Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Njal
The pill organizer sits on the counter where I left it last night, thirty days of squares laid out in a plastic grid.
I open Wednesday and shake the morning dose into my palm before I've even put coffee on.
Lithium. Lamotrigine. The little white one that keeps the rest from turning my stomach.
I don't take them on an empty stomach anymore. I learned that the hard way in the facility, the first week, hunched over a toilet at six in the morning while a nurse stood in the doorway and told me it would pass.
So now I eat first. Two eggs, dry toast, whatever's in the fridge. I stand at the counter, chew, and I look at the thirty squares, and I think the same thing I think every morning.
This is the rest of my fucking life.
Not the rental. Not the small town.
The grid. The squares.
The eggs I have to eat so the medicine doesn't come back up.
There's no day coming where I get to set this down, no finish line where somebody hands me back the man I was before.
This is it now, every morning, until I'm an old man or a dead one, and most mornings I can look at that straight and not flinch.
Some mornings it sits on my chest like a boot, and I have to breathe around the weight of it before I can pick up the fork.
This is one of those mornings.
I can't remember what life was like before the diagnosis — before bipolar, before the mania that came with it.
I swallow the pills with the last of the coffee, rinse the cup, and set it in the rack, and then I lace up my shoes and go out into the heat.
The road past the rental is gravel and dirt for the first mile, then cracked asphalt the rest of the way to the county line.
I run it every morning.
Not because I love running—I don't—but because a body that's worked hard is a body that sleeps, and a brain that sleeps is a brain that stays where I put it.
The sun's barely up and it's already wet-hot, the air thick enough to chew, my shirt soaked through before I've cleared the driveway.
I run anyway.
Past the neighbor's place there's a truck in the drive, a porch with a wind chime, and a dog somewhere behind the house lets out one deep bark when I pass, like he's marking the time.
I don't slow down. I keep my eyes on the road, my breath in a rhythm, and I let the miles do what the miles do, which is empty me out until there's nothing left in my head but the slap of my shoes and the pull in my lungs.
For a mile and a half, I'm nobody.
No history. No diagnosis. No plethora of pills waiting on the counter.
Just a man moving down a road with his lungs on fire and his mind, for once, gone quiet.
I'd run twice as far for that.
But the road always ends, and the house is always there when it does—same as the pill organizer on the counter, same as the phone with its list of people I'm supposed to check in with. The quiet I run into doesn't last past the front step.
Back at the house, showered and dressed, I make the calls I'm supposed to make.
My sponsor picks up on the second ring. His name's Walter, he's sixty-one, he's been sober and stable for twenty years, and he doesn't waste my time or his.
"You eat this morning?" Walter asks.
"Two eggs."
"You take 'em?"
"Took 'em."
"You sleep?"
I turn the burner off and lean my hip against the counter. "Mostly."
"What's mostly?" A chair creaks on his end.
I look out the window over the sink, where the pines stand between my yard and the neighbor's. "Five, six hours. Woke up around four. Got back down."
"That's not bad." There's the sound of him pouring something, probably his own coffee. "How's the head?"
"Level."
"You sure?"
I scrub a thumb at a dried spot on the counter that won't come up. "I'm sure, Walter."
"All right." He lets a few seconds go by, and when he comes back his voice has dropped lower. "You did the work on a morning you didn't want to. That's the whole thing right there. The easy days don't count for much. It's the hard ones that save you."
I look at the thirty squares on the counter and I don't say anything, because there's a knot in my throat and I'm not about to let him hear it.
"Call me on Friday," he says, and hangs up, because Walter knows when a man's had all the kindness he can stand before noon.
I set the phone down and it lights up again before I've let go of it.
Bjorn:
You alive?
I thumb back a reply.
Me:
Unfortunately
Bjorn:
Good. Mom wants to know if you're eating. Say yes even if it's a lie.
Me:
I ate, and it’s not a lie.
Bjorn:
That’s a fucking miracle. Talk later, prospect.
The corner of my mouth pulls up at the phone before I catch it.
Prospect.
He's one too, same as me, same patch missing off both our backs—but he's older by four minutes and he's never once let me forget it, not in twenty-eight years, not through any of it.
Not even through the part where I gave him every reason to walk away and he didn't.
