“You didn’t notice her sitting by your bed?”
That he doesn’t so much as twitch at the mention of mental health warms me to him even more. “Maybe not. I don’t remember much of the last few days.”
“Because of the infection?”
“Yeah, and the sedative they gave me to compensate for the fact I’d puked all my lithium up.”
Experience told me there were other reasons to sedate me, but if I cling to every single waver in my mental health, it will become all I am, if it hasn’t already.
Aidan’s gaze is drilling a hole in the side of my head. I force myself to look at him, to accept his curious stare, and tell him the truth. “I have bipolar disorder,” I say, “among other things.”
“What other things?”
“Anxiety, paranoia, depression. Sometimes it’s symptomatic of the disease; sometimes, it’s just... me.”
“Bipolar.” Aidan says it as if he’s turning it over in his head and matching it to somewhere he’s heard it before.
I sigh. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t. I haverealbipolar, not the trendy one where you go to a clinic and come out with bigger boobs.”
“You want bigger boobs?”
I laugh, and lights come on, both in my soul and somewhere on the darkened ward. “Not especially, but a week in this nut house has done strange things to me already, so who the hell knows. I’d better go.”
“What?”
“I should go,” I repeat. “Before they catch me and put me in restraints.”
He can’t tell if I’m joking, and I don’t elaborate either way. I rise and he catches my hand in his, just for a moment. The contact is fleeting and wonderful, and I don’t understand how I feel as he lets go. Or why he did it.
“You’ll come back, won’t you?” he whispers.
I nod as footsteps approach. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”
Six
Aidan
When I was a kid, I spoke so rarely that my teachers thought there was something wrong with me. They sent me to a speech therapist who concluded I was a sullen little git who needed to get out more, so I joined the football club until I got kicked out for fighting.
I have no explanation for what’s happening to me now. For how the few hours a day Ludo sits with me have become the highlight of my miserable life, and how much Italkwhen I run out of questions to ask him.
He wants to know about the trees I save instead of the ones I cut down, and he doesn’t ask how I came to fall out of one.
“It depends why I’m working on it,” I explain as he eats an orange, the only edible thing that came with lunch. “If the landowner wants it cut down and destroyed, there’s not much I can do about it, but Bernard, my boss, charges less for treating diseased trees, so councils and nature trusts usually opt for that.”
Ludo meticulously removes the pith from his orange segment before he slides it into his mouth. “How do you save a diseased tree?”
“Depends how sick it is.”
“Uh-huh.”
I take that as my cue to continue. “Like, if the tree is dying, sometimes it’s kinder to remove it, to give up the resources you might use trying to save it to other trees.”
“That makes sense.”
“Yeah, but it takes a lot for a tree to be a lost cause. I never make the decision in one day. I always go back, unless someone else has already tried to fell it and I have to finish the job.” I don’t add that this particular habit has caused more run-ins with Bernard than anything else or that another tree surgeon’s sloppy work is what has landed me flat on my back. I don’t say anything like that, because the truth is, I’m trying not to think about it. Chances are, I’ll never climb another tree, for fun or otherwise, and I’m not down with accepting that.
“What if a tree can be saved? What do you do?”
