Page 75 of My Unfinished Heart

I raised my hand again. “Am I supposed to take the awake medicine in the morning or at night?”

“The morning, Archer. Do you think you’ve been doing it wrong? Getting the pills mixed up?” She glanced at my mother. “Maybe you could watch him take his medicine for a few days? Make sure he’s getting it right?”

“I do,” my mother said, ruffled and offended. “I watch him take it every day.”

“Then why can’t I sleep at night?” I asked in case the doctor was so taken in by my mom’s tragic story that she missed the mistake she just made.

“Because, Archer—the nighttime medicine doesn’t work on you.”

“But you never give me the nighttime medicine. It’s blue. The awake medicine is white. Why do you grind up extra white pills and put them in my food?”

My mother barely blinked. “Archer you’re confused. Those are just vitamins.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the psychiatrist pick up her pen and turn a narrow-eyed gaze on my mother.

“But I take gummy vitamins.”

“Archer. Be quiet. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She turned to the doctor. “Maybe we should reschedule when he’s a little more lucid.”

“I’d like to do a sleep study,” she, the doctor, said suddenly.

I almost rolled my eyes. Sleep studies didn’t work on me either, and I was about to explain why that was, but my mother shut the conversation down quick. “We’ve had plenty of those. No help yet.” Then she sighed her long-suffering sigh. “I guess he’ll just have to grow out of it, right? Because none of you people seem to know how to help.”

“I want to talk to you alone,” I said quickly to the doctor, afraid I was about to miss my only chance. Once I got home, it was going to start all over.

“Archer, I don’t trust this woman. Let’s go. Excuse us.” She reached down and pulled on my arm.

“Get me away from her,” I said as my mother yanked me to standing.

The doctor was stunned speechless.

Guess who I never saw again?

My mother was good at not getting caught. She was good at spinning her tale of woe but stopping just at the point where the lie could string her up. Factitious Disorder by Proxy. Pathological narcissism. Munchausen’s. She was one sick bitch.

I do not understand how I am the way I am. Not when I was raised by that psychopath. All the research I’ve done, the psychology classes I’ve taken, tell me I should be a junkie dead in a ditch or a serial killer. I have the ways I cope—art is one of them, sex another, but I didn’t start painting until I went away to boarding school, and I didn’t have sex until I was fifteen, so that doesn’t explain it. I didn’t have any friends until I met West, or a brother until I was already old enough to understand I was the only person I could depend on to keep myself alive.

All I had—all I remember having—was a soft, blue blanket to rub against my cheek during my infinite childhood of sleepless nights.

There was this famous study done in the sixties by a psychologist named Harry Harlow with baby chimpanzees. Harlow was trying to prove the existence of love. The way he did it was kind of twisted, but it changed a lot of people’s minds about how children were raised at the time.

What he did was, he separated infant chimps from their mothers hours after being born. He gave them two “moms.” One was made out of a wire cage with a bottle positioned in it to feed from. The other was a wire cage with no bottle, but it was covered in terrycloth. Guess which one the babies wanted? Surprising a lot of people, it wasn’t the one with food.

It was the one they could hold onto. The one that felt like it was touching them back. The babies clung to the terrycloth mom twenty-two to twenty-three hours of the day. They took what they needed to survive from the wire mother but immediately retreated to the terrycloth mother as soon as they’d had enough to keep them alive.

They chose love.

Needless to say, after the experiment was over, the chimps didn’t do so well in life. They sometimes failed to thrive, and other times, when they did all right with the cloth mom, they didn’t do well around other chimps later on. Meaningful interaction turned out to be too much for them, which might feel familiar at this point in my story.

Anyway, when we got home from the psychiatrist’s office that day—the last appointment she’d ever take me to—my mother burned my blue blanket in the fireplace while I stood and watched.

“I’ll be sending you away,” she said.

“Good.”

Devastated as I was to lose the only thing that meant anything to me, I did not allow a single tear to fall down my face.

It was a valuable lesson on the perils of attachment, watching the one thing I loved turn to ash. I’ll never forget it.