Plain Jane

by Kim Hood

  ‘Come on now, when did you know me to keep any thoughts to myself?’

  She laughed, kicking her shoes off so she could sit cross-legged on the bed. Seeing her make herself comfortable in my room, comfortable with me really, made my eyes tear up with gratitude. Gratitude. There was another subtle emotion to think about. I’d kind of resigned myself to the likelihood that nobody outside of my family was ever going to want to be near me again.

  ‘So, tell me about Farley,’ Tracey said. ‘I hope I get to meet him soon, under … less awkward circumstances.’

  I shook my head. I thought of making light of it, but it didn’t feel light at all, and I didn’t want to be alone with that heaviness. ‘He’s over. I haven’t heard from him at all.’

  ‘Oh, Jane. I know I only met him for a couple of minutes, but he was so worried. It seemed like he really cared about you.’ She got it. I suppose that’s what best friends do – they get you.

  Tracey and I were going to be okay.

  I don’t know if Mom would have ever brought it up. Probably she would have had to talk about it in the family therapy sessions that were going to start when my doctor deemed me officially stable enough to work on ‘maintenance’ as she called it. That sounded ominously like I was never going to be free of Bipolar Disorder. I still didn’t like the idea of having this crazy label hanging over me forever.

  I didn’t want to talk about The Thing with anyone else there though. It was between Mom and me – period. It was our burden and no one else’s. Nobody else had to live with what we had seen. But until now we had both been living with it alone.

  It took me another week to find a time when Mom and I were alone. Emma had insisted on meeting the principal at the Secondary School for her tour of the school on her own, without Mom. She wasn’t even close to finishing treatment, but she was determined that she was going to be there the first day of spring term. So much for my excuse for skipping classes. It would be kind of difficult to claim I was visiting my sick sister if she was in attendance at my school. Not that I was likely to get away with that anymore anyway. Routine seemed to be something that everyone was insisting on.

  ‘And don’t forget to ask about where you could lay down for a rest if you needed it?’ We were in the school parking lot, and Mom was going to make Emma late while she tried to think of every last thing she should ask.

  ‘Mom! It isn’t kindergarten. I will be fine.’ It looked like she would be. I didn’t know where she had found this determination – maybe now that she wasn’t going to dance again, she had just transferred it to other matters. It suited her though.

  ‘Don’t forget. She’ll have me, if she needs it,’ I said. Though to be honest, I felt like I might need her. Only, I’d be back in school the next week and Emma wouldn’t start for another two months if all went well.

  ‘Okay,’ Mom conceded, though she still got out of the car to help with the crutches and she stood outside the car until Emma had made it up the walkway and had disappeared through the front door. I knew it wasn’t easy for her to let her baby go.

  We were out of Kendal and on the way to my appointment in Red River before I got up the nerve to talk about The Thing. There was no point in approaching it softly.

  ‘Mom, you know that I saw Grandad first, don’t you?’

  She turned so pale that I was a little worried I shouldn’t have said it while she was driving. I didn’t want to do this to her at all, but ignoring it wasn’t going to make it go away. I’d tried that.

  ‘Oh, Jane.’

  She just drove for a few more minutes, not saying anything more. Her knuckles started to look like wax she was holding the steering wheel so tightly.

  ‘I remember that afternoon every day,’ she finally said. ‘I was terrified for you. I rang and rang and you didn’t answer. I didn’t want you girls to have to know.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mom. I thought the home care lady would find him.’ I was crying now. ‘I didn’t want to be the one to tell you. I couldn’t talk to you until I was sure it was done.’

  ‘When you didn’t say anything, I wanted to just believe you when you said you didn’t go that day. I couldn’t, still can’t, face that you did.’ Her words were stilted by her effort to not cry.

  ‘It’s okay, Mom,’ I said. ‘Well, it isn’t okay, but it’s better with you.’ And it was. Even if she hadn’t have been driving I’m not sure if we would have collapsed in a crying heap or anything as cathartic as that, but the curtain of deceit that had separated us was gone for good.

