Resilience

by Jessie Close

  Mark was enrolled at the University of Montana’s College of Forestry and Conservation in Missoula, some two hundred miles northwest of Bozeman, and was starting a new chapter in his life. Because he was much older than other college students, he wasn’t interested in most college events and spent weekends in Bozeman working at his brother Dave’s construction company. Mark had two daughters in California from a previous marriage. He told me that he’d had two serious relationships in the nine years since his divorce, including one with a woman who’d committed suicide.

  “I tend to attract women who need saving,” he warned.

  I thought: Well, that’s definitely me.

  Mark said his hobby was barhopping. He liked hanging out in them. I told him about the Bear Claw, my favorite, and the only, bar in McAllister, and we instantly made a date to visit it ASAP. I’d hit the jackpot—an attractive man who enjoyed drinking as much as I did.

  A week later, Mark and I got drunk when he came to Bozeman and ended up tangled together in the guest bedroom in the Sovulewskis’ house, where we attacked each other like wild animals, making so much noise that we got well-deserved lectures the next morning from Pam and Dave. Our lovemaking had awakened their seven-year-old daughter.

  Mark was the perfect antidote for the pain and ongoing guilt I was feeling about Calen. My son was calling nearly every day from McLean Hospital to ask if he could come home. Each time I told him no it was as if a piece of my heart were being ripped out. Calen would get angry and argue with me. I don’t think he had anyone else to vent his anger on. Many nights, I hung up in tears, knowing that Calen had intentionally said things to hurt me.

  After his two-week hospital evaluation, Calen moved into Appleton House, a residential facility on the hospital campus, to live among thirty other “residents.” The hospital staff didn’t like using the word patients. Like him, Calen’s housemates had been diagnosed either with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, arguably the most serious mental disorders. When Calen was in a good mood, he would tell me about the others in his recovery program, especially a woman his age named Katie, whom he liked.

  I could tell from our talks that Calen was still struggling to control his own mind. Voices continued to tell him that he was stupid and needed to hurt himself. After about eight months at Appleton House, Calen missed a bed check at night. Hospital security was called, but before the guards could find him Katie and another friend of Calen’s from Appleton House found him sitting on the steps of the campus chapel holding a knife. Katie talked him out of using the knife to harm himself. When security arrived, Calen admitted that he was having suicidal thoughts and was moved for his own safety into a room on a locked ward.

  I’d decided that Mattie and I were going to move to Missoula to live with Mark. I should have recognized mania, but I didn’t. Once again, I was manic and chasing a man.

  Mattie and I moved into Mark’s two-bedroom apartment, and I enrolled Mattie, who had just turned nine, into third grade. This school had many more services than her former school, and her new teachers discovered she had dyslexia. I had known she was struggling with reading and had tried to help by homeschooling her those few months, but I didn’t know what else to do for her. This school in Missoula was just what she needed.

  But besides Mattie finding some important answers, here we were in Missoula living with a man whom we barely knew and who had a serious drinking problem, just as I did. It wasn’t unusual for Mark and I to go through a half gallon of vodka in a few days. Meanwhile, Calen was in a mental hospital. Little Mattie was dealing with a learning disability in a new school and now had limited contact with Noah, her father, back in Bozeman.

  If that wasn’t stressful enough, my continuing mood changes made me feel as if I were on a playground teeter-totter. The drinking helped, or so I believed.

  Calls from Calen tapered off after Mattie and I got settled in Missoula. He returned from the locked ward to his room at Appleton House and fell into a routine as doctors continued with medication trials, searching for just the right cocktail of drugs to keep him stable and silence the voices without turning him into a zombie. Tom and Sander went to visit him, and so did Glenn and her daughter, Annie. All of them reported that Calen appeared to be getting better.

  Mattie got help for her dyslexia both at school and at home. It turned out that Mark had been diagnosed with dyslexia as a child and had lived with it for years. He began helping Mattie with homework.

