This Is How I Find Her - Softcover

Polsky, Sara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807578800 ISBN 13: 9780807578803

Verlag: ALBERT WHITMAN & CO, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

The Best Children's Books of the Year 2014, Bank Street College

Sophie has always lived her life in the shadow of her mother's bipolar disorder: monitoring medication, making sure the rent is paid, rushing home after school instead of spending time with friends, and keeping secrets from everyone.

But when a suicide attempt lands Sophie's mother in the hospital, Sophie no longer has to watch over her. She moves in with her aunt, uncle, and cousin—a family she's been estranged from for the past five years. Rolling her suitcase across town to her family's house is easy. What's harder is figuring out how to rebuild her life.

And as her mother's release approaches and the old obligations loom, Sophie finds herself torn between her responsibilities toward her mother and her desire to live her own life, Sophie must decide what to do next.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sara Polsky works as a journalist and has published poetry and short fiction in magazines like Strange Horizons and Beyond the Wainscot. She lives in New York City. This is her first book.

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This Is How I Find Her

By Sara Polsky

Albert Whitman & Company

Copyright © 2013 Sara Polsky
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8075-7880-3

CHAPTER 1

On the fourth day of junior year, sometime between the second bell marking the start of chemistry class and the time I got home from school, my mother tried to kill herself.

* * *

This is how I find her:

I look for her when I come home, the way I always do, to say hello and tell her about my day. I head for her studio, which is what we call the little concrete-floored storage room in the basement of our building with our apartment number in marker on the plywood door. Our neighbors use their rooms for old chairs and crooked piles of boxes. Ours is almost empty except for my mother's easel in the center of the room and her paintings stacked against the walls. There's an ancient dresser next to the door, full of paints and colored pencils, paper clips and rubber bands and spare keys. The smell of paint hangs in the air and drifts under the plywood into the hallway.

The studio door is unlocked and I push it in without knocking, not wanting to interrupt my mother's work. A thin beam of light streams in from the window, not enough to paint by, and bright lamps in each corner cover the canvases in shadow and light. I expect to find my mother in her usual position, listening to classical music with the volume all the way up, right hand gripping her paintbrush, left hand moving as if she's conducting the violins and violas right through her stereo. She was there when I left for school this morning. She's been there every day and night for weeks, hardly sleeping, just painting.

My mother always paints when she's manic.

But not today. The studio is empty except for the half-done painting sitting on the easel, a blur of strong colors that looks to me like a woman running along a sunset beach. I can't tell whether the woman is fleeing or chasing.

Something about the painting feels off-balance to me, like a sentence stopped in the middle.

"Mom?" I ask, even though I can see she's not here.

I shut the studio door and head for the stairs in a walk that's almost a run. The painting looks abandoned in the empty, unlocked room.

My backpack thumps against my back, my shoes slap unevenly against the steps, my breath huffs out, all in the rhythm of hurry, hurry, hurry. Some kids barrel into the stairwell on their way to play in what passes for a yard outside our building. I stumble into them and grab onto a higher step. One of the kids, a neighbor I babysit after school sometimes, calls out to me, but I don't answer. As soon as they're out of sight, I move even faster. Hurry, hurry. My leg muscles start to burn.

Finally, I get to the top floor, second-to-last door. I unlock it and rush into our apartment, my backpack still on. The place is chaotic. Since school started, I haven't had a chance to clean, and my mother never does. There's a trio of used coffee mugs on the table where we keep the mail, next to a teetering pile of envelopes and magazine subscription cards. My feet crinkle against shiny scraps of paper on the carpet. They're everywhere, as if a blizzard's worth of shredded catalogs snowed in our apartment while I was at school. I imagine my mother cutting them up, planning some kind of collage.

Where is she?

"Mom?" I ask the empty air of our apartment. Then I shout. "Mom!" She doesn't answer. I move faster, toward the bedroom with her queen-sized bed in one corner and my twin bed in the other. My stomach swoops with nerves. Would I rather find her there or not know where she's gone? I'm not sure, and my feet keep moving forward without giving me a chance to think about it.

But when I get to the bedroom, my eyes get stuck on the numbers on the bedside clock. The clock face and I stare at each other, a contest I know I'll lose, for seconds that feel longer than they are. My eyes must know something the rest of me doesn't, because they won't let me look just those few inches farther to the left, toward my mother's bed. It's 3:34 p.m. The colon blinks at me: 3:34.

"Mom?" I say again.

There's still no answer, and when I force my eyes away from the clock, the first thing I see are her legs, dangling off the bed from the knees down, feet stopped just a few inches short of the floor as if resting themselves on the solid silence instead. I follow her legs upward to the rest of her, slanted across the bed, her head half on one pillow. Her eyes are closed, hair hanging ragged and long past the pale face I've noticed getting thinner again in the last few weeks. Her breath is so shallow I can't tell it's there at all until I put my ear right up against her mouth. Then some air tickles my cheek. I don't laugh.

When I look up, my hair drops off my shoulder and brushes against my mother's face. She doesn't stir.

There are the pills right in front of me. A few spill across her night table from a prescription bottle I don't recognize, its twisted-off childproof cap sitting nearby. And there's the glass. Just a regular kitchen glass with an inch of tap water at the bottom.

Terror crawls up through my stomach, stretches along my throat, and creeps into my mouth as I reach for the phone and press three numbers.

"My mom," I think I say, and "pills ... half a bottle ..."

Somehow, I get out enough complete thoughts to communicate the nature of my emergency. I confirm my address. Then I climb onto the bed, scrambling like a child much smaller than I am, and grab my mother's hand. I hold it until the sirens come.

CHAPTER 2

"Would you like us to call someone for you?"

There's a nurse in mint-green scrubs standing in front of me, and I sit up so fast I bang my head on a poster. The frame rattles against the wall behind my head. Metal. I can't seem to take a deep enough breath, and my stomach turns over while I wait for the nurse to tell me how my mother is doing.

"Oof, that looked like it hurt," the nurse says instead. "Are you all right?"

Her words travel to me slowly, warped like I'm hearing her from the other side of a pane of glass. I blink. I'm in a hospital waiting room, on a tough vinyl chair with a hole in the seat. Before that I was in an ambulance, rocketing from my apartment to here. How did I get from that ambulance to this chair?

There are more important questions that crowd that one out. Will my mother be okay? Where is she right now? Where did she get that bottle of pills?

Why didn't I know she had it?

"Your mother is going to be fine," the nurse says. I breathe more easily, in, out, in. The word settles into my stomach. Fine. Was she fine before?

The nurse looks at her clipboard to make sure she has my relationship to the patient right. I nod at her that she does. She tells me we've been lucky; my mother's just going to need to stay in the hospital for a little while.

Lucky.

It doesn't seem like the right word. Still, a few of the knots in my stomach unravel.

Then they come back when I think about how much it will cost for my mother to stay in the hospital.

And when I open my mouth and move my lips, no sound comes out.

"Would you like us to call someone for you?" the nurse asks again. "Your mother can't receive visitors yet, and you might be more comfortable at home. We can make a call if you need your dad or someone else to pick you up." Her words are efficient, routine, but her eyes are soft. Does she make this offer to everyone, or is she making an exception for me?

I shake my head. Then I finally get some words out.

"No, thank you." The words are...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ALBERT WHITMAN & CO
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0807578800
• ISBN 13: 9780807578803
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar