by M. R. Carey
It took her a few seconds after that to realize there was no attacker. What she’d kicked was her pillow, on which her laptop had been propped when she fell asleep over her homework. The laptop had landed on top of the pillow, thank God. There would have been seven kinds of hell to pay if she’d broken it after her dad worked two months’ overtime to buy it for her.
A siren. A siren had woken her. Fran blinked sleep-sticky eyes and tried to bring herself into the present, out of a miasma of broken images. In her nightmare she’d been back in the Perry Friendly. Bruno Picota was there too, which wasn’t much of a surprise, but this time he’d shown up as a big, lurching mass of shadow with a knife in every hand. Which was a lot more than two hands.
The mood of the dream was still with her, sliming up the inside of her head. She looked over at the clock, which was a cat with big cartoon eyes that rolled back and forth. It was barely nine o’clock, and she wasn’t due any more meds until eleven. After that, the night yawned, wide and pathless. She had had a nightmare before she had even officially gone to bed, which was a crummy omen for the next eight hours.
In the absence of chemicals, she went for the next best thing. She called out for Jinx, speaking her name in a whisper. Sometimes Jinx sneaked off to her secret den at night, but she always came as soon as Fran called her. Fran didn’t even need to whisper: Jinx heard her just fine if she talked inside her head.
The little fox arrived at once, unfolding from the bottom of the bed as though she had been there all along. She looked immaculate, her fur sleek and groomed, and she was instantly alert. That was just one of the many advantages of being imaginary, Fran thought with a slight twinge of envy.
Jinx had two forms. Mostly she was a regular fox, slightly stylized and childlike but more or less realistic. But when she chose, she could put on her armor, stand up on her hind legs and be Lady Jinx, knight errant and champion of the queen. Seeing Fran distressed, she transformed at once, the armor enveloping her in a swarm of shiny motes before coalescing into its proper shape.
Fran! Jinx clapped a hand to the hilt of her sword and drew it halfway out of its scabbard. What’s the matter? Tell me! The sword was called Oathkeeper, but in Jinx’s high, slightly lisping voice it came out as Oatkipper. It was an enchanted sword. Fran couldn’t remember what it did exactly, and she felt bad asking because it was something she ought to remember, but it was definitely magic.
She also didn’t want to admit that she was yelling for Lady J just on account of another bad dream, so she made something up. “There was a siren out on the street, Jinx. Is everything okay?”
Without hesitation, Jinx sheathed her sword. Sword and armor disappeared again with the same sparkly effect that reminded Fran of a Star Trek teleporter (original series). The fox exited through the open window in a single graceful bound, her huge white-tipped brush whipping from side to side behind her.
Fran rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. She sat up, still fuzzed with sleep and with the nightmare-hangover. God, why now? Why did it have to be now? With pre-SATs looming behind a ton of homework and the Indian summer all hot and sticky and Tricia Lopez freezing her all the way down to zero about Scott Tam who she didn’t even like.
Her laptop had moved. It wasn’t in the mess on the floor anymore: it was over on her Ikea desk, propped open with her Attack on Titan screensaver playing. Not a good start. Fran stiffened and braced herself for worse.
Lady J climbed back in through the window.
It was a police car, Jinx said. It went up Penn Avenue.
Fran had known that already, of course. She could tell a police car from an ambulance siren, and either of them from a fire truck. You didn’t grow up in Larimer without getting extensive lessons in siren taxonomy. But it was nice to pretend that Jinx could see things she couldn’t, and go places all on her own. That she was real, in other words. If Jinx was real, then it didn’t matter so much if Bruno Picota was real too. Oathkeeper’s touch was like a burning brand to evil (or something). Jinx could take him.
Even though she was alone in the room, Fran rolled her eyes at her own embarrassing lameness. She had turned sixteen exactly one month earlier and she hadn’t watched Knights of the Woodland Table in almost a decade. She knew it was crazy—the kind of crazy that was not okay—to be clinging to this kiddie stuff in the way she did. But then the nightmares weren’t okay either. Especially if they were going to start coming out again when she was awake. She shot a sideways glance at the desk. The laptop was being all nonchalant and pretending it had never moved at all, but there was no point in pretending.
