Rise--How a House Built a Family

by Cara Brookins

  I should say something. I knew I should. But I was caught between an unexpected desire to weep and a need to cheer over the news that other people finally knew there was something really, really, seriously wrong with Adam. In some bizarre way the news validated a hope that this also meant less was wrong with me. But underneath my celebration was a growing realization that this grave news was only the beginning of terrible days ahead. Schizophrenia was a big deal. Adam wasn’t one step away from slap-ass nuts; he was all the way there. Still, I had no words for Sophie. I felt irrationally angry at her, as though she should have known enough to whisper these truths to me before I had promised my life to him.

  “I know you aren’t planning to stay with him, that you don’t want to have contact, but Dr. Christe thinks you should know what to expect. He thought it might help you explain it to the kids, and—” She squeaked out a tiny sob. Sniffed. And then cried full-out.

  I felt like a real bitch for being mad at her. She didn’t deserve to have this in her life any more than I did. And unlike me she didn’t have the option to wash her hands of the responsibility. “I’m sorry, Sophie. I really, really am. I knew it was bad, and that it had been getting a lot worse over the past couple of years.” My turn to take the deep breaths. “But I had no idea it was that. I didn’t. Maybe I could have done something different to help him if I had known. Maybe I could have convinced him to see the doctor again, to take some medication.” I didn’t need her to tell me I couldn’t have, and she didn’t. Maybe she was mad at me, too. Maybe she thought I should have whispered it to her at some point along the way. We had both been too hopeful, too optimistic, too afraid to see the truth, let alone tell it. Adam and I had been married for two years, and small signs began four months in.

  “The main thing is to keep the kids safe. Dr. Christe thinks he can give you enough information to help. Maybe not to predict, but to have a better idea what you’re dealing with. You know, for the long term.”

  I didn’t want him to be any part of my long term. I wanted him out of my life for good. Away from my kids. I was all the way done. If this doctor could help me understand how to keep him away, then it would be worth it. But there I was, lying again. The real reason I was agreeing was because Sophie was crying softly on the other end of the line and I felt guilty abandoning her with what still felt like it should be partly my responsibility. “Okay,” I said. “When should I go?”

  “I’ll be there first thing tomorrow morning. Come before noon.” Her tears cleared up so quickly I had the uncharitable thought they had been fake. “Don’t bring them with you. The kids. Don’t bring them to the hospital.”

  I hadn’t considered even telling them I was going, let alone taking them with me. Jada was only a toddler and the older kids would be at school. But it said a lot that she didn’t want them to hear. It might be useful news, but it wasn’t going to be good news coming from the esteemed mouth of Dr. Christe. “Where,” I asked. “Where do I go?”

  “I’ll e-mail you the address.” Silence. We had nothing personal to say to each other, maybe we never had. It was all business these days—very bad business. “Thank you, Cara. It makes me feel better that we’re trying everything we can.”

  We hung up without saying good-bye, and I was standing in the doorway of my bedroom, with no idea when I had walked there. I looked at my phone, surprised to see that it was past midnight—officially April Fool’s Day and I officially felt like a fool for agreeing to meet Sophie. I climbed into bed and stared at the black flower of the ceiling fan, wondering what Sophie had meant by “trying everything we can.” To keep me and the kids alive? That must be what she meant. Because what else might we try for? Schizophrenia had no cure. I had read enough about it for a minor character in one of my many unfinished novels to know that much. Only pills to quiet the moods and voices.

  Did he hear voices? He’d never said he did, but I didn’t have to think back far to know that he had been listening to shadows for a long time. He was outrageously paranoid, which I had attributed to the drinking, and the pills he sometimes swallowed with vodka. But no, he had been paranoid even when he was sober, and I had been hiding too deep to see it. Many of the times I’d guessed him to be drinking, he had probably been stone-cold sober.

  It was hard to believe how long the crazy stuff went on before I suspected anything was wrong. It’s easier to be fooled than I had imagined. Adam would come home and tell me mundane things that happened at work. There was no reason to doubt a story about what someone else brought for lunch, or a mild squabble between employees. Then he mentioned his favorite coworker’s name and described the guy’s family. He brought recipes home from the guy’s wife. Hundreds of story details built on each other until one day the stories became bizarre, but still possible. Still, why would I doubt them when they had built on one another for years? Until one day I figured out that the best friend didn’t exist, at least not in the real world where I existed. This guy, his wife, his kids, his recently deceased grandfather, his restored antique pickup, and his basset hound, they all existed only in Adam’s head.

  Sorting what actually happened from the tall tales was impossible. The crackers and fresh honey the imaginary family sent me from their imaginary bees was real. Like all good legends, I suspected, some stories had a grain of truth even though the real plot line was miles away.

  If Adam had opened his eyes one Tuesday morning with full-blown schizophrenia, I would have recognized it immediately. But while I was going to school full-time and taking care of three kids and the house, the baby steps he took toward madness were excused, overlooked, and misunderstood until he had arrived at his final destination.

