Love Like Crazy

by Megan Squires

  Turning around, he flipped the faucet on. Water streamed into his empty cup. I watched him rinse it out, once, twice, and then a third time. Finally satisfied, he shut off the water, swiped over the mug with a towel, and set both items on the counter. Then, over his shoulder, just as he was about to leave the room, he muttered, “Happy eighteenth birthday, Eppie.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Adults often forgot what it was like to grow through childhood and into adulthood. They forgot that adolescence was a process of circumstances and emotions, chained together over time, the linking of epiphanies whose only requirement was to be experienced firsthand. Life was a firsthand sort of thing.

  But some adults didn’t realize that sometimes you needed to create opportunities for the sake of allowing that childhood to take place, giving that rite of passage the safe space it needed to unfurl. That’s where parental responsibility and guidance came in.

  My Dad hadn’t created opportunity or taken responsibility in my life, but I didn’t hold that against him. I doubted he even knew how. Nevertheless, I never got my slow and steady, handheld transition. Childhood fast-forwarded to adulthood all in one flash. All in one leap.

  Now was the time to create my own opportunity.

  “You sure about this, Eppie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  Lincoln rolled his turn signal, the yellow arrow on the dash pulsing. Whether intentional or not, his left leg bounced in the same staccato intervals. Thank goodness it was the left. The right would have resulted in such a stop-and-go, jerky motion that we might as well have been participants in a round of bumper cars. But his right side was controlled. That was a good sign. I needed at least half of Lincoln to be in control, because all of me felt out of it.

  “Okay,” he said once more after sliding the camper into an empty parking space, next to a two-door beige sedan and a tree whose blossoms were trickling off like rainwater in the low, warm breeze.

  Windows stood immediately in front of us, a whole spread of them. Four down times six across, equaling twenty-four. I paused, counting their number. “Did you happen to see how many windows were on the east side of the building?”

  “No, I didn’t.” His voice was quiet, calming. Usually when people didn’t understand what was going on at all, they had a higher cadence to their dialogue. Their sentences ended with trills that rose upward, like fingers reaching for the answer. Lincoln’s intonation was steady, no reaching. Lincoln was persistently steady, apart from the occasional fit of panic.

  “My guess is twelve.”

  “This building’s a rectangle. That would make sense,” I surmised.

  He nodded. His eyetooth snagged the corner of his mouth and bit down just a little into his lip. Maybe that’s why his smile was always so crooked, from chewing his lip in this way.

  “So twelve and twelve and twenty-four and twenty-four is seventy-two.” I did the math out loud. “Unless there are stairwells on the east and west sides. I’m going to knock off about six from each of those to account for the stairwells. Emergency exits are code, yeah?”

  “Yes. Six sounds like an appropriate amount to deduct.” Lincoln was kind, much too kind.

  I kept going. “That leaves sixty windows in all.”

  “Correct. Sixty windows.” His hand flicked over to the driver’s side door and he cracked the window with his fingers on the crank. It was hot. Muggy. Sweat pooled in my armpits and on my lip and behind my knees so quickly.

  “What’s our town’s population?”

  Lincoln swiped his forehead, then refit his cap back in place. “Hmm. Don’t know. Twelve hundred, I think?”

  “Twelve hundred.”

  I looked in front of me at the small compartment in the dash that no longer had a door to it. There were a lot of things in Lincoln’s glove box. An inhaler, a map that had been folded haphazardly into a very unmap-like shape, a deck of playing cards with a half-naked gypsy lady illustrated on the torn box, and a handful of napkins embossed with a big, arching M. I snatched one of those and the capless blue pen that sat in the cup holder attached to my door.

  “If twelve hundred equals one hundred percent,” I said, chicken scratching the tissue. “Then sixty equals what?”

  My fourth grade math memory was failing me fast.

  “Five percent.”

  Yes. Right. “Five percent.”

