He + She

by Michelle Warren

  She shoots her gaze to “Luke” and then at me, giving me a strange look—an adoring one, so far removed from the previous seconds that I think she’s returned to reality, but the moment is short.

  “Luke, you need to back off.” She points a rigid finger at the air. Her face turns scarlet, her body tensing and her arms waving in angular movements.

  I step toward her again but she holds out one hand, warning me away.

  “Hew is more of a man than you’ll ever be.” She gestures to me and I step closer. I need to be in a position to tackle her at the right moment.

  She scratches and clenches at the air. “He treats me with respect and kindness, nothing you have ever shown without an agenda. So to answer your question, yes, he’s the one. The only one!” she yells, and with a loud grunt and with both arms extended in front of her, she pushes into the air over and over like some crazed mime, as if she’s moving Luke away from her. When she has pushed as far as she can, tripping near the edge, she looks over the cliff and watches the water below. I think she believes she’s just pushed “Luke” to his death.

  My heart breaks into a million tiny pieces because I realize that all this time, Shea’s world has been entirely make-believe. Everything I know about her has finally fallen into place. The fake names, the reluctance to share anything truthful about her life, the highs and lows, the multiple breakdowns, the well-used pill bottle, the grandiose stories followed by the winks—even us. Everything that has been a charming game of lies to me might be completely real to her.

  She swivels toward me, her face contorted with horror, then it loses color, turning the palest translucent white. Her eyelids sink shut as her body plummets to the ground and I leap forward to try to catch her.

  Chapter 48

  She

  I try to open my eyes, but my world is blurry. At my small movement, someone squeezes my hand.

  “Honey. You’re all right. Open your eyes.”

  It’s strange to hear this comforting voice now. I haven’t heard it in a while.

  “Mom?” The word breaks through my cracked lips.

  Items around me come into view. A TV mounted across the room, sterile mint-colored walls, flowers and balloons, bland furniture, and a machine that I can’t see, but it beeps nearby. My mom leans over and strokes my head with her palm.

  “Mom?” I know she shouldn’t be here. I’m not in Maryland; I’m in California with Hew.

  “Hew!” I sit up, remembering his horrified face right before I passed out. I try to move, but I’m restrained by tubes attached in several places. I pull one out of my nose, rip another from the skin on the back of my hand, and throw the sheets off my body, determined to find him.

  “No, honey, no. You have to stay in bed. You took a bad fall and had an episode.” My mother holds me in place, trying to coax me the way she normally does. There’s a sharp pain at my hairline. I reach for it, feeling a large bandage. I don’t care; I try to get up again. My dad appears at my room door and runs to her aid, but I know I can fight both of them. I’ve done it before, and I can’t give in when I have so much at stake.

  “Hew!” I scream for him. I know he’ll come. He’s here; I know it.

  “Honey, calm down,” my dad says gently. “There’s no Hew here.”

  “No!” I fight them. They’re wrong! I swing my arms.

  Nurses rush in to help restrain me, and now there are too many to win this fight, but I keep wrestling them for freedom. I need to find Hew. “Get off! Hew!” I smack and kick, becoming violent. Why are they doing to this me? I only want to see him. I scream and cry as the nurses quickly work together to bind my arms and ankles in restraints. I’m crying so much that soon I’m choking on my own snot.

  Why won’t Hew come?

  A new nurse walks in and I know why she’s here; I’ve played this game before. She stands at my bedside, prepping a syringe. Despite my pleas, she leans down and plunges the needle into the inside bend of my arm.

  “You need to relax,” she says in a soothing voice.

  “I just need Hew.”

  I’m still battling, but I’m wearing down and soon enough the drugs kick in, slurring my words. Before I sink under the veil, I see Mom and Dad across the room. Dad wraps his arms around her, rubbing her back because she’s crying, too. And just for a moment, seeing those faces I love, like I have seen so many times before, I remember why I’m here and why they’re doing this. I’m sick and in this fleeting moment of clarity, I wonder if Hew is just like Luke—a hallucination.

