Quiet-Crazy Read Online Free PDF Page B

front of the sky-high building that has Alexander T. Syms Memorial Hospital carved across the front, climbs out of the car, and stretches himself up, poking his shirt in his pants and trying to look real important. Now, what am I supposed to do? If I make a move to get out of the car myself, will he think I am trying to escape? Will he, then, come running around andhandcuff me and walk me into the hospital like I’m some kind of uncommon-law criminal?
    I lean, bend, and twist every which way in the backseat, holding tight on to my red and white mum, my Snow White flower, trying to keep a watch on him strutting around the car and up and down the sidewalk so I can maybe in some way figure out from looking at his face what he would have me do. Finally, he comes to my door, leans over, and glares at me, his old rusty, weathered face looking ten times magnified through the window.
    â€œWhat you waiting on?” he says. “You gonna get out, or ain’t you?”
    I nod, grabbing fast to Daddy’s bag and swinging open the door at once, lest he turn impatient and start trying to drag me out. So, here I am feeling six ways at once, those feelings all packaged and tied up with a jet black bow of fear. After finally getting here, I decide I don’t want to be here. Yet I can’t go back home, can I? Plus, I don’t want Sheriff Tate to go inside with me, yet I can’t walk into that cold, strange concrete building alone. And I sure as heck don’t want to be so much in a hurry to please him, yet here I am jumping at his beck and call, just like on Sunday mornings at the piano.
    Once out of that law enforcement car, I feel the eyes of every single person walking down the street staring at this package of fear, eyes that grow bigger and bigger and comecrowding all around me staring me down, and it seems for all the world I am caving in on myself, drawing up into a little nutshell. All I can do is stand here praying for someone to do something and do it quick. My prayer is answered, and quick. Sheriff Tate sides up to me, rubs his hand around on my bottom, and says, “Now you have yourself a good ole’ time here, honey. And when you do
it
with some of them crazy people in there, you think ’bout me, you hear?”
    Maybe I can’t act out of fear, but anger makes me move real fast. Why I get so mad at myself, I don’t know, because all I’m doing is standing here. It’s not like I’m asking for anything like this to happen, still that debt is asking to be paid. And all I can offer in payment is madness—madness at myself first of all. Only second am I mad at Sheriff Tate. But Mama, she is a close second, and I know it’s crazy for me to be so mad at her when she’s not even here for me to be mad at. But with the madness from three people raging inside me, I push through the crowd and get to the door of the hospital in a hurry.
    Even the door is crazy. It doesn’t open just straight into the building, like normal doors. It’s divided into four sections, like pie wedges, and it just keeps turning ’round and ’round so that you have to hurry and get in one of those little sections and let it kind of push you on through. So, out of my madness, I drop my flower, and it circles around in that crazy door twice, me following it, before I can finally stepout into the lobby of that big old hospital. If anyone would like to take a picture of “ridiculous” just snap me. Me standing scared straight up and down, squeezing the handle of Daddy’s old army satchel, holding my wilted mum, and staring into a roomful of strangers, crazy or not, staring back at me. I ask, no I
beg,
God to just please let me sprout some angel wings and rise up to meet Him in the clouds right here and now, no matter that the ceiling is in my way, no matter how many floors are between me and the clouds. “Just do
it,
God, please? Just
do it!”
    But some things you