  “Eppie—”

  “Five percent of Masonridge is effectively crazy, Lincoln,” I gaped, careening over his words. Then I started laughing, hysterically. It scared even myself, and those noises originated in me, so they shouldn’t be startling, but they were. Unnervingly so. “Can you believe it? That’s an absurdity!”

  “Eppie, what’s going on?” Lincoln’s body sagged deep in his seat. His arm dropped onto the console between us. But it didn’t give me goose bumps this time. It almost resembled someone tossing out a life preserver. I wasn’t sure I wanted to grab on.

  “I’m baffled by those statistics, and I don’t even know if that’s a high amount or a low amount!” The laughing shut off, but in sound only. My body still shook from the force trapped within me, like it was tapping on me from the inside out, needing release. “Baffling!”

  His eyes were shrouded with worry, and I knew I put that worry there. “If this is too much, we can just go home. Rent a movie. Eat cake. Celebrate you.”

  “God, Lincoln!” His name came out in place of one of the shuddering laughs. “How can I celebrate someone I’m not even sure I know?”

  He took his life preserver offering away, hugging his hand into his chest, folding his arms there.

  And I started to sink.

  “I know you.” Stone-faced, stone-walled. “And you know you. You don’t need your mother to tell you who you are, Eppie. You don’t have to listen to her voices anymore. I don’t listen to my mother’s. I don’t listen at all when it comes to her.”

  My mouth popped open, then clamped shut. I did that two more times, then realized I probably looked like a fish. “The problem is that her voices aren’t all that awful, Lincoln. When I hear her, I hear love.”

  “I’m not sure that was real love.”

  “That’s what it felt like. That’s all I ever knew of her. For as long as it’s been, I still can’t reconcile the two different people she seemed to be. There’s who she was to me, and who everyone else keeps trying to tell me she was,” I said. “What if I don’t know how to love any differently than what she taught me? What if all I have to offer is this faulty version of the love I thought she had for me?”

  The typical Lincoln smile had been replaced by one so much less him. It was a crappy stand in. I didn’t believe anything about it. He must’ve caught on, because it slipped from his face, melted almost, and then only a flicker of a grin could be seen in his eyes. Anyone else would’ve missed it, but I knew what to look for. That crinkle in the corner, the too-many-lines-for-his-age creasing together like the folds of a paper fan. I think I loved this hidden smile almost as much as his trademark one. It was a smile only seen by me.

  “Eppie,” he said. His fingers reached out to sweep my cheek for no other reason than to just touch my skin. There wasn’t a hair that needed moving or a tear that required drying. Just touch, that’s what this was. “Your love isn’t her love. Your life isn’t her life. There’s nothing faulty about your love.”

  But I felt faulty. I did. “You want to know something funny?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Me jumping out of a window landed her behind one of those windows.” With a straight finger, I pointed to the shiny glass wall decorating Serena Vista. Which one was hers? What box belonged to my mom?

  “Something else put her behind that window, Eppie. Not you,” Lincoln assured. “Sure, some people had no choice in the outcomes that landed them here. Maybe their brains didn’t give them any other option. Maybe their situations didn’t let them or their chemicals weren’t in their favor. But I’m not sure your mom was in that categor
y, Eppie. She had options.”

  I knew that, I did. I thought I did, at least.

  I glanced back at the windows. “There’re just so many of them.” The pattern was almost dizzying to take in, so many reflections, so much glass. “I wonder if they at least got to choose their view.” I knew it wasn’t like renting an apartment or selecting your dorm room, but there had to be some comforts provided to the residents here. There had to be some benefit to being shut out from society indefinitely. Some benefit other than the loose promise of healing.

  “I think some of us—the lucky ones—get to choose our view in life.” He rolled up the window, getting ready. “Others don’t. And then there are those who just aren’t so good at the choosing.”

  I looked over at Lincoln, at his much too dirty hat and his too long hair and his out of proportion legs. But there were other things not right about his size—the size of his heart. It was too big for his body. Way too big. It spilled out of him in his words and his voice and his touch. And I got to catch that excess. I got to grab on to Lincoln’s extra heart. His abundance of love. I’d never let it go.

