The Lie of Mental Illness

Three years after being institutionalized, my psychiatrist husband Chad finally brought me homeonly to find Mary and their son living there.

When are you telling her about the divorce? Mary asked.

Not yet. I dont want to trigger a relapse, Chad muttered, avoiding my gaze as he hugged her.

Hidden in the hall, I listened until numbness set in. Entering the master bedroom, I found unfamiliar furniture and a huge family portrait above the bed. A bitter laugh escaped me.

From beneath the overturned oak wardrobe came faint whimpers. A tiny, bloodied hand clawed through the gap. I threw my weight against the wardrobe, but it wouldnt move.

Chad! Your sons trapped! I screamed, grabbing his arm.

Mary shoved me back, eyes blazing. My sons safely locked in the playroom! Stay away from him! She slammed the bedroom door shut, locking it.

Chad sighed, offering two small white pills. Take these, Harper. Theyll stop the hallucinations.

Staring at the pills, cold confusion washed over me. Was the blood real? Was I imagining everything?

I just hope you dont regret this, I whispered.

"Chad! I told you not to bring this psycho back into our house!"

Mary was screaming hysterically, violently smashing vases and picture frames across the living room floor. "Are you trying to drive our entire family insane?!"

My eyes were totally empty as I stood on the second-floor landing, staring down at Chad's exhausted profile.

He lowered his voice, trying to soothe her. "Mary, please stop. Harper has nowhere else to go. This is technically her house too."

Mary let out a shrill, mocking laugh. "This is the home of our family of three!"

"Did you forget how she grabbed a knife and plunged it into her own stomach, butchering her own baby?!"

"Harper is a complete lunatic! If you let her stay, she is going to murder our son one day!"

I froze. My hands curled into tight fists, my fingernails biting so deeply into my palms that they broke the skin.

Baby?

My baby...

A violent surge of adrenaline exploded in my chest. I rushed down the stairs, lunged forward, and slapped Mary entirely across the face. I glared at her, my eyes filled with absolute, murderous rage.

"Ahhhh!!!"

"Harper, you psycho! Are you trying to kill me?!"

Mary clutched her swelling, bright red cheek and scrambled behind Chad, cowering like a terrified animal.

"It was you."

I stared dead into Mary's eyes. "It was you. You were the one who drove that knife into my stomach!"

I whipped my head toward Chad. "You saw it too! Didn't you?!"

The air in the room froze solid.

Both Chad and Mary completely stiffened.

A second later, Mary's face twisted into an ugly, panicked snarl, like a cat whose tail had just been stomped on.

"You hear that?! She isn't cured at all! She is exactly the same crazy b*tch she was three years ago!"

Mary pointed a shaking finger directly at my face. "You are a monster! You butchered your own child, and now you are trying to frame me for it!"

My emotions spiraled entirely out of control. I screamed back at her, my voice raw and tearing. "I didn't! I never hurt my baby!"

That tiny life I had never even gotten to meet. The baby I still dreamed about every single night. Mary had taken a knife and butchered it while I watched.

All the blood drained from Mary's face, but then it flushed crimson with anger. "Chad, look at her! She is having another psychotic break! I told you she wasn't fixed!"

"If you let her stay in this house, I am packing up our son and leaving!"

Chad wrapped his arms tightly around Mary, gently rubbing her back to calm her down.

Then, he turned and looked at me. His brow furrowed deeply, his eyes swirling with a complicated mix of pity and exhaustion. "Harper, you suffered a severe dissociative psychotic episode that day. You were the one who..."

He reached into his pocket, pulled out two fresh pills, and gently patted the top of my head like I was a sick dog. "Just take the medicine. It's all in the past now."

"Don't blame yourself. You were sick. But you definitely can't blame Mary either."

I started to laugh. I laughed so hard that tears spilled over my eyelashes and burned my cheeks.

I looked at the pills in his palm and pushed his hand away. "You literally gave me my medication five minutes ago."

