A Danger to Herself and Others(67)

Dinner tonight is lukewarm chicken stew, but it’s too hard to hold the spoon with my right hand so after a few clumsy tries, I push the tray away. At least when I get home, the food will be hot. Maybe Mom and Dad will take me out to dinner to celebrate my homecoming. Sushi, maybe. Or oysters. (Neither of which are hot, but both of which they’d never give us here.) My dad was so proud of me the first time I ate oysters. Maybe we’ll go downtown to that restaurant in Soho with the amazing raw bar. After I took my SATs this spring, Dad and I celebrated by eating oysters there. It didn’t even matter that we didn’t have my scores yet—Dad said he was already proud of me.

He said he’d always been proud of me. I can still see the look on his face, like he couldn’t believe his luck, having fathered a daughter who filled him with such pride. (I guess most fathers feel that way at some point or another.)

I wonder if he’ll ever look at me with so much pride again.

Maybe he won’t ever want to take me for a special meal.

Maybe he won’t want to celebrate anything about me.

Annie keeps talking. I stare at the stew that I can’t eat and wait for an attendant to tell us it’s time to go back upstairs.



The next day after lunch, I line up with the girls who have grounds privileges. (Despite my episode, Lightfoot said I could go outside, though she reminded me that—like all the girls with grounds privileges—I would be supervised.) I follow a handful of other patients to the door where Lucy and I—no, just I—saw the other patients exit the building on September sixteenth. An orderly scans our bracelets and hands each of us a drab, gray sweatshirt before we step outside. A few other orderlies are already outside, ready to keep an eye on us, make sure we don’t stray too far. It’s colder today than it was in September. The name of the institute is ironed on to the front of the sweatshirt in faded white letters, and it smells like someone else was wearing it yesterday. I barely manage to get my bandaged arm through the sleeve.

The other girls run up ahead, staring into the sun and running their hands along the bark of the redwood trees that line the path ahead of us. They look like a group of second graders who’ve been let outside for recess.

I tilt my head to the sky and squint in the sunlight. The warmth feels like it did before they medicated me. I step on a pinecone, and my flimsy slippers aren’t enough to protect my foot from its sharp edges. I bite my lip to keep from crying, folding my good arm over my bandaged one across my chest.

Maybe when I get home, I’ll retrace every step I ever took. Go back to every store I ever shopped in, reread every book I ever read, re-eat every meal I ever loved, re-watch every movie I ever saw. How else will I know if I imagined anything else along the way? Lightfoot says she believes my symptoms began recently, but she doesn’t know for sure.

I’ll keep a list of the things that are the same.

1. Warmth of sunlight.

2. Pain of stepping on something sharp.

Distinguishing what is real from what was fake could take the rest of my life.

The idea makes me so tired I sit down right then and there in the dirt. I close my eyes and wait for an attendant to help me up and lead me inside.

They take the sweatshirt back before escorting me to my room, so some other girl can use it tomorrow.





forty-six


Lightfoot gives me my pills and sends me on my way. Or more accurately, she gives my mother my pills—one bottle of the blue antipsychotics, another of the yellow sedatives, and last but not least, a bottle of the chalky pink ones that are my antidepressants—and sits down with us in her office for one final conversation. There are enough pills, she says, to last until the end of the month. After that, we’ll refill the prescriptions at our pharmacy in New York.

She says it like that—we, our—but of course, Lightfoot won’t be there, and they’re my prescriptions. Not hers, and not my parents’ either. (Even if my parents are the ones who’ll pick up and pay for the medication each month.)

I’ve never been inside Lightfoot’s office, and it surprises me how different it is from the rest of this place.

My mother and I sit in heavy chairs made of wood and upholstered with leather, nothing like the plastic chair Lightfoot brought to my room for our sessions. Lightfoot sits in a high-backed chair on the other side of her desk, facing us. Her office is on the first floor. My father stands behind us, and I imagine his hand hovering above my shoulder, not quite sure whether it’s safe to touch me.

That’s just my imagination, not a hallucination.

That’s okay.

The walls are lined with wooden shelves full of textbooks and manuals.

“I didn’t know you had so many books in here,” I interrupt. My elbow is still bandaged, my arm still in a sling. I press my hand against my chest like I’m giving the pledge of allegiance, though it’s the wrong hand. I spot a row of classic novels tucked between the textbooks. “I would’ve loved to be reading Anna Karenina instead of the nurses’ cast-off romance novels all this time.”

Anna Karenina would’ve made for an excellent book club discussion. “Lucy and I could’ve gone round and round on the first line for hours.”

Are all happy families really alike?

Are unhappy families actually that different?

Discuss.

Beside me, my mother swallows audibly. I shift my gaze from the books. Mom’s face is flushed.