Carry the Ocean: The Roosevelt, Book 1 (11 page)

“I don’t think you’re the R word,” Jeremey said.

Dr. North winked at me. “Talk about both things. Explain why you flap your hands and how it makes you feel when people misunderstand.”

This is what I like about Dr. North. He’s good at asking questions.

I thought about it for a moment, then explained as best I could. “Hand-flapping feels good. Sometimes I flap when I’m excited, but sometimes because I’m nervous. It’s different for each feeling. Excited flaps let off energy. I have so much inside me I have to let it out. But if I’m nervous, it draws in energy. In my head it feels as if I’m making a wall. The happy-flapping takes down the wall, giving my energy to other people.” The idea of sharing my happiness with people that way made me feel good, and in my head I could see it, bright blue-white light going from my hands to other people. But then I remembered how most people reacted to my flapping, and the happy feeling ended. “People make bad faces at me and stop talking to me. Or they talk to me like I’m a baby instead of a person.”

Dr. North was in his listening position, sitting straight but not too straight, with his hands resting on his legs. “How does it make you feel when people react badly to your hand-flapping?”

“Sad, and sometimes angry.”

“Can you elaborate? What does the sadness and anger feel like inside?”

I considered Dr. North’s question. “Gray-blue.”

“Thank you, Emmet.” Dr. North smiled at me before turning to Jeremey. “Jeremey, I have a few questions for you. One, do you mind when Emmet flaps his hands?”

I was so nervous waiting for the answer, I had to hum.

“No.” Jeremey didn’t hesitate at all. “I don’t mind when he hums or rocks or flaps his hands, though I’ve never seen him flap his hands much, really. I know that’s how Emmet is.”

“Maybe that can be something to work toward, Emmet, letting Jeremey in far enough for you to flap in his presence. Now I have a second question for you, Jeremey. How did it make you feel to hear Emmet speak so easily about his feelings?”

Jeremey sighed. “Jealous.”

I sat up, frowning. “But why would you be jealous of that?”

“It’s so difficult for me to say what I’m feeling. You said it as if it’s no big deal.”

I wasn’t sure what to say, but Dr. North asked me a question. “Jeremey says it’s challenging for him to express his feelings. He has a difficult time identifying what those feelings are. This is part of his depression. Acknowledging feelings seems dangerous to his mind, so he has to practice. What’s something challenging for you to do, Emmet? What do you have to practice because of your autism?”

This was an easy question. “Faces. Faces are impossible.”

“Talk more about that. Explain why they’re difficult, so Jeremey can understand.”

“I can’t read faces the way people without autism can. I can’t see a face and know if someone is happy or sad. Which is bad because people assume I can, and they get angry when I don’t notice how they feel.”

“Do you care how other people feel?”

“Yes. But I don’t always remember to check for it. Sometimes I’m busy worrying about my own feelings and I forget.”

“Talk about how you check for other people’s emotions. I think Jeremey might find it illuminating.”

He did? I glanced at Jeremey but couldn’t meet his gaze, so I stared at the arm of the couch. “I have charts. I look at the charts to learn what each emotion is like on a face. Sometimes Althea practices with me. I know a lot of emotions now because I’ve memorized them, but it’s always good to have a refresher.”

I glanced at their faces now—Dr. North wore his listening face, but Jeremey was too complex to read. I was starting to call the face he made the depression face, and I didn’t care for it.

“I don’t think they make practice charts for figuring out what emotions you have,” Jeremey said.

Dr. North didn’t say anything, so I did. “Why not? They would be the same. You could use my charts. You could have a mirror and look at your face.”

“It doesn’t always show on my face, how I feel.”

The idea was alarming. How could I read what Jeremey felt like if it didn’t show on his face? “Is this part of depression? Does it keep the emotion from showing?”

Jeremey’s face became annoyed. Almost angry. He turned to Dr. North. “I don’t want to practice identifying my emotions. I want to go home. I want to be normal. I want to go to college. I want to have a job and a house and a car.”

Dr. North calmed him down, telling Jeremey what he’d told me, about how there is no normal, about how modifications help us integrate with society. I listened, but I thought about what Jeremey had said too. About the things he wanted.

