Days Like This

by Danielle Ellison

  “That doesn’t seem like a bad moment.”

  “It wasn’t,” I said, unwinding the rubber band from my fingers. “But it was her first manic episode—at least the one I can remember. The next day she was still chipper, so happy and cheerful. We went shopping. Everything was smiles and sunshine and presents and adventures.”

  “For how long?”

  I shrugged, sliding the band on my wrist. “Five days. Five days my mom was the most excited, the most cheerful, the most amazing. I said to her that second day, ‘Mommy, you’re pretty today.’ And she said, ‘You’re pretty, too. It’s a pretty day!’ That’s what we called them before we knew that’s what they were, her manic episodes. They were pretty days.”

  “And then they weren’t?”

  I nodded. “And then they weren’t.” I threw the rubber band back on the table and let my gaze drift back to Dr. Lambert’s face. She was still watching me, notepad and pen in her hand, but she wasn’t writing.

  I readjusted how I was sitting, pulled my legs up into the couch and kept ahold of that pillow. “She was always more hypomanic in the beginning— happy, reckless, excited. She would talk fast or get an idea in her head and we had to do it. Right then. A few times I would wake up at night and she would be in the middle of an episode and I’d hear it.”

  “Hear what?”

  I closed my eyes quickly, exhaled. “Her in her bedroom having sex with whatever guy she’d found. I don’t know where they came from, but they were around in the beginning a lot more than when I was older. Or maybe she didn’t bring them home. I don’t know.”

  She scribbled something on her notebook. After a second, she met my gaze. “The majority of bipolar patients suffer from depressive episodes. Do you remember her first depressive episodes that affected you?”

  The first one I thought of was the night I left Graham. I didn’t want to share that one.

  I cleared my throat. I knew the statistics and the general cases. Long states of depression, then manic highs.

  “My mom was more like a tsunami. For months, she’d be fine. She’d be herself. Then all of a sudden she’d be in my face like a bee drawn to sugar. Adventure was sugar. Shopping was the sugar. That’s how we got the convertible—on a manic episode when I was eleven.”

  I remembered that day too. She’d just received a check for one of the songs she produced. She cashed that whole check on the car.

  “I really only remember one time vividly that was early on,” I said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  I stared beyond Dr. Lambert, studying the lines on the wallpaper. They swirled and cascaded into each other until I couldn’t tell them apart.

  “When I was eleven it snowed,” I started. That storm was a big deal, because it rarely snowed in our part of North Carolina—and never like that. “Everything was white and it was so deep it was above my knees. I wanted to play outside, but Graham wasn’t answering the phone. We were the only two kids our age on our street, but Mom made me French toast and played The Beatles all morning, and she was happy.”

  I remember thinking how much she must’ve loved snow, with that look on her face.

  “I told Mom I wanted to build a fort. She asked if I knew how, but I didn’t, and she grinned and said she did.” I smiled a little at the memory. Mom put on as many layers as she could find, since we didn’t have much real outside wear, and tied bread bags over my socks before I’d put my rain boots on. She’d held my hand as we walked through the snow. I’d loved her like that and I’d never wanted her to let go.

  “We made a snowman and had a snowball fight and made a fort from the trashcans around the back of our house. We must have been out there for hours because I remember everything hurt, frozen, but I didn’t care. It was beautiful and Mom was happy and everything was amazing.” I said with a pause.

  I looked at Dr. Lambert from the corner of my eye, and she listened, intensely. Her face showed no emotion, and I didn’t know how someone heard a story and showed no emotion. I cleared my throat.

  “Then Mom showed me how to make a snow angel. ‘Count to twenty and come find me. If you find me, we’ll have cocoa.’ She snuck around the corner and I laughed and made that angel.

  “I didn’t stop. I moved my arms and legs like she showed me, and stared up at the sky as flakes started to fall again and counted as loud as I could. When I hit twenty I stood up carefully so I didn’t mess up my angel.”

  It was quiet in the room, just like it had been that day.

