“What is it, Perdita? Does it hurt?”
Perdita grunts and punches the air a few more times until Harriet takes her by the wrist. Then she opens her hand, wincing as she lifts each finger to reveal a wooden ring. She’s been holding on to it so tightly it’s embossed her skin. Harriet’s wits scatter when she sees the ring, but she doesn’t know this until she recovers them and the room rolls back in. Perdita’s watching her again. She seems to know that Harriet has seen the ring before. It’s carved to resemble a stalk of wheat that bends around your finger, the head of the stalk reaching for its heel to complete the circle. Harriet runs her thumb over each kernel, then drops Gretel’s ring into her coat pocket and listens to her daughter’s baby talk as rapturously as she did the first time around.
* * *
—
PERDITA IS MOVED onto a ward where she’s popular because the other patients find her babbling pleasant. Thankfully Perdita’s only staying until the hospital makes certain that her liver and kidneys are in good working order. Hopefully she’ll come home before her antagonism becomes unmistakable. The kids who’ve mustered up the courage to spend time with Perdita might take her requests pretty badly if they understood them. Most are the same age as her and are recovering from suicide attempts too. Andrew, the ward host, asks Harriet to stop bringing in gingerbread for them. According to him, the patients lie under the covers nibbling away at it all night. He’s all for treats, but his instinct tells him not to indulge this: “It’s a bit . . . I don’t know, like some sort of ritual. I don’t think it’s right.”
There is a girl on the ward named Tuesday; she wears a beanie jammed over locks dyed deep sea-green. A beanie or a brightly colored beret—Harriet never sees her bareheaded. She seems delicate in the refined sense of the word rather than the frail sense. She doesn’t strike Harriet as suicidal, but of course you can never tell, even with the type that tends to get photographed for street-style blogs. This just in: Black Indie Ariel spotted at bus stop.
Tuesday writes poems for Perdita.
(Of course being is an unnecessary thing,
the kind of mistake I
didn’t think I’d find forgiveness for.
You went looking and returned saying: Whatever,
it’s fine,
it’s fine, we can do unnecessary things
They are not inferior.
Continue with impunity
Each day a little more mistaken and
a little more forgiven.)
When Perdita gurgles for her to please go away, Tuesday kisses her cheek and says: “Yeah, you too.”
Perdita is happy to babble unintelligibly at first, but over the following days, there are tests and conversations and test conversations that establish the extent to which hovering below a waking state for eight days has been hard on her brain. Perdita can only make her simplest thoughts understandable in speech, and marginally more effective in writing. She can follow what is said to her if she really focuses her attention, but even then one out of every five or so words she hears seems to be a unit of white noise. She needs speech therapy and time. Much more time than the eight days she was under. Perdita scrawls something to the effect of this not being that much of a problem because she didn’t really talk to anybody before anyway, but she cannot completely hide her frustration. She’s never been more physically expressive. Margot has been weeping a lot now that there’s no longer any need to show death her poker face, and while the weeping is under way Perdita administers clumsy hugs and says: “Oh no! Oh no!” Her consternation is made cartoonish by the sheer amount of energy she has to put into conveying it. And the way she revs up when she tries to talk about the ring she brought back with her . . .
Hang on. Brought back with her . . . ?
“Oh,” Harriet says aloud to Perdita, “what am I thinking? That you went to Druhástrana, that you went there somehow without leaving this bed . . . even though you would have had to leave this bed to get there, Perdita, because as I have been saying all your life, Wikipedia doesn’t get to decide which places have actual geographic existence and which don’t. But OK, playing along for now, I seem to be thinking that you made it across and that Gretel was there. My Gretel. She saw you. She knew who you were, helped you, maybe. She gave you her ring. And she said—now let me see, what is it I’m wishing she’d said: Tell Harriet Lee I am still her friend . . . something like that . . .”
Perdita looks dizzy and signals to Harriet to start all over again and speak much more slowly, so Harriet does. As she repeats herself, Perdita nods with increasing enthusiasm. To the bit about Gretel telling Perdita that she’s still Harriet’s friend, Perdita throws both hands up in the air and says, “EHHHHHH!” which is her new placeholder sound for “YES EXACTLY!” The hairs on the back of Harriet’s neck give this reply a standing ovation and turn the skin there into fur. The same thing happened when she set down Gretel’s wheat-sheaf ring alongside her own matching one; the lid of the jewelry box had jerked and buckled until she took away one of the rings. But in this case, while Harriet would love to have made a preternaturally accurate guess, it’s much more probable that Perdita’s hearing different questions from the ones Harriet’s been asking her. Dr. Ilesanmi has spoken about this:
Expect a fair amount of disorientation for the first couple of weeks. Perdita may have stable or improved verbal recall for five or six days in a row; you may see meaning and pronunciation lining up more or less as it should, but then a day later she could become discouraged by a small slipup. Keep practicing with her; maintaining confidence is going to make all the difference here.
Harriet doesn’t ask all the questions she wants to ask. Instead, she tells Perdita about her death dream. Perdita feels bad about the dream but thinks Harriet might not have had it if only she’d read the note as soon as she’d found it. And now Perdita wants to know what Harriet-as-crow did afterward—after she’d gouged all the witnesses to her grief. Or did she wake up mid-rampage?
All this is whispered. Harriet’s laugh is a whisper as well. “Oh, after I’d gouged all the witnesses I ate a small bowlful of grapes, and I was trying to decide whether I myself count as a witness, and I couldn’t decide. I just couldn’t. Thank goodness you came back. I’m sure whatever decision I made would’ve been wrong. Hopefully now you see that it’s better if you just live on a long, long time after me, as you should.”
Perdita grudgingly agrees, and Harriet takes advantage of this to begin saying what needs to be said about the Kerchevals. Anybody who says you must hurt yourself primarily wishes to see you hurt, regardless of rationale or supposedly beneficial outcome. This is what Harriet tells Perdita.
No response whatsoever. Perdita is ICU Girl again; empty-eyed until Harriet says the dolls have been informed that Perdita’s coming home. Then she revives, nods, and smiles.
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