Finding Martha's Place by Martha Hawkins

Author:Martha Hawkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

A Single Light

THEY CAN STICK A TUBE through your mouth if you’re still conscious. But I guess it’s much easier to go through your nose because it don’t trigger your gag reflex that way. The strength of the suction can be fiddled with and there’s no time limit involved: they just pump and pump until all the junk in your stomach runs clear. Then they give you charcoal to eat because it soaks up any poison that might be still floating around your system. As a side effect, the charcoal arouses your bowels something fierce and everything runs out of you. It ain’t pretty, but that’s how you get your stomach pumped. That’s what they told me anyway, after that’s what was done for me. When your stomach pumping is over they bring in a psych consult to figure out why you wanted to kill yourself in the first place. But I wasn’t talking too much just yet.

Daddy and my uncle Ollie had found me. Mama had instructed them to rush over. What had tipped her off all right was when I had brought Nyrone to her house and not to school. That made her call Daddy and Uncle Ollie and they came over and rang the doorbell at my house, and then kicked in the back door because they knowed somebody was home. I was passed out cold on my bathroom floor.

An ambulance had rushed me to the hospital. This time it was either Jackson, where I had once had the shock treatments, or Baptist Hospital, I don’t rightly remember, because I wasn’t at this particular hospital for long. Very soon they sent me to Greil on the Upper Wetumpka Road. That was okay by me. Don’t know what else I was gonna do except go to a place like Greil. The full name was Greil Memorial Psychiatric Hospital, but nobody was politically correct back then and we all just knowed it as the loony bin. Greil is your last stop. It’s where you go when you don’t have no hope left on the outside. You either make it at Greil and get busy living, or you don’t make it and fade away—’cause that’s all that’s left for you to do.

With all the meds pumped out of my stomach I was seeing things more clearly, and as we drove up to Greil I noticed it was a quiet place made up of low, flat brick buildings surrounded by lawns and shrubs that were sure to bud and flower sometime soon. The bricks ran along the building walls and there was a high ribbon of white stucco along the top. Greil had been built only a few years back, in 1974. For a place of last resort, in my thinking, it looked almost pretty.

Inside, the floor was tiled and new, sort of a green-and-white pattern. I was looking at that tile floor when they brought me in the entryway. A receptionist was behind a glass partition, which I saw when I glanced up.

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