They didn’t pump her stomach because the pills had already dissolved inside her. They just monitored her levels. They talked about a psych hold but Lydia insisted it wasn’t an overdose, it was a mistake. My mother and father helped convince the doctors that was the case. They still believed Lydia. Or at least wanted to. If alarm bells were going off, no one was acknowledging them. Not yet. It seemed feasible. Lydia was so tiny, barely a hundred pounds, of course the pills would hit her like a Mack truck. She just needed to be more careful. What was she thinking?
My mom took her back to her house that night and stayed with her. All Lydia cared about, my mom told us, was getting in touch with her new boyfriend. She wanted him to come retrieve her from the hospital. She wanted him to come over to her house after she got out. She seemed to want to use this scare as some sort of fucked-up leverage. Their relationship was fraught with manipulation on both sides. None of us liked it, or him. He was having a bad effect on her. Christ, she ended up in the fucking hospital.
Memories.
How could this be happening? To us? The Magnificent Cayton-Hollands? These were not the story lines we were supposed to be pursuing. This was not the road we were supposed to be heading down.
Was this our tornado? Our disaster? Our very special episode? If so, I didn’t want it anymore. Lydia might, but I didn’t. Our dad was right. To hope for such things was ridiculous. I longed for the bland normalcy of our everyday. I wanted Lydia working the Grawlix, not in the hospital. I wanted the family unit in all their glorious predictability. I wanted to be back in Kansas, instead of here, in this fucked-up Oz.
Click your heels together three times.
There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.
But it didn’t work.
And then things really started getting bad.
CURSED
That was the summer that the clouds descended. Life became distorted; familiar but strange. Every week something new, and terrible. Those things that you only hear about happening to other people were beginning to happen to us.
Call it magical realism.
Is started when the Denver Police Department raided my house. I had just come home for the day and took my dog Annabel for a walk. Mere moments after my return there was a furious pounding on the front door.
“DPD open up!” the voice on the other side bellowed.
I squinted through the peephole. A fat pink fingertip was blocking my view.
“Yeah right,” I said, figuring one of my friends was pretty proud of themselves at that moment.
“DENVER POLICE! OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!”
This was no joke.
I stole a few moments to put away the by-now-hysterical Annabel and opened the door. Four uniformed officers burst into my house. They forced my hands behind my back and slammed my face down on the entry table.
“Are we gonna need handcuffs?” they said.
No. We were not.
“Do you have a warrant?” I asked, the lawyer’s son.
Two detectives promptly glided through the doorway, chests puffed like peacocks, badges bobbing on the chains around their necks.
“Here’s your warrant,” the lead detective said, handing me a piece of paper. “Have you been downloading some stuff illegally, sir?”
The question took me off guard. Downloading stuff? What kind of stuff? I stammered something about Friday Night Lights, the last season of Six Feet Under, but other than that I had no idea what he was talking about. Well, we’ll see about that, he informed me. And so for the next hour and a half I sat in my living room detained while the detectives combed through my laptop upstairs. The uniformed officers stood within arms length, making sure I didn’t try to escape. They peppered me with questions but I remained silent.
“Can I call my dad?” my only words.
They wouldn’t allow it so I didn’t say a thing, remembering my father’s advice growing up: You don’t talk to police. You talk to lawyers.
Slowly, whatever the fuck was going on came out. Did I have a password on my wireless router? No. I did not. I tried to put one on there but I’m pretty much computer-illiterate and it was harder than one click so I figured there was no harm in letting the bike messengers and vegan farmers next door enjoy the fruits of my free internet.
Well, someone was downloading some pretty awful stuff, I was informed, and all signs pointed to the router in my bedroom closet.
Awful stuff? What kind of awful stuff?
That kind of awful stuff. Jared from Subway awful stuff.
After combing through every download made on my MacBook Pro for the past who-knows-how-long, the DPD learned exactly what kind of stuff I’m into, and that it is decidedly not that.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time this is what happens,” the lead detective said. “We trace the signal to someone’s house who had no idea this was going on. They don’t have a password-protected network and, surprise, someone’s downloading horrendous shit.”
