so many people who needed things from her. The older nurses weren’t particularly nice or friendly. She’d imagined that they would take her under their wing and show her the ropes. But that’s not how it was. They were frustrated with her, impatient and bossy. And since she moved around all the time, she never really got to know any of them well.
Martha couldn’t adjust to her new schedule. Getting to work in the evening gave her a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach, the kind that she used to get on Sunday nights in high school. She worked until seven thirty a.m. and then she’d take the train home, rumpled and exhausted, while everyone else was just starting their day. It made her feel anxious, to see them freshly showered and dressed, holding coffee and reading the paper, while she was on her way home to sleep. I’m living life backward, she used to think. And the thought of being a backward person made her heart pound loudly, strangely, so that sometimes it even felt like it was beating the wrong way, like it was going backward along with her.
When she got home in the mornings, she couldn’t sleep. She could never quite get used to climbing into bed as the sun was shining. She would lie awake for hours, wondering if she’d done everything she was supposed to. Had she given all of her patients their medications? Had she measured right? Had she filled out the charts? She was sure she was killing her patients, and that kept her awake, always. She was so tired that her whole body ached, but her mind was always moving, always thinking, and no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t fall asleep.
With each day, it felt worse. Martha was antsy, but never wanted to leave her apartment when she didn’t have to. She didn’t want to wash her dishes or do her laundry. She ate in her bedroom and let plates pile up on her desk, let glasses full of iced tea sit on her nightstand until they started to mold and little black ants crawled in them. Her laundry lay in piles, and when you first opened the door to her bedroom, it smelled like the home of a dirty person—sour and stale. This wasn’t the way Martha kept things. She’d always been clean, always been disgusted by people who sat around in their own filth. But it didn’t seem to matter anymore, and leaving things to rot where they were was easier than trying to clean it all up.
Her roommate, a girl she knew from nursing school, told her that she couldn’t live like this and that she was moving out when their lease was up. Martha started skipping work, napping during the days and watching TV at night. Her parents came over to see her, and her father stood in the doorway to her bedroom, looking all around, while her mother said, “Oh, Martha,” and began to pick things up, gathering dirty laundry in her arms, as if the mess were the problem.
Martha quit her job and moved home. Her parents packed up the apartment for her, boxing up all of her books and clothes. “It’s just my job,” she told them. “It was too much. I’m burned out. I just need to rest.”
But she was still so tired all the time. She slept almost all day, glad to be in a bed with clean sheets, back at home. Her parents would come upstairs to see her, insist that she get out of bed for meals. Her mom would take her on errands. “You can sit in the car if you want,” she’d say. “But you have to get out of the house.” And so Martha would put on clothes, and sit in the passenger seat of the car while her mother went to the dry cleaners and the bank.
Sometimes her dad would come upstairs and sit next to her bed, to talk or just read. “It will get better,” he’d say to her. And for some reason, this made her cry, tears running down her face to her pillow.
Finally, her parents made her go see someone. “You need someone to talk to,” they told her. “It will make you feel better.” She could hear them whispering about her when she walked out of a room. But she didn’t care. She knew they were worried about her. If she’d had more energy, she would have