by Kira Peikoff
But “he” was clearly my neurons misfiring, trespassing down old routes they have no business visiting. I think the fact that I’m so disturbed by it is a good sign. It proves I’m not having a total psychotic break, just a few temporary disconnections. I even understand the pathology behind it. The trauma of suddenly seeing J at the museum must have triggered my dormant PTSD. After that first delusion, I was left weakened, fragile, and primed for another episode. The second trip wire was the recent close call at our house. We still don’t know who was lurking outside in the middle of the night. My frantic mind, combined with my own irrational longing, conjured the second delusion.
See, I reassure myself, there’s a perfectly rational explanation. And if I’m able to reason, it must mean I’m not crazy. Despite the note that Abby left for me.
I declare my mantra to the empty kitchen as I take a raw chicken out of the fridge. I’m preparing Abby and Rob’s favorite dinner of Thai coconut soup, the tacit context being that I am just fine. But despite my efforts to focus on the recipe and move beyond all this nonsense, I find my thoughts circling back to that magical flash of my boy at the park.
* * *
I’d climbed the steep stairs to the vantage point on the hilltop and sat on the cement bench that overlooks the playground. The Hudson River sparkled down below in the valley, and the swaying trees calmed me as I waited to pick Abby up from school. Quiet Bluebird Park is my favorite spot to visit whenever I have a free hour, since I don’t have to worry about being recognized. I tried to meditate on being present, though my fears perpetually torture me: J with a gun, J breaking in, J kidnapping Abby. When she first got out of prison, eight years ago, terrifying panic attacks began to strike me out of nowhere—the kind that leave you gasping and choking for air. So I took up meditation and yoga in desperation (and started carrying Xanax everywhere just in case).
At the park, I deterred the familiar horror reel with the only tools at my disposal—nature, beauty, breath.
After a time, I opened my eyes to notice a drizzle spraying down under shifty black clouds. The air crackled and rumbled, and I knew I should leave before the sky let loose. Abby would be waiting for me soon, and she hadn’t brought an umbrella to school.
As I stood, a swift motion caught my eye, something dark and fast near the giant trees that line the field at the bottom of the hill. I turned to get a better look—
—and let out a cry of shock.
It was my son.
His hair was as yellow as the summer sun, and he’d gone back in time to six or seven years old, with the knobby knees and noodle-thin arms that concerned me back in those days. He’d always been such a picky eater that I fretted about his weight, and true to the old days, his T-shirt and shorts hung off his skinny body. But unlike the real Colton who was confined to a wheelchair, this fantasy one was running across the grass. I knew it was impossible. But I was too dazzled to care.
I yelled down the hill louder than the storm clouds: “Colton!”
A mistake, but I couldn’t stop myself.
He didn’t look up. He was too busy picking up a stick.
“Colton!” I screamed again, cupping my hands around my mouth.
But “he” still didn’t hear. He was too far away.
I rubbed my eyes then, struck by a belated terror. My head was pounding. I felt woozy and feverish. I should have run straight back to the car. My very real daughter was waiting for me.
But, shamefully, I ignored the voice of reason and doubled down. I ducked under the railing and stepped onto the grassy knoll that led down to a playground. From there, I could catch up to him on the open field.
“Hey you!” I bellowed.
The angle of the hill was so steep that I crouched for stability. The grass was already mucky; the drizzle was turning into a downpour, but I didn’t care, because “he” finally noticed me; it was like my warped mind was rewarding me for giving in.
When our eyes met, he flashed me the eeriest grin: I know you and you know me. Then he bolted in the opposite direction, toward the parking lot. Was it a game?
He’s not real, I reminded myself—at least I had the wherewithal to pause there—but I broke into a sprint down the hill anyway.
“Stop!” I yelled. “Where are you going?”
His small figure was retreating, winding through giant fir trees, almost out of sight. The rain obscured him even more, and I felt that I would dissolve into the wet grass if he vanished again. There would be nothing left of me but muddy grief.
“Wait!” I shrieked. “Please!”
I lost my footing, but there was no room for error. I couldn’t catch my balance, and rapidly I lost control, tumbling down the hill like a rag doll, knees banging together, head spinning, arms flailing. I couldn’t stop, I was only picking up more and more atrocious speed as some part of my brain fired with total clarity: this is not going to end well. Near the bottom, there was no gentle slope to ease my fall, only a metal chain-link fence that encircled the playground. I slammed into it feetfirst, hearing a terrible pop in my left ankle a second before the agony set in. My vision blurred with the rain, and I clawed at my eyes to stay conscious.
My last thought was of my son, but he was nowhere to be seen.
* * *
I’m not crazy, I tell myself again, breathless with panic, though I’m safe and warm in my kitchen now. It was just my heartache manifesting, and I let it rule me. I need to be stronger in the future. I can’t let my family down, even if it means losing Colton forever. I mean, I’ve already lost him. Isn’t that the point?
My heart’s walloping my ribs. I feel myself nearing the edge of sanity: that bright binary line between reality and a darkness no human should ever encounter. Fear of the brink makes me grip the cold counter. I am in control.
“Mommy,” says a breathy little voice in my head.
