299 Days: The 17th Irregulars

Chapter 178 Sandy and Walter

Grant finished the morning with two commitment trials. He empanelled a jury and heard Rory, one of the nurses, describe how two people went off their mental meds and needed to be committed.

Rory was becoming the mental health nurse, even though he wasn’t trained in that before the Collapse.

The first person to be committed was Sandy McPherson. It was absolutely heartbreaking. She was in her mid-thirties with blonde hair and was the mother of two great little kids. She originally lived in Seattle. After her first child, Eli, was born, she developed very severe postpartum depression. It got worse after the second child, Josh. She essentially couldn’t function and her husband left her. It was just her—a severely depressed single woman—with two kids.

She was determined to do the very best for her little Eli and Josh, no matter how hard it was. She came out to Pierce Point and got a job at her cousin’s store in Frederickson. She got on various medications and, after some trial and error, found trazodone (Desyrel) to work well and she was able to function normally. She was very proud of how hard she worked to make everything OK, especially for her kids. No one knew she had depression.

Then the Collapse hit. She only had a few days of Desyrel left. She zoomed into the Frederickson pharmacy on the first day and tried to get a refill. They didn’t have any and the next day, the pharmacy closed. All the other pharmacies in the area closed then, too. At the last pharmacy she tried, she saw the sign on the door that said “Out of Business.” She cried in her car in the parking lot for over an hour. She cried until her face hurt. The drive back home was the scariest time of her life. She knew she would have to try to live without Desyrel.

The stress of knowing the medication was running out and all the stress of the Collapse was too much. Two days after the Desyrel ran out, she hit a new low. All she thought about was killing herself and, on occasion, killing little Eli, age four, and Josh, age two. They were the most adorable little boys; blond hair and smiling all the time. They were so huggable and loveable, which is what drove her to think about killing them. They were so precious and innocent. She didn’t want them to live through the hell that was all around her, and she was convinced that the hell of the Collapse would never go away. Never ever. Things would never get better because she would never have her Desyrel back.

She kept dwelling on the idea that she was being the best mom in the world by taking the kids out of this horrible place. She had fantasies of Eli and Josh thanking her for taking them away. She had a little gas left in her car and decided to run the engine in the closed garage and they would all go to sleep, forever.

She was trying hard to fight against the part of her that desperately wanted to do that. In a moment of panic, she stumbled over to a neighbor’s house and told them what she was thinking and begged for help. She was so ashamed about her thoughts of running the car in the garage, but she knew that she had to go to the neighbors and get help. Her motherly instinct to protect her young was still stronger than the depression.

As Grant listened to the evidence in the case, he became furious at the Collapse. As horrible as the past system was with all its corruption, at least the government had managed to make sure there was Desyrel at the Frederickson pharmacy for Sandy. Now there wasn’t any. The Collapse did this. Well, the government giving everything away in exchange for votes and people thinking they could live like kings on other’s labor, was what caused the Collapse. But still. It felt like the Collapse was to blame for what was happening to Sandy.

He hated the Loyalists even more right then. They had built up a system that was bound to fail and it was hurting people like Sandy. And Eli and Josh. Loyalist officials in Olympia, Seattle, and certainly Washington, D.C. had all the medication they needed. Pierce Point could go to hell as far as they cared. Sandy could go to hell; she was already there. The Loyalists would never know about her, or Eli or Josh. Sandy and her kids were a problem for the hillbilly teabaggers to solve.

Challenge accepted, Grant thought. We’ll do the very best we can.

The neighbors had locked Sandy in a room in their house, which was what Sandy had asked them to do. Pleaded, actually. The neighbors went over and got the kids, called more neighbors and decided to take Sandy to the Pierce Point clinic so see if there was anything they could do for her. Lisa and Rory checked her out and quickly realized that there was nothing medically they could do without some more Desyrel. Sandy asked that she be put somewhere where she wouldn’t hurt the kids. She was relieved, in some small way that her secret was out. Hiding this had been more of a weight than she realized.

