by M. R. Carey
Fran nodded, answering both of them. She’d seen the donut carton, and it didn’t bother her. She figured Dr. Southern had as much right to eat donuts as anyone else did. Being fat didn’t mean you had to live on lettuce. And Jinx only got all judgy like this when it was him she was judging. She didn’t notice other overweight people at all.
“Okay,” the doctor said. “Talk me through it. When and where and how much?”
“Stuff moving,” Fran said. “Stuff changing. I dozed off over my homework last night—”
“In your own room, the living room, what? Paint the picture for me.”
Like that makes any difference, Jinx scoffed. He wants to show you he’s listening, that’s all.
“In my bedroom. And I had a bad dream. I woke up feeling like someone was coming after me. Trying to grab hold of me.”
“Someone?” Dr. Southern tapped the point of his pencil on the desk, on a corner of it, close to his hand, where there was a little patch of bare wood probably made by years of this kind of impact. “Call it, Frankie. We’re talking the obvious someone, right?”
Fran handed over her journal. She didn’t want to say it out loud. Picota as a giant spider had felt terrifying but would sound lame, like a childish nightmare based on a childish fear. Even so, the words were forced out of her as Southern scanned the recent pages.
“Yeah, it was him. Well, it was a big spider-thing, kind of, and I don’t think it had a face, but it was still him. I mean, it was that memory and that place, so it didn’t really matter what the monster looked like.”
“The monster,” Southern repeated, still reading. “That’s how you were thinking of him?”
“He had, like, a dozen arms, Dr. Southern.”
“And by ‘that place,’ you mean the motel? Where he took you?”
“Yes.”
Duh, Jinx muttered.
“Okay.” Southern set the book down on the desk and turned his frank gaze on Fran again. “So you were reliving your abduction. I just wanted to make sure that was the context here.”
Fran didn’t say anything to this. From where she was sitting, it was a question that answered itself. Whenever her brain reached for nightmare imagery, it infallibly dipped into that same well.
“And the bad dream woke you. And then the changes kicked in after that?”
“I think a siren woke me. An ambulance out in the street. Or maybe it was the sound that made me have the nightmare, I don’t know. But yeah, I guess I was still thinking about Picota after I woke up. And then the weird stuff kicked in.”
She flicked her hand to indicate the same old, same old. Little bits of the world sliding in and out and round about like the squares on a Rubik’s Cube, which was a cool puzzle her dad had given her for Christmas once that had taken her more than half a day to figure out.
At the mention of Picota’s name, Jinx had drawn her sword and was thoughtfully testing its edge against the ball of her thumb. Now she took out a whetstone from the little pocket-purse-thing on her belt that Fran didn’t know the right name for and began to sharpen the blade.
“What weird stuff?” Dr. Southern prompted.
“Changes. Like, the colors of things changing. Where they were in the room. Or one thing turning into a different thing. You know.”
Like you told him all the other times. Stupid man!
Southern put the journal down, picked up his pencil again and did some more tapping with it.
“This was a one-off?” he mused.
“I suppose.”
“Well, it was or it wasn’t. Was this something that just happened all by itself, or was it part of a sequence you didn’t tell me about yet?”
“It was a one-off.”
“And it was right after a triggering incident. The nightmare.”
“Yeah.”
Now tell me how that made you feel, Jinx muttered, mimicking the doctor’s deep voice in her piping treble.
“Okay, give me some background,” Southern said. “Before it happened—I mean, in the days leading up to this, or even earlier on that same day—did you feel any increase in tension or unhappiness? What was your mood?”
Fran interrogated her memory as well as she could. It wasn’t an easy question. What was anyone’s mood? It went up or down depending on what was happening. You could wake up happy and then bang your head on the bedpost and hate the world. But there wasn’t anything that came looming out of the recent past like the great big shadow of a great big wrecking ball to shatter her ever-fragile buzz. There was just the usual run of ups and downs.
