Gracie stayed in the hospital under constant observation for the next month and a half. Since she refused to take her pills and was stronger than the people who tried to give her the medication, her antipsychotic pills were crushed and put into her IV. Although she wasn't allowed to leave the room or have any visitors, she got an update from home every few days. Apparently Isaac had gone and filmed his video, and Ren� said she heard the song on the radio all the time. He was home now, and she'd be able to see him in a few days when she was allowed to leave the hospital. He didn't know what was going on with her; she wanted to tell him herself.
The antipsychotic pills were working quite nicely. She hadn't talked to Bob since a few days after she started to take them, although she didn't feel any better about herself. They put her on an antidepressant, which didn't seem to bother her antipsychotic medication. They were helping but she wouldn't feel the full effect of them for another week or so.
When the doctor came into Gracie's room, she was playing with a bit of fluff that had fallen from her pillow. Her pillow was connected to the bed because once they removed the restraints from her wrists she tried to suffocate herself with it. Now it was coming apart and it was annoying her.
"My stuffing's coming out of my pillow," she said. "It needs to be fixed. You never know, I might choke on it or something." She looked up at Dr. Ward with a knowing smirk. She'd tried every possible means to kill herself in that room, and now she was beginning to get some things back. She was eating by herself now instead of through a tube and used silverware. She had writing materials, although she never used them. She'd asked for a needle and thread for sewing, but she wasn't allowed to have that just yet.
"We'll get you a new one," he said, smiling back at her. "You can go home soon, though, so maybe we'll just fix it."
"Home? I get to go home soon? When?"
"The end of the week. You can go back home on Friday. It's Tuesday now."
"Will I have to stay at home or can I go out and stuff?" she asked. "My boyfriend's back in town and I want to go out with him this weekend."
"If you feel up to it, by all means go. We're still going to have your family keeping a close eye on you while you're at home because you won't have that tube anymore to give you your medication. You'll have to take it orally. I don't expect you to remember when to take it, but someone in your family has to."
"I think Sarah will do it. She'd good a remembering stuff like that and she'll be stubborn about it until I do it."
"All right, then I'll make sure to tell her about that. I do suppose you'll tell her but just in case, I want to tell her myself. I will be letting your family know about your medication habits, such as when you should take it and how much you should take. Now we're going to let you out of this room and you can walk freely about the hospital and it's grounds. We're fenced in so it'll be quite a struggle for you to get out. You have a curfew and check-up times, so don't think you're off Scott-free. We'll still have someone keeping an eye on you, but you're almost on your own. We're just preparing you for your freedom when you get back home. There we can't monitor you."
"Good. I hate being watched all the time."
"Your family will be keeping a close eye on you when you get home. But that's their choice. Right now you're free to roam the grounds. There's pretty much no way you can get out of here without someone noticing, so I wouldn't try it. I know people who've done it before. I'll take out your IV because I know it isn't fun to carry along with you and you really don't need it." He pulled a band-aid and a fresh cotton ball from a bag in his pocket and removed her IV. "The check-ups are usually every few hours and just make sure you're still around. When you leave the hospital, talk to Wendy by the front desk and she'll give you a time to check in. If you decide to come back in the hospital, let her know and we'll just page you for a check up."
"All right."
He put the cotton ball and bandage on her hand and smiled. "There. You're good to go. I'll see you tonight before you go to bed to give you your medication." She nodded and watched him leave the room. She sat there for a moment, thinking about her newfound freedom. She got up and grabbed the notebook and pencil that was left on the table for her. She got up and left the room, grinning. Before she ventured outside the hospital, she'd have to get to know where everything was. She'd never been outside her room, so she was never able to figure anything out.
She wandered aimlessly, her notebook and pencil in one hand and her other trailing along the sanitized wall. Everything here was so clean and white, it was sort of mesmerizing. If it weren't for the large directional signs hanging from the ceiling, she'd be lost by now. As it was, she didn't know where her room was.
She turned the corner and suddenly the white room turned into an array of color�the lower half of the walls depicted sort of a jungle atmosphere while the top looked just like a bright blue day. She noticed towards the middle was big black lettering saying 'CHILDREN'S WARD.' She instantly liked it here. She wanted to stay for a moment and look over the scenery, but the urge to go outside was overpowering her.
She walked up to the attendant behind the desk, a nurse who wore a bright pink uniform. "Excuse me," Gracie said. The woman looked up and smiled. "How do I get to the front desk?"
"Take the elevator behind you to the ground floor. Go right down the hall and you can't miss it. There's signs if you get lost."
"Thank you," Gracie said. She looked around once more, gripping the notebook in her hands. She pressed the button for the elevator. If it weren't for the crack where the doors met, she wouldn't have even known they were there. When the doors opened, she stepped inside and pressed the button for the ground floor. It lit up with a ding from a bell. She giggled and pressed it again. Another ding sounded.
