The Art of Falling (3 page)

Too late. My broken shoulder hit the quilting of the oncoming jacket. As unwelcome as the collision was, I drank in the scent of fresh winter air clinging to that jacket before the nurse backed up.

“Wait,” the woman said. She leaned over and parted the flowers, revealing ruddy cheeks framed by dark curls newly tinged with gray. Her green eyes mirrored mine.

“Penny?”

Mom.

My mother reached through the bouquet and caressed my cheek so tenderly I rested my head against her hand.

“They’re moving me,” I said.

“I know.”

In bold defiance of visiting hours, my mother accompanied me the rest of the way.

Once the door to the psych wing locked behind us, we passed a cast of unwelcoming characters. Their eyes frightened me—some diverted, some masked by a strobe of mad blinking, some altogether devoid of animation. I tried to keep mine focused forward.

The nurse dropped my belongings, my flowers, and my mother at the office and wheeled me into a room. My new roommate hummed—at least I’d been paired with a musician. She didn’t answer when I said hello. Or alter pitch. Or turn around—all I could see was the back of her torso and her unkempt hair. She sat cross-legged on her bed, staring at the wall, that same sound one long monotonous tone. I felt acutely the loss of my mother’s presence.

The nurse moved me to a chair, removed my sling, and replaced it with a new gadget. Everything now attached with Velcro: the band circling my chest, and the cuffs attaching my wrist and upper arm to it.

“This is called an immobilizer.” What a word—I felt claustrophobic already.

The sling I’d previously worn had a strap—did they think I was at greater risk to harm myself now, as opposed to the past two days? Or did they know something I didn’t about the effects of a psychiatric unit?

When the nurse turned to leave, I suddenly feared his abandonment. His gaze drifted to my new companion. “Good luck to you.”

I would have felt better if he’d said, “Break a leg.” My roommate’s monotone sliced the air with a desperate edge. “Wait.”

The nurse turned.

“Could I have a piece of tape?”

“You’re not going to eat it, are you?”

I opened my hand. On my palm, the unfolding flower Angela gave me slowly blossomed.

The nurse looped a piece of paper tape from the roll in his pocket, stuck it to the back of the flower. “You’ll see your friends again. Don’t worry,” he said, and tacked the flower to the wall by my bed. Kind of crooked. Perfect.

• • •

A few minutes later, my mother scuttled into the room, carrying my sweatpants and sneakers.

“So I take it you weren’t able to spring me?” I said.

“Maybe you should take advantage of this. Work through some stuff. If I had thought things had gotten so bad you’d want to jump—”

“I did not jump.”

“Really? Or you just don’t want to tell me?”

“You’re being melodramatic.”

“This is serious, Penny. They wouldn’t let you have your shoes back until I pulled out the laces. And mother of god, these bruises.” She touched my arm, tentatively, then reached for me. The immobilizer made me feel like I was in the middle of a quick costume change gone awry, but the awkwardness didn’t seem to faze her. She wrapped me in her soft flesh, as if to cushion me should I fall again.

When she pulled away, she said, “What on earth is going on with you?”

The let’s-get-down-to-business voice, the look on her face—I felt like I was sixteen again and fighting off that last spasm of doubt before entering CAPA, Philadelphia’s High School for Creative and Performing Arts. She’d said, “This cannot possibly be a mistake, Penny.” She then invoked the mantra we’d repeated to all the public school teachers who felt dance was not a reliable occupation for a bright girl like me. “Who are the only people who need a fallback plan?” She waited a beat for me, and as always, I’d joined in: “Those who plan to fall.”

As my mother pulled up a chair, it struck me that it had taken two years and the locked doors of a psych ward for my mother and me to have a conversation.

“I just wish you’d called me,” she said.

“Me too.” Right then, feeling protected by her love, I meant it.

“This looks bad right now,” she said. “You’ve got to promise me you’ll fight, Penny. Fight like a shark.”

“You want me to eat my way out?”

My mother looked at me for a beat before we both cracked up. She bared her teeth and made chomping noises against my hand as if I were once again a toddler wanting raspberry kisses. Once she got her bouncy chuckle cranked up, I laughed even harder and had to breathe deeper. I felt like Pinocchio—part wood, part real—and here’s Geppetto trying to make me dance, yanking on strings that had now become nerves. I closed my eyes and tried to take shallow breaths as my back spasmed something fierce, my mother still thinking we were having a grand old time. I sank my nails into her flesh until she ran for help.

