“Mim, God, please,” said Dad.
I slapped the cards down on the desk, then held up both middle fingers. “Tell me what you see here, Doc.”
Dad stood, looked to my mother, who sat quietly with her hands in her lap. She wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t frowning either.
“It’s okay, Mr. Malone,” said Dr. Wilson, motioning for him to sit. Then, turning to me, he said, “Remember what we talked about, Mim. Remember the importance of verbally expressing exactly how you feel. Sometimes a thing doesn’t seem real until we say it out loud.”
I rolled my eyes. “I feel angry and—”
“Start with your name,” interrupted the doctor, holding up his hands. “Your full name, please.”
“I am Mary Iris Malone.”
“Go on,” he whispered.
I lowered my voice, because as I’d learned some time ago, a whisper was louder than a scream. “And I am not okay. I’m angry. And bored. And I think Dr. Makundi is a hundred thousand times better at being a doctor than you are.”
Wilson’s smile was infuriating. “And what about the voices, Mim? Have you had any episodes lately?”
“You make it sound like, I-don’t-know . . . epilepsy or something. Like I’m drooling and convulsing all day.” I picked up an inkblot card. “And aren’t inkblots, like, completely medieval? What’s next, a lobotomy? Shock treatment? God, it’s like Cuckoo’s Nest in here.”
Wilson nodded, unfazed. “We can be done with the inkblots if you’d like.”
“Yes, I’d like. Very much, I’d like.”
Pushing his chair back from his desk, Wilson opened a drawer and pulled out a stereo that looked as if it’d been shot from a cannon. He thumbed through a book of CDs. “How about some music? You like Vivaldi?”
“Makundi had Elvis.”
“I’m afraid I only have classical.”
Shocker. “Fine. Bach, then. Cello Suite Number One?”
He shuffled through the CDs, pulled out a Bach double disc. “I’m fairly certain the first cello concerto is on here.”
“Suite,” I corrected.
“Yes, it is,” he mumbled, “very sweet.”
“Blimey, you’re an idiot, Doc.”
Dad sank back in his chair, buried his head in his hands. Admittedly, he’d been hanging by a very thin thread, but this seemed to do him in.
Dr. Wilson asked a few more questions and jotted down some notes while I studied his office. Cozy plants. Cozy chairs. A mahogany desk, no doubt the price of an Audi. And behind the good doctor, his Wall of Hubris: I counted seven framed degrees, hung with care and pride and more than a little jackassedness. Oh-ho, you don’t believe I’m important, eh? Well then, how do you explain these?!?!?!
Wilson stopped writing for a second. “Your family has a history of psychosis, I believe?”
Dad nodded. “My sister.”
A few dramatic underlines later, Wilson closed my file and pulled out a new pad of paper. It was smaller and pink. “I’m going to prescribe Aripapilazone,” he said. “Ten milligrams a day—that’s one tablet daily.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mom grab Dad’s leg and squeeze. He shifted, pulled his leg away, said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” said Mom. They were the first words she’d spoken since we’d arrived. “Is that really necessary? Dr. Makundi was of the opinion that medication, in Mim’s case, was premature.”
Wilson took off his glasses, met my father’s eyes briefly, then ripped the prescription from his pad. “I’m afraid Dr. Makundi and I disagree on this matter. It is your choice, of course, but this is my . . . professional recommendation.”
I was the only one who caught this dig at Makundi. Or the only one who cared, anyway. Professional. Insinuating Makundi’s recommendation was less than. As far as I was concerned, Wilson and Dad and their dedication to medication were more absurd than all the stuffed grizzlies in the land.
“We read about a drug that was getting good results,” said Dad, looking at the prescription. “What was it called, Evie? Ability-something . . . ?”
Mom crossed her arms and looked the other way. She had a fire in her eyes I hadn’t seen before.
The doctor nodded. “That’s this. Aripapilazone is commonly known as Abilitol.”
A pall fell over the room. A black shroud of disease and deathbeds and all the worst things from all the worst places. This mutant word, a tragic portmanteau, the unnatural marriage of two roots as different as different could be. And do you, Ability, take Vitriol to be your lawfully wedded suffix? I wanted to scream objections to the unholy matrimony, but nothing came out. My mouth was clammy and dry, full of sand. Dr. Wilson smiled ever on, rambling about the benefits of Abilitol while my father nodded like a toy bobblehead immune to the deepening shadow in the room.
As they spoke, I caught my mother’s eye. I could tell by her face she felt the deepening shadow, too.
Neither of us smiled.
Neither of us spoke.
We felt the shadow together.
5
The Sixth Letter
I WAKE UP to the hum of cross-country travel, the late sun on my face, and Arlene’s heavy head on my shoulder. (If it weren’t for her snoring, I would swear the old gal was either dead or in a coma.) Wiping away the thin string of drool dangling from Arlene’s mouth to my shoulder, I nudge her head in the opposite direction and pull my backpack into my lap.