Week Thirty Seven
In the Forgotten Season, Chapter Four
The following is adapted from a memoir I've been writing about my childhood.
The pandas looked happy. Cheerful, playing, and doing whatever anthropomorphic pandas do when they’re committing one of their children to a psychiatric hospital. Absent were the chihuahuas in straight jackets, the lemurs lining up to take their pills, and the kangaroos slamming their furry heads against the walls of the padded rooms.
The book, titled “Welcome to Elmcrest” or “The Insane Asylum and You” or “So, You Decided to Kill Yourself” was an attempt by the authors to describe to new patients (and their siblings) what to expect during the first few days at Elmcrest Hospital through peaceful illustrations of pandas interacting with teachers, doctors, and fellow mentally ill and possibly suicidal animals. My parents pushed it across the table to me and said, “This is where Eric is going to stay for awhile.”
I remember thumbing through the book awkwardly, not so much reading it as coming to terms with being an only child for the first time in my life. On the one hand, my brother was horribly ill, but on the other hand, I would no longer be “Eric’s Brother.” I could reinvent myself. I’d head into fifth grade as a new man, one who’d escaped the long shadow of his better looking and more charismatic brother.
I secretly hoped it would take a few months for him to get straightened out. I needed enough time to establish myself amongst my peers as the new alpha male. Machiavellian ideas began to form in my head.
“Adam! Adam!” my mom was looking worn, “are you listening to me? We’re going up there on Sunday and you need to come, too.”
“To this hospital?” I said, absently pointing to a photo of a smiling panda picking flowers on a hillside.
“Yes. It’ll help get him settled in.”
—-
Elmcrest sat on a steep bluff overlooking the Connecticut River in Portland in the shadow of a high bridge that crossed the river a few hundred yards away. When choosing a location to build a hospital full of suicidal children, they couldn’t have picked a worse spot. One would expect to find already-tied nooses hanging from rafters or an air-tight warehouse with constantly running automobiles on the property.
To gain entrance into the hospital, you first passed through a gate and checked into the main office. Then, you were walked down to a separate building where a series of locks, doors, and chaperones would get you progressively closer to the main room. Decorated in bold colors, and designed with a mid-80s aesthetic, the goal of this modern area was to provide light, warmth, and security to seriously ill children, while erasing the notions of the turn-of-the-century asylums that plagued the country.
The main room was built next to a courtyard and had a series of bedrooms built off of it. The more a patient “progressed” through their treatment, the better and more private their accommodations became. Eric started off in a room with six to eight other kids and had a small corner next to his bed to “personalize” with safe objects from home - that were neither sharp or heavy.
The hospital was about an hour’s drive north from our house in Fairfield, and my parents created a schedule of visitation throughout the week that allowed them to be present in his life on an almost-daily basis, and brought me into the fold twice a week on Thursdays and Sundays. The rest of the time, I was looked after by friends of my parents.
On my first trip to Elmcrest, one thing became very clear to me: I needed to help Eric escape. Completely forgetting why he was in such a facility along with the clear fact that I was way too weak, small, and stupid to pull of such a feat. But the idea of my twin brother being held behind locked doors didn’t sit well with my 10 year-old mind. And so I went about planning our escape attempt.
Step 1: We’d need to hurdle the wall in the courtyard. To do that, we’d need to hop up on something, like a table, chair, or other patient.
Step 2: We’d make a run for the river and head downstream away from the hospital until we reached the swing bridge in Haddam some dozen miles to the south. And yes, I get the issue now. Why didn’t we just take the bridge next to the hospital? Well, you see, that’s what the hospital staff would anticipate. And my little pre-pubescent mind had considered that. But what it didn’t consider - or, one of the many things it didn’t consider - was that bringing my heavily medicated and sick brother miles down a river was a horrible idea.
Step 3: We go on the lam.
Yes, I understand. This is a shitty plan. I mean, hell, I drew maps and escape routes in crayon. And let’s assume we somehow make it out of the heavily-guarded hospital campus. Let’s pretend I was capable of carrying my brother toward our destiny. What then? In my head, we’d somehow make it to Disney World and spend the rest of our lives living in a fantasy dream world where nothing bad ever happens. But considering we had about $1.25 between us, and I hated sleeping outdoors, the plan was quickly doomed to fail.
But that didn’t stop me from pulling Eric aside and telling him, “You know, I can get you out of here if you want. I’ve got a plan.”
And his reaction was appropriate for a 10 year-old going through the most difficult part of his young life, “Yeah, no. I’m good here.”
And that’s when the strange notion finally occurred to me. Eric needed this place. He wanted to get healthy. This was the right place for him. Sure, he shared a room with a kid of tried to burn down his parent’s house too many times, and another friend of his tried to slice his own throat open with a broken ketchup bottle, but right now, Eric didn’t need me. He didn’t need to sleep at home. He didn’t need to escape. He needed to get better.
As we drove home, a tear fell down my face as I stuttered out a question that had been devastating the back of my mind for weeks, “Eric is going to get better, right?”
My mother, in her stoic and forceful optimism, turned around and said, “Absolutely,” without another word.
And I believed her. This was a strange time for our family, and 25% of us were not driving home in that car that night. But I understood at that moment that sometimes you need to break something apart to put it back together better than it was before.