  That made me think that maybe I was one of those that did a really good job at the choosing.

  I closed my eyes, inhaling deeply, three steady breaths in a row. “We can go now. I’m ready to visit my mom.”

  THIRTY

  “We’re just doing a graveside ceremony, Eppie.”

  The wall in front of me was blank, but I stared at it as though there was an abstract painting adorning it and I was expected to decipher its meaning. I swallowed, processing his words, and then blinked. When I opened my eyes, I tried looking at my dad, but I just couldn’t connect. Staring at the nothing before me was so much easier.

  “They advised against holding an actual funeral service.” His voice shook, even though it was quiet in volume. “I can definitely understand the reasoning there. The papers have been vultures. We don’t need to give them even more fodder by drawing excess attention to what happened.” Dad sighed. “Should I plan for you to attend, or should I see if Phil is able to stay with you?”

  “I’m not ready to do that,” I admitted without pause. “I’m too scared to go to the cemetery. I hate cemeteries.” I did. They were full of goblins and spiders and decay and cobwebs. Cemeteries always felt like Halloween, no matter what day of the year it happened to be.

  “That’s okay, Eppie.” Dad nodded, too many times in a row. His hands came up to my shoulders, cupping them there. “You don’t ever have to go if you don’t want to, understood?”

  I couldn’t nod back. “I just don’t know why, but I’m so scared to go.”

  “Eppie.” Dad never cried. Not even when he got the call about Mom. But now water was spilling onto his cheeks in a soundless emotion that only came out in tears. “It’s okay to be scared. This is scary stuff. For as much as I hate all of this, I’m grateful that you’re only seeing the scary now, in hindsight. In some twisted way, I’m actually grateful that for most of our lives, we were too ignorant to be scared.”

  “What if I never want to go?” I started, but I had a hard time getting out the words. Somehow they jumbled on my tongue, tripping me up. I’d eaten alphabet soup once and had stacked over two dozen noodle letters together before chomping them down. That’s what I imagined my words doing now. They were soupy vowels and consonants, all mixed up.

  Dad sighed and covered me with a waft of his hot breath. It smelled funny, and I didn’t like the smell of it at all, so much so that I covered my nose with the inside of my sleeve to avoid the stench. “Well, I can’t imagine you’d ever really want to go. This is a horrible ending, Eppie.” He took a drink from his cup and I realized whatever was in it was making his breath smell so bad. Stuff that putrid shouldn’t belong in your body. Stuff like that should be considered toxic. “If I were you,” he continued, “I’d want to hold off on that ending, too.”

  Dad never gave me much advice in the past, but for some reason, this felt like something I should listen to.

  So I did. I listened.

  I’d hold off on that ending for as long as I could.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Had it been necessary to set foot in the actual hospital, it would’ve been easier, and that was saying a lot because I honestly felt as though they’d have valid reason to have me committed with the amount of nervous pacing I was currently doing. And truth be told, if someone marched down the hall and told me I’d be staying there, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d argue. Surrender almost seemed sweeter.

  We all harbored varying degrees of insanity within us, I figured. That was just the curse of being human. Some of us hid it better than others. Some managed to tame it out until the rest of the world thought it no longer existed. But none of that was truly ridding ourselves of the nature inherent in our beings. I’d heard too many stories of once domesticated animals bearing their claws and reverting back to the wild creatures they originally were. The creatures they always were.

  Maybe that’s why places like Serena Vista existed—to tame the wild ones back into submissive captivity. That thought made me sad. So sad. It made me want to run, screaming through their halls, throwing open every door, unlocking the cages. You’re free! You’re free! You’re wild and free.

  Leaving that building didn’t equate to freedom, though. That definitely wasn’t the case for people like my mother. That place wasn’t the real trap, I knew that much.

  Because how could you ever truly escape a trap set up in your very own mind?

  I doubted you could.

