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She is the nurse who just hours before talked Isabel into staying at Three Breezes for at least one day. Isabel takes a closer look at her. Connie’s face is wizened from years of sunbathing. Her voice is raspy from years of smoking.
Finally! Somebody cart this woman off to solitary confinement.
Instead, Connie casually plops down on the floor and helps look for the bracelet. Melanie starts shaking. Her whole head vibrates and she starts hyperventilating. No one can calm her down. She’s talking so fast even she is tripping over the words and thoughts pouring out of her mouth.
“She’s only two months old. Elwin is never gonna deal with me,” Melanie chokes in between breaths, “he’s put up with so much. I have the baby. I get the postpartum thing and stop taking my meds and now he’s taking care of her all by himself. Of course he’s got his parents. They love this. They love the fact that they were right about me. I’m not good enough for their son. I hope he remembered to get the lamb-and-rice dog food. Coco hates the beef flavor. When I was little I used to love running through sprinklers. Wasn’t that fun?”
This is unreal. If I saw this in a movie I’d think it was heavy-handed.
Connie pulls Melanie up and takes her over to the nurses’ station to give her a sedative. Kristen and Isabel remain on the floor, Kristen still searching for Melanie’s bracelet, Isabel listening to Melanie’s disturbing chatter echo from down the hall.
Isabel steals a glance at Kristen’s right arm, bandaged because, as Isabel will later find out, her obsessive-compulsive disorder leaves her clawing at her skin until it starts to bleed. Perhaps sensing Isabel’s stare her hand flutters to this spot and quickly withdraws. There is an awkward silence between them.
Isabel looks back down at the floor.
How do I extricate myself from this one?
Melanie returns just as Kristen spots a cigar box and opens it. Voila! Among some pictures and letters is the bracelet. Melanie grabs it and shrieks with happiness.
“Good night, everyone,” she says as she crawls into bed, the shot Connie gave her a few minutes ago taking hold of her tiny, troubled frame. “Thanks for helping.”
When no one moves she adds, “That’s all I have to say.”
Kristen and Isabel file out and head back to their respective rooms. The bed crinkles as Isabel climbs up into it: instead of soft mattress covers there are thick sheets of plastic under the paper-thin sheets in the unlikely event someone becomes incontinent on top of everything else.
Every fifteen minutes the door opens and a flashlight shines in Isabel’s face. Directly into her face. So even if she manages to fall into a light sleep the beam wakes her up just enough to toss and turn all night. Isabel is on suicide watch. The flashlight checks are a status symbol. Everybody seems to know who’s got checks every fifteen minutes and who has the more desirable thirty-minute variety. Isabel wouldn’t have known this except that Kristen asked her point-blank about her checks while they were on Melanie’s bizarre scavenger hunt. When Isabel told Kristen that the nurse checked on her every fifteen minutes Kristen looked relieved. Kristen had been at Three Breezes for some time now, but she was still, apparently, a “fifteener.”
Four
The ant is neatly marching along the mortar line on the cement block wall alongside her bed. To Isabel, it appears he is as frantic as she is to leave the hospital. She tugs once more at the lower lip of the window but it will not budge. Windows are nailed shut at Three Breezes. So instead of freeing the insect, Isabel, with miserable resignation, watches it make its way down the wall.
* * *
Isabel avoided anthills. In the spring- and summertime, when nature was busy reinventing itself, those telltale signs of ant industry—miniscule pyramids of dirt—multiplied in cracks of buckled pavement, between bricks and along fence posts, and Isabel always stepped around them. She had ever since she was a small girl growing up in Connecticut.
Her brothers, on the other hand, went out of their way to step directly on them.
“Don’t!” she yelled at Owen, who was twisting his foot on top of the fourth of twelve anthills along their short front walk. Isabel ran over and pushed her seven-year-old brother away. Too late. Isabel imagined hundreds of suffocating ants under the cement gasping for air.
“I’m telling Mom if you do it again.” She was on her hands and knees frantically trying to clear a passageway so that the ants could find their way out of the rubble. Her nine-year-old mind realized this was futile so she grabbed a tiny stick to drill a hole into the ground so the ants could get some oxygen.
“I’m telling Mom if you do it again,” mimicked her brother. “You’re such a tattletale.”
He was right.
But Isabel didn’t think of it as telling on her brothers, she just couldn’t stand to see anything or anyone hurt. Even ants.
“What’s going on out here?” Isabel’s mother called through the top screen of the porch door.
“Nothing,” her brothers called out, disappearing into their fort in the backyard.
“Isabel? What’re you doing?” Katherine asked as she approached her hunched-over daughter.
Isabel was furiously drilling, pausing only to wipe her tears out of her eyes so that she could continue her rescue mission.
“Is it the anthills again?”
“I don’t understand why they do this,” Isabel cried as she squatted over the fifth flattened mound. “There’re families under here. Whole families. And they’re dying!”
“Oh, for God’s sake. This is ridiculous. Look at me for a second.”
Isabel obeyed as she wiped her nose on her sleeve.
“They’re going to be okay, the ants. We’ve been over this. They like to burrow out. They’ll be okay.”
Isabel looked back down. No ants were crawling out of her manmade holes. She looked back up at her mother.
“You’ve got to let it go. You think this is sad? Wait’ll life kicks you in the rear a few times. No one’s out there drilling holes for all of us, you know. Now, come on inside. Help me sort the Girl Scout cookie orders.”
As she stood up to go, Isabel looked back at her doomed friends. But she swallowed her tears and forged ahead.
* * *
As her childhood advanced, Isabel’s empathy for creatures of all shapes and sizes morphed into a sadness that was difficult to shake. Sadness gave way to isolation. Isabel constantly felt as if she were on the outside looking in. As if she wasn’t quite a participant in everyday life, but a sleepwalker. While she maintained the polished front of an oldest, overachieving child, her true personality had yet to emerge, and that only added to the disconnected feeling she wore like a bulky shroud.
As Isabel floated numbly through elementary school, her physical appearance was taking a very definite shape. She began to hear over and over again that she was pretty, and soon, perhaps because she felt so empty, the compliments at least temporarily filled her up. Isabel began to crave the attention that was paid to her looks. No one wanted to hear about her sorrow, no one wanted to see her sad.
She was becoming an expert at reading people. She soon learned that humor got more results than anger or tears, that attention was paid to the attractive, and that people were inherently egotistical. Everybody likes to talk about themselves. So she honed her listening skills. Isabel was learning to survive by playing roles: the curvaceous beauty, the class clown, the intense listener. She was excellent at being whatever someone else wanted her to be.
* * *
“Isabel. What can I do for you?”
Isabel cleared her throat.
“Um.