No!
“Go away!” I shout.
Not again!
“Mommy,” the voice taunts again, and I realize it’s not in my head at all, it’s coming from somewhere else, somewhere close by. I whip around to open the refrigerator, but no one’s in there.
The house is quiet again, but my adrenaline is spiking. There’s raw chicken all over my hands that I’ve just smeared on the fridge, and I can’t remember what I was doing, but I’m gripping a knife.
I set it down and back away from the counter.
“Mo-o-ommy,” it calls. “Come play with me!”
Fuck. It’s Colton’s voice, no matter how much I want to deny it. How could I imagine something so clear?
“Outside!” the voice announces, and I think it is coming from near the front door. Is it? I barely trust my senses anymore. I’m straddling that bright line, no matter how much I want to stay grounded. As I rush to the door, I might as well be hurtling myself over the edge. My head feels top-heavy, like it might roll off.
I run outside, barefoot, just in time to catch a glimpse of him—it is him!—jogging around a bend in the street, away from me. Again, he wants me to chase him. He wants to finish the game in the park. I’m mesmerized by the sight of him running—a feat I’d only dreamed of during his life. I hear the smack of his sneakers scraping the pavement as he vanishes out of sight.
This time, I can’t let him go. I sprint over the driveway’s crunchy gravel, then onto the hot pavement, my sprained ankle protesting with every painful step.
“Colton! Wait!”
I can’t seem to reach him no matter how fast I sprint; he’s gone. It occurs to me that he isn’t restrained by the physical universe. Since he’s not real, he can disappear at will. Meanwhile, my lungs are imploding and my ankle’s throbbing. There must be a reason he’s visiting me again, a message from beyond. So why won’t he let me catch him?
“Where did you go?” I yell at the empty road. “Hello?”
I strain to hear his little voice calling out to me. Nothing.
Panting, I bend over in the middle of the street. My soles are on fire, and I
can barely suck down enough air to breathe. It dawns on me that I will never catch him; I’m not supposed to. A sob bursts out of me. I’m not sure whether I’m crying or laughing, whether he’s real or I am.
A car drives up the road. It’s a silver Honda with a slight dent in the bumper—just like mine. I don’t bother to get out of the way. Go ahead and hit me, I think. Put me out of my misery. I almost wish it would. But the driver must see me, because it slows to a stop a short distance away. It is my car. I recognize the license plate. Oh, God.
I bury my face in my hands. The sour grease of the raw chicken turns my stomach, and when Rob and Abby step out of the car, I’m a gagging, sweaty, filthy mess. The horror in their eyes seals the deal; I’ve officially lost my mind.
“Mom?” Abby utters in disbelief. She gives me a wide berth, as though whatever is wrong with me might be contagious.
Rob rushes to my side. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“I saw him again.” My tears are falling like a steady rain. “He called for me.”
My husband lowers his eyes. “Oh, honey.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. But with the right inpatient treatment, you will get better. It will only mean a few weeks away, and we can visit—”
“No!” I scoot backward, my first instinct to escape, but there’s nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. “No hospital!”
Though his eyes are full of sympathy, his stern voice pins me down like an invisible net. “First thing tomorrow morning, I’m checking you into the neuropsych unit at New York–Presbyterian.”
ABBY
In my room, hiding under my covers, I’m trying to process what I just saw: my mother is crazy. There’s no more verge of a breakdown. It’s real, and it’s happening.
I want to cry, but the tears won’t come.
Is this her big secret, the thing she’s been hiding from me? Somehow, I can’t believe this is it. Or maybe I don’t want it to be.
What about the stranger who ditched me? I’m so confused.
I want to confront my dad, but he’s too busy dealing with my mom. Her feet are bloody, she’s freaking out about going to the mental hospital, and the kitchen reeks of raw chicken. I figure it’s best to stay out of their way.
While they’re in the living room arguing about something that sounds like “anosognosia,” I head into the kitchen and quietly clean up her mess: scrubbing the cutting board, wiping down surfaces, putting away dishes. Then I pop a frozen lasagna into the still-preheated oven and tiptoe back up to my room to wait an hour for the ding of our sad dinner … maybe our last one together for a long time. This thought finally shakes loose the lump in my throat.
I’m sniffling alone in my room when my phone chimes with a message.
Riley: Can you come over????
I text her back: Not a good time. I don’t have the energy to go into detail.
Typing dots show up in the bubble, and then she pastes a screenshot of something. I double-tap to enlarge the text. It’s an email: Congratulations, your MapMyDNA sample has been analyzed and is now ready to access!
My mother’s report—sent to Riley because of my Internet restrictions.
Me: OMG!!! Did u open it?
R: Nope, waiting for u!
Me: Leaving now.
* * *
The bike ride to Riley’s house takes me seven minutes—record time. Mom and Dad barely notice me leave. I often do my homework at her house, so it’s not a big deal. Once Riley and I are locked in her room, it takes us a few minutes to log in to the report and locate the stranger (JH0502) on the site’s social platform to ask her to share DNA maps with my mother (LB2345).
Once JH (hopefully) agrees, it will be clear at last whether they are related—and which one has been lying to me. We send the invite from my mother’s account and wait.