This was a very easy case. The jury took about five minutes to come to a decision. Sandy needed to be confined; she was asking them to do it. She wouldn’t be in the mental house because there were raving lunatics there and Sandy didn’t need that. She would stay with the neighbors. Eli and Josh would stay with some volunteers—a nice couple whose kids and grandkids were trapped in Tacoma—and would get to see their mom as often as possible. Pastor Pete was organizing visiting parties to make sure Sandy had many visitors. She would have people around—many of them people she hadn’t known before the Collapse—to keep her spirits up. They would remind her that she was not alone and that the community was doing all it could to help her, because she mattered. And that she was a great mom for saving Eli and Josh.

The community, Grant thought. Yes, the community was taking care of Sandy and Eli and Josh. Was this the socialism that Grant hated? Not at all. People helping people wasn’t socialism; it was merely a reflection of a healthy society. People privately helping other people, without coercion, was a humanitarian society. The government forcibly taking money from people, wasting it on their politically connected buddies, and giving people the scraps from the spending, like Desyrel, was socialism. Grant had to admit that a constant supply of Desyrel would help, and at some level the former government did manage to make that happen, but Pierce Point would do a pretty good job of helping Sandy. Eli and Josh were young enough that they might not remember when they stayed with the nice people.

Sandy showed her appreciation by doing all the work she could for the community. She came up with a brilliant idea: the battery bank. She organized a drive where people took out all the batteries from things they no longer used, like the remote control for the TV, and sent them to the Grange. Sandy sorted them and put them in tubs. She put sheets of cloth between rows so the contacts didn’t touch and drain them. People who were working for the community and needed batteries could come in and get them. Plus, the battery bank gave Sandy a chance to talk to people and feel like she had a job.

The second commitment trial, for an old man named Walter Winces, was not a sad story. No one really knew much about Walter; he was a bit of a hermit. One day, Walter’s neighbor’s dogs started barking, like they always did. Walter told them to shut up. He came over with a rifle and said he was going to shoot the dogs if they didn’t quiet down.

He wouldn’t stop screaming at them. The neighbors got their own guns out and Walter ran away. Then he went, with his rifle, to the other neighbors’ houses in his area and started screaming. He started smashing their mailboxes with his rifle. A neighbor used his CB to call the Grange, but before the Grange could get anyone there, Walter dropped to the ground and started crying. A brave neighbor girl ran up and kicked his rifle out of the way and another girl grabbed it. Walter was in a fetal position wailing.

Rich came and handcuffed him, and then went into Walter’s house and found all the pictures of what appeared to be his wife on the kitchen table. She had died five years earlier. Walter wasn’t drunk and wasn’t on any medications. After he calmed down, which took over an hour, Walter told Rich that just couldn’t stand living like this anymore. The barking dogs sent him over the edge. Walter said he was sorry, but didn’t want to live anymore. When Rich asked if he thought he’d do it again, Walter said, “Yes.” Rory came out to Walter’s house and could not point to any apparent medical condition. It appeared that Walter had just decided he wanted to die and was going out kicking. He was a mean old bastard; pathetic but mean.

The jury, hearing all this evidence, decided to put Walter in the mental ward, at least for a while. He would get weekly evaluations by Rory and then Rory would report back. Walter didn’t seem to care. Whether he was locked up in the mental ward or stuck in his house with all those pictures of his late wife, he was just waiting to die either way. Walter later apologized to his neighbors, and then asked them to kill him.

Grant wondered whether Walter going nuts was from the Collapse. Maybe, maybe not. The stress of the Collapse was overwhelming. It felt like the world was ending. Some people could adapt to that mentality, that type of living. Some couldn’t and the stress impacted them in different ways.

Maybe, Grant thought, it just seemed like there were more people going crazy like Walter. That was probably part of it. In peacetime, the police, courts, and social workers just took care of the Walters of society. Most average people woke up the next day and had no idea that a man was screaming at his neighbors, except the people paid to deal with it. Now the whole community dealt with it, like the jurors sitting there listening to this.

It was lunch time. Grant ate lunch with the jurors since their cases were over and it would now be proper to interact socially with them. He loved meeting all these new people and learning how things were going with them, what they were eating, how things were being shared, and, in some cases, who wasn’t sharing. He gained an enormous amount of intelligence about the operations of the community from those informal visits.

Besides, Grant had to admit, he was an elected judge and had to take every opportunity to meet people voting for him.

It was time for Grant to talk to Al the immigrations guy.