Ask Again, Yes

More than six years after being committed, Anne is recommended for release to a halfway house. She moves to a facility in Saratoga, where she will stay for a year under the care of young doctor who uses their sessions to explore Anne’s past. Off medication, she feels more stable and more confident. She no longer feels apart from her past. She wonders if despite all the conflicting diagnoses she received during her stay (paranoia, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder) maybe her problem was far simpler: Maybe she never recovered from the trauma of the stillborn baby or maybe, she thinks darkly, she is “very, very mean” (207). 

Anne takes a job, for which she is overqualified, at a nearby assisted living facility. Although happy at work, she still replays the night of the shooting. She remembers that she took a sleeping pill. She remembers a fight with Brian, when she confronted him about wanting to move out to abandon her and Peter (he’d squirreled away travel brochures from South Carolina). She remembers moving a chair to reach the gun from the kitchen cabinet. She cannot figure out why her husband went upstairs and left her there in her rage.