QUEEN OF ALL SHE SURVEYS
Amanda went home with Steven, chanting, “Gonna get my life back,” over and over. She did not call me until the eighth day after her release. “I made Eddie give me the car keys,” she plunged in. “He didn’t really want to, but Mom wanted to go out to lunch with me the same as always, so he had to give them up. Mom was happy to be back at Papa Joe’s. She had that lobster bisque she likes. She couldn’t finish everything, so I ate half her cheesecake. It was great. You can tell I’m on anti- psychotics, can’t you? Cravings!” “Uh huh,” I said. Eddie had already warned me that she was manic, and that every time she told her story, she’d scramble the details about which medications she spat out when. They forget and deny, a nurse had said, but reassured me that the drugs would continue to build up in Amanda’s blood, and she would calm down. Her mood would even out, and according to one doctor, she’d get back most of what she lost. Eddie and I promised one another we would be patient. “What else have you been doing besides taking Mom to lunch?” “I finished ten watercolors.” “Wow! Just this week?” “Yeah. Well, a few of them I started in the hospital. They’re very colorful, so I must not be depressed.” “Good, good.” “I’m going to get Mom her own watercolors so she can copy the paintings I did in the hospital. It’ll free up her use of color without all that realism dragging her down.” Did Amanda really expect that after a lifetime of making realistic paintings of people and places, Mom could or would change her style? I didn’t want to deflate my sister’s urge to connect with our mother, so all I said was, “Painting is good for her brain, according to the doctors.” “Uh-huh. So, that hotel I was staying at sent my luggage back with everything in it but my digital camera. I’m gonna complain.” To distract her from that particular absurdity, I asked, “What did you take with you, anyway?” “I had my computer, some books and CDs, and art supplies.” This was her honeymoon trousseau? She recited her list as if it was a perfectly reasonable way to pack for a trip. I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Anyways, I feel fine now. My leg doesn’t even hurt. I think that pain was psychosomatic, from living with Mom and Eddie. Eddie hasn’t been feeding Mom right, so I need to get some groceries. She hates those frozen dinners he gets. She needs me to cook a chicken breast with some lemon and fix her some mashed potatoes. I’m not cooking for Eddie, though. I hope he doesn’t try to make me.” Why would he? He never had before. I changed the subject and said, “Oh, you got a traffic ticket in the mail. You crashed a toll booth in Pennsylvania.” The ticket included a picture of the car speeding away. I had tried to make out the figure of my sister in it, but could not. It might have been anyone. “How much was it, anyways? There was nobody in the booth and it looked all decrepit, so I assumed it wasn’t working.” “Are you surprised you got all the way to Pennsylvania?” I was looking for an explanation, some way into her head. She laughed a careless laugh. “I didn’t know where I was going. I just drove.” What did the last few months look like to her, in hindsight? Lost in delusions of bridegrooms and warlocks, moving toward an ever shifting endpoint, Boston, Baltimore, Rome, she had been mauled by her disorder, and left less than she had been before. Was it better that she didn’t seem to know that? We all tried to make her feel normal. What was the alternative? “I think I’ll do that talk for the artists group, after all,” she said, her voice full and confident. “I’ll show my new watercolors.” “So it’s business as usual? Like nothing ever happened?” “Like nothing ever happened.” About two weeks later, I called the house and Mom answered. “They’ve been sawing and sawing,” she said. “They make a racket.” “Who’s been sawing what, Mom?” The house was a beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright design, but at fifty years of age, it always needed repair. A list of possibilities sprang to mind. “The men keep cutting the tree.” OK, so – not a repair. “Is it a dead tree?” A windstorm had blown one of those onto the roof a few years before. There was plenty of damage to the house, but Mom and Amanda had been unhurt. “It’s a good tree. I told her not to cut it but she didn’t listen.” The story came out in fragments over several conversations. Amanda had convinced herself that the trees on the lawn would fall through her bedroom window and kill her; and she wanted the entire thicket gone. “You’ve got the money to cover it,” she’d told Mom as she wrote out a check for two thousand dollars for the tree cutters. “Sign this.” Mandy had rummaged around for any blank check, and found an old one for a closed account. That particular detail didn’t faze her. She held the rubber check out to Mom. Eddie stopped payment on the check that would have bounced, and paid for the damage already done with his own money. He canceled the work order to wipe out the rest of the trees. “What do you care what I do about the trees?” Amanda asked him, missing the point. “Mom changed her power of attorney from you to me last summer, so I can do whatever I want.” How had she engineered that? She smirked and said. “I was a bad girl,” when he asked. At the time she seemed to understand the limitations of the appointment, according to the family lawyer. Now she seemed to think Mom’s property belonged to her and only her, to do with what she wanted. After the tree-cutting fiasco, this news from Eddie: “I found an interesting letter in the mail today. The lawyer apparently revoked you as Amanda’s power of attorney and she cut you out of her will.” “She fired me?” “Looks like it.” My mind flashed back to the day she told me about her little will. “You trust me that much?” I’d said, touched that she would leave me her paintings and all her worldly goods. “I trust you with my life,” she’d replied. My sister’s revised opinion of me suddenly became clear: the caseworker’s warning, the calls from Amanda becoming few and far between, and now this. Amanda was cutting me out of her life. This is what I pieced together, from Eddie and Mom─ after dinner one night, Amanda got up from the table without a word and steered Mom roughly into her bedroom. She physically sat her down on the bed and instructed her to stay there while she, Amanda, took a nap. “This is nonsense,” Mom said after sitting on the bed’s edge for a minute. “I have better things to do.” Eddie heard a scuffle of shoes and irritated voices, and bounded upstairs to find out what was happening. “Don’t tell Eddie,” he heard Amanda whisper to Mom just as he entered the bedroom. “She is strange. She does strange things. She did not attack me, but she pulled me around for a while. I think there’s something wrong,” Mom told me on the phone the following day. “Hang on, Mom. I’m coming home. I’ll be there as soon as I can make arrangements.” “I don’t know why you’d want to come into this mess.” “Because you’re my mother.” “I am? How lovely, dear!” The following day Amanda canceled her artist talk. “We drove around to buy new outfits for the reception and when we came home, she said, ‘I’m not going.’ Then she locked her door,” Mom said. That was enough for me. I rushed through the paperwork to take a leave from my teaching job, and I sublet my apartment to someone who could appreciate the grand piano in the living room. Meanwhile, Amanda was busy cancelling all her medical appointments. No psychiatrist, no caseworker, no therapy groups. Yes, she was done with being a patient, although she continued to lie to her friends about taking her medication. “She’s a good actress but a horrible liar,” one of them told me. “She looks down and fidgets when you ask about the pills, but tells you what she thinks you want to hear. She’s either stopped her medicines, or they’ve stopped working.” What are the signs that the pills have lost their effectiveness, doctor? Delusions, hallucinations, mania, difficulties with concentration and sleeping, attention, logical reasoning, and impulse control. In other words, the current portrait of Amanda. My sister was taking absolutely nothing. “Did you just get back from an outing, Mom? You sound winded.” I had been calling all afternoon. “Yes, yes. We just got home.” “Were you at the doctor?” “No. Not there. We saw a man.” “What man?” “A husband.” “Amanda doesn’t have one.” “I guess he helps me, too. We went for quite some distance. Wait, I think I have something in my purse.” I waited. She read the name from a business card. Her lawyer! “Did Amanda ask you to sign papers?” “Oh yes. Lots of papers.” I willed my voice to stay calm. “And then where did you go?” “To the bank. I needed money.” “How much?” “Three hundred.” I knew Amanda had no way now to get money now without Eddie’s signature. She must have had an argument with a teller about it. She had been banned — had she not understood that — from the bank, and by ignoring their wishes, she was playing with legal fire. I called Eddie, and Eddie called the lawyer, who reassured him that Mom had not signed any legal papers since the summer — she must have mixed up the two visits. The lawyer had looked from mother to daughter, registered that all was not well, and taken Mom aside for a private talk. He told Eddie, “Your mother explained to me that to Amanda had only recently been released from the hospital and was behaving oddly. When we came back into the office, Amanda became agitated as she laid out her demand that the entire estate be made over to her. She loudly announced to me that she was off her meds, but had the right as power of attorney to help herself to your mother’s estate. She then dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Bob Dylan is sitting right next to you. Can’t you see him? He’s right there, right there!’ I advised her to get back on her meds as soon as possible.” It wasn’t free advice. The invoice we later received was marked as review of the will, and cost one hundred dollars. Eddie let the caseworker know about the new development. He said to me, “Greg said he’s planning a surprise visit next week, in order to assess Amanda’s state of mind. It’s the first step in a sequence of steps to get our sister back on track.” “I hope this batch of authorities can’t be fooled the way all the others have been fooled.” Our sister had honed her skills at deception and was proficient in warding off all real help. “Don’t give up hope. Greg is a good guy and has been steering these people back to safety for twenty years. He tells me interesting stuff about the disease all the time. Apparently, Mandy is the repository of all the mutations in the family tree, going back forever. We’ve had a lot of random characters in our line and she’s the one unlucky enough to be housing their bits of genetic noise.” I wanted to cry when I imagined Mandy bent under the weight of all our sick ancestors—the kleptomaniac cousin, the delusional great grandfather who believed that his wife, after caring for their thirteen children all day, was out having affairs all night; the alcoholics, gamblers, cheaters; the great grandfather who beat a man to death in a bar fight, the depressives who never stopped crying. “I think if anyone can get Mandy back to normal, Greg can,” Eddie said. When I put down the phone, I looked in the mirror to see what living with this level of dread looked like. Since I was alone, I let myself cry, and the whimper became a roar. My sister once told me that a lion’s roar can travel five miles. It’s just the howling in its head that no one can hear. Eddie had an idea: he would hire more help, a nurse who would administer Mandy’s drugs along with Mother’s. He let Mandy know the plan. Insisting that she felt fine and had not hallucinated for months and months, our sister told Ed she would have nothing to do with a nurse, and he couldn’t make her. Patients have rights. Everyone said so. Maybe, but Ed could try to give Mandy another chance to recover. The nurse, Chris, came over at ten in the morning to set things up for both Mom’s and Amanda’s pill-taking. A heavy woman with a gruff manner, she immediately set to work, all business. She pulled out a stack of papers to be signed, a pile for Mom and a pile for Amanda. Mandy took the pen and began to help Mom with her signature. “Forget something?” “I’m not giving my permission. I feel fine. I’m not going to take any more pills. You can give Mom hers.” Chris said, “You know you’ll just end up in the hospital again.” “Yeah, right,” Amanda scoffed. Our sister had called Eddie’s bluff. Amanda followed up her triumph with a new behavior— staying out all night to avoid our brother, coming back only at dawn. Where did she go? When did she sleep? Did she just drive and drive and drive, her grey suitcase in the backseat jostling like a carsick passenger? We had won that suitcase as a prize for letting a vacation timeshare outfit bore us for an hour with their sales pitch. The people who ran the scam kept increasing the temperature in the room, as if that would melt our resolve against signing their contract. “We’re only here for the free prize,” my sister had insisted. Finally we got our reward. The luggage was flimsy and ugly, a particularly dismal shade of grey. “At least you might be able to use it as a portfolio to hold your drawings,” I said on the long drive back. Now, the battered thing had taken on a symbolic resonance at a time when it should have been disintegrating in a junkyard somewhere. My sister’s friends reported that she had been seeking refuge with them at night. “She showed up here at two in the morning, with that suitcase,” her friend Aurora told me. “She said Eddie was trying to poison her and she couldn’t be around him. What could I do? I let her in.” “Did she say much else?” “She kept mumbling about strychnine. It must be the only poison whose name she knows. She thinks that’s the stuff your brother is using. She says as a chemist, he knows how to make stuff like that.” “She’s got our brothers mixed up. Steven taught himself chemistry, and Eddie is a biologist.” Ed knew chemistry as well, but I couldn’t resist the urge to slap Aurora down a little. “Oh. I always think of Mandy as so sharp. I’m surprised she’d make a mistake like that.” Surprised, and skeptical, too, judging by the tone of her voice. “She’s always been smart, but she won’t be much longer, if we don’t get her into treatment.” “Amanda should go ahead and refuse medical treatment if she feels like it. She’s got rights. She should just smoke some pot. It cures cancer and lots of things, if only Big Pharma would let that cat out of the bag.” “Mandy knows that pot could drag her deeper into psychosis. It’s dangerous for her particular disorder. I hope she remembers that when people are passing weed around.” Silence. Then this: “Well, I’ll remind her not to inhale our secondhand smoke when I see her tonight. I told her she could stay over here again.” I thanked her as if she was an ally. I knew she thought I was trying to control my sister with misinformation she believed was correct. Her favorite drug couldn’t possibly hurt Mandy, who could stand to be more ordinary anyway. Too much intelligence and talent was elitist, in Aurora’s opinion. I didn’t think I’d hear from her again, so I was surprised when she called to say Amanda had stood her up. “She didn’t show up here last night, but the cops did.” “Wow. Did they say what they wanted?” “Nope, just that they were looking for her. I told them nothing.” What was there to tell? Neither of us had any idea at the time that Amanda, under the delusion that Eddie was going to rape and kill her and Mom, had marched into a gun shop and bought a gun. The shop owner asked if she had