Free I Can Hear the Mourning Dove by James Bennett Page B

expensive, rust-colored carpeting. There are large paintings of cats, in Japanese style, with chrome frames.
    All done feeding the fish, DeeDee sits beside me on the couch. She wants to know about my mental illness. “If you think I should mind my own business, just tell me,” she says.
    A small, hard lump forms, causing me to hesitate. I do want her for a friend but how close can I let her get?
    â€œI tried to kill myself September twelfth of last year. It was three months exactly after my dad died. I got home from school at about four o’clock on the bus, like any other day. Mother was gone, she was running some errands. I changed my clothes and sat out on our flagstone patio; it was a beautiful sunny day with the bluest sky and a touch of fall in the air. I happened to look at our pile of firewood, which was close to my chair. The pile of logs was so small, and it was clear to me that it wouldn’t last long. I’d been depressed all day, but for some reason that pile of firewood made me feel all hollow inside like there wasn’t anything worth living for. I knew my dad would never be coming home again and the two of us would never go out in the woods again to gather firewood. It felt like this huge prison of sadness, and I knew that death would set me free.”
    â€œHow did you do it?” DeeDee asks. Her elbows are on her knees and her chin is in her hands. She’s a good listener.
    â€œI cut my wrists with a razor blade, in the bathtub. Actually, I only cut my left wrist. There were single-edge razor blades in my dad’s art supplies in his old desk. I was unconscious when my mom got home and found me, but I was still alive.”
    â€œThen what happened?”
    â€œI went into the hospital. I was in for a little more than six weeks, clear up to the end of October. I got ECT treatments and everything.”
    â€œWhat’s ECT?”
    â€œShock treatments. They wire you up and zap you. They’re horrible. My new doctor, Dr. Rowe, doesn’t give shock treatments to teenagers.”
    â€œI’m sorry, Grace, I really am.”
    â€œThen in January I went back in for another month. I had another ECT series.”
    â€œWhat about the schizophrenia?”
    â€œThe schizophrenia started this summer when we started getting ready to move. The most horrible, confusing things started happening to me. I started having these terrible nightmares and I would wake up screaming and sweating; sometimes I even wet the bed. Every once in a while I would hear these voices speaking to me, and sometimes the voices were like my father’s voice; sometimes the voices would come from out of the sky. My mom and my grandma couldn’t hear the voices, only I could hear them. I had a lot of trouble sleeping every night, and I didn’t have any appetite. When I wasn’t disoriented, I was just depressed. It got worse after we moved here. We were only here about a month when I found myself in another looney bin.”
    â€œIt sounds like the schizophrenia came so sudden.”
    â€œThat’s true, but Dr. Rowe says your chances of getting better are increased if it happens that way. There’s almost no chance of getting well if you have the slow kind, the progressive kind. I don’t understand what all of it means, but that’s what she tells me.”
    â€œI can see how scary it is for you, Grace, I’m sorry if I was prying.”
    â€œIt isn’t prying, you’re just open. It’s the most wonderful quality.” She makes it possible for me to share. I would like to give her a hug, but I wouldn’t know how to do a thing like that.
    DeeDee gets us each a Seven-Up and we go out to sit on her patio. She shows me a lilac bush she has been pruning and a variegated red twig dogwood she has recently planted. I tell her briefly about the scraggly Russian olive tree near our apartment. She says a tree that far gone would probably need lots of