  “There were no tracks anymore because the snow was coming down hard, so I couldn’t find her. I went the way I saw her go, but the whole world was frozen and covered in white. It was still and quiet. I called her name, over and over. It felt like forever as I searched for her, behind everything, under everything. I didn’t know where she went. I cried.”

  I continued talking because if I stopped, even for a breath, I wouldn’t be able to start again. “I walked to the woods. Mom wouldn’t go in there, but I walked along the edge of the woods anyway. I found her curled up at the spot near the fence where the woods and the grass met, sobbing on the ground. I thought she was hurt, but she started rambling about being sorry, about hating everything, and I knew she was lost. I tried to get her inside, but she couldn’t even hear me. When she was like that, she never really registered that I was around.”

  I remembered the whole thing like yesterday. The cold. The weight of her. Trying to drag her through the snow.

  “Every other step she would fall down and start bawling over again. She would call out for my dad—Richard—like he was around the corner waiting. ‘He’s inside,’ I kept telling her. ‘We have to get inside.’ And that’s when Graham came outside.”

  “Graham saw you with her in that state?” Dr. Lambert asked.

  I nodded and shifted in my seat. His face when he saw us there was confused and concerned. I’d told him I couldn’t get her inside. The wind pierced my skin and I couldn’t feel my legs or arms. Graham asked me if she was hurt.

  “She’s sad,” I’d said.

  “Does she get sad a lot?”

  “Can you help me?”

  “I’m sure my dad can—”

  “No!” I’d yelled at him. He’d looked scared. “You have to help me. You can’t tell anyone. Promise me forever. You will not tell anyone ever.”

  His eyebrows furrowed, but he’d nodded. “Promise, forever.”

  Dr. Lambert said my name. “Cassie, what did Graham do?”

  “He helped me get her inside. Somehow we convinced her to walk, but when we got into the house she collapsed on the couch. Graham stood in the kitchen and watched me. He didn’t say anything until I sat down at the table and I made him promise not to tell.”

  Dr. Lambert’s forehead creased as she wrote down a couple notes. “He kept that promise. We didn’t find out about Joyce for four more years.”

  I locked eyes with her. “Graham always keeps his promises.”

  “Do you remember any other signs?”

  There were probably more, statistically. I knew it was common for kids to build a tolerance, to block out the things they didn’t want to remember. Maybe I did that.

  “She slept a lot sometimes. There was a whole week where I don’t remember seeing her and we didn’t have food in the house because she couldn’t get out of bed. I took myself to school; I made her breakfast that she didn’t eat. I ate at the Tuckers’ house every meal that week and told Mrs. Tucker that Mom was sick.”

  Dr. Lambert nodded. “Mrs. Tucker knew?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. She was always really careful what she said around me, and then when we found Mom in the bathtub a few years later—well, then there was no denying it.”

  “Let’s talk about that.”

  “About what?” I snapped. I didn’t want to talk about finding Mom. That was the worst experience, and I’ve had to live it over and over for four years. No way I was going there.

  “The denial,” she said. I exhaled
. “You made Graham promise when you were eleven not to tell anyone. How long did that last?”

  I wracked my brain. “I guess until I was fifteen, when I found her in the bathtub, when I found out she was bipolar.”

  “For four years he kept your secret,” she said with a pause. She clicked her pen closed. “Why didn’t you want anyone to know? You could’ve had someone help you. A lot of your heartbreak could have been prevented.”

  When she put it like that, it sucked. I was a kid. How was I supposed to know? I squeezed the pillow into my chest.

  “I knew it wasn’t normal compared to other people, but it was all I knew. She was my mom. That life. Mom being happy; Mom being sad—it was mine,” I said. I looked right at Dr. Lambert when I spoke. “It had always been mine. In middle school I realized it wasn’t normal, but by then I knew that if I said anything I could lose her; I could be taken away and I didn’t want that. She was all I had. She was my mom.” I didn’t want to lose her. “There were days when she wasn’t sick, when she was normal. Those were really the pretty ones. The ones I want to remember most, and I can’t because of the rest.”

