Patience, My Dear

by Bower Lewis

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  For Jefferson, who turns my foibles funny and my strengths into superpowers.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to acknowledge my parents, Robert and Judith Munro, with profound love and gratitude, and with apologies for the language in this book (and for my adolescence). Also, John Munro, Hilary McLeod, Alan McLeod, Heather Danskin, Ian Danskin, and the ever-indomitable Amelia and Evelyn McLeod.

  And my aunt, Penelope MacNaughton, who helped me come into my own. Thanks also to Winifred Lyons and Richard Pettengill, Lucy Lyons, my whole, huge Lyons family, Gillian MacNaughton, Andrew MacNaughton, Heidi Van der Heuvel and Douglas Loyd, Chuck Danskin, the guy who let me turn left onto Cross Street today, and Charles and Linda Austin.

  And with all my love, the knucklehead—Danielle Victoria Austin.

  Grateful acknowledgment to Kelley A. Swan, who makes me write better and laugh harder than anyone I’ve ever met. Also, Liane Thomas, Benjamin Leroy, Rebecca (George) Gray, Sara Kriynovich Burton, Eugene and Lynne Cox, Cameron Cox, Douglas Cox, Katie Allen Henderson, Emma Aer, Theresa Stone, Karen Gould, Dr. Yuan-Chi Lin, and Mr. Thomas Still.

  I’d especially like to thank my indefatigable agent, Sara Camilli, and my publisher Zane, along with Charmaine Parker, Deb Schuler, Shontrell Wade, Yona Deshommes, Tory Lowy, and the whole team at Infinite Words/Atria.

  And finally, I acknowledge my husband, Jefferson Marcus Lyons. Infinite words are not enough. I love you.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Defenestration was going to be a bitch. Patience didn’t like touching unsealed wood, a quirk of hers since childhood, and there wasn’t a window frame in the place that wasn’t paint-curled and splintered. She didn’t care for the sensation of freefall either, and—despite the impression people seemed to form at the sight of her tattoos and fuchsia-streaked hair—she abhorred a public spectacle. Also, she was afraid of heights. She crouched in the living room window frame of her fifth-story apartment, gazing across the neighboring rooftops at the skyline of downtown Boston, and disappointment hung around her like a tuba. Patience didn’t want to die.

  Patience.

  She wouldn’t have heard the building explode over the wind in her ears, but The Voice came through as clear as a live mic in an empty auditorium. She fought against the surging air to be just as clear as she told it to fuck off.

  It sighed. She ignored it.

  Her descent into the Kelleher family schizophrenia had been marked by the intrusion of an auditory hallucination more passive-aggressive than her mother’s Aunt Prim. The Voice sighed. It cleared its throat. It complained when she didn’t respond and typically ended up insulted when she did. She’d slept little the past few weeks, and fitfully when she did—dreaming of laboratories and boy band singers—despite the double shifts she’d been pulling to exhaust herself beyond its reach. It didn’t work of course, nothing ever did. The Voice interrupted as she took customers’ orders and followed her into the walk-in freezer. It commented if her plates weren’t carried straight enough or if she spilled some juice over onto her tray, always insisting that it was just trying to help. Her head hurt all the time now, and she was done. She’d known for years that this was coming, and now that it was here, she could think of nothing but finding some way to make it go away. The culmination of a decade’s anticipation and anxiety had turned out to be something of a fucked-up joke, but she’d be damned if she wouldn’t handle the punchline herself.

  She looked down at the tattered strap of leather she’d worn around her left wrist since her thirteenth birthday—since the night her favorite uncle gave it to her and then packed up his voices and disappeared for good. He’d promised her that she’d understand someday, that his world would make sense to her when the time was right. It had been ten years of ticking since that night. Ten years of waiting in line for a movie she didn’t want to see. Like the constant drip from a leaking faucet, it was always there, whether she noticed it or not.

