The Comforting One by: Alexandra Williams, Silver Gelatin Print, 2019
Charlotte
In the mornings, we all shuffled to the rec room like zombies. Seven a.m. seemed just too early.
We sat in silence for a long while, still trapped in a morning haze. A handful of us were taking sleeping medication. I didn’t blame those who did. It was a hard place to fall asleep. Our wing of the hospital was right next to the intensive care adults, and the previous night, a man had to be put in solitary confinement for violence. He’d thrown a punch at the nurse, after repeating he was supposed to pick his daughter up from school that afternoon. All night his fists pounded against the metal door, and he screamed for hours to be let out. Even with my pillow over my ears, I could feel the vibrations. I was in the non-violent adolescent wing, at the ripe age of sixteen.
Across the table we were sitting at, Zoe looked at me with puffy bags under her eyes.
“I have a daughter.” She said.
It was so strange and out of place, but then again everything was here. Quickly, I remembered the t-shirt she had worn the day before in the gym which looked stretched out around the stomach area as if she had been pregnant. But Zoe was seventeen, I assumed the shirt once belonged to someone else.
The information was given so randomly, but I understood. She was trying to tell me why she was here. The situation with her daughter and, I would later learn, Zoe’s relationship with the father are what pushed her over the edge.
“What’s her name?” I asked.
She shifted her eyes to the ceiling, quickly catching tears that sprung from nowhere with her palm, and slightly lifted the corners of her mouth. “Charlotte.”