ever spent time in a mental institution and she lied as easily as if she had been doing it all her life. She used her real name and address on the paperwork, and she did not forget to buy ammunition. There was no waiting period and the owner simply handed her the gun earmarked for the murder of our brother. We also knew nothing of the hotel she stayed in that night, or the man she called her boyfriend who was waiting for her in the room. She would tell me much later about how she had set her package and the grey suitcase by the door and leapt into his arms. He carried her to the bed, and when he was done with her, said, “Show me your packages.” Amanda opened the suitcase and arrayed the contents on the bed: a paring knife, a butcher knife, two steak knives, and Mom’s long silver anniversary cake knife inscribed with Dad’s words: Twenty five years my bride. “What’s in the other box?” Amanda lifted the gun carefully out of its box. “Give it here.” She placed it across the twenty-seven transparent bones of his hand. It fell through his skin and sunk right through the floor. Amanda didn’t come home for the next few nights and days, not to Mom’s house, not to Aurora’s. Nobody knew where she was or what she was planning. She simply disappeared. Once again her missing person case was re-opened. We were taking a chance by involving police—in her present mood, Amanda might perceive their interference as a dare, and the news was full of stories about cops using excessive force even on the mentally ill: one addled young man begging them to shoot him, whereupon they did, no questions asked; an elderly homeless woman being punched by a big cop as he sat astride her, protecting her from traffic, so he said; another officer on a wellness check killing the sick boy holed up in his home because I don’t have time for this. Citizens shot for playing with toy guns, jaywalking, fitting the description. Even so, their presence might be the fastest way to get Amanda into the hospital. Eddie searched her room for clues as to where she might have gone. He found a receipt for a hotel room and a final bill from her old shrink. There was a butcher knife and several smaller kitchen knives under her pillow. “She was going to fight you?” I gasped. “Apparently she thought she had to defend herself.” His voice trembled. “What did I ever do to her? Why does she hate me? She’s my baby sister.” Did his grief show on his face just then? We register sorrow in so many different ways. We lose weight, develop tremors, or agitate tumors into action. When our father, as a new doctor, had not been able to save his mother from cancer, he went mute for a few weeks after her death. The man who loved language was unable to speak. There is a picture of him at thirty-six, holding baby Amanda, a cupcake commemorating their common birthday as it flickered on the coffee table. My father’s face is etched with sorrow. As for the baby on his lap, there was nothing that could make her safe now. She wouldn’t let it. No sooner had she come back than she was gone again. “She’s on the move. Her case manager came to the house after she canceled her appointment with the doctor today.” Eddie’s voice sagged and I could barely hear him. “Greg tried to reason with her but she told him she couldn’t go with him because she had to meet a friend named Dan at the Hilton. Then she started off on foot, with that grey suitcase. Greg followed her in the car, talking to her at stoplights for a while. She got annoyed, but not agitated enough for him to call the cops on her. She didn’t threaten him.” Of course not, not our gentle Amanda. She’s got great empathy, one of the nurses had told me. “Most patients will turn their backs when they don’t like what we’re saying. Amanda always listens, even when she’s not interested. She doesn’t like to hurt people’s feelings.” “Mom said she couldn’t find any weapons under Amanda’s pillow this morning. Maybe she packed some different knives in the suitcase. She must be furious that you confiscated them,” I said. “Maybe she thought the warlock took them. I wish she had threatened Greg with them. Just unpacked them at a stoplight and started brandishing away.” “Yes. That would have brought things to a head. Poor Greg, what a job! It must be exhausting to try to anticipate the movements of someone who can’t think straight. But isn’t carrying a concealed weapon enough to bring the cops, especially if you’re a known mental patient? Doesn’t it go to intent or something?” It was beginning to seem that nothing would be enough until it was too late, bodies bleeding in the street. “I’ll mention it to Greg, but don’t hold your breath that anything will be done. At any rate, he’s going by the book so the commitment will stick.” He paused, weighing whether or not to tell me something, then continued. “I saw a laminated copy of the car registration—not the title—and lots of lawyers’ names and numbers scrawled on scraps of paper on Amanda’s bed. There were ads for subsidized apartments, too. She wants to get away from me. The irony is I would have been back in my own condo by now if she had just taken her pills. I guess I’m back to being the bad guy again. I guess I’m her all-purpose warlock.” “Try not to take it personally, Eddie. I know it’s insulting. She’s made me out to be some kind of art thief to her friends. And this lovely news came from women who are my acquaintances too. They stuck up for me, though, saying stealing her art didn’t sound like something I’d do. ‘There’s nothing that your sister wouldn’t do for you,’ they reminded her. Mandy didn’t try to convince them otherwise. She dropped the subject, the way she does now when you don’t buy what she’s selling.” “Ouch. Will the real Amanda please stand up? No wonder families give up on these people.” “Starting rumors is part of the disease, I read. But, you know, if she’s planning to move, well, that’s OK, especially if the commitment fails to go through, and she won’t let herself be treated.” I tried to picture Amanda in a little apartment, off her meds but coping somehow. Could a life like that be possible? Some people just live with their psychosis. They make space at the table for a hallucination and perhaps serve it tea, the way Mandy did as a child when she hosted imaginary friends. I felt a kind of diluted hope for my sister’s future emerge. The fact that it’s no use watering a dead blossom was a truth I could not fully embrace. Not yet. Amanda returned home, and then continued to come and go as she pleased. One day, as Chris was making Mom tomato soup, Amanda came in with a pizza. Chris cut a slice and handed it to Mom. Mom had taken only one bite when Amanda grabbed it out of her mouth and pushed it into the garbage disposal. She turned back to the pizza, cut a slice with her own hand, and handed that one to Mom. “She was getting a little jealous there,” Chris told me. “She scared the nurse,” said Mom. “Did she scare you, too?” Mom burst into tears. “Yes. Something is wrong. Can’t anyone fix that poor little girl?” I wondered if an intervention by Mandy’s friends would help. Two of them visited her at my request, to feel out the situation and encourage Mandy to get back on her meds. Cherie told me, “She seemed pretty well, pleasant and well-kempt.” Much later, Mandy would tell me that her friends had showed up with the express purpose of throwing acid in her face. How could she have remained so cool, so close to normal, with chaos like that going on inside her head? “Did she bother to lie about her pills?” “Yes, she said she was taking them, but she wouldn’t look us in the eyes when she said it.” No surprise there. “We noticed a tube of paintings all ready for mailing on her desk. It was addressed to one of the big New York art galleries. She saw us looking at it and that seemed to make her nervous. She usually wants to talk about her art, but not this time. There