Plot Summary

The story begins on the night Lily decides to kill herself. Mike and the two older children have been gone for a few days. She's alone in the house, giving her the opportunity to commit suicide without being interrupted or subjecting the children to encountering her body. Lily washes down a bowl full of pills with a bottle of vodka, losing consciousness on the living room sofa.


Lily's plan is interrupted by her next door neighbor who becomes suspicious when she cannot reach Lily by phone. Using her spare key she comes into the home and discovers Lily, calling 911.


Lily is taken to the hospital and resuscitated. She wakes to find herself in the hospital and Mike looming over her bedside. He launches into a verbal assault, scolding her for being weak and cowardly. When he begins blaming her once again for Teddy's death Lily tells him to leave. The shouting summons a nurse to the room. Lily tells her that Mike needs to leave and she forbids him from being allowed in her room in the future. Mike stomps out. The nurse shames Lily for refusing to see her husband “when everyone calms down and the two of you can fix these things”. Lily tells her to leave as well.


Two days later Lily is transferred to the Psychiatric Ward. There she meets a motley cast of characters in her fellow patients. It is an environment where Lily finds an acceptance and camaraderie that she's never experienced before. She shows them compassion and they, in return, show her a way of life that embraces living with one's flaws and misbehaving mind.


Lily is assigned a therapist, Sally, and a psychiatrist, Dr. Ingalls. Sally is confined to a wheelchair due to her Multiple Sclerosis and has an assistance dog named Siggy. Dr. Ingalls is an ex-hippie non-conformist whose own wife is suffering from a profound mental illness following the death of their two young children.


Sally and Dr. Ingalls show Lily, through their acceptance of her, how to begin to accept and love herself. They help her find ways to cope with the crushing guilt of Teddy's death as well as the trauma of her childhood. Lily learns a new perspective from which to view her past and the present.


Throughout the present tense telling of Lily's story intermittent chapters describe her flashback visits into the undercurrent. In these chapters, reader's experience Teddy's death and funeral, as well as key memories from her childhood. Those flashbacks allow readers to not only understand Lily's story but to understand the significance of the present time lessons she learns from her interactions with the characters in the psychiatric ward.


Lily is visited in the hospital by her stepson, Steven. Initially quiet and unwilling to speak, he finally shares how heartbroken he is that Lily was so willing to leave him through her suicide. They talk for the first time about the losses in his life, including the pivotal loss of his mother. The two realize they have much in common in their fears of abandonment and loss. Although they have a cursory discussion of Steven's feelings about his Father and the burden of his approval, Steven is unwilling to be disloyal to the one parent he has remaining in his life. But the two forge a fragile bond independent of Mike's influence. For the first time Lily sees that despite all of the stress and challenges, she has been a positive force in both Steven and Tavey's lives.


Mike arrives at the hospital under the guise of agreeing to try Marriage Counseling and, instead, serves Lily with divorce paperwork. He loudly declares her a failure and a significant mistake in his life. While Lily is immediately crushed and defeated, with the help of Sally, Dr. Ingalls and her fellow patients she decides to use the divorce as a transition into a new life free of the power of abuse.


After three weeks Lily is discharged into a day treatment program where she will continue to work with Sally and Dr. Ingalls. She is not yet completely steady on her feet or fearless in the face of her past. But she is, for the first time in six months, feeling hopeful about her future. She knows she won't ever be free of her visits to the undercurrent. But she is confident she'll reach a point where she will live, for the most part, above the undercurrent.