Plain Jane

by Kim Hood

  I’m told that I paced around the lobby for about half an hour before I went back out the front door, into a raging snow storm.

  That is pretty much the last thoughts I remembered before everything turned white.

  I am dancing. I can’t even tell you what the music is that I am dancing to. Something fast, with a strong beat. And then it changes to some floaty, ethereal sort of thing.

  I have never felt as entirely right as I do right now. I could dance forever under this curtain. Just me in the music, in the cotton surrounding me, so that even if I fell, it wouldn’t hurt. Not that I am going to fall. I am floating. Gravity means nothing to me. I am pure, perfect movement.

  God, this must be what it must be like to dance like Emma. I could dance like this forever.

  The light is so beautiful.

  I’ve been letting the softness surround me, and it’s so thick that it has blinded me without me noticing. This softness is the warmest blanket I have ever felt. But now, there’s this light piercing the dark and the curtain is falling through it, dancing a dance I have never seen before. I need to get closer. I need to see that.

  I can see a million universes when I look up. Falling, falling. A million different possibilities landing on me. I had no idea. It is more fantastic than I ever thought possible.

  ‘Jane. Jane. Jane.’

  Someone is calling my name. Is that my name though?

  ‘Come on. Get up, Jane.’ I want the words to stop. They’re making it so difficult to drift. ‘Oh, fuck. Fuck.’

  I didn’t know Farley could swear.

  And then I am being lifted up, but I don’t want to go. I am screaming and kicking the hands that are taking me out of this perfect universe. I know I will never find it again. ‘Please, please don’t make me go.’ That is all I am thinking, but I hear my voice saying more. I can’t even understand the words coming out of my mouth anymore.

  ‘Drug use?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Mom’s voice is shrill with panic.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Farley is saying.

  ‘History of mental illness in the family?’

  ‘Yes. My father had manic depression all of his life.’ That is Mom.

  And then there is nothing.

  I wake up crying. I think I cry for days. It seems like it. Sometimes Mom is there. Sometimes Dad. All I want to do is cry and sleep.

  There are doctors and pills. Every time I wake up, there are more pills to take. I don’t want them. They’re trying to poison me like they poisoned Emma. Thinking of Emma makes me cry again. Have they killed her?

  I think I throw the medicine at them. So they give me injections instead. Everything blurs and fades.

  I start to take the medicine they hand me. I still don’t like it but maybe it isn’t so bad because the terrible thoughts and pictures are gone and I know I will sleep again. I want to sleep forever because now that the pictures are gone there is nothing but sadness stretching out in front of me like an ocean.

  I can’t exactly say when it was that I started to be me again. It wasn’t like waking up from surgery or anything. I remember being nine, when I had my tonsils out, waking up, that feeling that I had been dead for days, not just asleep.

  This wasn’t like that at all. It was more like slowing down a clock, over days. Slowly I started to be able to think at the same pace as the world. Much more slowly, I began to feel ‘normal’. I can’t say that I started to feel good – because I didn’t. I felt more horrible than ever. But apparently this was ‘normal’. They kept the world blurred and on mute while that was happening.

  They. The doctors. The ones that came to see me. Me. Not Emma.

  It took me awhile to understand that I was the patient. That it was me that was being treated and not Emma. Well, she was being treated too, but in the actual normal part of the hospital – the part where you didn’t have to be signed in to visit. We were in different worlds.

  They explained to me over and over what the drugs were that I had to swallow. Lithium. Risperidone. The drugs that would slow the thoughts. Things were not right in my brain. I needed to rest; to give the drugs a chance to work.

  I wish I could say that I was fixed up in a jiffy, that I was delighted to be getting treatment, that I took it on the chin and got on with getting better. That would be a massive lie. I can’t even joke about that time yet. It was the most horrible six weeks of my life.

  Think about someone telling you that everything you’d felt, and even thought some of the time, might not be real. Think about someone telling you that your brain needs a complete tune-up, and might need medication forever. As much as I knew my head was completely messed up, it was still my messed up head. I didn’t want it to be changed. Not even when it was torturing me.

  And even when I gave in, and the drugs started to work, it was still awful. Worse actually, because then I could fully appreciate how off the wall and how horrible I had been. There had been some fuzzy gaps, but it wasn’t like I didn’t remember what I had done over the weeks before Farley handed me over. Unfortunately the drugs they were giving me couldn’t erase any of it.

  The memories of that hospital stay are not ones I want to revisit. I definitely don’t feel the need to share them with anyone.

  But I can’t get away with just moving on either. When you land yourself in the psychiatric ward it isn’t like having a broken leg. Stuff happening in your head seems to require talking about it – not necessarily to get better, because, let’s face it, talking about being crazy isn’t going to fix it. That’s what the drugs are for.

  It does require coming to terms with how your brain works though – in my case, how it may always work. After a few times of talking to the therapist, I started to see that it might be useful, that I might not be able to get through this without help. I mean, who in their right mind (ha! A little joke) convinces herself to stop remembering that she found her grandfather with half his head missing? I might need help to stop myself from hiding those sorts of facts from myself, so that they don’t explode into nasty pictures in my head.

