Mad Love (14 page)

“Alice?” Dr. Diesel stepped into the room. “I’m surprised to see you today,” he whispered.

“I want to see my mom,” I whispered back.

“Well …” He tucked the chart under his arm and thought for a moment. “Her sleep schedule is a bit messed up. Drowsiness is one of the new medication’s side effects. I understand she was a bit agitated last night. I think it’s best we let her sleep. Do you want to get something to eat in the dining room and then come back?”

“She said my name this morning,” I told him.

“Yes, that’s what I heard. Such good news.” Then he frowned. “I spoke to the hospital’s director. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to convince him to give your mother more time to pay her bill. But I had her moved to this room to help lower your costs. She didn’t seem to mind.”

“Oh.” I fiddled with my visitor tag. “Dr. Diesel? Can we talk?”

“Yes, of course.”

A pair of nurses stood within earshot. “Could we go somewhere … private?”

“Certainly. Let’s go to my office.”

I’d never paid much attention to the framed diplomas in Dr. Diesel’s office. I’d always been too freaked out to notice much of anything in there. But I was glad to see they weren’t just paper rectangles with fancy gold seals—they were proof that he’d gone to school for a very long time, proof that he knew stuff I didn’t know. Hope had propelled me to Harmony Hospital on that Thursday afternoon, but fear led me to the doctor’s leather couch, which squeaked when I sat.

Dr. Diesel settled into a high-backed chair and folded his hands on his desk. A bust of Sigmund Freud watched from the corner. “What’s on your mind?”

I crossed my legs, then crossed them the other way.
Just ask the question. Ask it!
“Dr. Diesel, did my mother ever hear voices?”

He raised his graying eyebrows. “Why do you want to know this?”

“Because I just want to know.”

He tapped his index finger on the desk. Once. Twice. “Well, I don’t think it would breech doctor-patient confidentiality to tell you that vocal hallucinations are not part of your mother’s illness.” He leaned forward and stared at me with such intensity that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he could actually see past my skull and into my brain. “Are
you
hearing voices?”

I shifted my legs again. Why couldn’t I get comfortable? “No. Why would I be hearing voices?”

He widened his eyes.

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m just wondering.” Then I looked away, focusing on the smoothness of Sigmund Freud’s plaster head. The two shrinks stared at me, willing me to spill my deepest, darkest fear. What was worse—not knowing or knowing? Hiding from the truth or facing it? “Maybe I heard
something
.”

Dr. Diesel picked up a pen. “Tell me about this voice.”

Fully aware that I was going to sound like a lunatic, and more than a bit worried that the visitor badge might be replaced by a patient badge, I took the plunge. “It’s this weird guy who moved into my building. His name is Errol and he wants me to help him write a book. He thinks he’s Cupid. Isn’t that idiotic?”

Dr. Diesel said nothing.

“Anyway, it was his voice I heard, saying ‘Find me’ over and over.”

“When was this?”

“Yesterday.”

“Had anything unusual happened yesterday?”

“Yeah. A brown recluse spider bit me and the poison made me act weird. That’s what my doctor said. But Errol says that he shot me with an invisible arrow and that’s why I heard his voice. He expects me to believe that.”

“Errol sounds confused.”

“Totally.” I paused. “Why do you think I heard the voice?”

“The question is, why do
you
think you heard the voice?”

“Because …” I took a long breath. “I think I’ve inherited my mother’s illness.” My eyes welled with tears and before I could fight them, they streamed down my cheeks and my shoulders started to shake. I was a complete wreck. Dr. Diesel pulled a tissue from a box, then walked around the desk and handed it to me. As I wiped my eyes, he sat in the couch’s matching armchair.

“Do you hear his voice now?”

“No. It’s gone.”

“And this was the first time you’d heard a voice in your head?”

“Yes.” I crumpled the tissue and waited for the diagnosis as one waits for a guillotine’s blade to fall—the result being equally permanent. The life I’d known would abruptly end. Alice Amorous, daughter of Belinda Amorous, you are doomed.

