Family Day at the Psych Ward

Most Sundays my parents and I sat down to a family dinner. It was a ritual we performed when I moved back home to pay off my student loans. One night in June, my dad turned to me and said, “I need you to take Steve to the hospital.”

“Why me? You’re his father,” I said.

“Because he’s your brother and brothers look after each other.”

 “Oh yeah, since when?”

He shrugged his shoulders and handed me his car keys.

My childhood was tortured, and Steve played a major role in my suffering. I was adopted, and Steve resented me for being favored by our father; he delighted in bullying me. One night, when I was six and taking a bath, he crept outside the open window, disguised his voice and whispered threats to kill me until I cried for my mother. In elementary school, I would run up to him with my friends while he was playing baseball and he would pretend he didn’t know me, humiliating me. I worshipped him and wanted him to love me, but he could barely stand to look at me. 

When Steve was fourteen and I was eight, he went to live with his biological mother and his bipolar diagnosis was confirmed. He returned to live in San Jose while I was in college. I didn’t see him for three years; we vanished from each other’s lives. 

I had recreated myself, often telling friends in college a made-up version of my life. I didn’t want to be the little boy who cried for his mother, frightened of a voice outside in the dark. I didn’t want to tell anyone about the illness that ruined Christmas nights, with tables turned over and plates of ham and apple pie smashed on the floor. I didn’t talk about the shame of police at the door, the blinking siren lights in the night and neighbors standing stone-faced staring at me in silent judgment. I made myself into someone who came from a stable, well-educated family, and my new friends loved my sophisticated sense of humor and charm. I was an actor. I was good at playing characters, and I wanted to keep the character I had invented. 

I drove to my brother’s house. Steve had married a recovering addict, Linda, he met in rehab, and she had a calming influence on him. However, she couldn’t take him to the psychiatric emergency room. An older neighbor had just come over after fracturing her wrist, and Linda was trying to manage that crisis while Steve was pacing frenetically and talking in half-sentences. Steve hated the sexual side effects of taking his medications and would refuse to take them, spinning into constant cycles of mania. Linda tired of taking him repeatedly to the psychiatric hospital to stabilize him and smooth the jagged edges of his mood cycles.

This time, she’d called my dad, who passed the job to me.

 I knocked and Steve opened the door. He was so manic I could feel the energy pulsing out of him. He greeted me with delight as if I was his long-lost brother; this was always the way of it. He never had any memory of his actions, whether it was stealing from me or insulting me in front of a friend. After the mania ended, he had amnesia and couldn’t understand why nobody would talk to him.

His wife, speaking to him in a soft, lulling voice, convinced him to get in my car and we drove to Valley Medical Center. Steve rambled about the Pope wearing a red beanie and electric sound waves coming out of his toaster. When we got to the entrance of the ER, Steve announced he wasn’t going in. I tried to cajole and reason with him, but he wasn’t listening. 

We drove to the Red Lion coffee shop, and he called his wife. I could hear his voice smooth out as he talked to her. He became childlike and agreed to go.

We drove to the hospital entrance.

He refused to go. 

We drove all night doing this dance. I drove him to the hospital, he refused to go, we drove around, we went to a bar or a coffee shop, he called his wife, he agreed to go, we got to the hospital, he wouldn’t go. Repeat, then repeat again. 

By dawn, the mania wore down, and we were both exhausted. We walked into the hospital, and I checked him into the psych ward. He looked crestfallen as he walked into lockdown. He turned to me, and I was surprised to see a pleading look in his eyes. “You’ll come back and visit me, right?” I felt a pulling in my heart. I had always jumped at the chance to be closer to him and had suffered for it in the past. I said yes but thought to myself, no way am I seeing you again. 

 A few days passed. The phone rang and Steve’s wife was on the line, saying that he kept asking for me and would I bring him a carton of cigarettes and clean underwear. She said her sponsor had suggested she not see him until he was stable and would I please go instead. I felt angry at the aching pull of love that came over me, like iron fillings drawn to a magnet. It was the bitterness of walking towards more humiliation from a brother who could not care less if I lived or died. I coldly agreed to do it. I would go there, drop off his stuff, and leave. 

