The Law of Loving Others (12 page)

I felt surprisingly happy to be at Andy's house that night, in that warm, messy space. I sat down on the couch next to Josh and I leaned into the relief—the comfort of being with people who knew me well and yet not well enough to know how shitty these last couple of weeks had been for me.

“Josh,” I said. “I miss you. How is everything?”

“I know! Pretty good, same shit. I'm going back up to Bard in a couple of days, right after New Year's.”

“How's stuff going over there?” I asked.

“It's actually really good. I'm working with this really cool professor in the environmental studies department. We're working on this project to make the science building produce more energy than it consumes.”

“That's kind of amazing.” I said.

“Yeah it's pretty cool.”

Someone passed Josh a joint. He took a hit and then handed it to me. “Be careful,” he said, “it's so short, don't let it burn your fingers.”

I inhaled, held my breath for a moment, let the weed infiltrate my body. For a little while I felt nice and relaxed, filled with an understated sort of elation. I felt just like the kind of girl who Daniel wanted me to be: cool and detached, happy.

A girl named Eliza walked in, someone I hadn't seen since the end of ninth grade. We'd gone to Hebrew school together years ago, when we were kids, and seeing her I immediately felt nostalgic, flushed with affection for her. I could picture us eight, ten years earlier, sitting in the synagogue cafeteria before class, drinking apple juice and stocking up on those cookies that were the kosher version of Oreos, the chocolate just a little less sweet than the real thing.

Eliza had always been pretty, but she had braces for many years and refused to smile, always kept her hands close to her mouth, doing her best to mask the clutter of ungainly metal laced across her teeth. But that night she looked poised and cheerful. Her father was Jamaican, and growing up she had this really striking, tightly wound curly hair that she hated. We'd spend hours at one of our houses, toying with blow dryers and straightening irons, a half dozen gels and creams, all promising that our hair would be straight and smooth, frizz-free. I thought about all that time we spent, trying so hard just to look like the people we wanted to be, and suddenly I realized how little I'd progressed since then. I still straightened my hair all the time, though now Eliza's was all natural—beautiful and curly, coiled and free, hanging just beneath her shoulders.

“Emma!” she said.

“Eliza! I was just thinking about you.”

“I ran into your parents a few weeks ago, they were so sweet.”

“Really?” I asked (and my whole body suddenly felt heavy, laden with worry at the thought of it—what had she seen?). “When? What were they doing?” I said.

“I don't know, maybe two or three weeks ago? It was just at the supermarket. I was so happy they even remembered me. We talked about the time they took us to that indoor amusement park upstate, in fifth grade. And how your parents squeezed into the kids' bumper cars with us.”

“Oh my god, I haven't thought about that in so, so long.”

“I know. I was actually so embarrassed, I don't know why I brought it up, but remember I got so carsick on the way back and threw up all over the backseat?”

“No,” I said smiling, “what are you talking about?”

“Stop, I know you do. It was so gross. But your mom was so nice, I just remember I was crying so much and really worked up, and she came and sat next to me in the backseat for the rest of the trip.”

I didn't remember this particular part of the story, but I did my best to conjure up the image, eager to see my mother the way Eliza did, maternal and kind, stroking her back so calmly, so benevolently.

JOSH hooked up his computer to this huge projection screen on the back wall, and a couple of minutes later we were watching a reel on YouTube of local news reporters with fluffy hair and business suits making egregious mistakes. One woman was saying “a top cock was injured in a car accident”; she kept trying to correct herself, saying “top cock, cock top,” then finally she got it right, “top cop.” Josh and Andy couldn't stop laughing. They replayed that one twice.

On the bottom of the screen there was a little ticker with the stocks going by and I thought,
What if there was a sign there for me, a coded message like the one my mother saw in those magazines?
Was I supposed to be on the lookout for signals? And then I felt it, the familiar panic blooming inside me. What the fuck was wrong with me? My mouth was dry and my chest felt so fragile, as if somehow my heart could beat right through it and fracture my ribcage.

