Find Me by Laura van Den Berg Page A

wall, banging my head on the sharp edge of the paper towel dispenser. She cornered me and did it again and again—fast, open-handed slaps. My face was scorching. My mouth was filling with blood. Her last slap knocked loose a tooth, a molar, and I swallowed it whole.
    *   *   *
    In the Hospital, I worry the gap in the back of my mouth with my tongue.
    *   *   *
    Here’s another. After I had been with Ms. Neuman for a year, I woke to find Marcus sitting on my legs in his Frankenstein mask, the rubber bolts sticking out of his temples. He told me he had a dream. We needed to go downstairs. In the living room, we found Ms. Neuman lying on the carpet, in the glow of the TV, her ex-husband talking about stationary weather fronts in his toupee. Her slip was hiked up. She was still holding the remote. A stroke, not the killing kind, but she couldn’t take care of us anymore, my case worker would tell me later, after I was gone from the yellow house on Ferrin Street, gone from Marcus, after I was spitting blood into a bathroom sink in Mission Hill and wondering how he knew.

 
    12.
    At the next Community Meeting, Dr. Bek informs us that the patient from Floor Group two has died. He tells us about the silver scales on her fingertips, about her forgetting. He tells us the last thing she said, “Oh,” and I imagine her lips rounding and her eyes growing large. I wonder if that “Oh” was a sudden recognition, a final moment of remembering.
    He tells us her name, Marie.
    In the Common Room, Floor Group two collapses into itself, knees bending, arms folding across stomachs, a structure dissolving into dust. They are the ones who will see the absence in her bed and in their hallway and when they push around the laundry carts. Each time a Group is reduced by a single body, a single voice, every member feels themselves grow smaller.
    The nurses are a mass in the doorway. I can hear them breathing behind us, the rustle of their suits. Floor Group three sits on the couch and stares at Dr. Bek like a row of inquisitors. The standing patients sway between the white walls. After this Community Meeting, our Floor Group will do our best to clean away the palm prints from the walls, the greasy outlines of fingers that always make me think about the residue of ghosts—if ghosts leave anything behind.
    There is no mention of what has happened to Marie’s body. Late at night, in our room, Louis and I have agreed there must be a large incinerator somewhere in the Hospital.
    Dr. Bek looks around the room, the silver head of his suit turning back and forth like it is moving independently from the rest of him. “Believe in your own wellness. Right here in this room, feel every cell in your body grow stronger.”
    The patients are not in the mood for meditations.
    What we want is answers to our questions. Has he made any progress? Is he closer to a cure? How much longer until you are standing up there and talking about my death? That is the question we are all really asking him.
    â€œNext time” is Dr. Bek’s answer. His head stills and his suit shudders, like something very strange is happening inside his body. “We are treating you. We are getting closer. That’s why you are all so important. For the next time.”
    He holds out his gloved hands, palms turned up, as though he is about to give us a blessing. “In times of sadness, it is important to not give in to negative feelings. To not be afraid.”
    I think about how the Psychologist in Allston, with his little white electrodes, was the last person who told me to not be afraid.
    â€œWhat if there wasn’t a next time?” Curtis shouts, his voice tearing through our Floor Group. He’s standing right in front of me, and I can see the flush climbing his neck. He breaks away and moves closer to the front. Group three scrambles up from the couch, still staring.
    Olds and Older are right