Free Straightjacket by Meredith Towbin Page A

who started talking about things I shouldn’t have.”
    “Well, I don’t want to start arguing about who’s more sorry, so let’s just say we both are.”
    “Yeah, okay. Let’s just forget it happened,” he said.
    Silence.
    “It looks like you’re busy, so I guess I’ll go,” Anna said as she glanced down at the portrait on the desk. She turned toward the door.
    “No, I’m not busy. Please stay.” He wanted to slap himself for how desperate he sounded. He should offer her a seat, or a cocktail or something, but there was just a bed, a dresser, a desk, a chair, and four walls. He dragged the chair closer to her so she could sit down, but she didn’t. Instead she wouldn’t stop staring at the wall. Maybe she’d forgotten he was even there.
    “What’s all this?” she finally asked.
    “They’re just some things I like, things I like to look at.” The wall was covered with scraps of paper from the corner all the way to the door. Some were pages torn from magazines, others were drawings. There were also papers with blocks of text on them. She squinted at the words, trying to read them, and moved closer. Her lips mouthed a couple lines, and she just barely whispered:
     
    for life’s not a paragraph
    And death i think is no parenthesis
     
     
    “Did you write that?”
    “No. It’s e.e. cummings.”
    “Oh. I like it.” Her gaze continued to weave through the paper mural.
    He felt like she wasn’t so much speaking to him as saying out loud what happened to be passing through her mind. Although he stood quietly by as she studied the scraps of paper, what he really wanted to do was rip every last drawing off the wall and squirrel it away somewhere, never to be seen again by anyone except himself. He might as well have been stripped naked in front of her. All that paper on the wall was him, or at least parts of him. He’d hung them up only because he was sure no one else here would ever bother to look. It let him bring a small part of his studio to this awful place.
    “Are these all your drawings?”
    “Yeah, they are.” He walked over to the bed and sat down.
    Now that he’d backed away, she moved closer to the wall so she could make out the details. “This place right here…” She pointed to one of the drawings. “Where is it?”
    It would be better to avoid bringing up anything having to do with angels or heaven. “It’s just a studio that I’d like to have someday.” He did want that studio back, with all the windows that let the light flood through, where he could work uninterrupted for eternity and wouldn’t need to stop because it was five thirty and time for dinner.
    “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Who are these people?” Her fingers pinched the corner of one of the portraits.
    “They’re some of the patients. That one’s George.”
    “I didn’t recognize him. I guess I can see it, but he looks so different. I can’t really say how though.”
    Caleb knew exactly why he looked different, but again, he wouldn’t tell her. He’d found that he could imagine what people would look like in heaven, erasing all of the earthly burdens that mutilated them. In the portrait George wasn’t compelled to count or slap his thighs. He didn’t have to focus his strength on trying to control what was out of control about him. In the portrait, he just was .
    And then she took a quick breath in. Her back was to him, but without a doubt she’d found the portraits of herself. He would have hidden them had he known she was coming. Now it was too late.
    “Is that me?” Her voice was serious and quiet.
    “Um, yeah, it is.”
    Five portraits of her hung in a row, smack in the center of the wall, so that they were at Caleb’s eye level when he worked at his desk. In some, a tender smile lit up her face. In others, her eyes zeroed in on the viewer—which had always been him—and though she wasn’t smiling, there was a serenity about her, the kind that made her glow from the inside