He spoke to me like I was a fucking idiot. Like of course this was the logical outcome of not having a password-protected wireless signal. There was no remorse in his voice. No “Sorry to traumatize you and your dog in the privacy of your household at five on a Tuesday afternoon.”
“Well is it the neighbors?” I asked him.
Probably not, he told me. They’d check everybody out, due diligence and all that, but most of the time it was some pervert driving around in a van looking for free wireless signals like mine. They’d stay on the case. They’d catch the guy.
And then he was gone. As was the other detective, and the uniformed officers. I locked my door after them and that was that for my run-in with the Denver Police Department Internet Crimes Division. Except for the fact that I couldn’t stop shaking for the next two days. Or the fact that I couldn’t fall asleep that night, or how the next morning Annabel lost her mind when the paper landed on the front doorstep, an occasion that never even roused either of us from our slumber prior to the raid. Or the fact that the whole block watched the police pull two cars onto my front lawn and burst through the door.
I threw away my old router, got a new laptop, a new password, but I was shaken. I talked to Anna and my dad about legal action but there was really nothing to be done. The experience stayed with me. Every time I saw a cop it would come back up. Walking through the airport en route to a gig I’d see two police officers walking down the concourse and I would shudder with fear as I pictured them slamming me up against a wall, arresting me for any number of thought crimes. I started hating cops, every one I saw. It wasn’t hard. Children of civil rights attorneys are hardwired that way.
Then a cop got shot in the head in broad daylight in City Park and my empathy was reawakened. It was at Jazz in the Park, a favorite Denver summer Sunday pastime. Some cheesy band plays at the boathouse grandstand by the lake, food trucks descend, and the young professionals lie on blankets and drink wine. Sometimes the mayor’s wife steps up to the mic and belts out a few songs. It’s lovely. And quaint. Old couples holding hands, young parents with children and lawn chairs and coolers and baseball gloves in the park that I grew up in, the park that I called home. It’s old Denver. But on this night there was an argument between some gang members on the perimeter of the event. And a police officer stepped into the fray to keep the peace. And a gun was produced. And like that she was gone. She was a mother of two, the paper said. Thirty-two years old. My age at the time. Lydia was at Jazz in the Park that night too. She heard the shots.
The heat was unrelenting that summer, an atypical spell with temperatures in the one hundreds for weeks in a row. And no rain whatsoever. Any Coloradoan knows what that means. Sure enough, late June, a few weeks after the officer died, the first forest fire ignited in the hills beyond Fort Collins, the college town about an hour and a half north of Denver. Wildfires are nothing new in Colorado but they’re always in obscure places, some unfortunate patch of mostly desolate Rocky Mountain terr
ain. Fort Collins was familiar. Colorado State University is in Fort Collins. New Belgium Brewery is in Fort Collins. I’ve dated girls from Fort Collins. And while the High Park Fire up north was horrible, it turned out to be nothing compared to the Waldo Canyon Fire that devoured parts of Colorado Springs to the south a few days later. It was coming at us from both sides. Ash and smoked filled the air.
That’s the fire you saw on the news. The area that Obama visited. The most destructive fire in Colorado history. It was like a war zone. Thirty-two thousand people evacuated, hundreds of homes destroyed. On the worst night of the conflagration I had a show and a few of the people in the audience were from Colorado Springs, where Lydia went to college and lived for those few years afterward. They had fled to Denver because every hotel room in the Springs was booked. After the show they showed us pictures on their cell phones of the apocalyptic scenes back home—giant, shrieking flames threatening to devour a highway crammed full of cars crammed full of earthly possessions: photo albums, clothing racks, dogs and cats. It was end-of-days shit, and between the fire to the north and the fire to the south, there was a feeling of impending doom in Denver. Like we were next up. The Front Range of Colorado is a place where it’s easy to get your bearings. The mountains are always to the west, a simple frontier truism. But the smoke was so thick during those wildfires you couldn’t see the mountains. You looked to the west and it was just a hazy wall of angry sky. It was impossible not to feel lost and scared, like something truly terrible was bearing down on us.
