The Law of Loving Others (23 page)

I slipped inside the house and found my father standing in the bathroom, in front of the mirror. His beard was covered in shaving cream and there was an old-school red-and-blue-striped can of Noxzema sitting on the counter.

I asked him if he thought I should stay home and not go back to school next week.

“Absolutely not. No, Emma, you have to go back.”

“Okay well I was just asking your opinion, I don't
have to go back
.”

“I've already paid for the semester, so in that sense, you do.”

“Dad.”

He tapped his razor against the inside of the sink.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “The real issue is that you should go back to school for you. You need to carry on with your life. Go to classes. Be with your friends. Do your work. What would you do here anyway?”

“Visit Mom? Take care of her when she's home?”

“No. And as soon as she gets home, she'll probably go straight into outpatient treatment anyway.”

He dipped his hands into the cloudy water, wiped the rest of the cream off his face. He looked at me through the mirror.

“We'll figure out a way for you to come back often, okay? I promise.”

THE last time I visited my mother before I returned to school, I got to the hospital just after lunch. I went into the dining room first, where plastic trays were stacked with empty Jell-O containers and what looked like the remnants of some sort of fancy, breaded mac and cheese. My mother wasn't there, and then I found her in the day room gazing at the large-screen TV.
The Ellen Degeneres Show
was on, and she was doing some little dance on the stage, her audience laughing wildly.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Oh hi, sweetie.” It was the first time that she had addressed me like this since she'd been in the hospital, and I couldn't help feeling grateful.

“How are you?” I asked. “What have you been doing today?”

“I'm all right, I met with a therapist for a while, then I played a lot of Scrabble with Debbie.”

“Is she good competition?”

“No, actually she's awful! She kept putting down words that I knew were not in the dictionary, but I didn't have the heart to tell her. She got a triple word score for ‘alot.' Like ‘a lot' but one word. I tried but couldn't bring myself to tell her.”

“Oh, Mom, that's sweet of you.”

SINCE my mother had been doing better, the social worker said we could take a walk through the hospital grounds. Outside it was chilly, but warmer than usual; it was too early for spring, but felt as though it was on its way.

We walked through a big open quad, and I imagined it was beautiful and leafy at another time of year. The grass was slightly crunchy beneath our feet; bare trees lined the walkways, their trunks thick and coarse. Add a few Hacky Sacks and students walking hurriedly to class, it could've been any small college across the country. It felt impossible to imagine that I'd be back at school in just a couple of days, swept up into an old and familiar life, a life that right then felt so foreign.

When my mother brought me to Oak Hill that first year, we took a walk around campus as my father finished unloading the car. I'd felt this twinge of homesickness before she even started to say goodbye. I wanted so badly to halt the inevitable progress of my life, the change that had been kicked into motion and couldn't be stopped. Two nights earlier, just before I'd left for Oak Hill, I'd gotten stoned with my friend Josh in his Toyota, and we drove around Scarsdale, exhaling into the warm, balmy air. He kept saying how excited he was for college, how ready he was for his life to start moving forward, and how he envisioned himself on a conveyor belt at the supermarket, like a bag of grapes or a quarter-pound of turkey, sitting on the rubber mat, ready to move, to be carried forward. I thought about this now, how if Josh was sitting idly, ready to go, I was holding on to that metal divider that separates your supermarket purchases, trying desperately not to move ahead. But I also knew that on some level, I had no choice but to submit to this uneasy place where we were, my mother and I, to allow ourselves to be carried along together, to wherever we were going.

MOST of the snow was gone, but there were still patches of ice along the cement path we walked down, and I held on to my mother to steady myself, put my arm through hers. I told her about Daniel, eliminating many of the sorry details, only letting her know that things were shitty—that I'd messed up and felt conflicted about what I wanted from him. She didn't talk much, but she said she thought I needed to be patient, with myself and also with everyone around me. I knew that she was right, but everything at the moment felt so urgent, so in need of immediate attention, that it was hard to be calm and forbearing.

As we turned back toward her building, she told me about the music therapy group she started attending, how much she liked it, and how sometimes it was just so hard for her to articulate things verbally. And how much easier it felt to express herself through music. It was the first time she'd felt any sense of community at the hospital, but there was a collective sense of hope, she said, as she and her fellow patients played on their instruments together, conjuring up a lovely, if tentative, optimism.

“I'm happy for you, Mom,” I told her, and I could see her fingers dancing nimbly across the piano keys, giving herself over to her music again, for the first time in a long while.

Some of my own anxieties started to recede as my mother began to get well, but there was still a seed of panic, somewhere inside me, that was always ready to unfurl. We stood outside of her building, and I looked around at this lovely and leafy hospital campus, wondering if it was something like my birthright.