  ‘I should have known. I should have been there for you, Jane.’

  ‘We should have been there for each other.’

  She nodded, still holding back the tears. Like I said, it was going to take some time for Mom and me to really be okay, but we made a start that day.

  ‘Jane, there’s someone here to see you,’ Dad called. I didn’t think too much about who that could possibly be, which is probably a good thing or I might never have gone to the door. It was Sunday, and I was fully in dreading-school mode by then, almost counting the hours I had left before I had to face going back to ‘normal’ life. How was it ever going to be normal again, when I wasn’t ever going to be normal? I hadn’t factored mental illness into the list of possibilities for escaping the norm around here. It wasn’t what I had in mind in any case.

  So I guess I was kind of in that self-absorbed feeling-sorry-for-myself mode instead of anticipating who was there to see me. The meds had put an end to my ability to think of more than one thing at a time unfortunately.

  There he was, looking pretty much as I had imagined him for the past two months. He had put on some less in-your-face hippie clothes, but there wasn’t much he could do about that hair. He looked so perfect and I just wanted to keep this image of Farley at my door framed in my head forever. I’d tried so hard to put him out of my mind because it made me so sad I could hardly stand it, and yet now, even if it was the last time I ever saw him, I didn’t want the moment to end.

  ‘You’re here.’ I stated the obvious. I hadn’t thought I would see him again. I knew he had been the one to find me in the park outside of Red River, but who wouldn’t have stepped up to help find someone missing in a snow storm? It had been something he would have done for anyone. It didn’t change things. If anything, it made them worse. There was no way he was ever going to forget how crazy I could be. He’d seen the worst.

  ‘I’m here.’

  I just waited, because this wasn’t my visit, it was his, and I didn’t know what he wanted from it.

  ‘Do you think I could come in, or even better, do you think you could come out?’ He had that vulnerable look, but I didn’t know what that meant anymore. I’d certainly read it wrong in the past.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. The half-smile he had given me dropped. ‘I mean, I have to ask.’ The days of doing what I wanted, without parental pre-approval were over – at least for now.

  ‘Two hours maximum,’ Dad called out from the living room, having obviously been eavesdropping. ‘School tomorrow.’ As if I wasn’t acutely aware of the fact.

  I was surprised to find a sporty little red car parked outside when I grabbed my jacket and followed Farley out.

  ‘What, did Kaitlin decide to buy a car that is actually road worthy?’

  ‘Nope, but I thought if I was going to take the plunge and stick around here, I had to stop borrowing hers.’

  My heart jumped just a little, but I silently told it to calm down.

  Farley seemed to know where he was going, as he drove through the village to the main road and then turned in the opposite direction from Kendal.

  ‘You know there’s nothing in this direction, don’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Perspective, Jane. It depends on what you are looking for.’

  ‘I don’t know what I am looking for.’ I wanted to add I am crazy, remember?

  ‘Sometimes it isn’t what you are looking for, it is what you find when you are not looking for it.’ />
  ‘You seem to have all of the answers, but you and I are living in different universes.’ I wasn’t angry about it. I was just kind of sad. ‘I wasn’t what you were looking for, and I wasn’t what you found, was I?’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘It’s the only thing I know, Farley.’ I’d spent a lot of time thinking about it. ‘I may have seemed interesting, but that was only Crazy Me.’

  I was remembering the perfect afternoon we had spent together, when I had felt so wonderful, when everything had seemed possible. I knew now that it had just been the beginning of mania. My brain had tricked me into thinking Farley and I had some kind of special connection.

  ‘You were exactly what I needed to find – but I feel so bad that it was at your expense.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was so interested in you, that I forgot that I was kind of messed up myself. I thought if I just lost myself in you I wouldn’t need to do my grieving after all. I was wrong.’

