The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone

by Adele Griffin

  Of course it wasn’t my parents who made me leave. It was when Addison got in her head that Ida hated her artwork.

  “Ida doesn’t think my pictures have potential.”

  “Ida says I’m not intelligent. She thinks I’m a copycat.”

  “Ida says I’m not as talented as she is.”

  “Ida says I’ll die all alone in a white dress in a white room with no windows or doors. Just like her.”

  So, yes, I believed that Ida was becoming a real threat. I had to call Roy. He’d stayed in Peacedale for the summer, to give our marriage some “space”—and I knew he’d be angry that we were cutting his alone time short.

  “We have to leave Dartmouth,” I told him. “Something is unfixing in Addison’s brain. It’s not right, and I don’t like being stuck here in the country, worrying about it.”

  MADDY MEYERS: My grandparents have lived at 21 Lyn Road for over fifty years. Still, one afternoon, Mom and I sneaked off to the Dartmouth Public Library’s records department. Just see if there’d ever been an Ida. All we found was someone named Calliope Saunders. So maybe that was “Miss Cal” or maybe not. We didn’t have any proof. And, by the way, proof of what? Of a poltergeist?

  Mom and I also found a house plan. Addison was right that the dining room once had been split into a smaller room plus a pantry—but Mom thought she remembered Gran once telling everyone that. Anyway, it seemed obvious to Mom and me that the problems were mostly in Addison’s head.

  ROY STONE: Maureen left things too long. By the time I said, “Come back home to me,” Addison had starved herself. She looked like a prisoner of war, a skeleton in a T-shirt. You want to know something? It was one of the few times I’d been so angry with my wife that I had no words. And when I looked into my daughter’s eyes, I knew we’d all failed her. But that wasn’t anything compared with what happened the next week.

  Maureen and I were both on watch, but that morning Maureen was gallivanting off somewhere. Luckily, I was close by. Only down the road. Needed to see a neighbor. At some point, I said, “Something feels wrong,” and I hightailed it back home. Don’t know how I knew, but I went straight into the bathroom. There she was, in a white sundress, blood in rivers on the bathroom tiles, seeping into the mat.

  I picked her up—she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. I called 911. I got her the ambulance. I acted quick; you can bet that. She was loaded up within five minutes—she’d have died, if they’d been any later. She was bleeding out.

  At the hospital when the doctors started talking about psychotic tendencies and hallucinations, I was all, “Come again?” Maureen hadn’t told me a word about what really went on at her parents’ place. She’d led me to think Addison’s imagination had been getting the better of her. Let me tell you, since then, I’ve researched the hell out of mental illness. Go ahead, you can ask me anything. I got all the answers.

  MAUREEN STONE: That morning, I was interviewing for the job I’m at now, a clothing store called Rick-Rack. So yes, I was preoccupied. And Roy, well, he didn’t ever want to hear that our daughter was gravely ill in a way that he didn’t understand. He’d keep insisting she had a garden-variety eating disorder. Every time I tried explaining to him about the voices—he didn’t want to listen. He thought I didn’t have enough control over Addison, that I was “soft” on her, that I should have been getting her to eat regular meals. We were in a struggle every time we spoke of Addison. We’d been back from my parents’ house for about a week, and fortunately Addison wasn’t sketching Ida or any of those other imaginary people. I never let my guard down, but Addison did seem stable. Dr. Tuttnauer had said to watch out if she seemed in a bliss state, but I’d have never called her blissful. Just stable.

  So when Roy’s text came in, dear Lord in heaven, I didn’t believe it. I was … shocked is too gentle a word. I got to the hospital just after they’d pumped her stomach. She was so tiny in that white hospital bed. The gauze wrapping was thick as oven mitts. Here was a girl who’d never been sick, never got colds or croup or flus or fevers. Now Charlie was another story; he was sick all the time, ear infections, summer virus, oh, you name it, we were always rushing him to the doctor’s. Never Addison.

  I sat by her bed until she woke up. And then my daughter turned her head and stared at me with her big, sad, dark eyes, and she smiled. She told me that Ida had followed her from Dartmouth.

  “I guess Ida’ll find me if she wants, Mom.”

