Folded Paper Wings by Carol Fischbach
“what to say to someone who has tried to commit suicide”
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Last night, the young woman perched herself 187 feet above the cold swift currents of the Puget Sound. Gray hoodie and torn jeans barely a barrier against the icy winds that must have assaulted her skin.
Now, in the same clothes, she sits unmoving at a stained and battered oak table.
Her hands clutch her edges, crossed against her belly as though she can fold herself into an origami bird and fly away. Downcast eyes are vacant without focus, suspended in their sockets. Perhaps she is thinking about her interrupted flight. The flight off the Tacoma Narrows Bridge where someone stopped her before she could find out how her fragile paper wings would crumble and fail her.
I gaze at her from the nurses station. Behind the window with dusty blinds that are partially open. Behind the safety of locked doors, here in this drab, stark, county institution for the mentally ill.
I am a nursing student. The young girl at the table could be my granddaughter. I prep myself to go talk to her because this is part of my clinicals and she is the therapeutic conversation I need for a paper due on Friday.
For the hundredth time I wonder what the fuck am I doing here? I look at her chart in my hands and see crooked, arthritic fingers and I wonder if I can file the edges of my nails at a different angle so that my fingers will look straight.
I shake my head at the chronic fears about my age, open the door to the common room and quickly close it behind me. The staff would not appreciate unexpected visitors.
The girl does not even look up at me as I approach. I see the smudged eyeliner and the smeared mascara crossing her frozen features like deep cracks. I hold my breath as I sit down next to her and pray that I won't say anything to worsen her despair for living. If she leaves here and successfully kills herself, I would know it was my fault.
There is no manual for this residency but our instructors are clear on what to say to someone who has tried to commit suicide. Ask them if they have plans in place. Ask them if they have tried it before. Ask them if they still want to die.
Hi, I say.
She glances up. Hi, she says and looks down again.
What do I say? How do I reach across the chasm between us? Those unmoving facial muscles so like my mother, only she laid in a fetal position on a couch in the dark. Here, there are only chairs. And this table. And the musty smell of used things.
I pause, consciously trying to slow my heart rate, and ask her what happened. I shift in my chair and try to figure out where to place my clammy hands. What pose should I take? How can I look open and helpful?
I remember my wrists and pull down my sleeves to cover them before I clasp my hands in my lap under the table and turn to look at her, hoping my face reflects a confidence I do not feel.
I tried to jump off the Narrows bridge, she says, but someone stopped me. Deflated words from a mouth that sounds like the last vestige of air leaving a punctured balloon.
Helplessness invades my responses. All I know is I need to breathe and I want to be there with her on the bridge. I want to feel the wind tearing through layers of skin. Look down at the roaring current beneath the surface. See the waves surging below me as I free fall towards them. Feel the undertow pulling me into the abyss.
I want to see her pain. I want to embrace her and tell her everything is going to be okay. She's okay. She's beautiful. She has family and friends and people that love her.
I love her.
Do you have family, I ask.
Yes, she says. My sister died so it's just me and my mom and dad.
Shadowed visions of me snooping in my mother's closet when I was eighteen smear the outline of the young girl's face. I picture the birth certificate I found nested between sheets of onion skin paper, carefully placed in a box. Edges flat. Never folded. My exact name typed on a long black line in the center of the page. But a birthdate two years before mine.
I remember the faraway look in my mother's eyes when I asked who that Carol was. The lift in her voice. The gentle longing that described straight black hair and blue eyes of an infant, born premature, who lived only three days. I think of how I was named Carol after her. How MY birth certificate was folded and placed into a stained envelope. How my mother pulled my curly brown ponytail and called me a whore before I even knew what that was.
Gray tones of forgotten photos from my mother's family album drift into my vision. A tall, thin young woman with her arm around my mother. They were laughing. She was my mother's older sister who died from kidney failure shortly after that picture was taken. I hear the quiet tones of my mother always telling me she should have been the one who died instead of Emily.
I think about how I know I should have been the Carol that not only died, but never was.
I want to tell this beautiful young woman she doesn't have to die because her sister did, but I can't. Because I didn't know it then. I didn't even know it when I left the facility and sat in my car and sobbed.
Instead, I stare at the table and run my fingers along a deep, narrow scratch, become clinical, and work up the courage to ask my final question.
If you left here right now, would you try to kill yourself again?
But I already know the answer.
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Carol Fischbach is a writer who believes you grow up only by choice but, nevertheless, worries excessively about aging and the creakiness of her voice. A perpetual student, she started nursing school almost in time to receive social security. Now, with her RN license, she works with those who have dementia and in her spare time is pursuing her MFA in creative nonfiction. She has been editor of a few inconsequential newsletters that are buried deep in archives collecting data dust bunnies and has one published short story somewhere. She writes life vignettes that she hopes to collect into a memoir. Meanwhile, she lives in Vancouver, WA with her husband and two kitties.