Free to Fall

12

I TOOK A LONG SIP OF THE COFFEE I’d smuggled into the stacks, lukewarm now. You could bring drinks into the library’s main study lounge, but I wanted to be alone today, so I was at a desk in the stacks, eating cereal from a plastic Baggie, drinking weak dining hall coffee, and blinking back tears.

I tried again to focus on my screen, my eyes burning with fatigue. I’d fallen asleep quickly the night before after practically running back to my room, but I’d woken up again when Hershey crept in just after midnight and was still awake when everyone else began trickling back to the dorms a little before one. After that, sleep eluded me. I stared at the ceiling as the hours dragged by until finally, at six, I got up and went here. Except for a quick dining hall run when it opened at eight, I’d been in this chair all day, trying to work on my cog psych paper but mostly thinking about North. I felt like such an idiot. We’d hung out twice, both times alone, and both times he’d kept it completely platonic. I couldn’t even be mad at him. He couldn’t have made it clearer if he’d tried.

Ding! A pop-up box appeared on my screen: You will be logged out due to inactivity in sixty seconds.

I sighed and tapped CONTINUE. How long had I been staring at these same search results? I was clicking through health files of patients with akratic paracusia, looking for subtle connections between them, but all I was finding were not-so-subtle ones. It was the same story over and over. Previously sane person starts hearing a voice in her head. Person starts adhering to the voice’s commands. Person engages in increasingly irrational, self-sacrificing behavior. Suddenly she’s quitting her job or giving all her money away or inviting ex-cons to dinner. Family members freak and intervene. Person resists medication. Person’s life falls apart.

After that, one of two things always happened. Either the person was forced into treatment by a concerned family member or simply fell off the grid. It wasn’t clear where people in this second category went, but the entries in their medical files just stopped. No annual physicals, no checkups, no routine immunizations. They’re unemployable without these things, so it’s not as if they’re off leading normal, productive lives. I couldn’t help but think of the photographs Beck took that day in Tent City, images of men with wild eyes and women with vacant ones. Had they heard the Doubt? Had it led them over the edge?

My handheld buzzed with a text.

@HersheyClements: where r u? im starving. meet at the dh?

I fired back a reply without thinking: already ate. studying.

I wasn’t angry with Hershey. I didn’t have a right to be. She didn’t know that North and I had hung out. But I couldn’t act as if nothing had happened, either. So I was avoiding her, at least for now.

My handheld buzzed again.

@NathanKrinsky: Come by the café. Pls. There’s something u need to c.

The profile pic belonged to another one of North’s coworkers, a guy I’d seen mopping the floors.

My chest fluttered and I hated myself for it. No, I would not come by the café. Not today, not ever. I started to punch out a reply but thought better of it. Instead I blocked @NathanKrinsky and buried my handheld in my bag.

Unfortunately, there was no block function in my brain. I couldn’t stop myself from replaying those horrific, mortifying moments in my head, the look on North’s face when he saw me, and worse, the sight of Hershey’s dress on his couch when he bent down to get that package at his door. It struck me now that he’d seemed, at least for a second, more concerned about the package than he had about my presence. Why?

I pictured the brown parcel in my head. Addressed to Norvin Pascal at North’s address. Was Norvin his real name?

When I searched the name on Forum, only one page popped up. My breath snagged in my throat when I saw the profile pic. Even without enlarging it, I knew it was of North.

In disbelief, I scrolled through his profile. All that stuff about Forum being an “invisible cage”? It was bullshit. He was on all the time. And his status updates were gross.

@NorvinPascal: When people say they’re having a good hair day, all I can think is “Sometimes you have bad hair days??” And I wonder what that’s like. #rockthehawk #blessed

I almost barfed on my screen.

With another annoying ding, the DPH pop-up box reappeared, blocking my view of North’s page and snapping me out of my stupor. I had work to do. It mattered. This other crap didn’t.

I tapped my screen to stay logged in then scrolled back up to the top of my list to remind myself what I was looking at. I’d decided to explore environmental triggers of APD first, so I’d narrowed my results to females in the Pacific Northwest. Next I’d sort by age. As I was tapping the “18–24” button, I accidentally hit the “Sort by Date” tab. The results automatically resorted by death date, putting the oldest files on top. I scrolled down, skimming stats, debating whether to open some of these older cases or go back to the newer ones, when one file in particular caught my eye.