Very reluctantly, Fran reached up onto the shelf behind the bed and got down her journal. She eyed its anonymous navy-blue cover with disfavor. You again, she thought.
I can take care of that for you, Jinx offered, once more dropping a paw to Oathkeeper’s jeweled grip.
Fran smiled in spite of herself. It was an appealing thought. “I wish, Lady J,” she said. “But I need it in one piece.”
She opened the notebook and grabbed a pen. Had another nightmare, she wrote. About him. He was sort of a spider thing this time, with lots of arms. It was in the evening. I dozed off when I was doing my homework. First time that’s happened in ages. Also, maybe I had a bit of a hallucination right after. Nothing too wild, just I thought my laptop was in one place and then it was somewhere else, but I’m supposed to write everything down so there you go. I was definitely freaking out for a while after I woke up.
Dr. Southern insisted on the journal. He said the meds were all very well in their way, and certainly you couldn’t argue with them if all you were looking for was a symptom-suppressant. But he also said you didn’t get well by suppressing symptoms. You got well by understanding what made you sick in the first place. Hence the journal, which was where Fran was meant to write down all the things that came into her head with a view to panning them with Dr. Southern the next time they met up.
“Panning?” she’d repeated when he used the word the first time. “Like what movie critics do?”
“No, like what gold miners do—or used to do, back in the day. They had a pan with a sort of wire mesh in the bottom, like a sieve. They got handfuls of wet mud from river beds, put it in the pan and shook it out again through the mesh, hoping to find little nuggets of gold in there.”
When Fran pointed out that they weren’t looking for gold, Dr. Southern said they were. He said their gold was the truth. Then he apologized for how corny that was and Fran said yeah, he’d better be sorry.
She closed the journal and put it back on the shelf. She stayed where she was on the bed for a long time, picking at balls of fluff on the crocheted coverlet. Jinx stood guard, respecting her silence and trying not to break it.
The coverlet had nine big squares in nine different colors. It had taken Fran’s mom two years to make it, and she hadn’t quite finished it before she got too sick to sit up. After she died, Fran’s dad, Gil, tied off the loose threads as best he could, but the unfinished corner looked like someone had taken a bite out of it. Fran always put that corner at top left so she would be facing it as she fell asleep. Somehow it made her feel a little bit closer to her mom, as though she might come back some day, pick up her crochet hook and her balls of wool and just take up again where she left off.
Fran’s mom hadn’t had much time for Dr. Southern. “You take what you can get, I suppose,” had been Elsa Watts’ sour verdict on that subject. Meaning that the psychiatric care Fran was receiving came from the legal liability part of Bruno Picota’s medical insurance—a cheap-ass provision written into the small print of a cheap-ass policy. It was part of the settlement after Picota was found guilty of kidnapping and attempted homicide, but it came with strings attached. If Fran wanted to keep getting treated, she had to go to Carroll Way, which was a big walk-in clinic ten blocks south. Dr. Southern came in there twice a week and handled every psychiatric referral they got. There was an actual therapy unit at West Penn Hospital, but the Watts family cou
ldn’t get a piece of that action unless they paid for it themselves. That had been impossible even when Fran’s mom was still alive. It was doubly impossible now that it was only Gil who was earning.
Fran could just cut loose, of course, and wing it with no chemical safety net at all. But her hallucinations came back hard and strong if she went off her meds, and in any case it was a requirement of her staying within the state school system that her condition should be “actively managed”—a typical piece of mental health doubletalk that Gil had duly translated for her.
“Means they’ve got to look as though they’re doing something whether there’s something to do or not.”
“Like they even know what my condition is!” Fran had grumbled. That had been four years ago, when she transferred from Worth Harbor Elementary to Julian C. Barry, and the monthly pilgrimage out to the clinic had started to feel like a heavy injustice.
