Sweet Forty-Two (22 page)

“Because of the schizophrenia?”

She stopped to pick up a seashell then kept walking. “Yes. Her father had it, too. Schizophrenia. Blew his head off in front of my grandmother when my mom was in elementary school.”

My mouth opened but less than nothing came out.

“He didn’t know he had it, though. My mom didn’t figure that out until she was in college in an Intro to Psychology class. That’s when she learned the symptoms and the epidemiology, and pieced together what she remembered of her dad with the stories she’d heard after he was gone. So, she changed her major so she could help people like him.”

“She became a psychologist?”

“Psychiatrist. She was at the top of her field almost from the get-go thanks to her passion. She knew her symptoms right away.”

I stopped and faced Georgia. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” The thought of a daughter dedicating her life to her father’s illness, only to be stricken with the same thing was enough to almost double me over.

“Yeah. God saves his bad days for her.”

“W-what?”

She forced a smile. “Keep walking. It’s easier to process when you feel like you can walk away from it.”

I took a deep breath and tried to remember the woman I’d met in my apartment building hours before. She seemed normal, no signs of a lifetime of holy treachery staining her eyes.

“My mom wanted to make sure I wasn’t in the dark about what was going on with her. She knew that days of erratic and unexplainable behavior were ahead, and, I guess, she wanted to prepare me the best she could.”

“How do you prepare such a little kid for something like that?”

A cynical smile appeared on her velvety lips. “A different reality.”

“Ah.” I nodded, recalling the moment she fled our seated position and led me on this walk. “Explain?”

“My mom sat me down and,” Georgia cleared her throat, doing a hell of a job retaining composure, “told me that sometimes she might say or do things that didn’t make any sense, and it would feel like a fairytale.”

“Uh, not like any fairytale I know.” I twisted my lips in confusion.

“Wonderland,” she sighed.

“W—oooooh.
Alice in Wonderland
...” As she nodded in the corner of my vision, my first memories of Georgia flashed through my brain. Strange tattoos, riddled speech. I looked at her again and she made sense for the very first time.

“Stop staring at me.”

“I can’t.”

“
What?
”

“Tell me why your mother chose
Alice in Wonderland
.” It seemed obvious, but I doubted that I knew it all.

Georgia stopped and sat, digging her toes into the cakey wet sand. “It was my favorite movie and book when I got old enough to read. But, she just used the movie when she explained her condition. She told me that when Alice fell down the rabbit hole and landed with a thump in Wonderland, she sometimes saw things that were pretty, and sometimes things that were scary or confusing, but always at the end she woke up from her dream in the field of flowers in which she started.”

“So,” she continued, “my mom assured me that if I felt confused or scared, it was no different than Alice, and when it was all over, everything would be normal and comfortable again.”

I’d been standing as she was talking, but I sank on my heels next to her, wrapping my arm around her shoulder. She never settled into the embrace, but didn’t flinch away, either.

“So, your tattoos, the bakery, the random things you say sometimes...”

She smiled. “All a part of my life. Who I am.”

“Isn’t that kind of more who she is?” I questioned, pulling my arm away and leaning back on it.

Her face went grey. “Same thing.”

“I don’t...” I wanted to say
understand
, but she didn’t let me.

“That’s enough, okay? I’ll tell you more, just not right now.” Two tears rolled down her right cheek, and she just let them. They bumped into each other at the edge of her jaw and fell as one onto her shoulder.

My chest ached for her. I didn’t have all of the answers to her behavior I’d witnessed over the last several weeks, but it seemed they all lay in this story. This empty hole of a story that messed with her face and made it look older than her twenty-four years. The hostility I thought I’d observed in her eyes looked like pain in the light of personal tragedy. Maybe hostility lingered, though.

I had to touch her. To hug her. Never in my life had I seen a person who needed to be hugged as much as Georgia did. As she sat, her knees pulled to her chest, that half-assed excuse for a self-hug didn’t seem to be taking hold in her soul.

“I’ll shut up about it,” I said as I slid closer to her until our sides were touching, “if you let me hug you.”

She scrunched her eyebrows and looked at me like I’d just said the most absurd thing she’d ever heard. As ironic of a look as I’d ever seen.

“Please.” I nudged her shoulder with mine. “Just let me hug you. I can tell you need it.”

“I’ll let you hug me,” she straightened her face as she sat forward, “if you open that letter. Then maybe we’ll both need one.”

Feeling like I’d been tossed down my own rabbit hole, I shook my head. “I can’t.”

“That makes no sense. You have every body part necessary for the task.”

“You know what I mean. I ... physically can’t.”

“Why not?”

“What if it’s bad?” I’d been tossing possibilities around in my head for a week straight.

“I’d say the worst is over, isn’t it? The absolute worst thing has already happened. What the hell else could be worse?” Now her hand was on my leg, but I didn’t move. Human contact was at a premium for me these days, and I needed it.

She was right.

The absolute worst thing had already happened. Rae died, then I did, and I was wandering the earth as an emotional zombie amongst the living.

I sighed, looking to the sky for some sort of sign. It was perfect and blue. Nothing scary.

“Okay, I’ll open it.”

“Not here, though,” Regan said of opening the letter. “Bo and Ember don’t know about it, and I don’t know if I want them to.”

I shrugged, but my heart was racing as he stood and I followed him back to the wall where the letter sat. “When I said open it, you know I meant open it and read it, right?”

He nodded, but kept walking a good five paces ahead of me.

“Okay, because I know some people get real literal under stress. I don’t happen to be one of those people...”

He chuckled. “Neither am I.”

I was out of breath after speed-walking through the pillowy sand. Maybe I’d have to start working out with Ember.

Or I could just keep making cupcakes.