  Patience yanked the old cord from her wrist and dropped it over the ledge, then pushed a pink lock from her face.

  “Fuck your promises, Uncle John. And fuck you too.”

  Patience.

  “That goes double for you.”

  It sighed again, and then her cell phone rang inside the apartment. Its chimes sounded clearly in her ears, as impervious to the wind’s dominance as The Voice. She glanced back to her cluttered coffee table, then turned forward again and caught sight of a man not much older than her standing at a window across the street. He was dressed in pajamas with a cup of coffee in his hand. She stared for a moment, confused at finding him there, and then he waved.

  She tightened her grip on the frame as it occurred to her that her plummet to the street would likely cause a fair amount of danger and discord to the people around her. She’d managed to miss that detail in her distraction and fatigue, and she was curious now whether that sort of disregard for others was a condition of the schizophrenia, or if she’d simply become an asshole over the past several weeks and somehow failed to notice.

  She slid her hands back to pull herself inside again as a torrent of wind bent a path around her and drew her forward, breaking her grasp of the frame. She hung suspended over Commonwealth Avenue for one miraculous moment as the shaft of air completed its arc around her body and pulled her back into the apartment. It dropped her onto her living room floor and quieted to a reassuring breeze, brushing the hair back from her eyes as her heart thumped in her ears. She coughed for air, and then, slowly, she began to quiet as well. It was as though a persistent humming she’d never noticed had stopped and a new sort of peace existed beneath the world’s general blare. She pushed herself up and dropped her head back against the sill. Her apartment seemed brighter than before, the air more transparent. She turned her eyes up to the light shining from the uncovered bulb and wondered if it always felt this way when an episode passed. The sensation wasn’t unpleasant. It was something—she wasn’t at all sure what—but the moment was tolerable.

  She wondered, too, if it was sensations like this that had fed the one constant thing in her uncle’s increasingly inconstant psyche—his staunch refusal to accept any form of help that might quiet the voices he alone could hear.

  She looked down to the tan line at her newly naked wrist.

  “We’re alike, Pax. You and me,” he’d said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be there to help you through it when your time comes.”

  But, he wasn’t. He’d never been heard from again. It was months before her mother stopped crying and accepted that her little brother was gone, just the way their grandfather and one of their uncles were also gone. Patience learned soon enough to stop asking about him and life resumed as a new kind of normal.

  No one ever spoke of John now.

  The phone chirped beside her pile of unopened mail and she nodded. If she wasn’t going to kill herself, she should probably check her messages.

  The guy across the street was still at his window, but his mug was overturned and empty now and his coffee was streaming down the front of his pajamas. She waved back apologetically and pulled the window shut.

  • • •

  A text message was waiting from someone who called himself The Biz. Patience frowned at the extra fifteen cents this would cost her and pressed the button. She didn’t know anyone who called himself The Biz. She didn’t want to know anyone who called himself The Biz.

  CAN U HE
AR ME NOW?

  She checked the sender field again and deleted the message. Cell phone spam could get to be a pricey invasion for a girl without a text plan, and Patience didn’t care for texting in the first place. There was an immediacy and an expectation about it that she found annoying and harsh, and text speak generally made her want to put her head through a wall. She hit the power button, but the phone lit right back up in her hand.

  THER IS WRK 2 DO! :)

  It had been a stressful enough morning as it was. She was in no mood for a lecture from some anonymous ass with a cell phone. She had nimble dialing fingers and an excellent vocabulary. She hit reply, fully prepared to spend another fifteen cents unloading her displeasure onto The Biz and his work ethic, but the field was empty where his number should have been.

  “Goddamn it!”

  HEY!

  She stood very still beside the table, staring down at the admonishment. A prickly sensation started at the back of her neck and worked its way up. This would be the paranoia, of course, arriving right on cue. She leaned against the wall and raised a hand to her throbbing forehead.