“It will get better,” her dad had promised her, and it had. She wasn’t on Ritalin anymore and her risperidone prescription was down to a maintenance dose—only half what it had been back in what Dr. Southern called her acute phase. “And given how big you’re growing, that means it’s really about a quarter dose,” Gil had pointed out. “Half the dose spread over twice the body mass. Or maybe three times the body mass, what would you say?” Which of course meant the discussion ended in a pillow fight because every time her dad hinted that she was fat it was Fran’s part to pretend to be furious. In fact, she was skinny and getting skinnier, as though her fervid brain was a wick burning up her body’s fat, but there wasn’t much you could do with that that was funny.
Her dad had been right about things being better. And in a lot of ways, she knew, she was really lucky. She got all her care for free as part of the settlement, and all her meds likewise. That counted for a lot, since Gil’s income was just enough to push him over the Medicaid threshold and his workplace policy didn’t cover mental health. But she had been right too, when she said that Dr. Southern, along with all the other smiley white-coated men she’d had to talk to over the years, hadn’t known what was wrong with her to start with and still didn’t know now. For ten years, the diagnoses had wobbled all over the place. Dr. Southern had read them aloud to her once and more or less admitted that his predecessors had been throwing darts at a medical textbook and writing down every word they hit. Juvenile incipient schizophrenia. Schizoaffective disorder. Early onset paraphrenia. His own approach was to deal with each crisis as it came and hope they were just aftershocks from the big earthquake that had happened all those years before.
The earthquake named Bruno Picota.
Right now, though, Fran realized with a feeling of helpless misery, the tremors were starting up all over again. Without even looking around her, she could feel it happening. The little glitches, the pockets of turbulence in the way things looked and sounded and even smelled.
She couldn’t hide from it. Hiding from it wouldn’t help. She raised her head and stared around the room.
Yeah, there it was. The middle square of the coverlet, which had always been bright red, was gray. Her little statue of a Chinese guy playing a flute, an unlikely souvenir from a vacation trip to New York, had turned into a lady with a fan. The chess position set up on her chest of drawers had gone from an endgame to a starting lineup.
The smell of honeysuckle coming up from next door’s garden was suddenly a smell of roses.
The traffic sounds had faded, as though Lincoln Avenue had backed away from her house in a hurry when it noticed she was listening in.
Worst of all, when she saw her own reflection in the mirror, her thick black hair was standing up in a glorious, untamed Afro instead of the tight braids she had gone to bed with.
It was a lot, especially coming all at once. Fran, who had closed her teeth on her lower lip at some point, tasted blood in her mouth and realized that she had bitten down harder than she had meant to.
Jinx read her anxiety and jumped up on the bed beside her, instantly solicitous. Fran, tell me what to do. Let me help.
“Sorry, Jinx,” Fran muttered. “I’m on my own on this one.”
But that wasn’t strictly true, was it?
Fran had an uncompromisingly realistic sense of her own abilities. She disliked letting other people do things for her that she could do herself, having found out the hard way that people would do everything if she let them. But by the same token, she didn’t kid herself when the odds were against her.
She went downstairs. Jinx tactfully stayed behind. It fazed Fran a little to have her imaginary friend standing around in the background when she was talking to other people. The times when she needed Jinx the most were the times when she was alone.
She found her dad watching a Steelers game on the TV. Gil Watts had his own way of watching football, which was a kind of radically engaged stillness, leaning forward on the couch with a frown of concentration on his face and his bald head shining with sweat as though he was making all those runs and passes himself. Gil loved the Steelers more than almost anything else in the world. He had a ball signed by James Farrior in the living room cabinet next to the photo of Fran’s mom whose frame was also an urn and contained her ashes. He felt that Farrior deserved to be considered the Steelers’ best linebacker of all time, and part of the passion he brought to that argument came from the fact that Farrior, like him, was an African American man born in Chesterfield County, Virginia.