  ‘Your mom.’ I had kind of forgotten about that.

  ‘My mom, my grandparents, my lost connection with half of me. I wasn’t as together as I might have seemed most of the time.’

  ‘I saw the cracks,’ I said. ‘There are worse ones to have.’

  ‘You have no idea how much that meant to me. I so needed someone who wasn’t trying to keep me on some sort of pedestal,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ve had years of practice pulling my sister off hers.’

  ‘The problem was, you were there for me, but I wasn’t there for you when you really needed me.’

  ‘There isn’t exactly much you could have done.’ Which wasn’t true. Every bit of it had been better with Farley – for me though, not him. ‘But I wasn’t real. It was pretty obvious that you figured that out.’

  ‘That’s not why I stayed away, Jane!’

  ‘No?’ It seemed to me a perfectly logical reason to stay away.

  ‘No. I realised that coming here in the first place wasn’t going to make everything better. As nice as Kaitlin is, she isn’t my mom. She only really knew my mom for a few years anyway. And my grandparents? Well, you know what a kick in the teeth they were.’ I had to smile thinking about Bill and Helen’s expressions, standing outside their orderly house, listening to my disorganised spiel.

  ‘And then there was the whole Orchestra thing. I couldn’t put off deciding what I was going to do with that too much longer.’

  Everything he said was making sense. Still – he’d pushed me away. There was no denying that. I had thought of that kiss, or non-kiss every day, and there was no other interpretation possible.

  ‘When I came here, I expected that something serendipitous was going to happen, that would make everything easy. That didn’t happen. I had to go back home for a while, to be honest with my dad, to make the decisions that fate wouldn’t make for me,’ Farley continued. ‘I’m not going to Boston.’

  ‘That must have gone down well with your dad,’ I said. As annoyed as I had always felt when Farley started on his ‘the stars brought us together’ kick, it hurt now to hear how wrong he’d been.

  ‘He’ll get over it.’

  ‘But you are here.’

  ‘For awhile anyway. I’ve got some work lined up on the ski hill. I needed to come back just for me – with no expectations,’ Farley continued.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you came back for just you.’ I was glad for him. It seemed like I was glad for a lot of people who weren’t me lately. I understood his wanting to meet me to apologise though. I was doing a lot of that myself.

  Farley had turned onto a small road, and after a few metres we came to a little car park, with one of those brown parks’ signs saying ‘Angel Falls’. We were only a few minutes from Verwood, but I had never been here before.

  Farley got out and I followed. I may as well see this through. It seemed pretty apparent that it was going to be a goodbye.

  ‘Come on.’ He took my hand and led me up a path. It was covered in snow, but there was an icy trail, where people had obviously been treading. I wished my hand in his didn’t feel so right. He did have beautiful hands.

  It was only a five minute walk before we came to the waterfall. It wasn’t massive or anything, but frozen as it was, it was stunning. A river captured in a moment, rivulets seemingly frozen in mid-drop, revealing exquisite hues of blue and green, stilled so that you could see every detail that would be impossible to see when it was in motion. It was five minutes up the road from where I lived and I had never seen anything like it.

  ‘I take it back,’ I said.

  ‘Take what back?’

  ‘Nature and the outdoors not being my thing. I may have been wrong.’ I had an itch to take photos. I hadn’t picked up my camera since the snowstorm day. Even though I had been home from the hospital for a week now, I had been too afraid to use it, in case it somehow triggered the bad pictures in my head again.

  ‘I knew you would like it.’ Farley was grinning again and I wanted to reach up and trace the laugh lines around his eyes with my finger. I wished I could.

  ‘I’m sorry, Farley.’ Would I ever run out of people to apologise to? Mostly though, I was feeling sorry for me. Being here with Farley was making me remember how happy I had been, even if it had been a little snapshot of happiness, and I wanted that back so badly.

  ‘What are you sorry for?’

