Waiting for Fitz Read online

  © 2019 Spencer Hyde

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®, at [email protected]. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters and events in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are represented fictitiously.

  Visit us at shadowmountain.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hyde, Spencer, author.

  Title: Waiting for Fitz / Spencer Hyde.

  Description: Salt Lake City, Utah : Shadow Mountain, [2019] | Summary: Hospitalized for her OCD, Addie Foster and her new schizophrenic friend, seventeen-year-old Fitzgerald Whitman IV, escape the psychiatric ward and undertake a journey to find the elusive—and endangered—bird, the Kirtland’s warbler.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018029416 | ISBN 9781629725277 (hardbound : alk. paper)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Friendship—Fiction. | Love—Fiction. | Obsessive-compulsive disorder—Fiction. | Schizophrenia—Fiction. | Mental illness—Fiction. | Kirtland’s warbler—Fiction. | Hospitals—Fiction. | CGFT: Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.H917 Wai 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029416

  Printed in the United States of America

  Publishers Printing

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover photo: Victor Tondee/shutterstock.com, Mrs. Opossum/shutterstock.com, Potapov Alexander/shutterstock.com, KanokpolTokumhnerd/shutterstock.com

  Book design: © Shadow Mountain

  Art direction: Richard Erickson

  Design: Kimberly Kay Durtschi

  For those still waiting.

  I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect.

  If you get the right ones in the right order,

  you can nudge the world a little.

  —Tom Stoppard

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Acknowledgments

  An Interview with the Author

  Discussion Questions

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  Mental illness is so idiosyncratic that it is impossible to nail down. “Like trying to pin a medal on a shadow,” as they say. The very act of categorizing different mental illnesses seems to deny a sense of individuality in some way. When people say they know what my OCD is like, I often balk, certain that they have no idea—even if they grew up with OCD! And yet, they must in some way be able to empathize, right?

  I currently work in a youth group with two boys who are living with autism, and their experiences could not be more different from one another, or from the autism my nephew knows and lives with, yet they are all labeled autistic. What I’m saying is, my experience with mental illness is certainly not anybody else’s experience. My OCD ticks, rituals, and washings are my own. We are labeled one way, and we live a life that fits our own definitions. I also have personal experience with individuals who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia and Tourette’s. However, even those experiences are individualized and likewise distinctive and personal.

  Now, this fictive world may not necessarily jibe with your experience of a psych ward (be that from popular media or firsthand living). Some illnesses are intense but the person can stay in a local hospital instead of a state hospital; some rooms are private, others shared; some wards are coed, others are not. The list goes on. These issues vary from place to place, doctor to doctor, era to era, and from person to person. For example, I was in a hospital where twelve-year-olds ate breakfast (runny applesauce) and watched movies (almost always rom-coms) and played games (without batteries) with seventeen-year-olds. But that may no longer be the case. And that is okay. The world in this novel is made up in order to portray a specific experience, for numerous effects.

  Addie’s OCD is a reflection of my experience translated through a fictional character. Some might think she doesn’t act impaired enough or show enough moments of frustration or exhaustion. That’s just it—I worked hard to keep those emotions at bay. That is how I coped, and that is how Addie copes as well. And that’s okay. Likewise, Fitz, Wolf, Leah, Junior, and Didi all fit with personal experiences I have had with each illness, or with each exceptional, unique, remarkable, wonderful human I know who dealt with a similar issue. If the way I portray OCD (or anything else) is different from your experience, mediated through your mind and your life and your struggle, well, you are totally right. Even better—we are both right.

  In Waiting for Fitz, I have taken my personal experiences and fictionalized them. I have created this made-up world and tried to fill it with real-world significance, with meaning, with truth. I believe that is the aim of all fiction: we strive to put words into a rhythm and order that will reveal something redemptive about what it means to be human. It is a lesson in empathy; it is practice in how to live.

  Discussing, talking about, writing about, and experiencing mental illness in all its permutations is tricky, delicate work. But that doesn’t mean we should avoid the conversation. Frankly, we’re all a little crazy. And that’s fantastic. So let’s learn how to be okay with discussing what it means to live (I mean, really live) with mental illness in this world, and in the worlds we imagine.

  One

  My life took off the comedy mask and put on the tragedy mask at the end of my seventeenth year. I won’t get all sentimental about it, but you need to hear the whole story to make sense of that mask swap or whatever.

  So my mom thought I needed more help than I was getting from my regular psychologist, Dr. Wall. I remember him getting upset once when I jokingly told him I felt like I had my back up against him at times. I started seeing him after my rituals got real bad. Like, really messy. He was less than motivational, to put it kindly. But I’d started showering about four times a day and washing my hands over a hundred times a day because my mind was telling me the people I loved would die if I didn’t. That sounds absurd, right? Don’t I know it. But in the moment it was life or death. Seriously.