I wasn't crazy. I remembered that day with absolute, terrifying clarity.

Mary, Chad's clinical assistant, had gripped the handle of that knife. She had stroked her own flat stomach, looking down at me with a sickening, triumphant smirk.

"I'm pregnant with Chad's baby."

"Harper, you must be exhausted. I had a room set up for you."

Chad guided me down the hall and pushed open the door to a tiny guest room. "I didn't touch any of your things. Everything is right here."

He looked at me, his expression suddenly stern. "You need to behave. If you cause trouble, I will have no choice but to send you back to the ward."

Without waiting for a response, he quickly stepped out of the room and closed the door. He was probably rushing back downstairs to comfort Mary.

I looked around the tiny space. It used to be a storage closet. It was so small it could barely fit a twin bed, and there wasn't a single window to let the sunlight in.

All of my belongings were shoved into a single, massive cardboard box in the corner. It was taped shut so tightly it looked like a coffin.

I ripped the tape open. Inside were all the things I had bought when I was pregnant. Parenting books. Fairy tale collections. The tiny onesies and little shoes Chad and I had picked out together.

And right at the bottom, tossed aside and buried under a thick layer of dust, was our framed wedding photo.

Tears fell off my chin, splashing onto the glass and blurring our smiling faces.

Through my tears, I couldn't stop laughing.

Chad. We weren't even officially divorced yet, but you were already living with another woman like husband and wife. You even raised a son with her.

Were me and my dead baby just a sick joke to you?

I carried a genetic predisposition for severe mental illness. When I was in college, the psychological torment became too much for my mother, and she took her own life.

It was Chad who grabbed my hand and pulled me out of that suffocating darkness. He literally changed his major and studied psychiatry specifically to save me.

He promised he would stay by my side forever. He promised he would protect me from ever having an episode. And he promised that even if I did get sick, he wouldn't be afraid. He would cure me.

We fell in love. We got married. And then, I got pregnant.

During my pregnancy, my hormones wrecked my emotional stability. I started experiencing minor, terrifying auditory and visual hallucinations.

Chad's private practice was booming, and he couldn't stay home with me. So, he brought his clinical assistant, Mary, to live in our house and take care of me.

Slowly, I started noticing things. The lingering glances. The flirty, hushed conversations. The undeniable, sickening intimacy between them.

The heavy psychiatric medication Chad prescribed made me chronically drowsy.

But one night, I woke up early. I walked out to the living room and saw Mary sitting squarely on Chad's lap. Her arms were wrapped around his neck, and she was giggling uncontrollably.

"What the hell are you doing?!"

Chad scrambled up, terrified. He rushed over and wrapped me in a tight hug. "Harper, relax! Mary was just giving me a clinical update. Don't let your paranoia take over."

"There is a hickey on her collarbone."

He pinched my cheek, offering a helpless, patient smile. "You silly girl. You are hallucinating again."

I violently shoved him away, my emotions spiraling. "Chad, I am looking right at you! You are constantly holding her, constantly flirting with her! Do you think I am completely blind?!"

A cold needle pierced my arm as Mary pushed a heavy sedative into my vein. Her voice was sickeningly soft. "Harper, Dr. Montgomery and I are just colleagues."

My tongue felt thick. "Really?"

"Yes. Just close your eyes and go to sleep. You will feel better when you wake up."

After that night, my "symptoms" escalated rapidly.

I saw Mary dumping white powder into my nightly glass of milk. Chad swore it was just a prenatal calcium supplement.

I heard a baby crying in the empty nursery in the middle of the night. Chad told me it was just the neighbor's cat in the alley.

And then came the night I supposedly grabbed a kitchen knife, walked into Mary's bedroom, and nearly plunged it into her heart.

"Harper, you were sleepwalking again."

Chad was carefully bandaging a deep cut on my hand, his eyes incredibly tired. "Last night, you stood over Mary's bed holding a butcher knife. You absolutely terrified her."

