This morning was going to be dark. It was incredible to Maddisen how pitch-black it was in those rare moments of peace after the streetlights went out, but before the sun came up. As the year advanced, Maddisen noticed, it seemed to be that way more and more often. So dark. Oddly enough, she liked the dark more than dawn; she could never relax in anything less than total blackness. And yet, this morning, she looked outside and saw that the sky was watercolored orange not with light pollution but with sunlight. While too bright and revealing for Maddisen’s taste, the outdoor setting was undeniably beautiful through the trees from her second story window. But to her, the famously beautiful and critically acclaimed wonder of the universe that was laid out before her like a dawning canvass on which she could paint her life meant only that she was incredibly late to school.
Her alarm clock. It sat in the far corner of her room from her bed, opposite her door. She had slept through it again–this was quite the recurring issue for her. The thing had been beeping and squawking her out of bed every morning; naturally she had gotten quite annoyed at it, one day mad enough to chuck it into a pile of miscellaneous junk in the corner. Even though she never heard the thing anymore—maybe because it was broken, maybe because it was muffled under stuff—and she couldn’t even find it, she had no regrets. And, finally, she could use the excuse “lost track of time” without lying whenever she was late to school, which was always. So, naturally, she figured it was really actually deserved when she awoke twenty minutes late to the sound of her mother pounding on her door, shaking her from her rest.
“Okay, okay,” she mumbled through the haze as she struggled to sit up. That was another plus of not having that stupid clock, not having to even roll over in order to whack the snooze button.
Five minutes later, when she actually did get up, she put on an album by The Rolling Stones as she dressed. Moving to its beat, she dragged herself through her morning routine, the showering, the changing, the brushing of hair and teeth. She walked downstairs transformed from the zombie that had moaned just minutes earlier from her bed into a less frightening, societally acceptable and only half-dead creature, rather than undead. She could work wonders with some makeup and a sleepy attempt at a smile.
When Maddisen came downstairs, she found her mom digging determinedly through the drawers under their small TV in the family room just beyond the kitchen where she was standing. Piles of electronics and chargers and auxiliary cables lay at her feet.
“Mom?”
The woman startled, then looked up. “Hi, honey.”
“Looking for something?”
“Yes, actually,” the woman said as she stood to talk to her daughter. “Have you seen my backup Prozac? I remember putting it in my bathroom cabinet, but I can’t find it anywhere.”
“Sorry mom, no.” Maddisen released a sigh. She didn’t know why her mother hoped to find it in an electronics drawer, but her mom’s “Prozac” was the antidepressant the doctors had handed her, and when it was mentioned, Maddisen tensed. Her mother had taken it since the divorce, since both of their lives had stumbled into a state of total disarray. That’s when she had started with the psychiatrist, too. Three, sometimes four times a week with the shrink at the beginning, now she was usually just gone once every seven days. It wasn’t her mother’s absence or insecurity that bugged Maddisen. Sometimes, even she couldn’t figure out what it was. Part of it was, of course, the reminder of the divorce. It was indeed quite painful, all the memories, all the dangerously volatile moods, the fighting and the choosing between her parents. But that was all behind her now. She never saw her father anymore, and she, unlike her mother, could stand on her own two feet without having to lean on some professional, let alone some pill. Not that she disrespected her mom.
Maddisen was, in fact, awed by how her mother had handled herself through the difficult years, through the division of money. That’s how she had chosen; she had as a child watched her father crumble to the crippling drink as her mother fought valiantly in court for the ex-lawyer’s big house and daughter. And that’s when she knew she wanted to be like her mom: free. Free from big bastards like her father, who told them what they couldn’t do. Free because those people ought to drown in their own pessimism, rather than floating on others’ proverbial corpses like they so often did. But, as well as she had held out, the poor woman had taken some part in the depression–it was an integral component of any divorce. It was almost as if not to exhibit it were unnatural. When Maddisen had, sitting in her kitchen, found the first bill for her mother’s psychiatrist, she had been, in fact, quite proud–any other reaction to her mother’s seeking of help, any reaction of shame or of anger, would have been, quite frankly, superficial. Proud that her mother had been brave enough, bold enough to face this, rather than hiding it in embarrassment. She had been proud that her mother had never resorted to self-medication like her ex’s drinking and gambling and unfaithfulness. Until her mother didn’t really face it.