was a piece of paper taped to the outside of the tube with her handwriting on it.” “One other strange thing was that she said she bought a generator. She’s worried that Eddie would be mad about that. She asked to stay the night with one of us to avoid a fight with him.” How could she have paid for a generator? Another rubber check? The money was all locked away. And why would she need assurance that the lights would stay on? Her friend had mentioned the three lights burning in the bedroom when they visited, although it was a sunny day. “It was like a tanning bed in there!” A wave of sorrow caught me then, to think of my little sister suddenly so afraid of the dark, afraid of falling trees in high winds, afraid of everything, yet fighting back with all the ferocity she could muster. It was an odd kind of bravery, the unhinged energy with which she challenged her demons even as they pulled her deeper into her own destruction and blocked off every exit. One afternoon, Amanda ran out of her bedroom to warn Mom that someone was coming to murder them. She started to yank all the curtains closed and duct-tape the window. “They’re going to kill us,” she hissed at Mom. “I have to do all the windows in the house.” “No, no!” Mom protested. Amanda ignored her. Mom knew she could go to the neighbors’ house if Amanda frightened her. I had called them and warned them of our situation. This time, the task proved too complicated for Mom. “I forgot where to go. I went next door instead,” she told me. The neighbor was out. “It was mild outside, so I just walked around. I sat on the patio and looked at Amanda’s tree stump. It cost quite a bit. I was upset when the people cut and cut. When I went back inside, she was in her room. She was quiet. She was fine.” Not for long. Eddie heard her roaming the house at three in the morning, running through the living room above his downstairs bedroom, right over his head. Then she rummaged in the garage, now she was on the patio, glass doors left wide open, the late winter breeze billowing through the curtains with threats only she could hear. Would she try to run? From what? Toward what? She slid back into the house and locked her bedroom door behind her. Although Amanda was hardly speaking to Mom or Eddie by this time, she came in the house one evening with the car keys but no car. She slapped the keys down on top of the TV beside the door, pushed her thinning blonde hair over her shoulders, and mumbled to Eddie, “The brakes won’t work. I left the car at McDonald’s and took a cab home.” She trudged upstairs to her room and locked the door. “I went to get the car and the brakes worked fine,” Eddie told me. “I have no idea why she thought they wouldn’t work.” And this, a little bit later in our conversation: “She’s been parking the car in strange ways at odd angles on the street lately. It’s a new thing. At any rate, last night I went to the end of the driveway and looked in the driver’s side window after she had parked in the depression by the big tree. She jumped, as if she didn’t recognize me. Maybe she mistook me for her warlock! I told her the car wasn’t safe there. It could get stuck in the ditch if it rained and why didn’t she just let me bring it into the garage. She scowled at me, but got out of the car. I turned the key and noticed the glove compartment was gaping open, so I opened it all the way, in order to shut it properly. A gun fell out.” “What? Oh, my god!” “Guess her knives aren’t lethal enough. I tried to keep a poker-face and I don’t know if she saw me tucking the gun in my pants or not. Who knows what she was seeing or how to interpret it?” “Oh my god! Oh my god!” “As soon as I had the car in the garage, she demanded the keys back. I said, ‘No way!’ and she gave me a black look, but didn’t argue.” “Was that the end of it? She didn’t hotwire the car the next time she used it?” Our sister had suddenly come into a skill set we never suspected her of having. “No. Instead, I find out the next day she got her friend to take her to get a second set of keys from the dealer. Her friend, that psychiatric patient Max, you know who he is, the guy who lives with feral cats, the one who told Amanda he’s only attracted to girls who are extremely troubled— he told me that Amanda said I wanted control over the car, and it made her mad.” Nobody could have predicted exactly how mad. Eddie said this into my answering machine, later that same night, in a near whisper, “You won’t believe this. I went to change my pants and pulled clean ones on. They fell apart in strips, right off my body. Amanda cut them with one of her art matting knives. She must have cut herself too. I can see some blood by the door, right where she dropped the knife. Wait a second—she cut the netting on my tennis racket as well. Is this a threat or what? Let me look in the closet.” A silence, held breath. “Yep. I just waved my hand through the rack of clothes and they all fell apart. Your old dresses at the far end of the closet were not touched. Neither were Mom’s fancy blouses. But there’s blood spatter, a spotty trail on the floor of the closet. It’s just drops. She must not have cut herself badly enough to go to the hospital, I guess, because she’s upstairs sleeping it off. I doubt I’ll be getting much of that particular commodity myself tonight.” Much later, Amanda would tell me, her voice thrilling to the recaptured excitement, “I cut his clothes and I loved doing it! I hated him. I thought he was poisoning us and raping Mom. That’s why I was eating out at restaurants all the time, because the food was safe, and why I was trying to find other places to sleep. I knew I was in danger. It gave me great satisfaction to cut up his belongings, even though I cut my hand, too. It left a scar. It’s still kinda pink.” Eddie called Greg with a description of what happened. Almost immediately, Greg knocked on Mom’s door. He had planned to come over anyway, to assess Amanda for extraction to the hospital. After a month of tracking her, he hoped he had numerous enough, and serious enough, examples of mentally ill behavior to make a commitment stick. This had been the stumbling block to getting her in treatment against her will. As horrified as we were at Amanda’s disintegration, her crimes up until then had not reached the level to where the law could intervene, but “This will do the trick!” Greg said when Mom, fingers splayed against her cheeks, showed him the damage. It was more than enough evidence. He shook his head and said, “It’s just terrible.” Mom led Greg upstairs to talk to Amanda. “I hope I can convince her to come with me. It would be nice if I could leave the cops out of it.” He knocked on Amanda’s door. No answer. He pushed it open. She was not there. Amanda had left during the night for NYC, grey suitcase packed with drawings, paintings stacked in the trunk. She carried in her pocket a poem she wrote about hanging herself. She got as far as Butler County, PA, before she crashed the car, totaling it. She also demolished the car she rear-ended. The police came and gathered the details of who Mandy was and what her circumstances were. “They said I was at fault, but I wasn’t. I was just taking a nap at the intersection,” she would tell me later. “I think the cops stole one of my paintings from the trunk.” “I thought Steven got them all when he went to clean up your mess.” “Oh, the cops had people to clean up everything, all the broken glass and stuff. I don’t know why they made me sit on the curb in handcuffs for so long.” “Were they cruel? They didn’t use a Taser on you, did they?” “One of them yanked my arms behind my back pretty hard. But they all called me Ma’am while they were yelling orders at me.” She had called me, and the answering machine caught her voice yelling, “Nobody’s picking up,” and “What’s this place called again?” to someone in the distance. “I only heard you