Afterlife - Julia Alvarez Page 0,57

are key but Izzy is right. The meds have to be adjusted, carefully monitored. Often, it’s a simple chemical imbalance in the system, as you well know, the doctor adds, a nod to Izzy, the professional colleague. As if the two women are conferring on their mutual patient, another Izzy, who sometimes goes rogue, loses self-control, needs their collaborative help.

Izzy has fallen silent, her dark-side-of-the-moon mood, which Antonia knows well from her own sojourns there. Slowly, Izzy raises her head in a canine tilt, sniffing the air, picking up a scent that won’t allow her to proceed. She levels her gaze first at Dr. Campbell, then over at her sisters, sitting in a righteous trinity to her right. Antonia finds herself wishing that she had made a different seating choice. She had thought of it when they walked in the room, as she always does when visiting a therapist’s office, convinced that the therapist has pegged each choice—couch or rocker or straight-backed chair or meditation cushion on the floor—with a corresponding disorder.

Mona and Tilly hold steady, returning their sister’s piercing look with the long-suffering, loving expressions they perfected in childhood to respond to their mother’s rages. But Antonia has never been able to withstand Izzy’s probing interrogations; her sister’s eyes bore through her many selves to that tender, unrehearsed self that hasn’t yet practiced and performed itself. Antonia looks back, and she, in turn, pierces through her sister’s many self-presentations—the charming, cunning, impassioned, flirtatious Izzys—past all the maneuvers that have allowed her to outsmart her therapists and evade treatment. But what Antonia sees unsettles her. She feels a cold liquid entering her veins, as when she has been put under at the hospital for some procedure or other. She winces in anticipatory pain.

Izzy is beyond their reach.

I hear your words, she had said some weeks back to Antonia on the phone. I hear them, but they don’t come through to me. What a horrible thought! Like that Dickinson poem Antonia often taught, the plank in reason breaking, the speaker dropping down and down, hitting a world at every plunge, never landing. And Finished knowing—then—

The poem stopped mid-sentence. Below it only the white blank of the page. This was Antonia’s dragon, why she had avoided too much contact with Izzy after Sam’s death: words, words, words, failing her.

I don’t know, Izzy says, her head like a periscope turning and looking around. I don’t know. I think I’ll give it a pass.

Tilly is the first to burst into tears. Please, please, Izzy, I’m begging you. I’ll never ask for anything ever from you, I promise! Tilly has fallen on her knees, sobbing so hard that soon she is gasping for breath, bringing on her smoker’s cough, a hacking, horrible sound, as if she is coughing up her very soul. The sight of her in such agony fells Mona, who drops to her knees, pulling Antonia down with her. What a sight before the cool-mannered psychiatrist with her diploma from Harvard on the wall. No wonder her patient exhibits extreme behaviors. The sisters are all nuts. But wait, maybe Dr. Campbell was present the day Dr. Vega lectured her medical school class on cultural sensitivity. This might be a Latina way of caring.

See what I have to put up with? Izzy jokes, flashing the doctor a collegial smirk.

But Dr. Campbell seems to have shifted allegiances. She will not settle for a glib response. I’d say your sisters really love you, she speaks with a wistfulness to her voice, as if this is a love she has yearned for and never known herself.

I guess then . . . Izzy takes a deep breath and lets out a surrendering sigh. I guess Love wins the day. The sisters lurch forward to hug her, cheerleaders whose down-on-their-luck team has finally won a game.

There is a flurry of phone calls: to the physician in charge of admission at Liberty House, the psychiatrist who will lead the team evaluating Izzy, the pharmacist for a prescription Izzy is to start immediately, a small dose, to settle her down. It is decided. Today being Friday, the weekend upon them, on Monday Izzy will report to this office and she and Dr. Campbell will walk across the green to the house that looks like an antebellum mansion to begin her soul spa.

Izzy stands, ramrod straight, clicks her heels together, and gives them all a salute. Antonia’s heart sinks. Oh boy, oh boy, she thinks. This is not going to work.

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