In the bathroom I sat down on a feathery teal-colored bath mat. It was slightly damp and littered with clipped facial hair. I brought my knees to my chest and rested my head against the soft denim of my pants. I called Daniel but he didn't pick up. I texted him:
I'm freaking out a little bit, can you please call me
. I tried to steady my breathing, but it was as if I could actually feel my brain refusing to let it happen.
I'm crazy. Crazy Crazy Crazy. This is really happening, I'm fucking gone.

AT home, after the panic had subsided and I felt a dreamy calm settling in, Daniel finally called me back.

“Hey sorry, I was at a movie.”

“Why didn't you tell me?” I asked.

“Tell you what?”

“That you were going to a movie?”

“
Really?
Are we in that kind of relationship? It was two hours, come on.”

“It's just that I'm kind of having a hard time, you know, and I would like to feel as though I could rely on you to like, be in touch.”

There had been several of these conversations in the last two weeks and generally they went like this: Daniel would tell me that I wanted too much, expected too much of him, and I withdrew and was cold, and then, after a few hours in that uncomfortable, distant place, we'd drift back toward each other.

I wondered if later it would seem so obvious—how ill-equipped Daniel and I were to handle all this. Was it clear that I wanted something from him that he couldn't give me? Maybe I didn't even know precisely what that was—just something unconditional and all encompassing. But right then I hated him for not being able to take care of me, for not loving me enough to drop everything and be there when I needed him. For not wanting to hole up with me—to ignore everything else and just focus on soothing whatever kind of discomfort I was feeling.

“Can I change the subject for a minute?” Daniel asked that night on the phone. “I want to talk about New Year's.”

One of his friends had rented out some “space” on the Lower East Side and was charging fifty dollars for an open bar, the whole night. I told Daniel I couldn't do that. I would barely want to go to something like that anyway, but it just felt too weird with my mother being in the hospital.

“But you went to a party tonight!” Daniel argued.

“It wasn't a
party
. It wasn't like anything was being celebrated, it was just a few people hanging out.”

“Well, you don't need to
celebrate
New Year's. No one cares, it's not like a real celebration, obviously. It's just people having an excuse to get really drunk.”

“Plus that's so much money, I would never buy fifty dollars' worth of alcohol. I just can't go to some big party on New Year's Eve and pretend that none of this is happening! I'm sorry if that's annoying, but I just can't.”

“Well, I don't know what to tell you,” Daniel said. “I get that this is hard for you, but your mom's not dying. She's gonna be okay. And I know it sucks that she's in the hospital, but
you
aren't, and you don't need to act like you are.”

“Let me guess, you just want to be a seventeen-year-old dude and have normal, cry-free sex and get drunk and not have anything be a big deal?”

“That sounds like a trap, Emma, but yes, that's
exactly
what I want! What's wrong with that? I'm sorry that I just want to be a normal person and be happy and have fun on New Year's Eve.”

I let out some sort of exasperated groan, ended the call, and threw my phone onto the carpet beside my bed. I just couldn't deal with him. But an instant later, my phone vibrated and there was a square of light in my otherwise pitch-black room. I leaned over to pick it up, assuming Daniel was texting to either apologize or admonish me. Instead, it was Phil.
Hey, you awake?

I spent the next morning in bed, with my computer on my lap, rereading old e-mails from my mother. They were ordinary in every possible way, except suddenly they felt like artifacts of a different time. In reality it was only a few months earlier that I'd told her about Daniel, and she'd responded,

Like you said, I am “not going to make a big deal out of anything” but things with Daniel seem like they're going very well. Of course Daddy and I would love to meet him over Thanksgiving, but I'll leave that up to you . . .

Your job at the dining hall sounds not quite up your alley (to say the least) but it's great that you'll have a little paycheck for yourself. You're working so hard, I know. Daddy and I are both very proud of you.

And just a month earlier, in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, she'd written,

Grandma fell today and I got a call from Saul early this morning. She's okay, but will have to be in the hospital for a couple of days. It's unfortunate to have her so far away for the winter, but as I always say, it was her choice to move to Florida with her boyfriend. In any event, I'm sure she would love to hear from you.

