by Sara Polsky
—
After lunch, after chemistry—where I guess my way through the pop quiz—after gym and English, skipping art is easy. Easier than trying to tell Natalie why I rushed out of the pharmacy and had gone by the time she came outside. Why I can’t stay after school to work on our art projects. Easier than telling her the way my stomach hurts when I think about the conversation I have to have with Dr. Choi this afternoon. And much easier than explaining to Natalie who Dr. Choi is in the first place. I could make up a story, but when I try to think of something, my mind stays empty.
So as everyone else scurries to eighth period, I hurry down the hall, head down, and push through the exit, listening for the now-familiar ka-thunk as the door locks behind me. James hasn’t followed me down the hall this time, and I ignore the part of me that wishes he had. Outside, my legs don’t need me to tell them which way to walk. They just go, powered by muscle memory. My mind has other things to worry about, like what my mother’s doctor has to tell me.
—
“Sophie Canon?”
The nurse calls my name from the doorway to the doctors’ offices too soon after I sit down. Even though skipping art got me here early and I’ve been waiting a while, I’m not ready to go in yet. I stand up and cross the waiting room slowly, keeping my eyes on the floor. I wonder whether anyone—or everyone—around me thinks I’m a patient. Whether there’s any way to tell, just by looking, which of the people here are healthy and which aren’t. I see no obvious clues.
Dr. Choi, sitting behind a wide cherrywood desk, stands up to shake my hand when the nurse shows me in.
“Sophie, it’s good to see you again. Please have a seat.”
I sit. My backpack looks scruffy against Dr. Choi’s dark carpet and wooden furniture, and I shove it under my chair with one foot. Then I rearrange myself so I’m sitting on my hands, to keep myself from twisting my fingers together while Dr. Choi is talking. I look up at him. Okay. I breathe. Here it comes.
Dr. Choi sits down again, across from me, and rests his hands on the desk, his fingers knit neatly together. He has perfect posture, and again he reminds me of a water bird.
“I have some good news,” Dr. Choi says. “Your mother has stabilized enough for us to evaluate her, and she seems to be responding well to the Depakote, the medication we put her on when she was first admitted. It tends to be effective for patients dealing with mixed states. We’re working on finding the minimum possible dosage, but it will take three or four weeks until we have an exact sense of how well the treatment is working.”
Three or four weeks? I remember Dr. Choi telling me very clearly that it would be ten days, the same amount of time I told Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John. The room tilts and panic rushes in. What went wrong? And then, will it be like this for another three weeks?
I grip the edges of my seat tightly, waiting, saying nothing. Dr. Choi has done this before; he must know all the things I want to say. All the questions I want to ask.
He glances down at my mother’s chart, open on his desk, then back at me. The chart is slanted away from me, so all I can tell is that it’s covered in dark, neat handwriting, my mother’s entire messy, up-and-down past reduced to a few orderly cursive lines.
“Your mother’s medical history shows she’s bounced back and forth among a lot of different therapists,” Dr. Choi says. “She needs more consistent care to manage her illness, and having a social worker didn’t seem to be enough monitoring last time. I’d like to send her to an outpatient treatment facility once she’s released from the hospital. She could attend group therapy sessions there, but she would also be able to start reestablishing her own routines at home.”
He pauses, picks up a pen, jots something down on a pad on his desk.
In the silence, I let Dr. Choi’s words wash over me, and I can feel my head moving in a nod of understanding. But I don’t think I actually heard him. Even though I’m trying to listen, everything he’s saying seems to be traveling to me from some other planet. As if I won’t hear it for light-years, and by the time it reaches me, Dr. Choi’s face will be gray and wrinkled on the other side of the desk. I think I’ve regressed back into the foggy-headed state I’ve been in since the afternoon I found my mother.
But then a few of his words reach out and grab me, pull me back: outpatient facility; reestablishing her routines at home.
“So you’re going to be able to send her home soon?” I ask.
But there’s something weird about my voice. It doesn’t sound excited. It sounds anxious and maybe a little bit frightened. And I can’t see my face, but my mouth feels frozen in something that isn’t quite a smile.
Dr. Choi’s own calm expression turns downward slightly, just for a second. “I do still think she should be stable enough to leave after she’s been here about two weeks, yes,” he says.
There’s an unspoken but at the end of his sentence.
“She’s done fairly well up to this point,” Dr. Choi finally continues. “Her situation doesn’t seem severe enough to merit sending her to an inpatient facility, and I know we’re dealing with a limited health insurance plan that won’t cover most inpatient treatments. But she will need monitoring to make sure she keeps up with her medications and out-patient therapy.”
Dr. Choi is leading up to something. I keep my hands on the sides of my chair, holding tightly.
“It looks like you’ve essentially been your mother’s caregiver for a few years now, Sophie,” Dr. Choi says.
A little more than five years, I think. But again I say nothing.
“It’s a lot to ask for you to monitor your mother’s medication and care. I’m sure you also have schoolwork and other responsibilities. So I hope you’ll consider other options for getting your mother help. We can recommend some resources in the community, or maybe there’s a neighbor or a relative who could assist you.”