Your mood was fine, Jinx said. Everything was going fine.
“My mood was okay,” Fran said.
“Nothing stressing you or freaking you out?”
“Nothing more than usual.”
Dr. Southern scratched his beard.
“Well, then I’m inclined to sit this out,” he said. “For now.”
“No,” Fran said quickly. And then, as he looked at her in mild surprise: “I mean, I’d like you to increase my meds. I want to go back to a full dose of risperidone. Please.”
“Why?” Southern asked her. He shrugged his shoulders, just a little, making the single word mean more—like he didn’t see the need. Like she had to justify the request somehow, when the reason was right there in front of them both, gruesomely obvious.
“Because I don’t want it to start happening again.” Fran didn’t bother to mention that it had happened again, right outside in the waiting room. She just wanted to collect her prescription and get out of there, not get into another round of discussion. “I don’t want to go back to all the … you know, to the hallucinations and the panic attacks. I want to be normal.”
“Normal,” Dr. Southern said flatly. “Right. But there are different flavors of normal, Frankie. We’re all trying to be normal in our own way.”
“What does that mean?” Fran asked him. She was trying not to sound angry, but she hadn’t come here for the kind of platitudes she could have got at a school assembly.
The doctor gestured vaguely, shaping something in the air with his fingers. “Well, it means we’ve got an idea in our minds when we say the word, but there’s probably no definition we can all agree on. Look, here’s the thing.” He held up Fran’s journal, like a preacher waving a Bible around to prove he was on good terms with God. “This is, what, the fifth or sixth notebook you’ve gone through? There’s year after year of you telling me about everything in your life that isn’t normal.”
“So?” That one word, all by itself, sounded really belligerent, but Fran couldn’t help it. She felt as though she was being talked into something. Something she wasn’t going to like.
“So I’m wondering if talking about your symptoms has become a symptom in itself. You see, I don’t know what we’re doing now, exactly. There are two possibilities here. The first—” He put the journal down again so he could hold up his index finger. “—is that your condition is entirely post-traumatic. Your mind responding to extreme stress. But if that’s what it is, then after nine years I would expect to see some change. Recovery, in a perfect world, but definitely change. Systems under stress aren’t stable. They either pull back toward stability or else they fall apart. You’re not doing either.”
Fran wasn’t so sure about that. There were times when falling apart described her interior landscape pretty well. Dr. Southern only had her words to go by. He didn’t know what it felt like to live in a world where all the objects that surrounded you might start spinning like the reels of a slot machine and come up different. Cherries into oranges. Red quilt into gray. A flute player into a fan lady.
Dr. Southern held up a second finger. “Option two is that the trauma just exacerbated a problem that was already there. That you’ve got what we call an endogenous syndrome. But in that case it ought to be possible to find a drug and a dosage that would switch off your symptoms once and for all. They shouldn’t come and go in the way they do. We ought to be able to do better than a stand
off.”
He stopped talking and just looked at Fran, as though it was her turn to speak. As though he was expecting her to have an answer.
She threw the question back at him instead. “So which is it?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” Southern said. “I really don’t. That’s why I’m not happy just loading you up with some more meds and saying goodnight and good luck. Frankie, these drugs have serious side effects. You don’t seem to be getting the weight gain, but even without that there are plenty of things to worry about. Headaches. Nausea. Loss of balance. You know, it’s even possible that the drug is causing your anxiety and your nightmares. We could be making the situation worse by treating it.”
“But it’s my choice,” Fran said.
This was the ace of trumps, and she played it with a flourish. Dr. Southern had told her once that he would let her make her own decisions when it came to treatment—that he would lay out the choices but not make them for her. If that meant anything, it meant she walked away today with a prescription rather than a sermon.
Dr. Southern looked unhappy. “Absolutely,” he said. “If that’s what you want, I’ll write you up and send you on your way.”
“That is what I want,” Fran confirmed. It was obvious he wasn’t even halfway done, but if she heard him out it would be a lot harder to stick to her guns. “Please, Dr. Southern.”
