“Oh,” Sophie said, stepping back until the backs of her knees bumped a chair. She tipped down into it without looking to make sure her aim was straight.
I stood behind her with no intention of staying long enough to make myself comfortable.
Dr. Christe sat a seat away, long legs stretched forward and arms propped on the backs of the chairs on either side of him. “One of the first things we do to give the patient a break, a little rest from the voices, is to medicate them until the voices stay silent.”
He pointed at the shuffling man.
I forced my eyes to follow the line of his finger, and this time the man was Adam, looking old and lost. Vacant.
“Adam’s voices are stubborn things. Some people don’t need much at all to quiet things down. This is how far we had to go to silence Adam’s voices, though. Damn near as far as you can and stay conscious.”
Christe leaned forward, knees on his elbows, observing his specimen like Jada watching fireflies in a jar. “We won’t leave him this far under. Next step is to teach him to deal with the voices we can’t eradicate. Help him learn he doesn’t have to do everything they say, and he doesn’t have to answer them. We’ll try to help him tell the difference between what is real and what isn’t.”
“It’s all real to him,” I said, my voice stronger than I expected it to be.
Dr. Christe turned to look at me, but I was watching drool pool on Adam’s chest. The effort of keeping his mouth closed was too much and he’d given up trying.
“Yes. It’s real to him. But we’ll do our best to help him make good decisions,” he said.
A powerful wave of pity washed over me. Adam had lined my bed with knives while I slept. He had lied to me and tortured the neighbor’s cat. He had told me terrible things that I would never know for sure if he had done or only dreamed. But I could see that on some level it was out of his control. A disease had stolen his mind, taken his family, haunted him with horrors none of us could understand. I had vowed to stand by him in sickness and in health. My guilt surged as strong as my pity. I had abandoned this poor drooling man, kicked him out of his home and had him involuntarily committed after his mind fled through no fault of his own.
But how could I take care of three kids and still have time to nurse a gravely ill man? Sophie must have asked about supplies and care packages, because the doctor listed things Adam could and could not have. The priority was clothes. “Patients do better when they have their own clothes. They feel more like people than patients. But no belts. No shoestrings. No jewelry. And he’ll need toiletries, too. Skip the dental floss—it’s practically unbreakable, you know. And the toothpaste has to come in a pump, no tubes. Even plastic tube corners are sharp enough to slice a wrist.”
I tuned them out. If he really wanted to kill himself, wouldn’t a shirtsleeve or pant leg work every bit as well as dental floss? “I’m going to get going,” I said, standing and walking to the door. “I can see how bad he is. I knew that.” I hadn’t, though. I hadn’t known how bad he was. Even after I heard he had given a sales pitch to an empty room, I had never imagined he was this crazy. All the way gone. Schizophrenia. I expected Sophie and the doctor to protest, tell me how much more there was to see and learn, but they didn’t. Sophie looked like she’d been punched in the gut. I felt guilty for leaving her to deal with everything.
“It’s good that you came. Any time you have concerns you can contact me. I’m happy to help. Do you have questions before you go?”
I shook my head, but then realized I did have one. “How long will he be here?”
“We’ll get him stable and then treat him as an outpatient. Things will get better after he qualifies for some medical assistance. He’s uninsured at the moment.”
He could see I wanted more than that. I wanted the whole truth.
“Three to five days.”
Like most things over the past few months, it was worse than I thought. Three to five days of safety. I nodded and walked out the door alone.
I would have to tell the kids a little about what was going on before Adam was released. It might help them to know that his mind was messed up and he wasn’t doing things out of spite. Life was never what you thought it was going to be.
My mom always said a person isn’t given more than they can handle. But that was only the first step of a lovely thought. I had moved on to step two, and it was less lovely. A person has to let go of the things that are too big and dangerous to hold close.
–11–
Rise
Sounds Easy
The kids said they didn’t have homework and I didn’t push it even though I had a feeling they were bending the truth. We needed to get away, out of this house, out of this mind-set. We needed to feel the physical stretch of moving heavy objects and the mental stretch that reminded us we were eating the elephant bite by bite, doing the impossible, building someplace safe.
So we went to the job site, this time with a small battery-powered CD player from the garage. The speakers were tinny and weak, but Drew had made an upbeat CD with a mix we could mostly sing along to. Even Roman danced to the beat while he waded into puddles whispering to himself, “Don’t get muddy. Stay out of the mud.”
Hershey came with us, even though she would be a muddy mess on the way home. She’d been lonely at the house. And though I didn’t want to admit it aloud, I worried about the old girl. Tail wagging lazily, she followed Roman, nudging him now and then like a wayward pup.
Hope and I ran neon-pink strings from wooden frames I had pounded into the ground at each corner. We hung a line level from the taut string to get a level mark for the top of the first block row. The house was on a slight incline—or at least it had looked slight—so the foundation would be highest in the front corner under my library and lowest in the back corner under the kitchen. What had looked like a difference of only a few blocks when we had eyeballed it was actually about six feet. That would put my library floor nearly eight feet off the ground. This wasn’t what I had imagined, and I started to worry about the block-and-fill foundation plan. It wasn’t too late to build a different type of foundation, with a wooden floor that would leave the space under the house empty instead of filling it in.
I decided not to settle for that. With everything in our lives feeling hollow, I needed our house to be connected to the earth. We all needed solid ground under our feet.