  It just about broke my heart.

  DOMINICK LUTZ: To talk about Ida, first I should explain I got to be friends with Addison only after she’d moved from Rhode Island to New York City. That night—it was sometime in early fall, I think—my brother and I had arranged to meet Addison at Lucey’s Lounge in Gowanus. Lucey’s is this dive bar where you get a bucket of ponies, a bucket of popcorn, and sit in the back for six hours, and nobody’ll bother you. A lot of artists hang out there. It’s a solid scene.

  As one half of the Lutz brothers, my twin brother Cameron—Cam—and I are artists. We’re known for being off the radar—just try to find a public image of us; you can’t—and working huge. We put twelve-man crews on some of our outdoor installations, and we use real shit: bronze, wood, marble, mortar.

  Just like everyone else on the scene, Cam and I’d been seeing Addison Stone’s art hit. We’d seen Talking Head and the Fieldbender portraits; we knew this artist was becoming major. But we didn’t know much else.

  Some people were saying Addison was a South American guy—but that turned out to be another street artist, Arturo Heron, who uses gas and electric light in his work, and who mostly gets the credit for Stop Thinking (About It), just like Addison got credit for some of his stuff. Other rumors had it she was a team of people. But then someone tipped us off: this was an American girl, too young to be that good, but the real deal. Everyone wanted to meet her.

  That night, I arrive at Lucey’s, and in the back room already are my brother, Cam; his girlfriend, Paloma; and Zach Frat, who was Addison’s tool of a first boyfriend. And then I saw her. I was blown away, totally. This ghost-goth-punk-heartbreak girl. Black witch hair and hollow black eyes and when the light caught them, thin, pale-ridged scars up her wrists.

  At first, it was all of us drinking quietly while Paloma was mouthing off. Paloma’s a sweetheart, but she’s got too many opinions, and she never comes up for air. I kept squinting at those scars down Addison’s arms.

  “Bad day at the office?” I finally asked, pointing at them. I wasn’t letting the elephant leave the room. I needed the story.

  She smiled. Addison’s smile was one of those ear-to-ear visual ka-bangs. Lit up her whole face, turned her from Miss Gorgeous into Miss Mischief.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I don’t listen to everything Ida says. I only let her visit if she can bring us the right synchronicity.”

  And then, like the way somebody else might describe a walk in the rain, she started telling me about Ida, who was also an artist, who lived up in Massachusetts, who one summer started following Addison around and wouldn’t leave her alone.

  “Ida was hoping to study at the Sorbonne. She showed me how to draw portraits, how to use oils.”

  “So you should let her visit you here in New York,” I said.

  “Oh, no.” Addison started laughing, shaking her head. Like I was the crazy one. “Ida died of pneumonia a hundred years ago. That’s why she and I cut my wrists. She gets in these black moods, especially when she sees me doing everything she wanted to do. But I’ve got the best of her in me—look, look how she helps.”

  Sketch of Ida by Addison Stone, courtesy of Dominick Lutz.

  Next thing, Addison whips out a ballpoint, and in this very focused, almost trance-like way, she sketches Ida on a placemat. It was a great sketch: a wistful, sad, pretty girl in a downcast three-quarter profile, with her fingers holding a locket that’s on a chain around her neck—technically a difficult angle to draw, especially in a gloomy bar, with a ballpoint, on a
placemat. Afterward, I took the drawing and slipped it inside a notebook in my backpack.

  From that night on, I believed what Addison told me. It made sense, if you could take that leap—that Addison’s talent was touched by something extra, maybe even something otherworldly? Or at least I could believe in her absolute faith that this was true. Which makes it true, in a way, right?

  DR. EVELYN TUTTNAUER: I was scheduled to see Addison in a week, after her return from her grandparents’ house. Three days before her suicide attempt, we’d exchanged a video call, perhaps forty minutes long. I was concerned about the hallucinations, but they’d stopped completely since she’d returned home. I spoke with her mother, who promised to look for any shifts in behavior.

