I’m not sure where he went right after he left. If Mom knew, she never said. And I didn’t ask.
A few years after he left, I got a letter from him. I was eleven and I used to grab the mail before my mom got home. The return address was somewhere in Barstow, California. I tore it up after I read it, but I remember what it said.
Dear Adam,
I’ve started this letter to you so many times and haven’t had the strength to send it. Your mom was always the good one. The one who knows what to do in any situation. She makes problems disappear like magic. That’s who she is and that’s why I fell in love with her.
But me, I’m the problem and I couldn’t keep breaking her heart while she waited for me to be the man she needed.
As for you, I think you’re better off without me. And I want you to have the best chance for success. I owe you that at least.
Dad
Not “Love, Dad.”
I didn’t write back or tell my mom about the letter he didn’t have the “strength” to send for three years. How much strength does writing a goddamned letter take, anyway? And it was 106 words. I counted. That really wore you out, didn’t it, Dad?
At least he was honest. He knew he was a coward. He knew my mom deserved better.
But the truth was that he didn’t really love us. When you love somebody, you try to be better.
So I don’t miss him.
DOSAGE: 1.5 mg. Increase in dosage appears to be showing positive results. Subject notes an increase in the appearance of hallucinations, but reaction to hallucinations remains minimal. Excellent progress.
SEPTEMBER 19, 2012
This relationship is weird because you already know that my doctors increased my ToZaPrex dosage. You already know that there are side effects, and because you are a Harvard-educated psychologist, you know what those side effects are.
But I’m in a good mood and the drug is working well, so I’ll tell you about “my experience” with the increase.
The headaches come and go. Mostly when I’m in crowded places where there is a lot of movement. And there’s some sensitivity to light. And increased hallucinations.
Rest assured, I’m very aware of what is real and what is not. I don’t have those moments of panic I used to, like when I wasn’t sure if my bed was actually on fire. But I see stuff I shouldn’t everywhere. There’s the man in the suit with the big metal briefcase that always spills open, flinging money everywhere. And the woman with the huge dog dragging her across the lawn. Then there’s the weird shadowy guy who hangs out at the edge of my line of sight, always dashing into an alleyway. The mobsters. Rebecca. A few others I only see once in a while.
With a last name like Petrazelli, I guess it makes sense to you that I would see mobsters. They are practically required images for all Italian male schizophrenics, right? I’m not sure if my mobster hallucinations are due to my heritage or to the fact that my mom was obsessed with the Godfather movies.
Don’t tell her that. I’d hate for her to blame herself for any of my crazy.
But yeah, I guess the hallucinations are all symbolic of something. The mobsters, for example, can’t be reasoned with. The henchmen carry out the orders of a shadowy don who never has to get his hands dirty. My neighborhood is as far away from the Italian Mafia as the moon, yet when I see them, they don’t feel foreign. They feel like they fit in. They’re like the weasels in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, annoying little henchmen who say things like “yeah, boss” in a loud, nasally voice.
Every now and then, I’ll get a different hallucination, something that I haven’t seen before, and that’s when I have to be careful, because there’s a small chance that they are not a hallucination at all—just a new person I’ve never seen before. So I wait for the signs. The strange eye color. The weird voice. The fact that no one else can see them when they do something odd. That’s actually the only reason I knew that the old lady in the tracksuit running down our street was a hallucination. She did backflips in our driveway. The couple pushing their stroller across the street didn’t even look up, and I’m almost positive they were real.
—
I’m not sure if this is a side effect of the drug, so I’ll tell you what happened, and you can tell me.
St. Agatha’s has a pool. Boys and girls aren’t allowed to use it at the same time because swimsuits are provocative and inspire horny teenagers to have impure thoughts. I’d like to tell them that these thoughts would exist regardless of the swimsuits, but whatever. This week we were split into groups and told to swim laps.
I didn’t think it was possible to hate anything more than running, but I will say this: I actually am a lot more motivated to keep swimming since the alternative is drowning at the bottom of a pool that everybody probably pees in.
I popped my head out of the water just long enough to see Ian swimming a few lanes over from me. I hate to admit it, but he is an excellent swimmer. He finished his laps before anyone else and spent the rest of the class sitting on the edge of the pool, watching everyone with a superior look on his face. He wrinkled his nose in Dwight’s direction, emphasizing his usual arrogant glance. Granted, Dwight was swimming as awkwardly as humanly possible and was the only one in the water wearing nose plugs and bright blue goggles. But I bet Ian would have looked at him like that anyway.
So here’s the part I need your help with. I get that my hallucinations aren’t the most trustworthy people, but sometimes I feel like they’re trying to tell me something I can’t see on my own. Does that even make sense?
I was the last one in the locker room, and I’d just finished getting dressed when I heard a splash. Rebecca, who had been sitting cross-legged on a bench waiting for me to leave, bolted out of the room. I don’t mean that she was running in a circle or darting between lockers toward the door. She actually took off sprinting toward the pool, and since this had never happened before, I followed her.
The pool was empty except for one thrashing body tangled in the floating swimming lanes. I didn’t have my specs on, but whoever it was, they clearly couldn’t swim. So I jumped in. I figured if it turned out that this wasn’t real, the worst that could happen was I got wet.
Trying to save someone from drowning is not as glamorous as it sounds. Once I’d gotten close enough to actually help them, I was rewarded with a swift kick in the face by someone desperately struggling to stay afloat.
“Stop moving!” I yelled.
“Why? So I can drown faster?” It was Maya.
“No,” I panted, tasting the blood that was now dripping from my nose. “So I can grab you and pull you to the side.”
She was hesitant to leave the safety of the swim lanes, but eventually I managed to pull her off and swim us both to the ladder on the edge of the pool. She climbed out and threw up over the drain.
“You can’t swim?” I asked, taking deep breaths. She glared at me for stating the obvious. “Okay,” I said. “Any reason you were in here to begin with?”
She pointed at the stack of clipboards near the door. “Coach Russert asked me to come get them since I’d be passing the athletics office on my way to English,” she said.