  Dr. Lambert leaned forward in her chair. “You said you wanted to stop it from repeating. What exactly did you mean?”

  I threw the pillow down. “I don’t want to ever have anyone else feel that way about me.”

  “What way?”

  My throat tightened. “I don’t want them to remember what I did, the bad things, and forget me. I don’t want anyone to suffer because of me. If I end up like her.” I picked the pillow back up. “So I didn’t tell anyone at college about Mom or this place or Graham. I went and tried to start over.”

  “That was hard?”

  “Very hard. I had a friend, June, and a boyfriend, but they weren’t real. They were the ‘After Cassie’.”

  “After? After what?”

  I wanted to stand up. I wanted to run, but I knew I couldn’t do that. I let a silence settle around us until I couldn’t handle the lack of noise. I reached for this bendy blue straw thing on the table. “Before I left Graham, I found Mom in a manic state. She was yelling about my dad, and she told me—she didn’t know I was Cassie—that he left because of her. And I snooped around. I found their divorce papers. ‘After Cassie’ is after mom told me about my dad. After I left Graham to go there. After everything.”

  It was the last thing I expected to find, but it was nestled in the trunk near the foot of her bed right beside my birth certificate. My dad wasn’t dead; he was alive. The reason for their divorce was listed as “emotional stress and turmoil.” He left because he couldn’t handle her emotional trials. He left because she was sick.

  “Why did you leave Graham?”

  Dr. Lambert rested in the back of her chair, studying me, legs crossed. I looked at her because I wanted her to hear this part too. I wanted this part to matter, because this part was the stuff that made me After Cassie. She’d said I’d changed, and I had. “I didn’t want to hurt him, to trap him in a life with me. I didn’t think I could stand it if he left me like that. I didn’t let anyone at Butler get close to me.”

  “Why?”

  A simple question; a complicated answer. I grabbed the blue bendy straw and twisted it into an O before I answered. “I don’t want to be abandoned the way my mom was.”

  “The way your father left?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The way you left Graham?”

  My eyes shot up. That made it sound so easy. It wasn’t easy. None of it had been. I followed her row of degrees until my eyes met the windowsill. The sun seeped through a crack in the blinds.

  “The way I left her, too,” I said. “I’d rather do the leaving.”

  “But does the leaving make you happier than staying?”

  “No,” I said in barely a whisper.

  “Thank you,” Dr. Lambert said.

  “For what?” I asked, looking at her again.

  “For telling me something real,” she said. I froze, bendy straw in one hand, pillow pressed against me. It did feel simple. Suddenly. My complicated life. My messy emotions. Simple. “Cassie, I think it would be good for you to keep seeing me. If you want to.”

  “I don’t need any help.”

  “Everyone needs help, Cassie. Besides, I think you know that’s not true.”

  “Dr. Lambert—”

  She didn’t let me finish. She threw the notebook and the pen on the table beside her. “I think you need to let someone in. You need someone to talk to, and it doesn’t mean you’re sick or crazy. We’re human. We’re wired to need other humans. To share, to talk, to trust. I want to be that person for you, Cassie, until you’re ready for it to be someone else. We can talk about anything you want, but I think it would help you.”

  “Help me what?”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  26.

  Graham

  I CHECKED MY phone as I turned on the shower after my Wednesday morning run. Three emails. I stopped taking the thing with me a long time ago. For some reason the universe knew when I was trying to exercise and everyone needed something in that hour. I didn’t listen to music, anyway. I liked the sound of my breathing, my heartbeat in my head, nature and traffic and animals. It kept me moving forward, pushed me on.

  The third email made me freeze. It was from Rice University saying my status had been updated. Holy shit. Was this it? My hands shook as I logged into my account. I had to try twice because I kept pushing the wrong letters. Stupid fucking touchscreen phones. The page loaded and I clicked on my account.

  Where the screen usually said, “Waiting,” it said, “Approved.”

  Approved.

  Approved.

  What a great fucking word.