  “Would you at least lay off the caps lock, for crying out loud? It’s too early for the noise.”

  The responding chime seemed more restrained than the last. Patience opened one eye and glanced down.

  Sorry.

  That prickly sensation turned into a cold sweat. She turned slowly around the apartment and then looked back out the window. Her neighbor’s was empty now and she appeared to be alone. But Patience was not alone, she was certain of that. Someone was there with her, watching. Taking inventory. She grabbed her coat on her way to the door and took the stairs down two at a time.

  • • •

  “I’m being followed.”

  The cop at the front desk looked up and Patience dropped the phone without invitation.

  “I’ve been receiving text messages from someone I don’t know. I think he was in my apartment this morning.”

  “You think he was in your apartment? Was there evidence of a break-in?”

  “No.”

  “Did you hear something?”

  “Nothing but the phone.”

  “Miss …”

  “Look,” she said, “I’m getting messages from someone who’s responding to the things I do and say, as I’m doing and saying them. He was there with me this morning, I’m certain of it.”

  The officer picked up the phone. “It’s probably kids. What they can’t do with cell phones these days. I let my twelve-year-old get his hands on mine a couple of weeks ago to set up my voicemail for me, and in the five minutes it was in his possession, he’d downloaded over thirty bucks worth of video games, including something called Zombie Cop Killers. I never knew a thing about it until the bill came.” He paused and looked up at her. “Did you erase the messages?”

  “Why would I ask you to look if I’d erased them?”

  “There’s nothing here now.”

  He passed the phone back and Patience grabbed it from the counter. They were right there on the screen, just as they had been. “What are you talking about?” She held it up to show him. “This one at the top, I’ve already deleted twice and it’s still here. Look!”

  The officer glanced down and his expression grew increasingly cop-like. “Miss, I am looking at a screen that says zero messages. What’s your name?”

  She raised her hands and stepped back. She’d come in looking for help and had wound up the remedy for some cop’s boredom instead. Unless, of course, the messages she could see as clearly as she could see the suspicion in his eyes weren’t really there, and the episode from the morning hadn’t passed at all.

  “My mistake,” she said. “You know, I think it was a different phone I was looking at. Thank you for your help, Officer. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”

  She turned away and pushed through the precinct door, praying no one would follow. The phone went off again halfway down the steps and she froze. She glanced back toward the station and then slammed the device ten or twelve times against the frigid iron banister, until there was nothing left but a catastrophe of plastic and metal. She yanked the battery from its remains and shoved the mess back into her pocket before turning in the direction of the wireless store.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The kid fiddled with his Bluetooth earpiece as Patience refused to let him transfer her previous number to the new phone. He finally gave in after some discussion, and it wasn’t until she asked whether it could be programmed not to receive calls at all that he became visibly annoyed.

  “Why don’t you just keep it turned off?”

  “Because messages would still go to my inbox. I don’t want them coming in at all.”

  He chewed on the tape covering his lip ring and frowned.

  “I don’t think there’s a setting for that.”

  “Well, could you just get rid of the inbox for me? Delete it or something?”

  “Delete the inbox?” He scratched his head. “I’ve never heard of anybody wanting to delete their inbox. I mean, how would you even do that?”

  Her patience with the kid was wearing thin. “If I knew the answer to that, Eugene, I’d hardly need to call upon your expertise, now would I?”

  He crossed his arms and shook a lock of faded green hair back from his eyes.

  “No, I cannot delete the inbox. I also can’t set the phone to self-destruct whenever a call comes in, and I can’t program it to automatically electrocute anyone who adds your number to their contacts. There could be an update for that one down the road, though, so you might want to keep an eye on the website or something. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

  Patience smiled back at him. “You could disable the texting function for me, right? Or do I need to wait for an update for that as well?”

  He tugged on his tie and leaned in a little closer. “Maybe you’re not ready for a cell phone, ma’am. Landlines have way limited functionality, and they’re a lot less convenient too.”

