Chapter 45 Monk
FORTY-FIVE
Monk
“You what?”
I can’t wrap my mind around what Verity said. It’s like she’s speaking another language it’s such a foreign concept.
“I have bipolar disorder.” She stares at me unblinking, but also like she’s braced for something. I’m not sure what.
I cross the room and take a seat beside her on the couch. “Are you saying you have a formal diagnosis, or are you like colloquially bipolar? The way people throw around ‘I’m so ADHD,’ but they’re just kind of scatterbrained.”
“Oh, it’s definitely a formal diagnosis.” Her smile is a shadow of its usual self. “Bipolar 1.”
A dozen questions queue up in my head, and I’m not sure where to start asking.
“When were you diagnosed?” I settle on.
“Um, I was twenty-one.” She plucks at the dangling threads of the torn knee in her jeans. “Right after I left Finley. But it started in Cali.” She grimaces. “Earlier than that actually. It started with my parents.”
“Meaning what? You said they had a volatile relationship that ended badly.”
“My father and mother were very much in love.” She blinks and pulls in a sharp breath.
“But Daddy had these… moods. We didn’t know what else to call them where he would act strangely.
Way down one day and way up, like on top of the world for no reason, the next.
We didn’t know exactly what was wrong. We never will.
He was never diagnosed. Never took meds.
Never spoke to a therapist. Like so many then—hell, like so many still—he just coped. ”
“You told me they died together in the fire?”
“Not technically.” She stares at her hands in her lap for several seconds before going on. “He and Mama were arguing. He was paranoid. Hearing voices. He pushed her and she fell and hit her head.”
“You were there?”
“Yeah. I ran to get help, and when I came back, the house was on fire, and he was outside with Mama lying on the ground.” A tear glides over her cheek, and she swipes at it impatiently. “When he realized Mama wasn’t going to make it, he ran back into the fire.”
“Jesus, Vee.” The pain is so obvious all over her face, and even though we’re on the couch together, she’s too far away. I move over until I can take her hand. “That’s fucking traumatic.”
She chokes out a laugh. “Understatement. The aunties were there for me, though. They took me in. At least I had that.”
“Walk me through this. All of it. What happened in Cali?”
“I was severely depressed.” Her eyes—haunted, unfocused—are fixed on the rug.
“I wasn’t getting out of bed, skipping class, extreme sadness.
When I started having really dark thoughts, it scared me and I called my aunts.
I ended up withdrawing from school and taking some time at home.
The doctor started me on an antidepressant, but what we didn’t know—couldn’t have known—was that it was the beginning of a cycle.
We treated the depression. I had a period of stability, but nothing addressed the mania, so when it came on, I spiraled. ”
“Do they know what triggers something like that? If it’s anything?”
“A lot of people have their first episode when they’re college age. Different things can trigger it. Stress. Lack of sleep is a huge one. Remember that big project I was working on?”
“And you weren’t sleeping much.”
“Right, not sleeping, but also never tired. Like a bottomless well of energy. And feeling confident in a way that I never had before. That’s hypomania.
All the energy without the bad stuff. That sweet spot when everything is clicking and the world is your oyster. Everything is perfect, until it’s not.”
“What happened?”
“I just remember feeling this sense of euphoria, like I could do anything. I wrote the script that won my fellowship when I was manic. I wrote my Golden Globe script when I was manic. I felt like the brightest, most unstoppable, most creative version of myself. That’s hard to give up, and it can be tempting to skip the meds.
Just let that wave take you for a while because you think you know where that line is.
Once the mania really kicks in, though, it’s so much harder to find that line, much less know when you’ve crossed it. ”
“What does it look like? Mania, I mean.”
“Forced speech, which I definitely experienced.”
“Is that the talking fast thing?” I ask, and she shoots me a surprised look. “I remember you doing that a few times, and I just thought you were… I don’t know, excited about the thing you were working on.”
“You might get really agitated, restless, angry sometimes, racing thoughts.” She pauses and bites her bottom lip. “May have a heightened sexual appetite or behave in ways that are… out of character.”
I’m quiet, but her admission rattles something in me.
That night was one of the most painful of my life.
It was college and we were young, yeah, but it was the end of, up to that point, the most important relationship I’d ever been in.
