Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

I held up one finger in what I hoped was a universal gesture that meant “wait.” I grabbed a pair of her jeans from the floor and held them open for her. She stepped into them, one leg at a time, as though she were a child. I had never dressed her before. I had missed all of that stuff. The diaper changes, the putting on of pajamas, the bath times, the cuddling. I had never been a father to her in that way, and it struck me now, as I pulled the jeans up over her legs, which were goosefleshed and shaking, that I had missed everything. I had missed the whole thing and never known it. I handed her a sweatshirt even though it was hot.

“Can you help me?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. I knew the police and paramedics in their professionalism, their sudden official-ness, scared her. They were just watching me dress her. She was too flustered to be able to figure out how the sweatshirt worked. I held it open and pulled it over her head, holding open the neck hole so she could find it, pulling it down when it got stuck on her ears. She was able to find the armholes herself, but I fussed with the cuffs anyway, making sure her hands got free. There she stood, in jeans and a nightgown and a giant sweatshirt surrounded by police and paramedics in that dark, slant-roofed room, her eyes black, black as the eyes of a deer.

I didn’t know what would be next. We would go with these men to where they took us. Eventually we would find someone who spoke English. There was nothing to do but what they told us to do. I took her hand and nodded at them that we were ready to go.

—

The emergency room they took us to was adjoined to a mental hospital, a combo I had never heard of before, and as emergency rooms go it was pretty tiny, more like a triage unit. There was no hustle and bustle, no other patients, just a waiting nurse, who looked as plump and peaceful as a chicken sitting at her desk when we came in. She wrote out the forms with a pen that had a big orange plastic flower on the end, as the paramedics filled her in on the situation in a stream of Lithuanian that flowed over both Vera and me. I signed everything she gave to me, even though I couldn’t read any of the forms.

Then she led Vera and me into a little cubicle behind a curtain with a hospital bed where Vera perched. She had to get one of her arms free of the sweatshirt so they could take her blood pressure, but she didn’t want to take the sweatshirt off, so she just snaked her arm up through the neck hole. Everything was absurd. I noticed Vera had mascara under her eyes, and I wondered when she had been crying. Had she been crying when she held Daniel at knife point? Had I failed to register that? Or had she been crying before that? Or only later in the ambulance? I couldn’t remember her crying in the ambulance. The nurse told us something in Lithuanian, and we just stared at her. She tried Russian, and Vera nodded, sniffling like her nose was getting clogged up, snaking her arm back in her sweatshirt. The nurse left.

“The doctor will be in here in a minute,” Vera said, sniffling again and sighing. I noticed that she wasn’t trying to explain her vision to the nurse. That plan seemed to have faded or receded in her mind.

I nodded.

“I hope they give me a lot of drugs,” Vera whispered.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I’m scared.”

A lot of things were only now occurring to me. That at some point, I would be asked to leave and she would be alone here. That she would be with other mental patients who didn’t speak English. That I would be essentially abandoning her in this strange place. The building was large and clearly very old. I wondered who had built it. If only Darius were here to explain things to us. It felt like the kind of building that would have ghosts, if there were such things as ghosts. I had been more in the mind-set of a trip to a hospital where, since she was a minor, and I was her father, I would be allowed to follow her, to spend the night at her bedside. But mental illness wasn’t treated like physical illness for reasons that seemed newly unfathomable to me. I squeezed her knee because her hands were unreachable, tucked up inside the sleeves of her sweatshirt. I had lost Vera so many times. I had lost her when she was a baby, I had lost her when she was four, I had said goodbye to her at the end of every weekend we spent together, sending her back to her real life, to her mother and school and friends, and none of it had felt like this. I was panicked to let go of her.

“Don’t cry,” she said. “Seriously, don’t.”

“I can’t leave you here,” I said.

“Well, you’re going to have to.”

The doctor, when he came a few minutes later, spoke English and so I was able to relieve Vera of the burden of talking, and I explained her past mental history, the current episode, at least what I had seen of it. Luckily, the police had suggested I bring Vera’s medication with us when we were still at the apartment, so I was able to give the ER doctor the prescription bottles that included Vera’s doctor’s name and phone number. Vera sat through all this patiently, her eyes far away. The questions were unending, and then suddenly they weren’t.

“Probably because of the use of the knife,” the doctor said, “she will be asked to stay for at least forty-eight hours, but this will be decided by the administrators tomorrow. Because she is a danger to herself and others, it is a policy. But they will decide tomorrow.”

Vera and I both nodded. I looked at her to see if this was okay, and she shrugged. It was what I had been expecting, since pretty much the exact same thing had happened when she was hospitalized in the States, and I guess she had been expecting it, too.

“We don’t have insurance here,” I said, “so how will we pay?”

“I don’t know the exact details of that,” the doctor said, “but some of the nurses can help you when you come and visit her tomorrow and the administrators have had a chance to review her file.”

It all seemed very humane. In America, the first thing you did at an emergency room was figure out how you would pay or give them an insurance card. The idea that such matters could be left until tomorrow was an unexpected, almost lavish kindness.

“Visiting hours are ten to noon,” the doctor said. “You can wear your clothes in the ward, but if you want we have some pajamas you can wear for tonight. If you don’t wish to sleep in your clothes.”

Vera nodded. She was still wearing her nightgown over her jeans and under her sweatshirt, but it was thin and had lace in the front. I could understand why she wouldn’t want to wear it.

“I will have the nurse bring you some,” the doctor said.

“Can I go and see her room?” I asked. “Can I at least see where she’ll be?”

“I’m afraid no one is allowed in the ward except during visiting hours,” he said, and gave me a polite smile. He was tall and balding. “Because it is the junior ward, the adolescents — the rules are more strict. But a clean transition is better. We will take very good care of her.” He stood there, nodding and smiling.

“It’s fine,” Vera whispered.

But I didn’t feel like it was fine. I felt like I was abandoning her here.

“The nurse will be right in with some pajamas and can show Vera to her room, but I’ll give you two a chance to say goodbye.”

Once he was gone, I hugged Vera where she sat. She didn’t wrap her arms around me back, just let herself be hugged, her arms at her sides. They had given her a strong sedative and I could tell it was kicking in. Her face looked thick and frozen. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m pretending it isn’t happening.”

We swayed back and forth, me standing, her sitting on the creaking hospital bed, not talking.