I walked into the hospital and to the psych ward. I could see the patients through the small window of the lockdown door, some shuffling with eyes staring at the floor, dressed in wrinkled green hospital gowns. Someone directed me to go to the outside quad, a small enclosed green space, and a nurse would bring Steve out to me. I stepped into the bright sunlight; the green grass stretched serenely in front of me. A gray-bearded man a few feet away kept jerking involuntarily, his tongue shooting in and out of his mouth. Most of the patients avoided eye contact, and I sensed being unwelcome in this community of the displaced. It was family day, and those lucky enough to have visitors broke up into small groups on the lawn,

Steve stepped out to the grass, and everyone took notice. He always radiated a strong charisma when he walked in a room that kept all eyes on him. Handsome and bearded with a piercing dark gaze, women loved him, and I resented how slight I felt around him. He walked out wearing a hospital gown tucked into blue jeans and cowboy boots. He saw me and his face lit up—he seemed genuinely happy to see me, which gave me a foreign and odd feeling. I was wary and braced myself n preparation for a cutting remark.

None came. “Hey Michaelo, what’s up little brother?” He hugged me close; my arms hung rigid at my side. I had never hugged him in my life.

We walked a few paces and sat down on the grass. Almost immediately, a twenty-something woman with black lipstick and full Goth attire flopped down on the grass next to us. Steve gave her the death stare.

“What do you want?”

The women turned into herself, like a caterpillar poked with a needle.

“Nothing.”

“Get out of here.”

She got up and shuffled off and Steve chuckled. “People are fucked up around here.” 

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.” Despite ourselves, we both laughed. 

We sat in silence for a few minutes. I was awkwardly quiet, but Steve seemed completely at ease. I was aware that this was the first time we had sat alone together and talked in years. Steve told me about the bad food in the hospital and having to be put in restraints for the first few nights, until the Haldol kicked in. 

He asked me what I remembered about our shared childhood. I told him I remembered when I slept through the time a drunk hit our car in the street and it exploded in flames. He laughed and told me he couldn’t believe the look on my face when I saw our front yard burnt and black from the fire. 

Steve remembered that our dad would whip one of us for some infraction, then go from one to the other of us, all four kids, and whip us for something we’d done weeks earlier. Steve mimicked him, “Sal, this is for cursing in church; Sandy, this is for smoking at school; Mike, this is for talking back to your mother.” It didn’t take long for us to figure out that when one of us got whipped, the rest of us took off. Our dad would walk from room to room, belt in hand, wondering where everyone had gone. We laughed at the gallows humor of our childhood.

We sat on the soft, warm grass and talked. Time passed gently. It was the first time I didn’t feel the need to get away from him. I held the slow, dawning awareness of seeing my brother for the first time. We had grown up with trauma and found after childhood’s end that this brought us closer. We were more alike than different. 

 A nurse walked onto the lawn and gestured to me. I began to get up. Steve grabbed my wrist.

“Don’t go yet.” His eyes showed a need I had never seen.

“I don’t think we have a choice. Looks like time’s up.”

Steve looked up and the nurse motioned for him to return. 

We stood quietly and wrapped our arms around one another’s shoulders and held each other close. It didn’t feel weird this time.

I watched him walk with the other patients back to lockdown, like children after recess. 

I left the psych ward and passed families parting from loved ones. A young mother clutched her two daughters to her as her partner looked on.

 I walked to my car. My father had asked me to stop at the supermarket on my way home. Tomorrow was Sunday—family day. 

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Michael Cannistraci completed a Master’s Degree at Hunter College School of Social Work. He currently works as a clinical social worker and psychotherapist. His essays have been published in Entropy Magazine, Briar Cliff Review, Ravensperch, Literary Medical Messenger, The Evening Street Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Bangalore Review, The Dillydoun Review, Quibble, The Bryant Literary Review and Glacial Hills Review, He was finalist in the Pen2Paper Literary Contest, the New Millennium Writings, and The Good Life Review Literary Contest. He/His/Him