The Law of Loving Others by Kate Axelrod Read Free Book Online

week before, and I’d cheated on my algebra final in ninth grade.
    I thought about these things over and over again. I couldn’t stop running down the list even though I understood, on some basic level, that none of this was related to what was happening to my mother, that none of it made any difference at all. Eventually a nurse came out to report that my mother was in the day room, and that I could follow her there. I looked up and saw my mother through the Plexiglas square in the middle of the doors—just the top of her head, her eyebrows, the wisps of her brown hair. I felt something sickening in the back of my throat, hot and sweet and burning, and just like that I threw up all over the floor, the lime-colored linoleum tiles suddenly splattered with puke.

    AFTER having waited so many hours in the hospital, the visit with my mother was only a few minutes long, cut short because an obese man who looked like he was in his thirties had begun screaming, shrieking, really, and two guards rushed over to restrain him. They ended up having to lock down the unit and all the visitors were forced to leave. But for those few minutes, my mother and I sat in some sort of day room, which was lit up in an oddly hostile, aggressive way. There were no windows, only bright yellow beams of light that lined the ceiling. A few plastic tables and a dozen or so plastic chairs, a stack of board games piled up in a corner—other than that, the room was empty.
    My mother and I barely spoke. She looked like she was going to cry—her jaw tense, her eyes wet—but she never did. She said hello, in a soft, tender voice; she said it twice, three times, maybe, but other than that she was silent. She was looking at something, but I didn’t know what. I stared at my mother’s feet, which rested in thin, turquoise paper sandals. I was thinking about a time in the late nineties: it was Passover, my family was having a seder at my grandmother’s house in Queens. I remember wanting something, but I don’t know what. Matzo ball soup? More orange juice? Maybe just some water. My mother had been talking to someone, engaged in conversation, but I had been impatient and really wanted her attention. I pulled at her hand, tugged at her thin, unpolished fingertips. And then I looked up and saw that it wasn’t my mother I’d been pulling at, but her sister, my aunt Elaine. I thought of that momentary feeling of horror, the hot slap of embarrassment and shame, when I looked up and saw only the absence of my mother. Never mind that it was my mother’s younger sister, someone who so closely resembled her, who had the same fine, permed brown hair, who wore the same simple diamond ring on her finger—but none of it mattered. All I could think was,
This is not my mother
.

    WE’D driven to the hospital separately, but instinctively I followed my father out into the parking lot, opened the passenger door, and sat down beside him. He stuck the key in the ignition and flipped it forward just an inch, and then a handful of red dots glowed from the dashboard, and the radio emitted a soft, blurry static.
    â€œLook,” he said, “she’s going to be okay, I promise. She’ll stay here for a little while until she gets stabilized, but then she’ll come home and things will be all right.”
    â€œOkay.” I sat with my tote bag on my lap, the cotton handles twisted snugly around my fingers.
    â€œI know this must be really hard and really confusing.”
    It occurred to me then, in that moment, that there was something about my father’s calm, the ease with which he was talking to me, that suggested this wasn’t new to him. I wondered, suddenly, if my mother had been psychotic like this before. But when? It didn’t seem likely. I wasn’t an idiot; wouldn’t I have known if my mother were crazy? If she’d always been this way?
    â€œYeah. I
am
feeling a little confused, I