Tim Murphy - Christodora

“Okay, Ava,” Renny said — why so gently? That was annoying. “But not now.”

Lauren glanced at Renny. “Ava,” she ventured.

“Ava what? Are you angry at me because I stole your thunder in the meeting? Because if you are, I’m sorry. The idea just came to me and I came out with it.”

“No, Ava,” Lauren said, her voice firm and loud now. “I’m worried that you’re cycling.”

She sat straight up in her seat. She made a high, indignant sound. She laughed sharply. “You’re worried that I’m cycling? That I’m cycling ? No, Lauren, you’re pissed off about the meeting, so you’re going to say instead you’re worried that I’m cycling, when you well know that I was diagnosed unipolar, not bipolar.”

“Ava,” Renny said, “I think that, in retrospect, you’ve been ramping up for the past two weeks, and now you’re cresting.”

With a Herculean effort, she sat back in her seat, said not a word. Then, slowly, with excruciating enunciation: “Even if I am, this”—again, she tapped the pen on her pad—“is a better way to do things.”

Renny and Lauren looked at each other helplessly — how infuriating! “Fine,” Renny said. “We’ll go over it. But not now.”

“Aw, c’mon, Renny, all I wanted was five minutes!” God, she just sounded like a girl from Queens! She stood up, pad in hand, and walked out. She heard Renny mutter to Lauren: “I have to call Sam.”

That stopped her cold. She could not see Sam go through the torment he had gone through a year ago. She stepped back into Renny’s office. “Don’t you dare call Sam, Ren,” she all but shouted. “That is not showing concern for us.”

She stalked back toward her office, well aware that Mrs. Conti and the rest of the support staff had heard her and were tracking her, peering over their fucking glasses as they typed. She stopped at Hector’s closet. “I’m going to my office and closing the door and getting some shit done before I go meet my daughter,” she announced.

He looked up. She noticed he was looking through the Kaposi’s briefs Blum had brought in earlier. “Okay,” he said. “Are you okay?”

She put a hand on her hip. “Do you know what I hate, Hector? I hate when people see good, energetic impatience — when they see a touch of activism in the middle of a fucking ossified bureaucracy — and they want to pathologize it because it scares them. Because it means they might have to get off their own fucking asses and actually get something done. And it sounds like — already! even though you know what I’m about — you see me that way, too. You’re scared of me.”

He shook his head. “No, I’m not,” he said. But she could see the briefs trembling in his hand.

She stared at him good and hard. Her affectionate and aggressive feelings toward him were all mixing in her head confusingly. She wanted to cry. Instead, she thought, He is literally sitting here in a closet. That was hilarious to her. “I hope you know you’re literally in the closet,” she said. Then she was horrified. Had she just said that?

He turned pale. His mouth opened. “I’m not in the closet,” he said, but it came out a croak, barely audible.

She held her stare. Voices in her head were telling her to continue to taunt him, but something else broke through. A tender voice told her to spare the boy. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Hector,” she said.

She got back to her office and closed the door. Her fat folder awaited her. She had exactly eighty minutes until she had to leave to meet Emmy. Certainly she could better use that time if she outlined precisely how to use it, how much time to spend on each thing. She flipped her yellow pad to a fresh page, drew a box at the top. “Chinatown Project,” she wrote. “Crunch follow-up data. Call Ben Eng. Spreadsheet format!” And so on like that. Thirty minutes later, she’d completed her outline and was ready to execute it with her remaining fifty minutes. Someone knocked on the door. It was Blum.

She gave him a stern look. “I’m trying to knock off about eight things before I go meet Emmy.”

He came in, shut the door, sat down and leaned in a bit toward her. “Aves, everybody’s worried about you,” he said.

She paused. She gave a helpless, bitterly amused laugh. She laid her palms flat and open on the table before her. “Blum, I can’t win this one, can I? Every bit of passion or oomph I ever show from now on will be judged through the lens of last year, won’t it? If I’m not tamped down with so much lithium I can barely think straight, I’m just a ticking time bomb around here, right?”

He laughed. Thank God somebody could still laugh at her in the way she wanted! “No, sweetheart,” he said. “No one’s been doing that. It’s the past week or so. You’ve been different.”

“Blum—” Her voice broke. “Blum, I’ve been feeling good.” She started crying; she could do that around Blum. “I’ve had energy, I’ve had ideas. Don’t take it away from me.”

“But, Aves.” He leaned forward more. “Look at yourself. You’re crying. Do you really feel good right now?”

“I’m feeling . I’m feeling. Okay?”

He sighed, shook his head. “Would you just call Vikram and talk about the lithium? You want me to do it with you now?”

“I told you I have a million things to do before I go meet Emmy.”

“You’re meeting Emmy soon?”

“We meet every Wednesday at three at Serendipity.”

“Why don’t you take a Valium now, then?”

“I will consider taking one,” she said. But Blum just sat there. “You are not doing directly observed therapy with me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Blum stood up, all six feet two inches of him. He was a boy from Midwood; they understood each other. “I know you hate that you have this thing,” he said. “But you have to think about keeping yourself and your family safe.”

“Safe!” she snorted.

“We all get crap to deal with, and this is yours, Aves,” he said in a suddenly sharper voice. “Be a grown woman.”

Blum left, closing the door behind him. She cried. She knew the good times were coming to an end. She should be heading uptown, she thought. But she kept tweaking the damn outline she’d made so she could fully implement it in the morning. There they were, the tears and the anxiety wrestling right alongside the exhilaration about all her plans, that lust for life, that rush. Good-bye to all that. She stuffed her yellow pad into her workbag, slung the black garbage bag of Hello Kittys back over her shoulder.

On the 6 train uptown, she gave withering looks to people whose body touched hers. Finally, to a man who bumped into her, she said, “You could be more careful.”

“Fuck you, bitch,” he said, before getting off the train.

Her head was racing. She should take a Valium before meeting Emmy. But in the pit of her stomach, she could remember the dead Valium haze from last year, the hell getting off those things, how proud she was she hadn’t needed one in three months. Being with Emmy would calm her — it always did. She never took her illness out on her child. They were going to have fun today!

She stepped into Serendipity. There was Emmy, sitting on a white chair, alone at a white table, waiting for her, her dark, curly hair pulled back in barrettes that were woven with pink and blue ribbons. Her Trapper Keeper was in front of her, with the big pink sticker letters on the front spelling out MILLY (Emmy short for M., M. short for Milly.) She smiled when she saw her mother, showing a mouthful of braces. Then, when she noticed her mother was hauling a black plastic garbage bag, the smile disappeared. Her eyes hazed over with fear.

But Ava didn’t see that. She barreled into the restaurant, knocking down a chair with the black plastic bag. “You can’t leave a chair out in the middle of the room,” she huffed at the waitress who hurried over to pick it up. “Emmy!” Suddenly, she was leaning over, kissing Milly, who cringed — she had schoolfriends just a few tables away; she knew they were already looking over, giggling. “I come from Chinatown bearing gifts!” exclaimed Ava. One by one, she pulled the Hello Kitty dolls from the plastic bag, arranged them in an arc on the tabletop. “Aren’t they cute?”