Birth Date: April 13, 1995.

Gender: Female

Date of Death: March 21, 2014

It was the birth date that got my attention first. My mom’s birthday. My dad and I celebrated it every year with cake and ice cream at the diner in Belltown where he took her on their first date. But it was the death date that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle. It was a day we also commemorated with cake. My birthday.

Heart pounding, I clicked the link for the full file. The words on the screen ran together as I sped to the bottom of the page. The last entry was dated March 21, 2014. I clicked on it and audibly gasped. It was stamped with the logo of the University of Washington Medical Center, the hospital where I was born. As I scrolled down, my eyes grabbed ahold of words and phrases as my brain struggled to make sense of them.

Patient presented with severe labor pains after twenty-two hours of active labor at home. Ultrasound consistent with fetal post-maturity syndrome and acute oligohydramnios. Patient underwent an emergency cesarean section and delivered a 3.2 kg female. Immediately following the procedure, patient began exhibiting signs of respiratory distress and lost consciousness. CT scan revealed large thromboembolism in right lung. Patient was pronounced dead at 16:05. Cause of death: pulmonary thromboembolism.

My thoughts stalled as I read and reread the words pulmonary thromboembolism, over and over. This was my mom’s medical file. It had to be. The birthday, the death date, the baby delivered by cesarean section at UW hospital, the particular cause of death. All of it lined up. But this patient had APD.

My brain, normally so practical, refused to accept the evidence in front of it. There must’ve been some other eighteen-year-old girl who delivered a baby by emergency C-section at UW hospital on my birthday and then died from a blood clot. Or maybe my mom’s file had just been miscoded with the APD diagnosis and showed up in my search results by mistake.

Or my mom was crazy.

All my fears about my own sanity swelled to the surface. I knew from my research that if my mom had APD, then my own risk for developing the disorder was three times the average. Suddenly I saw all my uncertainty about the Doubt in a new light. It wasn’t healthy skepticism. It was neurosis. People with APD didn’t think they were sick.

My pulse was drumming in my ears as I scrolled back up to the top of my mom’s file and clicked on the first entry. Forcing myself to read slowly, I moved through the file methodically, starting with the entry from her birth in 1995, going over yearly checkups and sick visits, a broken ankle at age seven, stitches for a busted elbow at nine, an appendectomy at fourteen. Normal kid stuff. No mention of voices or mental illness or any psychological issues at all. I felt myself begin to relax. Maybe her file had been miscoded, like I’d thought. Maybe she didn’t have APD after all.

I was midway through an entry dated April 2013 when I saw the words that removed any doubt whose file it was. Theden Health Center. The paragraphs that followed were a depressing description of a very disturbed young woman who was on the brink of failing out of school. It was a psych eval, signed by a Dr. K. Hildebrand, and at the bottom was a tentative diagnosis: Behavior symptomatic of acute akratic paracusia and personality disorder. The next entry, signed by the same doctor, was dated two weeks later and summarized test results from more than a dozen neurological and psychiatric exams, confirming the doctor’s initial diagnosis. At the bottom was the doctor’s prognosis: Non-curative. Institutionalization recommended.

The next entry was a link to a “Notice of Expulsion” dated May 1, 2013. Student no longer meets the psychological requirements for enrollment. The document was signed by Dr. Hildebrand and Dean Atwater.

My mom didn’t drop out of Theden. They’d kicked her out.

Reeling, I went back to the very last entry in my mom’s file, the report from the day she died, and read it more closely. I didn’t know many of the medical terms I saw, but I could piece together what had happened based on what I already knew from my dad. My mom went into labor nearly three weeks early, and there were complications. They needed to do a C-section. A blood clot had formed in her leg, traveled to her lungs, and she was dead.

Before the pop-box reappeared again, I slid my finger to the top of my tablet and pressed the PRINT SCREEN button, saving the image of that final entry to my photobox, then I clicked over to look at it there. Then my eyes lost focus as I stared, unblinking, at my screen. Minutes, maybe an hour, passed as I sat there, not moving, not really thinking, just staring. When the pop-box reappeared again, I let the system log me out.