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depression. We hadn’t known it was even possible to stay six weeks in a hospital. It was way too long and while she wasn’t getting better, she was deemed stable enough. On Thursday we packed Lisa’s stuff into paper grocery bags. She hugged the cherubic resident doctor and a couple of the nicer nurses, and got one mile of fresh air as we drove to the new center of our hopes, a cozy, community-based halfway house where she would live for at least the next six weeks. They would have to be better weeks.
    Eventually, yes, they would be, but that morning Lisa called 911. She told the dispatcher she had eaten liquid soap and said she felt dead. Two Palo Alto Police Department cruisers, a fire truck, and an ambulance raced to the group home, a place I’ll call La Casa, a Tudor-style thirties-era house on a quiet residential street, and took my stunned daughter away in handcuffs. Metal handcuffs. This is police procedure for anyone who’s “a danger to him- or herself.”
    When the officers had appeared at the door, Lisa was stunned. She told them she didn’t really mean it. They were calm but stern. Once a suicidal-sounding call is made, there is no going back.
    The director of the halfway house called me. He was on his way to the hospital to fill out the necessary forms, and he would talk to me there. He, too, sounded calm. This wasn’t all new to him. When he got the call about Lisa’s 911, he was buying vegetables at the farmers’ market, where normal people went on Saturdays. Ned was out of town or he would have been at the farmers’ market, too.
    I put down the phone, wishing I hadn’t picked it up, that the call had been a prank or I’d dreamed it. Two days free of the hospital, and that was that. What next? But this was no time to explore my feelings. I threw some fruit, bread, and cheese into a sack. All I could think was, We’ll have to eat at some point. I wouldn’t leave Lisa even for a few minutes to get a sandwich.
     
    lisa: “I need you to just breathe,” the policewoman called back to me. But I did not want to breathe, I did not want to see, I did not want to believe I was sitting in the back of a police car, handcuffed and heading back to the Stanford Hospital emergency room.
    I had spent two nights at La Casa. I trembled uncontrollably and couldn’t think, but mostly it had gone okay. When I checked in, everyone was just getting back from the offsite day program. We had dinner, watched TV, and went to bed. But the second night, a Friday, most people got to go out after dinner. Being a new resident, I had to stay home to be monitored.
    Another resident, Jeff, was in the house as well. The two of us stayed downstairs, he in the dining room while I sat semipetrified on the couch in the living room. The real world scared me and presented itself full of activity, color, lights, and people after being isolated in a lock-down ward for six weeks. I was now in a new place, around new people, and I was still very sick and feared rejection from my new peers. Ron, on duty as the night staff, read a book in the office and waited for residents to come home and take their nighttime medications.
    I watched as Jeff got some ice cream and then came into the living room and asked me if I wanted some. It was very sweet ice cream: vanilla with birthday cake flavoring. I ate it at the dining room table, and pretty quickly freaked out about how much I’d eaten, so I went up to the bathroom and tried to calm myself down by washing my face but I couldn’t hold back. I stuck two fingers down my throat and made myself throw up, as I had done so many times before. I was used to the taste of vomit, but I also had a soapy taste in my mouth. I realized I must have swallowed some facewash that had remained on my fingers. This freaked me out and I hardly slept at all that night.
    In the morning, after breakfast, I felt like my body wasn’t mine. Maybe it was all the meds I was taking, but my surroundings became hard to