“The crazy starts here,” she said.
A loud buzzer from the steel doors announced the arrival of a nurse, who instructed the handful of visitors to place all their possessions inside the lockers. The ward, she said, did not allow any outside objects, including bags, cell phones, jackets, food, or drinks.
“I made this for one of the patients,” said Santiago, holding his bowl in front of him with a hopeful smile.
“No outside food or drinks,” repeated the nurse, turning away.
“But I—”
“Look, they’re not going to let you take that in,” said the purple-coated lady. “What if you hid a knife inside it?”
“A knife?” spluttered Santiago. “It’s rice pudding!”
“Sure,” said the lady and shoved her coat into the locker.
The ward was mostly full of sad-looking young women, NYU students, he assumed, shuffling around in cloth gowns and sweatpants with a mixture of bored and forlorn expressions. He passed what appeared to be a therapeutic art class, where the patients were gathered in a circle, painting sunsets.
Santiago found Cleo’s room at the end of the hallway. When he came in, she was sitting on a low twin bed with her back against the wall, reading. She had on a silk kimono robe in a watercolor palette of peaches, lilacs, and creams. The long fabric of the sleeves folded around her like a nest.
Her eyes darted up at him in surprise. It was the first time he had seen her look anything other than beautiful. Her face was pallid, almost gray, with bruised violet circles around her eyes and yellow crust in their corners. The usual burnished gold of her hair was dull and bundled in a greasy topknot. Her dry lips were the same anemic color as her skin. Everything about her was muted, drained, except her eyes, which were even more pellucid than he remembered, a green so clear he found himself avoiding them.
“Mi amore,” he said softly.
She dropped her book, pulling her kimono tighter around her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “Who told you I was in here?”
Santiago began to feel panicked. He did not recognize this Cleo. And, worse, she did not seem to recognize him. She looked afraid of him. Her friend Santiago, who would do anything for her! He lowered his voice to a nonthreatening murmur.
“Frank told me,” he said. “He didn’t want you to be alone.”
“Who else has he told?”
“Just me,” he soothed. “Only me, and I will not tell another soul.”
“You swear?”
“I swear on my grandmother’s grave.”
She seemed to calm at this. Her pale eyes flitted over him.
“You’re so slim,” she said.
He could not suppress his smile.
“I must look ghastly,” she said, bringing a hand to her face.
“You could not. I brought you some arroz con leche, but—” He waved his empty hands up at the ceiling apologetically.
Cleo looked at him through half-closed eyelids like a cat.
“Greatest chef in the world,” she said in a tone too accusatory to be entirely affectionate. “Isn’t that what Frank always says?”
Santiago nodded.
“I’ll make it for you again when you get out,” he said.
Cleo was pulling her hair roughly out of the topknot. He realized, with a pang, that she was trying to make herself more presentable for him.
“So how are you?” she asked, straining to sound casual. “How’s the new restaurant?”
“It’s okay. I fly to LA tomorrow to do a—” He stopped himself. He didn’t want to seem like he was bragging about his life while she lay here in a hospital. “It’s all fine,” he said. “How are you?”
Cleo raised an eyebrow. She didn’t need to tell him what a stupid question that was. He pulled up a chair and sat opposite the bed, placing his hands on his knee, then clasping them in front of him. He felt too big for the chair, like an elephant perched on a toadstool.
“This place is actually, you know, pretty nice …,” he began.
The room was the size of a spacious studio apartment. It had a twin bed pushed against either wall and two bare writing desks with the kind of low, unobtrusive wooden chairs found in elementary schools. Through the window was a view of First Avenue to the Upper East Side and beyond it Harlem, where he had spent his first year in New York. Today, it felt no closer to him than Switzerland.
“It’s the Carlyle of psych wards,” said Cleo. “According to my roommate, anyway.”
“Oh, you have a roommate. Where is she?”
“Getting a lobotomy.”
Cleo’s face cracked with grim mirth at Santiago’s shocked expression.
“Art class,” she said. “But she would know. She got taken to Bellevue last time. You know the people you see yelling on the subway and switch cars to avoid? It’s pretty much just people like that there, apparently.”
Santiago himself had visited Bellevue after Lila’s first overdose and knew it was not the kind of place anyone wanted to return to. He could still remember the incessant shouting from the beds, like chained dogs barking, and the feral odor of human shit that hung in the air.
“You were smart to come here,” he said.
“I didn’t have a choice. The ambulance took us.”
“Us?”
“Frank.”
“He was with you?”
“He found me.”
Cleo’s face looked like a white napkin crumpled on the floor. He wanted to say something about how terrifying that must have been for Frank, but he stopped himself. He was saying all the wrong things, he knew.
“Do you know that I was married before too?” he said, trying a new tack. “It’s how I remained here after school.”
Cleo nodded. “To a dancer.”
“Yes, Lila. You two would have liked each other, I think. She would be older than you now, almost forty, but you are similar, in your own ways.”
He could not imagine Lila being middle-aged. She had been younger than Cleo was now when he knew her, with a rash, impractical nature ill-suited to anyone not very young.
“How were we similar?”
“She was an artist, like you. With a—I don’t know how to say this well—an ego that is large but self-esteem that is small?”
Cleo let out a husky laugh. “Sounds about right.”
“That is a dangerous thing. She was very eager to get into a dance company, very afraid she would not. Audition after audition … It hurt her.”
“Did she ever make it?”
“It was competitive, but she would have.”
“How do you know?”
“She danced like water.”
Lila was gifted, nobody could deny that, but she was not disciplined. Between her talent, family money, and easy access to America, she never had to be. When the choreographer of a prestigious avant-garde company grabbed her crotch to better show her a lift, Lila did not think twice about throwing a water bottle at his head. It hurt her career, her unwillingness to capitulate to the men who groped and coaxed her in the name of correcting her. It was what made Santiago—so fearfully obsequious, so accepting of the white man’s power to instruct—respect her more than anyone he had ever met. And yet, in the end, she had doubted herself.
“How long were you married?”
“Just a moment. We are still married”—he tapped his heart—“in here.”