by Sara Polsky
After a few minutes of trying to get her up, make her laugh, I move over to my side of the room, pick up my bag from the foot of my bed, and swing it on.
“Remember to take your medicine, Mom,” I tell her. “I have to leave for school now, or I’ll be late. Have a good day.”
Please, I think as if I’m praying. Please take your medicine. Please, please try to have a good day.
Some of those mornings, she’ll finally speak just as I’m leaving the room, her voice coming out gravelly and slow. She’ll murmur, “Close the blinds, Sophie, would you.” It’s a question, but she never manages to bring her voice up at the end.
I ask her if I can leave them open this time. “Maybe the sunlight will make you feel like getting up,” I try. But if she answers at all, it’s still in that low, slow voice, and she never says yes.
On those mornings, I snap the blinds shut and leave her in the dark.
Then I spend the walk to school reminding myself that she asked me to.
—
I wake up still in the green vinyl-covered chair next to the hospital bed. I don’t remember dozing off, but I’m stretched out, my long legs jutting between the chair and the bed. A nurse is stepping over me to get a closer look at the monitors measuring my mother. It takes me a moment to remember my afternoon: skipping art class, running into James in the hall, walking here.
“Sorry,” I say. I sit up quickly. “I think I fell asleep and started to slide off the chair.”
The nurse gives me a small smile. “It’s not a problem,” she says. “That happens pretty often, actually. Those chairs are slippery.”
I try, but I don’t think my face quite forms a smile back. I’m too nervous. I watch the nurse studying the screens by my mother’s bed. She doesn’t look particularly concerned, but I decide she’s probably trained to act calm all the time, even if things are wrong.
I feel the questions from earlier building up in my head, my chest, my throat, like a cough that’s itching to come out, howwhenwhy. I feel frantic again with the need to know, even as I tell myself to keep quiet so the nurse can work.
“Is she okay?” I blurt out. Even though the nurse told me yesterday that my mother would be fine, after spending my afternoon imagining the worst, I’m not sure I can believe it anymore. I need to know for sure before I can move on to the more complicated questions about why this happened and whether it will happen again.
The nurse gives me another small smile. “She’s stable. Right now we’re trying to keep her hydrated, and she’s taken a sleeping pill along with her other medication,” she says. “The doctor who’s been treating her will be in soon. He can answer any other questions you may have about your mother.” She, like the nurse yesterday, says your mother with a pause, a question mark, checking to make sure she’s right. I nod. Are the nurses just guessing when they ask if that’s who I am, or do they think I seem like her, tired and numb and straggly haired?
“Thank you,” I tell the nurse softly. I tuck my feet under my chair as she moves past it, and she nods at me. Then she tugs the curtain closed behind her and is gone.
—
The doctor does arrive soon, his shiny shoes clicking into the room while I’m still trying to rub the nap out of the corners of my eyes. He has a clipboard folded under his right arm, and I see my mother’s name typed across the top. Canon, Amy.
“I’m Dr. Choi,” he says. His voice sounds exactly the way I imagine it will, solid and mellow. He sticks out a hand. I shake it. “Ms. Canon?”
For a second I think he’s talking about my mother, checking if she’s the woman in the bed. Then I realize he’s just making sure who I am.
“It’s Sophie,” I say after a too-long pause. “I’m her daughter.” Can he see that too?
I tell myself to let him talk before I ask questions. But apparently my mouth has a different plan.
“What happened?” I hear myself asking. But—I picture the pills and the glass of water on the night table again—I know what happened. “I mean, why…”
Dr. Choi backs up to the wall, putting the sole of one shoe flat against the front of the radiator and leaning back against it. He switches feet after a second, and he reminds me of one of those long-legged birds in the videos we saw last year in biology class, balancing in the water.
“You know your mother has bipolar disorder, Sophie,” he says, like he’s testing me on how much information I already have.
He pauses for me to answer, even though it’s not really a question, so I just nod. I remember Aunt Cynthia sitting Leila and me down at her kitchen table and trying to explain what those two words meant, why my mother and I came to stay with Leila, Aunt Cynthia, and Uncle John so often. I think of the books I’ve read since, sitting on the floor of the 616 aisle at the library in town early on Saturday mornings, when no one else is around, hiding the books under my homework whenever anyone comes around the corner.
“She can have dramatic mood swings if she doesn’t take her medication,” Dr. Choi says. Another check to see how much I know.
I nod again. “She’s been on lithium for the past three years, plus fish oil and vitamins.” I rattle off the full list of her medications. It comes out sounding strong and confident, and Dr. Choi blinks at me. He double-checks my mother’s chart and his eyes widen like he’s impressed.
“We think that’s what happened this time,” he continues. “That she stopped taking her medication for some reason—maybe she felt she was doing better and therefore didn’t need it anymore. Or perhaps she thought it was interfering with her creativity. Many bipolar patients feel that way.”
I remember something. “She said her hands were shaking,” I tell Dr. Choi. “One day last week, I heard her saying something to herself about how she couldn’t control her hands and she was having trouble painting. Maybe she thought it was the medication, so she stopped taking it.”