Dr. Diesel tucked the pen back into his pocket and propped his elbows on the chair’s armrests. Then he smiled gently. “Alice, I’ve been diagnosing and treating mental illness for most of my adult life and there’s one thing I know with absolute certainty. Families of severely ill patients go through as much stress, sometimes more stress, than the patients themselves. One of the common offshoots of this stress is to focus on the various symptoms of the illness, then to convince oneself to be suffering the same affliction. First-year medical students do the exact same thing. They read about a horrific disease and they worry that they have the exact same disease.”

I unclenched my fingers. Surely he wasn’t telling me that I’d imagined the entire thing? “But what about genetic predisposition?”

“Sometimes bipolar disorder runs in families, that’s true, but the odds are small. Besides, your mother suffers from a very extreme form of the illness. Her condition has been so difficult to treat, I’m not even sure we should call it bipolar disorder. It’s one of those situations where the illness doesn’t quite fit into a category.” He pressed his fingertips together. “Clearly, Alice, you are under a great deal of stress worrying about your mother, and I know there are financial issues. But I can see from the look on your face that you are not convinced. Let’s knock this off the list of things to worry about, shall we?” He grabbed his pen and a pad of paper, then asked a series of questions. “Do you have times when you can’t slow down your body or your thoughts? Times when you can’t drag yourself out of bed to shower or eat? When it’s so dark that you can’t think any happy thoughts? When you can’t stop doing a task, even if you’re sleepy?”

On and on the questions went, and to each one I answered, “No.”

Dr. Diesel returned the pen and tablet to his desk. “I have just described your mother’s illness.”

“But the voice. That’s not normal.”

He walked over to the watercooler and filled a cup, then handed it to me. “Where does normal begin and where does it end?”

“You’re asking me? Aren’t you supposed to know the answer?”

He filled a cup for himself and took a long drink. “Where does imagination begin and end? What are its boundaries? One person is deemed creative, another is mad. Perfectly sane, perfectly healthy people see and hear things that can’t always be explained. I myself saw a ghost when I was about your age. I don’t believe in ghosts, but my mind conjured it one night and as sure as I see you sitting on that couch, I saw that ghost.” He threw the cup into the wastebasket. “Truth is, we’ve barely begun to understand the brain. It’s still mostly a guessing game.”

A clock ticked. A distant phone rang. I wiped my eyes again. “I don’t understand,” I mumbled. “I don’t understand why she’s like this … now. She was never this bad. She always managed to take care of things. Do you still think she’s going to get better? Do you think it will happen before they make her leave? Do you think she’ll be able to write again?”

“We must have realistic expectations. While I think this medication will bring her out of her depression and stabilize her mood swings, it may be some time before she feels like going back to work.”

“But she needs to write her next book,” I said.

Dr. Diesel smoothed his comb-over, then returned to the armchair. “This is not something she can control, Alice. You understand that, don’t you?”

I looked at my shoes.

“You understand that this has nothing to do with you. That she still loves you very much. You know that, don’t you? You know that she loves you?”

The room felt very small. I didn’t want to sit there anymore. Every sound, the clicking of someone’s heels in the hall, the whir of the overhead fan, the bubbling of a corner fish tank, became amplified. “I gotta go,” I said, heading for the door.

“Alice,” Dr. Diesel gently called. “Sometimes it helps to talk to people who know exactly what you’re going through. There’s a group that meets here on Monday nights—a support group for family members. Would you like to come?”

“I’ll think about it,” I lied. Not in a million years would I sit with a bunch of strangers and tell them what my life was really like. Talking wouldn’t erase the bad memories. An understanding nod wouldn’t soothe the loneliness. I couldn’t bring back the lost friends, or collect the hours of sleep I’d worried away, or gather the longed-for hugs into a bouquet.

“Yes, please think about it,” Dr. Diesel said. “You would be most welcome. And I’m here anytime you wish to talk.”

The lumber baron’s eyes followed me as I hurried across the lobby. Mary, the woman I’d met on Tuesday, sat hunched over her desk, working a calculator. I managed to slip past without being noticed. I checked my mother’s room but she was still napping. It was good to know that she hadn’t been tormented by voices. And that Dr. Diesel thought it was no big deal that I’d heard a voice. He was right about one thing—I was totally stressed out. I whispered good-bye to my mother, then called Mrs. Bobot to let her know that I was heading for the ferryboat and would be back in time for dinner.