on the answering machine the next day.” “Uh-huh. The nicest cop directed me to the Comfort Inn by the side of the road and told me I could call someone from there. So after I called and you wouldn’t answer, I walked around to the bus depot in the back of the hotel and hopped on a bus. I had to change buses three times before I finally got home. I didn’t know where I was. I just figured I should keep moving.” Karen said, “She got away before they found out about the warrant? She was lucky this time. One of my clients, a poor lady who just got out of a nursing home after treatment for ovarian cancer, suddenly became psychotic. She was making a lot of noise and a neighbor called the cops on her. The landlord let them in. She locked herself in her bedroom. They demanded she come out. There was a small hallway outside her bedroom and she came out into it holding a dull kitchen knife. All six cops in that small space demanded she drop the little knife. She just froze. Then, when she didn’t do what they said, every single one of them shot her dead.” After Mandy’s long bus ride, she got to the house, fumbling in her pocket for her key. Not finding it, she smashed the glass pane on the side of the front door to let herself in. In her mind, it was the only way to gain entry. That house is a fortress! Without a word to Mom or Eddie, she locked herself in her bedroom, and duct-taped her window against whatever might happen next. After about an hour, she came out of her room and washed her hair in the bathroom. It was still wrapped in a towel when the cops came. A female officer, six feet tall, came through the door. “Where is she?” she boomed. “I’ll get her,” Eddie said. He knocked on the bedroom door. “Mandy, the police are here. They want to talk to you.” “What do they want?” “We have a warrant for your arrest.” The big woman bore down on our little sister. “Why? I’m not doing anything wrong. Can’t you see I’m in my own house? Those are my paintings on the walls. I just washed my hair. I’m home where I’m supposed to be. My brother’s the one with the gun!” “You’re schizophrenic….” The big woman’s voice continued to bellow while the cops circled Amanda, their guns drawn. My sister will fight. She will lose. She will disappear into the circle of uniforms leading her past our sorrowing family, out the smashed door into a screaming car with spinning red and blue lights, and enter an overburdened system of courts, forced injections, and halfway houses. I wish she could speed away in her broken car instead, mind lit with absurd possibilities, outrunning for a time the disease that could not have been otherwise.
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They say I sat in the middle of the floor pouring water on my head but I say they are liars. They say I stole from my mother and threatened my brother. They say I tried to get a passport to go to Rome to get married, but I hate marriage. It makes women prisoners. This hospital is a jail, too, but the wardens keep it a secret. They say we can leave anytime, but the door is only painted on the wall like a mural. There is no real exit. There are only strange angles and deceptive surfaces, like the long table of mirrored glass in the middle of this room they have brought me to. It has corners that could cut someone. I reach out my hand to test an edge for sharpness, but it is not sharp after all. I see my mother, I see my brother at the table. Where is my sister? There she is in the corner, laughing at me, her shoulders going up and down like wings. She’s the angel, I’m the devil.
My mother asks, “Are you feeling better, dear?” She strokes my hair. A fistful of blonde comes away in her hand and she stares at it. “Why did you have me committed?” I turn from my mother to scream at my brother. Hands clamp down my flailing arms immediately. They will say I lunged at him. “No I didn’t,” I whisper. “The police had a warrant out for you, even before you sliced up my clothes. Plus you had a gun illegally. I only called them to do what they were going to do anyway. We had to get you into treatment before the rest of your brain burned up.” My head is hot. He is the one burning it. “You should go back to your own condo so I can come home to look after Mom.” I grab her hand. There will be no separating us. Now Mother is interrupting. She needs to stay quiet. “No dear,” she says. “You should stay in the hospital and get well.” I gasp. She has stolen my breath. I toss her hand away and run out of the room. I rush headlong down the halls on the slippery linoleum marked by red and green arrows. Wide-eyed people shush me as I go. A woman is wailing but it can’t be me. I am silent and I run until my legs fall away from under me. Before that, this. It was the middle of the afternoon on an ordinary Tuesday. I remember thinking about burning buildings against a clear blue sky, the misstep that breaks an old woman’s hip, the surprise attack by a virus charging out of the jungle. Don’t fret so much, my brother and I always told one another. It’s the thing you never think of that finally gets you, so what’s the use of worrying? Nature may abhor a vacuum, but life loves a sucker-punch. And here it was again – that knockout punch. The disaster we all hoped we had outrun was familiar terrain, a country once escaped from, dragging us back into the war zone. “She’s gone.” My ninety year old mother’s voice shook across the wire. “Did she say where she was going?” “She went to see a group.” “A group of what?” “I don’t know, but she needed money.” “Did you give her some?” “Yes, but she said it wasn’t enough.” “Did you give it to her from your purse?” “Maybe. It was quite a bit. One hundred. One thousand.” She put the phone down and snapped open her purse. I could hear her count the bills in her wallet. I waited, one hand clutching the edge of the table, until she picked up the phone again. She was crying. “I didn’t know what to do. She got in the car and waved. I didn’t know what to do.” “Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll find her.” I should do something. What was it, again? I was three hundred fifty miles away from my mother, and who knows how far from my sister, my vulnerable little sister. Possibilities lined up like birds on a branch: maybe Amanda told Mom where she was going and Mom simply hadn’t registered or retained it; or Mom, with her quirky relationship to time, had no real idea about how long her daughter had been gone. There might have been an appointment to keep, a traffic jam to navigate, a flat to fix. There is a brittle snap, a loss-of-limb sensation that occurs when a sibling is in trouble. I felt it now, in my left arm, the attached hand still holding a phone I could no longer feel. I turned it over, imagined crossed wires explaining next steps. I punched buttons that summoned my brother Eddie’s voice, waded through his electronic message and left my own. Our sister is missing. Call her doctor. Call the police. Emergency rooms and locked wards are full of mistakes that get fixed, people lost and found every day. We had survived this before, and we could do it again. My body didn’t believe it, not this time. As I moved across the room in slow motion, sounds came at me from varied points of origin, and there was a loud buzzing in my head. The phone slid out of my hand. I must have let people know Mandy was missing. Flyers with her picture appeared online and on bulletin boards at the laundromat and grocery stores. The phone rang and rang with questions from police and troopers, both of my brothers, Amanda’s friends. “No, I don’t know the car license plate number.” “GPS? I don’t think she has it.” “How could I possibly know her cell phone company?” “No, she doesn’t have a credit card. She’s an artist, she doesn’t have much money.” A few things I did know. I knew the names of her medications and I knew that one had been discontinued