“You don’t understand!” she shrieks. She starts pulling at my blouse, her nails digging into my skin beneath the fabric. “You’re always trying to stop me. You’re just like them. You want to keep me in the dark!”
“Mom, let go of me!” I struggle to keep her upright.
“She needs help,” Rowan says. “We have to call the hospital. We have to get her back on a ward.”
“No!” Mom screams, a sound of pure, unadulterated agony. She recoils from Rowan as if she’d been struck, her back hitting the wall. “Not back there. I won’t go back. Arthur, tell them! Don’t let them take me!”
Dad steps forward and holds her face. “You’re not going anywhere, sweetheart.”
“Did you give her the meds, Dad?” I feel the exhaustion of the last decade finally boil over into anger. “You said you gave them to her. Piper, Rowan, you two were here. You told me she was fine.”
“She said she took them,” Piper cries, tears finally spilling over. “She told us she was fine. We didn’t know. We haven’t seen her like this in years.”
“Because I shielded you!” I shout, the words echoing off the bleached walls. “I stayed here while you went to school. I handled the doctors. You didn’t see it because I didn’t let you.”
The silence that follows is devastating.
Fuck.
I’m losing my cool here.
Guilt swallows my anger. “I’m sorry,” I tell them. “That wasn’t fair.”
I look at my mother, who is now pacing the small hallway, muttering to herself about “the light” and “the arrival.”
I feel myself crack. Her strong girl is gone. I’m just a daughter whose mother is disappearing in front of her eyes.
“Mom,” I say, following her upstairs and into her bedroom. “Mom, please. Just tell me. Have you been taking the pills?”
“I’m happy, Madison,” she says, spinning around. She grabs my face with her damp, trembling hands. “Don’t you want me to be happy? The pills make the world gray. They make my head heavy. I’ve had so many good days lately. I’m finally awake.”
I pull away from her and head straight for the nightstand.
“Madison, don’t! Stay out of there!” She tries to grab my arm, but I’m faster.
I yank open the drawer. Underneath a stack of old bookmarks and a prayer book, I find three orange plastic bottles. I open the first one. It’s nearly full. The second? Full.
“Mom,” I choke out, holding the bottles up.
“I felt good.” The mania flickers into a desperate, lucid plea. “I thought I was cured. I wanted to feel the sun, Madi. Just for a little while.”
I look at the pills, the chemical tethers that keep her soul from drifting into the stratosphere, and I feel a wave of such profound, heavy sorrow I have to sit on the edge of the bed.
“You can’t do this,” I whisper as the tears finallyflow. “You can’t leave us alone to handle this.”
I pull her into my arms. She’s vibrating, so I hold her tighter. The guilt threatens to choke me because I wasn’t here every single day to watch her swallow them. I feel like a failure.
The fixer who couldn’t fix the one thing that mattered.
“We have to go to the hospital,” I say into her hair.
“No,” Dad says from the doorway. He looks older than I’ve ever seen him. “No commitment, Madison. I can’t do that to her again. I’ll watch her. We’ll get the doctor to come here.”
“She’s in a full-blown manic episode, Dad. She hasn’t slept. She’s not safe.”
“I won’t sign the papers,” he says, his jaw set in that stubborn, Callahan line.
I look at my sisters. They’re paralyzed by the reality of a disease they’ve only ever seen from the periphery. Then I look at my mother, who is currently trying to fold a pillowcase with trembling hands.
