Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel by Maria Semple Page B

anxiety.”
    Xanax, I had! Bee’s battalion of doctors had always sent me home with Xanax or some sleeping pill. (Have I mentioned? I don’t sleep.) I never took them, because the one time I did, they left me nauseous and not feeling like myself. (I know, that should have been a selling point. What can I say? I’ve grown accustomed.) But the problem withthe Xanax and the hundreds of other pills I had squirreled away was this: they were currently jumbled together in a Ziploc bag. Why? Well, once, I was thinking about OD’ing, so I dumped the contents of every prescription bottle into my two hands—they didn’t even fit, that’s how many I had—just to eyeball to see if I could swallow them all. But then I cooled off on the whole idea and dumped the pills in a baggie, where they languish to this day. Why did I want to OD? you’re probably wondering. Well, so am I! I don’t even remember.
    “Do you have some kind of laminated chart of what the pills look like?” I asked the pharmacist. My thinking was, maybe I could figure out which ones were Xanax and return them to their proper container. The poor guy looked baffled. Who can blame him?
    “Fine,” I said. “Give me the Xanax and that patch thing.”
    I removed myself to the brocade couch. It was murderously uncomfortable. I put my leg up and leaned back. That was more like it. It was a fainting couch, I now realized, and wanted to be lain upon. Hovering over me was the Chihuly chandelier. Chihulys are the pigeons of Seattle. They’re everywhere, and even if they don’t get in your way, you can’t help but build up a kind of antipathy toward them.
    This one was all glass, of course, white and ruffly and full of dripping tentacles. It glowed from within, a cold blue, but with no discernible light source. The rain outside was pounding. Its rhythmic splatter only made this hovering glass beast more haunting, as if it had arrived with the storm, a rainmaker itself. It sang to me, Chihuly… Chihuly. In the seventies, Dale Chihuly was already a distinguished glassblower when he got into a car accident and lost an eye. But that didn’t stop him. A few years later, he had a surfing mishap and messed up his shoulder so badly that he was never able to hold a glass pipe again. That didn’t stop him, either. Don’t believe me? Take a boat out on Lake Union and look in the window of Dale Chihuly’s studio. He’s probably there now,with his eye patch and dead arm, doing the best, trippiest work of his life. I had to close my eyes.
    “Bernadette?” said a voice.
    I opened my eyes. I had fallen asleep. This is the problem with never sleeping. Sometimes you actually do, at the worst times: like this time: in public.
    “Bernadette?” It was Elgie. “What are you doing asleep in here?”
    “Elgie—” I wiped the drool off my cheek. “They wouldn’t give me Haldol, so I have to wait for Xanax.”
    “What?”
He glanced out the window. Standing on the street were some Microsoft people I vaguely recognized. “What are you wearing?”
    He was referring to my fishing vest. “Oh, this. I got it from the Internet.”
    “Could you please stand up?” he said. “I have a lunch. Do I need to cancel it?”
    “God, no!” I said. “I’m fine. I didn’t sleep last night and just dozed off. Go, do, be.”
    “I’m going to come home for dinner. Can we go out to dinner tonight?”
    “Aren’t you going to D.C.—”
    “It can wait,” he said.
    “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Buzz and I will pick a place.”
    “Just me and you.” He left.
    And this is when it began to unravel: I could swear one of the people waiting for him outside was a gnat from Galer Street. Not the one who’s hassling us about the blackberries, but one of her flying monkeys. I blinked to make sure. But Elgie and his group had been absorbed into the lunch rush.
    My heart was really thumping. I should have stayed and popped one of those Xanax. But I couldn’t stand to be in that compound pharmacy