A 2 AM Conversation with an Aging Motorcyclist
It was mud season in New Hampshire.
Winter had run long, hitting us with more snow even as the ground turned to mush. I’d only lived here for two months, and had wanted to stay longer, but that wasn’t in the cards.
At this particular treatment center, I lived in an ancient, repurposed B&B called Baker. Baker had a broken heating system, some politely demure ghosts, and a staircase that produced a symphony of screams when we, the residents, scrambled down it to grab breakfast.
Baker was comfortable. There was something sweet about the tiny bathrooms and narrow floorboards, the porch that was decorated by two-foot-long icicles.
Plus, living with eight other teenagers was a new experience. We shared a sense of camaraderie I hadn’t quite felt before.
We were all institutionalized; we were all tired. We were all friends, more or less.
And so, I had not thought about my last night before my last night. It seemed something for my future self to deal with. I figured I’d see it coming.
I did not see it coming.
“When do they get here?” I asked Brenda.
She sat in the giant armchair beside me in the living room. It was just a couple of minutes until midnight.
I lay sprawled on the couch, a thin blanket strewn over me. My packed bags sat stacked on the carpet. I’d told her I would not sleep tonight.
She laughed, a thick, raspy sound.
“Around three, sleepyhead,” Brenda answered.
She was short, stout, solid. Her hair was cropped to her skull and one ear had a tiny, glistening crystal inserted into the lobe. I liked her because she played Radiohead in the mornings and did not make any sudden loud noises.
There was something in the way she held herself that I found solace in. Brenda was secure in who she was. She radiated the stoic confidence of a woman who knew how to stand her ground. She was not afraid.
I couldn’t relate.
Earlier that day, my primary therapist at the treatment center notified me I had to be ‘transferred’. The current facility ‘did not have the resources to properly support’ me. I was too volatile for them to handle, too unpredictable, too something.
I’d come to like that therapist, but had already had four by that point in my life, so leaving wasn’t exactly difficult for me. Yet when she told me strangers would be coming to transport me from New Hampshire to Utah, shoving me into a cop car and hauling me away to an otherwise undisclosed and higher-security location, I got nervous.
I had to go all the way to Utah?
Why couldn’t I go someplace closer?
My discomfort was largely irrelevant. I had no say in this decision. It was happening tonight, whether I liked it or not.
In the meantime, Brenda kept me company. She didn’t say much.
I nodded in and out of sleep, in spite of my earlier claim that I’d be up all night. Brenda found that amusing. Every once in a while I’d shift on the couch and crack my eyes open to see the shadowy outline of her, still there, still guarding me.
After a few rounds of slipping uneasily in and out of consciousness, I woke up and stayed up.
“What time is it?”
Brenda was awake, of course, sitting upright in her armchair, a loosely knit white blanket draped across her lap.
“2 AM,” she said.
A wave of panic rushed through me. I only had an hour. One more hour in Baker before the strangers came to take me away — to “transport” me, which made me sound like luggage, which maybe I was.
I was fifteen and about to be carted across the country to a behavioral-adjustment facility, which apparently operated under the philosophy that mental illness can be punished out of you.
The adults had decided.
It didn’t matter if I tried to run — they would catch me and take me to where they wanted me.
I may as well have been luggage, for all the autonomy I had.
Only one hour left at Baker. One more hour of being somewhat comfortable. One more hour of familiarity, icicles, and ghosts.
One hour.
I sat up and stared out the window.
It was snowing, even though it was mid-March. I could see the little white flakes, gray in the darkness, tumble down and down and down, carving the same path my stomach traveled in my body as I filled with dread.
I felt a panic attack coming on. My breath shortened.
And then, Brenda’s voice. “I can’t wait to get back on my motorcycle.”
It cut through my thoughts and the winter silence of the room.
The sentence shook me out of my head. I realized I didn’t actually know anything about her, other than the fact that she was probably fifty and probably liked Radiohead and probably didn’t get paid very much.
“You ride a motorcycle?” I asked.
She smiled, barely. Everything she did was understated.
“There’s nothing like it,” she said. “Just going for a long ride. The wind in your hair, the world moving by so quickly, and all that matters is sticking with the road that’s right in front of you.”
She took a deep breath. She was not looking at me.
I nodded anyway. I did not understand. I couldn’t even drive.
“I’ll go for hours,” she said. “Make a day of it. Just get on the old bike and go. Don’t look back.”
Just go and don’t look back, I thought. You make it sound so easy.
I’d already said goodbye to my housemates. They were all shocked, of course, that I was leaving so suddenly.
But they understood. They understood my fear. They understood that I never really had a choice. They understood a lot more than the adults thought they did.
Eliza — the oldest of us, at age seventeen — brought out her Polaroid camera and insisted we all take a picture to remember each other by, even though there would only be one copy, so really, only one of us would get to remember.
I don’t remember who got the picture. I guess it wasn’t me.
What I do remember is how we looked in black and white and shades of gray, scattered about the living room, smiling for a camera. We looked okay. Okay in a way that none of us had been for a long time.
Our nine bodies stood captured in the frame while Brenda waited in the hallway, just out of sight.
Brenda and I only ever had that one conversation.
The most I know about her now is how deeply she loves her motorcycle — or rather, what she associates with her motorcycle. I do not know her last name, and that doesn’t bother me.
People drift in and out of each other’s lives, and at a certain point, you can’t look back anymore. She told me as much.
Periods of silence stretched between us that night.
In the last hour before I was taken away, Brenda did not talk for longer than five minutes at a time.
But because she was so often quiet, each sentence stretched out into something bigger than it was. Her low rumble of a voice filled the room and seeped through the cracks in the floorboards.
It echoed when she paused.
I focused on her voice and kept listening until a car pulled up outside. I saw the lights, the flash of white-yellow piercing the dark. Then there was the screech of tires, the slamming of two car doors, and a knock.
Brenda rose from her armchair at last. The white blanket fell from her lap and pooled on the floor. She nodded to me.
“It’s time.”
And that meant goodbye.