Forever Sheltered (4 page)

Remembering how long it had been since my last tryst with anybody.

I would have to do the one-and-done with Dr. Darion after all.

I leaned in, just to see what he would do.

Chapter 6: Darion

Bloody hell, this girl was trouble.

Tina’s eyes flashed at me like cannon fire just seconds ago, but now everything had changed. She was breathing differently, little huffs like her respiration was speeding up. Maybe she thought I was a threat.

Or not.

I knew all the reasons for accelerated respiration.

Her arms were slender but strong. The pale blue sweater cushioned my grip. I should let her go, and I knew it. But I couldn’t make my hands move. They wanted to stay where they were.

I didn’t have time for any kind of affair. And if it blew up, Cynthia would suffer. Obviously this art teacher was nosy, and her curiosity had been engaged. She didn’t have any of the training she ought to have about professional distance, how to manage your feelings about patients and keep them separate from your life.

But I’d involved her. I’d asked her to care. Stupid. I should have known better. Tina wasn’t equipped for this. She was going to start watching. And she might figure things out. And then everything I had built to create a safe place for Cynthia would be for nothing.

And yet, here she was. I’d dragged her into this space with my own hands.

Hands that refused to let her go.

I recognized exactly when she made some new decision, one that I knew better than to allow. She leaned in, up on her toes again. She didn’t come quite all the way. I was, after all, the one holding on to her.
 

I could smell her. Shampoo. Lotion. Just a hint of flowers, jasmine maybe.

Before I realized what I was doing, I had closed the gap.

Her lips were like a soft landing. As soon as I felt it, I wanted more. I wanted it all. My arms went around her and dragged her lithe body flush against mine.

I kissed her harder, probing, insisting she open for me. Her passion flared, and our mouths moved with a mission of their own.

I felt out of control in an instant. I craved everything about her. I wanted it all at once.
 

My hands cupped her head, loosening the pigtails. Her hair was sleek and fine, cool beneath my fingers. Her head was delicate, and her neck long and slender. Every part of her ignited another fire in me, until I had no choice but to draw her even closer.

I reached down for her thighs and lifted her to straddle my waist. If she missed my desire for her before, she definitely felt it now.

She was so tiny, so light, it was easy to keep her in place. I ground against her. I chided myself even as I did it. But still it wasn’t enough.

The gurney was only two steps away, so I crossed the distance and sat her on it. Now I could use my hands on the rest of her.

I encircled her waist, our mouths still working over each other. I lifted the bottom edge of her sweater, and my fingers brushed her hot skin. God, I couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted her here, in the damn hospital, where anybody could find us.

She lurched against me, and I felt completely out of control. She wanted this too. But hell, I didn’t know anything about her. She could have a boyfriend. A big nasty boyfriend.

My hand slid up her ribs, and I realized she was a hippie to the core when my thumb brushed a naked nipple. How did I not notice that? Her little gasp against my mouth sent me into a frenzy of why and how. Condom? Not on me. Was she on the Pill? Hell, she could have any number of —

Both her breasts were in my palms now, and any other thought got lost. Her fingers were in my hair, and every stroke of my hands on her body made her jolt against me.

I lowered my arm and started feeling around for the bottom of her skirt. Hell, if she wasn’t wearing a bra, maybe there would be no barriers below either. My pulse hammered in my throat. This was the craziest damn thing I’d done in my life.

I found her knee.

Then the surgery room door swung wide, blasting the room with light.

Damn.

Chapter 7: Tina

What the hell was I about to do with this doctor?

The light blinding my eyes told me in no uncertain terms — get out of there.

I pushed at Darion and jumped from the gurney. My first class was probably about to start, and here we’d been discovered by a custodian.

Hopefully he had some discretion.

I whipped past the tiny man in blue coveralls and a ball cap, praying he didn’t know me.

The halls were a blur as I dashed back to my own wing. Only when I got into my empty room did my breathing slow down.

What just happened?

