The Law of Loving Others (14 page)

But instead, when he walked over to me, I asked him politely how long the medication usually took to start working, if he perhaps had a sense of when she'd really start to seem better?

“Unfortunately these things take time,” Paul said. “We start seeing slight improvements, but generally it takes about six weeks for these things to really take full effect. If you want to talk to the psychiatrist, I can grab her for you. I'm really not the medication person. Dr. Kaplan can give you a better, more nuanced sense of what's going on with that.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said. “Maybe I'll talk to her some other time.”

When I got back to the room a few minutes later, my mother had calmed down a bit, and the plastic shell of the smoke alarm hung limply from a wire. My parents and I decided to go upstairs to the terrace room.
It was the third floor of the building that she was staying in—a wide open space with big windows and an angular glass roof. The late-afternoon light poured through the long dusty windows. The sky was changing colors, from pale purple to blue, and the horizon was low around us. It was beautiful but somehow grim, all those leafless trees, their bare branches waiting patiently for spring. There was a low-level chatter in
the room
,
the muffled talk of the families who congregated uncomfortably at a series of round plastic tables: grown children visiting parents, a handful of couples who played board games tearfully. Sometimes it was difficult to tell who was visiting whom.

My mother still seemed a little shaken, a little weepy. I rested my hand on her back, on the pale pink cotton T-shirt slightly damp with sweat. “It's all right, Mom,” I told her, “you're gonna be all right.” She put her head down on the table and let out a little moan and my father walked away.

He stood by the window, with his hands buried in the front pockets of his jeans, a little bit hunched over. My father, quite literally, could never face his anger. He was generally so good-natured, so patient, but every now and then in moments full of tension, he just walked away, left the room, browsed a bookshelf, a spice rack, anything to avoid confronting an uncomfortable, painful truth. I was in ninth grade when my parents found out I'd been lying about sleeping at Annie's and was really at my boyfriend's, fooling around in the dank and dimly lit basement of his parents' house. I think this was when the idea of boarding school began to appeal to them—when they saw a flicker of some potentially dark trajectory, like maybe I'd turn into one of
those girls
. The kind who skipped class to smoke joints and sip forties in the parking lot, who carelessly let go of their virginities, propped up against a bathroom sink or in the backseat of an old sedan. Maybe I'd even get pregnant at sixteen and try to conceal my rounded belly beneath a loose-fitted sweatshirt, and just like that my whole life would veer off track. That night, they sat me down in the dining room and my mother said that we needed to start setting some serious limits, but
my father had already wandered away, wandered into the den, where he probably stared blankly at the rows and rows of colorful CDs that lined his shelves.

“Do you want to play Scrabble?” my father asked when he returned. The table where we sat was stacked with board games: Apples to Apples, Trivial Pursuit, Scattergories.

“Okay,” my mother said, softly. “Okay, maybe we should.”

“We haven't played this in so long,” I said. “Remember when I memorized all those Q words that had no U?”

“Of course, you'd walk around the house yelling out those words like you were practicing for a spelling bee,” my father said. He unfolded the Scrabble board and we all picked out our letters. I got six vowels and a
Z
.

A woman with fiery red hair in a velvety bathrobe approached us, paused for a moment and then said, “I did a terrible thing, I swallowed the sperm of a man who was not my husband.” She went to every table and said this, like a waitress reporting the daily special. When she came back to us a second time, my mother grabbed her hand and said, “Marie, it's okay. It's okay, sweetie.”

Even there, despite her madness, she offered that warmth, showed that instinct to be generous with her love. And there in the terrace room I saw the briefest, slightly heartbreaking, flicker of her old self.

IT was snowing heavily, two days later, when I met Daniel's mother for lunch. If my mother had been around, she would've insisted that I stay home, that the drive to the station wouldn't be safe, that the roads would be slick with ice and sleet, and that even the train itself was more dangerous on days like this. I went anyway because I needed to keep busy, keep moving.

I had somehow been able to convince myself that nothing had happened with Phil, that our flirtatious texts were only that, and that everything was normal with Daniel. But every so often I felt seized by guilt, a hollowing out of my insides, an ache in a place I couldn't quite name.