We checked Lydia into the psych ward not long after the fire was contained. There was no fooling us this time. Not again. Do we get a pat on the back for that one? She’d bounced from shrink to shrink, keeping them all at arms length, bristling when one asked to talk to her parents. She was too smart for them. She outfoxed one after another until eventually she’d arranged a scenario where a psychiatrist would just prescribe different drugs for her to see how they worked, a bizarre and increasingly severe cocktail that sent her from high to low with no apparent regularity or regimen: Adderall, Ativan, Lorazepam.
She’d quit working for my dad. It was too stressful, she said. She’d begun working at a hipster Mexican restaurant a few blocks from my house. She was their star employee; they wanted her to take all the shifts she could handle. But she only worked a few days a week. Said she needed those other days to relax and focus on her mental well-being. Which meant taking a bunch of antipsychotic meds to knock herself out for the entire day. We didn’t know any of this until she showed up to a dinner barely able to stand. She kept it hidden after that first scare, that first trip to the ER.
We met at a Vietnamese restaurant on Federal and Lydia sat down at the table and slumped over in her chair. She told us that she had taken sleeping pills earlier and forgotten about the dinner and she apologized. She just wanted to sleep away all the hours when she wasn’t working. Our eyes darted around the table at each other. This was clearly a problem. She went out to sleep in my dad’s car while we ate. I went to check on her in the middle of our meal. My dad had moved his car around to the back of the restaurant because it just seemed safer there. I peeked my head in the window and watched her little chest rise and fall in the backseat. I watched my sister breathe. A chef on the back staircase smoking a cigarette smiled at me.
“She very tired,” he said to me, cheerfully, in broken English. Then he drew a finger to his eyeball. “I keep an eye on her.”
That was our Father’s Day, 2012.
Her friend called me the next morning to let me know that Lydia had bailed on going to their mutual friend’s wedding. She said she just wanted to sleep. I went over to check on her and I could barely rouse her. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, which elicited moments of coherence, mumbled words. Sleep. Pills. Didn’t take too many. I called my parents and Anna and the entire nuclear family assembled around her bed. She was nauseous. We took her to the bathroom to try to get her to throw up and she collapsed on the cold, black-and-white tile floor—just like I had my freshmen year in college, at my worst. It was then that she confessed that she had looked up online just how many of her antipsychotic meds she could take without killing herself, but to completely knock her out. And she had taken exactly that many. It was not a suicide attempt, she insisted. It was an attempt not to exist day after day. Which was just as bad. I picked her up in my arms and carried her to my car. Anna and I sped to Denver Health a few blocks away. Anna got out and tracked down a wheelchair. We threw Lydia into it and pushed her through the doors of the ER. They had no doubts about her condition. She sped past everyone, all the people in the waiting room mired in their own personal tragedies. We just blew by them. We watched as they hooked Lydia up to a cavalcade of beeping machinery and flushed her system with fluids. She became conscious and seemed to resent everything. She wouldn’t talk to us. Wanted to use our phones to text her boyfriend. We were having none of it.
What the fuck is happening, Lydia?
A mandatory seventy-two-hour hold for a psych evaluation wasn’t even a question. And so once a bed was available they moved Lydia up to the fifth floor to the psych ward, east side of the building. Nonviolent. It was surprisingly decent. For some reason I was expecting a nightmare. Howling lunatics screaming Bible passages, shit smeared on the walls. But everything was clean and sterile, quiet and calm.