But the sight of his only daughter with blood trickling down her chin like a vampire disturbed in the middle of a meal made the game instantly irrelevant. Gil hit the remote, jumped up and crossed the room to meet her at a stride that was halfway to a run.
He put his hands on her shoulders and leaned in to inspect the damage. “What happened, Frog?” he asked.
“Changes,” Fran told him, lisping a little because her chewed up lip was starting to swell.
Gil winced visibly at the word.
“When? Just now? Up in your room?”
Fran nodded. “And a nightmare too. I fell asleep over my homework and had a real stinker.”
Gil pursed his lips, and the breath he’d been holding came out in a series of barely voiced pops—a habit he had when he was thinking something through and not committing himself to words until he’d found some.
“You want to go over to the clinic?” he asked Fran at last.
Another nod.
“Tomorrow?”
“Wednesday will do. There won’t be anyone there tomorrow.” There would be plenty of people, of course, but Dr. Southern wouldn’t be there and nobody else would be able to help her. Wednesday was one of the doc’s two days at Carroll Way, the other one being Friday: if Fran was lucky she would be able to tack herself onto the end of his appointments for the day.
“So anyway, do you want to hang out for a while?” her father asked her. “Since you’re here.”
“Sure.” Fran tried for an off-hand tone and missed it by a long, long way.
“Play cards.”
“You think you can afford it?”
Gil laughed out loud. “Oh, that’s fighting talk!”
He washed her face first, wiping the sticky blood away very carefully and tenderly as though she was a little kid again. He also painted the cut with a styptic pencil, a weird thing that looked like a stick of chalk and tasted of mint and raw bleach. It was meant to close and disinfect shaving cuts, but Fran had never met anyone other than her dad who used or had even heard of one.
That done, they got down to some serious gin rummy—with Songs of Leonard Cohen, Gil’s favorite album, playing in the background. Fran had the run of the cards, which was far from unusual. In the space of an hour, the burden of Gil’s debt to her rose from thirteen million dollars to seventeen million and a few odd thousands. They always played for reckless stakes.
“You want to go back on the higher dose?” he asked her at one point as he shuffled the deck for the next hand. His tone was carefully neutral. “You’re sure?”
Gil remembered the bad old days, presumably better than Fran did since she had been a smiling dingbat for most of them. He believed Dr. Southern was just waiting for the right moment to dose his daughter all the way back to placid imbecility. Fran let him put the blame on Dr. S because she was ashamed of how scared she was of the nightmares and the hallucinations. Ashamed to still have Picota in her head after all this time—a huge, clotted mass of darkness like the gungy stuff in a blocked drain. So much of it, and so concentrated, that it spilled out of her mind and silted up the world with tiny impossibilities.
If the changes were coming back, then she had to inoculate herself against them. She needed to keep things real, even if that meant packing her head with shit and cotton wool. Even if it meant saying goodbye to Jinx for a while. She couldn’t go back to mistrusting the whole world, watching everything out of the corner of her eye in case it became an enemy. If that happened, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t survive.
Risperidone was a lesser evil. The chemical intervention was something she knew and understood. She didn’t remember any too clearly what it had felt like from the inside to be smiling dingbat Fran. But she would go there if she had to.
As soon as they got to West Penn, before any actual treatment started to happen, Liz’s wounds and the bump on the back of her head were photographed from every angle as evidence in an ongoing case. That was a lot less exciting and TV-movie-forensic than it sounded. Beebee just took the photos with her phone, having activated the time-stamp functions. Then a nurse put seven stitches in the bigger cut and taped a Steroplast strip over the smaller one.
Liz thought they might let her go home after that, but it turned out they were only getting started. They had to X-ray her chest to make sure she didn’t have a pulmonary edema, and they had to take a soft-tissue X-ray of her throat. Then they wheeled her over to another department for an MRI scan. Literally wheeled her: they weren’t going to let her walk anywhere until they’d ruled out concussion and something else called a TBI—an acronym they refused to unpick for her.