On the Metro-North train into the city, I took my shoes off and sat cross-legged on the vinyl seat. My coat rested like a blanket across my chest. I got lost in a dark fantasy about my mother where she never got any better. She went from hospital to hospital and eventually my father decided to move her into a group home—some big Victorian house where she shared a bedroom, ate meals, and partook in communal activities with two dozen other adults who could not care for themselves. I saw her name on a laminated chore wheel stuck to the refrigerator. Some days she would sweep or clean the bathrooms. Other days she would stand in the kitchen and skin potatoes and carrots, like some sort of forlorn zombie with an apron tied loosely around her waist, muttering to herself about the malevolent spirits trying to hurt her through the heating vents. I imagined that my father would have a girlfriend—someone smart enough and kind enough, but she would have none of my mother's depth. She would be too skinny and do lots of yoga and drink smoothies and she would not have any sense of irony at all. She would say stupid things like how great it was that we lived in a post-racial society and that I needed to accept, or even embrace, my mother's illness to really know and love her true self. I wanted to pour a steaming cup of coffee straight into the lap of my father's imaginary girlfriend, onto her white linen pants.

I started crying somewhere in the Bronx and the sweetly sympathetic ticket collector stopped and asked if I was okay. He looked so young, like he could've been fifteen, with one of those faint mustaches growing in, just some downy hair above his lip. He had a hole-puncher in his hand and he clicked it absently and then stuck some tickets into his breast pocket.

“You okay?” he asked. “Need a tissue?”

“Sorry, thanks,” I said. “I'm okay, just some family stuff.”

“Oh,” he said. “Been there.”

As I said the words
family stuff
, it felt like a lie even though I knew it was true. A kind of shorthand for any number of things, but it was marked with a particular significance, as if it gave me license to wallow, to fuck up and act out. And now that was exactly what I'd done—used my
family stuff
to get drunk and sloppy with Phil. It felt so cheap, like it was just an excuse to be an asshole with flimsy morals. What felt the worst was that my family had always been so uncomplicated (not that it had been perfect—there were years that were punctuated with lots of unpleasant yelling and the fierce slamming of doors), but now things felt different, truly fractured. I had always felt this kind of smug superiority when people complained about their families—parents who'd had an ugly divorce and were using their kids against them, or had an estranged brother or uncle whom they hadn't spoken to in a decade. But I saw then that none of us was impervious to this kind of tangled, familial mess. We were never
really
in the clear.

I met Daniel's mother at EJ's Café on Columbus and 84th Street and I was covered in sleet by the time I got there, my hair crunchy with ice. There were only a handful of other people in the restaurant—an elderly couple sitting beside each other and sharing a tuna fish sandwich, a pair of red-headed children across the booth from their father, sipping chocolate milk out of two oversized glasses.

Jane ordered coffee and a beet salad; I got a grilled cheese sandwich on rye bread. I'd been feeling so on edge and was in this constant vaguely nauseated state. All I wanted to eat was simple, bland food.

For a while Jane and I talked about other things, the classes I'd signed up for next semester, Daniel's sister's travels. It wasn't until the check arrived that Jane asked about my mother, how she was feeling, how we were both doing.

“It's like there's simultaneously both too much and nothing to say,” I told her.

“What do you mean?”

“Every day it feels like so much is going on, but I spend time with her at the hospital and nothing is actually happening. I don't feel like she's getting any better.”

“It takes time,” Jane said. “Do you know what she was taking before all this happened?”

“No! That's the thing. I knew and know nothing. Maybe she was on something and stopped taking it? I have no idea.”

“That's very common,” Jane assured me. “People take their medications and they work so well that they feel like they don't need them anymore. It happens all the time. Or sometimes they don't even stop taking them but the meds need to be readjusted, a little more of this or less of that. But I think you can trust that your mother will return to her baseline; it's just a matter of time.”

I told her about my panic attacks. That they came out of nowhere and made me feel like I was losing my mind, that my heart just sped up and I couldn't seem to align myself with reality, to the actual moment that I was in. That I had these moments where I was terrified I was going crazy.

