Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [73]
I threw myself into the psychology classes. I took organizational and industrial psychology. I took cognitive psychology, and dutifully copied into my notebooks all the maps of the brain and neural pathways. Even though I never did very well in any of the classes—and really badly in the more statistically oriented ones— I loved the work. It appealed to my sense of order. My dad always used to say that everything had a reason, that nothing ever just happened. In my psychology classes I began learning just how much we know and don't know about why things happen in people's brains. I began to learn why people do what they do. I became involved in research, studying and investigating conditions like Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease with professors and fellow students.
In addition to studying, I also became involved in people's lives. I was trained as one of a group of peer counselors, who were taught to help identify people who were having crises. We learned to ask open-ended questions, and to find out if people were suicidal.
I never mentioned Lori to anyone, not even to the professor with whom I was working. Still, people began to associate me with psychology, and psychological issues. Friends started to think of me as someone who could help people with their problems. When a friend's girlfriend started seeming depressed, I was asked to talk to her. I made sure that she didn't have an active suicide plan, by asking her about her plans for the future.
With everything I learned, I thought, I was just one step closer to finding a cure for my sister. And in the meantime, I hoped, I would find out more about myself. For the thought that someday I too might be in Lori's place had never quite gone away.
The winter after I came back from my junior year abroad, I visited Lori several times.
Overall, she seemed far more agitated than when I had left. She had big scabs on her hands from where she had cut herself banging on the window screens. She showed me a big hole she had pounded out of the wall. She talked about losing it, and how many guys it had taken to hold her down. At times, she seemed almost in awe of the impressive numbers. Sometimes we sat on the bed and she would suddenly drift off, seeming to retreat into a world of her own. At those times, I now realized, she was hallucinating, and I waited uncomfortably for those moments to pass.
Sometimes she was very drawn, dragging herself around like a zombie. But on other days, she would seem much better. Sometimes we played pool, or listened to music or just talked. On those days, she often focused on her status.
“I have to get my status up,” she said. It was clear that in the hospital everything that related to your quality of life came from your status.
We seemed much closer than ever before. I had spent my junior semester abroad at the same place she had been six years earlier, so we had that in common. While I was in England, I had taken up smoking, because I thought it was European and cool. I brought her Silk Cut cigarettes that I had bought in London. She liked them, and going to the smoking room gave us something to do together, and something to talk about.
She told me her troubles. Sometimes she pleaded with me to get her out of here.
“I can't do that, Lori,” I said. “You know I can't do that.” I tried to get her to focus instead on what I could do to make her life easier. Could I come visit her more often? Call her from school? Bring her anything from the outside?
My psychology studies gave us something else to talk about. I tried to talk to her about the different symptoms she had, the medications she was using, and the side effects she was experiencing. I looked up every drug she was taking, and talked with her about what they did and how. By observing her shaking hands and the involuntary movements she was making with her tongue, I diagnosed that