You see, one of the hardest things for a parent to do is to show weakness in front of their child. They have always been the big one, the strong one, the omniscient, omnipotent protector and God of their child’s life, and to be seen crumbling by their child is to be weak. It itself is one of a parent’s greatest inherent fears, whether they admit it or not. So when madeline had caught Mrs. Wader coming home from her “shopping trips,” the errands had been thusly contrived to protect her child of whom she presumed such innocence. But it didn’t stop there. There were the pills. The first time that Maddisen had seen them, they had been driving together in the car, one of the first times she had ridden in the front.
It had all happened so fast. There was no flashing of the life before the eyes, no anticipative vision of an epitaph, no all-too-late and yet deeply cathartic insight into how she could have lived a better life. No, none of that. It was quite simple, really.
She had been staring out the window absent-mindedly, watching the tallest treetops higher even than the buildings on the way home from school, when they had suddenly turned to meaningless blurs. The car had swerved with a scream the source of which she had never known; her mom had blamed the tires and asphalt. Her head had been tossed aside and then thrown roughly by immense momentum into the glass on her right. Then, it bounced forward only to get nailed by a suffocating punch in the face she had only just been deemed large enough to withstand. And just like that it was over.
Thrown back against the old, poorly-cushioned headrest and aching from whiplash, she had sat for a moment with her eyes closed. And then she had felt an odd sensation in her lap; tiny and crawling. She knew it was silly, but initially she had thought they were her teeth. When she opened her eyes, she was relieved, and yet almost let down by the anticlimactic, prosaic appearance of the Prozac. She felt around in her mouth with her tongue, tasting no blood, and felt that there were still thirty-two teeth in her mouth. And yet, when she looked at the white little capsules all that she could see were teeth. They reminded her of the secret tool spies used to use when they got caught, like in those adventure novels about World War II; the little, fake cyanide-filled teeth. “Allergy medicine,” her mother had claimed, embarrassed. Bull.
She had known, right then and there with the big policemen all around her tiny twelve-year-old self berating her with questions, that her mother had lied. And that that, the lying, and not the depression, was her problem. Maddisen never found out whether her mother told the officers the truth that afternoon, that the woman had been unable to wait until she got home to pour her drugs into her mouth when she drove straight into that intersection, all with her daughter right there. She doubted the woman had. But her mother was trying to change, and she was progressing. And as her daughter, Maddisen was duty-bound to give her a chance.
As the girl sat down with her Cheerios, Rolling Stones still blasting from her room, she heaved a sigh. Looking at the clock, she observed that, per tradition, she was behind schedule. Honestly, it didn’t matter at this point, so long as she was no more than fifteen minutes late to class; often her teachers were pleasantly surprised when she walked on time. So she ate quickly, but not too quickly, because somehow it was these painful early-morning moments of panic that she relished. Perhaps because it was in these moments of distraction and irksome stimulation—of anticipation—that she found clarity; she was odd in that way, just as she was oddly drawn towards the dark.
Upon finishing her breakfast, she heaved her backpack and laptop onto her back and stumbled out the door with an audibly muttered, “‘Bye, mom.” She trudged across her lawn, avoiding the path down the middle even though it was clearly a shorter route to her destination, and then went around her mom’s powder-blue car to the driver’s side. She got in, clicking the unlock button on the key. Just then, she remembered her purse.
She sprinted back inside, taking the path this time, and ran up the stairs past the photos that hung there and into her room, grabbing the bag off her bed. She was hardly paying attention, running up and down the steps through only muscle-memory, so upon reaching the foot of the stairs, she nearly knocked over her mother. Maddisen dropped her purse, and its contents spilled all over the floor. Her mom spoke.
“Oh! Honey, I’m sorry, I thought you were gone. Let me get that for you.” She bent over.
“No!” Maddisen startled herself with her own reaction. “It’s fine, I’ll get it.” She bent over quickly, cupping her hand to conceal a small, missing pill bottle. She scooped it back into her purse. And upstairs, the Rolling Stones blared obnoxiously…

And though she's not really ill
There's a little yellow pill—
She goes running for the shelter
Of a mother's little helper
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day...