  ‘I’m sorry that everything interesting about me wasn’t real.’

  ‘All of it was real!’

  ‘No. It’s Bipolar Disorder you were hanging out with.’

  ‘Jane. You here today, you in the depths of cynicism, you at the height of happiness – it’s all you. You are right, some of it scared me – but that is because I didn’t know what was happening, and I wasn’t okay enough myself to deal with it.’

  ‘But it can come back. I don’t know that it won’t happen again – even with medication.’

  ‘Jane, even at the very worst, I could see you. Under all that you were going through, I could see you. You are real.’ He had spun me around to make sure I was looking at him when he said it.

  ‘More hippie shit?’ I asked.

  Farley just kept looking at me, like he had that day on the bus, when I had started to simply let myself be, to stop censoring myself. Now I couldn’t seem to find any words at all, and yet, I got that same feeling, like he was seeing the core of who I was.

  ‘This is going to take a while isn’t it?’

  I couldn’t help grinning, just a little, because I was pretty sure this wasn’t a good-bye after all.

  ‘What is?’ I asked.

  ‘Waiting for you to put some of that ice around you again, you know, so you can put me in my place when I start spouting too much hippie shit.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘When you do manage it though, can you leave a few chinks, so I can get in?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Now, just in case public displays of affection are not your thing, I’m warning you to stop reading here.

  ‘I wanted to kiss you back that day, you know,’ he said. ‘I just knew that you were too sick. And I wanted to kiss you somewhere magical, like here.’

  All of the possible responses to that disappeared before they made it anywhere close to my lips. There were no right words.

  ‘Come here,’ he said. ‘I mean, if you would like to.’

  I did. I knew what was coming, and even though I didn’t have one bit of protective ice around me, I did want to. I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t get hurt. I wasn’t sure that I knew what I wanted or needed. I wasn’t sure that Farley would stick around if I got sick again.

  Everything was one big possibility, maybe good, maybe bad. But sometimes, either way, you just have to take a chance and trust that it might lead to something interesting.

  I’ve always written as a way to understand the world – and my part in it. It isn’t that I find the answers through writing, but when I put words down on a page, my questions abo
ut life become clearer; the angst that comes with being a human being abates. I’d like to think that everyone has something similar to make their path through life less cluttered.

  And so, when I begin to write a new story, a new novel, it starts with a question or two. Sometimes these are questions I have carried with me for some time. Plain Jane started with two questions.

  The first question was one I had run away from. Years ago, while attending university, I volunteered on the children’s ward of a hospital that specialised in oncology. Twice a week I went in to do arts and crafts with the kids, and quite a few of them would be there for weeks or months at a time. Many were from towns and villages hours away.

  I loved getting to know these kids, most of whom took their illness in their stride, dragging their IV poles behind them. Some of them were pretty sick though, and soon, twice in one month – children I had gotten to know died.

  That I could handle, though it was sad. The part I found too difficult at the time was seeing the families of these children in the weeks before their dying. Parents were exhausted, many travelling huge distances and juggling the needs of their sick child with those of their other children. And those other siblings – when they were present – were often almost ‘ghosts’. The focus wasn’t on them – they were going to live after all.

  I didn’t stick with that volunteer position for very long. I wasn’t ready to face such harsh realities on a regular basis. But the possible stories of those siblings never did leave me. How do you cope if you are the ‘well’ sister? At a time when you are maybe sorting out who you are, where you fit, how does an experience like this impact you? It was something I wanted to explore.

  The second question had to do with an illness with a much different public face – mental illness. Cancer has a ‘brave’ face; it’s something you can fight against. Mental illness – when it has a public face at all – is still too often seen as dark or pitiable. I wanted to explore how it might really feel to be developing a mental illness. As a writer, I am most interested in understanding life from others’ perspectives and experiences, and though in my professional life I have had quite a bit to do with mental illness – that is not the same as getting into someone’s head and seeing what the world looks like from there.