Fragments of Me

The fluorescent light above the discharge desk hums at a pitch only I seem to notice, a thin electric whine that threads itself beneath the nurse's voice as she reads from a laminated sheet. Sixty-eight percent relapse within the first year. I've heard this number before — twice, actually, once after my first stay and once after my second — and each time it lands the same way, like a stone dropped into a pond that's already full of stones, barely making a ripple anymore.

"Lila? You listening?"

"Sixty-eight percent," I say. "I know."

The nurse, whose name tag reads DONNA in cheerful rounded letters that don't match the tired creases around her eyes, gives me a small, professional smile. "I know you know. I still have to say it. Liability thing."

"Sure."

I sign where she points — initial here, full signature there, date today's date, which I have to think about for a second because inside Meadowbrook the days blur into a single smear of beige carpet and support-group circles and the particular smell of institutional coffee. September the fourteenth. Sixty days since I walked in here with my mother's hand gripping my elbow like she thought I might bolt, which, to be fair, I had…

Dr. Cole's office smells like cedar and old paper, a smell so far removed from Meadowbrook's industrial disinfectant that for a moment, standing in the doorway, I forget why I'm here at all. Then I remember — Thursday, the appointment I'd dreaded on the park bench two days ago, the one I'd imagined as another version of Dr. Voss's unfamiliar face and unfamiliar questions. Except it isn't Dr. Voss. The discharge paperwork had her name typed neatly in the box marked *Outpatient Referral*, but somewhere between Meadowbrook and this converted Victorian on Fifth Street, the universe decided to hand me someone I actually know.

"You look surprised," Dr. Cole says, rising from behind a desk cluttered with the kind of organized chaos that suggests a man who knows exactly where everything is despite appearances to the contrary. He's got the same close-cropped gray at his temples I remember from group sessions two years back, the same unhurried way of moving, like stillness costs him nothing.

"Voss retired," I say. It isn't a question. Donna must have mentioned it during discharge, in that blur of paperwork and tired kindness, and I must have absorbed it without registering, the way you…

My mother's house still smells the way it always has — lemon oil on old wood, and underneath that, fainter, the ghost of cigarettes she quit a decade ago but never quite managed to scrub from the walls. I stand in the front hallway with my hand still on the doorknob, letting that particular combination settle into my lungs, and I'm thirteen again for one disorienting half-second before the feeling passes and I'm twenty-four, standing in my childhood home with a set of keys Marissa drove me here to use because Sarah is at her book club and specifically, deliberately, asked not to be present for this.

*I think it'll be easier for both of us,* she'd said on the phone yesterday, two days after I hung up on her mid-sentence, her voice still carrying that fragile, over-careful quality we've both adopted since the call fell apart. *You go get your boxes from the attic whenever you like. I'll leave the key under the frog.*

The frog is a hideous ceramic thing, green with exaggerated eyes, that's sat beside the porch steps since before I came to live here. I'd forgotten it existed until I knelt down an hour ago and found the spare key exactly where she said it would be, warm from the sun,…