by Wendy Wunder
Instead of dreaming about Danny, though, I have one of those terrible hot-dog-cart stress dreams where there’s a line of people snaking around the corner waiting for hot dogs and I can’t seem to fish even one hot dog out of the boiling water without something else interrupting me.
When I wake up, my phone is vibrating like crazy in my pocket.
I wipe the saliva off the side of my face and try to remember where I am. I don’t recognize the phone number blinking on the phone, begging me to pick up. Something smells eerily familiar. It’s only when I sit up and realize I’ve been completely covered in raw hot dogs, a bunch of them falling to the floor and bouncing off the carpet, that I remember where I am. “Noah!” I scream, and then finally pick up the phone. “I’ll be right there, buddy,” I say and stumble my way through the house, climbing over sleeping bodies, searching for the room I left him in.
It’s not quite the aurora. It’s in between the aurora and daybreak. The sky, still a purply gray, is streaked with pink. The storm has blown beer bottles and paper plates and towels and the wool blankets all over the backyard. The water trampoline has been blown into a tree. One of the space heaters has been upended and thrown, like a javelin, into the pool. I look into the Jacuzzi, where someone has dumped all the betta fish. They have boiled and are floating at the top like bright blue ravioli.
No one else is awake.
When I get to Noah, he is sitting up in bed, tears forming two glistening rivulets straight down his olive skin. “Noah!” I say. I’d never seen him cry before.
“I tried to call you,” he says, as I hug him. “I think I saw sex.”
“No, Noah. You didn’t. You didn’t see sex.”
“Well, I think I heard sex.”
“People were wrestling, Noah. It was part one of the party games. Wrestling.”
“Oh. I tried to call you.”
“I know, Noah. I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.”
I hug him, and he is warm and flushed from sleeping in his red fleece sweatshirt. “What do you say we go get Zoe and get out of here?”
“Affirmative,” he says, forcing himself back into the robot consciousness that protects him from this messy life. “You smell like hot dogs.”
I’m so pissed at myself for falling asleep and letting my guard down.
I tell Noah to tie my scarf around his eyes, so he won’t witness anything untoward as I search every room in the house. We make our way across the soggy grass to the boathouse. I can sense before we even enter it that it is empty. We sidle our way along the narrow wooden slip on one side, trying not to disturb the life jackets and fishing gear hanging on the wall. The agitated green waves in the rectangle where the boat used to go jump up at us like snapping sharks waiting to be fed. We climb the spiral staircase that leads to the whitewashed deck on top, walk out onto it, and look at the amusement park across the lake.
There, across the two hundred yards of water that separates us, we see something emerge from the mist. A black shadowy form with long dark hair. It is dressed in flowing garments that blow horizontally in the wind like flags. The shadow raises its black winged (ponchoed) arms when another streak of lightning crackles and buzzes across the sky. It seems to ignite the garlands of colored amusement-park lanterns. They seem to begin to glow.
The carousel, as if pushed by the wind, makes one slow, full rotation. The rocket swings whiz around, centrifugal force pushing them far from their center axis. A roller coaster car, stuck perpetually at the apex of the largest hill, makes one final click. The sound of its rushing descent is drowned out by an echoing clap of thunder. And then it is dark.
“Zoe!” Noah cries. We jump up and down on top of the boathouse waving our arms like castaways on a deserted island. The figure slowly lowers its arms. And looks toward us. Then it falls to its knees in the dirt.
“Come on!” I say and grab Noah’s hand. We scramble down the staircase and make our way to a plastic pedal boat that’s been overturned and stowed away for winter. I flip it over slowly, revealing the white and jaundiced grass now home to squirming earthworms, and drag it to the water. I throw a life jacket on him, and we pedal and pedal, but the waves and the wind make our work inconsistent.
When we get to her, she is revived and squatting on the end of the amusement park dock like a gargoyle. She is drenched. Her clothes shine and cling even more tightly to her tall, elegant form. Black watery smudges of mascara encircle her expressionless eyes and whisk down her face like Chinese characters. Wordlessly, she gets in the boat, puts Noah on her lap, and pedals with me back to Ethan Drysdale’s house.
I should have never left her alone with him. I should have heeded the rumors.
But I can tell she doesn’t want to talk about it, so we don’t.
When we get back to the dock, and we disembark from the rocking pedal boat and hoist it out of the water, Zoe sits on the bottom step of the boathouse stairs to catch her breath. She has her head in her hands, and she stares at the ground and begins dovening back and forth a little.
“You’re dovening,” I say.
“I am?” she asks, finally looking up at me.
“Yes.”
“It’s soothing, I guess. I see why people doven.” She shivers.
“Let’s get out of here, Zoe,” I say, gently guiding her to standing by her armpit. “What happened? Did he hurt you?”
“Who?” she asks absently.
“What do you mean, ‘who?’ Ethan.”
“Oh,” she says, dismissing me with a shake of her head. “He’s nothing. Men are rats . . . Fleas on rats . . . Amoebas on fleas on rats,” she quotes from Grease, which my mom made us watch with her a hundred times in her good days. She looks at me then, eyes bright behind the mascara tears, and says, “Hannah?”