  If you look up “obsessive compulsive disorder” you’ll probably run into some really obnoxious stuff that isn’t all that accurate. Or, if it is accurate, it’s made to sound like it’s something that just takes care of itself or that gets resolved by some loving therapists, followed by some block party thrown in your honor. It’s not all Hallmark-channel type stuff. Trust me.

  Let’s be honest: We all have issues. Let’s be even more honest: Sometimes we need help but don’t want to face it. I understand now why my mother was looking for more help, for better help, but at the time I thought she was just overreacting. I mean, don’t most teenagers have a three-hour morning ritual before they can walk out the door? Don’t most teenagers wash their hands to keep their families alive? Just kidding. A little. But that’s how it went with OCD. I guess if we get super technical, it’s not all that untrue. But I did need help, and Mom took action.

  She took me to see this nationally renowned doctor the summer before my senior year of high school. Apparently it was the only time in the last decade that this particular doctor had worked the floor of
the psychiatric ward at Seattle Regional Hospital. But it also meant that I was to be an inpatient.

  So, before you get all excited about this kind of added support, know that it meant I had to postpone my senior year of high school and stay in a psychiatric ward—the nuthouse, the puzzle box, the cuckoo’s nest. Whatever. Look, Seattle is far from being a bad place to live, but if you are only able to see the world from six stories up it’s just like any other place.

  Here’s how my first day went: I started the day by talking with Dr. Riddle—yes, that was his name, get over it—about the severity of my OCD. I wasn’t hiding the fact that I needed help, but I also wasn’t going to admit that staying in a hospital was the best thing for me. I mean, I was trying to focus on important things like The Great British Baking Show. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to sample that stuff? What do they do with it all after they bake it? What a waste.

  I made a killer baklava, and I was going to miss, like, an entire season at the very least. I made Mom record every episode and promise she wouldn’t watch them without me. The last time we watched had been a few weeks before I entered the hospital. I remember Mom walking over to the couch and crowding my space a little. She sat on my feet and warmed them up.

  “Richard forgot the bread portion of the presentation this time, and he forgot to preheat the oven,” she said, spoiling it. I wasn’t there yet. Two minutes later, Richard indeed made both those mistakes.

  My mom was a bit of an amateur baker herself, though she never let her bread dough prove for long enough; she was too impatient. I had proof.

  “Look at that,” I said. “Richard lacks toast, and he’s still tolerant. More than I can say for you.”

  “What? I’m tolerant. Except for lactose.”

  “You don’t lack toast. You had some for breakfast. I saw it. But sometimes you’re still intolerant,” I said. “Maybe you’re also gluten intolerant. Maybe you’re also flour intolerant.”

  “This is why nobody can watch shows with you, Addie,” she said.

  “You’re a flour-ist!”

  “A florist?”

  “No, but I’d love to see a florist who only sold flours. Tapioca. Potato. Spelt. Buckwheat,” I said.

  “You’re obnoxious,” Mom said, smiling.

  “Also, you can’t preheat an oven. It’s not possible. Anything is technically preheated. What you do is heat the oven,” I said. “It’s like how we say an alarm goes off. Well, that would mean it was on to begin with. We’d be relieved to have an alarm go off, so it would stop sounding, you know?”

  “Like I said—obnoxious,” she said.

  I was so sick of Richard being named Star Baker over Martha just because he had better presentations. It only matters how it tastes! Martha was the baker with the right flavors, and I thought that should win out over looks. Frankly, that should win out over anything.

  I was there in the ward after Mom had explained why I needed the extra time in the hospital or whatever, so I wasn’t too shocked by her leaving, though the fact that I was alone really hit me later on.

  “This is about you, Addie,” she said.

  I alternately blinked each eye because I was counting to the number seven each time I heard my name. I’d been starting to think of the disorder as a paradox. Zeno, the School of Names—they both had the same idea, which was this: “A one-foot stick, every day take away half of it, in myriad ages it will not be exhausted.” That’s how I felt. Like I could walk halfway to the end of the room but never make it to the wall. Not really. Because I’d only ever be able to go halfway. I felt that even with all of my rituals, I’d never really make it to the end. It’d be impossible. At times, I felt impossible. Zeno had it right—an infinite number of rituals, and I’d still never arrive.

  “I’m just winking at you, Mom. You know that.”

  She smiled and hugged me and started crying. Like, big and wet and messy kind of crying. I won’t lie and say I didn’t feel it, but with all the doctors milling around, I tried to be strong, and I thought not crying was mature. Looking back, I know I was wrong and I should’ve just let it happen.

  I know a lot of things now, but at the time I was so consumed by my own disorder. It might look like my stay at the hospital was just a stopover for some new meds, or for added doctoral support. But it wasn’t. I needed serious help, and I didn’t want to admit it.