There was a long moment when he just looked at her. Lady Jinx came up behind him. Oathkeeper rested on her shoulder, newly whetted, as she held it in a firm, two-handed grip. Even though Dr. Southern was sitting down, she didn’t quite come up to his shoulder. She measured the angles with a speculative eye.
“Okay,” Dr. Southern said at last. “You got it, Frankie.”
Lady J relaxed her stance and sheathed her sword.
The doctor took his prescription pad out of the desk drawer. He closed the drawer again right after, but while it was open Fran saw the name of his next client written on the cover of a manila file, identical to her own, that was sitting on top of a short stack.
ELIZABETH FAY KENDALL
Zac Kendall’s two-in-one mom.
The doctor wrote out the prescription. He folded it in half, and Fran held out her hand to take it. She felt a little ashamed of how she had beaten him down even though she hadn’t really had any choice.
“Do one thing for me,” Southern said.
“Okay,” Fran agreed. “What?”
“Don’t up your dose just yet.”
She did look at him then. It was a low blow. “What’s the point in giving me the meds if I’m not allowed to use them?”
“Use them if you need to is all I’m saying. Stick to your current dose unless you have another episode. I think we should have a follow-up meeting in a week or two to see where we’re at. If the weird stuff starts up again before that, and if you feel like you can’t cope, then you go ahead and up your dosage. But to my mind that would be a backward step when we ought to be trying to walk forward. I’d much rather we came up with a different approach.”
“There isn’t anything.”
“Maybe there is and we just haven’t thought of it yet.” He sighed heavily. “Frankie, I’m not trying to make things any harder for you. Swear to God. It’s my job to make you better. It would be easier to dose you up to your eyeballs, believe me. It would be easier to say risperidone isn’t working so let’s try a different pill. A stronger one. You’re old enough now that nobody would raise an eyebrow at that. But I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do. And I don’t like the idea of you coming to depend on the pills any more than you do already.”
Fran got to her feet, with difficulty because of the damn armchair and the damn cushion. “It’s my choice,” she said again. “I know what I’m doing, Dr. Southern.”
It was true, she thought defiantly. She reached over and took the prescription out of the doctor’s hand.
“Okay,” he said. “Well, then let’s leave it there for now. I’ll see you again week after next and we can review. If you do have another attack in the meantime, use your journal to get it all down—in as much detail as you can.”
“Of course,” Fran said. “Continued in next episode.”
She hated that he thought she was a coward. To her embarrassment, she felt the stinging in her eyes that meant she was about to cry. She wasn’t miserable, just ashamed and angry at being judged.
By a big, fat, donut-eating fat man! Jinx chimed in.
Fran got out of the room as quick as she could. Dr. Southern was still saying goodbye to her when she slammed the door shut behind her.
He’s just a dick, Lady Jinx growled.
“No, he isn’t,” Fran said, her voice thick. “He’s trying his best. But he doesn’t get it.”
She had to pull herself together before she went out to her dad. She took a side corridor that led to the bathrooms. There was a water fountain there too, so she pretended to be taking a drink, letting the water run while she bent over it and gulped back tears. They kept coming, though. Because if Dr. Southern didn’t get it, who would? And if he was going to block her off from doing the one thing that would make all the craziness go away, then there was no way out of this at all.
A rustle of movement from somewhere close by made her freeze. She wasn’t alone anymore. She waited for whoever it was to go away.
“Are you okay, Watts?” It was Zac Kendall’s voice. And he was right behind her.
“I’m fine,” Fran mumbled.
“Can I get you anything? Or call someone? If you’re—”
She spun round to face him. “I said I’m fine, Kendall!” she yelled. “Are you deaf or something?”
Kendall looked stunned. Too bad. He should have minded his own business.
Fran took to her heels and ran, out the side door and into the parking lot. She texted her dad from there, saying she was all done and waiting by the car.
