25. Jessika
TWENTY-FIVE
JESSIKA
My father tells me about Morgan's diagnosis on a Sunday.
We're sitting at the kitchen table after church, he still goes to the Lutheran church on Oak Street, one of the small routines the stroke didn't take, with coffee and the particular Sunday quiet.
"I knew something was wrong when he was twelve," my father says. "He would get, elevated. Too elevated. Happy in a way that was alarming, and then the crash was—" He stops. "I told myself it was adolescence."
“Dad. I already know, there are meds in his trailer.”
“I know you figured it out, but just let me explain.”
“Okay.”
"I told your mother before she died, I told her he was just dramatic." He looks at his hands on the table. "She knew. I think she knew. But she died before it got bad enough that we couldn't pretend."
"And then it was just you."
"And then it was just me." He breathes. "I was afraid. Of what the diagnosis would mean. How it would define him. How people would see him." He pauses. "The Hills men have always, we carry things. We don't show them. I raised your brother to be the same way, and it almost?—"
"It did a lot of damage," I say carefully.
"It did a lot of damage," he agrees. "To him. To you." He looks at me. "Because if I gotten Morgan into proper treatment at fifteen, at sixteen, if I been brave enough to?—"
"Dad." I reach across and put my hand over his. "We can't go back."
"I know." He turns his hand and holds mine.
"I just need you to know that I know. What I did.
What I chose not to see." He looks at me directly.
"You blamed Grant for Morgan. You blamed the wrong person because the story I was telling about Morgan had to be someone else's fault.
Not the illness I ignored. Not my choices. "
I squeeze his hand.
"We all got it wrong," I say.
"You had less to work with than I did," he says. "I had the full picture and I chose not to see it."
We sit for a while.
"Morgan's going to need proper care when he comes back," my father says.
"I know. I've been looking into options in Whitmore County, there’s a bipolar treatment program with good outcomes.”
"He needs to come home too," my father says. "He needs this." He makes a gesture that encompasses the kitchen, the ranch, the whole particular weight of family. "He needs family more than he needs doctors, even if he also needs doctors."
"He needs both," I say.
"Yes." He takes a breath. "Will you tell him I'm sorry?"
"You can tell him yourself," I say. "He's coming home."
My father nods. Looks at his coffee.
"Is Grant, is he going to stay?" He doesn't look up. "Around here. After all this."
I think about the drive north. About the truck and the hand over mine.
"I think so," I say carefully. "If I have anything to say about it."
My father looks up then. And he smiles, the particular smile of a man who knows h
e made things complicated and is watching them, slowly, become something better.
"Good," he says. Simply. “Good."
“Good,” I repeated.
“Go get my boy.”
“Okay dad.”
Outside, one of the horses calls from the pasture, and the ordinary morning comes back around us, and we drink our coffee and sit with the weight of what's been said and the particular mercy of being people who have survived our own failures and are still, somehow, at the table.