  What didn’t improve was the amount of drinking that Mark and I were doing. Whenever we traveled between Missoula and Bozeman we stopped at a bar near the highway turnoff to Warm Springs, which was not actually a town but rather the location of Montana’s only state psychiatric hospital. The asylum had been built in 1877, before statehood, near a natural spring that spewed out scalding water. The outlaw Jesse James reportedly visited Warm Springs, and Mark and I both got a kick out of hoisting drinks near where famous outlaws and Indian tribes had once congregated. Whenever I thought about the nearby state hospital, I thought of Calen and was happy that he was at McLean and not squirreled away in a state facility where the staff was under constant pressure to treat and discharge patients.

  The Warm Springs bar was about midway to Bozeman, so Noah would often come to retrieve Mattie there when it was time for her weekend with him. Mattie would stick quarter after quarter into a shuffleboard game while she waited for her father.

  Initially, Mark and I enjoyed our honeymoon phase. When Mattie was staying with Noah, we would take road trips across Montana filled with binge drinking and lovemaking. Montana is home to dozens of historic bars, many dating to the Wild West days, and we were determined to visit as many as we could. I remember one weekend when we drove to Lincoln because we’d heard it was home to the oldest bar in the state. It was also where the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, had been caught four years earlier by the FBI. After hitting the town’s two watering holes, we drove to the place where Kaczynski had lived in the woods only to discover that the FBI had dismantled his cabin and taken it somewhere else to use as evidence. His entire cabin was gone, and that struck us as hilarious overkill. I knew that Kaczynski had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and it scared me that Calen might have that same illness.

  A few months after moving to Missoula, during a manic moment, I began getting anxious and decided it was time for Mattie and me to return to the Mouse House. Almost overnight, I wanted out of Missoula and Mark’s apartment.

  Mark decided to quit school and move back with us. We settled into the Mouse House.

  Our drinking quickly became out of control. If I didn’t have a drink by the afternoon, my hands would shake and I’d feel sick to my stomach. The sound of ice going into a glass and the sound of vodka and tonic following it became a siren song. I loved it and couldn’t wait. But I also didn’t love it. With the drinking came suicidal thoughts—of how I would do it and where—and these thoughts began to scare me.

  Mark found work with a fence-building outfit in McAllister, and I took another stab at being a homemaker. It wasn’t easy, because I was drinking so much at night that getting up in the morning became pure torture. As soon as Mattie left for school, I’d reach for the bottle to “steady” my nerves.

  Not long after we returned to live at the Mouse House, my telephone rang.

  “Mom,” Calen said. “I just saw a vampire.”

  I’d been drinking and wasn’t feeling well. I really didn’t want to deal with this.

  “Oh, Calen,” I said.

  “She had bloody fangs. She turned her head and looked at me, and I could hear her hiss!”

  “Where are you?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know—somewhere.”

  I was frustrated and tired and let out a loud, exasperated sigh as I girded myself for what I knew would be a long conversation. Instead, the phone went dead. I assumed Calen was angry at me, so I mustered my strength and called Appleton House to tell them about our conversation and ask a staff member to g
et Calen back on the line.

  When the night-duty counselor answered, I said, “Calen’s not okay. He just called to tell me he saw a vampire. Would you send someone to his room to make sure he’s all right?”

  “Calen’s not here, ma’am,” the counselor replied.

  “What are you talking about?” I replied. “I just talked to him.”

  “He’s not here.”

  I felt as if I had just been doused with freezing water. I snapped out of my alcoholic fuzziness.

  “What the hell is going on?” I snapped.

  The nurse explained that Calen had taken a bus into Boston earlier that evening with three of his friends from Appleton House but hadn’t come back to the hospital with them. They said he had been fine when they had first gotten off the bus in Harvard Square, but moments later Calen had bolted from everyone.

  “You have no idea where he is?” I asked again, stating the obvious.

  “Boston’s a big city, ma’am, but we are looking for him.”