Pain upon pain upon pain. I had to wait while a nurse made my bed and then tolerate the move into it before she rolled me onto my side. Soon I receded into a safe, sleepy place, where lamb’s-wool walls insulated me from my mother’s expectations, my roommate’s hum, and the pinch of the hypodermic needle in my ample behind.

I felt my mother kiss my cheek and heard her parting whisper: “Sharks have to keep moving to stay alive.”

• • •

Later that afternoon a nurse arrived to take me to group therapy, my head still muffled from the drugs and my back stiff as the shank of a new pointe shoe. I heard pounding on the locked door to the wing. I looked up—Angela and Kandelbaum were waiting at the door, their faces a vibrant totem pole through the narrow window. The nurse wheeled me past so quickly my smile didn’t have a chance to rise to my face.

• • •

Dr. Tom opened the session by urging us to put our feelings into words. “It’s freeing,” he said. “Our words can build a bridge to other people so we feel less alone.”

I was screwed. Dance: the great wordless medium.

Yet I had never known a purer form of expression. To open the heart with wide-flung arms; to melt as regret spirals through neck and shoulder and down through the spine; to rise again with feet planted defiantly upon the floor. When I was a child, that movement was powered by my own feelings. In my career, I moved because Dmitri told me to, in the way he told me to, summoning whatever emotion would spark the movement to life. This was both my job and my great joy. Until he left, and the movement died. I closed my eyes. For a moment I could almost feel my damp leotard clinging to my torso. Oh, how I missed it.

“Penelope, how about you?”

I opened my eyes and crash-landed back in the psych ward. “Excuse me?”

“You just survived what should have been a deadly fall. Then you woke up. How do you feel about that?”

I wanted to answer well, as I sensed that my release from psych hung in the balance, but all I felt was empty. From the drugs, the surreal circumstances, the trauma, the odd company, who knew—but no words came. Yet I wasn’t so sure silence was my ticket out of here.

As I considered my response, the fingers on my right hand twitched against my thigh.

“I think I’m irritated,” I finally said.

“Interesting,” he said, nodding slowly. “Why do you think that is?”

“I need to move.”

Dr. Tom took his time before speaking. “Do you want to move away from something, or toward something?”

Didn’t he get it? I needed the movement so I could feel. In answer to my confused silence, he said, “Sit with that.”

But I was done sitting.

When the session ended, I refused a ride and steadied myself on the hall railing for the long walk back to my room. Although my feet flopped like swim fins, I was grateful for their willingness to give it a go. A nurse pushed the wheelchair slowly beside me. For when I surrendered, I supposed.

Halfway down the hall, my legs started to shake, and I stopped as if interested in a framed poster hanging on the wall. It turned out to be a Patient Bill of Rights explaining the limitations of voluntary and involuntary commitment. I figured the nurse couldn’t keep me from reading it, so I propped myself against the rail to rest. I skipped the first part since nothing about my trip to the psych ward was voluntary. I also skipped the part about the involuntary commitment of violent criminals—no one had mentioned I’d gone down shooting. I wasn’t eager to give voice to the notion, but I knew why I was here. I scanned for the relevant words. It said that unless someone witnessed me trying to “commit the act” or “threatening to repeat the act,” I couldn’t be held beyond one hundred twenty hours.

“What’s one hundred twenty divided by twenty-four?”

“Five days,” the nurse said. Her turbo math impressed me until I realized this must be the most often-asked question around here. Reassured that my stay would not be indefinite, I found the strength to make it back to my room.

But the trip used me up. When I got back in bed, my whole body cried out. Only a syringe full of the aggressive, awareness-robbing pain therapy embraced in the psych ward finally lulled me to sleep.

• • •

I woke, disoriented. Time was difficult to parse in psych, where our room offered no window to the rhythms of the natural world. The walls were painted the bleak gray of boredom. My roommate sat cross-legged on her bed, humming. With nothing else to do, I listened.

The sound was like a bagpipe drone to which no one had added the pleasure of a melody. After several minutes, I could hear that its tone was far from monotonous; it surged and ebbed. Resisting the amplitudes of hope and despair, it cycled instead within a narrow band of highs and lows, fighting its way through the middle.