Independence, that’s what he was talking about. I had some—I was in college, and I could get a job when I was done, but no one talked about me moving into an apartment, and obviously I wasn’t getting a car. Mom had said she was looking for somewhere for Jeremey and me to live together, but she hadn’t mentioned anything about it for a while now.

Maybe there was no normal. But there were a lot of things most people could do which everyone assumed I couldn’t. Jeremey too.

At the end of every therapy session, Dr. North has us set goals. I gave one, but it wasn’t my real goal. Because as of that session, I had a new one. A secret one, one I wanted very much to make real.

I wanted to be independent. Maybe I couldn’t be normal, but I could be like everybody else. Maybe not all the way. But my goal, my wish for myself, was to see how far toward everybody else I could get.

What I didn’t know, though, was how close that kind of independence was for me—and for Jeremey too.

Chapter Twelve

J
eremey

S
ometimes it bothered me they could keep me at the hospital for as long as they wanted. Technically I agreed with Dr. North that I should stay, but it still scared me that my freedom rested in the hands of another person. Even if the person was Dr. North.

Worse, I was stuck in the psych ward until I could learn how to manage my emotions better, and right now I couldn’t be counted on to report what I was feeling. Not that Dr. North didn’t try to teach me. Every day in therapy he asked, “What are you feeling right now? This very second?”

Finally one day I gave up and said what I always thought. “Stupid.” I tugged at a thread until it came loose. “Ashamed. Sorry. Embarrassed.”

I thought he’d scold me for saying
stupid
, but he smiled. “That’s good, Jeremey, how you can identify those negative feelings so easily. Do you feel any other emotions? Any positive ones? You mentioned gratitude in an earlier session. Is it still present?”

I considered his question. Answering quickly, I would have said I only felt negative, but it was like someone pointing out an image in one of those Magic Eye paintings. Suddenly there was more. “I’m grateful, yes. To you. To Emmet. I feel stupid that I’m here, that I can’t manage myself, but I’m grateful to Emmet for stopping me and to you for helping me. I’m glad his mom is helping my mom.”

I stopped talking. All I could think about was how my mom was always upset every time I saw her.

Dr. North didn’t miss a trick. “What are you thinking about, Jeremey? What else are you feeling?”

I fidgeted in my chair. “I’m anxious about my mom.” I took a deep breath before saying the next part. We’d talked about it a lot, but it scared me every time. “I’m nervous about going home.”

“You’re doing an excellent job, sitting with your feelings. It’s perfectly fine to feel nervous. Can you talk about why? No judgments on you or your mom. Let’s outline what you’re feeling.”

I stared at the tile on the floor in front of me. “She wants me to be someone I’m not. I feel as if I’m starting to accept that I’m different from other people. I worry she’ll drag me back into bad feelings.”

“Are you ready yet to have a group session with her?”

He asked this every day, and every day I said no. Today was no different. I shook my head. “Yesterday she started complaining about Emmet again. She said she’d help me find a normal boyfriend if I wanted one so badly.”

“How did you feel when she said that?”

“Angry. Upset. Hurt.” The emotions flowed so easily inside me, it almost alarmed me. Once I lifted the lid, it wasn’t a soup of feelings. It was a raging sea. “I love being with Emmet. He’s the best part of my day. But she makes me feel guilty, like maybe I shouldn’t call him my boyfriend. That we shouldn’t be boyfriends.”

“Is there some reason you and Emmet shouldn’t be romantically involved?”

I snorted. “My mom has plenty of reasons. She calls Emmet retarded. It makes me so angry, and it hurts. Which is dumb, because she’s insulting him, not me.”

“You strike me as a young man who feels deeply. I’m not surprised a slight against your boyfriend wounds you.” Dr. North leaned forward. “I notice you’ve referred to yourself in a derogatory way several times now. And in none of those instances would I have agreed with your self-assessment even on a minor level. Is this common for you, to see yourself as deeply flawed?”

Was it common? It was how I lived and breathed. I glanced at him sideways, sensing a trap. “Yes,” I said nervously.

“Do you think about killing yourself when you feel this way?”

This
had to be a trap. I clutched at the bedding, trying to wait him out, but it was clear this man had limitless patience. He asked this sometimes, but he hadn’t in a week. “What…what happens if I say yes? If I fail the test?”

“Am I giving you tests?”

They always answered questions with questions. “Yes. You’re trying to decide how crazy I am.”

