NOS4A2(84)

“Dude. What the f*ck? I thought you said the librarian was make-believe. Like your covered bridge of the mind.”

“Yep. That’s what I decided in the hospital. That all those memories were imagined. An elaborate story I’d invented to protect myself from the truth.”

“But . . . she can’t be imaginary. She was at the house. Wayne saw her. She left a folder behind. That’s where Wayne read about Charlie Manx,” Lou said. Then his big, expressive face came alive with a look of dismay. “Ah, dude. I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. About the folder.”

“Wayne looked in it? Shit. I told her to take it with her. I didn’t want Wayne to see.”

“You can’t let him know I told you.” Lou made a fist and rapped it on one of his elephantine knees. “I am so shitty at keeping secrets.”

“You’re guileless, Lou. That’s one of the reasons I love you.”

He lifted his head and gave her a wondering stare.

“I do, you know,” she said. “It’s not your fault I made such a rotten mess of everything. It’s not your fault I’m such a colossal f*ckup.”

Lou bowed his head and considered this.

“Aren’t you going to tell me I’m not so bad?” she asked.

“Mmm-no. I was thinking how every man loves a hot girl with a history of making mistakes. Because it’s always possible she’ll make one with you.”

She smiled, reached across the space between them, put her hand on his. “I have a long history of making mistakes, Louis Carmody, but you weren’t one of them. Oh, Lou. I get so f*cking tired of being in my own head. The screwups are bad, and the excuses are worse. That’s what both versions of my life have in common, you know. The one thing. In the first version of my life, I’m a walking disaster because Mommy didn’t hug me enough and Daddy didn’t teach me how to fly kites or something. In the other version, I’m permitted to be a crazy f*cking mess—”

“Shhh. Stop.”

“—and ruin your life and Wayne’s life—”

“Stop kicking yourself.”

“—because all those trips through the Shorter Way Bridge messed me up somehow. Because it was an unsafe structure to begin with, and every time I went across it, it took a little more wear. Because it’s a bridge, but it’s also the inside of my own head. I don’t expect that to make sense. I hardly understand it myself. It’s pretty Freudian in there.”

“Freudian or not, you talk about it like it’s real,” Lou said. He looked out into the night. He took a slow, deep, steadying breath. “So is it?”

Yes, Vic thought with a wrenching urgency.

“No,” she said. “It can’t be. I need it not to be. Lou, do you remember that guy who shot the congresswoman in Arizona? Loughner? He thought the government was trying to enslave humanity by controlling grammar. To him there was no question it was happening. The proof was all around him. When he looked out the window and saw someone walking the dog, he was sure it was a spy, someone the CIA had sent to monitor him. Schizos invent memories all the time: meeting famous people, abductions, heroic triumphs. That’s the nature of delusion. Your chemistry fouls up your whole sense of reality. That night I stuck all our phones in the oven and burned our house down? I was sure dead children were calling from Christmasland. I heard the phones ringing even though no one else did. I heard voices no one else heard.”

“But, Vic. Maggie Leigh was at your house. The librarian. You didn’t imagine that. Wayne saw her, too.”

Vic struggled for a smile she didn’t really feel. “Okay. I’ll try and explain how it’s possible. It’s simpler than you think. There’s nothing magic about it. So I have these memories of the Shorter Way Bridge and the bike that took me finding. Only they aren’t memories, they’re delusions, right? And in the hospital we had group sessions where we’d sit and talk about our crazy ideas. Lots of patients in that hospital heard my story about Charlie Manx and the Shorter Way Bridge. I think Maggie Leigh is one of them—one of the other crazies. She latched onto my fantasy and made it her own.”

“What do you mean you think she was one of the other patients? Was she in your group sessions or not?”

“I have no memory of her in those sessions. What I remember is meeting Maggie in a small-town library in Iowa. But that’s how delusion works. I’m always ‘remembering’ things.” Vic lifted her fingers and made imaginary quotation marks in the air, to indicate the essentially untrustworthy nature of such recollections. “These memories just come to me, all at once, perfect little chapters in this crazy story I wrote in my imagination. But of course there’s nothing true about them. They’re invented on the spot. My imagination provides them, and some part of me decides to accept them as fact the instant they come to me. Maggie Leigh told me I met her when I was a child, and my delusion instantly provided a story to back her up. Lou. I can even remember the fish tank in her office. It had one big koi in it, and instead of rocks it had Scrabble tiles on the floor. Think about how crazy that sounds.”

“I thought you were on medicine. I thought you were okay now.”

“The pills I take are a paperweight. All they do is pin the fantasies down. But they’re still there, and any strong wind that comes along, I can feel them rattling around, trying to slip free.” She met his gaze and said, “Lou. You can trust me. I’m going to take care of myself. Not just for me. For Wayne. I’m all right.” She did not say she had run out of Abilify a week earlier, had to spread the last few pills out so she didn’t come down with withdrawal. She didn’t want to worry him any more than necessary, and besides, she planned to refill her prescription first thing next morning. “I’ll tell you something else. I don’t remember meeting Maggie Leigh in the hospital, but I easily could’ve. They had me pumped so full of drugs in there I could’ve met Barack Obama and I wouldn’t remember it. And Maggie Leigh, God bless her, is a lunatic. I knew it the moment I saw her. She smelled like homeless shelters, and her arms were scarred from where she’s been shooting junk or burning herself with cigarettes or both. Probably both.”