Aripiprazole was the first drug they tried. Sold as Abilify, which sounded friendly, and purposeful, and seemed to promise the only thing Abraham wanted: Ester made able again. Able to laugh when it was the right time to laugh, to talk, to greet him with the old life in her eyes. To sleep through the night and stay awake during the day. Able to tell the difference between a police car that happened to be driving down the street and a government operation to steal her thoughts. Little blue pills, lozenge-shaped, full of power and possibility, imprinted with an identification code that ten years on he still remembered, two boxes of twenty-eight to start with because they might take as long as eight weeks to work. The side effects would come sooner.
Abraham understood all this. A year short of becoming a doctor himself, he had brought Ester back to London and listened to a careful, frowning psychiatrist tell him what he already knew. Drugs were essential. She wouldn’t get better without them. She had too much dopamine racing round her brain and the only thing that would begin to help was to close down some of her receptors, block them off, stop the overload that caused the behaviour. The new drugs were much better than the old drugs, more precise in their action, and while they came at a price they would almost certainly help – unless they didn’t. Abilify might suit one person and not another, and the only way of knowing was to plump for it and see. Wait and see.
How he willed them to work. Prayed as he handed her each blue pill and watched her take it. In Cairo, life had been in balance; Ester worked, he studied, Sofia went to school and was happy. A steady breeze and the sun at their backs. But even on their best days in London, Ester trailed behind, low in the water, her bearings gone, and in a moment the winds that drove her might rise from nowhere and send her tumbling wildly across the waves like a kite cut loose from its string.
She had always read to Sofia, in English, every night; and when she stopped, Abraham thought she must have a flu of some kind, a virus. He told her to rest, not to go to work, and was pleased when she seemed to listen and stayed in bed. But then for three days she didn’t wash, didn’t even clean her teeth – this, the most precise and careful of women. When he came into the room she would raise a hand to dismiss him and shake her head, saying nothing. Viruses can do this, he told himself, they can bring you down, and he squeezed oranges for her and made chicken broth. But she stayed away, far away. For weeks and then months, until it became clear that his prayers had no power. The woman who had pulled him along with her purpose and her stubborn joy about life had simply left – had been taken from him – and on his worst nights Abraham wondered at the God who could dream up such cruelty. If you’re going to take her from me, take her from me. Don’t take her and leave her here to force me to remember.
And all this in London, over a long winter, where the damp settled in his light Egyptian clothes and he was never, ever warm, and Sofia would ask him how long it would be until the sun came out again, and he had no answer for her. They were close then, he and Sofia, weren’t they, constructing their new lives? Ester walked when she was feeling expansive and watched television when she wasn’t, and no matter how much he might want to care for her she simply didn’t need him. This was terrifying in a new way, but it left him time with Sofia, who was terrified too and needed him more.
Christ, she was courageous though, his daughter. He told her what was happening, used the word for it, wished there was a better one, something less scary. Schizophrenia. They couldn’t have made it sound more jagged and alien if they’d tried.
And Sofia listened, asked questions, helped him tidy their new flat – always unbidden – prayed alongside him in church and went to school with the apparent faith of someone who still trusts that adults have solutions for everything. Her mother was ill, and illnesses were things people recovered from. Only at night when she asked him to read her the old books, the picture books, the ones she knew by heart, did she show any sign that her world had crumbled alongside his. Her courage made him feel weak, because he knew she was determined not to add to his burdens. If she could do it, why couldn’t he?