Free Find Me by Laura van Den Berg Page A

the lower cabin, a tiny wood-paneled room. Black cords snake across the floor and around the metal legs of a desk and a chair. Graphs are tacked to the walls. A cot with a white pillow and a yellow blanket is pressed along one side of the room. A seaside painting hangs above it. In the center of the room, a marine radar beeps; a green circle flashes on the screen. My mother takes off her AHOY cap and shakes out her hair. Her roots have been bleached auburn by the sun. I see the familiar middle part, the high forehead. My inheritance.
    How strange it is to watch her past become animated, to no longer wonder where and how her life was unfolding, but to know.
    She sits hunched over a notebook. A circular clock, the hands shaped like oars, and a map of the Atlantic hang on the wall behind her. Points in the water have been marked with black pushpins. The clock slides back and forth as the boat rocks on the ocean. The low light brings out the shadows in her face and for a moment, that grass scent comes back to me. She switches on a tape recorder and starts talking about microbursts. I consider the way the start of a bad feeling feels, that little pop of dread—microburst, what a perfect name for that feeling, even though I know my mother is talking about things that don’t have to do with the body but with the sea. Her voice is soft. There is the hint of something troubling her in the back of her throat. Her knuckles are red and splitting. Her fingernails are cut past the quick.
    I wonder if she ever thinks about me. What she remembers. If she dreams of finding the captain’s daughter alive and well, floating in a lifeboat in the middle of the sea.
    *   *   *
    As the weather gets colder, as the recovery progresses on the outside, Floor Groups four and six become harder to control. It starts when a patient from six, a young guy from California, has a dream. In the dream, he wakes in the night to find a Native American man standing at his bedside. His skin is crusted with dirt, like he’s just been dug up from a grave. He’s wearing a big headdress with feathers and tiny animal skulls. He leans over this patient and breathes breath as hot as death in his face and tells him to wake the fuck up.
    â€œAnd I did,” this guy tells us during morning yoga, when we’re all supposed to be in Child’s Pose. “I woke up.”
    Now this man is claiming Floor Groups four and six are doing more work than the other patients; he has become a representative. In a Community Meeting, he asks Dr. Bek if he has any idea what kind of crap the patients leave behind in the Dining Hall. Is he aware that under the tables they find crumpled paper napkins and plastic forks, the tines crusted with food, and corn niblets that have been smashed like bugs? Is he aware that microwaves leach the nutrition from our food? That cleaning microwaves three times a day could expose them to carcinogenic radiation?
    â€œDon’t we,” he says in the Common Room, his chest puffed under his scrubs, “deserve to simply enjoy a meal?”
    â€œPerhaps you are familiar with the old Norwegian saying ‘Det kjem inkte steikte fuglar flugjande i mun’? ” Dr. Bek replies. “Or, ‘Birds do not fly into our mouths already roasted.’”
    At dinner that night, this guy walks over to where Group three is sitting, picks up a tray, and throws it on the floor. Peas scatter like marbles. A roll slides under a table. A water glass overturns. The clatter echoes inside the Dining Hall. The patients drop their plastic forks and look toward the noise. I stop chewing. My teriyaki beef is a soft lump on my tongue. Dr. Bek and the nurses, who are always in the Dining Hall during meals but are never seen eating, stand along a wall, underneath the windows. They don’t say anything. They don’t move. They wait to see what will happen next.
    He throws another tray. The patients from Groups four and