What Happened to Barbara

The sky was full of fluffy clouds, the sun was beaming and birds were singing merrily. Extremely thin and shaking a bit, Barbara felt cold and slightly frightened as she was led to the car that was going to take her home. Home – there was no comfort in the thought of home; she could hardly remember what it looked like and what memories she had were made uncomfortable and unclear by the medications she had repeatedly been forced to take. She thought, I should be happy to be leaving this place but instead I’m fearful. She glanced back at the massive cold grey cement block building she had just come from. This had been ‘home’ for the past two years and as cold and unfriendly as it had been; somehow it seemed a safer place than where she was going. She wasn’t really sure she wanted her memories of ‘home’ to become clearer. The young nurse who accompanied them had mixed feelings about turning Barbara over to this man whom she had seen in whispered exchanges with Dr. Laraby after which Barbara had again been heavily medicated. Barbara was a lovely, fine boned, fairly tall, painfully thin woman with golden hair that sorely needed care. The nurse liked Barbara but had always felt uncomfortable around Wesley Renwick, Barbara’s husband, who had never shown any affection or concern for his wife. Under the circumstances she felt this was strange. The one good thing that had happened for Mrs. Renwick was that, after eighteen months in the institution, her case was turned over to the new Psychiatrist, Dr. Bosworth. What she was unaware of was that the continued use of strong medication and shock therapy had brought Barbara to a very perilous physical condition and the arrival of Dr. Bosworth allowed Laraby to turn her case over to him. If her heart failed and she died, Bosworth would be the one responsible for her death, not Laraby. Barbara had been a severely injured young woman when she was brought into the facility and she was still thin and pale and flinched at any unexpected sound. The husband broke into her musing and asked for Barbara’s medication. The Nurse said “Good-bye” to Barbara, squeezing her hand, feeling she needed some kind of reassurance, and slowly, looking back as she went, returned to the forbidding looking building. Wesley spoke sharply, “Get in the car, Barbara. It’s time to go home; the children are waiting for you.” The children, her children, were waiting. They had been waiting during the two years she had been locked up in the so-called sanitarium. It was a place where people sent their ‘not quite right’ family members to ‘get well’ or to get rid of them. The first doctor had not been kind or helpful but had put her in restraints when she had been so frightened that she fought everyone who tried to get near her. That was in the beginning, when she couldn’t understand why Wesley had brought her to this madhouse. After she had been there for eighteen months of abuse and drug induced weakness and confusion, Dr. Bosworth was assigned to her case when he joined the staff. That was six months ago and during that time he had gradually made her understand that in addition to her physical injuries she had been suffering from severe clinical depression because of the loss of her baby. She had, for some unknown reason, fallen down a long flight of stairs, damaging herself and, unfortunately killing her unborn child. Wesley had told the doctors he knew she had deliberately thrown herself down the stairs with the intention of losing the baby and possibly killing herself. She knew that wasn’t true but she was so ill with internal injuries and a mild concussion while she was in the city hospital that she had been unable to explain to anyone what had really happened; that she had been pushed in a house where no one else was supposed to have been at the time. The result of her frantic attempt to explain that had been the cause, she thought, of her two years stay here in what she mentally called ‘horror hall’. The Director, Doctor Laraby, with a bit of financial encouragement, had gone along with Wesley’s suggestions and as a result she had, as a general rule, endured massive medication to calm her and when she became insistent she was subjected to shock therapy. After she had been there for eighteen months, Dr, Bosworth came to work with Dr. Laraby and had been given Barbara’s case. At first he was puzzled by and finally believed her continued insistence that she was telling the truth, that she had been pushed and was not suicidal in spite of all the ‘therapy’ she had had to endure. It was clear to him that the treatment prescribed for Barbara was far from the care recommended for her diagnosed clinical depression and he began to gradually decrease the drugs that were keeping her constantly off balance. It was he who suggested to her that the way to get home was to become calm and for the moment, not to continue insisting that she had been pushed. “No one hears you, Barbara, their pattern is to believe the ‘healthy’ family member and go for a ‘cure’ with the protester. I’ll help you get out of here if you’ll let me.” He spent time with her, testing her and speaking with her at length about various things relating to her family. She was still a bit fuzzy about a lot of things but on the point of being pushed she never wavered, she learned to be calm as Dr. Bosworth suggested and behave as they wanted her to so she could get out of there. He kept a complete record of his findings and planned to keep an eye out for her and after her release to visit her at home once in a while as he was not sure her home situation was healthy, or even safe. In the beginning of his assignment to Barbara’s case he had been approached by Wesley Renwick with his insistence that she be kept ‘quiet’ as he said, for her own protection. His response to this clearly malicious man was to refer him to Dr. Laraby. Dr. Laraby, for his own reasons told Wesley to keep away from Bosworth. When they finally arrived at the house that had been her home, Barbara had to be helped from the car. She felt as though she had been sleeping too long and was having a hard time to fully awaken. She recognized the house and saw, to her surprise, that the garden which had been her pride and joy had been maintained. Did Wesley see to that? “Mom is here! Mommy is home!” called her children. There they were; Sarah, twelve years old now, and Roger, nine, her children. As they rushed towards her she shrank back against the car but was immediately engulfed by her eager children, hugging her and finally, making her feel more alive and real than she had in a very long time. She felt tears streaming down her face and held them as tightly as she could – not wanting to lose them ever again. Wesley abruptly pulled Barbara out of the children’s arms and announced, “All right, kids, leave your mother alone till she gets used to us. I’ll just take her up to her room now.” The children reluctantly let her go and she was taken to what Wesley had called ‘her’ room, not ‘our’ room. She was curious to see where her room was and shocked to find herself in what would have been the nursery for the lost baby. It was redecorated; at least the nursery furniture was removed but it still had the fairytale wall paper and carousel lamp, but her sense of what was right told her that this was not. She was beginning to remember how Wesley had always made decisions without consulting her or even telling her sometimes. She was also beginning to remember her useless, unexpressed anger. Putting her in this room was a travesty but she would not yet let him know how she felt. She had learned the hard way to keep her feelings to herself for safety’s sake. Sarah knocked on the door and quietly invited her to come down to dinner.