Dr. Stud

“Knock knock,” I call out before entering the room.

Though it is before eleven, she is awake. That must be a good sign. She looks up at me and smiles, picking up a sheet of thick paper and turning it around to show me. On it are some smudges of watercolor in shades of red. A stripe of blue arches across the top.

“Does this look like a barn to you?” she squints.

I head toward it to make sure that my first impression was correct.

“Yeah... no,” I answer, shaking my head. “That doesn’t look anything like a barn.”

“That is what I was afraid of,” she sighs, laying the paper back on the small table by the window. “But sometimes, art, you know… it’s in the eye of the beholder.”

“That’s nowhere near a barn, Didi,” I repeat. “I don’t care whose eyes you’re using. I don’t think that you’re going to be in for a career change.”

She shrugs, poking the point of her paintbrush into a puddle of dark green paint and smearing it under the red shape. It’s sort of childish looking, but I doubt making great art in here is really the point. They want people just to do things, to occupy themselves. They need to walk through pain-free days, just to see what it’s like.

“I brought you magazines,” I tell her, arranging them on the foot of the bed. “How are you feeling today?”

“Good news there,” she says brightly. “They tell me I am most of the way through detox, so that’s good. I’ve been downgraded from feeling like hot garbage to feeling like rancid meat.”

“That’s an improvement?”

She nods avidly. “Oh, you wouldn’t believe it. Hot garbage was definitely the worst.”

She’s making light of it, but this has really been terrible. The first three days, they wouldn’t even let me see her, but I could hear her voice echoing down the hall. I could hear her moaning. It broke my heart.

She probably won’t ever tell me precisely what she went through, but she looks different now. Her freckles are back. The circles under her eyes are almost gone. And she has started to gain back some of the weight she lost.

“Hey, can I have this pudding cup?” I ask her, poking the tinfoil top with my fingernail. “Suddenly, I’m starved.”

“Yeah, sure, if you’re not gonna throw it up right away.”

“I can’t make any promises,” I shrug and go ahead and open the container anyway.

We’ve known each other for so long, there isn’t a whole lot that we need to say. I need her to know I’m here. She needs to know I’m here. I bring her things, and we don’t talk too much about work because that is a lot of stress, and it’s unclear so far if it’s going to get better or worse.

So far, I think she’s in the clear. As long as she makes it back in time for the opening, she will be all right. Martha doesn’t even have to know.

“You know, I really do appreciate everything you’ve done for me,” she mumbles suddenly, hunched over her painting and not looking up at me.

“It’s just a temporary setback, Didi. You’ll make it through this.”

“No… I mean everything. Always.”

She looks up at me, her eyes shiny.

“When we were in school…yYou looking out for me, I mean. All the acting out that you chaperoned. All the lies you told to my mom, to the school counselor.”

“Taking your keys when you were drunk,” I add sarcastically. “Making sure you enrolled in community college…”

She smiles thinly. “Yeah, all that stuff too,” she admits. “And dragging me out of state when it looked like I was hopeless here. That too.”

“Manhattan was always my dream,” I shrug. “I was happy to have the company.”

She smiles slowly, sitting back in her chair. The morning light cuts through the window and illuminates her face so that I can really see how much color has returned to her cheeks.

“You know, that’s what you always say, but that’s not really it. I don’t even think you remember the truth anymore, Joe.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”