“I love my mom, but I don’t want to be her,” I said.
“Then don’t,” she said firmly. “Just be yourself.”
It wasn’t until the next day that I was able to get my sleep center results. With Grandpa and Aunt Mona, I sat in a tufted leather chair on the other side of the doctor’s desk while he flung out phrases like “sleep latencies” and “sleep onset REMs.” But when I heard “troublesome” and “narcolepsy with cataplexy, type one,” I sat up straighter and listened to what the doctor was trying to tell me.
She said that there’s some genetic disposition for the disorder, but that symptoms sometimes didn’t appear until teen years, and they typically increase over time, which is probably why my sleep issues had been getting worse lately.
She said that it was a long-term neurological disorder, and I was never going to be cured or perfectly normal.
But.
I could manage it with changes in my routine and with medication. And that I’d need to make an effort and be willing to experiment with treatments, because it may take a couple of years to find the right balance of medication—to keep me awake when I needed to be awake and to sleep when I needed to sleep. And maybe that’s where Grandpa went wrong after he got diagnosed: he didn’t like how the medication made him feel, so he gave up. I needed to be more tenacious than that if I wanted this to work.
And I did. In some ways this felt like turning over a new leaf. No more running away. Time to commit to things that mattered and stop fearing the worst.
Armed with prescriptions and a series of future appointments to check on my progress, I emerged from the doctor’s office feeling like Rocky Balboa, arms raised in triumph at the top of the famous stone steps in Philadelphia, ready to win at life. As if I’d accomplished something monumental. God as my witness, I’d never go boneless again!
Well, it was a start at least. And that wasn’t nothing. I could finally set my eye on the horizon, where feeling better wasn’t guaranteed but at least possible. It was a weight lifted off my shoulders—a spring-cleaning of the sticky cobwebs inside my head. And as we stood in line for a celebratory lunch of chicken sandwiches and strawberry-lemon bars, my newly cleared mind had space for thinking about other things.
Like Daniel. And that night at the opera.
And our fight.
I thought and thought, and I didn’t understand how I could be so angry at him one second, and the next, miss him so much that my heart felt like it was shattering. But it wasn’t until I got home from the doctor’s office that I came to some realizations.
He was right when he said he’d tried to tell me earlier about Raymond Darke—at least, in a small way. Before the opera, when we’d argued about going. He wanted to call the whole thing off. He never flat-out said,I knew Raymond Darke was my father this entire time—which would have prevented all of this. At the very least, my heart wouldn’t feel as if it had been punched repeatedly.
But I’d been so distressed about Daniel lying to me that I’d failed to realize how upsetting it must have been for him to face Raymond Darke. That was the point of the whole thing, right? It wasn’t that Daniel was hell-bent on outing Darke’s true identity to the world; he was trying to communicate with his father. And could I blame him? A couple years after my mom died, when I was twelve, I spent weeks trying to figure out who my father was, based on nothing but a nickname and a school that Aunt Mona had remembered. I looked online. I called people. I made lists. I never found out who it was, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. And I’d done it all behind my grandparents’ backs. I’d lied. I’d kept secrets. It wasn’t because I didn’t love them, but because it wasmyquest. They could never understand what it felt like.
Daniel shouldn’t have lied to me. But I could understand how it snowballed into something he didn’t intend. And I understood why he was afraid to tell me, because right now I was afraid too. Afraid that we’d both failed each other. Afraid of what I’d lose if I gave up on us and walked away instead of accepting his apology.
Afraid it might be too late for us to find a way to rebuild trust.
I hoped it wasn’t.
That night I got up the courage to send him a text:Truth or Lie. Do you believe in third chances?
His response came several hours later:I believe anything’s possible.
“Everything is connected.”
—Officer Jim Chee,The Ghostway(1984)
32
Late the next afternoon, I took a ferry into the city. I’d been trying to call the daytime manager at work to see if she’d put me back on the work schedule after my emergency leave. I was a little worried Melinda would be miffed for making her shuffle everyone around to accommodate me—and more worried about what would happen when I told her my doctor wanted me to work in the day. But when I called, no one picked up the manager’s line. So I called the main guest line repeatedly but kept getting a busy signal.
Which was strange. It should go straight to the automated menu.
After several fruitless attempts, I wasn’t sure what to do. Then I got a text from Daniel:
The Cascadia is closed today for maintenance.
But u should go in anyway.
Maybe around 5:30.
Will u go? Y/N