By the time he arrived, her cheeks were dry and her face was composed.
“All good?” Gil asked.
“Yeah. All good.” Fran forced a smile, holding up the pink prescription slip. “Can we swing by Walgreens on the way home?”
Wednesday seemed to be taking its own sweet time to come around. Liz had been living in fear of another psychotic episode, and the constant tension made her start at shadows. Any time she got angry or even a little irritated, she stopped dead and probed the feeling to make sure it was hers. And since it was impossible to be completely certain, she tried to steer away from feeling anything at all. She was queasily conscious of holding the world at arm’s length. Even her fellow volunteers at the homeless shelter, who were glad to see her back. Even the kids, which she flat-out hated.
That was the main reason why she had asked Zac to drive her to Carroll Way. Learning to drive was still enough of a novelty for him that he relished getting behind the wheel of a car, even if the car in question was a tired old wreck, steered like a boat despite being the size of a roller skate and wore the dust and sap of a Pittsburgh summer like an extra coat of paint.
The sitter, Christine Keithley, arrived at 4:30 on the dot. She was a classmate of Zac’s who mostly sat at the weekends but was prepared to do a couple of hours midweek as an occasional one-off. Word had gone around among the Worth Harbor mothers that Christine was capable and reliable.
“I already cooked Molly’s supper,” Liz told the sixteen-year-old. “All you’ve got to do is warm it up.”
“Okay,” Christine said happily. She was a stocky teen with fiery red hair who played in Julian C. Barry’s junior volleyball team as a wing spiker. Zac said a lot of the boys were scared of her because of something unspecified that she had done to a boy who had gotten too fresh with her at a school dance. Liz felt an instinctive warmth for her on account of that story. She also liked that Christine had brought some schoolwork with her: it showed a serious mind.
“I’ll be back in time to put her to bed,” Liz added.
“So there’s really nothing I
have to do except make sure she doesn’t set the house on fire?”
“Well, you’ll probably be drafted in for Lego duty.”
“Excuse me?”
“Through there. You’ll see.”
Christine went through to the family room, where the Lego table was out and Molly’s latest work-in-progress was … well, everywhere. By the time Liz had got her coat on and found her car keys, Christine had been recruited to build a dungeon for a dragon who had been naughty. Offenses unspecified. “I sort of feel like your daughter is running an authoritarian state, Ms. Kendall,” she told Liz.
“Every kid is born a fascist,” Liz said. “You have to pound democracy into them a little at a time.”
“Fair.”
“Don’t let her bully you, though. If you need to do your schoolwork …”
“I’ll get to it. Right after we build the dragon utopia.”
In spite of Liz’s good intentions, she and Zac were silent when they first got into the car. Mostly that was because driving still required his full attention, but she sensed that he was also a little bit freaked out at the thought that his mom was going to a psychiatrist. Liz didn’t blame him. She felt the same way about it, truth be told.
“So Nora wanted to add a new clause to my work contract,” she said at last. “So she can fire me if I turn out to be of unsound mind.”
Zac shot her a sidelong glance, scandalized. “She what? She can’t do that, can she?”
“She said she could, yeah. Said it was standard practice. It’s called the sanity clause. I told her she wasn’t gonna fool me with that one. My daddy told me there ain’t no sanity clause.”
Seconds went by. Zac shook his head. “That was terrible,” he said. “On a scale of one to ten, it’s … wow. It’s on a different scale. I can’t find it on the scale, Mom.”
“Pretty bad, right? And it’s not even original.”
“No, I’m relieved. If you made it up, I’d have to go get myself DNA-tested in case I’m related to you.”
“Only by birth, sweetheart.”
“Well, thank God.”
They sat in the waiting room for twenty minutes, which for Carroll Way was on the low side of average. Zac saw a girl he knew from school sitting over on the other side of the room with a man who was presumably her father. “Go ahead and talk to her,” Liz urged. “I’m fine just sitting here.”