“Yes,” I say.
“They’re back.”
COPING
I don’t have to ask, “Who’s back?” because I know what she is talking about.
The-thing-that-shall-not-be-labeled (bipolar disorder) often comes with visual and auditory hallucinations.
We, the two of us, have developed a system for keeping it all in check. It’s a stupid system, because we were ten when we developed it. And it probably needs to grow and change. But I was in my Pippi phase, and Zoe, when manic, acted exactly like Pippi. So when the doctors told her she has this thing, then I said, “Well, if you have it, then Pippi Longstocking has it too,” and that’s how we developed our system.
It was when her father left for the last time. I was sleeping over at her house. We were in her room playing. Zoe had promised to let me choose the game after a quick round of “fashion designer,” and she was pinning me into a taffeta skirt.
We heard the hushed voices in her mother’s room beginning to escalate into threatening barks. We heard a bunch of stuff slide off her mother’s dresser and hit the floor in a crisp, clonking avalanche. We heard a body slam against the wall. We heard her mother whimper and then another thud. We heard the sound of a face being slapped with the back of a hand. Then we heard a car peeling out of the driveway.
When I turned to look at Zoe, her face was business as usual as she continued to adjust the taffeta around my waist. She hadn’t even noticed that she had stuck three pins directly into the cushiony meat of her left thigh. Two-year-old Noah sleepwalked into Zoe’s room, and she put some earmuffs on him and tucked him into her bed.
It was the next day when she showed me the tracks on the ice.
We were sitting on the frozen lake in our snow pants pounding a hole in the black ice with the pointy heel ends of our skate blades.
“Can I show you something?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. I had almost cracked through to the bottom, and the hole beneath my skate was filling up with water.
“You can never tell anyone,” she said, and she made me blood promise, so I knew it was
serious. I picked a scab, and she squeezed her chapped lips, and we mixed the blood together with the tips of our fingers.
She looked at me, trying to decide if she could trust me. Yet her face was like a shiny tight balloon dying to burst with the news. “I . . .”
“What?” I asked her. I had no idea what could possibly be so hard to tell me. It had to be big.
“Maybe I should show you first,” she said. “Get up.” She held her hand out to me and hoisted me off the ice. It was like a cold desert out there. Or the moon. Everything was gray, white, and black. Like an Ansel Adams photo turned on its side. A strong breeze skimmed over the surface of the ice, blowing the snow into new shape-shifting formations. Still holding my hand, Zoe skated with me over the smooth black part of the lake—our scraping skates sounded like someone sharpening knives at Thanksgiving—until we got to the gray, opaque bumpy part. It was difficult to keep your balance over the bumps, but Zoe and I were expert lake-skaters, practicing pretend Olympic freestyle routines for hours at a time every weekend.
“Can you see it?” Zoe asked. We skated around in a bumpy circle following what seemed like the tracks of a snowmobile that had done a 360. It was the shape of an enormous bumpy snowflake.
“Snowmobile tracks?” I asked.
“No. Something else.”
“What?” I had known from experience that this was probably just clumps of snow that had frozen in place on the ice.
“A spaceship,” she said. “And I met them.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The extraterrestrials. They taught me their language and told me they’d come back.”
“When?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Zoe said, looking toward the sky. We heard a big thud and boom then—the sound of the ice shifting at the fault line beneath the lake. It sounded like God cracking his knuckles.
It was after that day that everyone noticed some changes in Zoe. She couldn’t control her impulses, and there was a lot of lashing out in school. She would forget where she was and speak out of turn. Teachers couldn’t control her. She took a lot of risks. Jumping off her roof and onto her trampoline. Stealing her mother’s car. Hooking up with boys while the rest of us were still playing Barbies. She felt invincible and superhuman sometimes and just acted on it. She thought she knew more about everything than anyone. I was her only friend.
But then she’d come crashing down. When she realized she wasn’t who she thought she was, she’d get so ashamed. Her self-worth would plummet. She’d go on long crying jags and wouldn’t want to leave the house.
To help her, I shared my Pippi idea. It was very simple.
If she was feeling too much like Pippi Longstocking—thoughts racing, larger than life, egotistical, invincible, frenzied—if she was feeling these things, she’d wear short stockings (socks), reminding her to slow down. She’d actually move in slow motion like she was doing tai chi or walking through water, but to everyone else she seemed to move at a normal pace. She trained herself to talk more slowly during these times, one word at a time, so that she was understood.
If I saw the short stockings, I’d remind her that she couldn’t really pick up a horse. She couldn’t really jump out of a moving car. She’s human. Not superhuman. If she didn’t recognize a Pippi episode coming on, and I noticed it before her, I would hand her some short socks that I always kept in my backpack.
When she was feeling the opposite, depressed and imagining dark scenarios that were far from the truth, when she felt like cement was filling her veins and she could barely get out of bed, she’d put on long socks, reminding her to be more like Pippi.
I’d see the long stockings and know to cheer her up. I’d remind her that her sad thoughts weren’t true. Things were good and not as bad as her thoughts were making them seem. And with this simple system, we had avoided the aliens and hospital visits and the lithium—stardust, Zoe called it. She hated the stardust.
