Divisadero: Part 2 of 3
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Part 2: Hana
‘Hana!’
She looks up from her book, instantly on the alert. ‘Is it him again?’
The orderly nods. She puts her book facedown on the desk-no time to insert the bookmark, not now-and runs down the corridor to her patient.
He’s thrashing in his bed, his body fighting its restraints even though he remains unconscious. More than once, she’s wished she could see inside his head, find out what thoughts haunt his mind so badly, even in sleep.
She slides a needle into a vein on his left arm, presses the plunger. He sinks back into slumber, his limbs growing heavy.
‘It’s okay,’ she murmurs, smoothing his hair back. ‘It’s all right.’
The clinic is quiet at this time of night, the patients mostly sedated, the stillness giving the impression of peace. It’s not exactly genuine, but she’ll take it.
As always, the buzzer next to her desk rings, softly and apologetically, around two in the morning. She slides her feet into her sandals, closes her book around a finger to mark the place, and walks down the gently lit corridor to his room.
‘Hey,’ she says from the door.
‘Sorry,’ he says, as always. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘There’s no need to apologize,’ she says. ‘Would you like to continue?’
‘Please,’ he says, and she settles into the chair beside his bed, opens the book, and begins to read.
He’s always most alert in the mornings, most himself, although how Hana knows, she can’t really tell; after all, she has no idea who he is when he’s himself. After breakfast, they take a walk around the garden for a while before her shift ends and she goes home to sleep.
She’d heard his voice for the first time on the sixth day that she’d been there. He’d said nothing for the first five days, and what she knew about him she’d had to learn from some of the other staff: he’d been a patient for three weeks, had checked himself in with no possessions except for a worn duffel that carried a few clothes and a laptop that he used every day. His diagnosis was vague; the only prominent symptom of his illness were the nightmares he clearly suffered from every night, often having to be restrained to prevent him from hurting himself as he spasmed in his sleep. The only other person he communicated with on an almost daily basis was a young woman who had been brought in with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Hana had never heard them talking, but they would spend at least an hour every evening playing chess in Amelia’s room, their dark heads bent over the board.
For the first couple of days, Hana had tried making small talk, commenting on what a nice day it was, would he like some more orange juice, and hey, wasn’t it sweet the way the cat was sunning herself on the wall over there? He’d responded with gestures and half-smiles, always polite, and she’d stopped talking when she’d realized how exhausted he was, how painful it was for him to gather the energy to come up with his non-verbal responses.
‘You can talk, you know,’ he’d said on day six, his voice soft and hoarse. They were sitting under a tree that she could tell he liked; he always chose that particular bench to sit on during their walk around the garden.
‘I wasn’t sure if it bothered you,’ she confessed.
‘It doesn’t,’ he said, turning his head to smile, and the briefest hint of dimples appeared in his cheeks.
‘Mr Wesson,’ she began.
‘Sam.’
‘Sam,’ she said, giving him her warmest smile. ‘I hope this doesn’t sound too clinical, but I’d really like to know more about your case. I’d like to help you, if I can.’
‘You already are,’ he said, and leaned down to scratch the cat behind her ears. He didn’t say any more that day.
It’s been four weeks now, and she’s just finished her first month at the clinic.
‘Happy anniversary,’ Sam says when she visits him that evening. He hands her a homemade card: a piece of folded paper with a drawing of a flamingo on the outside.
‘You remembered,’ she says, almost shocked. They’d only been exchanging words for a week when she’d briefly mentioned, in passing, that it was her favorite animal. (Sam’s were dogs.)
He lifts a shoulder in a shrug. ‘I’m good at remembering things,’ he says simply, no hint of pride in his voice, and the shadows under his eyes seem darker.
She suppresses a shiver, and looks down at the drawing in her hands. ‘This is really amazing.’
‘It could be better,’ he says, again in that matter-of-fact tone. ‘I didn’t have any charcoal, only a pencil.’
‘Would you like some?’
He looks up, and seems almost pleased for a moment. ‘If it’s no trouble.’
After that day, he spends more time out in the garden, and she often leaves him under a tree, still sketching, as she waves goodbye before she leaves for the day. He doesn’t offer to show her his sketches, and she doesn’t ask, sensing that it would be more than a violation of his privacy. Sometimes, she catches involuntary glimpses of what he’s sketching: a landscape reflected in the oval of a rear-view mirror; a dog with shaggy dark hair; a pendant that looks like some sort of horned pagan god.
‘Do you draw?’ he asks one morning, without looking up from his sketch. His hand moves deftly over the paper, making long, steady strokes.
‘No. I used to love taking photographs, though.’
His hand stills, and he looks up at her, deliberately breaking his own concentration. ‘You don’t anymore?’
‘It’s not that,’ she says, too quickly. ‘I... lost someone. It wasn’t the same afterwards.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. It’s soft and simple, but out of all the condolences she’s heard, it’s probably the most genuine.
‘You lost someone too, didn’t you?’ she says, emboldened by his sympathy.
He winces as though she’d pulled back her hand to strike him.
‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ she blabbers. ‘I didn’t mean to-’
‘It’s all right.’ His eyes are fixed on his sketch book, his hands flat on the paper.