  Was it really so realistic to think we’d be able to coast through existence, toeing around that snare, never thinking it would one day snap down on us? What made us so arrogantly confident to believe we were strong enough, brave enough, wise enough, healthy enough to avoid the trap without a little extra guidance?

  That’s what we needed. We all needed help. Some with medicine. Some with talking and listening and talking some more. Prayer. We probably needed prayer. And we needed one another. We needed one another to verify our crazy. To see it reflected in another person. To realize it wasn’t as scary or hopeless as it seemed. To hold hands and tiptoe together. We were stronger in twos, we had to be. After all, hadn’t all of those wild animals boarded into the shelter of that big boat side by side? Hadn’t they endured the relentless storm and come out under the sun, still a united front?

  We needed something to weather the storm in. An ark to keep us safe.

  That hospital, I figured, was that for its residents. Not a trap. Not at all.

  I looked across my shoulder to Lincoln, feeling so much stronger with him by my side, paired off together.

  “Do you know which one is hers?”

  We were leaned up against a decorative pergola positioned in the middle of the grass, our bodies slumped against the concrete wall. Mid-afternoon light twinkled through the cutouts in the trees, the crisscrossing branches creating gaps and holes for amber rays to spill through. It washed across my face, warming my cheeks with its golden warmth, feeling wonderful even though every other part of me hurt. My backbone protruded against the flat surface uncomfortably so I pulled my posture straight, taut like a wire. That didn’t help. I curled into myself. That just made the bone on the wall more noticeable. Comfort wouldn’t be found.

  “She’s next to my grandparents. Under that big oak.” I nodded up ahead with the tip of my nose toward a craggily tree whose bark was peeling and curling along the base. It had to be practically ancient, and I wondered how many rings were embedded in that thick trunk. Things like that had always fascinated me. How even trees kept track of the years they’d lived.

  “Tell me how you want this to go, Eppie.” Lincoln’s thumb rubbed against my hand in slow, steady circles. “Tell me what you hope to get out of this.”

  That was a loaded question. I paused for a moment, letting it ruminate in my head. What did I want out of this? What was the goal? To make some spiritual connection? To get answers? To understa
nd, once and for all, that she was gone and never coming back?

  Yes.

  Yes to all of the above. I wanted everything.

  “Will you walk with me?” My voice was small, my footsteps smaller as I edged forward, careful not to disrupt the freshly manicured grass on the gravesite immediately in front of us.

  “Of course, Eppie.” He turned to me, sunlight filtering through his curls of hair. I swear, he looked like an angel. A baseball cap wearing, lopsided-grinning angel. “I’d walk to the ends of the earth with you.”

  That caused a laugh to burst from my lips, and I felt a bit self-conscious at the whole laughing in a cemetery thing. Pretty sure that wasn’t proper etiquette. Slugging him against the shoulder probably wasn’t, either, but I did that, too. “Cheesiest line ever.”

  “Truth is often cheesy, and I speak a lot of the truth. Therefore, I tend to be a bit cheesy. I often ooze cheese, so I’m a kind of the Cheese-Whiz of truth telling. Just the way things roll.”

  I laughed again, this time not caring at all if it was okay or not to do so.

  We strategically guided our way around headstones and plaques, and I tried not to let my eyes make contact with any of the names and dates etched into their marbled surfaces, but they couldn’t help but land on them. I really didn’t wish to know of Julia Grey who was just fourteen when she passed. Or Alma Morgenstern who lived a hundred and two years and died at the turn of the century. And Ralph Gandy. I didn’t need to know about his thirty-nine short years of life.

  My brain couldn’t comprehend all of the life lived between those small dashes on their tombstones.

  It certainly couldn’t comprehend the one on my mother’s.

  “This is her.”

  I closed my eyes, praying just like my father said he had, but my breathing was so fast I could hardly focus on any one thing without the dizzying delirium that accompanied each unsteady breath. The panic slowly settled in, if panic even settled. More like crawled. Panic crawled through me, scratching at every nerve ending, altering every breath.