I want to laugh. A loud, wild, that’s-not-actually-funny laugh, a booming ha ha ha. I wonder what Dr. Choi would do if I did.
I think about my options—asking Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John for help, probably offering to take more hours at Uncle John’s office; trying to find a neighbor in our crowded, loud apartment building who isn’t too busy with her own job and life to watch my mother every day. I think about how hard turning our upside-down life right-side-up would be.
Laughing seems like the only possible response.
“Here’s the information about the outpatient facility,” Dr. Choi says. He tears the top sheet from his notepad and passes it to me. I look down and see a name, address, and phone number, but my eyes don’t actually read them.
I stand up slowly and put out my hand, the one that isn’t clutching the paper, to shake Dr. Choi’s. I hope I look steady and sure, put-together like the polished office I’m standing in.
“Thanks,” I tell him. We trade nods and slight smiles. “I’m sure I can figure something out.”
It’s not until I’m in the hall, moving slowly back toward the waiting room, that I realize my arms and legs are shaking.
—
I don’t know what the doctors have told my mother about her treatment, so I walk toward her room, wobbly legs and all, to share what I heard from Dr. Choi. I plan out what I’m going to say, complete with upbeat tone and perky smile.
Great news, Mom! I spoke to your doctor and they’re going to be able to send you home soon. You’ll just have to go to regular therapy sessions at an outpatient treatment center. It’s not far from here, and you can be at home and start painting again. It’ll be better than being here, I promise.
As I walk down the hall, it feels like there are two of me. One version is imagining what my mother will say when I tell her the news. The other is wondering why I’m not hurrying to her room faster. Why there’s a small part of me hoping maybe she won’t be awake when I get there.
But she is.
She
’s staring at the TV, watching a nature program. On the screen, a brown bear leads a train of cubs through the woods as the deep documentary narrator voice explains the relationship between mother bears and their offspring. How bears will mostly leave people alone unless we’re dumb enough to get between a mother and a cub.
“Hi, Mom,” I say, the same way I always do. I reach for the remote on the rolling tray and turn down the volume until I’m sure she’ll be able to hear me. She turns her head to look at me and says hello back. Does her voice sound better, more animated, today? I tell myself it does.
Instead of taking my usual chair, I perch on the edge of the bed near her feet. I’m not shaking anymore, but I still feel jittery, like I’ve had too much caffeine or sugar. I reach out to touch one of her feet, solid under the blanket, to anchor myself here.
A memory flashes through my mind of her playing five little piggies with my toes after a bath. It feels like something that happened a very long time ago, maybe to someone who wasn’t even me.
“I just came from talking to Dr. Choi,” I tell her. “Your doctor here,” I add in case she doesn’t remember. “He thinks they’ll be able to discharge you soon, maybe in a week. Then we can get you home again.” And this little piggy ran all the way home.
My words fall into the space between my mother and me. They sound curiously flat, not upbeat or perky, even though I’m following my script.
“That’s good,” my mother says. But her voice sounds listless too, just the way it has for the past few days, not better like I imagined. She doesn’t say anything else.
Sitting there, watching her, I feel my face heat up and the corners of my eyes start to burn. I think of those mornings when I pretended to be a waiter, offering her breakfast, cajoling her out of bed, bringing in her plate of pills, and the way she would lie there, hardly responding.
Why won’t anything I say ever get her to talk?
I wonder what James and Natalie and Zach and Leila are doing right now. Certainly not this.
Why is everything about our life the reverse of every-one else’s?
I take my hand away from her foot and knot it together with my other hand in my lap. It doesn’t matter that our life is different. Right now, here, I have a job. I’m the calm one, the one who doesn’t swing from one extreme to another when the seasons change or I stop taking my medications or I haven’t had enough sleep.
“How are you feeling today, Mom?” I ask. “Is your head any better, or still fuzzy?”
She mumbles her answer, and I have to lean closer to hear. “It’s a little better,” she says, her lips hardly moving.
“That’s good,” I reply.
I try to sound bright, as if, in my script, there’s an exclamation point at the end of this line. But again there’s something off about how it comes out.
My usual routine of acting cheerful until my mother starts to do the same isn’t working.
I study the empty air between us, as if I’ll be able to see the invisible wires that keep energy flowing from me to her and back again. If I find them, maybe I can press the call button by my mother’s bed and bring in a doctor to fix the one that’s broken.
We sit in silence on the bed. I pick at the blanket, the same way I do in Aunt Cynthia’s guest room, and listen to the sounds of the hospital: the rolling food carts and IV poles, the beeps of patients’ machines down the hall, the careful modulations of a doctor’s voice as she tells a patient how he’s doing.
I’m still leaning toward my mother. My body seems sure she’s about to say something. But my head knows otherwise. My mother’s eyes are back on the TV screen, watching the line of cubs follow their mother through the woods. The mother bear doesn’t turn around as the cubs and the camera track her. She just lumbers between the trees, confident the others are behind her.