Instead of telling me he wasn’t, he withdrew a small tablet from his jacket pocket, poking at the screen a few moments before presenting it to Jeremey. The tablet showed a 3-D drawing of a human brain. “This is a picture of a healthy human brain in a normal state.” He flipped to another picture, which was 2-D and top down. “This is a brain under normal activity. All the blobs of yellow you see indicate brain activity.” He flipped the screen again. The brain looked similar, but had fewer blobs. Less than half as the other one.

“This is a depressed brain, isn’t it?”

He nodded and flipped to another screen, this one showing whole bodies. “These are thermal images of humans experiencing different emotions. Notice how anxiety heats in the chest but leaves the other parts cold. Notice how love heats everything.”

I couldn’t look away from the depressed human, who was totally blue, cold as ice. It made me feel sad. Without thinking, I touched the screen.

Dr. North didn’t pull the tablet away. “Depression is a serious mental illness. We don’t understand it as much as we’d like, but what we do know is a person suffering from depression cannot make the same decisions and shepherd their emotions the same way brains that are not depressed can. Our brains are not who we are, but they must be dealt with, like it or not.”

“But how do I deal with it?” I’d been trying to be normal for years, but nothing worked.

“The drugs you’re taking might help. But so will active therapy. Most of the help, though, will come directly from you. Like Emmet, you’ll have to work harder to adapt. But you
can
adapt. I’m not attempting to commit you. I want to understand the background of your decision to attempt to end your life. I’m asking you to try to determine if this was a singular event based on heightened emotions and a rare feeling of despair or if you often experience this level of dangerous depression.”

I let out a shaking breath. “But we’re having a tough time finding the right drugs.” One had given me weird electrical shocks in my brain, and the next made me cry all the time. The one I was on now was better, but I worried it wouldn’t be right and I’d have to start all over again.

“SSRIs and SNRIs, since they are powerful drugs working on a fragile organ, must be treated with care. Which is what we’re doing right now. Part of checking to see if the drugs are working are your answers to my questions.”

I drew in a long, slow breath. “I think about killing myself all the time. Less since I’ve been here, but it’s almost a bad habit. Sometimes it’s because I’m upset. Sometimes it’s just there, like an option. I try not to think about it, but it’s not easy. It makes me feel safe, to know where the door is. Except that’s crazy.”

He held up a hand. “I would prefer you refrain from using both that word and the word stupid.”

“I am, though. Aren’t I? Crazy. I’m mentally ill.”

“Mental illness is no different than a heart condition. In the same way a faulty valve can cause harm to the body and require medication and care, so does a malfunctioning brain. Insanity is a crude, culturally loaded term setting the sufferer apart in a way which will not aid the patient’s recovery. The way we regard those whose brains hinder them with fault or injury is a prejudice, not a diagnosis.”

Where was this guy when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen? All I remembered from back then was my parents yelling. Maybe I should have attempted suicide long ago. Except, of course, what if I’d succeeded?

“So what happens when we find the right drugs? Will I not be depressed anymore?”

“Unfortunately, no medicine exists which can permanently or fully stop the thoughts and feelings depression and anxiety cause. We don’t understand enough yet what is going on, which makes the conditions difficult to treat. The best analogy I can give you for what SNRIs and SSRIs do is to say they’re a crutch, or a set of leg braces. You still need to walk and fight the limitations your brain gives you. But the medications, when carefully selected and administered, can become something to lean on and keep you from falling down so often.”

The mental picture was clear. “But I wouldn’t ever run a marathon, and I’d walk a little jerky?”

“You would walk, more regularly then you possibly ever have, and on good days you might even run a little ways. But no. With the levels of depression you’re describing, you will likely struggle with the tide of your emotions every day of your life. With proper care and assistance, this life can be a long and happy one.”

I asked the question that in its way was more frightening than being committed, because in a way the questions felt linked. “What if my parents won’t let me take the drugs? What if I go home and my mom says I have to quit them?”

Dr. North’s smile glinted. “Your parents do not make this decision. Your health care is private business between the two of us.”

Hope fluttered in my chest. How was that possible? “I want to take the drugs. I want to try to be normal.”

He raised a finger at me. “That’s another word I want you to eradicate from your vocabulary. There is no normal. There is not an invisible bar you must meet to be acceptable to society.”