  Not that I wouldn’t have had other, imaginary images explode in my head apparently. It would have been convenient to blame it all on Grandad, but the only thing I could really blame on him was the bad genes.

  More about that later, but I suppose what I want to say is that when I started telling you my story, I didn’t want it to be about Emma’s cancer. It wasn’t a look-at-the-sick-kid kind of story. And it still isn’t, even if the sick kid is me and not Emma. Though, to be honest, it was going to take me a little more time to realise that.

  It felt weird that it was me that Dad was driving home from the hospital and not Emma. I almost had a little laugh about it actually, but I stopped myself because my family was still a little sensitive about ‘inappropriate emotions’. How many times though, had I had the self-indulgent, dramatic thought of It should be me in that bed! I had kind of fulfilled that.

  I wished I could share that irony with Farley. I hadn’t heard one word from him since I’d slammed the door in his face more than six weeks ago. Well, technically I had heard him when he came and found me in the park, but that didn’t really count.

  ‘You and Mom probably deserve a medal or something, Dad,’ I said when we were half-way home. I think the guilt was the worst thing about everything. I knew that there was no way I could take away the hurt I had inflicted on everyone, but I had this almost compulsive need to try.

  ‘Yep. You are probably right,’ Dad said, but he was smiling, had been smiling since we had got in the car. ‘Do you want to nominate us?’

  ‘Well, there is the slight problem of Bipolar Disorder not being great material for gaining public support. Not like cancer does. So, you know, I don’t really add to the family adversity in a public way. You probably want to keep the whole mental illness thing under wraps.’

  ‘Jane,’ he said, taking his eyes off the road a moment to look me squarely in the eyes, ‘I don’t care what the public v
iew is. And I don’t need anything more than to have two healthy, happy daughters.’

  ‘I can’t wait to see Emma,’ I said, and god I meant it.

  She met me at the car. Emma came out, without Mom, using her crutches like a pro. Seeing her negotiate her way down the icy walkway, still nearly obstructed with last year’s untrimmed hedge, made me so proud.

  Proud. That is a weird feeling. It really is like your heart is swelling when you feel it. I had been paying attention to feelings lately. This was a new one.

  ‘Ems!’ I jumped out and pulled her into a hug, her crutches falling off her wrists and clattering to the ground. ‘Oh, I missed you so much.’

  We were both crying. I know that sounds completely clichéd, but we were. They don’t put these sorts of scenes in movies for nothing. I hadn’t seen her for more than six weeks and that had never happened before. I guess it’s easy to have the luxury of hating your sister when you can see her every day. Try not seeing your sister for a few weeks; see if you can keep being a cynic.

  Dad had to pick up the crutches and reattach them to Emma before I could let her down. This isn’t any fairy tale ending; she only had one leg. She would have fallen over if I had released her from our hug without the crutches in place.

  Mom was in the kitchen making dinner when we all went in. For a moment, hearing the classical music station she always listened to when she cooked, it felt like the last years had been a dream, like I could blink and forget that anything bad had ever happened in our family. When I walked into the kitchen and took in her whole profile, carrot peeler in hand, hair greyer at the temples than even the last time I had seen her, a mask of fatigue hiding how pretty she was, I knew that it was all real though. The drugs couldn’t stop me from seeing every new line on her face.

  She smiled when she saw me, but it wasn’t like Dad’s wide-open grin. She couldn’t look at me like nothing had happened. I understood.

  I’d known that Mom and I would take the longest to reconnect. That would have been the case if I had never gotten ill, and there had just been The Thing with Grandad, as I had taken to calling it, between us. Loads of time sitting around the psychiatric ward, with nothing more to do other than think, had made me come to that conclusion. Maybe we were too similar, both kind of too intense.

  The guilt was the worst with her too. I mean, here she was stuck between generations of craziness. You are not crazy, the psychiatrist had said. Even Dr Jonathan had stopped in to try to tell me that.

  ‘Hey there, Hamilton Sister Number One,’ he had said, coming into my room sometime after when I was too doped to string a sentence together and before I was certain enough that I could say more than a few words without sounding crazy.

  ‘So, you are real,’ I had said. The weird thing was, even though I pretty much knew what was real and what was not by then, I still had clear memories of all the bits that I had been told were not real. It wasn’t that I had been completely delusional, but my mind had kind of skewed things to suit where it wanted to go. I think that might be worse than being completely out there, because it makes it a whole lot harder to trust your judgement.

  ‘As far as I know, I’m real,’ he had said, pinching his arm as though that would prove it to me.

  ‘But you never made plans with me to take Emma off to some miracle-cure place.’ I had pretty much had that confirmed by the psychiatrist, but I’d still kind of hoped that he was wrong.

  ‘I wish I knew of a sure-fire miracle place, Jane.’

  ‘So all of my research was just a bunch of crackpot conspiracy theory.’ That had been the biggest let down, that I hadn’t been able to save Emma’s leg. Nobody had directly told me that surgery had gone ahead at that point, but they hadn’t told me it hadn’t either.