Okay, that's enough, Gracie, she thought. She stepped away from the buttons, still smiling. The doors opened shortly (she'd only been on the second floor) and she stepped to her right. A large sign with arrows told the way around the hospital, and she followed the signs that led to the front desk. A woman in green scrubs was sitting behind the desk doing paperwork. Gracie stepped up to her.
"Are you Wendy?" she asked.
"Wendy is on her break right now. I'm Sam. Can I help you?"
"Well Dr. Ward told me that I should check in with Wendy when I wanted to go outside. She's supposed to write it down or something and tell me when to come back." Gracie was unsure of what to do now. She wanted to go outside but the person she was supposed to talk to wasn't there.
"Oh, yes, I know about you. You're Gracie, aren't you?" Gracie nodded. "Okay, I'll write it down and give it to Wendy. Come back in at six, all right? Do you have a watch?"
"Um, no, but I have someone who's supposed to be with me who'll have a watch." She nodded.
"That must be Warren. He's over there." Gracie looked to where she was pointing. A man reading a magazine looked up and waved. Gracie waved back at him. "He'll be around, but he won't be with you. I'll tell him you're leaving and he'll follow you around until you come back here to check in."
"Okay. Where am I going?"
"Follow that corridor all the way down and you'll see a garden outside two doors. That leads to the area where you can hang around." Gracie nodded. "See you at six." She walked off, following the corridor. She could see the garden already, the bright flowers sticking out, beckoning her to come out and stop to smell them. She didn't run but she wanted to so she could finally be outside again. She'd never been much of an outside person, but it was just the fact that she wasn't allowed to that intrigued her so much.
She opened the doors and immediately sneezed from the direct sunlight. Sure the hospital had been bright, but outside was even brighter. All the colors that she hadn't seen in a month and a half automatically filled her pale eyes and she inhaled the deep scent of freshly cut grass and flowers�so many kinds of flowers. She took the time to look at all of them, recognizing some of them but knowing all of the colors. The smile on her face was so bright she was lit up better than the garden. She nearly cried when she saw a butterfly fluttering from petal to petal. She didn't understand how much she was affected by being inside until now�even prison inmates get to go outside.
She walked slowly through the garden, stopping to smell the flowers every now and then, until she'd passed the garden and walked onto the field of grass. There were other people out here. They were off in the distance behind a tall chain-link fence�they must not have been a part of the hospital. Glancing down at her pajamas, she walked away from them. She wasn't exactly dressed to be talking to other people. She wasn't quite ready for other people yet anyway.
There was a few trees scattered along the field but Warren told her she wasn't allowed to climb any. She knew why, she could climb up to the top of one and jump off to try to kill herself, or just climb one and accidentally kill herself, so she decided she wasn't going to climb any trees today. She settled on sitting underneath the shade of a nearby tree, opening up her notebook and beginning to sketch the garden in front of her. As she looked up to transfer the image onto paper, she saw Warren pick a rose and smiled.
"We did what we could to get everything back the way it was in your room, but I don't know if we remembered everything. If we're missing anything, you tell us and we'll get it for you, okay?" Gracie's mother said to Gracie as they walked up the stairs. "As for clothes and everything, you'll have to live off of what your sisters have until we can go shopping. Some of your clothes are still in tact so they're hanging up in your closet."
"Mom, don't fret. I'm sure everything is fine." Her mother smiled, stopping at the top of the staircase, and embraced her child. "Mo-om�"
"I'm just happy you're home. You don't know what it was like without my baby here." Gracie rolled her eyes, but appreciated the attention. Usually Ren� and Sarah got most of the attention while Gracie and her mother had a slightly offbeat relationship. It hurt somewhat to know that the only reason she was getting this attention was because she had a serious disease, but Gracie pushed the fact aside and let herself think it was just because her mother really missed her while she was gone.
Her mother opened the door to her room and Gracie stepped in, looking around. Her last memory of her room was the disaster area she'd left it in when she had her episode, and now everything was put neatly where it belonged. It was almost the same�just one or two minor things different but she liked it better this way.
"Oh�oh Mom it's perfect." She walked around her room, a smile on her face. She noticed a small throw rug in front of her mirror, which was new. "What's this?" she asked. Her mother openly fidgeted.
"Well�when you�"
"It's okay to say it," she told her mother, turning around.
"When you tried to kill yourself, you got blood on the carpet and we couldn�t get it out. When we noticed it we didn't have enough time to get the carpet replaced so we just threw a rug over it until you came home and we could replace it."
"That's fine." She wandered around the room, taking the entire thing in. She hadn�t been home in such a long time that the people and the place seemed nearly foreign to her. The hospital bed that she spent a month and a half lying in seemed home to her now, and it would take a while to get adjusted to being back home. She hadn't even seen her sisters yet. Her mother and father picked her up from the hospital about an hour beforehand and she spent the past hour talking with them and now she wanted to see her sisters. "Are Ren� and Sarah home?"
"Yeah, they're in their rooms. I don't think they know you're home yet." Gracie ran out of the room and burst in next door to Sarah's room. Sarah looked up and screamed.
