When the doctor says, “Serious and persistent,” the mother, because she has no emotional shelf for this concept, imagines Japanese Knotweed pushing up through asphalt; knotweed that you must knock down, and repeatedly because its roots are tenacious and robust. The moment you turn your back, the plant grows stronger, and more resistant than ever into a dense, six-foot-tall hedge with flowers and seeds that readily disperse everywhere.

No one has any control over this.

“I can’t even talk to him,” the doctor says. “Not until your son has been on medication for six weeks.” He looks steadily at the mother: “Do you have a lock on your bedroom door?”

The mother ponders his words.

***

Her son sits in his room all day, alone. His two siblings are off to college, and his mother works. When she returns home, she calls upstairs, and hears nothing back except blasts of brutality and chaos from his video games. The mother rarely sees him, although after midnight, every night, she hears him sneaking downstairs scavenging food from the refrigerator.

This goes on for a year. During this time, the medications begin to knock back some of the more egregious behaviors. Screams waking her out of a deep sleep. The stereo suddenly blaring full volume. There isn’t the constant pacing back-and-forth upstairs, or the door slamming that shakes the entire house. The medications help, but to rely on the health care system with its gaps, its platitudes, its lethargic roadmaps of dead ends, depresses her. There’s some small, deep part of her not yet ready to accept defeat.

***

After another sleepless night, the mother is downstairs, at the breaking point, thinking something has to give. She’s making coffee when she notices the kitchen sink full of knives, all of them covered with grape jelly. Even the handles. Thirteen knives. How can this be? She’s not sure what to make of it. There are jelly dollops on the cupboard knobs, the stove’s burners, inside the refrigerator, even on the windows: smeared in a swirly pattern as if some part of him desperately wanted to escape. At least he didn’t set the kitchen on fire. (This has happened.) As she steps away from the sink, reaching for the paper towels, her foot glides a good three feet on the tile, lubricated by an unusually large jelly blob.

She catches herself just in time.

This is what I’m up against, she thinks, but she also thinks: he’s making his own sandwiches. Without any help from me. It’s a crack, a hairline crack in what she believed to be true and honest. She distinctly hears the guardian angel overhead telepathing a new truth: Nothing is ever over until it’s over. The mother thinks about this day-and-night, until it becomes her mantra, and re-energized, she reads everything she can get her hands on about mental illness. She listens to podcasts and TedTalks. She seeks advice from organizations.

She seeks out those in similar situations.

She watches intently.

Then she starts, slowly. “I know you are ill. The doctors call this a brain disease, and I’m not so sure what that means, but I am sure that you are not brain dead. Your brain is on a different wavelength, and that doesn’t mean you can’t chop vegetables for dinner. It doesn’t mean you can’t take the dog on a walk.” She emphasizes the you can, saying it with conviction, no pity (pity would doom them both), and because she believes it, he starts to believe it. He chops vegetables. He walks the dog. After six months, a group home accepts his application, and there, he relearns basic social skills, and although his life is far from normal, a new trajectory has emerged.

With improved – but not stellar – life skills, he moves into a Section 8 apartment. There are bloody feet (bedbugs), a roach apocalypse, an unbelievably densely-plugged toilet, a failing bathroom floor, but despite it all, the you can start to out-compete the serious and persistent. They turn into you’ll figure it out. The son returns to college virtually, and it’s rough, but he finishes his degree. He talks to people, just a little. Sometimes they talk back.

“I know you believe this particular conversation happened,” his mother says. “But the eat-shit-and-die, the I am reading your mind responses: that’s the disease talking. That’s not you. You need to separate the two. Understand that most people care only about themselves. They don’t care about you.”

He begins to believe that he is a person, not the disease, and that he is not responsible for the disease, but he is responsible for managing it.

The son has one friend (met during a hospital stay) who joins him for Sunday dinners at his mom’s. The friend also has a dog who must be walked three-times-a-day. Once the son demonstrates he can do this (facilitated by large earphones and opaque, wrap-around sunglasses) the son adopts a dog. The dog is white with blue eyes, and whenever the son and the dog meet people on the street, people almost always say: “What beautiful eyes!”

Something changes in the son, and he not only initiates the hello, but engages in short conversations. At the county outpatient facility, he attends the recovery classes, and he makes real friends there, people who understand that he is a person, not a freak. When the illness struck, he lost every single friend he’d had. At the facility he meets a woman his age, with her own ESA. They go out for coffee. She stops by his apartment to play chess. He returns to college, virtually, part-time, for a master’s degree.

He starts thinking about a job and when he says, “Do you think I can?”

She sees in her mind’s eye the knives in the sink, covered with grape jelly; she smiles and doesn’t even have to nod.

Patricia Dutt short stories and flash fictions have been published in The Louisville Review, Deep Overstock, America Writers Review, and other literary magazines. Her home is in central New York where she taught high school science and worked as a landscape estimator. She writes a blog with her son on the mentalchill.org website, and also writes at  https://substack.com/@persistentpollinator.