Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [84]
“Hey, girl.” Beanie jumped up to hug Ramona. “I’m so glad you decided to come.”
Ramona didn’t hug Beanie back. She just stood there with her arms hanging, her purse dangling from her wrist. She did let her head go on Beanie’s shoulder, though. And then she couldn’t even help herself. She just allowed her head to rest on Beanie’s shoulder. Now she let herself cry.
16
Clarise was on the way back. More than a week since she’d gone hysterical over the girls, and her thinking was shimmering like an icicle catching the sun and making rainbows as it melts. The haze had lifted. Once she’d come back to awareness from that powerful injection they’d given her that Sunday afternoon, and realized that her first thoughts in the mornings were clear as spring water, and as the day progressed they went to cloudy, to mud, she finally made the connection that it was the Elavil pills. So she stopped taking the pills whenever she could. Only when they stood right over her, handed her water, and watched her swallow did she take the pills. Otherwise, especially if it was the morning shift nurse, who always rushed through Clarise’s room in her street shoes while her nurse’s shoes sat in the utility room sopping up the White-All shoe polish, Clarise would hold the pills in her hands, wrap them in the napkin on her breakfast tray, and leave them to go out with the garbage.
Now it was Monday evening, and she sat in the patients’ lounge, knitting and figuring things out. She tried to keep a blank look to her eyes the way she guessed someone’s eyes would look who was actually swallowing all the pills handed her in the pleated paper container. She didn’t even allow her reaction to show as Emma, the silver-blue haired woman who occupied the room next to Clarise’s, began pointing wildly at the window in the patients’ lounge and flailing her arms up and down, saying that the moon was falling out of the sky and it was headed straight for the window. About once a week Emma spotted such catastrophes on the way to happening and the staff would be called to arms, rushing from whatever else they were doing to restrain Emma, get her back to her room, shoot her up with a stream of narcotics that had her smiling and nodding for days after. Clarise had taken note of the beatific expression on Emma’s face before she emerged from her smiling and nodding state of mind. She would imitate that expression later this evening during her session with the psychiatrist; maybe he’d okay her full visiting privileges again. She had missed the aunts’ and uncles’ daylong stays, which had been reduced down to fifteen minutes twice a day after her ranting session the week before. And she certainly understood why the aunts and uncles had lied to her about the girls, knew that the wall separating the aunts and uncles from the girls must have been impenetrable or surely her aunt Til would have knocked it down by now with her sledgehammer will. So she didn’t waste her clarity of thought bemoaning what was done and for the moment unchangeable. Nor did she try to guess where the girls might be. Of course they were alive, well too, she told herself. By law they couldn’t with-old drastic information about the girls from their own mother, she was sure of that. Plus, if she dwelled too much on the dearth of information she had about their whereabouts, she feared she’d drive herself right into another fit of hysteria and they’d shoot her full of that liquid that caused that black, gumbo-textured screen to fall all around her that let in only a pinhole of ether. So right now as she clicked her knitting needles which sounded melodious even against the backdrop of Emma’s screams about the moon falling, resounding through the hallway as Emma was being carried back to her room, Clarise counted the rows of knit and purl stitches she had to do yet before her bright purple shawl was completed.