The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone (Page 13)

So I was the first non-family member to see Addy in the loony bin. I remember I’d dressed up, in heels and a purse—what do you wear to visit your friend who’s been committed? I’d brought a homemade lemon angel food cake, since it was her seventeenth birthday that week. They took me to a rec room, where she was sitting in the corner playing Wii with some homeless-looking dude. I recognized her pajamas as the same ones she’d worn at my seventh-grade birthday sleepover, which made me sad—puffy little clouds, too short at the wrists, so the bandages appeared extra-conspicuous. When Addy saw the cake, I could tell she’d forgotten all about her birthday. She looked about nine years old, and she also looked ninety. It was shocking to see her like that.

“Why’d you do it, Addy?” I asked her.

She thought about that.

“I wanted to get to the end,” she answered. “I wanted to see what Ida saw. She told me I wouldn’t be alone, because she was waiting for me. ‘Come home,’ she’d tell me. Over and over. At some point, it sounded like a good idea.”

“Weren’t you scared?” I asked.

“No. I wasn’t scared. In that moment, I was finished with life. I wanted something else. I can’t explain it to you more than that.”

I held back my crying till I got to the parking lot. Addy had become a shadow of the friend I loved.

“She’s going to live in that ugly hospital with all those other sad, shadow people forever,” I told my mom. “She doesn’t care enough to want to get out.” Then I went and looked through every Bristol and Dartmouth public record I could get my hands on, searching to see if I could find this monster, this demon, Ida. But at that time, I found nothing.

I’d sold Addy short. By mid-September, she’d bounced right outta Glencoe. Except for those scars, it was like it never happened. She was seeing her doctor every other day, but otherwise, she was like any normal girl. She had a full course load, she was focused, and she looked good, too, she really did! Not like some sick, crazy girl. Always in her leggings and long-sleeved shirts, and she’d painted her tired old last-year’s boots this shiny pop of silver-grey, and they were killer. Addy always could turn twenty bucks into two hundred, style-wise.

Most of the kids at South Kingstown had no idea what a private, violent hell her summer had been. She kept that side of herself secret; she was so ashamed of it.

Her first day back reminded me of this other time in eighth grade, when Addy decided to DIY-ink herself with India ink and sewing needles. She came to school with a purple-black rose tattoo above her knee. It was a screwup, and it looked like a mean bruise, but she never mentioned it. Just like the tattoo, her wrists became another thing that we never talked about.

CHARLIE STONE: My sister got discharged from Glencoe after five weeks. I knew she’d had electroshock, and I knew her meds were the reason why she slept all the time, even more than usual, and why there was no snap in her bones. The day Mom drove her home, her scars were so raw I wouldn’t look. She seemed unplugged. Drugged and floppy, a rag doll.

That same summer, I’d grown three inches and had been in the sun playing sports all day, making friends, doing fun shit, and having a ball.

“How was your summer?” she asked me first thing.

“Best summer of my life. And you?” I asked.

She laughed. Addison liked dark jokes. “Yeah, same,” she said. And then we both kind of cracked up, and I gave her a hug, but underneath the joking, shit, I felt really bad for her.

DR. EVELYN TUTTNAUER: Addison was in my care all that next year. In her regular therapy sessions with me, she revealed a tendency toward depression, punctuated with manic episodes where she produced a great deal of artwork. There were additional but rare hallucinatory incidents, for which I’d prescribed the anti-psychotic Zyprexa. She always called it Z.

While Addison had self-destructive impulses, I wouldn’t say she was ruled by them. When she was stable, I’d have described her as an ambitious, energetic, dramatic, and passionate young woman. Very giving, too: of advice, of her time, of actual gifts. She’d once taken off her own scarf and wrapped it around my neck and said, “Keep it, Doc. You look great in lilac.” When she felt good, she wanted others to feel good. She was nurturing. Ironically, she preferred the role of therapist to patient.

When Addison moved to New York, my colleague Roland Jones, who is an attending at Weill Cornell, began to see her three times a week. In-person visits trump phone-ins, always. You can learn a lot more about a patient by eyeballing them. And when it came to discussing Addison’s case, Roland and I were in a constant feedback loop. She was in both of our care.

LUCY LIM: Look, my parents have split custody of me. Split custody can be a crap sandwich, but the ’rents try to make it work. Addy’s family was the opposite—semi-okay on the surface, but uncover the lid, and it’s a boil-over of resentment between two people who shouldn’t even be sitting in the same room together, let alone married.

It was me and Mom who cared for Addison after Glencoe. She didn’t want to go back home. At my house, she had her own room, food in the fridge, peace and quiet. In the beginning, Addy’s doctors were trying her out on different levels of Z, turning up and down the knobs and dials of her brain, which she said made her feel like a human guinea pig. So she was pretty out of it, tired, overwhelmed, distant, and she took these long naps—usually conked out on my bed.

At first, Addy post-attempt-and-new-on-Z was an adjustment. Those scars were downright freaky. She was always the girl in the long sleeves on a hot day. The girl staring out the window, the girl a little spaced and not raising her hand. But eventually, she evened out, and her art began kicking some serious ass.

Addison taking one of her many naps in Lucy Lim’s bed, courtesy of Lucy Lim.

Our SKpades Student “Spotlight ON” interview this week is spotlighting Addison Stone! Everyone knows Addison, a long drink of a junior who has been taking over a lot of the art room this year. We caught up with her at Fieldbender Central to get the scoop.

Detail from Cave of Faces by Addison Stone.

SKpades: Addison, talk to SKpades about your personal style.

Addison Stone: Apathetic?

SKpades: Ha. That’s untrue! You bring it. Examps, people love your T-shirts. You should sell them. Have you ever wanted to get into the fashion industry?

AS: Designing clothes isn’t my thing anymore.

SKpades: Oookay, then explain this ginormzee painting? Everyone is talking about it.