A Cure for Madness by Jodi McIsaac Page A

screaming kettle from the burner and poured the boiling water into two mugs of sugary powder, adding some milk from the fridge to cool it off. I dug around in the pantry and found a bag of mini marshmallows. The ones in the mix were never enough. They were hard as rocks, but the hot chocolate would soften them up.
    “Remember when we used to sit here at night after Mom and Dad went to bed?” I asked. I handed him his mug and sat down at the table.
    “Yeah. I’m glad you remember.”
    Of course I remembered. It had been back in that strange phase when I’d thought everything was normal—or, at least, that every family was like ours. At the time we’d thought Wes was just a screw-up. We’d known so little about mental illness and had never thought it would rear its head in our family.
    He’d been doing drugs and living on the street half the time. His mood swings had been wild and often violent, and you’d never know what version of him you were going to get. In desperation, our mother had forbidden Wes and me from speaking to each other; she was worried his behavior would rub off on me.
    Or maybe she’d wanted to protect me. I traced the grain of the table with my finger. Whatever her motivation, it had only made us more determined to see each other. So we would sneak downstairs at midnight, drink hot chocolate heaped with mini marshmallows, and talk about absolutely nothing. More often than not, Wes had been stoned or high. Acid had been his drug of choice back then, and he’d dropped it more than once a day. I’d make faces at him from across the table while he was tripping and then giggle when he freaked out, seeing God knows what in my expressions.
    So stupid. So naïve . I’d had no idea that what he was doing would help destroy him, damaging us all in the process.
    “So what’s up?” I asked again.
    “I want to talk to you about why you left,” he said, his stained fingers gripping his cup.
    Not now. Not this.
    “When?” I asked, feigning ignorance. “Yesterday at the hospital?”
    “No,” he said. “You know when.”
    “Oh.”
    “When you left for London.”
    “I don’t want to talk about that right now, Wes. It’s just . . . too much, with everything else.”
    “You never want to talk about it. And if you’re taking off in a few days, we need to talk now .”
    “You know why I left.”
    “Not really.”
    “C’mon, Wes, that was nine years ago. You couldn’t expect me to stay here forever.”
    He let go of his mug and grabbed my hands. I tried to pull back, but his grip was as tight as ever. “Clare. They’d locked me up. You knew it wasn’t right.”
    “There was nothing I could do. I tried.”
    “Did you?”
    I yanked my hands away and stood up. “Jesus Christ, Wes! And no, I’m not going to apologize for swearing. You know what happened. What did you expect me to do? I just wanted to get away from this shit hole of a town, and that was my chance! Did you want me to stay around here for the rest of my life so I could baby you and make excuses for you, like Mom and Dad always did? Is that what you wanted?”
    He ignored this. “You never told your boyfriend Kenneth what happened, did you?”
    “He wasn’t my boyfriend. And what the hell does that have to do with anything?”
    “How come you never told him?”
    “Because I didn’t need one more person who didn’t believe me.”
    “ I believed you. And then you left me to fend for myself.”
    “I did no such thing. You were well cared for. You know that.”
    “Well cared for? Are you fucking crazy? You don’t know what it’s like in there, with them watching your every move and force-feeding you pills you never agreed to take. Doctors poking you whenever and wherever they want. I was a fucking lab rat.”
    “You were sick. You needed help.”
    “I needed you .”
    “I was twenty-two. I deserved to have a life. I still do.” My jaw was clenched so hard it was starting to ache. The pressure behind my temples was