Chapter 9: The Hold

I did not fight the paramedics.

Hank stood in the doorway with his cane across it, and I touched his arm.

"Let them," I said. "I'd rather walk in than be dragged in."

My mother watched me climb onto the stretcher without a word.

Leanne stood in the hall with her scarf soaked red from my hand.

"Where are you taking him?" she asked.

"County behavioral unit," the paramedic said. "Seventy-two hours."

Leanne took out her phone.

I rode in the back and looked at the ceiling.

The unit was on the fourth floor of the county hospital.

A nurse took my shoes and my belt and wrote my name on a plastic bracelet.

A psychiatrist saw me in a small room with a steel table.

She was brisk and tired, and she held a clipboard with my mother's paperwork on it.

"Your family reports you attempted suicide five years ago," she said. "And that you have been delusional since this week."

"I took a bottle of pills, yes."

"And the delusion?"

"My wife is alive," I said. "She was in a check-in line at the airport this morning. There are about thirty videos of it online."

She looked up.

"You think she's alive."

"I know she is. I also know how that sounds."

She put the pen down and studied me for a long moment.

"Do you want to hurt yourself right now, Mr. Ledford?"

"No."

"Do you want to hurt anyone else?"

"I want my brother to say what he did, out loud, in a room full of people. That's all I want."

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