I haven’t been hurt that way since, but I also haven’t loved that way again.
“I didn’t know what was happening,” she says, her voice shrinking.
“I didn’t understand that I was acting different.
I just knew I felt different, more confident, and it felt better.
I felt invincible and alive. Like my skin was on fire.
Funny enough, that is sometimes how I know a manic cycle is approaching.
When I feel that heat, that buzz, it signals me to call my psychiatrist so we can try to head it off. ”
“When you disappeared,” I say, “it wasn’t about not being able to pay your tuition, was it?”
“It was some.” She groans, closing her eyes.
“I spent all the money my aunts sent for tuition. For weeks after I left school, things I’d ordered online kept arriving at the dorm.
Thank God for Dr. Garrison. She forwarded everything to me in Georgia.
Most of it was shit we couldn’t use. We sold as much as we could, but we couldn’t recoup all the money I spent. ”
“Dr. Garrison knew?” I frown. “How?”
She closes her eyes and squeezes my hand before going on. “Remember Flame? That sculpture installation in the fine arts department?”
“Chap Brody’s? Yeah, what about it?”
“I became kind of obsessed with it. I would go see it multiple times a day. I know now that was probably tangled up in my parents’ death and the fire and all of that, but that night something kept telling me that if I could just destroy it, everything would be better.
So after I left your apartment, I broke in. ”
My brain stumbles and it takes a few seconds to collate my memories from that time, to find the words.
“Wait,” I say. “I kind of remember some, like, incident. There was just talk on the yard about it for a few days, but we thought it was a prank, or… but… that was you?”
“Yeah, Dr. Garrison was great about downplaying it, keeping it as quiet as possible, but I punched through the glass with a rock.” She extends her arm and traces a network of tiny scars crisscrossing the back of her arm woven into an SOS tattoo.
I’ve noticed it before, but something always held me back from asking about it.
“The campus police came,” she says. “It was… bad.”
“The police? Did they think you were committing a crime? They didn’t know you… that you’re—”
“I didn’t even know, so they certainly didn’t. And mental illness is often criminalized.” She levels a meaningful look on me. “With Black folks, even more so. Instead of recognizing it’s unusual that a young woman is running around naked, the cops—”
“Naked?” My jaw practically unhinges.
“Yeah.” She scrunches her nose. “Did I forget to mention that part?”
I feel sick and helpless, like it’s happening right now.
“Dr. Garrison was alerted when the alarm went off,” Verity continues. “She realized pretty quickly what was going on. Not my specific diagnosis, but that it was some kind of break or episode. She made them take off the cuffs—”
“Cuffs?” Rage surges in my chest, but I have nowhere, no one, to direct it to.
“Yeah.” A smile eases some of the distress sketched into her face.
“I’ll never forget her putting a coat over me, covering me up.
Like even in the midst of all this chaos I was causing, I deserved some dignity.
She got me to the hospital, called my aunts.
They came and took me home. I ended up staying in the hospital for about a month while I stabilized and we found the right meds. ”
“So you were going through all this shit,” I finally force the words out. “And I was in my fucking apartment sulking because I saw you kissing some guy in a bar.”
“Monk, you didn’t know.”
“I should have been there for you. If I’d known…” I drop my head into my hands. “Vee, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was ashamed.” Tears wet her cheeks and her mouth trembles. “And scared that even if you could forgive me, that I might end up like him. Like my dad and we might end up like—”
“Your parents?”
“Yeah,” she says with a grim twist to her mouth. “This thing ruins marriages and credit scores and friendships. I’ve accepted this. I manage it, but it’s not easy. I’m not asking anyone else to share it.”
“You mean you’re not letting anyone else share it.”
“It’s not some privilege.”
“You are.” I brush a knuckle along the curve of her cheek. “Baby, you’re the privilege.”
“You’re romanticizing it,” she says, pulling back from my touch. “Half the men with this diagnosis attempt suicide at some point. Ninety percent of marriages end in divorce. Ninety, Monk.”
“Are you asking me to marry you?” I dip my head to try and catch her eyes, try to lighten some of the heaviness in the air. “It’s kind of sudden, but I’ll think about it.”
“Stop joking. It’s not funny.”
“It’s also not the end of the world.”