Free Mentor: A Memoir by Tom Grimes

myself through college.) We played hoops together. Years later, when he visited Jody and me in Key West, he asked me why I hadn’t lost my mind living on a one-by-one-and-a-half-mile island. I reminded him of the Atlantic Ocean, where I took him snorkeling. I didn’t mention the limited scope of his life, from home to funeral parlor and then home again, the trip less than ten minutes by car. I liked him. He was a decent guy and a good father, but completely out-matched by my sister’s illness, which he would never comprehend.
     
    “What do you think?” he asked as we sped past buildings and parks vaguely familiar to me, the way the ghost of someone I once knew might be recognizable, yet not quite real.
     
    “I don’t know,” I said.
     
    “She’ll get better, right?”
     
    “I hope so.”
     
    My sister had been moved from Queens General Hospital, where she’d been abandoned for hours beside a raving woman handcuffed to a radiator pipe, to the relative calm of Holliswood, a psychiatric clinic surrounded by a leafless arboretum. His health insurance would pay one thousand dollars a day for thirty days. Afterward, my sister would have to be released, or the two of them would lose their life savings in a month.
     
    My sister’s wrists had been wrapped in cotton gauze and then taped. She wore a nightgown that repeatedly fell open, exposing one breast, before my brother-in-law refastened it. She stared at me, less animated than a zombie, and her mouth remained frozen, as if she had something to say but couldn’t summon the power of speech. She knew me, but I must have seemed like a hallucination to her from the sedatives they’d fed her. If she sensed my impulse but decision not to call her the night she attempted to commit suicide, she didn’t show it. Still, her gaze seemed to beg me to rescue her from the opaque world she inhabited. When I leaned over to kiss her cheek, her eyes followed me, swinging like a pendulum. While her psychiatrist, a slight man with a brown mustache, hovered nearby, observing, my brother-in-law spoke to her. My sister didn’t respond. I knew she wouldn’t. Ordinary entreaties wouldn’t reach her. “How do you feel?” or “Talk to me” were meaningless questions and requests. She didn’t need to speak; she needed to be spoken to. And, intuitively, I knew she counted on me to do it. So I said, “Well, you really fucked up.”
     
    The others looked at me, as she suppressed a rosebud of a smile, one waiting to bloom.
     
    “You just couldn’t wait for someone else in the family to commit suicide,” I said. “You had to be first.”
     
    My brother-in-law thought my remark would upset my sister. Instead, she tried to keep her smile from widening.
     
    “And you’re telling me the best you could do was a knife? You think a knife is original? You couldn’t have clubbed yourself to death with a dumbbell?”
     
    She laughed through her nose, which made her sound like a dog sniffing a patch of urine.
     
    “I have to tell you, I’m disappointed. I fly out here and you don’t even have the decency to be dead. Next time, get it right. Okay? Otherwise, I might as well stay home.”
     
    Her psychiatrist asked to speak to me in the hallway. “Why did she respond to you?” he said.
     
    “Because we have something in common. We both hate ourselves. What drugs are you pumping into her?”
     
    “Lithium and Haldol. Why do you hate yourselves?”
     
    “My father, mother, and twelve years of Catholic school. How long will she be here? ”
     
    “Until we get her stable. Do you believe your father molested her? ”
     
    “No.”
     
    “Why not?”
     
    “Because he never wanted to touch any of us.”
     

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    I n Florida, the humid air opened my pores and seeped into my skin, replenishing the moisture that had been sucked dry by Iowa’s winter. From my motel room, I called Frank. I told him my sister had been taken off suicide watch and was semi-lucid