Chapter 16

CHAPTER 16

Maddy’s been home from Garrison for eight or nine days, maybe ten. Her days and nights are a blur of indistinguishable monotony, the same card pulled from the deck over and over, making the passage of time difficult to track or remember. It’s almost noon, and Maddy is still in bed even though her mother parted the curtains and raised the shades hours ago, hoping the sunshine would lift Maddy’s mood and, by extension, her body out of her bedroom. Uninspired by daylight and curled on her side, she’s been staring at the floor for a long time. Her childhood lovie, a once-white-now-gray lamb named Sheepie, is face down, knobby tail up, abandoned and alone in the corner.

I know how you feel, Sheepie.

She slides her right arm out from under the covers and holds it up. Her hand trembles as if she were an older woman with Parkinson’s. She aims her mind at her hand, commanding it to steady, but it won’t listen. She watches her hand shake, and it feels disembodied, as if the cables running from her brain to her hands have been severed. It seems she can aspire to be in control of either her moods or her hands but not both.

This side effect would be a deal-breaker if she were a surgeon or a pianist, and it would, at the very least, be embarrassing to be seen like this in class. What’s wrong with her? Her classmates would gossip, developing their own theories. I heard she’s a meth addict .

But she isn’t a student anymore.

And she’s not a meth addict.

She is nothing.

She can smell something cooking, possibly a grilled cheese sandwich, through her open bedroom door. But just as her brain and hand have had a falling out, so, too, have the smell of her favorite foods and her appetite. Her mouth tastes as if she’s been sucking on quarters, and everything she eats is now metallic flavored. She’s tried gum, cough drops, mouthwash, coffee, ginger, even garlic. Nothing is strong enough to unseat it.

But nausea is the overwhelming reason why she has no desire for food. Her insides pitch as if she were on a small boat tossing about in rough seas, land nowhere in sight. She’s supposed to take her lithium pills with a full meal, but between the joyless taste of pocket change and perpetually wanting to vomit, eating much of anything is a tall order. She can almost stomach crackers and plain pasta.

Her mother called Dr. Weaver about the nausea and the hand tremor, terrified that these symptoms in particular were a sure sign that Maddy had kidney toxicity and was about to die, but Dr. Weaver assured her that the dosage of lithium she’s on is low and well within a safe range, and a little hand tremor is to be expected, especially as Maddy’s body adjusts to the medication. Dr. Weaver did change her formulation to extended release, which she says should alleviate the nausea soon. Maddy isn’t religious, but please God .

Her lips are cracked and her cardboard tongue sticks to the nickel-plated roof of her mouth. She reaches for her Hydro Flask on the bedside table and lifts it, but as she feared, it’s empty. She wants to call to her mother and ask for more water, but even with her bedroom door open, she can’t summon enough energy to speak in a volume that could be heard past Sheepie on the floor. She’s sure her mother will pop in any minute with a grilled cheese sandwich on a plate, and she can ask for water then, but each passing minute feels like a week under a scorching desert sun.

She’s sick of being thirsty. Her thirst is a toddler who begs for one more bedtime story after every last page, relentless, unreasonable, and never satisfied. Maybe the water she drinks combines with the lithium salt inside her, becoming seawater, every sip making her thirstier. And because she’s drinking gallons of water to put out a fire that cannot be extinguished, she always needs to pee.

She sighs. The walls of her bladder are distended well past uncomfortable, but getting out of bed is a mountain she dreads climbing. She wishes she were a dude and could piss into her empty Hydro Flask bottle.

She’s tired of being tired. No matter how much she sleeps, and that’s pretty much all she does, she feels exhausted. Fatigue is a common side effect of being on lithium, but because it’s sharing a bed with apathy, hopelessness, and self-hatred, and because she desperately wants to cut herself, she begrudgingly acknowledges that her fatigue is probably a sign of depression.

Her mother called Dr. Weaver about this, too. As long as she’s not suicidal and can be kept safe, she says they should ride it out for now. She’d prefer Maddy wait until she’s stabilized on lithium before they consider adding another medication to her daily cocktail. Her mother didn’t press the issue, mostly because she’s afraid that any medication with antidepressant properties might disregulate Maddy back into mania, an outcome her mother will do anything to avoid. She’d rather her daughter be an unshowered, weepy lump who never leaves her bed than a knife-wielding maniac who smashes up the family cars on her way to God knows where to do God knows what.

She looks up at the bare rectangle of wall over her desk, paint peeled off at the corners where tape held her Reputation Stadium Tour poster. Her mother must’ve taken it down. Maddy doesn’t ask about it. She guesses that makes sense. If she were an addict home from rehab, they wouldn’t leave pipes or bongs lying around. They’d get rid of anything that might trigger a relapse. From memory, she tries to project the black-and-white image of Taylor Swift, her lips red, hands on her face, and a diamond snake ring wound around her middle finger, onto that blank space on the wall. She sees it, but she can’t sustain it for long, and the image fades.