  So yes, I was shocked that Addison Stone had attempted to kill herself. This was no cry for help, either. Lacerations to both wrists, plus a dozen two-milligram tablets of diazepam. Often when the attempt is halfhearted, the lacerations are light and crossways. Addison’s wounds went deeper. Up and down. That young woman really wanted to leave this world. In every subsequent visit, when we spoke about the suicide, she never faltered, telling me that Ida had suggested it, and that they’d done it together, and that she hadn’t been afraid.

  LUCY LIM: The minute I came back from Lake George, my mom sat me down and dumped it on me. That Addy’d swallowed pills and slit her wrists with razor blades. I’d hardly heard from Addy that summer—at first, she’d sent me fun snail mail, these teeny works of perfect postcard art, sketches and jokes and watercolors. But then she seemed to lose interest in all that. And she was never much for being online, but by mid-July her texts had totally dried up. She didn’t do Facebook either, so I couldn’t check in with her that way. She was like a balloon that had disappeared up into the sky.

  The worst part of Mom’s news was, for a split second, how damn glad I felt. Addy hadn’t been writing me, but not because she didn’t want to be friends with me. Because she’d been going completely insane. Well, praise the Lord and pass the potato salad.

  Then panic set in. Oh my God, no! Addy would rather be without me than with me? She would have left the planet, she would have slipped into death without a good-bye?! I told Mom I’d start a hunger strike if she didn’t get me a visit to Glencoe ASAP.

  So I was the first non-family member to see Addy in the loony bin. I remember I’d dressed up, in heels and a purse—what do you wear to visit your friend who’s been committed? I’d brought a homemade lemon angel food cake, since it was her seventeenth birthday that week. They took me to a rec room, where she was sitting in the corner playing Wii with some homeless-looking dude. I recognized her pajamas as the same ones she’d worn at my seventh-grade birthday sleepover, which made me sad—puffy little clouds, too short at the wrists, so the bandages appeared extra-conspicuous. When Addy saw the cake, I could tell she’d forgotten all about her birthday. She looked about nine years old, and she also looked ninety. It was shocking to see her like that.

  “Why’d you do it, Addy?” I asked her.

  She thought about that.

  “I wanted to get to the end,” she answered. “I wanted to see what Ida saw. She told me I wouldn’t be alone, because she was waiting for me. ‘Come home,’ she’d tell me. Over and over. At some point, it sounded like a good idea.”

  “Weren’t you scared?” I asked.

  “No. I wasn’t scared. In that moment, I was finished with life. I wanted something else. I can’t explain it to you more than that.”

  I held back my crying till I got to the parking lot. Addy had become a shadow of the friend I loved.

  “She’s going to live in that ugly hospital with all those other sad, shadow people forever,” I told my mom. “She doesn’t care enough to want to get out.” Then I went and looked through every Bristol and Dartmouth public record I could get my hands on, searching to see if I could find this monster, this demon, Ida. But at that time, I found nothing.

  I’d sold Addy short. By mid-September, she’d bounced right outta Glencoe. Except for those scars, it was like it never happened. She was seeing her doctor every other day, but otherwise, she was like any normal girl. She had a full course load, she was focused, and she looked good, too, she really did! Not like some sick, crazy girl. Always in her leggings and long-sleeved shirts, and she’d painted her tired old last-year’s boots this shiny pop of silver-grey, and they were killer. Addy always could turn twenty bucks into two hundred, style-wise.

  Most of the kids at South Kingstown had no idea what a private, violent hell her summer had been. She kept that side of herself secret; she was so ashamed of it.

  Her first day back reminded me of this other time in eighth grade, when Addy decided to DIY-ink herself with India ink and sewing needles. She came to school with a purple-black rose tattoo above her knee. It was a screwup, and it looked like a mean bruise, but she never mentioned it. Just like the tattoo, her wrists became another thing that we never talked about.

  CHARLIE STONE: My sister got discharged from Glencoe after five weeks. I knew she’d had electroshock, and I knew her meds were the reason why she slept all the time, even more than usual, and why there was no snap in her bones. The day Mom drove her home, her scars were so raw I wouldn’t look. She seemed unplugged. Drugged and floppy, a rag doll.

  That same summer, I’d grown three inches and had been in the sun playing sports all day, making friends, doing fun shit, and having a ball.

