I nodded. "At that time, only one wing was open. It looked different than it does now. The garden was still beautiful. The open wing was clean, and there were only a very few patients being cared for. My grandparents believed I'd get more personal care there than I would anywhere else."
Ryan sat back on the couch, looking surprised. "Wow, Lily."
I nodded. "I know. I can't remember much of what happened while I was there. They kept me highly medicated. It's all so bleary." I furrowed my brow. "But I wasn't there very long. I did get better, and I went home. And soon after, my mother died. An aneurism. Such a freak thing."
"Oh no, God, Lily. Baby, I'm so sorry."
"It sent me somewhere else again." I took a long, shuddery breath. "And back to Whittington I went."
"Oh, Jesus."
I nodded, recalling how cold it'd been there, how the lights were always too bright, the noises too loud. "Again, I wasn't there for very long . . . I went home. But I couldn't cope. Couldn't cope with the loss of my mother, with living in the world without her. Maybe I wasn't ready. I don't know."
"Lily, you'd never been given a chance to grieve. Did your grandparents help you with that? Did anyone help you with that?"
No, no one had. "No, they wouldn't talk about her. I think they thought mentioning her name would drive me into a psychotic break. And maybe they were even right, but," I sucked in a breath, "not to talk about her, to just pretend she'd never existed, when she had been my whole world. My everything. It was . . . unbearable. God, Ryan, it hurt so much." I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. It still did. She was the only person who knew the horrific images I'd seen. She was the only person who knew the crushing helplessness I'd felt that night. I missed her so desperately.
"I know, baby." He brought my hand to his mouth and kissed my palm.
"Last year, it happened again, and that's why I ran away." I lowered my eyes. I could describe it from my doctors' perspectives, but I wanted him to understand it from mine. "It's so difficult to explain and have it sound rational because it's not rational. It's not and I know it." I paused. "The world shifts, and something in me shifts, too, because I just accept it. I accept a new story, a new life, new characters. Sometimes it's only a slight variation of my real life, and sometimes it's entirely different." As if I were looking at the real world through a kaleidoscope, there, but changing, shifting with a thousand different colors, and patterns, and light. I watched my own hands fidget in my lap, feeling embarrassed and insecure.
"I know," he said softly, because he did know. I looked up at him and saw the understanding, the acceptance in his eyes and felt both love and sadness blossom in my chest. My lips tipped up into what felt like a sad smile, and I nodded, taking a deep breath before continuing. "Last spring, I began imagining my mother was still alive. My grandfather—who had been ill—had passed away a few months before, and my grandmother was planning to sell Whittington. And in my imaginings, my mother wanted to spend the summer there. Just a couple months of the two of us, of mountain air, and sunshine, and a reprieve from my grandmother who did nothing but stare at my mom and me with worry and walk around wringing her hands. I can't even tell you exactly why it made sense in my mind that we go there. I could tell you the conversations I had with my mom, I could explain it all, but it would make me sound like the crazy person I am."
"Lily, stop, don't say it like that." His voice was raspy.
"It's true, though, isn't it?"
Ryan sighed, pressing his lips together for a moment. "I guess we're both crazy people, then. And Lily, I think that sometimes, well sometimes, the only way to survive is to go crazy."
I thought about that for a moment, how similar grief and madness seemed, two sides of the same coin perhaps. I thought about how the grief stricken tore at their hair, their clothes, seeming to want to escape their skin. And I thought about how the mentally ill sometimes did the very same thing. I'd seen it often enough at the institutions I'd been at, felt like doing it myself. Perhaps that's what a mental illness really was—an extreme, long-lasting cousin to grief. How did you carry such a thing with grace?
And he had to understand . . . "It happens to me again and again, Ryan. It happens over and over—even when things are seemingly fine."
"You've been well for a year now."
"Yes, and I've been well for a year before. Is this really something you want to deal with? When you already have struggles of your own? When you're just getting well? Just feeling strong? You are, aren't you?" I felt tears stinging my eyes again, one spilling over.