Page 106 of Keepsake
I’d feared being locked in some kind of mental institution, but the reality of my next few weeks was much less dramatic. My doctors had found a daytime mental health center just outside of Boston. Every morning I woke up in my parents’ house and got ready. Then my dad dropped me off at this place, the same way he used to drive me to my private school.
“Have a nice day,” he’d say. “Play nice with the other kids.”
“See you at six,” I’d say, because it just wasn’t funny. Though he meant well.
The place was like a country club for rich people who weren’t doing so well. Or a day camp with expensive medication.
After checking in, I went to a yoga class. Then I saw a doctor who gave me an antidepressant. Then I was sent to another activity, where I tried weaving or decoupage. Or I meditated. (Or tried, anyway. My mind kept wandering to more interesting subjects.)
I did everything they asked of me. Almost.
My doctor—a nice lady with a white streak through her dark hair, whom I was to call Dr. Becky—needed me to stop feeling guilty about Oscar’s death. But it wasn’t so easy.
“The goal,” she said, “if you want to make this burden manageable, is to forgive yourself. Accept that not everything is your fault. And to let the people who love you carry some of it for you.”
“I tried that,” I pointed out, thinking of Zach fighting valiantly to ease my pain. “But I was the only one who got Oscar into trouble.”
“Really? Did you force him to be part of your kidnapping?”
“Of course not.”
We went around and around like this a lot.
“Lark, nobody can carry one hundred percent of her own burdens. Humans aren’t cut that way. A baby sea turtle never meets its mother, and most of them die before they reach the waterline. Humans are interdependent by choice. You have a burden of guilt, and it’s brave of you to want to carry it yourself. But it’s foolish not to let others help you. Give some of it away to your parents and your friends. And when they need your help, you’ll be strong enough to support them, too.”
I swallowed thickly every time she said this. The logic of it had already made inroads into my mind. The hard part was letting it into my heart.
Zach had said something similar at the hospital in Vermont. I couldn’t remember that morning very clearly. Foggy from the sedative and dizzy with remorse, much of what happened that morning was a blur. But I remembered the softness of Zach’s shirt against my cheek, and the strength of his arms around my body. He’d told me a little piece of his own story—torn-up shoes, and begging for food. What were his words?I’ll be your Apostate Farm.
God, how I missed him.
“I tried letting Zach carry my burden,” I told Dr. Becky. “But that didn’t seem fair.”
“That’s because you were cheating,” she said. “Zach didn’t know you like your family or May. He was a stranger, so it didn’t feel like much of a risk to show him all the scary things in your heart.”
“So it wasn’t fair to him,” I finished.
She smiled at me. “Maybe not at first. But Zach needed you, too. He needed to know how it felt to love someone he didn’t owe. He had his own burdens to unload.”
Dr. Becky was a huge fan of Zach’s, even though she’d never met him. Figured. Zach was pretty irresistible.
“I wish Zach could have known the stronger me. The healthier one,” I told her.
“But he can,” she said gently. “Every time you confront the things that scare you, it’s a step back to feeling like yourself again. Right now it feels like you spend all day talking about your sorrow. But it won’t always feel like that. Every time we stare it in the face, it becomes a little more banal. Pretty soon you’ll bump into your sorrow on the street, and just give it a little wave. It will still be familiar, but not so startling.”
“I’m going to kick it in the shins.”
“Have at it,” Dr. Becky said with a smile.
The antidepressants turned me into a slug. I fell into bed before ten and could barely drag myself out of bed in the morning. My expensive team of experts took their time tinkering with the medication and dosage.
“You won’t always need the meds,” Dr. Becky promised.
I hoped she was right, because they made me feel even more like an invalid.
To be fair, my parents were lovely during these difficult days. Somehow my mother was a model of restraint. She didn’t nag or hover. And the toughest question she asked me during the first week was which comedy I wanted to watch with her on TV.
One time I woke up screaming, and she just sat down on the edge of my bed and held my hand. She didn’t look terrified anymore. I think I’d managed to burn through all our mutual terror already. We’d moved on to a place where the worst had already happened, and all there was to do now was pick up the pieces.