I read through all of her e-mails from the past couple of months—once, twice, sometimes a third time. I was searching for some sign, some indication that this breakdown of hers was on its way. I tried so hard to find something ominous that I'd missed the first time around, but so far there was nothing.

A little while later I went into the kitchen—I could smell something cooking, maybe garlic or onions, and heard something sizzling. My father was dicing garlic and the counter was cluttered with glass bowls filled with finely chopped vegetables: red and yellow peppers, onions, thin spirals of orange zest. On the table he'd prepared a plate with scrambled eggs and rye toast with some jam. His back was to me as he worked.

“Whoa, look at this,” I said. “What's going on?”

“I'm making some food to bring over to the Friedmans' tonight, so I thought I'd make you some breakfast too. Nothing special, just some eggs.”

“Thanks.” I sat down at the table, still dressed in what I'd slept in—a sweatshirt and some flannel pajama pants that my ninth grade boyfriend had given me. “What are you making?”

“Cellophane noodles and vegetables.”

“What are cellophane noodles?”

“You know, those Chinese noodles, they're translucent and very fine. I used to make them all the time when you were a kid. With that peanut sauce you like?”

“You really need to do that right now?”

My father filled a pot with hot water and set it on the stove, added a sprinkle of salt.

“Need to? No. I just want to. What's the problem?”

“I don't know, it's just feels a little weird. Like, Mom's in the hospital and suddenly you're on steroids or something.”

I felt shitty the instant I said it, as though I was some trope character,
the sassy daughter
, on a sitcom.

“You don't need to be nasty about it, Emma. I like being busy, productive. There's nothing wrong with that. Everyone deals with these things differently, I think you know that.”

“Sorry. Thank you for making me breakfast.” I scooped some forkfuls of egg onto my toast. “I guess I just wonder if it's the best thing. Like maybe you could just tell the Friedmans that Mom's in the hospital and you're having a hard time and you don't want to go, instead of making this nice fancy meal for them.”

“It's not a meal, it's one dish. And I'd like to go.”

“I guess, for me, it just feels a little weird doing normal things while she's trapped in that place, like a zombie, you know.”

“I understand that sentiment, I really do, but I think it's important that we do try to do normal things,” my father said. “You need to. Mom is going to be okay, she really is, and her recovery is not contingent on you staying home and keeping vigil for her. I've done that in the past, when you were younger, but it doesn't work, it's not helpful to anybody. And I think I've learned that this is the best way to handle things when your mother is sick.”

“Okay,” I said. “I get it, thanks.”

But I didn't, not really. Unlike my father, this was all so new to me, and I couldn't help but feel the sting of those words, of my own ignorance. Having both Daniel and my father urge me to act like everything was fine didn't feel remotely helpful, and it made me feel so utterly lonely.

Daniel and I spent the rest of the afternoon arguing via different forms of communication. He texted to remind me that I went to his parents' Christmas party, so why was I protesting New Year's? I responded that I just wasn't feeling up to it, and that I wasn't mad at him and that I didn't care if he went to the party, I just didn't want to.

Then he called.

“I feel like you say that, and then I'm going to go out and then you're actually going to be really pissed.”

“I'm not,” I said. “I'm really not. Just enough already, please, I don't want to keep talking about this.”

“You'll use this against me later,” Daniel said. And he was probably right.

PHIL was waiting for me outside my house just before five. It was one of those winter afternoons where the sky seemed to have turned dark impossibly fast. It looked as though it could've been the middle of the night. We were quiet, both of us, when I got into the car. We'd been thrown into a strange space—how do we act normally, casually, after exchanging so much intimate information, as we had just hours earlier over the phone? I stared out at the trees, all dotted with red and green light. And even though I really didn't like New Year's, couldn't stand all that pressure to be happy, I was dreading the end of the festive season. I'd come to rely on the way the holidays punctuated the days, broke up my time. There was something frightening in what January brought, that cold, dark, open space to just be there, be present.

