Regan
Georgia stopped mid-stride, but didn’t turn around. It was as if she were waiting to see if she’d heard me correctly.
“Georgia,” I called again.
She turned around this time, her face caked in a shame I wanted to take away. It didn’t belong there.
“Come. Sit.” I moved over, patting the place next to me.
She tilted her head to the side, like she couldn’t understand me, but she walked anyway. When she reached the wall, she put her palms behind her on the ledge and lifted herself so she was sitting next to me.
“I’m sor—” we spoke at the same time, both snickering nervously.
She put her hand on my leg. “Me first. I’m sorry about this morning.”
“What are you sorry for?” I wasn’t testing her. I just needed to make sure we were on the same page.
“Well ... you met my mom. Because she’s alive.”
“You never told me she was dead.” I’d come to that conclusion somewhere during my swim, but that was all just a technicality.
Georgia crossed her legs in front of her. “We both know that’s bullshit, Regan. I don’t know why you’re being so decent about it.”
“So, what’s ... the deal there?” I tucked my hair behind my ears and leaned back.
“Did you open your letter?”
“Uh-uh. We’ll talk about that later, though. I think we can agree that I’ve shared a bit more than you have in recent weeks.”
Her shoulders sank as she sighed. A long, thoughtful sigh.
“Schizophrenia.”
She paused, looking up at me and squinting the sun away from her eyes. I didn’t react. Not a twitch of a muscle or a blink of an eye. She expected me to, maybe wanted me to by the challenging look on her face, but I wasn’t going to. She wasn’t getting away without giving me some actual information.
I lifted my eyebrows, urging her to continue.
“My mother has schizophrenia, and she’s spent the last few weeks at Breezy Pointe, an inpatient psychiatric facility north of La Jolla.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” I replied stupidly. Of course I didn’t know.
“That was by design.” She seemed to echo my thoughts.
“Why?”
Georgia shifted so she was facing me, her bent knee resting warmly against my outer thigh. “Why what? Why she was at the Pointe or why I didn’t tell you?”
“Both, I guess.”
She cleared her throat. “My mother has catatonic schizophrenia. With the right blend of meds and therapy, she can function just as well as you and me. If something gets out of balance with the therapies or in her brain, everything goes haywire.”
“She didn’t look catatonic,” I interjected.
“I was getting to that. It’s kind of on a spectrum, erratic behavior on one end, and catatonia, like you’re probably thinking, on the other. It’s rare she has episodes like you’re thinking, but when that happens she needs medical intervention. She’s completely unable to take care of herself. Feeding, bathing, all of it.”
Georgia’s cheeks reddened as she spoke. I reached my hand over and touched her knee, but she bounced it, indicating she didn’t want me to touch her. I pulled away before she did.
“Anyway, that’s what sent her in a few weeks ago, then the weekend that I met you guys, I went to visit her and she had kind of a mental flare, you know, like a solar flare. She grabbed my wrist and had to be restrained, and that earned her another week and a half...” She trailed off and looked skyward, taking a deep breath.”
“Shit...” I sighed on instinct. Then, I put it together. “Fuck, all the commotion about the bruise on your wrist. That wasn’t about Dex at all.”
She shrugged. “He’s totally innocent.”
“But,” I started with further revelation, “you never actually said he did anything.”
“Fancy, huh?” She gave a wry grin, but I didn’t buy it.
“Why do you lie?”
“I don’t fucking lie,” she snapped.
“Then why do you ... I don’t know ... craft a different reality?”
My words seemed to strike somewhere deep. Her eyes filled with thick tears and she slid off the wall and walked toward the water.
“Georgia!” I shouted, “I’m sorry, don’t go.”
“No, it’s okay,” she called over her shoulder. “Just walk with me.”
I caught up to her and put my hands in my pockets. “So...”
“When I was little,” she started after a quiet sniffle, “my mom was really honest with me about the schizophrenia. She was diagnosed when I was four, and left my dad when I was ten.”
“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.”