When I got back to Seattle I stopped at the post office. The monthly newsletter from the International Romance Writers’ Guild had arrived. I stared at its pink cover. Then I crumpled it into a ball. Not a gentle sort of crumpling as one might do with a gum wrapper or a grocery receipt. My face turned crimson. I threw my entire body into that crumpling as if my life depended upon rearranging the pink paper’s molecular structure. Then I threw the wad of paper on top of the garbage can. As I stomped out of the post office, the newsletter began to uncrinkle until its headline could be read by any curious soul who might pass by.

“Make Way, Belinda Amorous. A New Queen of Romance Has Been Crowned.”

Cal
Anderson Park was crowded with people searching for ways to escape the heat. I headed straight for the nearest cart and bought an orange Popsicle. An oak tree offered its shade so I sat on a bench beneath the green canopy. Because I hadn’t read past the International Romance Writers’ Guild’s headline, I didn’t know who had taken my mother’s place as the Queen of Romance. Even though it wasn’t the new queen’s fault, I despised her. They’d throw her a huge party with champagne and a bubbling chocolate fountain and everyone would congratulate her. “Whatever happened to Belinda Amorous?” they’d ask.

“She hasn’t published a thing in three years.”

“She didn’t come to the last two conferences.”

“She’s overseas.”

“Well, we can’t have that kind of person as our queen. Off with her head.”

Orange syrup dripped down my wrist, the Popsicle’s life span cut short by the heat wave.

“Where’ve you been?” Errol sat next to me, his hood drawn over his head. “I’ve been looking for you. We don’t have a lot of time and chapter one’s not going to write itself.” His bossy tone was like sandpaper grating across my nerves.

I turned away. “Leave me alone, Errol.”

“What’s your problem?” he asked.

My jaw clenched. “I think the question should be, what’s
your
problem?” The rest of my Popsicle fell onto the ground where a pigeon started pecking at it. “That’s just great.” I held up the empty stick as if it were some sort of symbol for my life.

Errol reached into his hoodie pocket and pulled out a pill bottle, which he opened, then popped a pill into his mouth. I watched from the corner of my eye, hoping to read the label. After returning the bottle to his pocket, he slumped against the back of the bench. “Are you going to tell me what your problem is?” he asked.

“Why would I?”

“Because I care. I care about you.” He sounded serious and for a moment I believed him. But then I remembered Velvet’s comment about girls falling in love with Errol all the time. He’d probably told every one of them that “he cared.”

“Right. You don’t even know me.”

“How can you say I don’t even know you? We kissed, didn’t we?”

Even in the shade, my face got all hot. A kid ran by, chased by another kid with a squirt gun. A trio of pigeons competed for the last drops of my Popsicle. “You want to know what my problem is?” I threw the stick on the grass and looked right into Errol’s dark eyes. “I’ll tell you what my problem is. My problem is that, according to a guy with a whole mess of diplomas, I’ve got an overactive imagination and I worry too much. I need to join a support group for people like me who imagine and worry too much. And then we can all sit around and talk about how worried and imaginative we are.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Is that it? You call that a problem?”

Was this some sort of challenge? Oh, it was on. I narrowed my eyes. “My problem is that my mom used to be the Queen of Romance but she hasn’t written anything in a really long time so she’s been dethroned and I don’t know when she’s coming home. And because she’s gone, I had to leave school to take care of all her stuff, and the apartment building, which means I have no life.” I took a quick breath. “My problem is that if my mother doesn’t write a book by the end of summer, she’ll have to return one hundred thousand dollars to her publisher. She doesn’t have one hundred thousand dollars. We can barely pay the bills. She’d have to sell the building and then where would we live?” As I kicked a pebble, the pigeons flew off. “My problem is that because I’m the daughter of a writer, people like you and Realm want me to help you get your books published, but I don’t have time to deal with your books. Don’t you get that? I’m trying to write my own book. I’m trying to write it so my life won’t totally fall apart, and I can’t even come up with a stupid title!”