Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg

Author:Elizabeth Berg
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307763402
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-22T23:00:00+00:00

Things got worse. Ruth stopped going out. She wouldn’t let me come over, would only talk to me on the phone. And then one night she called while I was eating dinner. I sat on the steps in the hall with the kitchen phone cord stretched taut and heard her say, “I have some pills here, Ann.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She breathed out heavily.

“Ruth?”

“I don’t want to be alive anymore. I don’t, Ann. I’m miserable. I don’t see anything changing. I don’t have any hope. I want to stop. But I don’t want Michael to know I did this. Help me figure something out.”

“I’m coming over there,” I said, and heard Meggie say, “Where’s Mommy going? We’re eating!”

“Don’t come,” Ruth said.

I went. I packed a bag for her, told her she was not safe alone and I was taking her to a hospital. They admitted her to the psych unit, and I left her sitting at the edge of a narrow bed, her hands folded on her lap.

For a week, I wasn’t allowed to even talk to her. Then, when they told me I could visit, I went to the hospital and found her outside the main door, waiting for me. “I get to go out,” she said. “Yahoo. Let’s go get ice cream.”

We went to a Friendly’s and ordered gigantic sundaes. Her eyes were no longer flat; she’d moved back inside herself.

“They want me to go to AA meetings,” she told me. “Can you believe that?”

I said nothing.

“I mean, I know I drink too much.”

I shrugged.

“Do you think I drink too much?”

I meant to say, gently, that yes, she did, but what I did instead was to start crying, embarrassing myself. I thought it was because when I’d looked up to answer her, I’d seen the plastic hospital bracelet on her wrist, with its mean metal clasp, with its smeared and indifferent THOMAS, RUTH, but it wasn’t that. It was that I loved her and realized at that moment that if she hadn’t called me, I might have lost her. This I muttered, more or less, between the hands I held over my face.

“Hey,” she said, moving out of her side of the booth to come and sit with me. “Hey. You’re supposed to be taking care of me. You’re supposed to be making sure I don’t do crazy-person stuff. Stop crying.”

“I’m so happy you didn’t do it,” I said. “I want you to always be here. You’re my best friend. I never had one. Not like you.”

“Will you stop crying?” she said. “Listen to me. I’ll tell you a story. There’s a guy in with me there, we play pool. He has big tattoos, but I kind of like him. I like him. He writes me poems, and there are no grammatical errors. Last night, he painted my toenails for me. Red.”

I stopped crying. “Really?”

She nodded. “Don’t get too excited. You have to do therapy shit all day. It’s enough to drive you crazy, in case you’re not already.

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