Chapter 3

Cara

The apartment was slowly recovering from my last manic episode. The dishes were done. The throw blanket on the couch had been folded. The books that had migrated from the shelves to the coffee table to the floor over the past several weeks had been gathered into stacks and were slowly finding their way back to their respective homes. The curtains were open, once again letting sunlight chase away the gloom. I swept the floor and pushed the vacuum across the carpet.

Funny how my environment was always a reflection of my mental state.

I stood in the kitchen in an oversized T-shirt and my pink-striped underwear, waiting for the coffee maker to finish. I looked at my apartment the way you looked at a relationship that wasn’t quite working.

It was a great apartment. Objectively. One bedroom on the sixth floor of a building on the Upper West Side, hardwood floors, a kitchen that had actual counter space with granite countertops, and big windows that caught the afternoon light.

My agent Dana had found it for me eighteen months ago, right after Every Soft Catastrophe landed on its third Best-of list and the royalty checks had briefly felt like evidence of a prosperous future.

“You need a real home, Cara,” she’d said. “You’re a famous author now. Act like it.”

So I had given notice to my roommate and left the tiny efficiency we shared over the laundromat. I had signed the lease, feeling like I had finally arrived.

Unfortunately, the royalty checks had not maintained their optimism. The third book had not materialized, and now the contract, and the advances that went with it, had been cancelled. The lease on the apartment was due to renew in a few months, and the rental agent would not care about my current professional situation.

I poured my coffee and sat on the bar stool next to the counter.

I had to face the fact that it wasn’t just writer’s block making my bank account miserable. And it wasn’t just my mental health, or lack thereof. My former editor had just poisoned my reputation so badly that no publishing house was going to want to work with me. I sighed and turned to gaze out the window.

Satan was sitting on the windowsill.

She was always on the windowsill. It was her preferred location for observing the world with the absolute contempt it deserved. She was a small black cat with yellow eyes and large ears. She had just appeared on the sill one afternoon, which was impossible because we were six floors up and there was nothing outside that window but air. The fire escape was at least twenty feet to the left, under my bedroom window.

I still didn’t know how she’d done it.

I had looked down at her and said, “Absolutely not. The building has a strict no-pet policy.”

She’d walked past me into the kitchen and sat next to the refrigerator and waited until I fed her something, and that had been that.

She turned those eyes on me now as I leaned on the kitchen counter with my coffee.

“Don’t,” I said.

She blinked slowly. A cat’s version of I wasn’t saying anything.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I went out yesterday. I wrote things. Actual sentences.”

Satan looked away, completely unimpressed with my progress.

I drank my coffee and looked at the laptop on the kitchen counter. It sat there in the morning light, closed, patient, judging me enormously.

I dumped my half-finished coffee down the sink and went to the bathroom to put myself together for the day.

The pill bottles lived on the bathroom shelf, five of them, lined up neatly with their labels facing out. They had been prescribed by Dr. Okafor, my psychiatrist, whom I saw every six weeks in her office on the East Side.

I picked up the first bottle and turned it in my hand.

The thing nobody told you about psychiatric medication—the thing that didn’t make it into the pamphlets or the carefully worded segments on morning television commercials—was how they really worked. They smoothed everything out. The highs flattened. The lows lifted. My life landscape became a place of reasonable, navigable emotions that didn’t threaten to pull me under or launch me through the ceiling.

In short, it turned me into a zombie who really didn’t care about anything.

When I took the medication, the world became dull, colorless, and uninteresting.

I couldn’t write in that world.

I had tried, in the early months after my diagnosis, to create from that medicated place. What came out was technically correct and completely lifeless, like a page from an old, outdated encyclopedia. My editor had read those pages and said, very carefully, that they felt different.

Leanne. Who had just humiliated me in front of eleven million subscribers.

I set the bottle back on the shelf.

The honest truth—the one I only admitted to myself in the privacy of my own bathroom—was that the decision whether or not to take the medication had been made simpler recently by the fact that I simply couldn’t afford it. I hadn’t been able to pay the health insurance premiums for months now. The royalty checks covered rent and groceries and the basics if I was careful, but the out-of-pocket prescription costs had become a luxury.

Dr. Okafor didn’t know this yet. I was planning to tell her at my next appointment, which I was also not entirely sure I could afford.

I was managing, I told myself. I knew my own patterns. I knew the signs. I had been managing myself for years.

The broken chair at the gala offered itself up from memory, and I cringed at my reflection.

Some days I managed myself better than others.

I grabbed a hairbrush and yanked it through my hair roughly, as though I could discipline my brain for malfunctioning.

It had been eight days since I first walked into the Groundwork coffee shop by accident. In those eight days, I had accumulated something that was beginning, cautiously, to resemble a new manuscript. Not the third novel—that contract was cancelled, those pages were dead. This was something new. Something I hadn’t planned.

I didn’t know what it was yet. I didn’t have a plan, or an outline, or even a coherent plot. But I had some characters coming to life. The female lead was quite dynamic. But the male lead, her love interest, remained vague and lifeless.

I got dressed. I chose an electric blue dress because it reminded me of the way the sky reflected off that high-rise across the street from the coffee shop. I covered it with my cream cardigan because the autumn mornings were chilly. I would have to drag out my winter parka soon. I parted my hair and plaited it into two neat braids, mostly because it was easy to manage, even if it made me look more like a schoolgirl than a literary professional. I still wore the diva sunglasses because I was not yet ready to fully give up that particular security blanket.

Satan watched me from the windowsill with her yellow eyes as I gathered my laptop and my bag.

“Don’t wait up,” I told her. “And don’t bring any boyfriends to my apartment.”

She turned back to the window. Six floors down, New York City spread out below her. She stared at it like it was something she owned.

Maybe she did.

I locked the door behind me and went to write. As I waited for the bus, I couldn’t help but wonder if the CEO god would come for his morning coffee today.