The Silver Linings Playbook - By Matthew Quick Page 0,1
relaxed - at peace - so I decide not to interrupt their session. I hate goodbyes.
In his white coat, Dr. Timbers is waiting for me when I meet my mother in the lobby, where three palm trees lurk among the couches and lounge chairs, as if the bad place were in Orlando and not Baltimore. "Enjoy your life," he says to me - wearing that sober look of his - and shakes my hand.
"Just as soon as apart time ends," I say, and his face falls as if I said I was going to kill his wife, Natalie, and their three blond-haired daughters - Kristen, Jenny, and Becky - because that's just how much he does not believe in silver linings, making it his business to preach apathy and negativity and pessimism unceasingly.
But I make sure he understands that he has failed to infect me with his depressing life philosophies - and that I will be looking forward to the end of apart time. I say, "Picture me rollin'" to Dr. Timbers, which is exactly what Danny - my only black friend in the bad place - told me he was going to say to Dr. Timbers when Danny got out. I sort of feel bad about stealing Danny's exit line, but it works; I know because Dr. Timbers squints as if I had punched him in the gut.
As my mother drives me out of Maryland and through Delaware, past all those fast-food places and strip malls, she explains that Dr. Timbers did not want to let me out of the bad place, but with the help of a few lawyers and her girlfriend's therapist - the man who will be my new therapist - she waged a legal battle and managed to convince some judge that she could care for me at home, so I thank her.
On the Delaware Memorial Bridge, she looks over at me and asks if I want to get better, saying, "You do want to get better, Pat. Right?"
I nod. I say, "I do."
And then we are back in New Jersey, flying up 295.
As we drive down Haddon Avenue into the heart of Collingswood - my hometown - I see that the main drag looks different. So many new boutique stores, new expensive-looking restaurants, and well-dressed strangers walking the sidewalks that I wonder if this is really my hometown at all. I start to feel anxious, breathing heavily like I sometimes do.
Mom asks me what's wrong, and when I tell her, she again promises that my new therapist, Dr. Patel, will have me feeling normal in no time.
When we arrive home, I immediately go down into the basement, and it's like Christmas. I find the weight bench my mother had promised me so many times, along with the rack of weights, the stationary bike, dumbbells, and the Stomach Master 6000, which I had seen on late-night television and coveted for however long I was in the bad place.
"Thank you, thank you, thank you!" I tell Mom, and give her a huge hug, picking her up off the ground and spinning her around once.
When I put her down, she smiles and says, "Welcome home, Pat."
Eagerly I go to work, alternating between sets of bench presses, curls, machine sit-ups on the Stomach Master 6000, leg lifts, squats, hours on the bike, hydration sessions (I try to drink four gallons of water every day, doing endless shots of H2O from a shot glass for intensive hydration), and then there is my writing, which is mostly daily memoirs like this one, so that Nikki will be able to read about my life and know exactly what I've been up to since apart time began. (My memory started to slip in the bad place because of the drugs, so I began writing down everything that happens to me, keeping track of what I will need to tell Nikki when apart time concludes, to catch her up on my life. But the doctors in the bad place confiscated everything I wrote before I came home, so I had to start over.)
When I finally come out of the basement, I notice that all the pictures of Nikki and me have been removed from the walls and the mantel over the fireplace.
I ask my mother where these pictures went. She tells me our house was burglarized a few weeks before I came home and the pictures were stolen. I ask why a burglar would want pictures of Nikki and me, and my mother