  Morning came too quickly and the long drive to the hospital was too short. I had expected Sophie to be happy and grateful to see me. She wasn’t. She was as uncomfortable and quiet as I was while a nurse guided us to a room with Dr. Christe. He half stood to shake my hand and we exchanged names as though we didn’t already know them. He was grinning in a slightly unnerving way that probably felt more natural to his loose-minded patients than to their families. His dirty-blond hair was slightly mussed, but in a way that even I had to admit was a little sexy. Sophie looked absolutely taken with him.

  He sat on the business side of a small pressed-board desk with cherry-colored veneer pulling off at the corners and seams. The room smelled like lemon furniture polish, which felt suspicious given the layers of dust and the absence of any real wood to polish. When he gestured to the only remaining chair in the room, a beaten-up red pleather office chair with wheels, I made an awkward wave to Sophie and sat. The space was so cramped my knee was pressed against hers. And when the nurse in pink elephant scrubs, which I thought were in poor taste, moved to pull the door closed, I almost bolted for it. Instead, I coughed and sputtered, “Can we leave that open, just partway? The air is just a little … well, I need some air, is all.”

  She raised one eyebrow, looked at the good doctor, and then left without pulling the door.

  “I can imagine this is difficult for you,” he said with a practiced sympathetic lowering of brows and a slight nod. “But it’s important everyone who may have contact with Adam be aware of the way his mind works these days. Recognizing certain signs will help us keep him on track.”

  And keep us alive.

  “Do you know anything about schizoaffective? Have you read some things?”

  I nodded, struck mute.

  “Well. You can probably identify which symptoms match Adam’s better than any of us. So the important thing moving forward is to recognize when these manifest and alert us if they get worse.”

  Worse than tossing my computer hard drive in a Dumpster? Worse than trying to take his own life? The good doctor seemed to want me to speak. But most of the things circling my brain and fighting for my tongue were completely inappropriate. I wondered if everyone who sat in this chair was afraid of saying the wrong things. Words that might warn a nurse to bar the gates and lock them in, turn them fro
m a guest into a patient.

  “Worse than what?” I managed. “Because if they get worse, who will be alive to note changes?” It wasn’t what I planned to say when I opened my mouth, and from the way his jaw opened and closed, it wasn’t what he expected to hear. Not exactly politically correct? Was the danger of insanity a secret? Even here?

  “Based on his response to medication so far, now keep in mind there are more we can try, and we will, but based on the effects to date he isn’t going to get complete relief from medication. Some people really can control their symptoms with medication, mind you, but other cases are more complex. We can’t expect he will ever behave perfectly normal, but we can expect improvements. It will be difficult to answer your question about what might be worse until we establish a new baseline for his behavior, a new norm.” He stared at me, hard little eyes drilling holes in my skull.

  Well, that was a useless mouthful. I clenched my jaw, wondering if airborne truth serum was a thing, and if it was, if it smelled like lemon wood polish.

  “I’ll tell you what might be the most useful.” He turned a soft, sweet smile to Sophie. “And you tell me if you disagree, okay?”

  She nodded, and smiled, and her cheeks turned pink.

  I rolled my eyes, a completely involuntary reaction.

  He turned back to me, and all sweetness melted away. “Let’s go have a look, shall we?” He stood, towering over us, at least six foot two, which I never would have suspected behind the little desk. His chair must have been lowered nearly to the floor.

  I didn’t move even though Sophie stood and was hemmed in by my knees.

  “He won’t be able to see you. It’ll be fine.” He fluttered his fingers, waving me toward the door. “A picture’s worth a thousand words.”

  I had enough pictures burned into my mind to last a lifetime. I didn’t want to see him. Not even if he couldn’t see me back. I had the feeling he would know I was there, sense me, and I didn’t want to be on his mind in any way. Another part of me worried more about the opposite, about my reaction to seeing him. Would I feel enough compassion to take him back? I couldn’t imagine that being a positive thing for me and the kids.

  But Sophie put her hand behind my shoulder, lifting and pushing. “It will help. It will be good for you to understand. Dr. Christe wants to help. He knows what’s best.”

  Sharp words wanted out but I held them behind my teeth and got to my feet. I refused to lead the way, waving for the good doctor to ignore Southern hospitality and precede me. He rocked forward and back, shaking his head until he was sure I wasn’t budging. If there were dangerous people in straitjackets lurking around the corners, I wasn’t going to step blindly out among them. Part of me knew that I was being unkind, I was stereotyping, but another part of me had already seen enough to know that this time the reality was even more frightening than stereotypes had ever suggested.

  Sophie walked beside Dr. Christe through a maze of blue-green hospital hallways with me trailing behind, mentally jumping into a fighting stance every time we turned a corner. When he swiped his card beside a set of double doors and pushed the one on the right open, I held back, frozen with fear.

  “You aren’t going to see anything worse than what you’ve already been through,” he said, soft and gentle. This time his lowered brow looked genuine.

  I walked past him, to where Sophie was standing in front of a long window, silent and stone-faced. On the other side was what I thought of instantly as a dayroom, even though I wasn’t sure where the word came from or if it was actually correct.