Beside me on the bed, Riley hugs her knees to her chest. “I can’t take the suspense!”
The screen gives her face a bluish glow. Outside the window, the sun is setting, and the sky is turning purple, like a bruise. I still haven’t told her about my mom.
“I want to log in to my account for a sec,” I announce.
I take over and give sharing permission to my mother’s profile so that I can compare my traits with hers. I don’t tell Riley, but I’m hoping to find some evidence that I didn’t inherit her craziness. It’s comforting that we’re different in lots of ways already. She has brown hair and I have red; she’s short and I’m tall. But on a deeper genetic level, am I destined to become like her anyway? I wonder if, along with wet earwax and blue eyes, the trait report includes something like “chance of mental illness.”
“Um,” Riley mutters, interrupting my thoughts. “Aren’t you supposed to be exactly fifty percent related to each parent?”
I give her a look that says, duh. Everyone knows that.
She points at the screen, frowning. My DNA map overlapped on my mother’s map says that we share 49.9 percent of our genes.
I snort. “It’s obviously a mistake.”
Riley wrinkles her nose. “Isn’t MapMyDNA, like, the top testing company?”
“I thought so, but who knows?”
I’m now annoyed that we ever embarked on this stupid experiment. The last thing I need is some lab error to get in the way.
“It’s less than a percent off, so I guess it’s not that wrong,” Riley says, trying to make me feel better.
“Whatever.” I wave my hand. “I have bigger problems.”
“What does that mean?”
I open my mouth to tell her about my mom when her email buzzes with a new message: JH0502 has agreed to connect with LB2345.
We both let out a little shriek of excitement.
It takes ten seconds to log out of my account and back into my mom’s.
YOU HAVE ONE NEW CONNECTION!
“Click it!” Riley urges.
I can’t wait to solve this mystery. I press the word CONNECTION, and the screen refreshes with a cheerful new announcement in bright-orange text:
You and JH0502 share 0% of your DNA.
Wait, what? My mom has been telling the truth this whole time?
I slump back against the bed. “I thought for sure they were cousins!”
Riley seems disappointed. “Wouldn’t your mom get all weird when you asked her about this?”
“Super weird. I could swear she was hiding something.”
“And wait, how can you be related to both of them, if they aren’t related to each other?”
I consider this strange new twist. “JH must be through my dad’s side?”
“Then why would she tell you she had history with your mom?”
“I have no idea.” My head is spinning like the Gravitron ride, going around and around but never getting anywhere. It’s hard to think straight.
“Look.” Riley points at a link under my mother’s profile. “We can download her raw data. All the DNA sequences.”
It’s a huge file that takes a whole minute to download. When we open it, there’s nothing but long strings of random letters and numbers.
I sigh. “Great. Now what?”
“You need someone to, like, read this for you. And your file, too.”
“I guess I could email the company …”
“No, silly!” Riley punches my arm. “Take it to Mr. Harrison tomorrow!”
I picture our gentle giant of a science teacher, with his scruffy beard and big shoulders and thick glasses. If anyone can help me make sense of this, it’s him.
At this point, he’s my only hope.
CLAIRE
Lying in bed next to Rob always used to make me feel safe. But tonight, I find no comfort in his embrace. The tightness of his arms around my shoulders reminds me of the restraints in the psych ward.
“Relax,” he whispers. “I’m on your side.”
I allow myself to go limp against his chest. But I don’t want him to think I’m giving in. “Listen,” I say even
ly, “Today was horrible, but I’m feeling better. I really don’t think I need to go anywhere.”
He sighs. “This is the toughest part of relapsing.”
“What is?”
“Returning to lucidity. But it’s a trap—it doesn’t mean you don’t need help.”
A quiver of ice shoots through me. Nothing is scarier than distrusting my own perceptions. My most cherished fantasies have sold me into madness.
I bury my face in his neck, inhaling the musky scent of his skin. It smells like home. “Why is this happening? Everything was fine for so long.”
He strokes my hair. “Some genetic tendency, probably, combined with an environmental trigger.”
I abruptly sit up. “I know what the Goddamn trigger was.”
Neither of us needs to say her name; if J hadn’t appeared out of the blue with her wicked smile and her sickening obsession, none of this would be happening.
“It won’t help to fixate,” he says gently. “Try to let her go.”
“But she came to our house!”
“We don’t know that for sure. And what else could we do, anyway? We already upgraded the alarm.”
“What if I’m gone and something happens to you guys?”
“It won’t,” he says firmly.
“What if someone at the hospital recognizes me?”
“It’s a chance we have to take. But it’s been over a decade …”
I cringe, imagining some asshole leaking my location to the press, then reporters tracking down Abby at school, shoving mics in her face, splashing her image across the Internet: FRANKENBABY FOUND! The media is a particularly nasty instrument of torture. Hell, it might not even matter if I get recognized. If J knows where we are and wants to out us as revenge, it’s all over anyway.
Rob rubs my back. “Don’t worry about anything besides getting well. I’ve got the rest covered.”
“Don’t you think I’m myself right now, though? Honestly?”