and another reduced. I did not know where she was driving and I doubted that she did either. “It might be easier to find her if we file the case as a stolen vehicle,” the detective on the phone was saying. “She’s not a thief! She’s the most honest person I know!” That was beside the point, apparently. Categorizing her as a thief was just a means to a quicker end. “Maybe she went to see you,” my brother Steven said, and suddenly it seemed like a possibility. I visualized her behind the wheel of a three thousand pound car on a high-speed, congested road sandwiched between trucks and SUVs. With her brain blistering and her hands shaking, would construction on the road confuse her? Did she even know how to fill the gas tank herself? I looked out the window at the falling snow burying the grass. Did she have an ice scraper in the car? I imagined her at my door, dragging her grey suitcase behind her, smiling her wry little smile. I twisted the knob and looked out onto the porch — hoping, losing hope. “Come on, Mandy. Just come home,” I whispered. Watching the stream of headlights climb the walls and fall away again, I stood at the window for hours. The trouble with hope is that it’s so fragile anything can kill it—a cold night, the smoking chimney far off in the distance, a medical mistake. The night my sister was hospitalized the first time was a night I could finally sleep through. Sometimes, like a fisted bud, hope can ride out even the snow that bends bough to ground. At last, I climbed the stairs to bed, but not before I had turned on every light in the apartment. What I didn’t know was that my mother and brother were doing the same thing in our family home, lighting up the dark across the rolling winter hills from three hundred fifty miles away, a beacon for my shipwrecked sister. Over the next few days a picture emerged in pieces, some sense out of the senseless, from Mom’s bursts of aborted sentences. She had argued with Amanda. About money? No. About leaving? Yes. Where did she want to go? The bank. Actually, it was three banks. A trip to one of them showed unusual activity in Mother’s account, and a loss of four thousand dollars. A scrap of paper wedged in behind a cushion in the car revealed itself to be a half-finished passport application (destination Rome). A note on the dresser said: My friend Antonin and I are going to Florida to get married. I’ll be back in two weeks, after the honeymoon. “Antonin, is it? Antonin Artaud, the writer?” I had asked her the day before she disappeared, when she told me she had given “Antonin” a ride to the ER. He had a gash on his head and needed stitches, she said. I thought of her art, all those wounded heads. My art is always autobiographical. “No! He’s real.” She was ready to argue about it, although she rarely argued with me about anything. “Oh? So tell me about him.” “He’s an endocrinologist I met in the hospital,” she said, a smile warming her voice. She fell in love so easily, whether the objects of her desire were real or not. When I love somebody, I want to crawl right under his skin. Usually, her hallucinations were manifestations of friends, family, and rock stars. She either knew them or knew enough about them to imagine a personal relationship. They’d appear on a screen in her mind and she would watch them like television. When the latest crop of hallucinations broke through, they’d spilled out of Mandy’s mind into her bedroom, clinging to her green curtain, following her into the living room where she liked to dance. “Dancing makes me feel better,” she told me. “I just wish these guys would quit nagging me to go put on a bra.” So the hallucinations were demanding and sexist? In real life, she wouldn’t put up with that. She knew how to stick up for herself. She always had, even as a small child. Once, Dad brought home a doll for me and she promptly sent him back to the store to buy one for her. And there was the time one of her little friends came to church dressed in a dress identical to the one she was wearing. Copycat! she’d shouted, slapping the surprised little girl. “Have you tried your trick of pushing the hallucinations away with your hand?” She was often able to stop them from rushing at her by visualizing a white light around her upraised hand. “They fall back, but they get up again.” I reminded her of John Nash’s trick of turning away from the hallucinations, simply not acknowledging them. It was no use, she said. “They’re too compelling. This batch makes me talk to them.” “Aren’t you scared of them? These seem so much worse than the ones you’ve had before.” Different, too—like the group of beings gathered around the kitchen table commenting on everything Little Amanda did. “I mostly get annoyed when they give me insomnia.” She’d been short on sleep since her twenties, and had endured several bouts of addiction to, and withdrawal from medications for it. I thought of the row of amber pill bottles lined up on her dresser, more and more added every year. A person can learn to live with anything. Amanda promised that she would give her doctor more details about the nature of the new hallucinations the next time she saw him, and report back to me. She’d always been good about calling after each doctor visit or hospitalization. We’d always analyzed everything to death, as our mother put it. It was our thing. Amanda did not call. Not the doctor, not me. She stopped calling. The silence was heavy and felt final. She had turned her cell phone off. She probably hasn’t called because she’s sleeping, I reasoned. Her doctor likely increased her drugs and the new dosage knocked her out. The bitter truth sneaked up slowly: she hadn’t called because she didn’t intend to answer to me anymore. I dialed her doctor’s number. It went to voice mail. I left a panicked message and waited for a call back. It was Amanda, not the doctor, who called, two days later. In a brittle harried voice, she asked if I knew anything about an organization in New York for people like her. “What do you mean—artists?” “No, no. The other thing. Psychics.” She thought she was psychic? Psychotic, more like. “What’s the group’s name?” “Just a minute,” she said. I could hear her asking people who weren’t there for the name. “It’s Ghana Corporation, and I’m leaving for New York tonight.” “What do you mean? You’re in the middle of a relapse! You can’t go to New York!” “I’m going, I’m going!” she yelled, and clicked the phone off. Shaking, I dialed the number of the household landline, hoping that Eddie would answer. When I heard his voice, I probably cut into his first words, I don’t know. “Eddie, the hallucinations are worse and she’s talking about leaving for NYC!” An inattentive doctor, a missed connection—Amanda had stepped off a cliff and nothing could break her fall. That night, the moon shone on the driveway like a spotlight on a stage. Our sister stood in its circle, ready to be taken away by strangers to a new, exciting future. The garage door opened and Eddie appeared instead. “You forgot your hat,” he said. “Let’s go inside and I’ll help you find it.” He steered her back inside the house, handed her a stack of winter caps to fumble through while he called 911. In the somber, familiar ceremony, he held her hand in the ambulance and helped her into the hospital. When he called to check on her the next morning, the nurse said, “She eyes the exits constantly. She’s pacing along the red arrows on the floor, back and forth like an animal, right now. She claims there’s nothing wrong with her and she’s not hallucinating.” We didn’t realize that our sister had learned to say what the staff needed to hear to let her go. “She’s very clever,” the nurse observed, like it was a bad thing. “We can’t keep her very long, but she knows that if she keeps going off her meds, her next stop will be a state facility.” It sounded like punishment. So, what was her crime? The