The night before, I lay in my bed, on top of my comforter, the phone cradled at my shoulder, feeling nearly suffocated by the steady flow of heat from the radiator as I talked to Phil. I'd answered the phone drowsily when he called, but after a few minutes I was awake and alert, enlivened by the sweetness of his voice, the way he was so warmly forthcoming as he offered his story to me. He told me about his brother's second, most recent suicide attempt, though Ted's therapist had treated the first attempt as more of a
gesture
. This time was more definitive, Phil told me. I wanted to know, but didn't ask how he'd done it, and I'd imagined that Phil wanted to keep that part of the story for himself, press the weight of those small, particular details close to him, not wanting to send them out into the world.

“He's textbook bipolar,” Phil said, “exactly what you hear about—waves of euphoria and then this horrible, crippling depression. I don't know how to explain what that's like, especially when Ted and I spent our whole childhood acting as though we were one person, when we share the same fucking DNA . . .” He trailed off and paused for a moment.

“The way I feel about Ted is like, how sometimes you hear pregnant women talk about their babies—you're ‘thinking for two' now—that's how I felt, that he was always just this other part of my consciousness. And still, every time I feel super-excited or invigorated by something, I wonder, is this mania? Is that what it's like? But I keep having to remind myself that it's
his
disease, not mine. It's hard. It's a struggle. Especially when something like this happens, you know. I mean, then everything is different.”

I envisioned Phil and Ted as two young boys sharing a small, cluttered bedroom: two twin beds side by side, identical dressers and piles of soiled clothing littering the floor beside them. Maybe a baseball bat or a worn leather mitt left carelessly in the middle of the room, and a fish tank in the corner, with a skeletal iguana crawling lazily from side to side, pressing his tiny, gummy fingers against the glass.

“In high school, there were times when I was so jealous of him and his mania,” Phil said, interrupting the image I'd conjured of them as children. “I couldn't understand why he was given this incredible wealth of energy and creativity. He'd go through these periods where he never needed any sleep, and sometimes, in ninth and tenth grade, I would try my hardest to stay up with him, but eventually I'd end up falling asleep. I'd wake up a few hours later and Ted would still be awake, sitting at his computer, typing away furiously, writing a paper or working on some short story.”

Phil kept talking for a long while, offering all his scattered, nuanced thoughts about his brother, compressed into this single monologue. I couldn't help but compare him to Daniel, who, only eighteen months younger, seemed infinitely less mature. Phil somehow came across as so wise—he was confident but humble, emotionally astute in a way that no other guy my age seemed to be.

It was after three in the morning when we finally got off the phone, and by then my eyes had completely adjusted to the darkness of my room. Everything had become visible—the words on the spines of the novels on my desk, the lacy straps of a tank top that hung from my chair, the frayed edges of a ribbon that Grandpa had been batting with his paws.

THE next day, there we were in the car, just a few miles from the hospital. The trees were bare and white on either side of us, and they almost looked like ashy remnants of a forest fire. I felt an urge to take Phil's free hand, warm it up between my palms. He was underdressed in this icy weather, no puffy down jacket, no hat, just a zip-up fleece and a navy scarf tied loosely around his neck. And even something about his body struck me as more mature, more manly than Daniel's. His face had a sculpted quality to it, and his shoulders were broad, in a brawny, superhero sort of way.

“Are you excited for this wild night?” Phil asked me. “When was the last time you spent New Year's Eve in a locked ward?”

“Oh stop,” I said. “It's not like that.”

He smiled. “I know, I know.”

“Though I guess, technically, literally, it
is
a locked ward.”

“That it is.”

“So what about afterward?” I asked.

“Afterward?”

“Yeah, I just don't know how long I want to stay there.”

“Well, let's see, afterward we'll find a bar somewhere that hasn't acknowledged it's a holiday, and we'll go and talk about how much we miss the way our families used to be, and how going to visit them at the hospital is the
best
thing, the
only
thing to do, but how it breaks our hearts a little bit each time. We'll mope around a little, and then we'll get shit-faced? How does that sound?”