Zig-Zag Boy by Tanya Frank

Author:Tanya Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2023-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

Once I reach Davenport and have cell service again, I get a call from Savanna.

“Zach has stopped taking his meds. He’s either huddled under the blankets or staring into space,” she tells me. “He doesn’t want to wake up in the morning to do his college classes. He’s hardly eating. He didn’t want me to tell you.”

I try to stay focused on the road, but I feel my stomach lurch. I was going to stop at the Swanton Berry Farm to get a scone and a cup of tea, but I drive right past it, Savanna’s Texan accent loud in my earpiece.

“Will he talk to me?” I ask.

“No, and he won’t talk to his doctor either,” Savanna explains. “He’s only getting out of bed to go to the bathroom, and he won’t eat or drink unless I share my food with him. If I want something different or completely to myself, it causes an argument.”

I feel like the storm I had been fearing—the one that had been gathering in the recesses of my mind, gaining pressure as it hovered over my hypothalamus, picking up wind speed between my ears—has finally broken. I imagine that the animals at the farm will sense it too, the opening of the heavens. They will retreat to the barns to take shelter. The sky will darken, and electricity will fork above the redwoods.

For Zach there will probably be a strange release, one I cannot ever fully understand. He has told Savanna that when he takes his prescribed drugs, he feels numb inside. He feels dead, and if he feels dead, he may as well be dead. The experience of psychosis is at least one with feelings, as extreme as they are. He knows he is alive in this state.

When the storm inside my body subsides, I am not as shocked as I am sad. Sad and disappointed. I am angry, too, but I don’t know where to direct my rage. I hear the tiredness in Savanna’s voice. Being young gives her more energy than I have. Being in love gives her hope and dreams. I know that this is all new to her. At some point the newness and novelty may wear thin, and she may leave.

I don’t want her to go. I need her. She is giving me a breathing space of sorts, a chance to be a different kind of me. I ask if she has spoken to her parents, wondering about my responsibility, if I should try to tell them that their twenty-one-year-old daughter is having to deal with matters that are hard enough for me, thirty years her senior.

Savanna told me once how she always tried to fix other people’s problems. She was the eldest child of four, all girls. The most sensible one. She was the good student at school, the designated driver when she and her friends went out to a party. She feels she can help Zach, force him to take his medication because he loves her. I see myself in her in so many ways, or I see her in myself.

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