idea of my sister in one of those places froze the blood in my veins. Eddie was able to convince the doctor to keep Amanda over Christmas, which coincided with the anniversary of our father’s death, and was always a hard period for Mandy. I didn’t bring up the date during our phone calls, but only asked what I should get her as a Christmas gift. “A pea-coat,” she said without hesitation. I ordered a beautiful one in black and sent it on. It was the coat she was wearing in the Missing Person flyers. Two days after Amanda was released, she disappeared again. This time she abandoned the car after it had run out of gas, and continued on in a taxi. Eddie somehow found the car, and the name of the cab company she used. The driver said he drove her all over Ohio, from Akron to Sandusky, finally depositing her at a Holiday Inn in Ripley, West Virginia. Sure, she looked out of it, he admitted, but she had lots of money, bills falling out of her purse, in fact, so he kept driving her wherever she wanted. He had never had a thousand dollar fare before. Ready with the hotel’s address, Eddie called the police. Paramedics were sent to the hotel to examine our sister. Good. Anyone would realize that a mental patient in the throes of a relapse needed help. I pushed dire warnings from my friend Karen, a mental health worker, out of my mind. “It’s legal to go nuts alone in your room if you’re not a danger to yourself or others. The authorities won’t necessarily intervene.” Now my brother was echoing her, his voice tight as a fist. “They say she’s not agitated, suicidal, or homicidal, or any kind of threat. They say they will arrest me if I come down to get her and she resists, which of course she will. They will charge me with kidnapping.” “Are you kidding me? They know she’s a mental patient just out of the hospital!” “She doesn’t have a weapon, that’s all they care about.” “So we’re just supposed to watch her from afar and hope she can figure out how to get home?” She would need our help even with that basic task. When she was younger and rescuing her was easier, she would gladly catch a lifeline thrown by any one of us. No more. She couldn’t get away from the people who loved her fast or far enough. “Let me talk to the desk clerk,” Eddie said. “Maybe he’ll have an idea. At the very least he can tell us where she goes next.” Matt the desk clerk understood. He had a schizophrenic sister who had needed to be rescued from time to time. He promised to call us if there was any news, and to call the cops again if necessary. He would also call us when Amanda checked out. In the long meantime, we all tried to reach her. Our brother Steven got through. He told me that she happily prattled on about how “we” were going to Boston or Philadelphia or Baltimore to get married, that she had money, that she was wearing her warm coat. Steven gave her his toll-free number, “in case you need anything,” doing what he could, then letting go. Matt was also true to his word. The phone rang twenty-four hours after Eddie last spoke to him. “She looks really out of it now,” he said. He called to say Amanda was back after checking out and wandering in the snow all day. “She’s calling herself Rose Westinghouse. She says it’s a pen name and she’s here incognito.” Our streets are full of people who look like she must have just then, talking to the air, waving their arms to ward off demons from cardboard-box shelters. Reduced to that, what rescue could they hope for? Karen told me about one of her clients, who after being saved by her family once again, refused to go home. She had found a kind of happiness living in a tunnel, with people like herself. They formed a community below the bustling city. These people are my real friends, she said. I belong here. Eddie asked Matt what had happened with his own sister. “We finally had to let her go,” he said. A few hours later Mandy came downstairs to ask Matt to call 911. “My husband has a cut on his head,” she said. The authorities came quickly this time, and trooped into Amanda’s room. The TV was playing the same boxing match Matt had been watching at his post behind the desk. The camera zoomed in on a fighter, lip swollen, a cut bleeding into his eye, as Amanda tried to make herself understood. “It’s my husband. He’s standing right behind you! Don’t you see his swollen lip? The cut over his eye is bleeding. He needs stitches!” This time, they took her to the local ER, where she proved too much for them. She was transported to the PICU at Chestnut Ridge Hospital. It was New Year’s Day. “I was so scared for you, Mandy!” It was the first time we had spoken since she entered the PICU and I wanted to tell her everything, fill her in on her great adventure. She would want to know the details. She would be amazed. “Why? How long was I gone anyways?” “For days. We had the police and everyone looking for you.” “They didn’t catch me though, did they.” The satisfaction in her voice disoriented and chilled me. Her response was a warning that she had been turned inside-out, and that I was dealing with a different person now, made of dark opposites. How was it possible? What had this impostor done with my sister? “You need to get me out of here. I’m only stuck here because the devil tried to give me an aneurysm.” “What?" In the near-whisper she used when she was hallucinating, she continued, “The doctors found AIDs in my blood.” As if she had been caught delivering information to the enemy, she slammed down the phone. I called back. “We were disconnected,” I said, giving her a way to save face and a chance to revise her message. “I was telling you they plan to do a spinal fusion on me.” “No they won’t, honey. They only take care of the head there. They’re not equipped to do those kinds of procedures.” “Oh. Do you know what a warlock is?” “It’s the male counterpart to witches in myths and folklore.” “They are not myths. They’re real! I knew you wouldn’t believe me.” “It’s not a question of belief, Amanda. You’re hallucinating.” “I am not, not hardly at all! You’ll find out when they discover my body eaten by warlocks.” “Now you listen to me. You know that people are taking videos of everything that happens in the world these days. If there were carnivorous warlocks around, don’t you think someone would have discovered a chewed up body somewhere and put it on the news?” It wasn’t much, but it was the best I could come up with on the spot. “Maybe you’re right,” she said, giving in a little. “But the doctors still want to do a colonoscopy on me here.” “They can’t do that either. I’m your power-of-attorney and they have to clear any procedures with me.” “Don’t let them do things to me. Promise.” It was an easy promise to make. No one would touch a hair on her head without good reason, if I had anything to say about it. We hung up and I looked at her pictures on my walls. I looked for clues to her thinking, the graphic preoccupations I must have missed, some pattern to her disintegration. It was an impossible task, since the point of her style was to exaggerate the features to bring out the emotional truth of an image. As I grappled with the fact of her relapse, I saw how, despite the illness, she had raised the workings of her unquiet mind to express high art. I thought of the old Japanese artist who created art in a mental institution, her home for the duration of her entire adulthood. Somehow gallerists had appeared, exploiting her talent, imagining they understood it, and she developed an international reputation with her mad bright circles. Was there any comfort for my sister in her story? Was there the chance that, although there was no cure for her disease, her colors could persist? The doctor had an explanation for the severity of Mandy’s breakdown. “Sometimes when the particular drug she was on is discontinued, there is a bounce-back effect that results in major psychosis,” he said. “Do