Elizabeth Flock - But Inside I'm Screaming

“But why has this made you want me to be perfect? Why have you expected me to be this happy little achiever?”

“Don’t you see?” Katherine looks at Isabel. “I wanted you the way you want your father.”

Isabel is breathless with the revelation.

“I guess I’ve been hard on you because it’s killed me so to be rejected by you over and over, year after year, while you wait by the window for your father to come home from work. I know I’ve expected a lot of you and your brothers. But it was that or become a wreck hoping for your love.”

Mother and daughter are both looking out across the grounds.

Katherine is first to break the thick silence. “I don’t know what else to say, really.” She straightens her posture and carefully folds her handkerchief, smoothing out the wrinkles, and puts it back into her purse.

“Say that you’ll love me if I’m not perfect. Say that you’ll still love me if I’m a failure at everything…because I pretty much am.”

“Oh, Isabel. I do love you. I may not have heard you when you said you weren’t perfect…that may be true. But you haven’t heard me when I’ve told you that, no matter what, I love you. I always have. I always will. But Isabel…and this is important…this may be the most important thing I’ve ever said to you. It shouldn’t matter what I think. It doesn’t matter what I think. You have to love yourself. Even if you’re a failure. You have to love yourself.”

Isabel feels the goose bumps of recognition tingling up her arms. She thinks of Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz when Glinda the Good Witch tells her she hadn’t needed to make the trek to the Emerald City—she had had the power to return to Kansas all along: she simply had to click her heels together.

There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.

It is the first thing Isabel and her mother notice when they open the door to her room: a single sheet of paper placed neatly in the center of her hospital bed.

“This is weird.” Isabel picks up the paper. “It’s four poems.”

Katherine reads the titles over her shoulder. “‘Loneliness,’ ‘Sleep,’ ‘Death.’ They’re so sad.”

The fourth is a short poem titled “Lark’s Song.”

My song is not easy to hear.

Melody.

Music, not.

My song is my voice.

My voice is not easy to hear.

Perhaps that is why no one listened.

The poem is followed by five words in tiny writing: “Don’t be afraid of laundry.”

“What on earth does that mean?” Katherine asks.

Isabel drops the paper and, without a word, hurries out of her room and down the hall of the unit.

It’s too late. I know it. It’s too late.

Isabel turns the corner just as the orderly is slamming up against the locked door. It moves but is not quite open. The orderly stands back and then hurls himself up against it once more, pushing it wide enough to slip in. Isabel is directly behind him. She hears nurses coming in their direction.

“Where’s the light switch?” His voice, full of urgent frustration, is close to her in the darkened laundry room.

“It’s on the right, I think. Not the left,” Isabel answers as she tries to reach around the door. There is something blocking her way.

The light comes on and Isabel screams.

Lark is hanging from the metal air duct. Her face is purple, her eyes bulging and bright red with broken blood vessels. She had tied her sheets together and moved the dryer directly underneath the pipe so she could step off it into oblivion.

“ Isabel? I was wondering if you would like to read my journal.” Ben is standing in front of Isabel, who is sitting in the Adirondack chair looking out over the grounds.

Maybe if I don’t answer him he’ll leave me alone.

But Ben is not adept at interpreting subtleties. “I know you can hear me, Isabel. Here’s my journal.” He shoves the notebook at her. “Read it and get back to me.”

Ben walks back to the unit. Both his arms hang down at his sides. Isabel watches him go.

Fundamentalists should look at Ben and then try to argue that we did not descend from apes.

Dear Diary:

Herein lies my journal, which I will revisit at least once a day for the duration of my life…

She turns the page.

I would like to begin by addressing the nature of wild animals. They make me very angry. They do not even attempt to adapt to the man’s world. They don’t even care about you. When you break your arm, they don’t care. When your feelings are hurt, they don’t care about you. If you miss a train, they don’t care about you. In short, they don’t care about you….

Isabel flips ahead through the pages, all of which are crammed with Ben’s nearly illegible scrawl.

I have come to believe that Northerners are evil. Especially New Yorkers. But Northerners in general. They don’t care about you. Southerners, now that’s a different story. Southerners are the only truly great people. They really care. The food they cook is the best, by a long shot. They must care about you if they’re cooking like that for you.

Why does Ben want me to read this, for God’s sake? I don’t give a shit about this twisted journal.

“Isabel?” Connie the night nurse is smiling apologetically as she approaches Isabel.

“Larry’s here and wants everyone to get together in the living room for an emergency group session. We need you to come inside now.”

“I don’t want to go to group. I want to stay out here,” Isabel replies.

“I know, sweetie, but Larry says it’s important for everyone to be there.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. He wants to talk about ‘how Lark’s death affected us.’” Isabel mimics Larry’s somber tone. “I don’t feel like talking about it. Sorry, Connie, but I’m not going.”

Connie crouches down in front of Isabel’s lap.

“Honey, we know you saw Lark. You were the only patient to see her like that. That’s an incredibly traumatic thing. Larry really wants you to come talk to him.”

“What’s there to talk about? Lark killed herself. You guys all screwed up. All the bed checks, the flashlight checks, the sharps closet. All of that and you can’t keep a patient safe in broad daylight right under your noses. Larry wants to take the heat off the staff—no offense to you, Connie. I don’t want to hear it. I just want to be alone.”

Isabel gets up and walks down a sloping hill into the middle of the field below. Connie goes inside presumably to get Larry.

Larry pushes through the unit doors and heads straight to Isabel, who is sitting cross-legged on the grass.

“Larry, don’t even waste your breath,” Isabel calls out to the therapist, who is trudging down the hill. “I know you want me to come to group and I’m not going to, so you can just turn around.”

“I just want to talk with you for a second, Isabel. Is that okay?” Larry is trying to sound nonthreatening. “After that, if you want to come to group, fine. If not, no problem.”

Yeah, right.

Larry exhales as he plops down beside her on the grass.

“I’m not going to beat around the bush. You’re a smart woman. You know why I want to talk to you. I’m worried about you witnessing something like Lark’s suicide. That can be a jarring thing to see, even for a professional. I wonder what you thought when you saw her?”

I didn’t think anything. Not one single thing.

“Nothing.” Isabel shrugs.

“You realize, don’t you, that you are probably still in shock. That was a horrible thing to see.”