I shook my head, inappropriately light thoughts always invaded my head when catastrophe loomed. My mother had trained me as such, as I’d just finished explaining to Regan. I was one of Pavlov’s dogs, salivating with mental escape tactics at the ringing of the emotional bell.

“Okay. I’m going to go back home. My mom’s there waiting...” I nervously tucked my hands into my back pockets.

Regan held up the perfectly square card. “Take this.”

Oh, hell no.

“Uh, no.”

“Please.” He pressed it into my chest with urgency in his eyes. “If I chicken out between here and the apartment, I’m just as likely to throw it out the window of the car as I am to read it. I have to talk with Bo and Ember about some band stuff, but I’ll be back home in a little while. Just ... please take it with you. Please.”

I put my hands up, taking the offending parcel into my hand. “Okay, okay, I’ll take it. I’ll read it myself, though, if you don’t come back.”

His eyes lit up. “You could read it, then just ... tell me?”

“You’ve lost your fucking mind.” It was a phrase I didn’t use lightly.

“Maybe so. Thanks. See you later.” He leaned in and kissed my forehead, and then turned and jogged toward the house.

Did he just...

Never one to disassemble motives, I walked to my car like I was carrying a live bomb, briefly considered buckling it in, and drove back to the apartment.

It wasn’t until I was a block away from my apartment that it dawned on me with a sickening sinking feeling. My mom showed up, and I never asked her how she got there, if she needed a ride back to her place, or if she wanted to stay with me. I was so wrapped up in the hurt on Regan’s face that for the first time in twenty years I put someone before my mom. Me.

That was exactly why Regan and I could stay just friends. I had to keep my priorities straight. Well, it wasn’t the only reason, but it was enough to get me through for now. My mom
did
have a point though. She didn’t need me. There were great assisted living facilities throughout the area, and she knew exactly what she was looking for when that time came. Maybe I was the one who wasn’t ready for that.

I parked in my garage and raced up the stairs, hoping my mom had actually waited for me. My door was unlocked, which was a good sign, but not an absolute.

“Mom?” I called before looking around.

When I finally paused and took a minute, I smelled fresh bread and turned and jogged back down the stairs.

“You’re baking,” I said as I opened the door, trying to sound nonchalant. Baking meant she wanted to talk. I forced myself to be ready to listen.

“You’re out of breath,” she observed. “Were you worried I’d disappeared?”

I shrugged, taking a seat on the stool nearest the stove. “I have varied success with my conspiracy theories. So...”

“So?” Mom put a loaf of bread on the counter to cool and began pulling out ingredients for what seemed to be cookies.

She put the ingredients down and looked me straight in the eye. “The board accepted my resignation this week.”

I knew it was coming, but hearing the words caused the muscles in my abdomen to squeeze around themselves. I nodded, keeping my trained stiff upper lip in place.

“Did they, um, say anything?” I wrapped my arms around my stomach.

“They thanked me for my service, praised me for addressing my condition head on, and sent confirmation that my license to practice is now null and void.”

“How are you feeling?” I slid off the stool and walked on shaky ground over to where she stood, unmoving.

“Twenty years as a board certified psychiatrist. When I started, I had a fire inside me, Georgia. A fire to help people like your grandfather. To heal families from all kinds of trouble. It was only in my worst nightmares that I’d turn into one of those people.” She looked into the distance, smiling through barely visible tears.

I wrapped an arm around her waist, resting my head on her shoulder. We’d talked about her resignation for months. Years, if we were both honest with ourselves. She’d only been practicing for a few years before she was diagnosed. At the time, she took it in stride. She didn’t crumble and try to run away, as I’m sure I would have. She faced it head on and turned her brain into a case study.

It wasn’t until her first major catatonic episode five years ago that she started to question the ethics of her oath. Once she was regulated again with new medication, all was well. Until this year, when my dad died.

Though my parents had long been divorced, his death triggered a series of devastating episodes for her, starting with her yelling at a patient, and ending most recently with her crying in the fetal position under her desk. I had to go get her. That was the last time she was ever there as Dr. Hall. The next time she walked through the doors of the medical center, it was as a patient-only. I tried to encourage her to go somewhere else, somewhere she wouldn’t feel so exposed, but she wouldn’t have it. She reminded me that she worked at the best facility in California and intended to have her treatment carried out at the same place.

“Well,” I sighed, pulling up my emotional big-girl panties, “let’s talk about the ECT, shall we?”

My mom wiped under her eyes. “You’re not going to yell at me and storm out, are you?”

“No. Promise.” I took her hand and led her into the seating area, sitting us in a booth in the front window. “Tell me everything.”

For years my mother had warned me about ECT, only having recommended it to her own patients in extreme life-threatening circumstances.

“The medication alone isn’t working anymore, Georgia. You know as well as I do that there are triggers that can set off schizophrenia in someone who hasn’t ever experienced symptoms, and in those who are already diagnosed, can trigger episodes like I’ve been experiencing. The therapy and medicine aren’t enough anymore.” She repeated her last line almost as an affirmation. Or surrender.

“So ... what will this do, then? Have you been thinking about hurting yourself?” While she’d never exhibited suicidal ideation around me, terminology I’d picked up from years of studying psychiatry along with her, it was never far from my mind that her father ended his own life.

She reached across the table and set her hand on mine. “No. This isn’t like your grandfather.”

“But he had—” I started, and she cut me off.

“I speculate that he had schizophrenia, Georgia. All the signs were there, and had I read a file on him after I graduated college, I could have diagnosed him from that alone. But, he was never diagnosed. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. Grandma only said he felt ‘watched’ all the time, like he was
going crazy
. He didn’t have help. That’s why he killed himself.”