Of course, Ingrid could not help. Perhaps she could have, perhaps she would have said and done just the right thing—if she’d known the real problem. But she thought Maddy needed things you could buy at the store, deflated ginger ale and Tylenol, and maybe a fun party to take her mind off track practices. But what was the fix if you needed to take your mind off… your mind?
Jim met Maddy at the Newark station. She climbed into the front seat of the Ford. He looked at his daughter, looked quickly away. What had happened? She had been home for Thanksgiving not three weeks before. Things hadn’t been great, but they weren’t like this. He put the car into gear, turned the wheel, looked back at her.
“Madison,” he said. “I think you look depressed.”
He didn’t know how else to describe her. He was sure, in that moment, that the word he had used was not hyperbole, but precise, necessary. She leaned back in the seat. Her head touched the headrest. She was wearing a sweatshirt, her hair pulled back. All the color that was once in her cheeks had migrated to the rims of her eyes. When she spoke, her voice, usually high, was low, as if forming words took energy she didn’t have.
“Dad,” she whispered, “all I want to do is go to sleep.”
“Let’s get you home,” he said.
Madison walked through the front door and immediately went upstairs to lie down. Jim wasn’t sure what to expect from her over the next few days. Rather, he didn’t have expectations. He was just relieved she was beneath their roof. He and Stacy discussed what was happening, how different their daughter seemed, how concerned they were. “We need to start getting her consistent professional help—as quickly as we can,” they agreed. They called the therapist they had connected with over Thanksgiving break, scheduled an appointment for that weekend. Maddy surprised them when she came downstairs just an hour later. She was dressed in workout clothes, her sneakers on.
“I want to go join a gym,” she said. She was going to be home that weekend, also over winter break after finals, and she needed a place to stay in shape for the next month, she explained. Just a few hours earlier, opening the car door seemed to have exhausted her, but now she was determined to burn energy as if she possessed an endless supply.
This had become the cycle, the endless battle: like carrying a weight on her shoulders, then finally dropping to her knees because it was too much, then telling herself not to be weak, to get up as she always had, to find a way to keep moving forward. Then she would stand, tell herself she could handle this, and start walking again. Until, of course, she would again collapse beneath the weight.
This sequence was not unlike high-intensity intervals on the track. And, just like those, each repetition took more effort than the previous one. That was actually the point of interval training: raising your heart rate to 180, then dropping it to resting, then raising it again—this drained energy much faster than maintaining a steady pace. How many more intervals could she run? She wasn’t sure, but she had to keep getting up, because perhaps the next one would be the last, perhaps the weight would disappear as quickly as it had appeared.
Jim drove Maddy to Retro Fitness, a few miles away on Route 17, and they signed her up for a monthlong membership. Sometimes she ran on the treadmill, other times she sat on the bike for dozens of miles, sweat dripping across the display, her head down and legs churning through hills. She needed the endorphins. The rush of them made her feel like herself, even if it was fleeting, even if she could often feel the sensation leaking from her body before she pulled on her sweats and opened the door to leave the gym. The alternative was lying in her bed, staring at the ceiling, and just hoping and praying that something would change. But that wasn’t her—that had never been her. She wanted to keep doing the things that had once made her feel good. And so instead of sleeping in her childhood bed, turning from side to side, letting the exhaustion wash over her, drown her, she decided to get up and put on her sneakers. She would keep making that choice. Maybe she could churn out the darkness, force it to seep out of her, like sweat, if she just ran fast enough, long enough.
That first evening, she spent a couple hours at the gym. While there, she got a text from her high school friend Erin: “Going over to your house!” Erin did not know that Maddy was home from school, but she had just finished finals and was home for winter break. She was close to Ashley Holleran, who was back from Alabama, as well as the rest of the Holleran family. When she texted, Erin thought Maddy was still at Penn, so she was surprised when she got a message back that said, “I’m at the gym, be back soon.”
Erin and another of Ashley’s friends, Brandon, were at the Hollerans’ when Maddy walked through the door. Erin was expecting to see the person she remembered from high school, the Maddy who was laughing and happy, the Maddy who would bolt up the stairs to shower, then come back down ready to hear all about what had happened during first semester. But that person did not walk through the door. Erin couldn’t quite figure out what was happening. Maddy seemed evasive, avoiding eye contact as if she had something to hide. She quickly excused herself.
Erin had just spent seven days in the library, studying for finals, so she reminded herself how anxious and tired she had felt during that time. That’s all this was. Maddy was still in the middle of it all, cramming for her first-ever Ivy League exams. And anyway, it was late at night. The whole interaction was understandable, explainable even. It was dark out, and Erin was seeing Maddy in the artificial light of the room, so maybe it was a kind of optical illusion. Maybe she wasn’t quite as pale and empty as she looked.
Over the next few days, Jim and Stacy tried to understand exactly what was going on, but Madison seemed incapable of articulating what she was feeling. She kept falling back on the stress of finals, and how she felt she was failing multiple courses. And when she wasn’t talking about that anxiety, she simply kept saying, “Something is wrong, something is really wrong.”
They soon believed that the solution to their daughter’s struggle was beyond their purview, which as parents they found hard to accept. They felt that only a highly trained professional could help Maddy. “She had a really hard time talking about what was going on,” Jim said. “I think she was really confused. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what was going on exactly. I just knew that I couldn’t help her. I felt that she needed a psychologist, or somebody that was really well trained and qualified. And we had insurance through my work, so we knew she was covered.”