"Gracie!"
"Sarah!" They met at the middle of the room and embraced, tears flowing freely. Having heard the outburst, Ren� ran into the room. "Ren�!" She hugged Gracie and the three cried openly. They'd never been apart from each other for more than a few days, so a month and a half seemed like a lifetime without Gracie.
A few minutes later the triplets were on Sarah's bed, talking. "Girl, so much has happened with your boyfriend since the last time we talked to you. Their song is on the radio all the time and they're on TV all the time, either on themselves or their video is on MTV playing�they're huge. Mom's been talking to his Mom all the time, they're close to best friends now. They're in town for the weekend before they have to leave again. They all want to meet you. They're coming here tomorrow night but Mom says it's okay if you go out with Isaac tonight. Normally she wouldn't want you to leave but she knows they're only in town for a short period of time and she doesn�t know when they'll be back and you have to live with us so you'll see us all the time anyway�" Gracie smiled. Ren� could really chat her head off if she didn't stop her.
"That's nice. Has their album come out yet? I remember Ike talking about it." Ren� nodded. "Really? I want to hear it."
"I have it. Let me go get it." Ren� bounced off to her room and returned a few minutes later with a CD. She gave the case to Gracie and put the actual CD into the stereo. Gracie checked out the booklet, reading the lyrics as the song played on the stereo. She made it halfway through the first song before breaking down and crying.
"Gracie?" Sarah asked, putting her comforting arm around her older sister. "Honey what's wrong?"
"It's�it's just everything," she sobbed. "Being there and now being here and I have to be happy or someone will think something's going wrong and I have so many things I have to do to take care of myself so I don't go back to the way I was�I don't want to go back to the way I was."
"Gracie, it's all right," Ren� said, trying her best to comfort her. "We got it early. We got it early so we could help you before you did anything too rash and you're better now. Sarah and I, we're going to take care of you."
"Yeah, we are," Sarah chimed in.
"So is everyone else. We're not going to let you go back. Mom and Dad and Isaac�they'll help too. No one is going to allow anything to happen to you because we all know how to keep you safe."
"Does Ike know what it is yet? Did you tell him?" Gracie asked, looking at Ren�. She shook her head.
"He knows something's wrong but he doesn�t know what. He knows you wanted to tell him so he didn't ask." She nodded, wiping the tears from her eyes. "He's got it bad for you, Gracie. He misses you just as much as the rest of us. We're so happy you're home."
"I'm happy to be home." She sat back against the wall. "Oh, I have to tell you about my doctor. Did you guys meet Dr. Ward?" They shook their heads. "Oh my God was this man sexy. Let me tell you, I did not mind having him around every day. He was just�woah. He's old, but he's like Sean Connery. You know how Sean Connery is like sixty but he's still incredibly hot? This man is just awesome. He was so nice and everything and I absolutely hated that I had to be the way I was when he was around. It was so embarrassing. I'm tied to the bed, screaming my head off while this incredibly gorgeous doctor has to watch me."
"How was it in there?" Sarah asked. "Or do you not want to talk about it?"
"No�no it's okay. I've come to terms with what's wrong with me. It's a disease, I have no control over it. I'm better now and I don't have a problem talking about any of it. It was bad in there. Not really bad that I'd dread ever thinking about it again, but it was bad. I couldn't wait to get out of there, but after a while it became sort of home so I dealt with it."
"What'd you do in there? I mean you were in a room for a month and a half? How'd you pass the time?" Sarah asked. Ren� sat next to her and the two were sitting identically, which was always amusing to look at. It was even more amusing when the three of them did it�Gracie remembered a picture she'd had on her desk. Back when all three of them had the same hair color and there was no way to tell them apart, her father shot a 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' picture. She didn't know where that was now. Either she'd ripped it to shreds in a fit of rage or it was still on her desk.
"I don't know how I passed the time. I slept a lot�there wasn't much to do. For the first week or two I was actually tied to the bed so I couldn't even get up and walk around. The first few days after I was untied from the bed I was horrible. I did everything possible to kill myself. I was going crazy in that room and they didn't seem to understand that. I had refused to take my medication and they had to put it in my IV and before they found one that worked, I was intolerable. They had to strap my pillow to the bed because I tried to suffocate myself with it. I mean I tried everything. I took my IV out and tried to slice myself with it, I ran myself into walls. They realized they couldn't give me food that needed silverware because I'd try to kill myself with the silverware. I bashed myself with the monitors and machines�it was horrible. But after the medicine started to work I calmed down a lot and little by little I was able to do certain things until I was basically a normal person again. They started letting me outside three days ago so I could get used to being somewhat independent, and it also showed them if I was ready to leave yet. Now here I am. I feel fine, no voices, no sudden urges to hurt myself�I'm just happy to be alive. You don't know how good I feel about myself."
"We're just happy you're better. Come on downstairs, I'll make you something to eat," Sarah said. Gracie nodded. She could listen to album later. They walked out of the room and down the stairs to the kitchen.