Nora, June, and the Yellow Wall
* This story is dedicated to those who know the gray, and to those who stand beside them. You know who you are. May each of you have a June in your life, or be one.
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On the ninth day, Nora made it as far as the kitchen table.
That was something. She knew it was something, in the flat, faraway way she knew everything during the gray times. Yesterday she had not made it out of bed at all. Today she had gotten up, pulled on the oversized white T-shirt she had been wearing for three days, pushed her hair up into a knot without brushing it, and walked the eleven steps from the bedroom to the kitchen.
Then she had sat down at the table, folded her hands, rested her forehead against them, and stopped.
She had been sitting like that for an hour. Maybe two. Time went strange in the gray. It didn’t move so much as pool around her, thick and heavy, like water in a basement.
People who had never been there thought depression was sadness. Nora had tried to explain it to people, back when she still bothered trying. It was not sadness. Sadness had color, at least. Sadness had a shape you could hold. This was something else: a slow draining-out of everything, until the world looked like a pencil sketch of itself. All outlines and gray shading. Nothing filled in. Nothing that mattered. Even the thought of lifting her head felt like being asked to lift a car.
She was twenty-nine years old. She had bipolar disorder. It had been nine years since the diagnosis, and she knew all the words for what was happening to her now. Depressive episode. Anhedonia. Psychomotor slowing. She knew she had a psychiatrist, a good one, and medication that worked most of the time, and an appointment on Thursday. She knew this would pass. It had always passed before.
Knowing didn’t help, while you were in it. That was the cruelest part.
She heard the key in the lock.
She didn’t lift her head. She didn’t need to. Only one other person in the world had a key to this apartment, and only one person would come in without knocking, and only one person would say, in the same cheerful voice she used for everything, “Morning, sunshine. I brought the good bagels.”
June.
Nora heard the paper bag set down on the counter. The creak of the cabinet. The hiss of the kettle being filled. June didn’t ask how she was. She had stopped asking that years ago, because she already knew, and because the question only made Nora feel like she had to come up with an answer.
Instead, June pulled out the chair beside her and sat down, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, and said nothing at all.
That was June’s gift. She knew how to be quiet with you.
They had met at nineteen, freshman year, assigned as roommates in a cinderblock dorm room so small that they could hold hands across the gap between their beds. Which, on the worst nights that first winter, they sometimes did.
Nora had been the bright one, then. Or so everyone thought. She was the girl who stayed up all night writing papers that her professors read aloud in class. The girl who talked fast and laughed loud and joined five clubs and dyed her hair blue on a dare. She would go weeks barely sleeping, buzzing with ideas, spending her whole loan check on art supplies and impulsive bus tickets to cities she had never seen.
And then, every few months, the lights would go out.
She would stop going to class. Stop answering her phone. Stop showering. She would lie in bed for days, staring at the cinderblock wall, unable to explain why. The friends who had loved the bright girl did not know what to do with the gray one. They would knock a few times. Leave a note. Then they would drift away, the way people do, uncomfortable, a little hurt, assuming she didn’t want them.
June didn’t drift.
June was a painting major, a short, round, freckled girl from Ohio with yellow paint permanently under her fingernails. She did not know anything about mental illness. But she knew how to sit on the floor beside a bed and keep someone company. She brought Nora soup. She brought Nora her class notes, copied out in her loopy handwriting. And it was June, finally, in the spring of their sophomore year, who sat with her in the waiting room of the campus health center, holding her hand, the day a doctor first said the words bipolar disorder.
Nora had cried in the car afterward. Not from sadness. From relief. It had a name. It wasn’t that she was lazy, or broken, or weak. It had a name.
“Okay,” June had said, gripping the steering wheel. “Okay. So now we know what we’re dealing with.”
We. Nora had noticed that. She had never forgotten it.
The yellow wall came later.
It was the first apartment Nora rented on her own, after college. A small, dim place with gray carpet and gray countertops and a window that looked out onto the gray brick of the building next door. During her first episode there, June had let herself in, looked around, and said, “Absolutely not.”
She had come back that afternoon with a gallon of paint and a roller.
She didn’t ask permission. She just painted one wall of the kitchen, the one behind the table, the brightest, loudest, most cheerful yellow Nora had ever seen. She wasn’t neat about it. She splashed it, and dripped it, and left big wild brushstrokes at the edges where it ran out. When she finished, she stood back with yellow paint on her nose and said, “There. Now there’s always one thing in this room that isn’t gray.”
Nora had moved apartments twice since then. Both times, June had shown up on the first day with a gallon of yellow paint.
Nora lifted her head now, a little, just enough to see it. The yellow wall. Bright and messy, behind her shoulder, exactly where it was supposed to be.
Then she looked down at her own left wrist, resting on the table.
Eleven black bangles. Thin, shiny, stacked one on top of another.
That had been June’s idea too. After Nora came through her first bad winter, the one in the dorm, June had given her a single black bangle from a thrift store. “For making it through,” she had said, a little embarrassed. And then after the next episode, another one. And another. Nine years. Eleven times Nora had come up out of the gray. Eleven times June had been waiting with a bangle when she did.
Nora wore them every day. On the bad days, she counted them.
The kettle began to whistle.
June got up and made two cups of tea and put one in front of Nora, close to her hands, and sat back down. She didn’t push. She just took a bagel out of the bag, tore it in half, and set the bigger piece on a napkin beside Nora’s elbow.
“You don’t have to eat it,” she said. “It’s just there if you want it.”
Nora closed her eyes again, and rested her head on her folded hands, and did not reach for the bagel.
But she did not ask June to leave, either.