“Emma,” she said, and something in her voice was both stern and calming. “Your mother has an illness, but
you
don't. Having anxiety is actually a
healthy
reaction to what's going on right now. You're going through a lot, but I promise, absolutely promise, that you'll be all right.”

I wanted to tell her about the information I'd read—that the average onset of schizophrenia was twenty-five, so I was definitely not in the clear, not yet. That she couldn't know for sure that I didn't have it. That according to the research I'd done, if you had one parent with schizophrenia, there was a 10 to 15 percent chance that you would develop it as well. And so, at that very moment, schizophrenia could've been there, lying dormant in my brain, waiting for the precise moment to strike. But I wanted to believe Jane, I wanted to let her comfort me and felt so relieved that she had answered with such certainty, that suddenly I was so hungry. I finished my sandwich, dragged some remaining fries into a puddle of ketchup and stuffed them in my mouth.

“Have you ever done yoga? Or any kind of mindfulness, breathing exercises?” Jane asked.

“No, I'm bad at that sort of stuff. It's okay, I'm okay.”

She offered to refer me to a therapist she knew, someone
brilliant
, she said, who could really sit down and talk with me,
unpack all this stuff
.

I thanked her and said I'd think about it. I drained the rest of my coffee, which was now chilly and sweet, the sugar all resting there at the bottom of the ceramic mug like grainy cement.

WE stepped outside and though it had stopped snowing, the air still felt frigid, impossibly cold.

“I would love to take you somewhere nice,” Jane said, wrapping a long orange scarf around her neck. “I never got you a Hanukkah present. Maybe we can make a quick stop at Bloomingdales?”

“No, Jane! That's ridiculous, so unnecessary.”

“It would be a real treat for me. My daughter's been gone for months so I haven't been able to take anyone shopping! Maybe we can get you a nice new hat? Or a bag? That tote you're carrying is ripping at the seams.”

We stopped at the corner and waited for the light. There were discarded Christmas trees everywhere. People had been depositing them on street corners, leaning them against garbage cans. The sidewalks were littered with pine needles, and when I looked down for a moment, the pavement, ornamented with so much green, could have been mistaken for the floor of a forest.

DANIEL and I fell back into our old routine so effortlessly and I felt relief sweep over me. I couldn't undo it, but as more time passed I could convince myself nothing had really happened with Phil, and it felt like I was driving farther and farther away from the scene of a crime.

All the news outlets warned that a big nor'easter was coming and we had to prepare for the worst: buy food, fill bathtubs with water, stock up on batteries and flashlights. Jane went to the supermarket and came back with bags and bags filled with groceries.

“All stocked up!” she said

Daniel and I helped put the food away. There was arugula, fresh mozzarella, eggplant, baby carrots, a bright orange block of cheddar, a block of Parmesan, three different kinds of breads (a French baguette, a loaf of whole wheat, some pita pockets), a roasted chicken, and some deli meats too, smoked turkey, slices of prosciutto.

Just before five, Daniel and I decided to smoke a joint and go to the planetarium, which was only a few blocks from his apartment. We were about to walk out the door when Daniel said he forgot something. He brought back a little sock puppet with googly eyes and gray yarn for hair.

“What
is
that?” I asked.

“You don't know who this is?”

“Einstein? Your grandpa? I don't know!”

“It's Sir Isaac Newton.”

“Stop,” I said. “You're so cute. When did you make this?”

“It's not cute, it's manly. He should come with us, he loves astronomy.”

As we walked over to the museum, we held hands and Daniel told me facts about Isaac Newton: he was born tiny and premature and nobody thought he would survive, he was raised by his grandmother, he was brilliant but was also considered a tyrant.
And
, he suffered two nervous breakdowns during his lifetime.

Every so often Daniel surprised me with this erudite side of his and I felt like such an idiot for ever doubting his intelligence.

AT the planetarium, we sat in the back, in plush velvet seats, and looked up at the fake, majestic sky. We were still in our puffy coats and snow boots. I whispered to him, “Do you remember that episode of Friends where Ross and Rachel come here?” Daniel smiled, kept looking straight ahead.