  I slammed down the receiver and called Tom. That’s when I got a second jolt. Tom already knew. The hospital had called him as soon as officials realized he was missing, but Tom and Calen’s doctor had decided not to tell me because they didn’t want to “upset me.”

  I was furious but also understood why they had kept me in the dark. I had told Tom and Calen’s doctor that my own mental illness seemed to be mushrooming as a result of all Calen’s calls and the stress that a parent feels when a child is sick. Just the same, I was angry that I wasn’t called.

  I quickly told Tom that Calen had telephoned me and that if I had known he was missing I might have been able to persuade him to return to the hospital.

  Angry, I slammed down the receiver and started toward the cabinet where Mark and I kept our vodka. But when I got there, I hesitated. What if Calen called again? I needed to be sober. When my hands began shaking, I decided to compromise and pour myself a modest drink.

  I imagined the worst. I couldn’t stop thinking about Calen roaming Boston alone, psychotic and frightened. I imagined him hurting himself or others hurting him.

  There are twenty-four hours in a day, and each hour is sixty minutes long, but when one of your children is missing and you know he is psychotic, those sixty minutes drag and the twenty-four hours seem longer. There is nowhere to rest, no calming of your mind. Knowing Calen was away from his evening medication added to my fear. He’d been so fragile for so long that missing even a single dose of medication might cause him to act out.

  Around midnight McAllister time, I called Appleton House. It was 2:00 a.m. in Boston.

  “I’m afraid we haven’t found him yet, but we will,” the night-duty counselor said calmly.

  “I’m afraid because he obviously missed his nightly meds,” I said.

  “Well,” the counselor replied, “it might be worse than that. One of his friends said she thinks he has been ‘cheeking’ his meds and then spitting them out later. We don’t know how long he might have been doing that, but I’m sure we will find him. Don’t worry.”

  I wanted to scream: Don’t worry? My son may have not been taking his medication for days and is now missing on the streets of Boston and you tell me not to worry?

  I bit my tongue and got another drink after hanging up. That drink was followed by another and another. Calen’s dog, Jack, seemed to instinctively know something was wrong, because he came over and sat at my feet while I tried to picture a happy ending to this emergency.

  In my mind, I pictured Calen suddenly pulling up outside the Mouse House in his gray pickup and jumping out, the way that he used to. He would hurry into the house yelling, “Hi, Ma!” and I would know that he was safe and give him a hug.

  I ran that fantasy clip over and over in my mind until I blacked out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The phone rang early.

  Calen had returned to McLean Hospital on his own, stopping occasionally during the six-mile walk from Harvard Square to Appleton House to duck into an alley or crouch behind a bush so that he could avoid anything and anyone stalking him.

  The image of my nineteen-year-old son hiding from imagined vampires and other phantoms made me physically ill. Again I wondered: Is this going to be his life—our life?

  About two months after Calen moved into Appleton House, one of his doctors called to tell me that Calen had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. I was told that the diagnosis meant that he had elements of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia—both a mood disturbance and a thought disorder. A double curse. My heart sank. It had been clear from the start that Calen was deeply troubled, and various scary-sounding diagnoses had been tossed around, but this one had finality to it.

  I called my parents in Big Piney to tell them. When the word schizoaffective passed my lips, I burst into tears and crumpled to my knees. All I could think about were the homeless people who roamed the cities, dirty and delusional, screaming and acting oddly. All I could think about were the movies in which mad-dog killers escape from mental asylums. That wasn’t my son!

  Mom tried to console me, but my own fragile mental condition made it impossible for me to imagine anything but the absolute worst future for my son. He was cursed to live life tormented by his own mind—alone, scared, and scary. I became so distraught by my imagination that when I later called McLean to speak to Calen, my call was directed to one of his doctors instead. After listening to me for several moments, the doctor advised me not to speak to Calen. It wasn’t because he was worried about how Calen would react. It was because I was so emotionally upset that the doctor thought talking to Calen would be dangerous for my stability. I wouldn’t be able to handle it.

