“What’s wrong with me?”
The doctor’s almond eyes sized me up. Mom’s version of what had happened to me was heavy on tender loving care, but light on facts. But now Mom and Dad were downstairs in the cafeteria for lunch. I knew this because Mom had told me so about eleven times.
“We’re going down for a bite to eat, honey. Do you understand, Jamie? Just a hop on over to the hospital cafeteria. To have lunch. We’ll be back. Twenty minutes, tops.”
After they’d left, I’d pressed the call button. I told the nurse I wanted Shehadha back. I needed to ask the kinds of questions that were harder to brave when parents were hanging around on the sidelines.
“I’m taking your curiosity as positive sign. We’ve been reducing the morphine. So you might be feeling less groggy.” Dr. Shehadha had a broad, taut face like a fashion model, without a model’s blank expression of having been recently beamed to earth. A face I could trust.
“I jumped,” I said as the night came back to me in a cold brush.
Her expression neutralized. “You did.”
“I remember,” I told her, “but I can’t remember why, exactly. It was like it happened to a different person.”
“You were very disoriented and confused. Those are symptoms.”
“Symptoms. Means. I have a …” My mind struggled to find the correct word. “Diagnosis?”
The doctor drew the room’s one high stool closer to my hospital bed and sat, tucking her Crocs behind the bottom rung. Her narrow hands rested in her lap. Intimate, but serious.
“You ready?”
How should I know? I nodded.
“Okay. Here’s the story, Jamie Susanna Atkinson. We scanned your brain-imaging patterns yesterday—do you remember that, after the EKG, when three people came from radiology and they had that machine with the big screen and the crane-type arm that swung around?”
I managed another nod.
Shehadha continued. “So. They took pictures of your heat-imaging patterns that measured your brain activity, and the results we got suggest a pattern that we associate with some type of psychosocial disease, such as schizophrenia, that, if detected in early stages, has a very successful—”
“Issat … a joke?” She’d delivered the word schizophrenia so quickly, blink and you missed it. I attempted to prop myself a little higher and immediately fell back into the unexpected explosion of pain. Every bone, every muscle.
She waited as I clicked away at the morphine button. Then: “Is landing in the emergency unit of this hospital due to two concurrent, near-successful suicide attempts your idea of a joke?”
“Two attempts?”
“Your blood was toxic.”
I nodded. The empty Baggie, Connie’s meds. “If it is a joke,” I said, “then I’m not in on it.”
“It’s not your fault, Jamie,” she said. “Not at all. You have a disease. The good news is that your disease is really, really treatable.”
And then she introduced me to a few less-cheerful terms: auditory delusion, hallucination, paranoia, somnambulism, catatonia, and depression.
“In my family, we just call it mopey.” Though even saying it, I felt like a traitor to my mom. Who seemed particularly wrecked. Especially when she and Dad returned from lunch to find out I’d learned everything.
“It’s my fault, Jamie. I knew something wasn’t … I just knew it.”
“Mom, you didn’t. You couldn’t have.”
“I should have.” Her eyes were so sore-looking they made mine hurt.
Dad, carrier of the black marble, the Atkinson gene, could not seem to keep still for a minute. Then, and every other time he came to see me, all those long, lying-around days, he paced restless and uncertain. Always fiddling with the curtains and experimenting for the exactly correct fraction of shade to sunlight. Leaving Mom to talk about everything she’d done wrong in raising me.
A disease. It was hard to heal myself around that word, even as my bones fused and my bruises eased into softer color themes, though the scar up my thigh was a thick track of tissue, ugly as litter on the landscape of my skin. As much as I hated it, I knew that it would help me remember that there were many possible outcomes for what I’d done, and I was lucky that I’d escaped relatively unscathed.
I’d wanted to see Sebastian right from the first day, after I found out that he’d saved my life. My name in his voice had been the last sound I’d heard before I’d gone under. As I’d stood, paralyzed, he’d apparently called the coast guard and the police, and scrambled down and come in after me right after I’d jumped. Fighting against his own fears, dragging me to shore.
The first time Sebastian visited me, I wasn’t ready. Too groggy, too battered, the tube still snaked in my throat, I’d muttered unintelligibly at him and assumed, as my puffy eyes watched him go, that this had been his courtesy visit and I’d never see him again. But that’s what I’d always assumed with Sebastian, and I’d always been wrong.
The second time, after he called to check on me, and to tell me he was coming by, I was “ready.” I’d gotten Mom to bring me my cosmetic kit—pitiable, really, the whole makeover attempt, combing my hair and fingertip-blending a concealor stick under my sea-monster eyes, while Sally, my attending nurse, watched with a face carefully null of reaction.
Those first visits, we talked about everything but the accident.
“Why do you keep coming back to me?” I croaked.
“You have this amazing energy, Jamie. For real,” he said. “Maybe it’s not always happy, but it’s always right there.”
“Sebastian, you’re too much of a sucker for the drama.”
“Well, and it’s also the lip biting, and the chipped tooth,” he said, bending to kiss my lips, puffed as they were. “You know I’ll always be a sucker for that.”
I continued to improve. My checkout day was established. Tess and Teddy returned from their respective pockets of the world, bringing me plushy Get Well animals and adventure stories. Mags came back with gossip and lectures and tears, sometimes all of it crammed into the same exhausting ten minutes.
And Sebastian. Always Sebastian, whenever he could. One afternoon he arrived with vast quantities of Rocco’s takeout, carted in a brown paper bag and smelling like the sea. He climbed onto the narrow iron bed, and side by side, we spread out the feast. I finished my second fried clam sandwich before I picked up my nerve.