  Patience touched the dismembered carcass of her phone on the display case as she stared back at the kid barely two years younger than her who’d called her ma’am on the worst day of her life. He straightened and took a half step back as she brushed the phone’s pieces onto his shoes.

  “Do you have any other recommendations?”

  He picked up her new phone and pressed its buttons deftly. “The texting is disabled now.” He nodded. “And as an extra special treat, I’ve set your ringtone to silent and turned off all your message alerts. I’ll ring you up at that register over there, if there’s nothing else I can help you with.”

  “Super.”

  • • •

  Patience reached to slide the new phone into her coat pocket, but the text and ringtone-disabled beast lit right up in her hand.

  I M THE LORD UR GOD! :)

  She stared down at the message, paralyzed in her tracks as pedestrians played chicken with the traffic on Harvard Avenue and a car alarm polluted the peace. A bus pulled up and she blinked at the passengers stepping off before looking down at the display again. Her fingers closed around it as she turned back to the brick façade of the store and smashed it until it was virtually unrecognizable from its predecessor. Then she stalked back inside and tossed the pieces onto the case in front of the startled kid.

  “Change it again.”

  • • •

  Patience sat on a bench in Ringer Park, contemplating her descent into mental illness. Perhaps more than any other facet, she was dismayed to discover such a dearth of creativity at the deepest recesses of her mind. So she was receiving messages from God now, like a million other schizophrenics before her. She’d have thought her psyche would have gone with someone edgier and a little less clichéd. Someone like Kurt Cobain or Dorothy Parker…Lenny Bruce, perhaps.

  U DONT WNT 2 GIVE LENNY BRUCE ACCESS 2 UR HEAD!

  TRST ME ON THT ONE!

  She glared up at a passing cumulus cloud and deleted
the messages. It chimed again and her face was hot in a flash. “Stop it! Can’t you leave me alone for five damn minutes?”

  A woman on a nearby bench looked up as Patience argued with the sky and she took a breath. She smiled back nicely and the woman returned to her book.

  “Would you at least cool it with the texting?” She kept her voice low now. “It’s obnoxious. If you won’t get lost, then why don’t you speak normally, like a proper hallucination, until I find someone to prescribe me something that’ll make you go away?”

  I DID SPEAK! U WUD NOT LISTN!

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. Mea-fucking-culpa! You’ve got my attention now, though, so you can go back to your regular voice anytime you’re ready.”

  The phone remained dark and silent for a moment. Then it chimed at last.

  NU IPHONE! GRATEST THNG SNCE YO-YO MA!

  SRSLY…DID I DO THIS???

  She dropped her face into her hands as it chimed away like a babbling toddler. Patience didn’t care what intricate perversities were involved with mental illness, this was unconscionable. “You cannot be serious,” she prayed. “Please tell me that you’re joking.”

  ABOUT THT LAST PART, YEAH …

  WUDNT WNT 2 PISS OFF JOBS! ;)

  The woman across the path stole another glance as Patience cursed and snapped the phone shut. Then, without a thought to what she was doing, she was on her feet with it thrust before the startled stranger’s face.

  “I’m very sorry to bother you, ma’am, but I need an outsider’s opinion on something. This is too much, don’t you think? I mean, I don’t care if the guy does think he’s God, it’s bordering on harassment. I really don’t feel I’m being overly sensitive or anything…”

  The woman drew back. She appeared apprehensive about her role in the conversation.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Were you expecting a call?”

  “God, no! I want the calls to stop!”

  Patience pleaded silently with her to understand, and then, just as quickly, lowered the phone and backed away. She’d never understood why Uncle John hadn’t kept his voices to himself. He knew that no one else could hear what he did, but he never seemed able to refrain from upsetting everybody by answering back. And now, here she was in a public park, demanding validation from a perfectly polite-looking stranger, and there seemed no stopping the momentum.