I fold up the letter again and slip it into the drawer of my nightstand. I’m looking out the window and I’m thinking how happy I am she’s alive and then I’m thinking how I’m still alive myself. Still intact and in this body and breathing through these lungs. Still here. Two twists I wasn’t expecting.
It’s a Thursday now maybe, or it could be a Friday. I don’t have to go back to school until next week. My mom has taken a semester leave, saying she can’t juggle classes on top of her job and wanting to be home to take care of me right now. I joke with her about how she could have asked for extra credit, since she can do a home-study of a mental disorder under her own roof and hopefully I’m enough to fill a thesis paper, but she barely cracks a smile.
I shouldn’t be joking about it. She doesn’t even want me to say the word in front of her (schizophrenia), though doesn’t she know how an unsaid word (schizophrenia) holds more power the longer it’s kept from touching your tongue? The fact that it’s unsaid, and that it could be years before I get an official diagnosis, makes me wonder about it all the more. In the night, I tiptoed downstairs to pore through her college psychology textbooks, seeing what the “positive” and “negative” symptoms are and ticking off how many I’ve had. I also read about how it doesn’t go away, how there’s no cure. People who have this spend their whole lives on antipsychotic medications to keep the delusions and the voices away. And even then, the meds don’t always work. The cocktail can change often—it’s never the same mix for everyone. There’s no way to know.
It’s realizing all this that scares me more than anything supernatural ever could. The concept of a ghost, I can understand; the misfiring synapses of my brain, I can’t. One is outside and apart from me and something I could run from, but the other is me. The other is what I am. So I’ve been thinking on it for all these months, and I’ve decided.
I just have to play along whenever my mom’s around.
Now she’s fluffing my pillows. She’s asking me what I think of couscous for dinner tonight. I’m not sure if that’s what we want to eat, but I say it’s fine.
After my mom watches me swallow today’s dose of meds, she says she’ll go make dinner in the kitchen now. But she lingers, at the doorway, blinking her eyes so they don’t water. She does this more and more, this staring, like she can’t believe I exist. It’s how I used to look at the girls, before I got used to them.
“You can go,” I tell her. “I’ll just be in here, reading.” I hold up a novel I’ve barely started because I can’t pay attention to books right now beyond page one. I use my bad arm to lift it, and she flinches, even though it’s just a few Band-Aids now, only to keep the scars covered.
I’ve been wanting to tell her so many things about how lucky I am to have her, but I can’t seem to get out the words, so I haven’t said any of that yet. I only hope she already knows.
She’s gotten a new tattoo, to commemorate this, which is a strange thing to do, but she says it’s a healthy way to handle trauma. It’s not on her chest. That’s still clean—I keep checking. It’s on her arm. So when I see her walk out of the room, I also catch my own face staring back at me, like a stunted anthropomorphic owl perched on her shoulder. I also always check to make sure the beauty mark is on the correct side of her face, so I’m sure the person wearing my image is really her. It says something to me, that she’s done this, tattooed me on her body. It says she’ll be here for me no matter what, and I know for a fact that some of the girls can’t say that about their mothers. Not all girls can.
If I’d been one of the missing, my mom would have never given up on me.
Never.
Once she’s gone, I don’t touch the book. I watch the window for some time.