She seems quite pleased with her assessment. I am unimpressed. I can still feel him in the air around me; you can’t make up a person in such detail. And if I were going to make up an imaginary friend to help me cope with life, why wouldn’t I give him nice, strong legs? I remember the aching in my arms after having pushed his wheelchair through the streets of the Bone. The awkwardness of having to do things like drive him, bathe him, help him onto the sofa the night he slept over.
I leave Elgin’s office that day feeling like I am floating instead of walking. I could say that everything feels surreal, but the truth is, I feel surreal. Like it’s not Judah, but me who doesn’t exist. When the doors lock behind us that evening, and I crawl into the stiff, bleached sheets of the mental hospital, I am unsure. I know nothing. I bury my face in my thin pillow until I can’t breathe, then force myself to come up for air. I assure myself with a quivering, jelly voice that I am real. I do this all night until the lights flicker on, and the doors open, and the medication is handed to us in little paper cups that smell of old people. Judah is real, and I am real, I tell myself over and over. But, by lunch, I am once again unsure. If I made up Judah, I could be making all of this up—the murders, the hospital, Dr. Elgin. I check my door plaque to make sure my name is Margo.
I see Elgin three times a week, then two as she feels I am making progress in our sessions. I stop fighting her after that first time, stop saying that Judah is real. I slip silently into the role of the humble patient, clutching what remains of my sanity between oiled fingers. And then, one day, after I’ve been in Westwick for a little over five months—and my limbs are growing soft and spongy from the time I spend sitting—everything changes.
THEY RELEASE ME FROM WESTWICK, though I do not feel ready. The revelation about Judah has made me feel strange in my own skin. I am unable to trust even myself. What happens to a person when their own brain becomes the enemy? I don’t know. I’m afraid to find out.
My apartment is just as it was, except with a fine layer of dust coating everything. My lease with Doyle isn’t up for another year, and unless he decides to be a dick, I don’t have to worry about being tossed into the street for not sending a rent check.
The first thing I do is shower. I sing “Tainted Love” at the top of my lungs. At the hospital, the water was always lukewarm, the pressure barely strong enough to rinse the shampoo from your hair. I let the steam grow around me, turning my skin bright red as it licks me with hot pelts. I want to wash away the last few months of my life. Start fresh. And I feel fresh; I have fresh perspective, I have Dr. Elgin, I have a mission … purpose.
When I finish, I dress and pick up my laptop, which has been sitting on the charger for five months. I have e-mails. I open the first; it is from Judah. I giggle because there is no Judah. Right? Right. There are several from him over the months. In the first one, he apologizes for his anger when I visited, and wants to know how I am. As more time passes, his e-mails take a different tone as he urges me to call him. He fears for my safety; he’s afraid of what I am capable of doing. None of this is real, of course. I might have written these e-mails myself, though I have no recollection of it. I delete each one, and then empty my trash so I never have to see them again. I do not need an imaginary friend to show concern for my well being. Dr. Elgin said that if you love yourself, you don’t need to create people in your mind who love you. Self-hatred is a form of self-obsession, isn’t it? A self-loathing so creatively profound that any concern for others dwindles down to nothing. I don’t want to be that person—so infatuated with my flaws that I forget to see the needs of others. My mother loved to hate herself, and, in the process, forgot she had a daughter.
For the next few days, I re-acquaint myself with outside life. I take walks; I buy flowers and fruit from the market. I read an entire book while sitting on a bench near the Sound, the horn from the ferryboats calling out and making me smile contentedly. I am a loony, recently released from the loony bin. How many of the people around me glanced my way and thought I was normal? How many of them did I perceive as normal when in reality they were Volas and Lyndees and Leroys? Life was creepy and people were creepier.
On the fifth day, after I take a brief call from Dr. Elgin, who is checking on me, I climb into my Jeep and drive the sixty-five miles to Leroy’s ponky dink town. I don’t want to get too close—not this time anyway—but I slow down as I pass his drive and notice his blue Nissan is no longer in the driveway. There is a minivan instead. As I watch, a mother unloads her family, wrangling bags of groceries behind them and through the front door. I lean my head back against the seat and close my eyes. Leroy had me institutionalized for long enough to sell his house and get out of town. Did he know I’d come for him again? Why didn’t he just kill me when he had the chance?
I meet Johan Veissler, a South African, who runs his uncle’s fishing business while his uncle recovers from a stroke. They are a family of salmon fishermen, my least favorite fish, though lately there is always an abundance of it in my freezer.