It was hours ago, then, that we took our shaking, hysterical daughter into the ER. She came running, falling down the stairs, yelling, “I killed her! Where is she? I killed her!” and we thought she might have still been dreaming, because what in waking life could lead her to do that, to think that? Once she got to the kitchen she fell down crying, and we took her in because her arm was broken—why would I even begin to consider that the broken bone would be the least of her troubles?

They made us wait outside while they fixed up her arm and called the psychiatrist—why does she need a psychiatrist, we wondered, but they wouldn’t tell us, not until he passed me a signed prescription for Risperdal.

She’s having delusions, they said, delusions and hallucinations. They might have been going on for a long time, only usually it takes an episode like this to bring it to the attention of everyone else. The hallucinations seem to be a large part of Phoebe’s life, so the transition to medication will probably be very difficult. It won’t go away, but in time she will be able to lead a normal life.

I called my oldest friend, Marion, hoping that she, of all people, would understand. Her son, one of Phoebe’s best friends, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder years ago. She was floored, but how do you tell someone that your child is schizophrenic without getting that reaction? She came right over to the hospital with some chocolate, saying that it’ll be rough for a while, but hey, at least M&Ms taste good.

I asked her if she ever felt like she had failed somewhere along the way to lead to Luke’s disorder. I feel like that. I know it’s chemical or genetic or something, but I feel like there’s something I could have done to stop it. Marion just sat there, holding my hands, and shook her head. There’s nothing you can do, she said, except make sure she stays on those meds. I don’t have to tell you to be there. You won’t be able to help that.

I can’t take it all in. My daughter has schizophrenia. My only child has a problem that will follow her for the rest of her life. And not even a problem that she has, but a problem that is part of her. I’ve poured so much of myself into her, and now I have to watch her suffer through something that I can’t even imagine. The doctors said that her world isn’t like my world, where I can see something and trust in its reality. Imagine, they said, that someone has just told you that your daughter only exists for you. I know well what it’s like to exist only for her. But the pain of that reversal, the pain of its revelation — the helplessness I feel must be nothing in comparison to her’s.

When my mom told me that Phoebe ended up in the hospital after having some sort of an episode, I assumed she thought that I would take it better than she had or than anyone else had, just because I’ve been living with this shit all my life. Well, different shit, but still shit. How could I take it better, though? I know what she’ll have to live with. What she’s been living with, only it’s just now that the betrayal comes out.

And then the fact that it’s Phoebe, the girl who’s been in my life for as long as I’ve been alive, the daughter of my mom’s best friend, the one who probably knew about me before I even caught on. The one who sits on the phone and just talks in an effort to make me feel better. The one who buys me stuffed animal cats to match the ones in my paintings.

My mom thinks she’s my girlfriend, and I feel obligated to go along with it just because I can’t tell her that I can’t get close to anyone else. I don’t want to put anyone else through my life. A mother would never want to hear that about her son, that her child is only ever happy because of the chemical changes in his head, that he doesn’t feel okay loving people, because what if they loved him back? No doctor would prescribe meds for someone in love with me, but she would need them.

But Phoebe and I, we’re siblings and we’re best friends, we’ve always been. I feel bad, now. I never noticed anything was wrong. She always notices for me; maybe it’s just the nature of the two, that one is so easily recognizable and the other only shows up in dreams and flickers that you ignore as just part of life. Should I have known? Could I have?

I’m laying on my bed now, staring at the sky through the window. It’s sunny. It’s the kind of day that half the time, I’d have to be a part of. I’d be out painting, especially now, late in the afternoon, when the shadows fall perfectly to make even more shades than the sun provides. I love the transitions, the late afternoons and early mornings – they remind me that there isn’t just a vacuum between light and dark, day and night. It’s easy for me to forget that.

Right now, though, I don’t have the energy, the desire to go be a part of the day. I paint those landscapes and I try to imagine myself in transition, in between two extremes, but right now it’s too far into night for me.

“Come on in!” I yell in the direction of the door, not wanting to get up. Professors get lazy too, especially when the clock moves towards five. I glance up and immediately recognize the halting step and unsure expression of a concerned parent.

“Hi,” she says-then pauses-looking over the room. “Are you Professor Talbot?”

I finally do get up and walk over to shake her hand. “Yep. Call me Izzy.”

“Hi, Izzy, I’m Marion Daniels. Luke’s mom.”

I notice then how much she looks like her son, whom I’ve taught for a few semesters now. Quite a painter, he is. She looks very put together, very prim— not the type you’d expect to produce a artist, but you never know.

“Nice to meet you, Marion. Has Luke been complaining about me?”

She starts in reaction to my question. I’ve thrown her for a loop. She regains her ground.

“No, no, of course not. I just wanted to— to check on him.”

I nod, but don’t say anything.

