Chapter 2

Home again, or: blind leading blind

My Own Lapsed Usefulness 

It was six months before our trip to Montana that Sarah first told me the true nature of her lived experience. What once seemed like minor psychosis now read like schizophrenia, and I became worried that my support enabled my partner’s delusions. I remember sitting there in our sagging loveseat, staring at my fingers through a curtain of curly dark hair, listening to her explain why she had disappeared from our bed the night before.

In Sarah’s words, “I’ve experienced time loss since I was a child. At night, usually around 10 or 11, I would be swept away, and in an instant see the clock read 7 am. I never told anyone because why would they believe me? I don’t know where I go—I’ve never been hurt—and when it happens, it honestly feels like no time has passed.”

“Swept away?”

“Yes, like I become electricity.”

“Sarah, have you ever considered that the time loss was just sleep?” I remember asking, growing equal parts annoyed and concerned. I had been awake since 2 am, when I turned to Sarah’s cool pillow and discovered myself alone in our bedroom. It was 7:15 am now, just a quarter of an hour since Sarah strolled from the kitchen into our bedroom. I never heard the front door close.

“You don’t understand,” she protested. “This is why I was worried about moving in together, I knew that when it happened you would think I’m lying.”

“I don’t think you’re lying,” I spat back, bristling at the accusation, “but when I wake up in the middle of the night and you’re not there, and then you show up for breakfast and you can’t tell me where you’ve been, I think I’m allowed to be a little concerned.”

It was just like Sarah to avoid telling me something so important. Before we moved in together, she had warned me time and time again that my experience with her mental illness would change upon cohabitation. It was true that I had spent many days tending to the apartment when she was stuck in a depressive rut, and comforted her for hours when her anxiety was too much for her to handle, but this? Disappearing for hours at a time without knowledge of her location was as new to me as it was frightening.

“Emma, I really don’t think I’m here anymore when I’m gone like that. I feel my body slipping somewhere else, I’m safe from anything in this world,” she said quietly, with a look of shame.

“Do you understand how you sound right now? Is it helpful for me to remind you that you take medication for psychosis?”

“No, it’s not. Besides, this is the first time it’s happened while I’m in the room with somebody else. No one has ever noticed I was gone. It must mean something.”

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered, retreating without another word to the bedroom to change into my work clothes for the day. In our year together and three months sharing space, Sarah’s mental state had never seemed quite so fragile. On her best days she was still a dreamer, but this absolute detachment from reality proved her illness was less than romantic. I reminded myself as I buttoned a striped top that to her, these experiences were real, and now that she was disappearing at night, they were real to me, too.

As I put in my grandmother’s gold hoop earrings I considered that maybe an intervention would encourage her to seek help. The problem was, I didn’t who else there was to tell Sarah she had a problem. Sarah hardly spoke to her family, had immense trouble maintaining close friendships, and was most content passing her time alone. Not to mention, every time she started therapy she would miss so many appointments that all her therapists broke up with her.

I knew much of this before we moved in together. And yet, looking at myself in the vanity mirror, I wondered if I had overestimated my ability to support her. I knew it would be helpful to try and believe her, to understand her, but secretly I felt a seed of resentment plant deep in my stomach. The first of our relationship.

I took a breath and stood to re-enter the living room, finding Sarah staring out the window, tending to the leaves of our budding philodendron. Her willowy figure seemed small in the sunlight, and I felt my resolve soften. She must be a sleepwalker, I thought, gearing myself up for the question I was about to ask.

“So,” I said, staring at her shoulders, “where do you go when you disappear, if it’s not of this world?”

“That’s the thing,” she replied slowly, hair glinting gold, “I don’t know.”

Though Sarah said these disappearances never occurred more than once every three months, it wasn’t two weeks later that I woke at 5 am, startled to find her half of the bed bare. But I had prepared this time. Without Sarah’s permission I had installed a motion detector by the front door, which could tell me when the door was opened or closed. I opened the app on my phone to check the activity: nothing since 8pm the night before, when I returned home from after work cocktails with my coworkers. Puzzled, I racked my brain to remember our last conversation. She seemed quiet last night, but I had one too many and was frankly not paying close attention to her. Did she perhaps leave through the window?

When 7 am passed and she didn’t return my calls, or walk excitedly through the front door to apologize and explain the situation away, I rummaged through Sarah’s desk to find her bright yellow, leather-bound notebook. I flicked frantically to the last entry, dated the day before, which read:

5/23

Before, when they saw us across that great expanse, everything the light touched had already happened. But now they are here, and they see all that could be. Perhaps they have come to help, perhaps to meddle.