Her phone buzzes. She picks it up and reads a notification from the Duolingo: You’ve made Duo sad It goes on to remind her that it’s been a while, inviting her to jump back into her Italian lessons. Feeling bullied and shamed rather than encouraged, she turns the phone over and closes her eyes. Having missed the application deadline, she lost her chance to do next fall semester in Florence. And she lost all that work from last semester to an incomplete. None of it mattered. She could’ve just stayed in bed.

She rereads the two most recent texts from Sofia, one from the morning of her middle-of-the-night manic text rant and the other on Thanksgiving Day.

SL

SOFIA LOGAN

Tues, Nov 22 at 8:43 AM

That’s so cool!

School is ok

Classes r harder this year

Miss u too xo

Thurs, Nov 24 at 5:17 PM

Hey r u home for the weekend?

Wanna do something?

Maddy’s manic text monologue about writing a Netflix special had to have read weird to Sofia, but she seems to have rolled with it. She probably figured Maddy was either drunk or high. But a continued lack of response to her two questions, sent while Maddy was in the ER, is a cruel problem Maddy doesn’t know how to solve. Her heart aches as she imagines how Sofia must be interpreting Maddy’s radio silence. There she goes, ghosting me for Adam again.

Maddy stares at her phone, thumbs hovering over the screen. She’s tried to reply several times, but she feels too embarrassed to explain it all. She’s also scared of how her friend would react if she knew the truth, that their recent reconnection might not be strong enough to withstand the weight of this new reality, that moving on from Maddy might be easier than dealing with her. She could answer without mentioning her hospitalization and diagnosis, but she doesn’t have it in her to pretend she’s fine, either. Her options are to tell the truth or say nothing, and either way, she fears she’s losing her friend. Again.

Her bladder can’t take the pressure anymore and forces her to get up. She zombie-walks into the bathroom, sits on the toilet, and pees while looking back into her bedroom. Her bathroom door is gone. Taking a page from how things operated at Garrison and under her mother’s directive, Phil took it off the hinges. If she leans forward, she can see through her open bedroom door that her mother never closes and into the hallway. She has lost her right to privacy.

She flushes and stands in front of the mirror. Her eyes look haunted, her skin angry with acne, her hair oily and plastered to her head. She’s wearing an oversize gray T-shirt and flannel snowman pajama bottoms. Adam is coming over today, will probably be here any minute. She doesn’t have the energy to shower, get dressed, brush her hair or teeth—not the grooming behavior of a girl who’s desperate to keep her guy, which is revealing. She cares, but she doesn’t. She fears that, like with Sofia, losing him is already in the cards, flipped by life’s fortune teller the day she was hospitalized.

She was upset that Adam never came to Garrison to visit her until she learned that her mother never told him where she was. She only communicated that Maddy was dealing with a private family matter and that she would be in touch soon. When Maddy asked her mother why she did this, she replied, It’s better that he didn’t see you like that, in that place .

Maddy nodded, agreeing to the cover-up, grateful. If he’d seen her there, he’d never be able to unsee it. She’d be forever broken in his eyes.

But will her mother ever be able to unsee it? Has Maddy’s identity been permanently reassigned, and she is now and forevermore the tragically damaged, mentally ill daughter? Maddy stares into her expressionless brown eyes in the mirror and can’t see the normal Maddy she used to be. That girl is gone.

She and Adam have been texting since she got home from Garrison, but she hasn’t yet disclosed what happened. His messages have been polite.

How r u

Miss u

Hope ur ok

His words feel well-mannered but distanced. He doesn’t ask, Hey where were you? What happened? She doesn’t tell him. They each skirt around the fragile glass elephant in the room like disciples of Emily Post, the politest of New Englanders, masters of avoidance.

Sending u love

He’s one text shy of sending her thoughts and fucking prayers.

He has also sent her flowers, but the bouquet of white chrysanthemums and carnations he chose lacks any hint of romance or cheer, like an arrangement people send to a funeral. Like someone died.

She’s been agonizing over how to tell Adam about the cheating. She could explain that it was a symptom of mania, a product of her illness, a chemically and biologically driven behavior. But whenever she hears this explanation in her head, it sounds like the shadiest of cop-outs.

I fucked some other guys last month, but it wasn’t me. It was the bipolar. A disease made me do it. Don’t be mad, okay?

Maybe she just won’t tell him. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. She wonders whether this cliché exists because it contains a timeless pearl of wisdom or because it’s the easiest excuse.

She’d rather confess to the betrayal than to her bipolar diagnosis. She could promise to be faithful and never cheat on him again. He could forgive her. But she can’t promise not to be bipolar anymore. According to Dr. Weaver, she is and will forever be bipolar. There’s no cure, no twelve-step program to recovery, no penance or rain that can wipe the stain clean, nothing to erase what she has.

What she is.

She’s on lithium, too fucked in the head to go back to school and take her finals. She’ll probably have to miss next semester, too. She’ll never graduate, never get a real job, never have another boyfriend, a husband, a family, a future, a normal life. She looks at her stupid, ugly bipolar face in the mirror and hates herself. She might as well die now.