I did not know the woman whose heartache inspired this lament, but my pain aligned with hers, so minimally yet perfectly expressed.

In time the hum wavered, sputtered…stopped. My roommate’s head bobbed toward her chest; my heart beat faster. She had abandoned me for sleep, leaving nothing to distract me from the introspection I’d been so carefully avoiding.

As frightful, intolerable silence stretched on, I sought calm within the emptiness I’d felt the day before. But my inner being had since taken on the gloom and chill of midnight, and from its blackness arose the unwanted question:
What
was
I
capable
of?

My sore body tensed against the answer. Was I battle ready, or poised to flee?

I brushed a tear from my cheek. Words pushed their way into the room.

“Was it”—muscles clenched, even my gut contracted—“was it suicide?”

My roommate gently snorted. I waited out the silence. She awoke and resumed her hum.

I welcomed the return of its soothing presence. My muscles unwound. My heart slowed. I sensed that I belonged, in this room, in this moment, and was disturbed now by only one sensation…

The way the word “suicide” had tasted sweet on my tongue.

• • •

After a few days of prescribed chit-chat, I decided my healing wouldn’t come in the realm of talk therapy. Just because I suffered traumatic memory loss didn’t mean I was out of my mind. If anything, I was out of my body. The conversation I needed to re-establish was neuromuscular. So I claimed my legal right to sign myself out of the psych ward.

I would not escape without a private audience with Dr. Tom.

“Your chart indicates you haven’t been eating much. Is that normal for you?”

“I eat enough.”

“It makes me wonder if perhaps, when you were out on that balcony, you may have fainted.”

I smiled. To seem agreeable, so I could leave. “Your guess is as good as mine. But I’ve never fainted in my life. I’m strong as a moose. You’ve got to be, to withstand six hours of exercise a day.”

“Six hours? That’s excessive.”

For crying out loud. This guy had “outsider” scrawled all over his forehead. “You don’t earn a professional dance career by lying on a couch and eating bonbons. The effort may seem excessive to you, but it’s necessary.”

“Do you ever vomit after meals?”

“Oh lord. Please don’t be so cagey. The very thought of bulimia makes me want to puke.”

“Your chart says you weigh one-twenty. That’s underweight for five foot ten.”

“Keep in mind I’m a dancer
and
a woman. I lied.”

“Then what is it, really?”

I paused. While I carefully tracked its daily fluctuations, I had never uttered aloud my real weight. I fiddled with a new calculation that would put me close enough to “healthy” to get him to back down without crippling my pride.

He lost patience. “Of course I could bring a scale in here—”

“Okay, okay. It’s one hundred thirty-two.”

He gave me another one of those x-ray stares, as if checking out my contours beneath the supersized sweatshirt my mother had lent me.

“Can we get the paperwork wrapped up? My mom will be here soon.”

Dr. Tom released me grudgingly, and only after “prescribing” three well-balanced meals a day and handing me a vial of antidepressants. The orthopedist had to sign off, too. He wrote something on a prescription pad and signed it. I tried to decipher the words as he scrawled—Vicodin? Oxycontin?

No, when he handed me the slip of paper, I saw two words: “physical therapy.” He would allow my body to heal me. Tears of relief sprang to my eyes.

Both doctors told me I could recuperate “at home,” a term which had lost all meaning. With no other options, I had called my mother, who now huffed along beside my wheelchair.

I tried to tell myself everything would work out fine. My mother had always taken great care of me. She loved dance as much as I did, although that was both a blessing and a curse. For a woman of her bulk, the rigors of dance training were a physical impossibility, and weight loss was a mountain she couldn’t scale. So she threw all her energy into supporting my career.

I feared she might be thinking that I had blown my big chance. A chance she’d never had. So when she acted as if all along it had been our big plan that I come home for Easter, the pretense ate at me. When she offered to drive me back to the Philadelphia hospital for rehab—more than an hour’s drive each way—her generosity whittled away at what was left of my self-esteem.

I stuffed the feelings down. The independence I had fought so hard to earn had vanished. I hated to admit it, but I needed her.

When she opened the car door for me at the hospital curb, she reminded me how resourceful she could be: in her back seat sat my trunk. She’d gone over to the Independence Suites and somehow talked the super into fetching my stuff.