  “How was your summer?” she asked me first thing.

  “Best summer of my life. And you?” I asked.

  She laughed. Addison liked dark jokes. “Yeah, same,” she said. And then we both kind of cracked up, and I gave her a hug, but underneath the joking, shit, I felt really bad for her.

  DR. EVELYN TUTTNAUER: Addison was in my care all that next year. In her regular therapy sessions with me, she revealed a tendency toward depression, punctuated with manic episodes where she produced a great deal of artwork. There were additional but rare hallucinatory incidents, for which I’d prescribed the anti-psychotic Zyprexa. She always called it Z.

  While Addison had self-destructive impulses, I wouldn’t say she was ruled by them. When she was stable, I’d have described her as an ambitious, energetic, dramatic, and passionate young woman. Very giving, too: of advice, of her time, of actual gifts. She’d once taken off her own scarf and wrapped it around my neck and said, “Keep it, Doc. You look great in lilac.” When she felt good, she wanted others to feel good. She was nurturing. Ironically, she preferred the role of therapist to patient.

  When Addison moved to New York, my colleague Roland Jones, who is an attending at Weill Cornell, began to see her three times a week. In-person visits trump phone-ins, always. You can learn a lot more about a patient by eyeballing them. And when it came to discussing Addison’s case, Roland and I were in a constant feedback loop. She was in both of our care.

  LUCY LIM: Look, my parents have split custody of me. Split custody can be a crap sandwich, but the ’rents try to make it work. Addy’s family was the opposite—semi-okay on the surface, but uncover the lid, and it’s a boil-over of resentment between two people who shouldn’t even be sitting in the same room together, let alone married.

  It was me and Mom who cared for Addison after Glencoe. She didn’t want to go back home. At my house, she had her own room, food in the fridge, peace and quiet. In the beginning, Addy’s doctors were trying her out on different levels of Z, turning up and down the knobs and dials of her brain, which she said made her feel like a human guinea pig. So she was pretty out of it, tired, overwhelmed, distant, and she took these long naps—usually conked out on my bed.

  At first, Addy post-attempt-and-new-on-Z was an adjustment. Those scars were downright freaky. She was always the girl in the long sleeves on a hot day. The girl staring out the window, the girl a little spaced and not raising her hand. But eventually, she evened out, and her art began kicking some serious ass.

  Addison taking one of her many naps in Lucy Lim’s bed,
courtesy of Lucy Lim.

  Our SKpades Student “Spotlight ON” interview this week is spotlighting Addison Stone! Everyone knows Addison, a long drink of a junior who has been taking over a lot of the art room this year. We caught up with her at Fieldbender Central to get the scoop.

  Detail from Cave of Faces by Addison Stone.

  SKpades: Addison, talk to SKpades about your personal style.

  Addison Stone: Apathetic?

  SKpades: Ha. That’s untrue! You bring it. Examps, people love your T-shirts. You should sell them. Have you ever wanted to get into the fashion industry?

  AS: Designing clothes isn’t my thing anymore.

  SKpades: Oookay, then explain this ginormzee painting? Everyone is talking about it.

  AS: Cave of Faces. I didn’t know it would grow so big.

  SKpades: Yeah, last week when they put it up in front of the auditorium, everyone was like, “Errrmerrgaahhd! Whoa! It must be, like, twelve feet high!”

  AS: Yeah, I love it. From down the hall, it looks organic, right? Like something from nature. Then as you come closer, your eyes pick out those faces, which makes it more interactive. Not natural, but social.

  SKpades: Wow, that is so true! My brain just exploded! Last question—tell us what you did on your summer vacation.

  AS: I went to see my grandparents. Oh, and my brain also exploded.

  Excerpt from an article in SKpades, courtesy of South Kingstown High School.

  LUCY LIM: After Glencoe, Addy quit all her other hobbies. No more theater, no more dance class, no more local modeling for department stores. Even when she came over to my house to watch a movie, she’d be buried in her sketchbook. Her art was showing up everywhere. She did the cover of the yearbook, the Our Town play program. Pretty much anything that the school needed, art-wise, Addy was happy to do.