Relief flooded through me. He might get help, a magic pill to clear his mind … and it would take the responsibility away from me. But handing him off for the doctors to deal with felt like taking the easy way out. A cheat to keep the kids and me safe. “I think he’s bipolar. Really bad. He’ll be there a long time,” I said, scared and hopeful.
“That’s the theory,” Mom continued. “But in reality he’s quit his job and has no insurance. They’ll keep him long enough to get him stable and then, because they have a dozen critical people waiting for the next open bed, they’ll send him home.”
“Home?” Not my home. Not anymore. I couldn’t.
I could guess how things would go down at the state hospital. They’d give him pills to level things out and quiet the paranoia. He would quit them no more than a day or two after his release. I could watch him at first, make sure he swallowed them morning and night. But then I’d start to settle into the belief that everything was fixed. All better. And one night at 3:25 A.M. a tiny wiggle of paranoia would slip past the drugs and whisper that he shouldn’t take them. The medicine was poison, or mind control, or a plot to dull his creative genius. He’d skip just a few, just to test the idea, and when his mania returned and set him on top of the world, he would know beyond any doubt that the pills were bad, and that would be that. More looney times. More days like this one.
Time. I’d have to buy some so I could form a plan. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes to sign.”
–9–
Rise
Shop Not Shopping
On the first night of Christmas break, I couldn’t sleep even after finishing an old Stephen King novel and starting DeMille’s latest. My reading had turned a hundred percent to action settings far removed from my own, and a touch of the supernatural was a bonus. Roman had fallen asleep later than usual after a late nap, and he was on the other side of my bed, kicking off the covers faster than I could spread them back over his cold feet.
Using my phone, I updated a building to-do list and added notes to a file for my mystery novel. Still, the sandman refused to visit. I wanted to blame it on my double serving of pie, even though I knew digestion-related insomnia was for people with more simple lives.
Pouring the house’s footing had been a wake-up call. Not only was the project a million times more difficult than I had imagined, but it was a mere metaphor for what I really needed to do. I had fooled myself into believing that building a physical house was the same as rebuilding our family. While we might still use the physical build to accomplish the personal one, they were two distinctly different creatures and required individual diets. I felt enormously out of my league in both cases, like I’d adopted a Saint Bernard and an elephant.
I needed to meditate, to find peace with myself and let go of the past, before I could build my future. But I was afraid of what I would find if that bright world reappeared when I relaxed my toes and let the essence of myself float away. More specifically, I was afraid of who I would find. I didn’t have any real-life friends anymore, and I’d grown afraid of the two imaginary people I had adopted as allies, as frightened of meeting them again as I was of my unlocking-door nightmare playing a rerun.
Caroline had been my inspiration for the house, a strong woman who wasn’t afraid to express her opinion, to stand up for herself, to build a new life when the old one was blown to pieces. I’d imagined her encouraging me, lending a sisterly shoulder when I felt all alone. But somewhere along the way her voice had turned from empowering chants to vengeful whispers, and I was beginning to think she was little more than a dark side of my own mind. In order to banish Caroline, or at least rediscover the positive elements of her spirit, I would have to come face-to-face with another unnerving spirit, Benjamin.
The old man, thin-shouldered and withered from sunlight, had seen me naked. Not skin naked, but soul naked, and that was scarier than revealing the stretch marks on my tummy or the mole under my right breast. I had started moving past feeling like a victim of Adam and Matt, which sounds like a good thing, but my angry thoughts of revenge were dark enough to scare me. Blaming them on Caroline, a spirit I’d made up, wasn’t going to hold for long. And if they were really and truly my thoughts from the start, then I knew that Benjamin would see them. And the things from before—like that I’d stayed with Adam and let my kids be damaged by his insanity, or that I hadn’t left Matt even when he slammed my pregnant body into walls or left bruises on my neck—Benjamin would know those things, too. I imagined him snarling in disapproval, looking away in disgust, and saying, “You should have been more like Caroline. She would never jack things up like you have. Caroline, come here, sweetheart. Show Cara how to fix this mess. Take pity on her.”
Without even considering that my focus would call him up, I pulled the covers to my chin and slipped directly into my meditation world instead of sleep. The light was there, warm and inviting enough that I forgot I was afraid to enter. Caroline didn’t show herself, invisible as always, but Benjamin was there, cross-legged and looking deep into my eyes. I didn’t want to be afraid of him, I wanted to get him talking. So I did the only thing I could think of, a move my grandpa had taught me many years ago: I took away my enemy’s bargaining chip. No one could make me feel paralyzed or manipulated by secrets if I didn’t have any. I opened my mind and welcomed him without restriction.
Go ahead, I told him. Weigh the good and bad of me.
Once he knew every little corner, I could move on from that dreadful place. If he didn’t like what he saw, then he could move on, too. He was part of my own mind, a creation of my subconscious, which had to mean I could boot him right out if I wanted to. As soon as I thought it, I knew it wasn’t true. I did not create Benjamin, he simply was, and I had no more power to boot him out than to make him speak.
Chin a notch too high and avoiding eye contact, I must have looked like a defiant teenager. This is me, damn it. This is who I am and what I’ve done. Take it or leave it.
Benjamin didn’t move, just watched me with his slow-motion blink the only proof he wasn’t a statue. His lip didn’t snarl in disgust, and his eyebrows remained smooth, relaxed. The furrows on his brow were from age and smiles, not disapproval. I had the sense that he was not only watching me, but watching out for me, and then I slept. There were no nightmares and no lectures from Caroline, and I now understood that those were two different things.