Notes: Whoa does this suck… This series is drawing itself out so much… . But… er… yeah.

One… two… three more parts? If I'm lucky. Title comes from a song called "Free Ride" by Embrace. Mood go up… mood come down… mood go up…

In The Hospital Where Stretchers Are Arms and Hands

I hate hospitals. There's something very wrong about them, about the way they try to seem cheerful and happy. "We're here to heal!" is what the outside is trying to say, but the inside says "People come in here and they never come out".

They never come out.

I don't handle death very well. Both my natural parents were killed in a car accident; I don't remember them at all. They died and I didn't understand that they wouldn't be coming home. People tried to explain to me, they tried to explain what had happened and why. But I wasn't a particularly bright small child. Even when they put me into the foster home, I still thought that, maybe, someday mommy and daddy would come back. Stupid pipe dreams. And then one evening, foster-daddy had the news on. I was maybe five? Six years old? I happened to walk in during a report on a very nasty car accident. The reporter was a blonde woman who looked thin and harried; her hair was being blown askew by the wind and her makeup smudged slightly from the light rain. Behind her was a pile of twisted metal and men and women working to pry it open, to do something to it. I didn't listen to that woman, to that reporter. I kept my eyes fixed on the wreckage behind her because I had to know… what were they doing?

It seemed like nothing until the very end of the report. They were just making the necessary closing small talk about the senseless tragedy. "Car accident," they kept saying. "Car accident."

One of the paramedics in the background finally hefted a white, twisted thing in his arm. I had to look at it for a moment before realizing what it was.

A person. Sexless, ageless, immobile, and dead, dead, dead. "Car accident," everyone had said after my parents had disappeared. "Car accident," the reporter said. Suddenly it all clicked together in my brain.

I seem to remember screaming. I think, at the time, that I thought that was my mother on the tv screen, being lifted by that strange, frightening man in white. I just didn't understand.

Sometimes I pretend I can remember being taken to the hospital the night of the accident by the next-door neighbor I'd been left with. But that's stupid. I barely spent any time in the hospital that night, and anyway I was so young. It wouldn't have mattered if I'd spent days there.

But it seems like a much better reason for hating hospitals than the alternative.

Oh, the alternative! Which would you like? Foster-mommy was so prolific, after all. I got very used to the waiting room of the emergency room, sitting close to foster-daddy, but not too close. It didn't matter anyway. He was always so far gone on those nights, looking sad, tired, and old. He would just sit, sit and stare at the wall. It made me uncomfortable, and by that time I was old enough to know that a hospital waiting room wasn't the place families were supposed to spend their Friday evenings.

But there we were. I swear, I watched people grow and change and die in that stupid prison. Nurses, doctors, orderlies, interns. Patients. So many patients. So many nights. So many scars, so much blood, so many stitches. Yes, the first time I ever found myself a part of the stupid charade, I wasn't even worried. Because she stood and she walked, glassy-eyed, out of our house and to the car. She walked into the hospital with a towel around her wrists. And I figured that if she could do so much, then she'd eventually walk back out of the hospital. Which she did.

But she'd just walk back in a few weeks later. Oh, once or twice she swallowed pills and we had to call for an ambulance. Still, I think she preferred slitting her wrists once or twice a month in some horrible fit of rage… and then realizing that she wanted to live. Again, and again, and again. I wonder now why they didn't just admit her to the psychiatric ward. Maybe she didn't want it. Maybe foster-daddy didn't want it. Maybe we didn't have enough money or the insurance company wouldn't pay for it. I don't know; no one ever bothered to tell me.

I heard a lot of phrases get tossed around in those days. Depressive, manic-depressive, borderline personality. Medication, lots of different kinds. Pink pills, purple pills, green pills, all very pretty. But scary. Very scary. And, of course, the scars and the stitches. Ugly, blotchy, red, yellow, orange, crimson, and black, they were the most frightening. Sometimes they were hidden under bandages, but after awhile she'd always get sick of those and discard them. Foster-mommy was so pretty; the scars were so ugly. Sometimes it was so gruesome it made me uneasy to hug and kiss her when she called.

And that's the real reason I hate hospitals so much.

The clinic didn't look like a hospital; in fact, it almost looked like a home. A tiny box of a home in the city, a twenty-minute drive away, during which Pietro spent spitting into a towel and trying not to shake. When we stepped inside, it was warm and cozy and, above all, safe. I don't know how it managed that. I could have stepped onto the street and felt vulnerable and scared, but inside the clinic I was wrapped in a cocoon of the love of strangers. These people… they just wanted to help…

Pietro collapsed on one of the chairs in the waiting room, next to an untidy girl with limp blonde hair, sunken eyes, and a wan smile. I gave his shoulders a sympathetic squeeze before going to see the head receptionist to confirm that Pietro had arrived as a patient.

It was hard to walk away from him, however. My life has been filled with bad nights, but the hardest thing to do is watch someone you love suffer. And Pietro was suffering. Suffering because of his own stupidity and because of his own wrongs. We'd spent the night in the bathroom, he trying as hard as he could to vomit or control himself and I providing the solid brick of a human being people sometimes need to lean on. I'd brought some blankets and pillows in and created a makeshift bed on the floor where we were able to sleep for a few restless hours in the early morning before the cycle had begun again.

It's hard to walk away from a person who, just a few hours ago, was begging you to help him, to make it all better. To make it all better or kill him.

Even when you know you'll be walking back.