’s any consolation.” Kristen pats Isabel’s shoulder. “It gets easier.”
The following day Kristen approaches Isabel, who is reading and smoking on the deck.
“Hi,” she says.
Isabel looks up. “Oh. Hi.”
“What’re you reading?” Kristen is twisting her head to the side in order to see the cover of Isabel’s book.
“Anna Karenina,” Isabel answers.
Kristen looks like she wants to talk, but the Russian novel is a dead end to her, conversationally. Sensing this, Isabel closes her book and asks about Kristen’s bandaged arm.
Kristen does not know why she likes to bleed, she tells Isabel. She loves to pick at her cuticles until they are ragged and bloody. She loves to let her hair get dirty so she can scratch her scalp until it bleeds in different places. She has one area at the very top of her head that she has kept from healing for two years. Every time she makes up her mind to stop, the scab will itch and she will pick it off, usually pulling several hairs out at the same time. It hurts so much that it feels good.
Even at a young age, Kristen says she knew this was not normal. Then, her first boyfriend in high school confirmed it. Billy was more than six feet tall, almost a foot taller than Kristen, so he could literally see over the top of her head. He spotted the bloody sore along the part in her hair.
“What happened to your head?” asked the fifteen-year-old, sounding disgusted.
Kristen quickly ran her hand through her thick hair and repositioned her part so the sore was covered up. She had just picked at it so the blood was vivid red.
“I told him it was a mosquito bite,” Kristen tells Isabel. “I was embarrassed when he saw it so I told him I’d scratched it because it itched.”
“Ew” was all he said and the conversation was dropped. Kristen was careful to move her part from then on so Billy would not notice that it was not healing.
“Did your parents like him?” Isabel asks.
“Yeah. At first they loved him,” she answers with a weary smile that fades too quickly. “Until they found out we’d been having sex.”