“But if now’s not a good time, I could come back. ” Time to add a touch of honesty, since I wasn’t interested enough in talking to Kitty to get in trouble over it. “I’m new to this, so I’ve never been here before. I guess I’d need to fill out some paperwork or something?”
“Well, if you’re with the church it shouldn’t be too big of a thing. ” She turned and rifled around in a drawer. “I can give you one of their passes and just let you sign in. Kitty’s not a high-risk patient. I’ll send you back with an orderly if you’ll give me a minute here. ”
She invited me to leave my purse with her at the front desk. This struck me as a reasonable precaution, so I handed it over without a fuss. She put a tag on it and set it on a counter.
Not a high-risk patient, Pam had said. I wondered exactly what one had to do in order to achieve the high-risk designation, if not kill a couple of kids. Of course, upon reflection I realized that the mere attempted murder of a kid must warrant even less stringent measures—which would account for how Malachi had gotten loose a few years previously.
After a moment, Pam beckoned me over and handed me a laminated visitor’s pass with a metal clip that I attached to the bottom hem of my shirt. She flagged down a skinny, sloppily dressed orderly and gave him the fifty-cent version of my story. “Okay,” he said. “Back this way. ”
It turned out that Kitty was being housed in the next building over. First I was led through the rabbit warren of the main building while the orderly ran an errand, then back out a side door. My guide swiped a card at the next entrance and ushered me through a big metal door with a little square window. And then I was officially inside.
The place wasn’t as bad as I expected. I didn’t see any moaning mentally disabled people having pills forced down their throats; there weren’t any Nurse Ratcheds immediately visible in the corridors. Everything felt old and unkempt, though. Leftover 1960s architecture and decorative aesthetics made me feel at times like I was at the bottom of a retirement home’s swimming pool: surrounded by aqua blue, dirty almond, and the odd trimming of institutional mint green. The hospital was clean and more or less tidy, but definitely showing its age around the edges.
In the back of my head hummed an irritating reminder about how Malachi had lived here for years. It must have been a strange way to pass the days, I thought, surrounded by technicians and nurses in pajamalike uniforms, taking calming medicines out of tiny Dixie cups.
I imagined that things could have been worse, but if it were me, I think I would have died of boredom.
My tour guide, the oblivious white rabbit, asked another caregiver if she knew where Kitty might be. “Is she out in the TV room, or did she stay inside her space today?”
A tall black woman with a lean, muscular body like a runner glanced down at my visitor’s pass. She cocked her head off to the right. “Kitty stayed in. ”
“Okay,” the orderly said. “Come on, then. ”
I followed him pretty close, ducking behind him to clear the way for the occasional briskly stepping doctor or empty gurney. A wide set of double doors opened before we reached them, having been triggered from the other side by the handicapped button. A patient scooted forward in his wheelchair, moving past without giving us a second look.
Down another mazelike run of halls, doors, and up a flight of stairs we went without speaking. I got the strong impression that I was interrupting this guy’s routine, and while he wasn’t going to slap me for it, he could have done without my accompaniment.
Finally, at the end of a linoleum-tiled strip, we stopped at a door and the orderly knocked. “Miss Kitty,” he called, addressing her like the brothel madam in a spaghetti Western. “You’ve got a visitor. ”
He slipped a card-key into the slot below the knob. A green light popped and the door came open. “How do you feel about that, Miss Kitty? Are you up for a visitor today?”
The woman underneath the windowsill didn’t answer him either way.
“She, uh, she usually lets you know if she doesn’t want to be sociable. You might not get much talking out of her, though—and what you do get may or may not make a lot of sense. I’m not sure what’s been wrong with her lately. She’s been doing better since we moved her up here, though. Haven’t you, Kitty?”
If she heard and understood him, she couldn’t be bothered to show it.
“She didn’t like being on the first floor,” the orderly explained. “She’s been calmer up here. ”
“Huh,” I said.
“Yeah. Anyway, I’ll be back in about twenty minutes. If you have any problems or need any help, hit the red button over there by the door and someone’ll come around faster. Will that work for you? Are you comfortable with that?”
“Sure,” I answered, though I wasn’t certain if he was asking me or Kitty. I figured one of us might as well throw him a bone. He wasn’t looking at either of us, but was flipping papers on his clipboard, and when I told him all would be well, he left us, closing the door and flashing me a hasty thumbs-up sign at the small rectangular window.
The room where Kitty lived was about half again as big as a dormitory room, with a full window lined from the inside by something like extra-sturdy chicken wire; on the outside it was laced with a series of thin metal bars. Thick white paint coated the cement-block walls, and in places those walls were covered with pieces of paper affixed with tape. The sheets looked like articles to me, or handwritten letters. I didn’t see any pictures, not of Kitty or her family, or even anything snipped from a magazine.
“Hello,” I said to her.
I stood in one spot, sliding my weight from one leg to the other because I didn’t want to approach her without permission.
So this was what happened to you if you saw things. This was what happened if you couldn’t make it work for you like Dana and Tripp, turn it into a business or a show. Was there no middle ground for people like me? Surely it couldn’t be one thing or the other—you either ended up on television, or…well…
You ended up someplace like this.
Kitty was coiled with her arms around her shins, knees pulled up to her right temple. A straight plait of blond hair went down past her waist, the ends trailing on the floor where she was sitting, dangling in the crooks of her arms and spilling over her face. If I looked hard, I could see faint highlights of early gray winding their way through the locks.
She didn’t lift her head up from her knees, and I couldn’t se