"Your condition is deteriorating rapidly."

He gently stroked my hair. "We need to increase your dosage, okay?"

I stared into his bloodshot eyes, suddenly unable to tell who was actually sick.

Was it me? Or was the entire world losing its mind?

The agonizing inability to separate reality from hallucination absolutely shattered me.

I started self-harming. I took razor blades and sliced into my own arms, just to feel something real. Because the physical pain was so much easier to process than the psychological torture.

Chad started looking at me with undisguised exhaustion.

Until the day Mary walked into the living room and explicitly told me she was pregnant with Chad's baby.

My eyes were totally hollow. I backed away, whispering frantically. "No. No, it isn't real. You are a hallucination. Get away from me!"

Mary stepped forward, backing me into a corner.

Her cold, venomous voice drilled directly into my skull. "Chad stopped loving you a long time ago."

"Look at yourself, Harper. Your hair is falling out. You look like a corpse. You are constantly screaming about conspiracies. What kind of man could possibly tolerate a freak like you?"

"You should do everyone a favor and kill yourself, just like your crazy mother did!"

Every single word she said precisely snapped the fragile, terrified strings holding my sanity together.

I lunged forward, desperate to tear her face off. Mary smiled a triumphant, evil smile.

She violently shoved the handle of a kitchen knife into my hand. Before I could process what was happening, she forced my own hand backward. The blade tore through my skin, sinking deep into my pregnant belly. Hot, thick blood poured out of me, soaking my clothes.

The physical connection between a mother and child is absolute. The agony ripped my soul apart.

I looked toward the crack in the study door. I saw a pair of eyes watching me. I begged for help.

The excruciating pain swallowed me whole. My knees buckled, and the world violently spun out of control.

Through the haze, I swear I saw my baby grow tiny wings, crying softly as it floated up toward the ceiling.

Mary started screaming at the top of her lungs. "Harper, no! Stop hurting yourself! Your baby is in there!"

"Harper!"

Chad threw open the study door and sprinted into the room. He scooped my bleeding body into his arms, a look of pure, horrified devastation on his face.

Mary dropped to her knees, sobbing hysterically. "Chad, I tried to stop her! She just grabbed the knife and stabbed herself..."

"She... she has completely lost her mind."

When I finally woke up, I was strapped to a bed in a psychiatric ward. My stomach was totally flat.

That "treatment" lasted for three excruciating years.

"Bang!"

Just as my fingers brushed against a rusted key inside the cardboard box, the door to my tiny room was violently kicked open.

Mary lunged inside. She grabbed a fistful of my hair and brutally dragged me out of the room and toward the stairs.

"Harper, you psychotic b*tch! How dare you hurt my son?!"

A tearing agony ripped across my scalp. I lost one of my slippers, my bare foot violently slamming against the wooden stairs, leaving dark purple bruises across my skin.

Chad was sitting in the living room, reviewing patient files. Hearing the screaming, he snapped his head up. His face went totally pale.

"Mary! What the hell are you doing?!"

Mary threw me onto the hardwood floor and shoved her phone directly into Chad's face. "Look! Look at what this psycho did to our son!"

On the screen was a photo of a terrified little boy. There was a glaring, red handprint across his cheek, and his tiny arms and legs were covered in jagged, bloody scratches.

Chad sucked in a sharp breath. He slowly turned his head to look at me, his face turning black with fury.

"It wasn't me!"

I pushed myself up onto my elbows, desperate. "I swear! I just saw a child pinned under the wardrobe! His little hand was reaching out, trying to scratch at the wood. His fingernails were completely peeled off..."

"Stop lying!" Mary shrieked. "You disgusting freak! You smashed the lock, broke into his playroom, and tortured my son!"

"I am going to kill you!"

Mary raised her hand and slapped me across the face again. This time, Chad didn't even try to stop her.

