Where Lies Begin

Her knight in shining armor had just ridden in and she didn’t even know it. All around them, the other in-patients were scattered with their visitors. On overstuffed sofas layered over with plastic to prevent the worst of the stains, mommies and daddies were giving their little girls and boys cuddles, but not her. Her mommy and daddy didn’t come around anymore. Left her here to rot. Forgot all about her, once a year for Christmas and then nothing more. She embarrassed them. She knew she did. Even if she couldn’t spell the word. They looked at her and their eyes got sad. Even when they were smiling as widely as they could, their eyes were sad.

Her knight though, his eyes weren’t sad. They were bright and shiny, and his smile made it all the way up to them, and he was saying things to her, but she hadn’t heard them because there was too much noise. Too many people speaking all at once. This was meant to be a quiet room, but the visitors didn’t know that and they talked very loudly. So loud it made her want to cover her ears so she wouldn’t hear anything, but then she wouldn’t be able to hear what her knight was saying.

Her knight wasn’t her knight yet. He was a stranger. Stranger danger. Somebody she had never seen before. She didn’t trust people she’d never seen before. Didn’t trust most people she had seen before either. Not after they made her go to bed early or watched her use the toilet or bullied her for not knowing how to play their card games or… He was still talking and she was missing it all.

“I’m a friend.”

That she understood, those were the kind of words she used. Friend. She had a friend once but he got moved to somewhere else. His mommy and daddy hadn’t paid the bills so he was moved to the state hospital and that meant that they couldn’t see each other anymore or swap puddings when they got the kind that they didn’t like as much. He was gone now, and that warm little feeling she got in her tummy when he held her hand was gone, too. She feared she would never see him again, just like grandpa and grandma, but she knew her grandparents had gone somewhere you could never come back from while her friend might come back someday. Except she thought that her friend’s mommy and daddy had gone to that place you couldn’t come back from too, so they would never pay their bills, so he’d never come back either.

“I’m a friend of your sister.”

Her sister. She had a sister. Big sis. Clever girl. She wished she was as clever as her big sister. Her big sister was so clever she didn’t have to go to a place like this. They let her stay outside in the big world with the big boys and girls. She was so lucky. She got to go nap when she wanted to and eat food she liked and she didn’t have to go to where she was told to go all the time. She could do anything because she was so smart. When she was little, she had been here, or in whatever place they were in before here, with the younger ones who couldn’t live in the outside world. But then they had gotten bigger and her sister had gotten smarter and they had said she could go outside and be with mommy and daddy. When she came back, she was wearing different clothes every time.

This man wasn’t really a stranger. He was a friend of her big sister. Her big sister was so clever, there was no way that she would be friends with a stranger. She knew about stranger danger too, so if this was a stranger then her sister would never have been friends with him.

What if he was lying? There were people here who said they were her friends, but they weren’t. They came into her room at night. They pushed her when she was in line for lunch. They stole pieces of the puzzles and hid them so she couldn’t solve them and then they called her a dumb-dumb even though it wasn’t her fault that the pieces were gone. It was their fault for taking the pieces but when she tried to tell the nurses, they just looked at her with sad eyes and pretended that they believed her, but she knew they also thought she was just a dumb-dumb. It wasn’t fair. She wasn’t a dumb-dumb. She wasn’t. They were liars. What if this man was a liar too?

As if he had heard her inner thoughts, the man said, “If you get up and walk over to the window there and look outside, you can see your sister. She’s sitting in the front seat of my car. And she is waiting for you to go out and see her. Would you like to go see her?”

He’d changed the way he was speaking to her. He was talking slower. Using easier words. Making sure she was understanding him before saying something else, just like her sister used to do. Like her mommy and daddy never got used to doing. They were always like little bees, buzzing about too fast for her to catch them. Always busy. Too busy to slow down for her. That was good. Him slowing down. Not mommy and daddy being so busy. 

When he went slow she didn’t miss so much, even though it was still too noisy in here. She got back to her feet, still keeping her eyes on him, and walked over to the window. If her sister was there, then he wasn’t a liar. If her sister was there, she could wave and say, “Hello sister. I have missed you, sister. I have missed you for so long. I have missed you since mommy and daddy brought you at Christmas time.”

