Patient seems to understand why she was admitted and eager to get better. Patient is no longer suffering from delusions.

PROPOSED COURSE OF ONGOING TREATMENT:

100 mg Zoloft/once daily for management of depression and anxiety

Ongoing therapy, individual and family, with psychiatrist Dr. Leonard Lichme

RECOMMENDATION:

Release

EMAIL FROM NICK WARREN TO JOHN PARKER, DATED SEPTEMBER 1

Hey, Parker,

Sorry I wasn’t able to write or call. I wasn’t really feeling up to it for a while. Doing better now, though. I’m home.

By now you’re in New York. I hope you’re having an amazing time.

—Nick

P.S. Of course I remember the red flag. Sometimes I still look for it.

AFTER

September 2

Dear Dara,

I’m home now. They finally let me out of the loony bin. It wasn’t that bad, actually, except for when Mom and Dad visited and stared at me like they were afraid if they tried to touch me I might shatter into dust. We had to do a family session and say a lot of affirmations, like I hear you and respect what you’re saying and I see how angry it must make you when I . . . etc. Aunt Jackie would have loved it.

The doctors were pretty nice, and I got to sleep a lot, and we did arts and crafts projects like we were five years old again. I had no idea how many things you could do with popsicle sticks.

Anyway. Dr. Lichme said that whenever I wanted to talk to you, I should write you a letter. So that’s what I’m doing now. Except that every time I sit down to write, I don’t even know where to begin. There’s so much I want to say. There’s so much I want to ask, too, even though I know you won’t answer.

So I’ll settle for the basics.

I’m sorry, Dara. I’m so, so sorry.

I miss you. Please come back.

Love,

Nick

September 26

“There.” Aunt Jackie thumps a palm against the last cardboard box—overstuffed, straining against the tape like fat against a too-tight belt, and marked in thick black letters Goodwill. She straightens up, brushing a stray bit of hair from her face with the inside of her wrist. “That looks better, doesn’t it?”

Dara’s room—Dara’s old room—is unrecognizable. It’s been years since I’ve seen the floor, now clean-swept and scented with Pine-Sol, beneath the carpet of litter and clothing obscuring it. The old rug is gone, bundled to the curb along with bags filled with stained and ripped jean shorts¸ broken sandals, faded underwear, and padded bras. The bedspread—a leopard print Dara bought with her own money after my mom refused to get it for her—has been replaced with a pretty floral pattern Aunt Jackie found in the linen closet. Even Dara’s clothes are packed away, most of them for donation; dozens of empty hangers swing, creaking, in her closet, as though pushed by a phantom hand.

Aunt Jackie puts an arm around me and gives me a squeeze. “Are you okay?”

I nod, too overwhelmed to speak. I’m not sure what I am anymore. Aunt Jackie offered to do the remainder of the packing herself, but Dr. Lichme thought it would be good for me to help. Besides, I wanted to see whether there was anything I could salvage; Dr. Lichme gave me a shoe box and told me I should fill it. For three days we’ve been wading through the swamp of Dara’s old belongings. At first I wanted to save everything—chewed-up pens, contact lenses, broken sunglasses—anything she’d touched or loved or handled. After filling up the shoe box in less than ten minutes, I trashed everything and started over.

In the end, I’ve kept only two things: her journal, and a small gold horseshoe necklace she liked to wear on special occasions. For luck, she always said.

The windows are open, admitting the September breeze: a month that smells like notepaper and pencil shavings, autumn leaves and car oil. A month that smells like progress, like moving on. Dad is moving in with Cheryl this weekend; tomorrow, I have a mandated date with Avery, Cheryl’s daughter. Mom is in California, visiting an old college friend, drinking wine in Sonoma and taking spin classes. Parker is off at college in New York, probably staying up late and making new friends and hooking up with pretty girls and forgetting all about me. Madeline Snow has started fourth grade—according to Sarah, she’s the darling of the whole school. FanLand is closing up for the season.

I’m the only one who hasn’t gone anywhere.

“Now there’s just one last thing . . .” Aunt Jackie moves away from me, extracting what looks like a bit of scraggly pubic hair from her purse. After a bit more fumbling, she produces a heavy silver Zippo and lights the whole bundle on fire. “Sage,” she explains as she revolves in a slow circle. “Purifying.” I hold my breath to keep from coughing, feeling the twin desires to laugh and cry. I wonder what Dara would have said. Can’t she just smoke some weed and be done with it? But Aunt Jackie looks so solemn, so intense, I can’t bring myself to say anything.

Finally she finishes walking the perimeter of the room and shakes the sage branches out the window, casting tiny embers onto the rose trellis, extinguishing the flames. “All done,” she says. She smiles, but her eyes are tight at the corners.

“Yeah.” I hug myself, inhale, and try to find Dara’s scent beneath the bitter stink of the sage, beneath the smell of September and a room newly scrubbed. But it’s gone.

Downstairs, Aunt Jackie makes us mugs of oolong tea. In the two weeks she’s been staying with us—“To help out,” she announced cheerfully, when she showed up on our porch with her long hair in braids, carrying an enormous set of misshapen luggage covered in various sewn patches, like some deranged version of Mary Poppins, “and to give your mom a break”—she has been slowly working the house from top to bottom, treating it like an animal in need of molting, from the new orientation of the living room (“your feng shui was all wrong”) to the sudden explosion of living plants in every corner (“much easier to breathe, right?”), to the refrigerator stocked with soy milk and fresh vegetables.