

I remember the night Marta was admitted to the rehabilitation facility.  She came in screaming like tires on pavement.  She yelled that she didn’t belong, that they had her by mistake, and that she needed to go home.  The nurses put her into my room, haphazardly heaving her onto the bed adjacent to my own despite her flailing protest.  She convulsed on the pale green mattress, throwing her fists like battering rams against it.  She wouldn’t stop shrieking.  

I wondered why she would be acting this way.  My question was answered when I later overheard the doctors discussing her condition.  Apparently, she’d been at a party shortly before arriving at the rehabilitation facility.

“It’s drugs,” the doctors said.

I couldn’t sleep.  The moment Marta would quiet long enough for me to think she had fallen asleep the shrill cries would begin again.  At one point, she rose silently from her bed and began looking around the room as though she was a sleuth and the room was a puzzle.  She quietly went into the bathroom connected to the corner of our room.  

“How do I get to the other side?” she said, repeating the words like a mantra, with a gradually increasing volume until she was shouting it loudly enough for the nurses down the hall to come in and end her tantrum. 

“Here, these will help you, honey,” the nurse said to Marta, handing her a little cup of pills.  Marta shortly passed out for the night.

For the next week, Marta walked around like an invalid; her eyes gazed blankly at whatever they fell upon.  Her whole appearance was a mess, from her purplish dyed hair chopped in a myriad of lengths to her slack jaw expressions.  The first few days, she didn’t speak except in gibberish.  When she finally regained the ability of spoken English, she spoke in riddles.

“Jess, they hate me and keep me here to haunt me,” she said to me of the doctors.  “They’re just faceless, featureless white zombies in white coats whose white teeth chatter white lies.  You can see it in their silver smile, Jess, can’t you?”  At one point, she told me the doctor’s eyes were scalpels trying to dissect her.

“I know, Marta,” I said, trying to calm her.  She shook in fear.  “But they’re here to help you, okay?  I am too.”

Her eyes were no longer hollow and bottomless but icy and vindictive.  They softened only when her father came to visit her on family visitation days.  He would smile in her company.  But when he turned to leave, I could see tears well up in his deep blue eyes.

I was in here because I’d gotten in a fight with my parents over drinking out of their liquor cabinet.  My parents thought it would teach me a lesson, I suppose.  But Marta was here for an entirely different reason.  She told me one morning at breakfast that they wanted to send her to a long-term residential facility.