I put the phone in my pocket and head to work.
* * *
The new Beans and Babes is a gutted retail space off Apalachee, a box of bare concrete and exposed studs that Meghan's turning into her second location.
When I get there, Bodul's already up a ladder with a drill in his hand and a pencil behind his ear, and he looks down at me with the joy of a man who's been saving up material.
"Look who decided to grace us with his presence." Bodul sinks a screw into the soffit above the counter without looking away from me. "I was starting to think you got lost. You want me to draw you a map next time? Big arrows with ‘Njal, this way to the labor’."
"I was here at seven." I drop my bag by the wall and pull my own drill out of it. "You were in the parking lot whimpering about your back."
"My back is a war wound."
"You threw it out lifting a box of cups."
"A heavy box of cups." He comes down the ladder and claps me on the shoulder, and the grin eases into something quieter when he gets a look at my face. "You good?"
"I'm good."
"Yeah?"
"Bodul."
"I'm just asking." He lifts his hands, drill and all. "A man can ask."
And the thing is, he can. That's the difference between Bodul and most of them.
He asks you if you’re good and he means it, and then he lets it go—no weight left hanging in the air, no watching out of the corner of his eye to see if I'm about to come apart in his hands.
He asks me the way he'd ask anybody. Like I'm a man and not a glass that somebody already cracked once.
I've never told him what that's worth to me. I'm not going to. But I catch it every time he does it, and every time, it loosens something in my chest by a notch.
"Hand me the level," I tell him, and we get to work.
We hang fixtures and run trim for three hours, and it's hard work, the kind that lives in your hands, your shoulders, and asks nothing of the part of my head that gets me in trouble.
Bodul talks the whole time.
About a bike he's rebuilding, about Hakon coming in Thursday, about how I've got the personality of drying paint these days and somebody ought to do something about it. "You used to be funny," he tells me, sinking a screw. "Before. You were funny before."
"I'm hilarious."
"You're a wall, Njal. I'm working with a wall."
"I’m not."
"Okay, I believe you."
"You don't, and I hate you." I’m fighting a grin when I say it.
Here's what nobody tells you about coming back from the dark.
It's not the big moments that put you back together. It's this.
A man on a ladder giving you grief about a level. The radio playing something nobody likes, the AC losing its fight with the afternoon, the dumb steady rhythm of working beside somebody who knew you before you had a complete psychotic break and stayed anyway.
Somewhere in the second hour, I notice my shoulders have come down from around my ears. I notice I've stopped listening for the thing in my own head that I'm always listening for.
I forget, for a while, to brace.
I can't tell you the last time that happened.
"You two planning on eating, or you gonna run on spite all day?"
Meghan's in the doorway with a paper bag in each hand and her sunglasses shoved up into her hair.
She’s Tor’s ol’ lady, Tindra’s mom, and runs the original Beans and Babes.
She's running this one too, the boss on this job exactly like Runes told me she'd be—warm right up until the second you cross her, and then God help you.
"Meghan," Bodul's already coming down the ladder. "Tell me that's the chicken biscuits."
"It's the chicken biscuits." She sets the bags on a sawhorse and starts unpacking them. "Eat over the drop cloth, not on my new floor. I will know if you spill anything."
We eat. Bodul talks with his mouth full and Meghan tells him he was raised in a barn, and the whole thing is easy in a way that surprises me every time it happens, like a muscle I thought I'd lost still firing.
When Bodul wanders off to take a call, Meghan settles onto an upturned bucket across from me and looks at me over her biscuit.
"You doing all right out there?" she asks. "That far out by yourself?"
"It's quiet. I like quiet."
"Quiet's good." She picks at the wrapper. "Quiet's also a lot of room for a man to get up inside his own head and lock the door."
I meet her eyes. "I've got people I call."
"I know you do." She nods, satisfied, and drops it right there.
"Permit office is jerking us around on the inspection, by the way, so don't be shocked if Tuesday's a wash and we send you home early.
Somebody downtown wants his palm greased and Tor's handling it.
" She wads up her wrapper and pitches it into the trash bag clear across the room, nothing but net.
"Not your problem. Just so you're not blindsided. "
"Appreciate it."
"Eat your other biscuit, Njal. You're too damn thin." And she's up and gone, hollering at Bodul about something across the site, before I can get a word in.
