It’s a hard, jagged line that rises high to attack the edge of the paper, like a burst of flames.
This is when the understanding leaks into me, faster and so much more welcome than a sedative. Fiona is trying to communicate. She drew me this symbol, and she pulled that alarm. In doing so, she showed me the way out.
Because there it is in the paper carving she did for me:
Fire.
She wants one.
But she hasn’t said why yet.
— 54 —
MY mom’s wardrobe choices for me make me question her mental state. Once the nurses let me have everything she’s brought for me, I discover that she’s packed me more socks and also the ugliest sweaters and sweatshirts I own, ones she would have had to go digging through my drawers to find, and more than I’d need for staying only through the weekend. For my therapy appointment, I’m encased in a bright orange sweatshirt, the cautionary color of traffic cones, and if there’s anything that says I’m not myself, it’s this. Only a very sick person would wear this shirt.
The one thing my mom didn’t send was the necklace. It wasn’t anywhere in the bags she packed for me, not even in the pockets. It’s all I can think about now, how I’ve lost it, how without it I’ve broken my connection to the other girls. Fiona is here with me, but the others—I can’t hear them, and I haven’t dreamed them, and it’s Abby I keep wondering about, Abby I miss most of all.
“How are you feeling today, Lauren?”
the doctor is asking me. Or she may have asked this minutes ago, and I still haven’t formed my answer.
Some days I see one doctor in a group with the other patients, and other days this doctor, alone. The last time I was in here alone with this doctor I was asked all about wanting to harm myself, which I denied, and I’ll say the same today.
This time, though, when I say I’m feeling better, the doctor asks about the voices. “The girls,” she calls them, as if she was pleasantly introduced to each of them before I came in the room and they’ve stepped out for a moment, perhaps for tea.
How long have they been talking to me? she wants to know. Do they ever ask me to do things, things that scare me or upset me? Things I’d rather not do?
“Like what kinds of things?” I ask.
“Violent things,” she says carefully.
Her hair is layered and cropped short, and her pantsuit is wrinkled in only one spot as if she ironed everywhere else but the left knee. This mistake in her pants seems violent to me.
“No,” I say.
“Such as trying to hurt your mother?”
she says, and waits.
“That’s not what happened,” I start, getting upset. “I’d never hurt my mom.
Who do you guys think I am?”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” she says, then switches gears. “Tell me about this party where you lost your keys. That was a bad night, wasn’t it? What happened?”
“I lost my keys.” She stays silent, so I keep talking. “I guess I dropped them. I don’t remember. I kind of blacked out.”
“Do you have blackouts like this often? When you wake up and don’t remember what you’ve done? Or maybe when people tell you that you’ve done things and you have no memory of doing them?”
I’m not sure what someone told her I did beyond losing the keys; my mom wasn’t even there that night. Has she been talking to Jamie? Did Jamie say something?
“That’s like something I saw on TV
once,” I say. “Multiple personalities, I think. Is that what you mean? Like I black out and someone other than me takes over and makes people call me by a different name?”
“I’m not saying that at all. Is that what you’re saying?”
She leans forward and the large button earrings she has fastened into her lobes droop low, skimming her shoulders. The earrings themselves are bigger than her ears and must weigh a ton. It’s like she’s decorated herself with two plates from her kitchen.