I wait for Dr. Choi to ask me why I didn’t follow up, didn’t make my mother tell me what she meant about her hands. Why I didn’t make sure she kept taking the medication anyway.
I want him to say it, the same thing I’ve been waiting for Aunt Cynthia to say since I showed up with my suitcases on her doorstep. That it’s my fault.
But Dr. Choi just nods matter-of-factly. He doesn’t seem to blame me. In fact, he makes a note on his chart, like maybe what I said was helpful.
“That could very well be what happened,” he says. “But once she stopped taking it, she entered what’s called a mixed state, where patients experience both manic behavior and depression. Mixed states can be particularly dangerous, because individuals not only often have suicidal thoughts, but also have the energy to carry them out. Or try to.”
He says it starkly, the same way I told Leila about my mother getting her stomach pumped. The energy to carry them out. Bizarrely, I picture my mother gathering her energy by eating one of those power bars for athletes, then filling up her glass of water at our kitchen sink and carrying it into the bedroom. I imagine her pushing her palm into the cap of the pill bottle and twisting it, lefty loosey, until it snaps off with a loud click. She probably doesn’t even notice the sound, or the patter of pills falling into the cap and spilling over onto the bedside table.
But I force my brain to stop there. I don’t want to think about what she did next.
I look up at Dr. Choi, who is waiting, watching me, both feet back on the floor, his hands folded over the clipboard at his waist. I’m sure he has a million other patients to see, but he doesn’t glance at his watch. He looks like he doesn’t have anything else he needs to be doing.
Part of me wants to say what I’m still sure he’s thinking. It was my fault. I should have known she wasn’t taking her medication, after I promised I’d remind her. I should have found that other bottle of pills before she had a chance to use it. As if admitting all of that myself would somehow get my mother o
ff the hook, get Dr. Choi to say oh, of course it wasn’t her fault, let’s send her home right now. Maybe it would erase those sympathetic looks from Dr. Choi’s and the nurses’ faces; the expressions that make guilt squirm around in my stomach.
But another part of me doesn’t want to confess until I get some answers too. It wants to ask how my mother could do this, knowing I would be the one to find her. Whether she realized that what she planned to do would mean leaving me alone, or whether she thought of me at all.
I don’t know which of those things I want to be the truth.
I also realize none of these are questions Dr. Choi can answer. So I tell myself it’s fine, it’s enough, that I know the facts.
“Okay,” I say. I nod again to show I’ve processed everything he’s told me, the good student my mother always thinks I am. And to give myself an extra second so my voice will come out steady. “What happens now?”
Ten
I say it into the silence of the dinner table, where Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John have run out of stories to tell about their workdays. Leila asked what I thought about English class and Mr. Jackson, but I didn’t want to say any of the things that popped into my head, about how weird it was to be in class with her and James again and how I spent the entire period remembering yesterday afternoon, so I shrugged and didn’t answer. Now, next to me, Leila’s just silently bolting down her chicken before she leaves for band rehearsal.
While I speak, I keep my eyes on my food: a chicken drumstick with sauce and piles of rice and salad and snow peas.
“I saw my mother’s doctor today,” I tell my plate. The pink and black triangles edging the white china look like teeth, and I imagine them opening up and talking back. Someone’s fork clangs loudly against a dish.
When I look up, Uncle John meets my eyes, and I feel Leila looking at me from my right. Only Aunt Cynthia stares down at the table.
I start talking again, wincing when my voice croaks.
“The doctor said he thinks she’ll need to spend about ten days in the hospital. Maybe as long as two weeks. She’ll need more treatment after that, but the doctors will have to decide whether to recommend her for an outpatient or a residential program based on how she’s doing.”
I look up. Now they’re all looking back at me.
I hurry through the rest of what Dr. Choi told me. “The hospital stay is just to get her stabilized, but the doctors will have to see how she’s doing on the new medication before they decide what kind of treatment to recommend next.”
My words are exactly the ones Dr. Choi used. Stabilized, treatment, facility, evaluate. I sound like a medical textbook, but I almost like the terms. They sound concrete enough to hold, but when I say them, I don’t feel like I’m talking about my mother.
I see Leila out of the corner of my eye, and the expression on her face looks almost sympathetic, her mouth slightly turned down and her eyes sad. But that can’t be.
No one else says anything. I spear a snow pea with my fork and chew it slowly, listening to the crunch reverberate inside my head.
A throat clears.
“You can stay here for as long as it takes,” Aunt Cynthia says.
I’m so surprised to hear her speak that I look up again, and our eyes meet, accidentally, for just a second.
“It sometimes takes longer than the doctors say it will, so I just wanted to say that.” She trails off.
I stare. My empty fork points toward my mouth.
That’s all she has to say?
My mother is her sister too.
Uncle John must see something in my face, because he leans forward and jumps in before Aunt Cynthia can say more.
“We’ll know more in two weeks” are his words. His tone says calm down, everyone.