  I clicked on the link below the Best Word and directions popped up. I was officially an entering junior at Rice University in the architecture program. Classes started in late August. It went on to talk about payment, housing, forms, a bunch of shit I didn’t care about right then because I was accepted. I was going to Texas. I was going to school. I did it. I fucking did it!

  “MOM!” I YELLED, busting into the kitchen. She was sitting at the table eating breakfast and probably reading some romance novel on her e-reader when she looked up at me. I smiled, like a crazy idiot probably, but I didn’t care. I was going to school!

  “What’s going on, Graham?” she asked, taking a bite of her eggs.

  I leaned back against the kitchen counter. I could play this cool. “I was wondering what you were doing in August?”

  Mom shook her head and took another bite. “How am I supposed to know that? I don’t know. Nothing?”

  “Good—because we have to go to Texas to take me to school.”

  Her fork froze mid-air. “What?”

  I smiled. “Rice starts in August. I have to be there the twenty-fifth. If you want to put it in your calendar.”

  She dropped her fork. “You got in?”

  “I got in!”

  Mom cheered, and jumped up from her seat. She wasn’t disapproving when I decided to stay here after graduation. I told her I was trying to figure it out, but really, it had been for Cassie. But this, she knew how much I wanted it. She wanted it for me. Mom laughed, stretched her arms up around my neck to hug me.

  “I have to call your father! We’ll plan a dinner when your dad is back in town!” She kissed my cheek and left me in the kitchen. I could hear her still cheering, still excited, from across the house.

  I had to go tell Molly. I knew she was at work, so I was almost to my truck when Joyce called my name. I debated getting in my truck anyway and walking on like I hadn’t heard her, but then I’d already paused. Now it would be rude. Besides, I wasn’t mad at her. I wasn’t mad at anyone. I was moving on, officially now, and that was allowed.

  “Graham,” Mrs. H said, a smile on her face. “Good morning.”

  “That it is, Mrs. H.”

  “I know it’s short notice, Graham, but we are having game ni
ght tonight. Remember how we used to do that every month?” she asked.

  I nodded. I’d remembered. One night a month in high school Mrs. H had game night for Cassie and our gang. It was after she got on her meds when she was more stable. We’d all come over and hang out with Cassie. She’d give us all a beer and play some kind of great music in the background, and we’d make up our own rules to whatever we were playing.

  “You’re invited, if you can come,” she said.

  I shook my head. “I would, Mrs. H, but I have plans with my girlfriend. We’re celebrating tonight.” I didn’t have plans yet, but I would. She’d be excited for me. She wanted this for me almost as much as I did.

  “Celebrating what?”

  “I was accepted into a college I really wanted,” I said.

  “Oh, you got into Rice?”

  “You remember that?”

  She smiled. “I remember a lot, Graham Tucker. I’m bipolar, not old.” I chuckled, even though she was both things. “You have fun with your girlfriend, but we’ll have to do it another time. I want to celebrate with you, and I’m sure Cassie will too.”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said.

  I sent Molly a text that I was coming to visit her. Her response was quick: I am sick. She was sick.

  Do you want me to come by?

  No. Not pretty :(

  Feel better.

  I slid my phone away. Crap. I turned back to the Harlen house. I knew I shouldn’t go there, but it was like nothing else was listening as my feet led me there. I could have game night with them. I could hang out with Cassie if I wanted to. I didn’t want to be with her. I knew I was where I was supposed to be with Molly, and then I was supposed to go to Texas. I could do this. We could be friends, really friends. Not some other form that didn’t feel right.

  And besides, I could get out at any time.

  Mrs. H answered the door. “Actually, game night sounds wonderful.”

  27.

  Cassie

  GRAHAM LAUGHED. IT was the best sound. Each time it echoed through my house, it shook something inside me. It was just the three of us, and playing Life didn’t really scream party, but there was something about us sitting here and Cheap Trick playing around us. The last two months had been good for me. Being here, with them, sparked something I’d lost in Indiana. I’d been more like myself since I’d been home. Mom did that; Graham did that.