My heart sank to the pit of my stomach. Was she acting out to punish me? If this wasn’t some uncharacteristically creative writing, Sarah’s health was worse than I thought. I cursed myself for moving in with her so quickly, then cursed myself again for resenting my partner’s illness so much. Her condition made me scared, for myself and for her. At 8 am I drove to work, all the while convincing myself that she would be home, cooking dinner, by the time I returned.

The workday passed slow and sticky. I sat idly at my cubicle, keeping busy with engagement spreadsheets and meaningless analytics, counting the hours until my fifteen-minute commute home. I hadn’t heard from Sarah, and I wondered what I would do if she was not home when I returned.

I had all day to think about Sarah’s psychosis. Her most bizarre belief was that she was no longer “on this astral plane” when she disappeared. Frankly, I had a hard time entertaining the notion, but the lack of motion detection on the front door had me stumped, and Sarah wasn’t exactly the type to climb out of the window and down a rickety fire escape. But then again, I wasn’t sure I knew the Sarah who sleepwalked at night. I shuddered to think of what she may do during those unconscious hours, and imagined her walking like a ghost along Park avenue.

By lunch I was racking my brain for what I was taught in my single year of therapist school, which I attended before I flunked out and took a job at a local nonprofit. Generally, I remember learning, it is not helpful to tell someone they are being crazy, even if they are being crazy. And running my fingers through my greasy curls, I feared my reaction to Sarah’s explanation a few weeks ago had tipped my hand.

When the workday finally ended, my nervous system was shot with the weight of my worry. I hadn’t said a word about Sarah to my coworkers that day, and I hoped in vain that I’d never have to tell them what happened. My mind, conditioned from watching too many hours of true crime, had considered every grotesque possibility. I packed up my purse to leave.

After parking on the street outside of my building, I glanced up at the red brick and curtained windows, the vintage apartment so carefully chosen during the sunny days of our honeymoon phase. I remember us buying those curtains, walking up the department store isle and choosing an opaque white that offered both light and privacy (for the plants). Looking up at them, I saw they were still drawn from the night before. My heart skipped a beat; Sarah never left the curtains drawn during the day. In fact, she scolded me whenever I forgot to open them in the morning, citing the sensitivity of her string-of-pearls. Surely, I thought, she must be missing.

Once stationed on the second floor, I took a deep breath and placed my key in the dark green apartment door. It swung open, and an immediate and painful relief washed over me. On the kitchen counter there stood a bundle of bluebells in a mason jar, with a paper note, that upon further inspection read:

“Love you, Em. See you soon!”

Her handwriting.

Had this been there all morning? Did I miss it in my own fear? And how in the world did she find bluebells, my favorite flower and an April bloom, in the final days of May? Her note seemed so casual, so flippant, like she was out running errands. I once again checked the motion detector app. No one but me had entered or exited, but I decided to wait until 7pm before before calling the police, knowing that I would trigger Sarah’s progressive sensibilities if I sent the cops to find her. Besides, I wanted time to puzzle over the obviously defective motion detector.

It was a few hours later and I was half asleep in our lumpy armchair when I woke to a strange sound emitting from the defunct living room fireplace. It sounded like a metallic popping and crackling, almost electric, like what you would imagine outer space sounds like. Startled, I opened my eyes to see Sarah standing before me, soaking wet, creating a puddle on the red and yellow rug. For a moment we locked eyes, and within seconds she collapsed.

Without thinking, or breathing, or even checking on her, I dialed 911. The ambulance arrived in a matter of minutes. When they knocked on the door I sat frozen at the kitchen table, gawking at the app which said no one but me had entered the home upon Sarah’s return. The sensor must be faulty, I thought again.

Unable to rouse Sarah, the paramedics lifted her harshly into a gurney and I winced as her knees clapped together. She looked so small, I thought, in the arms of the man and woman who were too busy checking her vitals to pay any attention to me.

“Where should we go?” They asked, after assessing her health and finding her state relatively stable.

“What?” I replied, dumbfounded.

“What hospital should we take her too?” The female paramedic repeated.

“HCMC,” I said without thinking. The hospital where my mother died of breast cancer early last year. “Can I ride in the ambulance?”

“We ask that you drive separately to hospital,” said the male paramedic as he rolled my drenched lover out of the apartment. I nodded in understanding, holding the front door open for them.

“Fuck! No elevators!” I heard the female exclaim as I shut the door behind them. I hadn’t event thought to mention it. I peaked through the peephole to see the male paramedic lift Sarah from the Gurney and carry her like a baby down the stairs and across the threshold.