“He’s— well, he’s taken sort of a— a downward swing, and I know he knows you well and respects you, and I just wanted come in and ask if you could keep an eye on him for me,” she says, slowly, carefully, as if she’s had it memorized for a while.

“I have noticed a shift in his paintings,” I tell her. I only see him twice a week. I really don’t know what else to say.

“A shift? What kind of a shift?” she asks. She must not look at his work on a regular basis, I figure. I know it gets harder once they get to college, but with Luke’s painting, it’s really very noticeable.

“The colors in his paintings shift. A few months at a time they’ll be really bright, really colorful, and then they’ll shift to darker, more muted tones. Mainly grays and blues.”

She nods, and her face tells me that something’s just clicked. Not for me, though.

“Is there a reason for that, Marion?”

She looks down, wrings her hands a little, then moves her eyes back up to me with something like an apologetic look on her face.

“Luke is—” she pauses. I won’t push her. “He has his own shifts.”

Now it’s my turn to nod, as it’s finally clicked for me.

“And right now he’s on a— a downward shift. The mood stabilizers help some, but of course there’s only so much they can do.”

“It makes sense, then, that his paintings would come out that way. He does beautiful work, Marion, beautiful landscapes.”

“Landscapes?” She really must not have looked at anything he does. I’ve tried to get him to do figures before, but it’s like trying to get Jackson Pollock to do Renaissance art.

“Yeah, almost all landscapes. With that cat of his in them. I’ve never seen him paint a person without being forced.”

She winces for a minute, then looks confused. “Just landscapes and cats?”

“Yep.” Now it’s my turn to pause. “Does he have anyone to talk to about— whatever he needs to talk about?”

She smiles a little. “Of course. He has a girlfriend.”

“Alright, well, just let me know if there’s anything I can do. I’ll keep an eye on him.”

She looks satisfied. “Thanks so much, Izzy. I really appreciate it.”

“Not a problem. He’s a talented kid. I hope things work out for him.”

“Thanks again,” she says, then turns to leave. I hear the door click behind her, but I’ve already gone back into my mind. Poor kid. It makes so much sense, but you wouldn’t wish that upon anybody. I hope he gets back to those bright paintings again soon.

When she was young, Marion used to laugh at her friends who were afraid of the dark at sleepovers, or of bees when they’d fly into the classroom. She eventually realized, though, that she hated it when someone would mock her for her inability to walk into a house if she saw a cat in the hallway; she never laughed, now, when people let slip that they were afraid of flying, or spiders, or the number 13. She also realized that hiding a phobia is like hiding a physical abnormality — you can try, and you will try, but certain situations will inevitably make it impossible.

Sometimes she would laugh at herself, even. She would flinch at Garfield cartoons and avoid the room when Luke was watching “Tom and Jerry.” He took a liking to the movie Homeward Bound, which was even worse. Would it really have damaged the young audience so much to have had that stupid cat drown? But no, she told herself, her quickened heartbeat was worth it to spare the countless tears that children would have shed in return.

Luke grew up, and for whatever reason that dumb cat showed up in most of his pieces. All of them, maybe. Marion would try to turn her head and focus on something else, or squint until it blurred into another shape. One time, Luke’s girlfriend got him a black and white stuffed cat, and Marion didn’t want to go near her son while he was holding onto it. Irrationality, she thought, is when you avoid your own child because of the fake animal that he is holding.

She hid it from Luke for a while, but it all came out one day when he kneeled down to pet a neighbor’s cat, and she shrieked and jumped back. It had taken her by surprise. There was no avoiding that reaction when the cat creeps up that way — stupid cats, they either creep or they sprint, no loping or anything in between like dogs. They linger. They skulk. They sneak. Always negative movements.

“Mom, what was that?” Luke asked, with a questioning smirk on his face.

“It’s the—it’s that—that cat.” Marion squeaked out, covering her eyes and pointing at it.

“Mom, are you afraid of it?”

“Yes! Yes, I’m afraid, I’m afraid of the cat!” She turned and walked a few paces away. Luke got up from the cat and caught up with her, then put his arm around her.

“Would you mind if I’ve got some cat hair on my hands?”

“Don’t remind me.”

“So that’s why you always wince at my pictures, eh?”

“Yes.”

“And it was easier to just keep wincing and not tell me why?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why?”

“No.”

And that was it. I’m some kind of pathetic, she thought. Not that I can help it.

That’s what it was like with Luke. Everything was immediate, everything was passionate. He treated the world as if it was simply an extension of himself, loving it and always pushing it to its limit. He would point out beautiful cloud formations and trees with pride, as if he had taken part in their creation. And he wasn’t lying about the inspiration, either. He had me sit next to some flowers and read Slaughterhouse-Five, and after an hour and a half he showed me a finished watercolor.

