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

his beard.
    â€œJust get to the bad part, okay?”
    â€œThis is it, this is all of it.”
    â€œYeah, but you said she was hospitalized when I was a kid.”
    â€œRight, when you were about four. She needed to get things readjusted, find some sort of equilibrium again.”
    â€œHow long was she there for?”
    â€œAbout ten days.”
    â€œDid I freak out?”
    â€œYou were okay. You were a tough little girl. And you went and stayed with Grandma for a little while.”
    â€œAnd things have been okay since then?”
    â€œYes, they really have.” He paused. “Let’s go home, Emma. Do you want to leave your car here and we can just drive back tomorrow and get it?”
    I nodded my head yes. I worried that if I started to speak again, I would begin to weep. I hadn’t been so openly upset in front of my father in years. I pressed a knuckle against the radio dial and then with another couple of taps, the CD player lit up. Bob Dylan’s voice, raw and scratchy, filled the car.

    WHEN we got home, I lay in bed and tried to gauge exactly how dumb and naive this new information made me. Was I like one of those sixteen-year-old girls who went into labor without even knowing that she’d been pregnant? It seemed impossible to not feel something growing inside of your body all those months, to willfully ignore all those hormones shifting. Would people look at me and wonder the same thing?
    That night, I couldn’t sleep. I started by just typing “schizophrenia” into Google, and hours later I was still awake—lost inside the endless maze of mental health sites, message boards, virtual support groups. The information was abundant and terrifying. I typed in, “My mother has schizophrenia” and the searches that automatically filled the search bar were “My mother has schizophrenia, will I get it?” “My mother has schizophrenia, do I?”
    I looked up the symptoms: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized behavior, thought disorders. I wasn’t sure if I knew what it all meant. What was disorganized behavior, exactly? Did the fact that I was messy and often careless—that every winter I lost two pairs of gloves, left a scarf wherever I went—count as disorganized? I didn’t think I had hallucinations—that didn’t worry me much—but then I read further:
auditory hallucinations
, hearing voices. This left me slightly confused, a little on edge. I didn’t hear other people talking to me when they weren’t, but wasn’t there always a voice in my head? Narrating my every move? Was that normal? Did everyone have that?
    I typed in, “famous people with schizophrenia.” I wanted to see public figures who had suffered in this way. The list was shockingly small. I was hoping it would be the kind of thing where half of the artists and writers I admired were actually plagued with the illness, but probably, I’d been thinking of bipolar disorder. After an hour of googling, all I could come up with were Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys, Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd, Jack Kerouac, and Ezra Pound.
    I went back and reread the symptoms. I started to feel panicky as I read. Whatever slight curiosity or uncertainty I’d started out with earlier in the night had been replaced by a persistent, definitive terror. I was crazy too, or if I wasn’t now, then I would be soon. I tried to calm down. I reminded myself of the time sophomore year when I convinced myself that I had herpes. I’d spent an hour in the girl’s bathroom on my hall, staring at myself in the mirror as I’d been taught to do by the sex ed teacher. I didn’t know if what I was looking at had always been there, was my normal skin, or if I had recently contracted some disease. I’d gone to student health later in the day, after I just couldn’t take it anymore, and the nurse practitioner looked at me like I was an