Free Inside Madeleine by Paula Bomer

the phone when scheduling the interview and Mary had stupidly forgotten her name, had not written it down either—and that all the other people on the porch were “clients,” as they were called.
    “Hi, I’m Brigid. You must be Mary. You’re early.”
    “Yes. Yes, I’m sorry I’m a bit early.” They shook hands.
    “That’s okay. Come in here, to the office.”
    They entered a small room directly inside the house. “Sit down,” Brigid said, gesturing to a couch. She sat at a desk and swiveled around toward Mary.
    “I’ll just explain a bit about the place. Soon, Ahmed should be here and he’ll want to talk with you further. He owns this house and a few others. He’s a psychiatrist. I’m basically the manager. I’ve been working here for four years,” she said. “We have a weekly group meeting which either he or his wife attends. Usually his wife. The meetings, or sessions, are a part of the work week. In other words, you get paid for attending them. It’s an important part of the job, actually. We all need to talk about how things are going, how it’s all affecting us. The clients can be very tricky, behaving one way for one of us, another way for another one of us. Particularly the borderlines. They’re the most tricky.” Brigid smiled at this.
    “I see,” said Mary, but in truth, she was blinded with fear and could barely see Brigid sitting right in front of her. What the hell was she doing here? Borderlines? She had read about them. Read about them in her Abnormal Psychology class, in her DSM 3 manual.
    Brigid took out a blue ice tray from a cupboard. “This is how we dispense the meds. See? Each one is labeled. You fill them up according to what they get. Changes are always noted in the med book, which is in this cupboard as well. We give out meds two times a day, morning and evening. And some can request an extra Xanax or something like that, depending. It’s all in the med book. In the beginning, you’ll always be doing your shift with someone who’s been working here for a while, and usually that will be me. You won’t be expected to do all this at once.” She smiled at Mary. She had big, horsey teeth. She wasn’t a pretty woman, but she wasn’t ugly either.
    Ahmed came in, smelling of cologne, his bald head the color of toffee. He took Mary to another office which seemed to be just his. Inside, the wooden floor gleamed and there was an expensive Afghan rug on the floor. It felt like a real psychiatrist’s office. And it smelled nice. Walking through the house with him to get to his office, Mary had noticed an odor of urine and warm garbage.
    “So! You want to work with the mentally ill! That is very brave of you. You will not regret it. Of course, I must ask you some questions about yourself,” he said. His voice was deep and slightly accented, and he rubbed his hands together and smiled.
    “Where are you from?”
    “Outside of Pittsburgh.”
    “And you are a student at BU?”
    “Yes. I’m studying psychology. I want to work in my field. I’m very serious about my … my career.”
    Ahmed smiled even more broadly. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
    Mary hesitated. “No.”
    “Oh, you are so young!” Ahmed said, his thick hands thumping the desk in front of him. “Your whole life is ahead of you!”
    “I guess.”
    “You must come over for dinner sometime. To our house in Newton. Yes, yes. You must.” Then he paused. “I pay five dollars an hour to someone like you.”
    “Someone like me?”
    “Yes, a student. Later, I may give you a raise. Okay?”
    “Okay.”
    Then he began talking about himself. How he came from Morocco, how his wife was a psychologist, how they came to own and operate these homes. How in the past decade, the institutions were emptying out due to the great strides in medication and treatment and now half-way houses were the way to take care of these people. How they were so much more “civilized” than the large mental institutions.
    When Mary