“Why is there a cat next to me in the painting? You don’t have a cat.”

“It fit there.”

“Why did you have me read Vonnegut?”

“I wanted my two favorite things to be in the same picture.”

This was at the beginning. He would spend hours painting, always pictures with this little black and white cat in them, a cat like my sister used to say the neighbors had, and he would always just say that it fit; he was always so convinced that I would look at the paintings and not be able to imagine them being so complete without the cat with the white chest. And when he wasn’t painting, he was always doing, always caught up in the moment, and whenever he would see me, his face would light up like I was the sun, like he loved me and he hadn’t seen me in years. He did love me. He loves me. I’d sleep in his bed and he’d wake me up early kissing me, telling me that he loved me. I have to believe that that hasn’t changed, even when everything else did.

He stopped painting. He starting sleeping all the time and when I’d come in he’d only give me a small, fleeting smile before his face fell back into whatever darkness had come over him. I’d try to kiss him, try to put my hand under his shirt and down his back to elicit some kind of response, but I’d never get anything.

“Luke, is it me? What’s up?”

“I still love you, Natalie, but not now.”

I got him a stuffed animal of the cat to try and cheer him up, but he just ran his hand over it once and then looked at it miserably. I wanted to help him. I still want to. I don’t know how to.

We went to dinner at his parents’ house and his mom pulled me into the kitchen while she was washing the dishes.

“He talks about you like he loves you, you know,” she said to me, putting a dirty plate under the stream of water.

“He says he does,” I replied. “I just—I want him to be happy.”

“It’ll pass,” she said, with the attitude of someone who knows because of experience after arduous experience. “Wait a little bit, it’ll pass. He’ll come back to you. He always has. He just needs to—stabilize himself.”

I fell in love with Luke, but then I look at this shadow of the man who said I inspired him staring out at me from behind heavy eyes, and I don’t know him. What kind of person would I be if I left, though? My life isn’t anything like what he’s gone through. And anyway, I can’t leave. His mom says he’s always come back—and I can’t stand the thought of him kissing someone else awake early in the morning when he does come back.

And then I thought—no, I didn’t think, I knew, I realized, I was sure, as sure as I was that there was snow on the ground and that her name was Natalie and that I loved her—I just knew, I knew that she was dead. Natalie was dead.

I didn’t start crying, because a realization like that hits you pretty hard and your body doesn’t know how to react at first. How do you react when you suddenly find out that the sister who was alive when you went to bed in the same room the night before was dead now? I wish that was the worst of it, though, because the next thing that I knew—no, the next thing I found out, that works, the beauty of the English language is in the number of words and slightly different meanings that you can get, from think to know to realize to find out; there are more that I’m just not thinking of- it’s a wonder that we can even use any of it—

I found out that Natalie was dead and then I found out that I had killed her. Somehow during the night, the night when I didn’t sleep, I had killed my sister in the bed across from mine. I think it was with a pillow and I had suffocated her, she had probably struggled and cried, only I hadn’t paid any attention and had somehow managed to kill her and get her out of there, without even knowing it.

I screamed, then. My hands were at my mouth and I was screaming. I was screaming and crying and tearing into the closet to see if Natalie’s body was in there, then I started going through our parents’ room and the bathroom and the room with the computer and then I ran downstairs, only I tripped so I fell downstairs—that’s why I’m here, that’s how my arm broke—and then my parents came running in from the kitchen but I got up and pushed them away and kept rifling through the rooms, the closet and the bathroom. And then I burst into the kitchen crying with my parents right behind me—I knew they would throw me right in jail when they caught me so I just wanted to keep away from them—and I saw Natalie looking at me like I was—crazy. She gasped at my arm and I fell down, pointing at her, telling her that I had killed her, telling her that she was dead and that I had killed her—

This is all new, you know, I don’t know what it’s like to be crazy. I don’t know what it’s like to have people force Risperdal down my throat, I’m not used to people always asking me if I’m okay and looking at me like I’m a grenade they’ve just thrown. I used to think the neighbors next door had a cat because I always saw it around their house, but cats hide all the time, so it was never weird that Natalie didn’t see it. I used to tell her it didn’t like her, I thought it only came out for me, and she told me plenty of times that they didn’t have a cat but I saw it, and why shouldn’t you believe what you see? And I knew—I know—that Natalie’s dead, but you’re sitting here telling me that she’s not, that I’m not a murderer and that that cat with the white chest that I saw for all those years isn’t real—I feel betrayed. Can you see the snow out there? Is there actually a heart monitor next to me that’s making a rhythmic beeping noise? I have a hard enough time trusting other people—now I can’t even trust myself.