My cheek burned like fire. A high-pitched ringing echoed in my ears.

"Harper! I bring you back to this house out of pity, and you are trying to drive us all insane?!"

The very last trace of warmth in Chad's eyes completely vanished.

Mary collapsed against the sofa, sobbing violently. "Chad, this time she just tortured him. What about next time?"

"Next time, she is going to murder all three of us in our sleep!"

"This is exactly what psychopaths do! You are a doctor, you know this better than anyone!"

Chad closed his eyes, taking a long, deep breath.

When he opened them again, there was nothing left but overwhelming disgust and total exhaustion.

"You need to go back to the hospital. You can't stay here."

"I am telling you the truth!"

I lunged forward and grabbed his forearm. "Go upstairs and look in the master bedroom! Go look under the wardrobe! That poor baby..."

"Enough!"

Chad violently threw my arm off of him. The force sent me crashing backward into the glass coffee table.

The table shattered into pieces. Jagged shards of glass sliced into the palms of my hands. Thick drops of blood fell onto the floor. Drip. Drip.

"I am done."

Chad stared at my bleeding hands. A microscopic flash of guilt crossed his eyes, but it was immediately swallowed by sheer exhaustion.

"You are never going to get better. And I... I am so incredibly tired, Harper."

His voice dropped to a cold, dead whisper. "Maybe the path your mother took is the only way you will ever find peace."

Boom.

It felt like a bomb went off inside my skull. All the blood drained from my face. It felt like every single bone in my body had just been crushed into powder.

Then, like a complete lunatic, I started to laugh.

"You don't have to call them. I will leave myself."

The man who promised to spend the rest of his life protecting me, the man who swore he would never let me end up like my motherhe was dead.

No. He had been dead for years. I was just too pathetic to realize it.

I dragged myself off the floor, walked back to the tiny storage room, and picked up the rusted key.

It was the key to my late mother's apartment. I wasn't completely homeless, despite what Chad wanted to believe.

Then, I reached into the box, pulled out the yellowing divorce agreement Chad had drafted a year ago, and signed my name.

I dragged the final stroke of the pen out long and hard, severing every last tie to my past.

When I walked back downstairs, Chad was standing at the bottom of the steps, watching me.

We stared at each other in total, suffocating silence. Neither of us said a word.

Outside, a taxi honked its horn impatiently.

It was time to go.

As I walked out the front door, he followed me all the way to the cab.

"Harper..."

Chad's eyes were a chaotic storm of emotion. Conflict. Guilt. Exhaustion.

"I can drive you."

"No."

I turned around and took one final look at the house we had shared for years. A single tear slipped down my cheek.

"Here is the key to your house. And the divorce papers are signed."

"From this second forward, we owe each other absolutely nothing."

Chad stared at the key and the papers in my hand. He didn't take them.

His voice was thick and raspy. "Just focus on getting your treatment. Once you are stabilized, we can talk about the divorce."

"Promise me you won't do anything stupid. Just go back to the ward and let them help you."

In that exact moment, a strange, suffocating sense of panic suddenly gripped Chad's chest.

"I am done with treatment." I smiled softly. "If I am crazy, then I am crazy."

"But you really should go check on the kid pinned under the wardrobe in the master bedroom."

"I know the hospital director told you I was stabilized, but consider it peace of mind."

Chad's entire body went rigid. The panic in his chest spiked, and he instinctively looked up toward the window of the master bedroom.

I turned around, opened the door of the cab, and slid into the back seat.

As the car slowly pulled away from the curb and merged into traffic, I didn't look back once.

"Ahhhhhhh!!!!!"

An agonizing, blood-curdling scream erupted from the second floor of the house.

Mary burst through the doors onto the second-floor balcony, stumbling and collapsing against the railing. Clutched in her arms was the crushed, lifeless, brutally mangled body of a small child.

"My baby... my baby... she murdered our baby!!!"

"Chad! Stop her! Harper is a murderer!"