Yes there was. “I don’t want to be the moody guy who cries all the time and has panic attacks if the grocery store is loud.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being that guy. There’s nothing wrong with learning to manage yourself so you may react differently to stimuli, to control your environment, but being that man is being yourself. You are the young man your parents are eager to protect, the one Emmet is so fond of. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how difficult it is to impress him.”

I appreciated what he said, but I felt he was deliberately misunderstanding me. “Dr. North, I want to go on dates and go to school and go shopping and…everything. I don’t want to live with my parents. I want to be the same as everyone else who graduates high school. I don’t want to feel this way.”

“You
can
go on dates and go to school and go shopping, and everything. But you must do it as Jeremey Samson. You can no more erase your anxiety and intense emotional responses than I can become a sixty-year-old professional basketball player. What you
can
do is learn to manage your emotions. To learn how to tell yourself your feelings are not facts. That they seem real,
are
real, but that does not make them laws and truths.”

I had felt so hopeful, and now I felt such despair. “So you’re saying I have to be a loser for the rest of my life? The guy everyone laughs at? The guy no one wants to be friends with? The kid his parents wish hadn’t been born?”

“I have said none of those things. What I am saying is you can be yourself. Your best self. And your first step toward it is accepting and loving who you are.”

“Then I’ll need to have Emmet around all the time. He’s the only one who makes me feel okay.”

“When managing depression and anxiety, you must do the work, and you must do it yourself. It’s perfectly fine to feel stronger or better with Emmet or any friend or loved one. But you must never let them be the
only
way you’re stable. People are good medicine, but they can’t be your foundation of functionality. You must build that yourself.”

Tears welled up so fast I could barely hold them back. “But I can’t. You don’t understand how impossible it is for me.”

“This will be a challenge, yes. But you’ll get there, and I will help you. I promise.”

I didn’t see how he could make that promise, but I didn’t argue, because I wanted to hope.

T
he most difficult part about being in the hospital wasn’t the meds, or the loss of freedom, or the scariness of what would happen when I got out. It was my mom.

She came every day, though honestly I wished she wouldn’t. I don’t mean to say unkind things about her or make her sound like a bad person. She loves me, and I know this. But sometimes I think she loves the boy she wishes I were a little more than she does the one she actually has.

Mom always wants to fuss, but in the hospital she was unbearable. She took issue with the light in my room, saying there wasn’t enough. She didn’t like the bare walls. That I never got to go outside made her crazy—she lectured Dr. North and the nurses about fresh air. She criticized the food—and honestly, this I was down with. I didn’t tell her Althea brought me in amazing vegan dishes. She made me eat a lot of kale, which was only okay, but she also gave me these fruit salads with cashew cream and sometimes, if I’d been good, vegan and gluten-free cupcakes from the co-op, the same ones Carol had given us the day I’d had a panic attack outside of Wheatsfield. They were sweetened with maple syrup and were so good I thought I might die.

I never made the joke out loud, though. I figured I’d kind of used everything up on that subject for a while.

Mom wouldn’t have understood about Althea’s food, because basically the food I should be eating was the food she made at home. I should
be
at home.

“When will they let you out?” That was always her first question when she came to visit. Not
how are you doing?
She made no remark about how I was looking so much healthier and happier. She always seemed sad, as if she were about to cry. She’d cover her mouth with her hand, or press her lips flat and shake her head, and ask me when I’d be able to go home. Go back to normal.

I didn’t know how to tell her she was the reason I
wasn’t
going home. I’d admitted to Dr. North the greatest threat to my mental health was her attempts to nag me out of my funks. He agreed with me. But this was my stumbling block: how to tell her. And, honestly, what to do instead of going home.

As my tension over my inability to confront her grew, Emmet noticed. Of course,
he
had no problem asking me what was wrong.

“Is it your meds?” He looked over my head as he sat beside me on the couch. “Are you dizzy?”

“No. My meds are good. I feel a little foggy, but calmer. The world isn’t as sharp-edged.” I rubbed the butt of my palm nervously against my jeans. “The problem is my mom. I need to tell her she’s too intense, that she’s part of the problem. But I’m nervous. I don’t think it’s going to go well. And until I confront her, I can’t go home.”