I had no time to think about it as an orderly wheeled in one of my adult patients. I smoothed down my hair, tightened my ponytails, then realized they were a mess, so I pulled them out and tucked the elastic bands into my skirt pocket.

The man in the wheelchair was Albert. He had declined quickly in the weeks he had been coming to art therapy, but this was the first time he wasn’t walking. Still, I was happy to see him. He would take my mind off the doctor and our torrid moment in the unused surgical suite.

Albert’s gnarled hands grasped at the arms of the chair. I knew he did this to hide the shaking. He had Parkinson’s, although that wasn’t why he was hospitalized. He and I had something in common, long scars on our wrists. His were still fairly fresh, red and raw, although no longer bandaged.

Mine might have been old, but when I first saw Albert’s a couple weeks ago, they throbbed in recognition like the wounds had opened up yesterday.

“Hello, Albert,” I said. “I see you’ve got your own set of wheels now.”

The bright yellow FALL RISK bracelet stood out from the cuff of Albert’s faded flannel shirt. I glanced up at the orderly and nodded as an acknowledgement that I had seen it. Calling attention to it would make Albert feel worse. The whole reason for his attempted suicide a couple months ago was his inability to paint anymore. The lack of mobility had to be another blow.

Albert grunted. His pale eyes went immediately to one of his paintings on the wall, a castle in blues and grays that I had framed. It was his first breakthrough work since his arrival at the hospital. He made it during my first week on the job.

The image was bleak, blustery from a storm on one side of the castle and roiling with black spirits on the other. But on the day he painted it, I spotted an unlit hurricane lamp in one of the windows.

And I asked him to light it.

So now the image had one bright spot of color, the warm red glow of a single window. Albert looked for it each time he came. Probably to remind himself that even where he was, and the dark, dark places he’d been to get here, he still had something to look forward to, something to do.

I sat opposite him at the table. “What are you up for today, Albert? Watercolors? Crosshatch? Markers?” I liked to get an idea of how much he was shaking that day before I chose something. But his grip on the armrests was unrelenting.

“I might just pound some clay today, milady,” he said, and managed a small smile.

His face was kind and gentle, surrounded by a thick mop of gray curls. He always reminded me of that painter Bob Ross on the PBS show, the one who showed you how to make “happy trees” on canvas. He had the same calm demeanor, and on a good day the joy about his art was palpable.

Albert really must have fallen hard to attempt suicide when his talent was so visceral. Even with the struggle to control his movements, he was easily the best artist I’d ever met or studied under, even in college.

I pulled the container of clay from the shelves. If I were unable to do the one thing I loved, if some disease took that away, I’m not sure I would do any better. One thing I told the students who attended my suicide talks is that once you choose death as your destination, it never goes away. Every upset, every disappointment, every setback has the same way out. You don’t even have to search for it to know it’s still out there, waiting for you to stumble one more time.

In that, suicide wasn’t that much different from alcoholism or drug addiction. You could go to rehab or therapy. You could get it out of your mind for a while. And life could go well for months or years or decades.

But the moment it didn’t, in that instant when your depression or your struggle or your exhaustion hit that critical point, it all rushed back. And your mind went straight to the place you thought you’d twelve-stepped or group-sessioned out of existence. The needle. The bottle. The knife.

“Where’s Clementine?” I asked. Normally Albert arrived with a sullen woman who complained the entire hour about having to be there.

Albert lifted his arms, wiggling his fingers through the air. “She flew the cuckoo’s nest.”

“Really? She went home?”

He nodded. “But the beds never stay empty in the loony bin.”

I set a lump of clay in front of him. “I’m always surprised more people on your wing don’t end up here.”

He swung his narrow arm and brought his fist down on the clay with a hearty thwack. “It’s a pretty wild bunch.” He waggled his eyebrows at me. “We’re crazy, you know.”

“We’re all crazy,” I said.

Albert continued to mash at the clay, making it more malleable.

I wasn’t allowed on the psychiatric ward. I had six patients from there, or I used to. I guess I was down to five.

Two were Albert and Clementine. The other four were girls closer to my age, also there in the aftermath of suicide attempts.