He says nothing else for several minutes. It’s long past the time that she usually leaves for home, and sleep is threatening to cloud her eyes, but she stays still beside him, waiting.
‘I’m trying my best,’ he says then. ‘But sometimes I don’t think it’ll be enough.’
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ she asks. The words sound baseless to her, ridiculous even, but he gives her a small smile.
‘You could get me some paint,’ he says.
She returns from a three-day break to find that Sam hasn’t stepped outside for over seventy-two hours, and that his room has been transformed into a garden of paint.
There are dark green creepers around the window panes, snaking up to the ceiling. Tortuous roots are draped over the floor, their textures gnarled and ancient, like the illustrations she remembers from the books she’d loved as a child. A broad-leafed canopy stretches over the ceiling, thin white veins threaded among the summery greens.
‘This is beautiful,’ she says quietly, so as not to startle the two patients. For once, they aren’t hunched over the chess board. Amelia is on the floor, leaning back against one of the tree trunks as though she were at a picnic, a half-smile on her lips, her eyes far away. It’s the first time Hana has seen her in a room that isn’t her own.
‘We needed a garden,’ Sam says. He’s sitting cross-legged on the bed, a heavy book cradled in his lap.
‘A garden without any flowers?’ she asks.
He looks around at his work, seeming startled. ‘I didn’t notice.’
‘Any more bad nights while I was away?’
He shakes his head.
‘You haven’t slept, have you? That’s why you haven’t had any nightmares.’
He shrugs, and retreats into silence.
Over time, Hana comes to think of Sam as her despairing saint.
Even a cursory look at him-the tenseness that never goes away from the line of his shoulders, the smudges under his eyes, the lines on his forehead-can reveal that he’s carrying a burden. Perhaps a secret more than a burden, an unspoken weight, or a burden that’s also a secret. Something hidden, something only he-and perhaps the person he’s lost-can understand.
‘May I?’ she asks one morning, gesturing toward his sketchbook.
He hesitates for a moment, and then opens the book to a particular drawing and pushes it toward her.
It’s a picture of him leaning against a shiny black car, his arms crossed over his chest. He’s much younger, his hair shorter, but still long enough to fall into his eyes. There’s an arm around him, fingers curling familiarly over his shoulder. He hasn’t yet drawn the person the arm belongs to, and yet the drawing doesn’t seem unfinished.
‘You’ve loved him for a very long time,’ she says, surprising herself.
‘All my life,’ he says. She thinks she knows the feeling.
Amelia is as much of an enigma as Sam Wesson, if not more. There are times when Hana feels like an intruder even as she watches Amelia from afar. She has a private gaze, so piercing in its intensity that to be the focus of those eyes makes Hana feel as though she were being stripped bare.
Unlike Sam, Amelia doesn’t draw, but on the desk in her room are sheaves and sheaves of paper with an unknown language on it, slightly resembling the Japanese script. Hana doesn’t dare take a closer look.
‘Let me help you,’ she says one night, sitting by Amelia as she rocks back and forth on the floor of her room, arms wrapped around her knees, her face calm and focused.
Amelia looks up, offering Hana a glance that’s somehow scornful and sympathetic at once. She reaches over and deliberately sweeps the chessboard to the floor, the game over before it can be finished.
When Hana bends over to retrieve the pieces, Amelia’s hand closes around her wrist. ‘Leave them,’ she says, her thumb against Hana’s pulse-point. ‘Please.’ Her eyes are fixed on the scattered pieces, as though analyzing a pattern in them that only she can see.
‘It’s okay,’ Sam says as Hana knocks on his open door that evening. ‘I know you know.’ He gestures to the test report in her hands.
‘You did this to yourself,’ she says.
‘Not all of it,’ Sam says, glancing up guiltily. ‘I was already having nightmares. I just... took something to make them worse.’
‘Why?’ she asks, helpless, angry. ‘Why would you do that?’
Sam doesn’t answer, but his gaze flickers to the painted trees on the wall.
‘Amelia.’ She doesn’t realize she knows until she says the name aloud. ‘It was the only way you could be close to her. If you were a patient here. It was always about Amelia.’
‘I don’t think she’s schizophrenic,’ Sam says. ‘And I think it’s safe to tell you that.’
‘Safe?’ There’s a discomfiting prickling at the back of her neck, the kind she sometimes gets when Sam says something unexpected, something that suggests that whatever she knows about him doesn’t even skim the surface of who he is.
‘I think she’s a... I think she’s special,’ Sam says. ‘In a way that might make someone want to hurt her. And I can’t stay here much longer, Hana. Will you look after her after I leave?’
‘Of course I will. It’s my job. But I don’t understand this. Any of it.’ Hana gets to her feet, starts to turn away from Sam.
‘She’ll explain, if you give her time,’ Sam says quickly. ‘She’ll talk to you.’ He smiles. ‘She likes you.’
Hana flushes, and Sam’s smile widens into a grin, his face all dimples and shining eyes.
He’s gone when Hana comes in the next evening, no trace that he’d ever been there except for the garden on the wall. That night, she helps Amelia move into Sam’s room, the cat leading the way, tail held high, purrs resounding in the quiet corridor.
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