chosen work.
And she was sure that she had not “misheard” Roger.
Abruptly she decided not to waste any more time questioning him. For all practical purposes, he was impervious to inquiry. And he had nothing to say that might sway her.
Surely he would leave when he had seen his mother?
Without challenging his falseness, she drew him forward again, toward Joan’s room.
Along the way, she explained, “This is where we keep our more disturbed patients. They aren’t necessarily more damaged or in more pain than the people downstairs. But they manifest violent symptoms of one form or another. We’ve had to keep your mother under restraint for the past year. Before that-”
Linden temporarily spared herself more detail by pushing open Joan’s door with her shoulder and leading Roger into his mother’s room.
Out in the hall, the characteristic smell of hospitals was less prominent, but here it was unmistakable: an ineradicable admixture of Betadyne and blood, harsh cleansers and urine, human sweat, fear, floor wax, and anaesthetics, accented by an inexplicable tang of formalin. For some reason, medical care always produced the same scents.
The room was spacious by the standard of private rooms in County Hospital next door. A large window let in the kind of sunlight that sometimes helped fragile psyches recover their balance. The bed occupied the centre of the floor. An unused TV set jutted from one wall near the ceiling. The only piece of advanced equipment present was a pulse monitor, its lead attached to a clip on the index finger of Joan’s left hand. According to the monitor, her pulse was steady, untroubled.
On a stand by the head of the bed sat a box of cotton balls, a bottle of sterile saline, a jar of petroleum jelly, and a vase of bright flowers. The flowers had been Maxine Dubroff’s idea, but Linden had adopted it immediately. For years now she had arranged for the delivery of flowers to all her patients on a regular basis, the brighter the better. In every language which she could devise or imagine, she strove to convince her patients that they were in a place of care.
Joan sat upright in the bed, staring blankly at the door. Restraints secured her arms to the rails of the bed. Her bonds were loose enough to let her scratch her nose or adjust her posture, although she never did those things.
In fact, one of the nurses or orderlies must have placed her in that position. Fortunately for her caregivers, Joan had become a compliant patient: she remained where she was put. Pulled to her feet, she stood. Stretched out on the bed, she lay still. She swallowed food placed in her mouth. Sometimes she chewed. When she was taken into the bathroom, she voided. But she did not react to words or voices, gave no indication that she was aware of the people who tended her.
Her stare never wavered: she hardly seemed to blink. Standing or reclining, her unfocused gaze regarded neither care nor hope. If she ever slept, she did so with her eyes open.
Her years of catatonia had marked her poignantly. The skin of her face had hung slack on its bones for so long now that the underlying muscles had atrophied, giving her a look of mute horror. Despite the program of exercises which Linden had prescribed for her, and which the orderlies carried out diligently, her limbs had wasted to a pitiful frailty. And nothing that Linden or the nurses could do-nothing that any of the experts whom Linden had consulted could suggest-spared her from losing her teeth over the years. No form of nourishment, oral or IV, no brushing or other imposed care, could replace her body’s need for ordinary use. In effect, she had experienced more mortality than her chronological years could contain. Helpless to do otherwise, her flesh bore the burden of too much time.
“Hello, Joan,” Linden said as she always did when she entered the room. The detached confidence of her tone assumed that Joan could hear her in spite of all evidence to the contrary. “How are you today?”
Nevertheless Joan’s plight tugged at her heart. A sore the size of Linden’s palm stigmatised Joan’s right temple. A long series of blows had given her a deep bruise which had eventually begun to ooze blood as the skin stretched and cracked, too stiff to heal. Now a dripping red line veined with yellow and white ran down her cheek in spite of everything that could be done to treat it.
When the bruise had first begun to bleed, Linden had covered it with a bandage; but that had made Joan frantic, causing her to thrash against her restraints until she threatened to break her own bones. Now Linden concentrated on trying to reduce the frequency of the blows. On her orders, the wound was allowed to bleed: cleaned several times a day, slathered with antibiotics and salves to counteract an incessant infection, but left open to the air. Apparently it calmed Joan in some way.
Roger stopped just inside the door and stared at his mother. His face betrayed no reaction. Whatever he felt remained closed within him, locked into his heart. Linden had expected surprise, shock, dismay, indignation, perhaps even compassion; but she saw none. The undefined lines of his face gave her no hints.
Without shifting his gaze, he asked softly, “Who hit her?”
He didn’t sound angry. Hell, Linden thought, he hardly sounded interested-
She sighed. “She did it to herself. That’s why she’s restrained.”
Moving to the side of the bed, she took a couple of cotton balls, moistened them with sterile saline, and gently began to mop Joan’s cheek. One soft stroke at a time, she wiped away the blood upward until she reached the seeping wound. Then she used more cotton balls to dab at the wound itself, trying to clean it without hurting Joan.
Linden would have cared for her carefully in any case; but her devotion to Thomas Covenant inspired an extra tenderness in her.
“It started a year ago. Until then we kept her downstairs. She’d been unreactive for so long, we never thought that she might be a danger to herself. But then she began punching at her temple. As hard as she can.”
Hard enough to wear calluses on her knuckles.
“At first it wasn’t very often. Once every couple of days, no more. But that didn’t last long. Soon she was doing it several times a day. Then several times an hour. We brought her up here, tied her wrists. That seemed to work for a while. But then she got out of the restraints-”
“Got out?” Roger put in abruptly. “How?”
For the first time since he had entered the room, he looked at Linden instead of at Joan.
Avoiding his eyes, Linden gazed out the window. Past the institutional profile of County Hospital next door, she could see a stretch of blue sky, an almost luminous azure, free of fault. Spring offered the county days like this occasionally, days when the air reminded her of
Today it gave her little comfort.
“We don’t know,” she admitted. “We’ve never been able to figure it out. Usually it happens late at night, when she’s alone. We come in the next morning, find her free. Blood pumping from her temple. Blood on her fist. For a while we had her watched twenty-four hours a day. Then we set up video cameras, recorded everything. As far as we can tell, the restraints just fall off her. Then she hits herself until we make her stop.”
“And she still does?” Roger’s manner had intensified.
Linden turned from the window to face him again. “Not as much as before. I can get you a copy of the tapes if you want. You can watch for yourself. Now it only happens three or four times a night. Occasionally during the day, not often.”
“What changed?” he asked.
Gazing at him, she remembered that his father had done everything in his power to protect both Joan and her. Roger’s stare conveyed the impression that he would not have done the same.
Her shoulders sagged, and she sighed again. “Mr. Covenant, you have to understand this. She was going to kill herself. One punch at a time, she was beating herself to death. We tried everything we could think of. Even electroshock-which I loathe. During the first six or seven months, we gave her an entire pharmacy of sedatives, tranquilisers, soporifics, stimulants, neural inhibitors, beta blockers, SSRIs, anti-seizure drugs-enough medication to comatise a horse. Nothing worked. Nothing even slowed her down. She was killing herself.”
Apparently something within her required those blows. Linden considered it possible that the Land’s old enemy had left a delayed compulsion like a posthypnotic suggestion in Joan’s shattered mind, commanding her to bring about her own death.