We avoided it together until three years ago when she was fourteen. Zoe threatened to hurt herself, and that was the last straw for her mom. She checked her in at a mental hospital.
The next day Zoe had to stand in line to use a pay phone like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or something.
“I can’t have shoelaces. Or clips for my hair.” Zoe sighed into the phone. “They watch me go to the bathroom. So I pee standing up like a guy, just to freak them out.”
I didn’t know a lot about those places, but what I’d gathered from TV shows is that you should probably play by the rules. “The more you play by the rules, the faster they’ll let you out of there,” I told her. “Why no shoelaces?”
“They think I’ll hang myself with them.”
“Oh,” I said.
I could feel the weight of Zoe’s sadness on the other end of the line as she whispered, “Just a minute,” to the crazy lady behind her waiting to use the phone.
“When can I visit?” I asked.
When I got there the next day, Zoe was sitting on a couch in the lounge, reading a magazine. She’d crafted a braided, turban-like headband out of her pillowcase because they wouldn’t let her have barrettes.
The hospital walls were painted in muted tones of puce—the color of tongue and bologna. Those inspirational posters they sell in airplane magazines that define words like Success and Responsibility in corny ways hung in strategic locations. A spindly anorexic girl sat at the occupational therapy table in the corner gluing the Serenity Prayer to a wooden plaque with the dry noodle letters of alphabet soup.
“Are you being have?” I asked Zoe, using the special syntax we made up for behave.
She nodded and said, “Except I’m not taking these.” She held out a handful of pretty pink pills, like tiny Easter eggs, that she’d managed to hide beneath her tongue at meds time. I grabbed them from her and shoved them in my pocket.
“The shrinks don’t like it when I talk about them, but they’re real,” Zoe said.
“Who?” I asked.
“You know who. Aliens,” she loud-whispered.
“If you want to get out of here, you maybe should stop talking about them.”
“What should I tell them, then? They won’t let me out until I say something.”
“Do they have arts and crafts or something?” I had imagined it like a big summer camp.
“Uh-huh.”
“Draw some hearts and rainbows, write happy entries in your journal. Eat, even when you are not hungry. Always agree with them.”
“Okay.”
“And sit down when you pee.”
“Aww, that was fun.”
“Zoe,” I said.
“Okay.”
I looked her in the eye. And it turned into a staring contest. Zoe tried to make me laugh by crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue, but I’d seen that a million times before, and I persisted, examining the turquoise part of her eyes and moving to her pupils to see if she’d closed them off to the world. But she hadn’t. She seemed back to normal. No need for all this incarceration business. What she needed was to stop acting like Pippi. Adults did not understand kids who acted like Pippi.
A bell rang, and the nurses started kicking people out. I hugged Zoe, her chickeny bones poking through her sweatshirt. She wasn’t eating or sleeping much, which was part of the thing that she had: the-thing-that-shall-not-be-named.
“Guess what?” I’d said to her.
“That’s what,” she answered.
“No, guess what for real.”
“What?”
“You’re going to get better,” I said.
Then, Zoe being who she is, said, “‘The final, and only, act of healing is to accept that there’s nothing wrong with you.’”
“Okay,” I said, looking around for the poster she must have been reading it from, but it wasn’t there.
“There are ali
ens, and they did speak to me. I am okay with you not believing that. But that is my reality.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Don’t judge me,” she said.
“I don’t,” I insisted. “But we just have to smooth things over with the overlords on this planet, parents, teachers, et cetera, so that this doesn’t happen again. The lockup. We can’t be having it. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” she said, and we did our secret handshake.
Visiting hours ended. Mothers said their tortured, guilty good-byes. Siblings, relieved to get the hell out of there, lined up at the heavy locked door of the unit like puppies waiting to pee. I joined them with my mom, who had been waiting for me near the nurses’ station.
We left, and when the door, heavy as the hatch of a submarine, sealed itself between me and Zoe, the depth of this situation washed over me and left me gasping for breath. I turned to take one more peek through the tiny window, and I saw Zoe in the hallway, crying, collapsed, and crumpled into a ball as if someone had tossed her into a wastepaper basket. The nurse guided her to her feet and led her to her room, holding an ominous glinting needle in the gloved right hand behind her back.
“No!” I screamed. “She doesn’t need that!” I pounded on the door. My mom tugged at my elbow, and then I saw a Cyclopsian security camera staring right at my third eye. I remembered to keep my composure or they’d lock me up too.
• • •
That was three years ago. And that’s the last time I heard the A-word.
Until last night.
When I took her home from Ethan Drysdale’s house, I was hoping she’d sleep it off, but this morning when I came over, I found her in the basement, and it looked like she’d been working for twenty-four hours straight.
She is in constant motion, scuttling between piles of silks, jerseys, corduroys, satins, and velvets, her mannequins, and her sewing machine. She grabs a voluminous bundle of bright pink tulle spun like cotton candy and glides to the sewing machine. She has pins in her mouth and scissors in her back pocket. A measuring tape around her neck. Her hair is in a tousled ponytail that is becoming one large matted dreadlock. Her eyes are red.