Out there in the front of the car, she could see her sister. Her sister waved to her, and she waved back. The nurses started heading over in case she was going to be trouble, but she wasn’t. She definitely wasn’t going to be trouble. The man she didn’t know, the friend of her sister, waved to the nurses and they decided that everything was okay. She didn’t know how he did that, but he did, and now everything was easier. If they knew her sister was out there, it would have been fine for her to go to the window and wave, but if her sister wasn’t there, she might have been making trouble and they didn’t like that at all. Not one bit. You got put on punishment if you made trouble. They would have just had to look to see her sister, but they wouldn’t have bothered, they would have asked her questions, and it was when she was trying to explain that there would have been trouble. She knew what she wanted them to know, and she said words she thought would make sense, but nobody ever seemed to understand. They treated her like she was a naughty little baby. But she wasn’t. She was more than twenty years old. She had counted. And they had only put one candle on her cake. And even if she wasn’t more than twenty years old, the doctor had said that she was as smart as any five-year-old, so they still shouldn’t have treated her like a baby. If the doctor was right, and he was very clever, then they should have tried harder, they should have listened to her and understood what she was trying to tell them, but they never did. They always looked bored and had sad eyes. They always wanted to stop talking to her right away even when they were the ones who had started talking to her.

Ambling back over to the table with the man she didn’t know was her knight in shining armour, she sat back down and looked at him. He was a white man, and mommy and daddy weren’t, and her sister wasn’t, and they didn’t have many friends who were white men back when they still came around, but this man was white, with his hair all slicked back and his big smile with little thin lips. He was smiling at her, not like the doctors did when she was being good, or like the nurses did when they got to tell her off for being trouble, but like something else. Something new. Like her sister did sometimes. Like he could be her friend, the way he was her sister’s friend.

‘Now you know I’m your sister’s friend, and she is here, I wondered if you might like to go outside with us, for a while?’

That was silly. That didn’t make any sense. Go outside? She wasn’t allowed out into the world. It was too big and bad and scary for her. She wasn’t smart enough. She would be in big trouble if she went outside. Everyone said so. She had to stay inside where it was safe, and they’d take care of her. Who would take care of her if she went outside? Who would give her food, dress her, and make sure she went to the toilet and did all the things she needed to do but didn’t know how to do for herself? She wasn’t allowed. He had to know that.

And somehow, he did, he saw the frown on her face, and he explained. ‘I asked the nice people here if we could take you out for a little trip and bring you back, and they said that as long as I took care of you, that would be A-okay with them. I got a special pass for you.’

That was too many words, too many abstract ideas, her frown deepened as she tried to pick through them. “If you want to go outside with me, and see your sister, that is allowed, as long as you stay with me.”

He laid his hand on the table in between them, palm up, fingers curled just a little. He was offering it to her. Since her friend had left, nobody had touched her except when they were scrubbing her in the shower, and that wasn’t the same. That wasn’t a nice touch, that was a rough one, that was all business. All business. Nobody had held her hand since her friend, or her sister. This man was offering her the first kindness she had experienced in a long while. Tentatively, unsure, she reached out towards it, expecting him to jerk it back at any moment, the way the nurses and doctors sometimes did if she tried to touch them. But he didn’t move. He sat completely still, with his hand held out, and when she put her hand on top of it, he closed his fingers around it, and it was warm and dry and nice. He was smiling at her, holding her hand, and looking at her like he was happy to be looking at her. Nobody was ever happy to look at her. Not ever.

“Go out?” She managed to mumble after far too long – lost in the glory of the sensation. The brief spark of light in the vast void of loneliness that consumed her every waking moment had distracted her, but the man didn’t look mad that she’d been lost in thought. He was still smiling.

“That’s right,” He nodded eagerly, “You and me and your sister, we’re going to take a little trip. Go see some sights. Does that sound good to you?”

“Sounds good.” She repeated back to him.

“Well alright then.” He took her by the hand, and drew her up to standing, like she was a princess at a ball, being asked to dance.

That was the last solid memory she had to hang onto. Her knight in shining armor, rescuing her from the bad place, going to her room and getting her dressed, taking her out past the desk through the locked doors, signing the paper that made it so she could leave. It was all a blur. After so long with nothing happening in her life, too much was happening and it was all flying by. She was holding his hand again, being led around by it. He was smiling at her, smiling at everyone, even when they weren’t smiling back. And then she was waving goodbye, and he was calling back one last reassurance. “Don’t you worry. I’m going to take real good care of her.”