I decided to take the Amtrak back to school because flying felt too fast. I needed the extra time to mentally prepare myself for the change, and I wanted to prolong it as much as I could. The train would be eight hours and would take a non-direct route, north through upstate New York, then west through Syracuse, tracing the border of the state, and then back down through Pennsylvania.

My father drove me to the train station at Croton-Harmon, a town along the Hudson. We got to the station only a few minutes before the train was scheduled to leave and so our goodbye was rushed. But it seemed almost better that way. He told me he loved me, that he'd keep me posted about everything. Assured me that it would all be okay, as if there was any way he could possibly know. But I appreciated his optimism, his need to comfort me.

“Please call me when you get in tonight,” he asked.

“It'll be so late, I won't get back to school until after midnight.”

“I don't care, just call me. Please,” my father insisted.

“Fine,” I said. “I love you.” And I hurried onto the train, struggling with the weight of my duffel bag as I walked through the aisle, bracing myself on the worn red leather of the seats.

The car must have filled up at Penn Station, and so when I finally found a seat, I was sitting backward, the train thrusting me in one direction, though I was firmly planted in another. The scenery was alternatingly dull and beautiful, with pockets of land that seemed untouched, blanketed in snow.

I looked at my phone. I had called Daniel three times since he left my house that night. He hadn't picked up any of the times. I didn't know what I wanted from him. I didn't know why I was calling. But I couldn't imagine being back at school without him, was terrified by the thought of it.

I opened up
Anna Karenina
again. I had reached the place where, a few weeks ago, I'd written in the car,
this day.
I had wanted so badly, had hoped so ardently, that by the time I reached this chapter in the book, I'd have some better, clearer sense of things. I still didn't know what had changed and what hadn't. I still wanted to know, desperately, what would happen to me. To my mother. And so I moved forward two hundred pages and wrote it again,
this day
. Maybe Daniel and I would be completely, permanently broken up, maybe I would walk past him in the dining hall, and he would stare down at his tray, careful not to offer me even a flicker of recognition. Or perhaps we would've worked things out, somehow moved beyond everything that had happened. And then there was Phil—would I look back and think that was all some foolish, misguided expression of my grief?

My mother was still in the hospital the day I left for school, but maybe, by the time I was four hundred pages through, she'd be home again. Maybe the next time I saw her, she'd open up the front door of our house, take me in her arms, her fingers aching from the trio of piano lessons she'd given one after the other. Or would she still be at the hospital, feeling aimless, tired, trapped in the complicated mazes of her mind?

There were so many things that I would continue to wonder about. Would this fear of mental illness always plague me and our family? Was there any way to steel myself against it? And mostly, would my mother ever, truly, be well?

But that day on the train, I stretched out onto the empty seat next to me and shut my eyes. What I saw was that image of myself as a child, my small feet perched on the edge of the stepladder in my grandmother's home, staring out the window ahead, looking for my mother, waiting for her to come back to me.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am so grateful for Michele Rubin's effusive support and motivation during the first part of this process. I definitely would not have had the courage to write this novel without you. To my wonderful agent, Mel Flashman, thank you for your warmth, superb advocacy, and enthusiasm. To Sarah Bush and everyone else at Trident Media, thank you! Rebecca Kilman, my incredible editor, thank you for your brilliant insights and your affection for this project. It has been such a pleasure to work with you. To Marissa Grossman, thank you for coming in at the eleventh hour with so much warmth, energy and dedication. Huge thanks to Ben Schrank, Casey McIntyre, Lauren Donovan, and the rest of the Razorbill/Penguin team.

Thanks also to Rhona Kaplan. To Dan Chaon and everyone else in the amazing Oberlin creative writing community. Thanks to Eli Rosenfeld and Sir Isaac Knewton. Nikki Terry/Orange Custard Design, I am so happy we were able to work together on this project; thank you for your support and kindness and the beautiful website.

To my friends—I am endlessly grateful for all of you, all the time. Special, special thanks to those who have been so loving and supportive throughout this process—you guys are really the best. It should also be noted that one friend encouraged me to write this book in a single Gchat conversation—thanks for that! Seriously: no one, not even the rain, has such good friends.

Lastly, I feel so lucky to come from a family of such wonderful readers and writers. Thank you to my CBC. To Sara Mark and Ellen Umansky, thank you so much for your love, support, and enthusiasm for all things family and literary. To my best bro, Sam Axelrod, for being the most thoughtful and critical reader and also the best at tidying up the house. Your book is next. To my father, George Axelrod, thank you for always encouraging and nurturing my creativity (beginning with tri-Elvis). To my mother, Marian Thurm, my most trusted reader and editor, thank you for everything. I feel so lucky to have inherited a fraction of your gift. And thanks to all my Thurm-related family (Coop included) for everything, always. I love you.