“Oh my god, thank you.” I feel so grateful to have my tote bag back, that I start crying for real. We burst into the cold of the outdoors, and it immediately stings my cheeks. It’s snowing and there’s at least six inches on the ground, and it’s still coming down. The snow muffles the noisy bar in the background, and I’ve never been so grateful to be so cold. I run a couple of paces on the barely shoveled pathway, out into the courtyard.
Dean, who is following me closely, wraps the coat around my shoulders when I stop, and hugs my back. I’m crying so hard, hot tears drip from my face and melt the snow they land on. This is so pathetic. I’m mortified when my tears turn to laughter.
“What? Are you laughing or crying?” Dean says into my neck. He frees me from his arms, and I drop my tote bag into the snow to put my arms into my coat.
“I don’t fucking know, man,” I say with a laugh and a sniffle. “This is fucking insane.”
“You curse like a sailor,” Dean remarks, snow crunching under his feet, he doesn’t look directly at me, but instead takes in the trees surrounding the property.
“It’s been so long since someone did that to me.” I use my sleeve as a tissue, even though I have tissues stuffed away in my bag.
“This has happened before?”
“Yeah, but when Andy was still around. And it was mostly about him.” I look off into the distance, avoiding making eye contact with Dean. He essentially rescued me.
“You need to be more assertive.”
“No, shit.” I laugh coldly. “I need to be a lot of things. Assertive isn’t exactly at the top of the list.” I pick up my tote bag, dusting off the snow that stuck to the bottom of it. I pull out a throat lozenge and pop it in my mouth. I don’t even know what a lozenge will do for me right now, but I need something to do something to take away the panic that’s brewing in my gut. “I know I’m fucking crazy.”
“You’re not crazy,” Dean assures me, his nose already turning pink, the light from the restaurant dimly shining onto his face.
“Yes, I am.” I laugh again, and I feel like I sound like a maniac. Which I totally am. I hold up my tote bag, shaking it as I speak. “I have a whole ass bag, dedicated to remedies for—for illnesses that aren’t even real!” I shriek, shaking the tote bag like a maraca, pills jangling around.
“But they feel real to you, Madeline,” Dean tells me. I stop my shrieking and hollering for a moment. He has a point, they do feel real to me. They feel so real and sometimes it’s all I can thinkabout. He knows I’m not fucking insane, that this isn’t all in my head.
“They do,” I agree.
“It’s a disorder,” Dean tells me. “But that doesn’t discount what you actually feel. And that doesn’t make you crazy for reacting as if it were real. Because it’s all real to you.”
“It is,” I agree again. Dean’s managed to pace a couple steps away from me, but our voices are still quiet like we are nose to nose.
“I tried to do this road trip before.” I admit. “The year after Andy died.”
“You have?” Dean asks, coming closer again.
“Yes. But I had my first panic attack. I thought I was having a heart attack because of a pain in my shoulder that wouldn’t go away. It was a literal dark and stormy night, and I had gotten about an hour from York Falls. I had read online that shoulder pain could be a sign of a heart attack earlier that day. I couldn’t focus on anything but the pain and the thought of having a heart attack, and so I crashed my car into a telephone pole.”
Dean nods solemnly.
“I saw a cardiac specialist after that. I had an EKG done. They said there was no evidence of a heart attack. I didn’t believe them,” I swallowed hard. “So I had a stress test done. And those results showed I was fine.”
“Did you have bloodwork done?” Dean asks me.
“Yes. And that was fine too. But I was still convinced something was wrong,” I note. “So I took supplements. Fish oil. CoQ10. I was convinced I was sick, and my heart was in danger. I was alone. And I had a full-on meltdown when the vitamins didn’t help my pounding heart and shoulder pain.” I laugh. “A breakdown.” I correct myself.
I feel so ashamed of the things I did in a panic, thinking I was going to die. But Dean is right, it all felt real to me. It feels real inthe heat of the moment. The fast heart rate is a heart attack, the pain in the neck is paralyzation, the headache, a stroke.
“I went to the ER. And they did a CT scan on my chest,” I continue.
“Which turned up nothing?” Dean guesses.
“Which turned up nothing.” I confirm, scuffing my feet on the ground. “A nurse suggested I might be experiencing anxiety related to my grief. I called a psychiatrist after that.”
“Do your meds work?” Dean asks.
“They do. For the most part. I still have my routines, my remedies. But it’s better than crashing cars into telephone poles and ER visits.”
“Anti-anxiety medicine paired with an anti-psychotic medicine makes a difference, right?”