  Calen’s illness locked its jaws on me and began gnawing, chewing slowly. I could think of little else. I already knew Calen’s behavior had cost him most of his friends. Who would want to hang out with a madman? Now his friends were moving forward with their lives, earning degrees, going to work, and getting married while he was trapped in a mental hospital. What sort of future will he have after he is discharged? What college would want to admit someone with his diagnosis? What young woman would risk dating him? What employer would hire him? It was as if he had become his illness, and I felt sure that his illness would crush his dreams and rob him of all hope. Would you want someone with schizoaffective disorder teaching in a classroom? Would you want to hear a pilot before takeoff announce that he has schizoaffective disorder? I had taken Calen to McLean so that he could get “cured,” but the books I read said there was no cure for schizoaffective disorder. It was a lifelong sentence. What if he never does get better, never is able to leave the hospital, never is able to return home? Now that his symptoms had a label, I knew he was no longer Calen. He had become his illness, and I hated that.

  During a visit to a Bozeman grocery store, I found myself telling a clerk that my son was in a mental hospital and had been diagnosed with a severe mental disorder. A repugnant look took shape on her face. It was as if I had given birth to the Antichrist. Driving home, I decided I had to do something to fight that look. Would that clerk have reacted as she had if I had said my son was in the hospital fighting cancer? Of course not. She would have been sympathetic, understanding, and probably would’ve tried to console me. Instead, she glared at me with contempt. My son was one of “them,” and that made me suspect as well. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it? Did she think mental illness was catching?

  I thought about the fact that gay men who had become sick with the HIV/AIDS virus had been viewed as lepers. Over time and with education, that viewpoint changed. The same couldn’t be said about bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Those diagnoses turned you into lepers. Calen’s friends had abandoned him. I had been afraid that Mattie’s little friends wouldn’t be allowed over to our home to play if the parents discovered I had bipolar disorder. Even if the parents hadn’t been afraid, I was. That needed to change.

  What could I do? I was only one mother liv
ing in rural Montana, and I was struggling with my own issues. Still, I had to try. When I got to the Mouse House, I drank a couple of vodkas to calm my nerves and reached for my phone.

  “Glennie,” I said when my sister answered, “you will never have to buy me another birthday present or Christmas present or anything else for that matter if you can do me one favor.”

  Glenn was busy shooting a made-for-television movie version of South Pacific with Harry Connick Jr., but had taken time to answer my call.

  “What?” she asked me quietly.

  “Can you do something about the stigma, the stigma that people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder face?”

  I was worried that Glenn would assume I was drunk, so I explained to her how the grocery clerk had reacted when I’d told her that Calen was in a mental hospital and had schizoaffective disorder.

  “It’s just awful,” I said. “This is Calen.”

  Glenn promised to think about it, and when I hung up I felt better. If anyone could do something about the stigma, it would be my sister. I knew she would want to learn about mental illness before she did anything. Glenn is an avid reader, and she doesn’t do anything without thoroughly researching it first, especially when it comes to lending her name to a social cause. If Glenn is going to promote something, she has to believe in it. Her integrity is not for sale and never has been. If anything, I suspected she might wait to make sure that my request was genuine and not sparked by my drinking and guilt about Calen.

  By Christmastime, the doctors had put Calen on a new regimen of medications, and he was stable enough to come home for a visit. I was thrilled but also a bit apprehensive. I wasn’t worried about how he might act: I was worried about how my family would treat him. Holidays had always been a tough time for me emotionally. I kept telling myself that everything would be okay as long as I didn’t drink in front of Calen. I had gotten good at hiding my drinking from my parents and siblings. Now I would hide it from my children as well. Sander was coming home, too—from the University of Colorado at Boulder. My boys would bunk in the studio while Mattie, Mark, and I were in our cozy Mouse House.