Happiness, the emotion most commonly connected to smiles: How can I catalogue what makes people happy? For me it’s at blue skies or at snow, at stars, at dogs, at Miatas, at hockey, at the way the hot water hits my scalp in the shower, at the way my body relaxes when I first lie down in bed every night, at mud pie, at sweet tea, at the first step off the plane at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, at the sight of my teams’ logos in unexpected places, at Renaissance art, at pink shoes, at the celebrations of athletes, at the sound of spoken Czech (especially the ř, the rzh) – what I choose to smile at (except I don’t choose to smile, a smile out of happiness is that involuntary reaction that I mentioned above) makes up who I am, so right now you’re probably wondering why ř, a sound that is nearly unpronounceable for a native English speaker, would make anybody smile, but just put in one of your own quirks, and then you’ll get it. So why do we smile? Because we’re happy. Why do things make us happy? I have no answer. Because.

Can often look a lot like contempt: You see someone who is clearly below you. You catch a rival breaking a law, making an incorrect point, losing while you’re winning. You feel the sort of happiness that comes when you elevate yourself over someone else, the happiness that is born out of hate. You look mean when you smile in this way—I do too. This is the smile that will not spread to your eyes, although they may narrow. We block out our memories of having felt contempt, but imagine how Brutus must have looked as Julius Caesar died at his hands.

And embarrassment has an effect similar to: In revenge for countless pranks over the years, we told our trickster friend to meet us at 11, someone had an announcement. Two days before we’d done the same thing, because we’d staged a “coming out” that we all knew about except this one friend—we were fighting to suppress our laughs as she said “I’m a lesbian” and he looked on, stunned, then went on to look up how to deal with your friends coming out online and wrote her a card saying that he loved her no matter what—only now we were telling the truth because someone felt too guilty to continue and convinced the rest of us to give up the charade, it’s mean. She handed him a card that only said “I’m straight,” and again he looked at all of us, stunned. A small, meek, questioning smile spread his mouth as the comprehension dawned. This smile is a defense mechanism – in some situations, it might appear in the form of tears.

Anxiety on the human face: Physical exertion to the point of pain, to the point where you feel like you can’t go any farther, but you have to – think of the faces on weightlifters in the Olympics. Or something deeper – everything hits you at once and you don’t know how to handle it all – how do you know when you’ve reached your limit? The muscles around your eyes contract – your eyes might even close – and the corners of your mouth lift. No one would mistake you for a happy person right now.

As does pride: You feel a specific sort of happiness when you succeed, when someone you love succeeds, when something you’ve worked to create soars. I scored with three seconds left in an IM Floor Hockey game, and when the game ended, this is what you would have seen on my face. I got a call from a friend saying she’d made the team after having heard the stories about a tortuous tryout – this is pride. This smile generally replaces the anxious sort of smile.

And smiles also show up to hide anxiety: You’re afraid when you shouldn’t be. You’re stuck in a position where you don’t know what to do. Someone asks you a question that you can’t answer or you shouldn’t answer or you really don’t want to answer so you just keep smiling and smiling and smiling, it’s not reaching your eyes, and the smile is working as hard as it can to hide everything that’s going on behind your eyes that aren’t smiling—

And even crying out of sadness distorts the eyes and cheeks and mouth: We found a ten pound puppy in the women’s locker room of our pool, and we couldn’t resist taking him home. Eight years and 90 pounds later, I walked downstairs at 5 in the morning for swim practice and found my Romeo arduously wagging his tail and struggling to get up. My dad was there – I met his eyes and had to turn away. The emergency surgery a month ago—the news that it was cancer—the struggling again—the only dog I’d ever had, the big, black, beautiful animal who had so often run off after squirrels but who had never failed to come back—the knowledge that when I left, I would never see him again—

Like love might: Happiness that comes not from yourself, but from someone else. Happiness that you feel when you see a specific person (or animal, I will add, because humans are not the only creatures worthy of love) brings a specific look onto your face. You walk into a room, and you see someone whom you haven’t seen for a long time, someone who’s been on your mind for every minute you’ve been away. You recognize this smile when you see it, because ideally, you’re wearing the same one.

And certainly in the same way that crying out of happiness does: I only have one of these examples – what does it say about me, that this is the one? My hockey team, my obsession, the Carolina Hurricanes, won the Stanley Cup, and I cried twice – once when the buzzer sounded and the realization hit me (holy shit, my team just won—we just won), and again when they brought the Cup out and each of the players lifted it over his head. How long had I watched and waited, cheered, yelled, invested, all to see this moment? I could never describe this scene in a way that would make you cry, but just imagine; the appearance in reality of what you’ve hoped for, wanted, dreamed about, fantasized over, makes you react in the same way as its exact opposite would.

A technical definition of a smile: An involuntary response to an emotion; muscles around your mouth and your eyes move to turn your mouth into a half-moon or a trapezoid shape and to make your eyes smaller.