  Each corner was arranged with a round table, neatly lined with four chairs. To my right, a game of chess had put one of the players to sleep, a reaction I could sympathize with. A woman working a zillion-piece puzzle rocked sideways, performing a complex pat-a-cake with herself each time a piece fit in place. All in all, they looked more normal than I expected. A half dozen patients were sitting or standing in pairs and talking, as normal as if they were planning a barbecue or bragging over how the kids were doing in school. They all wore street clothes, though the quality ranged from teen-boy holey to designer chic. If it weren’t for the doctor and three nurses keeping an eye on them, I would have guessed they were family members rather than patients.

  The idea unnerved me, that the dividing line between patient and visitor was so thin. But it also reassured me that I wasn’t the only one who might have missed the signs until it was almost too late, that insanity can be totally invisible unless you really want to see it. The door on the far side opened. It had a small security-glass window guarded by a bulky man who probably made more money moonlighting as a bouncer. A man wearing blue scrubs shuffled in, his slippered feet sliding forward in six-inch increments. His head angled down, chin to chest, and even though the hair was familiar, he was too small and round-shouldered to be Adam.

  “Oh,” Sophie said, stepping back until the backs of her knees bumped a chair. She tipped down into it without looking to make sure her aim was straight.

  I stood behind her with no intention of staying long enough to make myself comfortable.

  Dr. Christe sat a seat away, long legs stretched forward and arms propped on the backs of the chairs on either side of him. “One of the first things we do to give the patient a break, a little rest from the voices, is to medicate them until the voices stay silent.”

  He pointed at the shuffling man.

  I forced my eyes to follow the line of his finger, and this time the man was Adam, looking old and lost. Vacant.

  “Adam’s voices are stubborn things. Some people don’t need much at all to quiet things down. This is how far we had to go to silence Adam’s voices, though. Damn near as far as you can and stay conscious.”

  Christe leaned forward, knees on his elbows, observing his specimen like Jada watching fireflies in a jar. “We won’t leave him this far under. Next step is to teach him to deal with the voices we can’t eradicate. Help him learn he doesn’t have to do everything they say, and he doesn’t have to answer them. We’ll try to help him tell the difference between what is real and what isn’t.”

  “It’s all real to him,” I said, my voice stronger than I expected it to be.

  Dr. Christe turned to look at me, but I was watching drool pool on Adam’s chest. The effort of keeping his mouth closed was too much and he’d given up trying.

  “Yes. It’s real to him. But we’ll do our best to help him make good decisions,” he said.

  A powerful wave of pity washed over me. Adam had lined my bed with knives while I slept. He had lied to me and tortured the neighbor’s cat. He had told me terrible things that I would never know for sure if he had done or only dreamed. But I could see that on some level it was out of his control. A disease had stolen his mind, taken his family, haunted him with horrors none of us could understand. I had vowed to stand by him in sickness and in health. My guilt surged as strong as my pity. I had abandoned this poor drooling man, kicked him out of his home and had him involuntarily committed after his mind fled through no fault of his own.

  But how could I take care of three kids and still have time to nurse a gravely ill man? Sophie must have asked about supplies and care packages, because the doctor listed things Adam could and could not have. The priority was clothes. “Patients do better when they have their own clothes. They feel more like people than patients. But no belts. No shoestrings. No jewelry. And he’ll need toiletries, too. Skip the dental floss—it’s practically unbreakable, you know. And the toothpaste has to come in a pump, no tubes. Even plastic tube corners are sharp enough to slice a wrist.”

  I tuned them out. If he really wanted to kill himself, wouldn’t a shirtsleeve or pant leg work every bit as well as dental floss? “I’m going to get going,” I said, standing and walking to the door. “I can see how bad he is. I knew that.” I hadn’t, though. I hadn’t known how bad he was. Even after I heard he had given a sales pitch to an empty room, I had never imagined he was this crazy. All the way gone. Schizophren
ia. I expected Sophie and the doctor to protest, tell me how much more there was to see and learn, but they didn’t. Sophie looked like she’d been punched in the gut. I felt guilty for leaving her to deal with everything.

  “It’s good that you came. Any time you have concerns you can contact me. I’m happy to help. Do you have questions before you go?”

  I shook my head, but then realized I did have one. “How long will he be here?”

  “We’ll get him stable and then treat him as an outpatient. Things will get better after he qualifies for some medical assistance. He’s uninsured at the moment.”

  He could see I wanted more than that. I wanted the whole truth.

  “Three to five days.”

  Like most things over the past few months, it was worse than I thought. Three to five days of safety. I nodded and walked out the door alone.

  I would have to tell the kids a little about what was going on before Adam was released. It might help them to know that his mind was messed up and he wasn’t doing things out of spite. Life was never what you thought it was going to be.

  My mom always said a person isn’t given more than they can handle. But that was only the first step of a lovely thought. I had moved on to step two, and it was less lovely. A person has to let go of the things that are too big and dangerous to hold close.

  –11–

  Rise

  Sounds Easy

  The kids said they didn’t have homework and I didn’t push it even though I had a feeling they were bending the truth. We needed to get away, out of this house, out of this mind-set. We needed to feel the physical stretch of moving heavy objects and the mental stretch that reminded us we were eating the elephant bite by bite, doing the impossible, building someplace safe.