  Chapter 49

  She

  Five days later in Maryland

  “So, it says here in my files that I should call you Shea now? Is that correct?” Dr. Leevy looks up at me over her wire-rimmed glasses. She smiles, and her dark cheeks bulge like apples. Even though I hate our sessions, there’s something I like about her and her no-nonsense attitude. And though she’s a hard-ass, I like her more than the others who tried to treat me before her. She’s the only one who found a way through.

  “Yes, it’s a conscious name change, not a delusional one,” I assure her.

  “Okay, well, we’ll talk about the name change tomorrow. For now, this is a quick interview for me to assess what’s happened since we last saw each other”—she looks at her folder—“two weeks ago.” She sets it back down and folds her hands on her desk. “Shea, I don’t want to beat around the bush. You and I have a long history, and you know how I work. You’re here for a ten-day observation period. According to the police report, some of the witnesses who saw your episode in California were under the impression that you were suicidal, and you wanted to jump from the cliff of the overlook.”

  “You know that’s ridiculous.” I roll my eyes.

  For the first six months after the accident, I saw many doctors who were eager to pigeonhole me into any diagnosis that remotely applied—schizophrenia, paranoia, schizoaffective disorder, and atypical bipolar mood disorder. The truth is that I don’t meet the basic checklist for any of those illnesses. Not even close.

  When I met Dr. Leevy, she took a different approach. She was the first to take her time with me, to understand the complexity, the uniqueness of my condition, and explain that mental illness is not always black and white. My illness lingers in the shady gray areas that can’t be completely explained by a textbook.

  So, as of right now, she’s given my illness no specific name. According to her, there are no cases that identically mirror mine—that she can find in research. The only thing we know for certain is that the hallucinations are a cycle. When I have an episode, my reality sometimes bends far from realism. Instead it’s like a Salvador Dali painting of dripping clocks and eccentric landscapes of ever-changing objects that bend to my needs, acting upon my subconscious will, and torture or even save me when I’m not looking. But with all that said, I have never even come close to suicide.

  “It does surprise me, yes,” Dr. Leevy admits. “Even on your worst days, you never showed suicidal tendencies. But please, explain what you were doing.”

  I glance around the room, considering the right things to say. Being under medical attention and medicated regularly for several days now, I’m able to distinguish reality from fantasy—for the most part—though my brain is functioning in a familiar fog created by the pink pill.

  “Well?” She leans back in her chair and crosses her arms.

  “You know. The same as before.” I shrug. When I think back on my episodes, I feel ashamed to talk about them. They have only ever been controlled my taking the pink pill regularly, something I was not doing in California, and only when he showed up.

  “Luke?” she asks.

  I nod, but don’t make eye contact.

  “Okay, so let’s go over what we do know is true at this moment in time. Go ahead.”

  I sigh heavily and roll my eyes. If I had a pressed penny for every time that I’ve had to “bring myself to reality” in the last several months, as Dr. Leevy calls it, I could have hundreds of the
m, enough to fill a cigar box.

  “Today, my name is Shea. By choice,” I remind her. “And I’m here because roughly two years ago my fiancé, Bren, and I were on a date, walking around the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, when a woman driving a car swerved off Pratt Street and hit us.” The bridge of my nose begins to burn, a cold burn, the way it always does when I get to this part of the story. “Bren.” I tear up at the memories, my voice cracking as I fight to speak. “Bren and I were severely injured.” My voice rises into a high-pitched tremor. I pause to compose myself, feeling every scar left on my body from that night throb with pain. “He died and I survived.”

  “Don’t gloss over the details. This is important.” She taps her finger on her wood desktop.

  I sigh. I do it a lot during our meetings because everything we discuss, reliving all the pain over and over, chips off little bits of my soul. “I sustained severe head trauma, and afterward suffered from post traumatic stress syndrome, which in turn possibly triggered my hallucinations.”

  “Correct, and who is Luke?”

