A Danger to Herself and Others(68)
And I lose Lucy once more.
Maybe it was Lightfoot who sent me Jane Eyre a few days ago. I scan her shelves for an open space where the book might have been. Maybe reading a classic novel was a privilege I earned without realizing it. Maybe Lightfoot wanted me to recognize how lucky I am: See what they used to do to people with mental illness—lock them up and throw away the key? Or maybe she thought I’d identify with the first Mrs. Rochester, a woman who was considered a villain for more than a hundred years after the novel was published until some readers considered there might have been more to her story.
“How long until she forgets about these imaginary friends?” Dad asks.
Lightfoot shifts in her seat. Her clothes—she’s wearing her usual papery blue scrubs; she’ll be seeing other patients when this meeting is over—rustle when she moves. Yesterday she told me I could wear real pajamas, but it didn’t seem worth the bother to ask my mother to bring me more clothes when I’d be leaving so soon. Anyway, I said, imagine the damage I could have done if I’d had real clothes the night I hurt myself. I remembered how the green pants had ripped when I wrapped them around my neck. There’s a reason this place makes wearing real pajamas a privilege.
Lightfoot smiled then, a real smile. She said she trusted me not to hurt myself again.
Why? I asked.
Because if you were going to hurt yourself again, you wouldn’t have told me you understand that real clothes could be dangerous.
Now, Lightfoot turns to my father and says, “They weren’t ‘imaginary friends.’”
“But she’s still talking about having a conversation with someone who was never there!” Dad sounds frustrated, like the service in this place is below par.
He did that at hotels and restaurants all the time.
A place this expensive ought to include free drinks from the minibar.
We’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes, and the waiter still hasn’t taken our order.
They have the gall to call this mush flourless chocolate cake?
For the first time, it occurs to me that my dad is actually kind of rude.
“Lucy was there,” Lightfoot explains calmly. “Just not in a way that you and I can experience. Hannah’s brain works differently.” I hate the way she emphasizes my name. It underlines how different I am from my parents, separating me from them even further. “Hallucinations are when the brain experiences a sensation without corresponding external stimuli. In fact, Hannah may remember Lucy and Jonah better than she remembers other friends because she herself generated them. It’s called the generation effect. Hallucinatory memories can be particularly powerful.”
“But with the medication—” Mom begins and then stops. “She’ll be normal again, right?”
“I prefer not to use words like normal. Or crazy for that matter,” Lightfoot adds. She smiles one of her medical-school smiles, the I-know-how-hard-this-must-be-for-you-to-understand smile. “As I said, Hannah’s brain works differently. Remember, this is a disease, a medical condition.”
At my hearing, Lightfoot compared my disease to a broken bone. She said that she’d set the bone and wrapped it in plaster. But broken bones aren’t diseases, and people who break their arms and legs don’t usually have to worry about them all that much once the cast comes off. Then again, perhaps a bone that’s been broken is more likely to break again.
“Medication and therapy aren’t a cure,” Lightfoot continues, which is just a fancy way of saying: Hannah won’t ever be like you again. In fact, she was probably never like you to begin with. “They’re part of her treatment plan.”
“You said her symptoms were under control,” Dad counters, as though Lightfoot is a salesperson trying to put one over on him.
“I said we were managing her symptoms,” Lightfoot corrects patiently.
I’m not an expert in body language, but my mother is leaning away from me as if she’s scared whatever I’ve got is contagious, as though having a family history can work backward as well as forward. Her legs are crossed so that her feet are pointing away from mine. She’s wearing designer kitten heels, the kind of shoes that would be confiscated upstairs because even one-inch heels could do damage. Mom’s beige blazer has trim that matches her navy-blue pants perfectly. Her pants are stylishly cropped above the ankle. When I was little and she still dropped me off and picked me up from school, I always thought that my mother’s outfits were so much more stylish than what the other mothers wore. She might technically have been wearing the same thing as the other moms—a pantsuit, a pair of well-pressed slacks—but she invariably added something extra to her outfits: a brightly colored silk scarf, perfectly applied eyeliner, shoes with embellished heels. When we went shopping together, we’d share even the tiniest dressing room so we could show each other every single thing we tried on.
Now, I wonder if my mother will ever want to be close to me again.
I shift in my chair. When I got dressed this morning, I had a choice of what to wear: the new outfit my mother bought me for the hearing, or the leggings and tank top I was wearing when they brought me here months ago. I chose the new clothes, but put the leggings on beneath the skirt because I worried I’d be cold on the plane with bare legs. Lightfoot helped me roll the left sleeve up over my bandage. Now I wish I’d gone without the pants. I might have been cold, but at least it would’ve been an outfit my mother approved of.