Freedom of Sketch

Property

I've heard that every individual has a certain scent to them, like their own signature they carry wherever they go. It sews itself into the skin and weaves through strands of hair. When the staff prepare a display of my previously incarcerated items upon the nurse's counter, I smell a nostalgic sweetness: soft rain, dryer sheets, cats, and traces of paint. Hints of my old citrus body wash hover over everything. Is this how I smell to other people?

Seeing my long lost items brings me an early Christmas. They're wrapped up in a scent that belongs only to Before Hospital Shiloh. Tori tries to review an inventory sheet with me, but I'm preoccupied with feeling everything. I half-expect my hands to grasp only empty air, but I touch familiar textures. A piece of my heart returns to me, and I smile through a glassy haze of tears. It's all here: my favorite black hoodie with two silver rows of safety pins curving like backwards parentheses on either side of the zipper; my trousers, heavy with crisscrossing chains; an assortment of unique studded and spiked jewelry, my underwire bra, and my checkerboard socks.

As Tori attentively marks each item off of her list, Wade stuffs them into glossy white bags with hard plastic handles that snap together. One whole bag is dedicated to hospital projects, the school kind and the therapeutic kind. I own about two dozen pairs of rubber-soled socks now. In the meantime, Jenny discusses medications with my mother. The nurse goes into great detail, down to the dosages and time of day they must be taken. Mother has an irritated, faraway look in her eyes. She has important pre-holiday adulting to do. She needs to run to the bank before they close early, and buy a gallon of eggnog at the grocery store, and arrange stacks of presents beneath the blue spruce she picked up a few days ago. Everything must reflect a picture-perfect household, like the glowing house in Lizzie's puzzle. No dysfunction, no fault lines here.

Jenny beams at me and rests her hands on my shoulders, holding me at arm's length so she can get a good look at me. "Oh, Shiloh," she says, "I hope you know how proud I am of you."

"How proud we are of you," Tori chimes in. She laughs and playfully messes up my hair.

"Seriously," Jenny continues. She wraps me in a hug, and I take in a final breath of her lavender-vanilla perfume. "You're so far from where you were when you came in. It's all due to your hard work."

Tori joins our embrace. "You made it, Shiloh."

I wave goodbye even when I'm well across the parking lot. I can't see behind the reflections in the double doors, but I know they're still there, watching. I load my bags into the trunk and climb into the front passenger seat of my mom's SUV. As my mother pulls out of the parking lot, I twist around to watch the hospital fall away and eventually disappear as the snow drifts down and erases everything we leave behind. I curl my fingers underneath my hospital bracelet and pull until it snaps off of my wrist. I hold it tightly in my fist. I think I'll keep it until I'm ready to let go.

***

The dark neighborhood is still trapped under its dome of overcast clouds; the houses remind me of tombstones. I don't see a single soul. The basketball hoops are glazed over with scabs of ice. I see the half-melted snowmen sagging sadly in several yards.

My mother pulls into the garage and closes the door against the cold. My hospital bracelet is still clutched in my hand as I venture into the blank, melancholy shadows that have filled our home. The cats are nowhere to be seen. The jagged outline of a Christmas tree hulks in the corner of the living room. Fat, unlit white candles frame the fruit basket on the granite kitchen island. "You've done some decorating," I say.

"Mmhmm." Mom adjusts her handbag. "Will you be okay here alone when I run my errands, or do you want to come with?"

I don't think I can handle the public version of the Real World just yet. "I'll be fine here. I'll probably take a nap or something."

"Sounds good. Love you."

Me: "Love you, too."

It takes two trips for me to haul all of my bags upstairs. I feel like a stranger in this house. Everything is too clean, too hushed. Every snowflake that hits the ground outside should sound like an exploding bomb. I open my door and retreat to my room. Mom's been in here to clean; there are vacuum cleaner tracks in the carpet, and my wastebasket is empty. It smells like a hotel room. I peel back the comforter on my bed and see fresh sheets, stiff from lack of use. My bed feels like a slab of ice to my palm. I haven't slept here in almost a year. I curl up on top of my comforter, cheek resting on my hands. I fall asleep like this, imagining the quiet chatter of my peers and the staff, Big Brother's blinking red eye, and endless corridors.

***

I startle awake during the night, soaked with sweat, hair heavy and damp. "Lizzie," I whisper to the darkness, reaching for nothing. I'd dreamed that I'd been at Circle Valley and had lost her. When I tried to find her, the hallways contorted into one big square, floors a mosaic of broken mirror and bloodstained water. I rub my sticky forehead and a part of me wishes I could just go back to the hospital. "I give up on reality!" I'd announce with a half-smile, shrugging, body limp with helplessness. Right now, I wish I could be talking to Tori, or Wade, or Jenny, or anybody. I wish I'd saved Talia's number. I look down at my hand as if it might still be written there.

The house is more massive than I remember. The cold, quiet darkness reminds me of a concrete warehouse. I slowly descend the stairs, avoiding the ones that creak so as not to disturb my mother. A cat-shaped shadow runs across my path on my way to the laundry room, and I gasp instead of scream.

I feel gutted.

Beep beep beep! I disarm the home security system to ensure that it won't go off when I open the doors the the deck and set myself free into the winter wonderland. The sky, stretched smooth and taut from farmland to city, is only a few shades darker than the snow. The landscape is so solid, no space between the sky and horizon line. It's like being locked in an empty room, which makes me feel more claustrophobic than I ever did in the hospital. At least in there, I had people who listened to me at all hours of the day or night. Out here, the wind smothers every word with its own hollow voice.

Our deck huddles beneath sheets of snow. I stand uncertainly among the shapeless lumps of our buried furniture, silent and grim like a mourner at a cemetery. I don't know what I'm mourning, whether it's my old self, the places I've been, or the places I wanted to visit but never did. I am in limbo, trapped in a spirit world, my own glass fortress.

Eventually, my skin crackles in pain as my blood freezes, so I retreat inside. On my way back to my room, I take a detour by the living room coffee table, bare save for a stack of coasters and the remote control. I miss the days when I used to believe in Santa Claus, when I was little and innocent and my mind was open to the possibility of magic.