A rush of cold was working its way up my body, a slow-moving tidal wave. My hands were shaking, blood rushing in my ears.
“I don’t remember that,” I said, but my voice shook, and even as the words left my mouth, I knew they were not true. A part of me did remember. I might not have it accessible in my thinking brain, but the experience had imprinted itself on my DNA. I could feel the instability, the confusion. The fear. He’d left before. Lots of times. But he’d been looking for Atlantis, hadn’t he?
My mom was watching me carefully. “A lot of people don’t begin to show signs until they’re in their early twenties. Your father was one of those people. At first he just experienced what’s called hypomania—he’d go on kicks of staying up all night working on projects, his paintings and woodworking, all of that. But then the episodes began to get more severe. He wouldn’t sleep for days at a time, and his projects became more extreme. Do you remember when he tried to rebuild our kitchen cupboards?”
The memory came to me, images strung together in bits and pieces. I’d come home from school one day and found my dad in an argument with the landlord. My dad was insisting he could build better cupboards than the ones that were in place, but once he removed them, he never put new ones up.
My mom let me sit in silence, not rushing me in the slightest. “Yes,” I said finally. Another memory pulled at me, insisted I take a look. There was something about the car, too. I lifted my chin. “He used to go on… explorations.”
Explorations appeared unbidden on my tongue. It was his word. It was what he called those days and weeks when he disappeared. For one unguarded moment I saw the pain in my mother’s eyes, saw what that experience must have been like for her.
“Yes. That’s what he called it when he was in a downswing. He’d take the car and live out of it for a few days. He’d drive to the ocean, and I wouldn’t know where he was or when he was going to come back.” Her voice caught. “You’d sit by the window, watching for him for hours at a time.”
She closed her eyes briefly. “Things got bad enough that he began having incidents in public, fighting with clerks, things like that. I began to feel worried about leaving you with him. After the diagnosis, he was able to get on medication and was stabilized for a while, but he struggled to remain consistent. I started to notice a pattern: whenever he became obsessed with talking about Atlantis, I knew he was headed for another manic episode.”
Memories were rushing me, filling me up and emptying me out. My dad talking too fast. People yelling at us on the streets. His hands shaking. The packages full of Atlantis maps and supplies that would build up on our stoop, bought with money we didn’t have.
She exhaled, slipping her fingers into mine, her eyes serious. “And then there was the Easter dress incident.” Panic was slowly building in my chest, flashes of memory looping through my mind. There were people yelling—at me? At my dad?—horns honking, and most of all the eyes.
“I remember some of that.” Stop stop STOP, my brain ordered. But I had to look, had to remember. “What… ?”
That was as far as I could get, and she understood, jumping in. “It was the Saturday before Easter, and he took you to the Loop to buy you a dress. You two were crossing the street, and a cab almost hit you in the crosswalk.” She spoke slowly, her eyes carefully focused on mine. “It stopped in time, but it scared your dad, and he lost it. He’d been up and down for weeks, and the stress really set him off. He started yelling, and kicked the car repeatedly until he’d dented the door. A crowd gathered, and someone called the police. Your dad was arrested.”
I was breathing, but none of the oxygen seemed to be making it to my head. I felt just as light-headed as I had underwater, and just as untethered. I remembered the dress, yellow when I wanted pink and too frilly for anything we ever went to. What had happened to it? Had I dropped it in the street? But most of all I remembered my confusion. My dad was taking care of me, but I knew there was something wrong with the way he was doing it. I could tell by the way people looked at us. “Then what happened?” I managed.
She squeezed my hand. “This time he went to the hospital for several weeks. I tried to tell you why, and explain, but you told me I was wrong. Then you took all his maps to school for show-and-tell and told everyone your dad had gone to the Sahara desert to look for Atlantis.”
My throat caught. I’d brought a map of the world, one I’d spent all night drawing with markers on a poster board. The teacher had cut me off midway through my show-and-tell, and I’d gotten so upset that I’d thrown the board. She’d acted like she didn’t believe me. Because she hadn’t. Obviously.
I realized I was clenching my teeth, but I didn’t stop because the pressure in my jaw took away some of the ache in my chest. I’d been a kid trying to make sense of the world, my mind coming up with reasons that hurt less than the ones I was being presented with. As painful as the thought of him leaving to search for Atlantis had been, it had been less painful to Child Me than what was actually happening—my dad, who I relied on more than anyone in the world, had been struggling with something inside of himself. Something I didn’t understand.
You knew all along.
The thought rose quietly, and I looked at it long and hard. Truth. Because I wasn’t just learning all of this. I was recognizing it. Maybe I hadn’t known all the details of my dad’s mental illness, but some deep part of me had known he hadn’t left to find Atlantis.
I dropped my head, pressing my fingers to my temples. My mind was swirling, moments and memories locking into place. And then I was thinking about my mom. A question pulled at my mind, made my lungs constrict. I looked up at her. “Why didn’t you just tell me the truth? Why did you let me believe that?”
I didn’t want to be angry with her, but I was. I’d been a child; she’d been the adult. It had been her job to guide me through that experience.
Her mouth twisted with regret. “I didn’t handle it well, Liv. You were so adamant about what you wanted to believe, and after a while, I started to think that maybe it was better for you to have your story to help you cope. As you got older, I thought you must know. But then you started having those nightmares.…” She exhaled. “If I’m being honest, I struggled with the stigma of mental illness. I didn’t want you to see him differently, or for others to look at us differently. I know now that I was wrong. Mental illness has nothing to do with what kind of person you are. And not being open about your father’s challenges was wrong and caused you pain, and I am so, so sorry for that.”
Her eyes were welling up, and so were mine. It was a lot to digest and go over. What I did know was that she was sincere.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said.
“How could you?” She wiped my cheek with the palm of her hand, which only made more tears spill out. Then a horrible thought struck me. I’d spent years obsessed with Atlantis, just like my dad. Even now, anytime a story or movie popped up online, I couldn’t help but read it. “Mom, is it hereditary? You said Atlantis was his trigger. Do I have bipolar disorder too?”
She shook her head. “According to Ali, you’ve never had any of the early signs. Your obsession with Atlantis… That was about missing your dad.”