“But that’s what I’m saying, John,” Aunt Cynthia interrupts, not hearing what he’s trying to say. “Sometimes it takes longer, and I don’t want Sophie to feel—”
Leila pushes her chair away from the table with a sudden scraping sound that makes the rest of us jump and Aunt Cynthia stop talking. I don’t look up as her boots clomp over to the garbage and her fork shoves the last of the food off her plate. The dish clinks into the sink.
“I have to leave for rehearsal,” Leila says. Her boots move from the sink to the doorway. “I’ll be home late.”
The rest of us stay quiet as Leila moves through the living room and the front hall, as the door closes behind her. I picture her on the other side, looking down the steps to the lawn, her car in the driveway, the opposite of the view I had yesterday. If the scene were a photograph, what would her caption be?
I push my own chair back from the table and stand up with only one more quick glance at Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John. Like Leila, I dump the last of my food into the trash and my plate into the sink. As I follow my cousin’s path out of the room, I hear my aunt’s and uncle’s voices fill the silence behind me, soft but rising.
—
I’m in the guest room—my room—finishing the last of my math homework when I hear the knock at my door. Three soft taps, then whoever’s on the other side clears his throat and taps a fourth time.
“Come in,” I call. The words are too quiet and I have to repeat them before I hear the knob turn. In the chair behind the tiny wooden desk, I shift so I can see the doorway. My legs jut out to the side and I jiggle my feet. The chair creaks under me.
Uncle John steps into the room, meets my eyes, then looks at the floor. He takes a seat at the end of the bed, elbows on his knees and wrists hanging down. I remember the way he used to be, teasing Leila and me, trying to make us laugh. He seems so serious now.
“You have to understand that this is stressful for your aunt too,” he says.
I do?
“She is worried about Amy. She just wanted to make sure you know you’re welcome here.”
I shrug. I’m not sure I care what she was trying to do, and I don’t really want to listen to Uncle John taking her side.
“But that’s not actually what I came up here to talk to you about,” he says.
I stop moving my feet, and under me, the chair stops creaking.
“How would you feel about a job in my office after school?” Uncle John asks.
I look up. That wasn’t what I expected him to say. Was this what he and Aunt Cynthia were talking about in the kitchen after I followed Leila out?
“I was thinking maybe two afternoons a week and Saturdays,” he says. “We could use your art and math skills, and we pay our part-time employees by the hour.”
Ah.
Uncle John and Aunt Cynthia must know how much my mother’s time in the hospital will cost us. This must be their way of offering to help.
I look at the floor again, wondering what my mother would say. Would she wave Uncle John off with a laugh, tell him she’d come up with some other way to get the money? Would she be angry or offended? Would she agree and promise to pay him back later, everyone knowing but not saying that that would never happen?
I wish for her, a sharp thought that leaves an ache behind, like the smoke from a blown-out candle after a birthday wish.
I imagine her sitting in this chair, having this conversation with Uncle John, and that’s when I know: she would refuse the money. She’d be convinced the two of us could manage on our own. But I also know Uncle John is right. My mother’s illness and her irregular job mean she can’t get good insurance. I think of the way I divide our money every week—anything she’s gotten from selling a painting, whatever the neighbors have given me to watch their kids for a few hours after school—to pay for our groceries, the rent on our apartment, her medication.
There usually isn’t anything left over.
“Okay,” I say. “That would be helpful.”
It doesn’t feel like I’ve said enough.
“Thank you,” I add
after a pause.
The words come out sounding formal rather than grateful, but Uncle John doesn’t seem to expect anything else. He nods and stands up.
“We can start tomorrow,” he says gently. He pulls the door closed behind him.
Eleven
When the alarm rings early the next morning, Saturday, I open my eyes to see the bright red numbers on the clock glaring at me as if they’re as angry about the time as I am. I slam the heel of my hand against the snooze button and turn over, cocooning myself in the pale guest room sheets. I don’t fall back asleep. I just work my fingers into the weave of the blanket, pulling it out of shape. Soon there’s a thumb-sized hole in the cream-colored knit.
At home I get up as soon as the alarm rings because I’m afraid the noise will bother my mother, lying in her bed on the other side of the room. The times she actually goes to sleep, I don’t want anything to wake her up before she’s rested. But this morning I hit snooze again and again and again. I’m half hoping it will wake up everyone else in the house.
Until eventually even I’m sick of the alarm’s enh-enh-enh, and I shut it off and unroll myself from the blankets. When I trudge downstairs and into the kitchen in my pajamas, Leila’s already there. And she doesn’t look like my blaring alarm woke her up. She’s dressed and the counter is strewn with ingredients. As I stand in the doorway, she levels off a cup of flour from a canister and dumps it into a mixing bowl.
She turns and sees me. “Morning,” she says, almost cheerfully, like we’ve always lived in the same house and greeted each other at breakfast.
I don’t say anything, and after a minute of prickly silence and another cup of flour, Leila speaks again.
“I was late to rehearsal last night, so I got stuck having to bake for the whole band.”
Late because I kept everyone at the dinner table to talk about my mother? But Leila doesn’t say that.
