The Last Book Party(30)

She asked me to drive so that she could close her eyes, as she hadn’t slept much the night before. As we drove across the Sagamore Bridge, over the Cape Cod Canal, I floated the idea of Danny taking a hiatus from graduate school and doing something less stressful for a while. “I don’t think it’s gotten to that point,” my mother said, her eyes still closed. “This will pass. It always does.”

I took a deep breath, reminding myself that we’d been here before. My role was to quietly help my mother so she could calm Danny enough to get him to his psychiatrist, who would either talk him down or change his medication. If I argued with my mother or questioned her protocol, she would get angry at me for “piling on at a time like this” and making her more anxious and therefore unable to help Danny. As if I needed the reminder that Danny’s moods always came first. I had lost count of the number of times I had overheard my mother tell someone how grateful she was that at least one of her children was “average,” how having two extraordinary children would be too demanding and tip the balance out of her favor.

It had been more than a year since I’d had to deal with one of Danny’s meltdowns, and the closer we got to Cambridge, the angrier I became. Angry at how we all lived in fear of his panicked phone calls. At how ingrained it was in me to be the “easy one,” the good girl who never acted unreasonable. But when we arrived to find Danny watching Days of Our Lives in his pajamas, empty plates and mugs littering the floor and his bed, I just felt sad for my kind and brilliant brother, who, despite his complicated relationship with my parents, never demanded anything of me at all.

“Hey, Evie,” he said as I sat down on the edge of his bed.

“You’re scaring me,” I said. He had dark circles under his eyes.

“I’m just tired,” he said. “Really fucking tired.”

My mother took some plates and mugs into the kitchen. She came out holding a half-empty packet of hot dogs.

“What’s this?” she asked.

Danny shrugged.

“Have you stopped taking your medication?” my mother asked.

“I was feeling good. I didn’t need it,” he said.

My mother sighed. For the past two years, Danny had been taking an antidepressant that worked reasonably well but that would make him dangerously ill if he ate certain foods, including aged cheeses, smoked fish, or cured meats like bacon and hot dogs. My mother was vigilant about reminding Danny of the importance of avoiding those foods and even tried to keep them out of his sight. At our potluck Fourth of July picnic at Corn Hill the previous summer, she not only had refused to serve hot dogs, but had asked all our friends to forgo hot dogs too, so that Danny wouldn’t be reminded of his eating restrictions and his condition. Danny had known she had done this and had joked with me about how un-American it was for her to ban hot dogs on the Fourth of July. We’d laughed at the idea that he could forget that he suffered from depression or that the sight of a single hot dog could send him spiraling.

Our mother had been just as overprotective when Danny was seventeen and it had become clear that he had not inherited my mother’s height. “Don’t say anything about his being short,” she told me once, as if my mathematically brilliant brother didn’t know that at barely five-six he was considerably shorter than the average American man. Danny and I had laughed about that too. “I hate to break it to you,” I’d said, “but you’re short.” He’d run to the mirror and pretended to collapse in horror.

My mother convinced Danny to get dressed and go with her to see his doctor. I stayed behind and stripped his bed, gathered up his dirty sheets and clothes and took them down the block to the laundromat. I threw out the remaining hot dogs along with a container of moldy yogurt and three slices of rock-hard pizza. I didn’t know what to do with the pages and pages of notes and equations on the desk, the couch, and living room floor, so I put them into two neat piles on the coffee table. Their numbers were meaningless to me, but they meant something profound to Danny. I prayed his depression would lift so he could resume the task of making sense of the numbers in a way that gave him peace.

When they returned, Danny crawled back into bed. My mother thanked me for cleaning the apartment. “You’re a godsend, Eve. It’s nice to have you home for a while.”

She told me that Danny’s psychiatrist had convinced him to go back on his medication.

“Will it work?” I asked.

My mother glanced toward Danny’s bedroom, her face pinched with worry.

“We can only hope.”





24





I returned to Truro with a heaviness and the feeling that I had been away a long time, that my giddy conversations with Henry about books had taken place weeks ago rather than only a day before. Henry didn’t ask the reason for my absence, and I didn’t share what was going on in my family. It was soothing to get back to Henry’s world, and his joy at my return—he seemed to light up when I walked into his office—took me by surprise. His eagerness gave me the sense that I was not alone in really liking our time together.

“You have no idea the battle that has been raging between me and these pages,” he said, tapping his fingers on the manuscript on his desk.

“What’s the problem?” I asked, perching on the edge of my school desk.