Читать книгу Unravelling - Elizabeth Norris, Elizabeth Norris - Страница 14

or the past nine years, my dad has been the head of the counterintelligence unit at the San Diego office of the FBI. It’s ironic, really. This man who dedicates his life to the pursuit of truth, who works a nineteen-and-a-half-hour work day, who watches repeats of The X-Files and quotes it to his children, lives in a house where Truth always remains Unsaid.

And for almost as long as I can remember, I’ve learned to do the same.

My mother is bipolar. And at present, she’s not exactly functioning.

When I was seven, during one of her manic episodes, she stopped taking her meds, pulled both Jared and me out of school, and drove us up the coast—at least twenty miles over the speed limit, with the windows down—all day and into the night, until we stopped at the Northern California border and got a hotel room. We stayed up late, jumped on the beds, had a popcorn fight, and laughed until our stomachs cramped.

By the next morning she’d come down and wouldn’t get out of bed. We were holed up in our room at the Anchor Beach Inn in Crescent City, California, with the curtains drawn and the lights turned off, while she slept it off for two days before my dad found us and brought us home.

After that, my mom and dad fought—about her medicine, about Jared and me, about how much she slept and how much he worked, about her medication and his inability to express his feelings, about her spontaneity and his rigid schedule, about everything. They fought all the time—days, weeks, months, years. Until at some point—and I can’t remember when— the fighting stopped, she started drinking herself into a self-medicating coma, and our house just fell . . . silent.

And Jared and I were on our own.