“You have got to be shitting me.”
His mother gasps in horror and swats at his arm, like the obscure act of familial violence will put the expletive back into his throat. The psychiatrist looks, at most, mildly uncomfortable, but having been Jack’s doctor upwards of six years has undoubtedly toughened her tolerance for foul language.
“I am, in fact, not…kidding you, Jack,” the doctor says, crossing her legs and straightening the minute imperfections out of her skirt. “In light of your recent episode, we feel it would benefit both you and your mother if you were to go into residential care.”
“Wait, so I’m going into permanent care because my mother doesn’t want to take care of me? I can take care of myself, you know, just fine, I don’t need a nuthouse to do it for me,” he says; his body tenses his body up, stiff like the walls quickly pulling up around himself.
His mom says “Jackie, no” at the same time Dr. Moore says “it isn’t a nuthouse.” They both look appropriately embarrassed for either interrupting one another or admonishing the teenager at the same time, but he can’t tell which and doesn’t really care either way.
“That stuff is for the hopeless and retarded. I’m neither. I am able bodied, can read and write,” Jack says deliberately, enunciating each and every syllable with precise perfection, while attempting to relax each muscle one at a time, trying to hide the sheer wave of “this is it” panic seeping through his veins; the bad kind of adrenaline. “I don’t need around the clock babysitting.”
Dr. Moore gets the familiar expression of absolute pity on her face, and there it is, the thing that makes him swallow milligrams to numb the feelings of not only him but the feelings everyone has towards him. She leans forward, uncrosses her perfectly posed legs, moves like she wants to put a hand on his knee, but then remembers that doctors can’t touch patients, can’t risk catching psychosis. “Jack, you are becoming hopeless. Your last overdose was your worst yet; you almost died. You should have died. The state wants to take you away, all your benders, all the times you run away and get arrested, you have to see how that reflects back on your mother.”
Jack sat perfectly still, thinking that maybe if he didn’t make a move, didn’t disturb the air, it wouldn’t draw attention to the track marks on his arms or the bruises under his eyes; maybe if he didn’t move, all the wrong he did to the world could be forgotten, if just for the moment. It was easy to shoot up and walk across highways at noon, to take drinks from strangers even though he knew it was laced, hoped it was laced, just for that good kind of adrenaline. What wasn’t easy was the messy aftermath and handling a sniffling mother too unfortunate to escape the killzone of her son’s disgrace.
He doesn’t really have a choice, as it turns out. There’s been a bed waiting for him for four day at the unit an hour away. Four days his mother had been talking to the doctor about sending him away. Temporary care had been mentioned in passing when he first overdosed, but that wasn’t permanent hospitalization, just enough to make sure he lived until the next week. The residential care, the permanent stuff, had apparently been on the table since he came home with six hickeys and four stitches a month earlier.
Jack didn’t have the time or drive to call up Alex; after therapy didn’t mean driving home, it meant driving to the hospital. After all, the papers had been signed for four days.
