November 13 - The window had other views

Hannah knew the scene outside the window intimately. She had made up her mind from the moment they brought her here that she hated looking inside the building, inside this one small room, so her eye was almost always drawn outside, to the window panes, to what was past the panes of glass. She could see things there that she thought she had almost forgotten about. There was yellow sunshine, like rays of piss slanting on the grass; there was the grass, which she remembered as prickly about her ankles, spiking into her flesh when she ran barefoot as a girl, while the dirt caked onto the soles of her feet; there was the blue sky with its cumulus clouds that made shapes and stories, shifting with the mood of the wind. There! In that one she saw a dragon, no this time it was a bunny rabbit, here, still another time, was her own portrait painted by God up in the clouds. Hannah placed her chin on the window sill – grimy; seldom cleaned, these forgotten window sills – and smiled up at her portrait in the sky for hours.

Hannah loved to tell Bruce these stories when her brother came to visit. “I saw a dog!” she would cluck with joy, while his wife and the two children – Hannah could never remember which was which so called them both, “My niece!” with a beatific grin to appease for the lack of a moniker – while they stood by with smiles plastered onto their faces. “Smile, girls!” Bruce would instruct as he beeped the car locked in the parking lot and ushered them inside, his wife included in the word ‘girls’. They were instructed not to say a word, lest it tip Hannah over the edge.

It was the happy stories and goings-on outside the window that Hannah liked to tell Bruce about most of all. “A family,” she crowed with delight. “I looked out, and the mother bent down and took the child’s hand, and the father, he went down, squatted on his ankles so he was his daughter’s height, and the grandfather – he was the one in the wheelchair – he was smiling.” Bruce would nod encouragingly, sure that this story had really come to pass and pleased at Hannah’s perception. It was when she said other things that he scratched his head and turned to the nurse after he left Hannah’s room and said, “Are you sure her dose is high enough?”

“My husband!” Hannah cried. “My husband he was outside the window last night! He came and he recited poetry. Just like that man with the long nose. Oh dear, I can’t remember…”

“Cyrano de Bergerac?” Bruce’s wife supplied before gasping and clamping her lips shut, trying to glare at her own tongue as if it had betrayed her. Bruce shot her a warning look.

“Yes!” Hannah said triumphantly. “Like Cyrano de Bergerac. He came and recited poetry and threw flower petals up at my window. You see this one here now?”

The two daughters leaned forward, eager to pet the velvety petals of a rose; Bruce found his own fingers itching to do so, tantalized by that soft plush flesh that he had always equated with touching a vagina, but then he recoiled when Hannah opened her hand and revealed tissue papers from the bathroom instead. She beamed down at them. “You see the flower petals he threw up at me?” One of the daughters started to snicker and Bruce smacked her on the bottom and she stood stick straight.

“Hannah,” he reminded. “You don’t have a husband, dear.”

Even this didn’t trouble him too badly; there was only so much they could expect the medication to do, even in this day and age. But there were other things that Hannah said that worried him more.

“The window has other views,” she whispered one time – thankfully he had thought to visit alone without the girls – clutching at the collar of his shirt so he had to call for the nurse to pry loose her fingers, her knuckles white from the effort and her lips parted in heavy panting, spittle flecking at the corners. The nurse eased her back against her pillows, told her to close her eyes, but Hannah whimpered and looked pleadingly at Bruce.

“The window has other views,” she repeated.

“What do you mean, dear?” he asked carefully of his mad sister.

“Sometimes it doesn’t look out on the yard. Sometimes it’s a dark pit, and I saw a man out there. I saw a man with a knife. I watched him butcher….” She shuddered.

“Butcher…?”

“Animals. The squirrels. The squirrels don’t play outside on the grass anymore.” Bruce was ashamed of himself for looking quickly, to reassure himself, that the grass was still there and that the squirrels still jumped and cavorted on the prickly green grass, and felt a sinking thud in his gut when he didn’t notice one right away.

She’s crazy, he reminded himself.

The nurse nodded when he told her to up the dose, upon leaving.

Hannah started shutting the curtain on her window, even in broad daylight. “But dear,” Bruce reminded her gently. “You love the green grass and the blue sky and the puffy white clouds.”

“Those things aren’t there anymore,” Hannah shot back with an angry stare, and Bruce wondered how she knew that it was a gray, rainy day out there at that moment. Of course; she must have heard the downpour, she would have felt the damp cold. She’s crazy, he reminded himself.

The next week, she had taped the curtain shut around the window. “We couldn’t stop her,” the nurse explained, spreading her hands helplessly.

“What do you mean you couldn’t stop her?” Bruce thundered. “How does a frail eighty-pound woman move her bed to the other side of the room all by herself?” Hannah was lying there now, sucking her thumb. The nurse flinched at his tone but straightened her back.

“She said she’s scared of the window, and it doesn’t really do any harm to have her sleeping in the other corner, so what difference does it make?”

Bruce opened his mouth a time or two but couldn’t think of the correct answer, so he stormed into his sister’s room and patted her back and tried to move her vacant stare from the wall to his face, to no avail. Sighing, hands in pockets, Bruce wandered over to the window. Needing to reassure himself – hating that need – he peeled back the layers of duct tape – somehow she had found enough rolls to tape around the window a good quarter inch thick in every spot – and peered out at the prickly green grass beyond. Just a normal day, he promised himself.

A quick movement caught his eye, and Bruce saw a man – he thought it was a man; a shadow of a man – darting across the lawn, out of sight before he could really put gender or size or texture or anything to who or what it was. Just my imagination, he thought, and looked around at the squirrels for reassurance, but there weren’t any playing.