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Policy and procedure review
Staff training
Disciplinary action to staff
CHAPTER 51
Lulu called a special group therapy meeting that afternoon. When she took her usual chair, I saw that there was a faint rust-colored stain on her white shoes.
Sophie’s blood.
I felt bile rising in my throat, but I swallowed it back down.Don’t look at the blood.
Lulu took a deep breath and looked at all twelve of us in turn before she spoke.I see you, she was trying to say.I’m here for each of you.
But a lot of us couldn’t return her gaze. A lot of us stared at our hands lying there helplessly in our laps. A lot of us were terrified.
If Sophie could do something like that, what was stopping any of the rest of us?
“What happened today is a very, very difficult thing to deal with,” Lulu said gently. “Belman is supposed to be a safe space, a place where you’re cared for and protected and healed. And when it isn’t—” Her voice caught. She blinked rapidly, almost like she was trying to keep back tears. “When it isn’t,” she went on, “that can be really scary.”
I’d never heard Lulu rattled like this before, and I didn’t like it. I was still shivering, my teeth still chattering.Breathe in, breathe out, just like that. Don’t look at the blood.
“Is she going to be okay?” Michaela asked. She was hugging her old one-armed teddy bear tightly to her chest.
Milton—his name came to me in a flash. She used to carry him everywhere.
Lulu nodded. “Yes, she is.”
“But how’d she do it?” Sean wanted to know.
“What we should focus on right now is that she’s getting the help she needs,” Lulu said.
She wasn’t offering specifics because she didn’t want to give us any ideas. But somehow Indy had found out the details and reported them to me: how Sophie had taken one of the cafeteria’s plastic spoons, sharpened it against a table leg, and then started sawing it along her wrists.
I couldn’t stop wondering if I’d missed some sign. Did she try to tell me what she was planning? What if she was talking to me, confessing to me, and I wasn’t even there because I was in my other world? What if she’d thought I was listening, but instead I was standing in front of some damn fourteenth-century fire trying to get warm? What if she was really hurt? What if it was my fault? What if my other world prevented me from seeingthisworld, right when it was the most important that I pay attention?
“Does anyone want to share what they’re feeling right now?” Lulu asked.
No thank you. I wanted to keep everything closed up tight inside me where it was safe.
For a long time nobody spoke, and Lulu let the silence settle around us. My eyes kept going back to the stain on her shoes. It was so small that Lulu probably hadn’t even noticed it. I felt nauseous looking at it, but I couldn’t stop.
Across the circle, Michaela had started to cry. Sean reached out and patted her shoulder. It was the only nice thing I’d ever seen him do, and Lulu saw it, too, and let it happen.
After a while, Lulu leaned forward and said, “I just want you all to know, this is really hard for me, too.”
I looked over at Indy. Staff at Belman never said things like that.
“Fuck,” Indy shouted suddenly. “Fuck!”
“Adam,” Lulu said, and we all looked at her likewho’s Adam? But of course it was Indy’s real name—the one we never used.
“Maybe Sophie’s just another goddamn Upper East Side self-slasher, but I was in theroom, I was literally watching her! And I was so stuck inside my own head that I didn’t even notice what she was doing.” He punched at the air. “Fuck!”
Lulu’s voice was full of emotion when she spoke. “It isn’t your job to monitor other patients,” she said. “It’s ours. And today, we didn’t do our job.” She shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “We don’t want bad things to happen to any of you, ever. We’ve dedicated our lives to trying to help people like you. But none of us are perfect, and a psychiatric hospital isn’t an easy place to be, and I know that, and I’m so sorry for the pain that you are in.”
Indy slumped forward in his chair and put his face in his hands. Even Lulu seemed like she was moments away from bawling, and she was the one who was supposed to keep us together, cheer us on, prod us into talking about our problems.
