She tried the words out in her head. They lay there meaninglessly, like an innocent-looking chunk of plutonium.
Anderson turned down one street and then another, and the guard waved them out the gate. They were back in the world now, the confusing, hectic reality. They turned down Main Street, toward the motel. The GPS lady sang her indifferent tune. “Continue point two miles. Then turn left on Pleasant Street.”
Pleasant, Janie thought. The word echoed in her brain, transformed into Psychosis.
Out the window, the local high school was getting out for the day. Big kids slouching toward the parking lot, calling out to each other with loud, exuberant voices.
“Turn left on Psychosis Street. Recalculating.”
Recalculating. Medicating.
“Continue point two miles on Psychosis Street. Medicating. Medicating.”
They were going down a side street now, past a local bank, a sweet street with smaller houses, their porches adorned with American flags. Side street. Side effects.
“Continue point three miles. Turn left on Catherine Place.” Catherine, Catatonic.
“Turn left on Catatonic Place. Medicating…”
Anderson was looking at her in the rearview mirror.
“Janie, I must apologize,” he said quietly. “It clearly wasn’t the right previous personality. I should have caught that. There were things I missed I should not have missed.”
“Things?” Janie tried to shake her head clear.
“Yes, the younger son, Charlie—he is too young for Tommy to have known him.… I thought they had an older child named Charlie.”
How do you stop trying when it is your son? But it has to stop somewhere.
It’s time to stop this.
“Turn left on Denial Road. Medicating. Medicating.”
The car seemed to be roaming the streets with a will of its own. Anderson was still speaking. “And I used the word reptiles. I should have said lizards. It is my mistake. It’s not like me, but that’s no excuse. I was not being precise. I didn’t catch the difference between snakes and liz—”
“Jerry. Stop the car.”
He pulled to the side of the road. He faced the front, beads of sweat glistening on the back of his neck. “Yes?”
“We’re done here, Jerry.”
“I agree, definitely, this was the wrong … home.”
Was the man dense? “No, I mean … I’m done with schools and stores and houses. All of it. Please drive us to the motel.”
“That’s where we’re going.”
“The GPS said left. You turned right. Three times, actually.”
He frowned. “No.”
“Why do you think she keeps saying ‘recalculating’?”
“Oh.” His hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel. “Oh.” He looked through the windshield, as if lost at sea.
She tried to keep her own voice cool. “Jerry. Listen to me. There is no previous personality. Noah made it all up.”
Anderson kept his gaze fixed in front of him, as if the answers lay there, on the asphalt road. “What do you mean?”
She looked at her sleeping boy. He was slumped in his car seat, his shining head tilted on one shoulder, pale lashes fluttering. She could see the seat belt making a mark where it crossed his cheek.
“He made it up. Because he has schizophrenia,” she said.
She had said it, that word that sounded like every bodily function run amok at the same time.
She opened the car door and stepped out on the road. She leaned down, hands on her knees, sequestered behind a dense curtain of hair. The vertigo was too strong. She kneeled at the edge of the road. She felt it hard and firm beneath her, like reality.
“Are you all right?” He was shading his eyes and looked unsteady on his feet.
People like the two of them—desperate people—were dangerous, she thought suddenly. She saw the other mother, the black tear-tracks on her face. She felt sick again, this time with guilt. Yet some part of her, she realized, was also relieved. That door was closed. She was back in real life again, however terrible that might be.
Anderson wiped his face with his hand. “You’ve had a diagnosis,” he said at last.
She looked around, as if wanting someone to contradict this: the grass, the asphalt, the cars whizzing by on their way to the supermarket or the mall. “Yes.”
He shook his head. “Who?”
“Not exactly a diagnosis. A suggestion. By Dr. Remson. He’s a child psychiatrist in New York. One of the best, apparently.” This last she threw out to hurt him.
He took this in without reacting. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I guess I was afraid you wouldn’t want to work with us.”