“Your father’s been released.”

In media res…

When I was sixteen, I took too much acid one time while my parents were still pretending to be together and they had thrown this huge party at the house on River Lane.

It took them a while to find me.

Long enough for them to have made a drunken game out of it. A joke. And I was the punchline.

It was winter. They crept up on me like ghouls and when I panicked they laughed. As if they had done nothing wrong. As if the white stretcher from five years ago didn’t still haunt me.

They crept up on me in their top coats and hats and gloves and furs and shiny black shoes and boots wielding martini glasses ordained with olives, oranges, lemon twists.

None of it felt right. None of it. Not the party, not them, not the house, not the woods. Even the river ran spooky and this was Christmas, not Halloween. My father had just been released from his stay-away at the nuthouse and I guess managed to trick everyone into believing he was normal because they didn’t diagnose him with anything, despite my mother’s “concerns” about schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Honestly, I think she just wanted him medicated, treated, fixed, then locked away in a box she would never have to open again.