Fran interrogated her memory as well as she could. It wasn’t an easy question. What was anyone’s mood? It went up or down depending on what was happening. You could wake up happy and then bang your head on the bedpost and hate the world. But there wasn’t anything that came looming out of the recent past like the great big shadow of a great big wrecking ball to shatter her ever-fragile buzz. There was just the usual run of ups and downs.
Your mood was fine, Jinx said. Everything was going fine.
“My mood was okay,” Fran said.
“Nothing stressing you or freaking you out?”
“Nothing more than usual.”
Dr. Southern scratched his beard.
“Well, then I’m inclined to sit this out,” he said. “For now.”
“No,” Fran said quickly. And then, as he looked at her in mild surprise: “I mean, I’d like you to increase my meds. I want to go back to a full dose of risperidone. Please.”
“Why?” Southern asked her. He shrugged his shoulders, just a little, making the single word mean more—like he didn’t see the need. Like she had to justify the request somehow, when the reason was right there in front of them both, gruesomely obvious.
“Because I don’t want it to start happening again.” Fran didn’t bother to mention that it had happened again, right outside in the waiting room. She just wanted to collect her prescription and get out of there, not get into another round of discussion. “I don’t want to go back to all the … you know, to the hallucinations and the panic attacks. I want to be normal.”
“Normal,” Dr. Southern said flatly. “Right. But there are different flavors of normal, Frankie. We’re all trying to be normal in our own way.”
“What does that mean?” Fran asked him. She was trying not to sound angry, but she hadn’t come here for the kind of platitudes she could have got at a school assembly.
The doctor gestured vaguely, shaping something in the air with his fingers. “Well, it means we’ve got an idea in our minds when we say the word, but there’s probably no definition we can all agree on. Look, here’s the thing.” He held up Fran’s journal, like a preacher waving a Bible around to prove he was on good terms with God. “This is, what, the fifth or sixth notebook you’ve gone through? There’s year after year of you telling me about everything in your life that isn’t normal.”
“So?” That one word, all by itself, sounded really belligerent, but Fran couldn’t help it. She felt as though she was being talked into something. Something she wasn’t going to like.
“So I’m wondering if talking about your symptoms has become a symptom in itself. You see, I don’t know what we’re doing now, exactly. There are two possibilities here. The first—” He put the journal down again so he could hold up his index finger. “—is that your condition is entirely post-traumatic. Your mind responding to extreme stress. But if that’s what it is, then after nine years I would expect to see some change. Recovery, in a perfect world, but definitely change. Systems under stress aren’t stable. They either pull back toward stability or else they fall apart. You’re not doing either.”
Fran wasn’t so sure about that. There were times when falling apart described her interior landscape pretty well. Dr. Southern only had her words to go by. He didn’t know what it felt like to live in a world where all the objects that surrounded you might start spinning like the reels of a slot machine and come up different. Cherries into oranges. Red quilt into gray. A flute player into a fan lady.
Dr. Southern held up a second finger. “Option two is that the trauma just exacerbated a problem that was already there. That you’ve got what we call an endogenous syndrome. But in that case it ought to be possible to find a drug and a dosage that would switch off your symptoms once and for all. They shouldn’t come and go in the way they do. We ought to be able to do better than a standoff.”
He stopped talking and just looked at Fran, as though it was her turn to speak. As though he was expecting her to have an answer.
She threw the question back at him instead. “So which is it?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” Southern said. “I really don’t. That’s why I’m not happy just loading you up with some more meds and saying goodnight and good luck. Frankie, these drugs have serious side effects. You don’t seem to be getting the weight gain, but even without that there are plenty of things to worry about. Headaches. Nausea. Loss of balance. You know, it’s even possible that the drug is causing your anxiety and your nightmares. We could be making the situation worse by treating it.”
“But it’s my choice,” Fran said.
This was the ace of trumps, and she played it with a flourish. Dr. Southern had told her once that he would let her make her own decisions when it came to treatment—that he would lay out the choices but not make them for her. If that meant anything, it meant she walked away today with a prescription rather than a sermon.
Dr. Southern looked unhappy. “Absolutely,” he said. “If that’s what you want, I’ll write you up and send you on your way.”
“That is what I want,” Fran confirmed. It was obvious he wasn’t even halfway done, but if she heard him out it would be a lot harder to stick to her guns. “Please, Dr. Southern.”
There was a long moment when he just looked at her. Lady Jinx came up behind him. Oathkeeper rested on her shoulder, newly whetted, as she held it in a firm, two-handed grip. Even though Dr. Southern was sitting down, she didn’t quite come up to his shoulder. She measured the angles with a speculative eye.
“Okay,” Dr. Southern said at last. “You got it, Frankie.”
Lady J relaxed her stance and sheathed her sword.
The doctor took his prescription pad out of the desk drawer. He closed the drawer again right after, but while it was open Fran saw the name of his next client written on the cover of a manila file, identical to her own, that was sitting on top of a short stack.
ELIZABETH FAY KENDALL
Zac Kendall’s two-in-one mom.
The doctor wrote out the prescription. He folded it in half, and Fran held out her hand to take it. She felt a little ashamed of how she had beaten him down even though she hadn’t really had any choice.
“Do one thing for me,” Southern said.
“Okay,” Fran agreed. “What?”
“Don’t up your dose just yet.”
She did look at him then. It was a low blow. “What’s the point in giving me the meds if I’m not allowed to use them?”
“Use them if you need to is all I’m saying. Stick to your current dose unless you have another episode. I think we should have a follow-up meeting in a week or two to see where we’re at. If the weird stuff starts up again before that, and if you feel like you can’t cope, then you go ahead and up your dosage. But to my mind that would be a backward step when we ought to be trying to walk forward. I’d much rather we came up with a different approach.”
“There isn’t anything.”
“Maybe there is and we just haven’t thought of it yet.” He sighed heavily. “Frankie, I’m not trying to make things any harder for you. Swear to God. It’s my job to make you better. It would be easier to dose you up to your eyeballs, believe me. It would be easier to say risperidone isn’t working so let’s try a different pill. A stronger one. You’re old enough now that nobody would raise an eyebrow at that. But I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do. And I don’t like the idea of you coming to depend on the pills any more than you do already.”