Chapter 4

Home again, or: blind leading blind

Content to pretend

Bobby’s house was well lit and cluttered with junk. A stark contrast to my clean and lamp-lit apartment, where I usually preferred we hang out. But these extenuating circumstances called for a change of scenery, and I watched as Bobby shifted a pile of papers and hardcover novels from the coffee table to make room for our steaming cups of coffee.

I first met Bobby a few years previously when I was a regular at the bar where he worked. We struck up an immediate friendship, and when I met Sarah, the three of us became as tight-knit as our busy schedules would allow. Bobby knew that Sarah was complicated, and he felt like the safest person to whom I could confide the events of the previous day.

“What’s going on?” He asked, aware as I was at the lateness of the hour, and the strangeness of my visit. I recounted the last 24 hours, watching his eyes widen and his hands mindlessly fidget with the trinkets on the side table.

“So what do you think I should do?” I finished, sincerely hoping he had some easy solution to my situation that I hadn’t yet considered.

“I think she needs to go to in-patient, if you ask me,” Bobby replied after a long pause, “but knowing Sarah, I’m not sure she’ll agree to something like that.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Is there any part of you that thinks she’s making it up for attention?”

“Not any part of me I’d like to acknowledge.”

Despite the coffee I fell asleep on Bobby’s couch around three in the morning, wrapped in a cat-hair-laden blanket with a pillow much too small for my head. At 8 am I woke up to the sound of Bobby snoring in the other room, and quickly packed up my bag to rush home, hoping that I could beat Sarah’s uncompromising internal clock. I had no such luck, as she was already journaling at the kitchen table by the time I walked through the green apartment door.

Sarah glanced at me, eyes swimming, and I knew immediately that my absence had made her feel abandoned and scared. Shame crawled down my throat and into my stomach. Not knowing what to say, I took a box of sugared cereal from atop the fridge and, sitting down at the table, poured a bowl while I watched her write:

5/25

Alone again, or home again, or nights spent yearning between green curtains the shade of milkweed hold me hostage to my own lapsed usefulness.  

Like the Robin, the first bird to follow winter, I seek refuge in my nesting place. I feel safe when I imagine that a single storm could not send me turning through branches into the barely thawed earth below. As I do in spring when the landlord raises my rent. 

It is comforting to imagine myself as something I am not. To be a tulip bud pushing forth from remaining snow or a barn owl watching with patient breath for evening to come. If I am not myself my actions are not my responsibility. If I am not myself, I am content to pretend.  

“Are you going to tell me where you were?” She finally asked, setting down her pen.

“I was at Bobby’s. Are you going to tell me where you were?”

She burst into tears, “I’ve told you everything I know! Besides, if you cared where I was you wouldn’t have left the moment we got back from the hospital.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Did you even miss me when I was gone, or were you relieved to no longer have to deal with me?”

“I was worried sick, Sarah. I’m still worried.” I said, scooping a spoonful of cereal in my mouth to prevent me from saying anything more.

“What do you want from me?” She asked with sudden lucidity.

“I— I think you need help, honestly. Professional help.”

“It just all felt so real.” She paused, “If I admit it didn’t happen it’s like admitting I’m insane.”

“I don’t think you’re insane, I think you’re sick.” I placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’m here for you one hundred percent, I love you so much,” I finished weakly, my words sounding hollow even to me.

Sarah, perhaps hearing that I was at the end of my rope, agreed to schedule an intake session at Hazelnut Grove Recovery Center, a local mental health and addiction recovery facility. The center had a good reputation for substance abuse care, and a burgeoning psychosis care department. The team of providers was young, mostly mid-thirties, which Sarah liked. Looking at their website, they offered a myriad of services to patients, from one-on-one counseling to hypnotherapy and group therapy.

I accompanied her to her intake session a few weeks later. Sitting in the comfortable gray-green sofa of the lobby, I listened to gentle nature sounds playing from cheap plastic speakers while Sarah spoke with a psychologist, Dr. Murphy, in the next room. The recovery center smelled subtly like peppermint, and I watched as patients stepped by me to chain-smoke cigarettes outside. I wondered what they were all addicted to, or what was wrong with them, but quickly felt embarrassed for the thought. After an hour and a half Sarah emerged from the office with red eyes.

We didn’t speak much on the drive home, but after that Sarah began twice weekly individual therapy, and once weekly group therapy at Hazelnut Grove. After a month of therapy and at the suggestion of her care team, Sarah quit her job managing the front desk at a local salon, and moved to part time work at Three Sisters Cleaning. There, she scrubbed toilets for $20 an hour, bringing home just enough to cover rent and utilities. Each night I could smell the ammonia coming off of her clothes in the closet hamper.

Though I saw the wonders that working less was doing for her mental health, my role as involuntary breadwinner left much to be desired. Quietly, I resented the financial situation she had put me in. Our salad days were over.

“Fifteen milligrams of Abilify once a day, twenty-five milligrams of hydroxyzine four times a day, and seventy-five milligrams of Wellbutrin,” Sarah listed aloud, having just adjusted her medication for the second time.

“What did Dr. Murphy say?” I asked, taking the Beach Boys record I was listening to off the turntable in the living room and carefully sliding it back into the sleeve.

“She said I should start to see improvement after two weeks.”

“Have you guys worked on your missing time? Does she have any ideas what that’s about?”

“We think it’s a coping mechanism for trauma, still doesn’t explain where I go though.”

Another five months went by without incident, and in the half year since her disappearance I had completely let my guard down. In this time, and with a team of counselors, phycologists, hypnotists, and fellow schizoaffectives, Sarah explored parts of her psyche that were yet unknown to me. Sometimes after therapy Sarah would come home and tell me about her revelations, and I learned that she often saw small animals, mostly cats and mice, running in her peripheral vision. I learned, too, that she tracked the cars coming and going from our brownstone parking lot.

Most of these delusions, I assumed, came from a mix of brain chemistry and complex childhood trauma. I knew that her stepfather had been cruel and abusive, and her biological father had been in and out of jail for stalking the women he had been seeing behind her mother’s back. What I didn’t know, but would soon come to find out, was that as many as ten distant relatives had been institutionalized for paranoid schizophrenia.