  ‘I’ve thought about this a lot.’ He had looked kind of sad when he said this, and it had made me feel bad, like I had caused that sadness. As I said, there were acres of guilt to wade through once my mind had slowed down enough to process things. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t say it, because it might be more confusing, but I’d feel wrong not saying it.’

  Then he stopped, and didn’t say anything at all.

  ‘What? Say what?’

  ‘The truth is, I am a little sceptical of the way we are treating cancer. I’m afraid you may have been sensitive to my own unease. That wasn’t fair.’

  ‘But I was out of my mind for a while there.’

  ‘Maybe, but I don’t think you were totally wrong. Ok, the internet may not be the most reliable source of information, but it’s not unreasonable to question things in life, Jane. Even when you are mood stable.’

  ‘Thanks for that, but I don’t think anyone wants to hear opinions from the crazy contingent, Dr Jonathan.’

  ‘Hey, just because your neurons happen to need a little help to regulate, doesn’t mean you are crazy.’

  Yah, right. I have a feeling Bipolar Disorder is on the list of Crazy Diseases.

  I thought it was definitely the reason that Mom hadn’t wanted to talk about The Thing with Grandad while I was in the hospital. I get it. Who wants to bring up something horrible, with someone you are afraid might flip out? I suppose it seems safer to talk about fluffy, happy things.

  Only thing is, even though I was still getting used to being crazy, I was pretty sure that talking about happy, fluffy things wouldn’t keep me from getting depressed or manic again. And likewise, talking about horrible, horrendous things – like The Thing with Grandad – wasn’t going to make me crazier. Talking about it was the only thing that was going to bridge the gap between me and Mom though.

  It was Tracey who came over to see me, not Dell. I didn’t expect him to. Even when we were together he had never come over to my house. Also, like I said at the beginning, he had never been someone to face anything difficult head on. I’d liked that when I had difficult things that I wanted to avoid right alongside him. That hadn’t worked for me in the long run though. It probably wasn’t going to work for Dell either.

  At some point he was going to have to stand up to his father, and at some point he was going to have to process the fact that his mom had left him to do that on his own. Maybe that was just the therapy talking though. When most of your human interaction for weeks is with a shrink, you start to psychoanalyse everyone else too. Maybe lots of people go through life not ever facing the bits in their life that haunt them. I suppose if the bad things don’t make you crazy, that’s fine.

  Whatever Dell did or didn’t face wasn’t going to be my concern though. At least he would have Tracey to help him through, if avoiding stuff got too hard to do. She was a rock. I swear she would have been in to see me in the hospital every day if she had been allowed. She hadn’t been though.

  Instead, she had messaged me every single day. Mostly she had sent funny pictures and video links, because how many times can you ask someone how they are doing? At first, I hadn’t even replied to her most of the time. It had been too hard, and there wasn’t anything that I could say. It didn’t stop her though; she just carried on contacting me, not asking for one thing from me.

  We went to my room now, even though my room is pretty much the size of a closet. There wasn’t anywhere else. The house seemed so full with all of us home. It felt like ten of us were living in it instead of just us four.

  ‘Wow, what happened to your room?’ Tracey asked. It hadn’t gotten any bigger, but Mom had done an amazing job of redecorating it for me. As far as I can recall, she must have found it literally covered in notes and photos and drawings. Not in a good way either. None of the photos and drawings were gone, but she had organised them for me in a real portfolio, and she had framed some of the best. They were hanging on my newly painted lime-green walls.

  ‘Mom did it. I kind of like it.’ I actually loved it. I especially loved the high stool and architect desk she had squeezed into the corner. She had done it as a surprise, but when she had shown it to me, she hadn’t mentioned my drawings or photos at all. That had been the best gift.
Maybe she had learned from Emma. Sometimes encouragement feels far more like pressure.

  Tracey sat down on the bed carefully, like she was afraid she might mess it up. When had we become so formal? We had spent hundreds of afternoons here just hanging out, doing not much at all, stretched out on the bed, eating sweets and throwing the wrappers on the ground. That was before Emma got sick though. Correction – that was before I got sick though, because I knew now that it hadn’t been normal to stop wanting to be with your best friend, while you waited for the world to just end, almost hoping it would just end. Not at that intensity. Not for that long.

  ‘I have to say this, Tracey.’ I wanted to say it right away, because there was no point in her feeling all awkward for ages if she didn’t have to. ‘You have no idea how much you sticking by me helped. Really helped. But you don’t have to. I understand if you want to just spend time with other people instead.’

  Saying that made my heart hurt a little. It was the right thing to do though. Farley had never contacted me again. If he couldn’t handle me, I could hardly ask sensitive Tracey to stay friends with me.

  ‘Are you mad at me? Because I’m with Dell?’ She looked like she was going to cry.

  ‘What?’ I hadn’t expected that; I was so far beyond it that I had forgotten that Tracey might not be. I’d meant any people but me, but she’d heard ‘Dell’. ‘No, not at all! Honestly, I am so happy for you two, Tracey. It’s a two-for-one-deal. My best friend gets the nicest boyfriend, and my favourite ex – well only ex – gets the girlfriend he deserves.’

  ‘Really? You aren’t just saying that, and secretly mad?’ Knowing Tracey, she had been torturing herself with worry for weeks.