I realize what I’m waiting for my mother to say: the kinds of things mothers usually say to their daughters when they get home from school every afternoon, maybe while they’re sitting together at the kitchen table with a snack, legs swinging under their chairs, flicking through the day’s mail.
“How are you today, Sophie?” I ask in my closest imitation of my mother’s voice. The question cuts across the mix of beeps and far-off doctors’ murmurs and bear sounds from the TV.
My mother’s head shifts back toward me on her pillow. She looks confused. A small part of me feels guilty for adding to what must already be a muddle in her head.
But right now, the part of me that wants to keep talking is louder.
My voice gets higher and more sarcastic until it’s not actually a good impression of my mother at all. “How was your day at school, honey? Learn anything interesting? What did you have for lunch?”
Shut up, the voice in the back of my head says, taking her side. You know it’s not her fault she’s like this.
My mother is still looking at me, staring straight into my face, not talking. I look right back, at her concave cheeks and uneven hair and long fingers that usually spend their days conducting imaginary classical symphonies and swirling colors on a canvas, not resting on hospital blankets. The fingers that paint away for hours while I sit on the floor of her studio and narrate my day to her, whether or not she’s listening.
This is just how she is sometimes, the voice reminds me.
I ignore it.
“I ate lunch in the hallway by myself again today,” I tell my mother. The words come out evenly, even though calm is the last thing I feel. “I’m working in Uncle John’s office after school and on weekends so that he and Aunt Cynthia will help out with your hospital bills. I’m living in their guest room. You used to stay there, I’m sure you remember. Until—”
I stop. My mind flashes back to the summer before sixth grade, the last time we stayed together at Aunt Cynthia and Uncle John’s house. Before Leila stopped returning my calls and Aunt Cynthia stopped coming over to cook with my mother in our tiny kitchen or go shopping with her at the mall. I realize I don’t actually know what to say next. Until what?
“Leila drives me to school every day, but we spend most of the time not talking to each other, and I’ve hardly seen Aunt Cynthia since last week.”
Now, finally, I sound the way I feel, my voice clogged and uneven like I’m crying. But when I reach up to touch my face, there’s no water there. The tears are still waiting at the corners of my eyes while the furious words in my head try to fit themselves together into sentences.
There’s a whole other part to how I am that I don’t say a word about: talking to Natalie at work, my afternoon with her and Zach and James at the house, pretending to be other people. The part of my life that’s been better since my mother left.
The part that will have to disappear as soon as she comes home.
I stand up.
I mumble a good-bye, not letting myself look back at the familiar face on the pillow, and leave the room. I move so slowly down the hall I probably look like one of the patients who shuffle along beside me, the bottoms of their hospital gowns flapping around their knees.
It’s not until I’m in the elevator, punching the button for the lobby again and again and again and please nobody else get on and why won’t the doors shut already and then finally they do, that I let myself think the rest of my thought.
Maybe I don’t want my mother to come home.
Sixteen
I wake up in the guest room bed, under the covers in all my clothes, to the sound of the doorbell ringing.
My eyes feel dry and itchy and my legs are twisted in the sheets, as if I was trying to run away from something in a dream. But I don’t remember what I was dreaming about. I don’t even remember falling asleep.
When I roll over, I see one red sneaker on the floor next to the bed, the untied lace trailing across the hole that’s frayed open near the toe. The other shoe is next to the desk. I vaguely remember kic
king it off and hearing it bounce against the wood before I burrowed into the blankets.
My stomach growls and I check the clock: 7:53. But is it a.m. or p.m.?
The bell rings again and someone opens the front door below me. I put my ear to the wall to listen. Aunt Cynthia calls for Leila, who clomps down the stairs to my left and starts talking to whoever’s at the door. A low voice answers her, and I hear it say my name.
I sit up fast. It’s definitely p.m.
That’s James’s voice in the front hall; I completely forgot about the meeting for our English project. I shove my feet into my shoes, not bothering to tie them, and dash into the bathroom to throw water on my face.
In the mirror, my eyes are red-edged and wisps of hair stick straight out from the sides of my head. I look like I spent the whole afternoon brushing my hair with a balloon. I study my own face and think of one of the words from that list I made in the lunchroom on the first day of sixth grade, after Kelly whirled her finger around her ear to tell her friend who I was, the crazy woman’s daughter: I look deranged. If one of the nurses from the hospital saw me right now, they wouldn’t need to ask whether I’m related to my mother.
Don’t start that right now.
The warning voice in the back of my head won’t even let me think about what that is. Won’t let me remember any of the things I said or thought this afternoon.
I pat my face dry and run my fingers through my hair. I step into the hall without another glance at the mirror.
Focus. English project. Downstairs.
—
“Pizza?”
James holds a slice out to me on a paper plate that’s already spotted with grease. He showed up with two boxes of pizza still in one of those red vinyl cases pizza delivery guys carry, and I realized that when James said he’d come over after work, he must have meant work at the pizza place downtown.