  Each morning before school, I’d walk to the bathroom, careful not to brush the wrong carpet thread when I reached the threshold. I’d stand up and sit down three times before entering the bathroom. I’d sniff two times with each step while also counting the tiles beneath each foot. I’d make sure I blinked with my left eye before entering the shower. Counting each time I tapped on the shower wall, each tap on the faucet, and each throat-clearing, I’d net two hundred and seven. I’d do this seven times before exiting the shower. Then I’d wash my hands forty-three times. Those two numbers added together made two hundred and fifty, and the two and the five made seven, of course—my favorite number. Finally, I’d dry off, sit on the bed, and count to eleven. What a great number, eleven: it’s first place two times, or seven and four, which is nice.

  If anything went wrong at all during the ritual, I’d have to leave the bathroom and start over with a new towel, the carpet fibers back in the right place, the right amount of blinks per step, the right motion for each scrub, the right thoughts for the entirety of my time in the shower. If I pictured Mom’s face and thought of the words death or cancer or tragedy, I would have to turn the water off and start over.

  Again. Again. Again. The dichotomy paradox in action. I was a living paradox.

  My downward spiral was similar to that water, getting sucked down and down until the rabbit hole was no longer a myth, and I was stuck in some alternate reality wishing there was a potion I could drink to get me out of there.

  But I had to hope. That’s all I had left between my bleeding hands and crushing thoughts.

  My rituals weren’t just confined to the bathroom. They followed me everywhere. I’d have to flip the lights on and off seventeen times before stepping on the stairs. I’d count each step, blinking three times with each left-foot step, four with each right-foot step—all the while, thoughts of death circling in my head. If I didn’t tap the stair banister in the right increments, three times each, I was convinced that cancer would eat my mother from the inside out, turning her bones to dust.

  She’d watch me with large, sad, hopeless eyes as I’d back up the stairs and start over. Each number I counted was tied to the safety of my mother, of my dog, of anybody or anything close to me. One misstep, one ritual imperfectly observed, and I had to start over so my mom wouldn’t get in a car wreck on her way to work, so the dog wouldn’t get tumors in her legs and slowly crumple to the floor. Stupid, I know. But try telling my mind that it wasn’t as real as the thumping machine in my chest, pulsing behind my rib cage.

  I felt embarrassed and ashamed in equal parts every morning. I hated taking so long, making my mother late for work, even as I knew that what I was doing was saving her, was keeping her alive.

  I know it sounds ridiculous. But if you had to face three hours of that kind of thinking every day just to shower, you’d know there had to be something more, some other kind of recourse, some other kind of help. And while the compulsions didn’t stop after the shower, at least I was able to go to school and lose myself in class lectures and books. In words. My only savior sometimes.

  We’d drive to school, and she’d tell me I might need to start getting up earlier, or she’d gently ask me if I’d like some lotion, while not mentioning the cracks in my hands where the cold was eating its way in, splitting my skin like veins rising to the surface, or the dried blood caked on my knuckles.

  She was always careful with her words, and she never talked about how hard it was for her to sit and listen to the light ticking on and off, to the sho
wer handles getting tapped, to the water purling through the drain for hours. But I knew.

  Desperation skulked in the corners of my mind, in the shadows, snaking through my body and squeezing my heart.

  I counted each beat. I had to.

  Mom tried her best to keep me focused on other things. She was good at that. She even got a purple streak in her hair one day at the salon to remind me that things we do on the outside don’t always determine the inside. But I still washed my hands that night. Whatever. She was trying.

  “Make friends. Be nice to the doctors. Don’t mock them. Don’t be a smart aleck.”

  “But he’s the best Baldwin brother.”

  “Stop it,” she said.

  “C’mon, Mom. Give it a rest. I only joke with people I like.”

  “Making fun is not the same as joking,” she said.

  “Semantics.”

  “Addie, I want you to be able to go to school without worrying about your hands bleeding because you wash them too often, or worrying about your family, or never feeling clean.”

  She started crying again. I looked down at my cracked hands and rubbed them together, then folded them under the sleeves of my sweater.

  “I want that, too,” I said.

  I told you I wasn’t going to get all sentimental, so don’t think this was a regular interaction. I was the queen of avoiding emotions by putting on my comedy mask and acting like everything was fine. I made up stories about my life, about who I would be later, about who I was then, about who I was friends with, and about what I was destined for. Whatever. You would too if you had to live with the aching parasite of relentless obsessions.

  “Comedy or tragedy, Addie?” Mom said. It was a game we always played, but I wasn’t in the mood, so I hugged her closer and cried on her shirt. Don’t judge me. It was real.

  So Dr. Riddle threw me into Group Talk the first day. I quickly learned that Group Talk was just an overly generalized name for spending an overly emotional, overly dramatic, and overly annoying hour and a half with seven other people. We’d eat lunch after group, then I’d meet with the Doc one more time before heading off to Therapeutic Activities and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. In the evening, the other patients and I usually sat around and watched a film together before separating to our small whitewashed rooms with small white beds and a ridiculous excuse of a pillow. That’s about how most days went.