  “Luke is a delusion. A coping mechanism, a paranoid invention.” I use her words from earlier sessions and wipe my wet cheeks. “That I created because I couldn’t believe that Bren would ever leave me—even by dying. In my mind, I created a fake brother to cheat with. That way I was the one leaving Bren on my own terms.”

  For the first year with Dr. Leevy, I didn’t have the ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Luke was real and Bren was alive, and anytime someone suggested anything to the contrary, I became angry and violent, ready to defend my beliefs until I exhausted my body, my mind, my voice, and the people around me. It wasn’t until several months ago that I started to have spots of clarity. In the breaks of light, Dr. Leevy presented me with piles of documented information, like death certificates and several meetings with Bren’s family, for me to use to finally connect the pieces that had been warped or missing in my mind.

  She believes I never had the proper closure for Bren’s death, since I was in the hospital recovering my mind and body for over a year and a half. I didn’t get to attend his funeral, and see for myself that he had really died. Even though I eventually accepted Bren’s death, Luke had still been an annoying constant. A sucky souvenir from a bad trip. I even believed he gave me these scars; I still believe it sometimes.

  Though the difference is that now I’m quicker to catch my blurred psychotic moments. An improvement that Dr. Leevy attributes to a new experimental medication I’ve been taking. Things were even going so well that I tried to break my relationship off with Luke and pull away from him in my hallucinations, but the paranoia of him became worse, like Luke was somehow fighting back, trying to cling to me. That is, until I pushed him over the cliff several days ago.

  “Have you seen Luke since you returned?”

  “No.” I slouch in my chair.

  Dr. Leevy leans forward and rummages through her files, then lifts a piece of paper that she scans. “What about this person you were screaming for in the hospital in California? Someone named Hew, it says here.”

  Even medicated, I still want to believe Hew is real. I allow everything we shared to play in my mind like a movie, from our unorthodox meeting, the no-name game, touring through San Francisco to his favorite places and then mine, our drive to Napa, the bike ride through the vineyards, kissing in the river, being dressed and worshiped by him the day and night we made love, at the party, in our room. And those were just events. What about the feelings and everything connected to them? The lust, the happiness, the comfort, the trust, and all the jokes and laughs we shared? No. No! I can’t for one second believe I made all that up. My hands clench the handles of my chair as I fight my confusion.

  Hew was complex and three-dimensional, while Luke was always so flat, just fragments of back story I contrived in my head to make everything fall into place and work the way I needed it to. I may have invented Luke to heal my mind after Bren’s death, but Hew is the one who really saved me and healed my heart. He gave me the courage to fight off Luke and to finally free myself of him. I know Luke’s gone now, and for good. The problem is that if I told all this to Dr. Leevy, I know she would tell me that Hew is another imaginary companion that I created to get rid of Luke, some kind of delusion of a boyfriend.

  Every moment I spent with Hew felt so real. This information, though undeniable to me, could be dangerous to share because without any proof of his existence, who will believe me? This is how I felt with Luke in the beginning. The illness convinced me that my delusions were absolute truth. What if they are doing that again?

  I try to make sense of the complexity in my sluggish mind, but I’m still confused because several unanswered questions remain. How did Hew always seem to find me in San Francisco, just like Luke always seemed to? And if he’s real, then why did he leave me when I needed him most? Did I scare him? If I did, I understand, but where did he go? When I passed out after pushing Luke, I hit my head on a rock, slicing open my head. He wouldn’t have just left me there to bleed to death. There is no record of him in the police report, or any man for that matter. I know, because I asked to read it. How could a person who stood by me for days while I cried my eyes out to him and told him nothing about myself, not even my real name, run away when I needed him most?

  “I don’t remember doing that. I don’t even know anyone named Hew.” I finally answer her question with a lie, playing it cool and staring right through her.

  “I see.” She punches the button on the end of her pen with her thumb exactly three times, every other time it’s four—open, closed, open—like she always does before she jots her notes. I swear she has OCD.

