Chapter 6: The Ward

The psychiatric unit had one long hallway, a dayroom with a television bolted to the wall, and a window that did not open.

They took my shoes at the desk.

They took my wedding ring too, the one Callie had given back, and put it in a clear plastic bag with my name on it.

"It'll be here when you leave," the nurse at intake said.

She was fifty or so, with reading glasses on her head and a voice that had heard everything.

"Seventy-two hours?" I asked.

"The hold is seventy-two hours. The doctor decides whether it's longer."

"And who is the doctor?"

"The unit physician. Not the man who signed your certificate." She looked at me over her glasses. "I know who signed it. He signs a lot of them."

She drew my blood herself, as I had asked, and labelled the vials in front of me.

I slept on a narrow bed with a plastic mattress, and in the morning I woke to somebody turning the page of a chart.

The same nurse stood by the bed with a paper in her hand.

"Honey," she said, "your labs are back. Your creatinine is four times what it should be."

"I know."

"You know?"

"A medic read it to me on the day I walked out of the warehouse. Eighteen percent."

"It's seventeen now." She sat down on the end of the bed. "You've known for three days and haven't told your own doctor?"

"I told the one in my family's house that my back hurt," I said. "He said it was stress."

She was silent for a moment.

"He's been telling people that for years," she said. "Is there anyone you want me to call?"

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