They let us visit as much as we wanted. We’d bring her books and meals and keep her company. We’d sit at the communal table while Denver’s destitute crazies shuffled past us in various states of decrepitude, and we’d chuckle to one another at the bizarre things they would say. While Anna and I ate lunch with her one day, we were stunned to find that a man we knew named Danny was there on the same ward with Lydia. We had not seen him in years. When we were children Danny appeared out of the blue one day, just rang the doorbell at my parents’ house with some sob story about needing money. My parents helped him out and he became a regular visitor after that. He’d show up every few months, always with a pitiful new tale. Occasionally he’d bring us gifts—a basketball for me, a TV that he wanted to give to the family. My parents would refuse the offerings and give him a few dollars and send him on his way. He was clearly mentally ill then, but essentially harmless. Sometimes he would come when my parents were away, and we were instructed not to open the door on those occasions. Harmless, but still. When no one answered he would ring the doorbell over and over, he’d shout loud hellos and we’d go completely still, like frightened animals.
It’s Danny! Stay quiet!
He’d peer through the windows to see if anyone was home and we would scramble to stay out of eyeshot and hide behind furniture. We’d look at each other in those moments and giggle nervously, frightened children in a high-stakes game of hide-and-go-seek. Then Danny just stopped coming by. We’d see him around town sometimes. Denver’s still a small enough place that that type of stuff happens. But then we stopped seeing him altogether. If we thought about him at all, I’m sure we figured he was dead. And here he was on the psych ward, some twenty years later, worse for the wear, sure, but Danny nonetheless. Danny!
Two rooms down from Lydia.
It made us laugh, the insanity of it all, we Cayton-Holland three baffled and tickled at how we were suddenly seeming to exist in the sad works of art on which we fixated. But those moments gave way to teary panic when we removed the rose-colored, indie-film lenses from our eyes. This was just our little sister. Struggling. In a psych ward. It was devastating. We begged her to level with us. Was she suicidal? Did she want to kill herself? Because we could keep her there. Or send her somewhere nicer, somewhere she could get the help she needed, long-term, some asylum in Switzerland, whatever it took.
“We’re not going to let you leave us,” we told her. “There’s three of us, not two. Three. You get it? You understand?”
She started bawling. She said she did. She wanted to get better. She was going to get better. This was the wake-up call she needed.
Th
ey ushered us into an antiseptic white room for Lydia’s exit interview, a safe place for families to wring their hands before welcoming their wounded member back into the outside world. The doctors wanted to speak to us alone before Lydia joined. I wondered what they thought of us, whether they blamed us. Were we the root cause of all the problems the little girl they had been examining for the past seventy-two hours was experiencing? The mother, the father, the sister, the brother—the four-headed shadow consuming Lydia.
We told them how much we loved Lydia, how she was the smartest person any of us knew. They agreed. They said Lydia was one of the smartest patients they had ever encountered. Which is why the help that she needed had to be dictated by her. We could push her all we wanted but she had to be in charge of helping herself.
In charge of helping herself? What good would that do? She had been in charge of helping herself for the past year, hop-scotching from shrink to shrink, and all we had to show for it was two overdoses and a little sister who just wanted to sleep her life away.
Still, I knew what they meant. Stubborn was not a strong enough word to describe Lydia. She was bullheaded, impossible. If she didn’t want to do something, there was absolutely no getting her to come around.
When we were kids our neighbors had a trampoline that they used to let us jump on all the time. Their children were grown and out of the house, so they didn’t mind having some young kids in their backyard playing every now and then. But it was a delicate balance. You had to space out your requests, not overstay your welcome. We didn’t want to tax their goodwill. Lydia could care less. Whenever Anna and I determined it was time to go home, she would simply refuse. There was no reasoning with her, no explaining the diplomacy of the situation. She just wanted to jump forever. Anna and I would insist but Lydia wouldn’t have it. She would lie facedown in the center of the trampoline in an attempt to make herself as heavy as possible so that we couldn’t remove her. Eventually, Anna would take her legs, I’d grab her arms and we’d struggle to carry her home while she remained completely limp in nonviolent resistance. It was highly effective. So I was relieved when she came into the room that day and seemed compliant. The look on her face was pure heartbreak. She didn’t want to do this to us anymore, she said, to her family, the people she lived and breathed for, the beneficiaries of her self-taught agnostic prayers. She was not going to hurt herself anymore. She was going to get better. For her. For us. She promised. This was the bottom. There would be no lower rung.
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