‘Summer,’ he finally said, his voice dry.
‘Yes.’ It came out like a gasp, like a release of air. ‘Dad. Yes. Hi. It’s me. I’m here.’
‘Summer.’ He swallowed hard.
‘How are you doing? Are you okay?’
‘I…’ His movements were slow, his mouth opened and closed like a goldfish. It’s just the sedatives, I told myself. They haven’t worn off yet. But there was something else, too: a void. It was like his whole past had been wiped away. Like he had no idea who he was.
The alarm on his watch started to go off. He looked around, puzzled, then located the sound on his wrist. He stared at his watch, then at me. Desperately. He coughed, moved his neck from side to side and then slowly, so slowly, edged his hand toward the watch. He tapped the face gently, as if he feared he might break it. When that accomplished nothing, he tried pressing a button. When the beeping continued, he looked at me again. I shrugged back at him, just as desperate. We were two different species trying to communicate.
‘I don’t…’ he said, then looked down and tried another button. The alarm stopped. He stared at it for a while, perhaps wondering if it was going to start again. The woman in the wheelchair next to him still hadn’t moved. The silence was louder and more penetrating than the beeping. My ears rang and rang.
‘How do you feel?’ I asked.
He put his hands back on the wheelchair’s arms. Every movement seemed tentative. The lines in his forehead were gone.
‘My neck hurts, I think,’ he said. ‘And my arms. And my jaw.’
‘So it hurt, then?’
‘Did what hurt?’
‘The…’ A nurse walked by a few yards away. She glanced at me. Is this normal? I wanted to ask her. Is any of this normal?
‘How do you feel?’ I asked my father again.
His eyes moved up toward the ceiling as he tried to think. ‘Feel? I don’t know.’
‘Do you feel sad?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Do you feel…happy?’
‘Happy?’ He ran his hand over his chin. Was his chin unfamiliar, too? His hands? When we went home, would he look in the mirror and not know himself? ‘I don’t know,’ he said, with a certain amount of fatigue, but also a certain amount of wonderment. ‘I don’t really feel anything.’
He made a groan and put his head against the wheelchair’s back. ‘I’m going to close my eyes for a minute.’
‘Okay. That’s fine. Take all the time you need.’
While I sat there with him, I composed a commentary in my head, as if this were a documentary about ECT and I was the narrator and I already knew how the story would end. This was Richard Davis’s first appointment, and by far the toughest. After this, he began to miraculously recover. Says Lawrence Frum, the doctor who administered the treatments: ‘This is the best outcome from ECT I have ever seen in my practice. This man has a new lease on life. It is simply astounding.’
I changed my high, thin voice to a deep, assured one. Faith, I thought. Yet again, I turned everything over to faith. I revised the documentary script a few times to make the outcome better and better. My father would eventually practice medicine again. He would eventually run a hospital. My mother would wash up as something plain and somewhat pitiful, maybe a telemarketer or sales clerk, her drama career hitting a dead-end. We would get through this, and he’d come out a hero. It made me feel better. It really did.
14
The computer’s screensaver drew fractal-like scribbles. Once the image became an impossibly tangled ball of yarn, it dissipated and a new drawing began. I watched it for a while.
I touched the monitor and there was static. The keys on the keyboard felt like teeth.
In the past two months, I have hidden under a pile of coats at a party and not gotten up when they called my name at the dentist’s office. I have also given a fake name when a woman from a marketing survey called home and, just yesterday, I bought a postcard off the street and addressed it to my great-aunt Stella in Cobalt, PA. I wrote about horses and windmills and signed it Beatrice A. Haverford.
I stared at the sentences, astounded that my hands had created them. I pulled the cursor over everything and hit delete.
When someone is severely depressed, he often doesn’t want to take his medicine. But you cannot be angry at him. You cannot blame him and you cannot blame yourself. You just have to accept it and realize that it is something out of your control and not get angry. Except it is angering, so you find yourself getting angry at other things, like strangers, or garbage bags that don’t open properly, or your purse, when you can’t find things at its bottom.