The majority of people who came through my door were cancer patients from the specialized clinic housed inside the hospital. Thinking of this, though, turned my mind back to Dr. Darion, so I took out a ball of clay of my own and began to shape it alongside Albert.

We had not gotten a chance to talk alone since my arrival at St. Anthony’s. He’d always come with Clementine, whose cantankerousness required my full attention.

Albert pinched off a section of clay and rolled it into a fat tube.

“So, what did you do on the outside?” I asked him.

“A little of this, a little of that,” he said. Despite the shake in his hands, he skillfully molded the clay into the rough shape of a fish. “I don’t guess you have a modeling stick?”

“There is a set here somewhere.” I dropped my lump of clay and headed back to the cabinets. I spotted the shaping tools a week ago. I didn’t think I would have cause to use them. They were sharp and fine, expert tools rather than something I would hand a child or a psychiatric patient. I wasn’t sure why they were even here.

Albert clearly had experience in several areas of art. I would wheedle information out of him. Anything to avoid thinking about the doctor.

I dug around until I found the tray of chisels and taper tools.

Albert poked through them and extracted a long-handled hook. For a moment, I worried I’d done the wrong thing, imagining him dragging the sharp point into his wrist again. But maybe I was the only one who thought of those things. He laid the handle expertly between his fingers and began picking at the body of the fish, giving it texture and shape.

I gave up on my own lump of clay and watched him work. The curve of the clay became clear as a woman’s shape appeared in the upper half. When Albert’s fingers fused the fins to the body, I saw it. A mermaid.

“You are amazing,” I said to him. Once again, he’d found a way to work so fast that the shake in his hands was minimized. It’s something we had been practicing. If he could move quickly enough, he could stay ahead of the trembling, incorporate it even. If he slowed down, then the tremors took over, ruining the work.

The wheelchair worried me. I knew Parkinson’s was debilitating. I just didn’t think I’d see him change so fast.

Albert’s pale lips were drawn tight in concentration. He picked up a different tool, rapidly cutting into the clay to create scales along the fins.

I could only watch in awe. The minutes ticked by. We didn’t need to talk or go through the list of recommended questions and answers left by my supervisor to encourage therapeutic discussion. Albert was an artist in the truest sense. The work was his therapy. Just doing it. Being able to do it.

He moved to the female figure, pressing in her belly, separating her arms from her torso with neat, lean lines. The smooth swell of her skin gradually transitioned into the rippled scales.

The castle he had painted was also by the sea. The ocean must have been an influence. There was so much I wanted to know about him. The sense that time was passing, not just for class, but to have the opportunity to learn about him, made me want to interrupt him, to insist on answers. But I let him work.

The hour was almost up by the time he set down the last tool and held out the mermaid. She was beautiful, graceful, and well detailed. Only after I held her in my nervous hands, anxious that I would smudge or damage his work, did I realize that instead of long flowing hair, Albert’s mermaid had pigtails.

He had sculpted me. My eyes pricked with emotion. Of all the people I’d run around with in art school, graffiti artists, painters, illustrators, none of them had done something like this of me. Not one.

My voice didn’t quite hold steady. “Where did you train?” I asked. I hadn’t learned to do this at my liberal arts college. Maybe it couldn’t be taught in a class, only in an apprenticeship, or in long hours of trial and error.

Albert sat back in the wheelchair. His hands gripped the armrests again. “I was lucky. I lived only a mile from a great sculptor by the name of Jean Luc Mireau. He left Europe during the war and settled not too far from my father’s fishing enterprise.”

“And he trained you?”

Albert laughed. “He let me clean up his messes. But I learned.”

“And the painting?”

“I picked up a few things here and there in school.”

“You’re wonderful.” I hoped he didn’t think I was gushing. I still cradled the mermaid in my hands.

“Just an old man with a few skills.”

I didn’t believe him, but nothing I’d found on him proved any different. I had his name on my patient roster, and a Google search turned up only a few courses he had taught at a small liberal arts college in the 1970s.