They sat like that for a long time. June drank her tea and scrolled through her phone and occasionally read something funny out loud, not expecting a response. The refrigerator hummed. A bus went by outside. The light moved slowly across the yellow wall.
After a while, June set her phone down.
“Nor,” she said, in a different voice. Quieter. “I have to ask you the question.”
Nora knew which question. They had a plan, the two of them, worked out years ago with Nora’s psychiatrist, on a good day, when Nora could think clearly. June would always ask, plainly, without dancing around it. And Nora would always answer honestly. And if the answer was ever no, June would drive her to the hospital, and Nora had promised, on that good day, not to argue.
It had happened once. Four years ago. Nora had not argued. She was still here because of it.
“Are you safe?” June asked.
Nora took a breath. It felt like breathing through wet cloth. But she checked, honestly, the way she had promised to.
“Yeah,” she said. Her voice came out rusty from not being used. “Just heavy. Not that.”
June let out a long breath and nodded. “Okay. Good.” Then, briskly, as if they were discussing the weather: “And Dr. Abrams is Thursday?”
“Thursday.”
“I’ll drive you.”
Nora was quiet for a long moment. Then she said the thing she always said, somewhere around the ninth or tenth day. The thing the gray always whispered to her.
“You don’t have to keep doing this, you know.”
June didn’t look up from her tea. “Mm-hm.”
“I mean it. Nine years, Junie. You have a life. You have Marcus, and your gallery show, and—” Her throat tightened. “I’m a lot. I know I’m a lot. Everyone else figured it out a long time ago.”
June set her cup down.
“Hey,” she said. “Look at me.”
It took effort. A great deal of effort. But Nora turned her head on her folded hands, and opened her eyes, and looked.
“Three years ago,” June said, “when my dad died. Who drove nine hours to Ohio in the middle of the night?”
Nora said nothing.
“Who slept on my mom’s couch for two weeks? Who dealt with the funeral home when I couldn’t stop crying long enough to talk to them? Who answered the door for every single casserole?” June’s voice wobbled a little. “Who sat on the floor of my old bedroom with me, at three in the morning, and didn’t say anything, and didn’t try to fix it, and just stayed?”
“That was different.”
“It wasn’t, though.” June reached out and laid her hand over Nora’s, over the stack of black bangles. “You don’t get to be my best friend only on your good days, Nor. That’s not how this works. I don’t love the bright girl from freshman year, or the sad girl at this table. I love you. All of it. The whole weird, wonderful, exhausting package.” She squeezed. “And I’m not going anywhere. So you can stop asking.”
Nora closed her eyes. Something hot and wet slid out from under her lashes and down her cheek.
It was the first thing she had felt in nine days.
June got up after a while and came around behind her chair. She pulled the elastic out of Nora’s tangled knot of hair, very gently, and began to brush it out with her fingers, slowly, working through the snarls the way you would for a child. When it was smooth, she gathered it back up into a neat bun. Then she took the wide white headband off her own head, the same one she had worn since college, stretched and soft with age, and slid it onto Nora’s.
“There,” she said. “Now you look like a person who might eat half a bagel.”
Nora made a sound that was almost, almost a laugh.
She ate a quarter of the bagel. It tasted like cardboard. But she ate it.
It didn’t lift all at once. It never did. People who had never been there imagined the gray breaking like a fever, all at once, in a single dramatic morning. It wasn’t like that. It was slower. Quieter. A tide going out so gradually that you only noticed when you looked down and saw sand where the water used to be.
On Thursday, June drove her to Dr. Abrams, and waited in the car, and Dr. Abrams adjusted her medication. On Friday, Nora showered. On Sunday, she answered a text from her mother. On Tuesday, June came with bagels again, and Nora ate a whole half. Two weeks later, she went for a walk around the block, and noticed that the trees on her street had leaves on them, and could not remember when that had happened.
And one morning, almost a month after the ninth day, she woke up and the world had color in it again.
Not all at once. Not loudly. But the coffee smelled like coffee. The light coming through the window was warm. And when she walked into the kitchen, the yellow wall seemed to glow, so bright and wild and messy it almost hurt her eyes, and she stood in front of it in her bare feet and simply looked at it for a long time.
When June let herself in that afternoon, Nora was sitting at the kitchen table, with her hair brushed and the white headband on and a pot of coffee already made. She had even set out two mugs.
June stopped in the doorway. She looked at the coffee. Then at Nora. Then, slowly, a grin spread across her freckled face.
“Well, look at you.”
“Hi, Junie.”
June didn’t say anything else. She just dug in the pocket of her paint-stained jacket and pulled out a small paper bag from the thrift store on Fifth Street. She set it on the table between them.
Nora opened it. Inside was a thin, shiny black bangle.
She slid it onto her wrist, on top of the other eleven, and they clinked softly together.
Twelve.
“It’ll happen again,” Nora said quietly, turning the stack on her wrist. “You know it will. Maybe in a few months. Maybe a year. But it’ll come back.”
“I know,” said June, and poured herself some coffee.
“And you’ll…”
“I’ll bring the good bagels,” said June. “And the paint, if you move again. And the bangles.” She took a sip. “I’m going to need to find a bigger thrift store, honestly. You’re running out of arm.”
And Nora laughed. A real one, loud and surprised, the kind that used to get her in trouble in the library freshman year. It bounced off the walls of the little kitchen and rang against the bright yellow paint, and June laughed too, and for a while neither of them could stop.
The gray would come back someday. They both knew it.
But so would June. With a key, and a paper bag, and a gallon of yellow paint.
She always had. She always would.
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