  “Other than the name change—”

  “By choice,” I interject.

  “By choice.” She shoots me her famous raised eyebrow. “Pending further evaluation, of course, I see no reason to hold you beyond the ten-day period.”

  I smile inside but I can’t let her see, so I hold my face in an unreadable shield. Being free and at home will allow me to search for Hew and prove to myself that he’s real, but most importantly, give me the chance to somehow apologize and win him back.

  “Now, Shea. If this is approved, you will be released to your family, like you were before, and you will be expected to take your medication as prescribed and stay under the supervision of your parents. No more trips on your own. For now. Do you understand?”

  I nod, and look down as I twist the hem of my hospital shirt.

  “In the year and a half that I’ve worked with you, I don’t, nor have I ever believed that you are a threat to yourself or others. In fact, your improvement, despite this little hiccup, has been a miracle. But for now, you must remain medicated. Say yes if you understand.”

  “Yes,” I mumble.

  “Good.” She shuts the folder and rises from her seat in one fluid motion.

  “And after you leave, I expect follow-up visits with you every week.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She ushers me to the door. When she opens it, my male nurse, Ray, is waiting to take me back to my room.

  “At our two o’clock session tomorrow, I want to discuss your trip to California in detail and your new name,” Dr. Leevy reminds me, then shuts the door behind me.

  Chapter 50

  She

  Two months later, at home in Maryland

  The floor of my bedroom in my parents’ home is a mess. Scattered amongst the items are wedding binders with collages of my perfect wedding with Bren, unfinished party favors, bags of crafting materials from Michael’s, sample invitations, and travel pamphlets for planning the perfect honeymoon that would tour us around the world. This is the second time I’ve looked at these items in two and a half months. But that last time was on the day Bren and I had planned to get married after graduation. I put on my wedding dress, like I was getting ready for that day, looked in the mirror, and proceeded to have the mother of all breakdowns.

  I had only been home from t
he hospital for few months when it happened. Imagine my parents’ shock when I ran out of the house in the wedding dress, crying, and hopped in a taxi that I had called, leaving them. Only to be notified a week later that I had been found on the cliffs of California, about to attempt suicide. That last part I still find ridiculous. If there’s one person in the world who’s thankful to be alive, it’s me. Though I’ve had a tough time weeding through the garbage dump the ordeal has created in my mind, I’m slowly finding my way back.

  Today, at Dr. Leevy’s request, and for a lot of my own reasons, I’m packing these memories away. But I leave out the brochure on Paris. I want to go there someday. I owe it to Bren; I owe it to me.

  I rise from the floor and drift to my window seat and sit, flipping through my brochure and looking at the glossy photos of the Eiffel Tower, the Seine River, quaint cafés, and museums. I set it aside for something real and glance to the window. Outside, the sun is shining but the leaves are falling off the trees.

  I haven’t seen Luke since California. Dr. Leevy believes that my “killing” him by pushing him over the cliff allowed my mind to free itself from the delusions. If it were that easy, why didn’t she tell me to do that in the first place, I asked her. She said I needed to want him to leave, like asking a guest who’s outstayed their welcome to go. Sometimes I think she makes everything up as she goes. It’s easy to sound smart in hindsight.

  To this day, I still haven’t fessed up to her about Hew. As far as she knows, I traveled California by myself, which I feel like I may have done, too, because I’ve looked for him on the Internet, scouring everything I could think of to find the real Hew. But with no real information about him, not even his name, my searches have been useless.

  Every day since I last saw him, I’ve even tried to conjure him with my mind through a delusion. He never materializes, not like Luke did. And because of that, there’s been a huge void in my chest since I decided that he must be a hallucination, too. But if Hew was, then I decided I’d rather stay in that world with him forever. So over a week ago, unbeknownst to my parents and Dr. Leevy, I stopped taking my meds. There’s a hard lump inside the window seat’s cushion beneath me where I’ve been hiding my pills, until I can smuggle them to the bathroom to flush them.