Agitated and fueled by an unexpected swell of energy, she ransacks the medicine cabinet, her makeup bag, the vanity drawers, the shower stall. No razors. No nail scissors. No sewing needles or safety pins. Not even a pair of goddamn tweezers. She’s breathing hard and sweating, frustrated but not surprised. The knife block on the kitchen counter is now just an empty stump of wood, the knives hidden somewhere safe where her mother’s crazy daughter can’t find them.

“What are you doing?”

Maddy spins around. Her mother has materialized in the doorless doorway.

“Looking for a tampon.”

Her mother stares at her, unblinking, studying her. She knows.

“I’ll get you some.”

Her mother is holding a glass of water in one hand and Maddy’s morning dose of lithium, two pink-and-white pills, cupped in the other. She passes the glass and pills to Maddy’s shaky hands and waits to ensure that her daughter takes them. Each pill that Maddy swallows feels like another shovelful of earth tossed onto her coffin. She swallows the first pill with a big swig of water. New Maddy is bipolar . She swallows the second. Old Maddy is dead.

“I made you waffles. You want to come downstairs and eat?”

That’s what she smelled. That was sweet of her mother to dig out the old waffle iron, and Maddy appreciates the hopeful effort, but even the thought of her favorite comfort food on a fork approaching her mouth makes her stomach turn.

“No.”

“You’re really supposed to take these with food. Give it a try?”

Maddy says nothing.

“I’ll bring it up.”

Her mother leaves through the open doorways. Maddy downs the rest of the water in the glass and trudges back to bed. She lies on her side, digging her fingernails as hard as she can into her wrist, finding no relief.

She hears the doorbell ring, Daisy bark, and the front door open. Moments later, Adam is standing in the doorway, holding a waffle on a plate in one hand and a small brown paper bag in the other. He’s wearing jeans and his red ski coat, his eyes bright, his face shaved smooth, his hair recently cut. She sits up straight, trying to look as normal as she can.

“Hey,” he says in a gentle voice.

“Hey,” she says, embarrassed to be alive.

“Your mom says you need to eat this.”

He approaches her with caution and hands her the plate. She sets it on the bedside table.

“And I got you this,” he says, offering her the paper bag.

She pulls out a royal-blue velvet pouch, uncinches the top, and peers inside. It’s full of colored marbles.

“I heard you lost yours.”

She looks up at him, confused.

“Too soon for humor?” His face baby-steps toward a smile. “I saw Jack over Thanksgiving weekend. He didn’t go into details, but he said you had some kind of nervous breakdown.”

“Oh,” she says, getting the joke, wanting to die.

He sits on the edge of the bed, his hand on the comforter, her knee beneath it.

“So how are you?” he asks.

She shrugs, wordless. He nods.

“I’m so sorry, Mad. This sucks.”

His tone is saturated with pity, translating the meaning of This sucks into Sucks to be you . He’s sitting close enough for her to touch him if she were to extend her tremoring hand, but it’s as if his presence has transformed her bedroom into a fun house, their world distorted, and he appears impossibly far away.

“I miss you,” he says.

“I miss you, too,” she whispers.

“This is hard,” he says. “But I didn’t want to do this over text.”

How noble of him. He pauses, possibly hoping she’ll do it for him, or maybe he’s searching for eye contact and connection, but she can’t speak or look up from the bag of marbles in her lap.

“I know you’re going through a lot, and I don’t mean to be a jerk here, but maybe we should just focus on our own stuff right now. You do you, you know?”

He goes quiet, maybe waiting for her to nod or respond in some way. She remains still, her gaze focused on the jade-green swirls in one of the marbles.

“A bunch of us are going skiing in Colorado over break, and then, I really need to focus on school next semester. I don’t know, I just don’t think I can really be here for you right now. I don’t want to disappoint you.”

She looks up at him now, blurry through wet eyes, and nods. He avoids her gaze. Of course he’s breaking up with her. Why would he want a girlfriend who is mentally ill?

Hey, Adam, I hear your girlfriend has bipolar disorder.

I hear she’s crazy.

Nuts.

Insane.

Off her rocker.

Unhinged.

Just like her bathroom door. She can’t be trusted. She’s dangerous. She is too much and not enough. She is unlovable. She is lost. She is nothing.

She wants to scream out to him, Don’t leave me! But she doesn’t have the will. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t deserve to be heard. She’ll have to settle for screaming on the inside.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

She nods.

They sit in silence for an uncomfortable minute like two strangers on the subway. Then, as there seems to be nothing left to say, he squeezes her knee, leans over, and kisses her on the forehead.

She watches him walk out her bedroom door and listens to his footsteps descending the stairs. When she hears the front door close, she inverts the velvet pouch over the side of the bed. The sudden chaotic noise of twenty or so marbles bouncing against the hardwood floor startles her, even though she caused it. She watches them scatter, spin, and drift to the same side of her room, the floor not level. When the last one comes to a rest in the corner near Sheepie, she cries, heaving grief from her center, producing noises that sound hideous and primal, like the wails of an abandoned, dying animal.