I eat the other biscuit.
* * *
The ride home is the best part of the day, the way it's the best part of every day.
The sun's going gold and low by the time I clear Tallahassee, and the road opens up.
I let the bike eat it. Out here there's nothing but pine, pasture, and the long light coming sideways through the trees.
The engine settles into that low steady note I feel in my teeth, in my breastbone, in the parts of me that don't quiet down for anything else.
I've lost a lot. I don't lie to myself about that.
The mania took the better part of a year and it took things I'm not getting back—brothers who don't call anymore, a look in Bjorn's eye that didn't used to be there when he watches me drink my coffee, a version of myself I can't ride back to no matter how clean my labs come up.
The hospital took the rest.
There are whole stretches of the time I was in treatment gone out of my head like somebody took a wet rag to them. It was years ago, yet it still feels fresh.
The stretches that stayed, I'd hand over the others to lose.
But it never took this.
The bike. The road.
My own mind has turned on me every way a mind can turn, and out here it has never once betrayed me.
Whatever's broken in me goes still on the road.
It's the only church I've ever set foot in and believed, and I worship at it every evening on the way home, and some nights it's the one thing that carries me from the job site to my own front door with the weight off my shoulders.
I pull into the gravel drive as the last of the light goes. Kill the engine. Sit there a second in the sudden ringing quiet.
Through the pines, the neighbor's porch light is already on.
Inside, I head straight for the shower.
Get the drywall dust off and eat something standing up at the counter, then I carry a glass of water out to the back porch to watch the dark come down, because the evenings are the stretch I still haven't worked out how to fill.
That's when I hear her.
A voice, low and tired, carrying through the line of pines from the yard next door.
A woman's voice.
I can't make out the words—she's not pitching them for anybody, she's talking the way you talk when you're sure you're alone—but the sound comes across the still air clear as a struck bell, soft and rough at the edges.
I go still in the chair, glass halfway to my mouth.
I don't mean to listen. It isn't mine to listen to. But the words keep drifting over, and there's firelight flickering through the trunks where her pit must be.
I sit there in the dark with the glass forgotten in my hand and I don't move a muscle.
She says something I don't catch, and then she laughs.
It's quiet, and it's surprised out of her, like whatever she's talking to did something she wasn't expecting—and then a dog's tags jingle in the dark and I understand she's been talking to him this whole time, the one that barks at me every morning, and the breath goes out of me slow and strange.
A woman alone at a fire, talking to her dog, laughing at him where nobody can see.
I haven't wanted anything in seven years.
The mania burned the house down and the medicine that put it out soaked everything else along with it.
Food's gone to maintenance. Music's just sound coming out of a speaker.
I've sat in a room packed with my brothers, loud and laughing, and felt like a man watching them through plate glass, close enough to touch and sealed off from all of it.
The doctors call it flat affect and tell me it eases for some people with time.
I quit waiting for the easing. The waiting hurt worse than the flat did.
I'm not waiting tonight.
Tonight there's a voice through the trees and a small tired laugh.
Something in me leans toward it the way a plant leans at a window, before I've decided anything, before I can talk myself out of it.
The first real pull I've felt toward anything since they walked me through the hospital doors and the locks closed behind me.
And it scares the hell out of me.
Because the last time I felt something strong, it didn't stay small.
It got big, it got loud, and it talked me into believing I was something more than a man.
I’ve spent years taking every pill in that grid making good and sure I never feel anything that big again.
But this isn't the engine kicking over. I know the engine.
This is smaller and it's warmer and it's only—wanting to hear her laugh again.
Wanting to know what the dog did to earn it.
I sit in the dark a long time after her fire dies down and her back door clicks shut.
I turn the feeling over in my hands and check it the way I check everything now, looking for the heat at the center of it, the first lick of flame.
There's no flame. It stays small.
I go inside and take the night dose from the square marked for tonight, and I lie down in a quiet house with the window cracked.
For once, the quiet doesn't press down on me the way it has every other night out here. It doesn't feel like a thing I have to hold my breath against.
It feels like a room I might get to live in.
I don't sleep right away.
I lie there and listen to the pines tick in the breeze, and I think about a laugh I heard through the trees, and I let myself wonder who she is.