you know why she stopped taking it?” I did. “It was all the side effects. Her psychiatrist tried several times to get her dosage below the threshold where hallucinations would break through, and he was successful last spring. Amanda’s head became clearer, she got back her concentration, and she was able to juggle the household chores and her art. She produced more than one hundred pieces of art last year.” “And that’s better than usual?” “Yes, although she’s always been productive, despite the anxiety attacks that strike randomly and can last six hours at a time.” He made a sympathetic noise. “Tell me about those.” “They have been the bane of her existence for years.” A mental picture of Amanda, suffering, came to and through me, and left me wrecked. My sister, on her bed, face turned toward the clock, stroking one foot along the opposite leg to quiet the spasms. “The attacks will come nearly every day sometimes. She charts them in ledgers but she’s never uncovered a real pattern of what precipitates them.” “The side effects indicate she was over-medicated,” the doctor said,” but now she needs to go back on a low dose of the same drug. It is the most effective drug for these types of conditions. There is clozapine, then there’s everything else. Will you please encourage her to accept our recommendation? We’re meeting with resistance.” What? Why? “We’ve all tried, every day, to get her to accept the medication,” a nurse told me later. “If she doesn’t, there will be other breakdowns and she’ll have no future. She’ll have to be in a protected environment.” It took me a minute before I realized she meant a long-term facility, an asylum. “Each breakdown damages the brain, and it’s a terrible shame when the patient is so smart. The organs break down, too, and she’ll age faster.” The nurse sounded as if she might cry. “I really care about Amanda! She is so sweet, and sick as she is, she’s always polite. I hate to think of what will happen to her without clozapine.” If I hadn’t fully understood before, I did now. I went to work on Mandy. “Why are you refusing treatment?” “There’s nothing wrong with me.” “Uh-huh. That must be why you’re in the hospital. Ever notice how other patients leave after a few days and you’re still there?” No answer, so I answered my own question. “It’s because they take their drugs. They let their doctors treat them. They don’t tell them how to do their jobs. When did you get a medical degree? Daddy would be so ashamed of your arrogance.” Silence. “Just take the pills!” I snapped. “Deal with the side effects, if you get them, once they’ve pulled you out of your psychosis.” She brushed me aside in a torrent of words. “I am not psychotic! For seven years, I slept twelve hours a day, I had no concentration, I couldn’t do anything. It took me years to work up to two hours of painting a day. That stupid drug gave me anxiety attacks, made me twitch and not be able to breathe. It’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. Is that what you want for me? I’d rather have a breakdown now and then than ever live like that again!” “But they say that this drug is the only thing that will protect your brain function from more breakdowns! Every episode atrophies your brain more and more. How much art do you think you’ll get done if this keeps up? You’ll have nothing left to think with!” “There’s nothing really wrong with me! I haven’t hallucinated in months. I’m only in here because I saw a warlock in my hotel.” “No, you’ve been fixated on a man you named Antonin, and you’re always on your honeymoon. When did this fantasy guy turn into the warlock?” She fumbled a few words for a minute, and then tore on ahead. “I don’t need drugs, anyways. Besides, they’ve got me on two other anti-psychotics.” “You’ve been on those same ones for two months and you just keep getting worse.” “I didn’t get better at St. Thomas because I was spitting out my meds!” “What…” “I’m telling you the truth now. I didn’t take my drugs.” I couldn’t believe it. I struggled to make sense of it, but the fact wouldn’t fit. It stuck like a key in a rusted lock, breaking off truth from theory, impulse from forethought, the bad days from worse nights. It was the one possibility that had flitted across the surface, but never fully lodged in my mind. Amanda had always been a good patient, and taken her medicines without complaint. She saw what happened to patients who did not. “Have you had any success getting your sister to accept our recommendation?” the doctor asked me the following day. “She won’t do it. I brought out the big guns—brain damage and risking her ability to do art. No dice.” “That’s that, then.” “Wait! What about the fact that I have my sister’s power-of attorney? It should be good for authorizing the use of a particular drug, shouldn’t it?” “We could try that. It is the kind of situation it’s designed for.” The doctor sounded so unsure that I wondered who he was trying to convince. “Has she started the medicine?” I asked the next day, and again the day after. My mind darted away from the image of Amanda physically fighting off the injection. “The doctor decided against it. She is adamant against it, and patients do have rights. We’re concerned that even if we give her the drug here, she won’t take it at home.” “I’ll mash it in her ice cream!” “We have no control over what the family does once the patient is home,” the case manager said primly. “But it would be unethical for us to force her here. You can try to get guardianship of her when she comes home. You could call her a Vulnerable Adult who is only competent some of the time.” “If you gave her the drug, it would normalize her thinking, and she would no longer object to it.” “She objects now, and we must respect that.” One of the other nurses told me, “We’re praying for a miracle.” The day after they gave up on her, they released Amanda. During the discharge process I participated in a conference call with her and Steven, who had come to pick her up, despite his worry that she might lose complete control of her senses, grab the wheel and kill them both. Over the phone I heard the gleeful reunion of my younger siblings. The audible affection between them had texture and pulse and for a moment I believed in happy endings. That didn’t last very long. When I heard Amanda say, “Eddie did this to me!” and begin to heckle our absent brother manically, goose-bumps rose up along my arms. Steven asked the caseworker for “a note or something, to make Eddie knock off whatever he’s doing to bother Mandy.” With back-up from Steven, Amanda told the caseworker she wanted Eddie out of Mom’s house within two weeks. After having ordered the doctors around for so long, she seemed to think she had muscles to flex. “You can’t really tell your brother, thanks for the help, now get out, can you?” Vicki said. She was there to negotiate a smooth transition, so she tried a compromise on for size. “Maybe he should stay for a few more weeks. We want everything to remain in place so that you have no duties to resume.” I told her that Eddie had hired an aide to look after Mom while he was at work, but he was the one tending to Mom throughout the night, when she woke up disoriented or in tears. He administered medication, made breakfast, called her from work twice a day, brought her dinner, sorted the mail, paid the bills, did the laundry, took her to the doctor, made sure she had her bath. Did Amanda really expect that he could move out of the house but still perform those services? There’s a law in physics that says it can’t be done. “He’s violent!” Amanda was pulling out all the stops. She wasn’t used to losing. “Violent in what way?” Vicki’s voice sharpened to a point. “He used to be a bouncer.” I had to laugh. “Sure, decades ago, when he was full of testosterone and beer!” “He’s still violent! He got into a bar fight a few years ago. Some guy was beating up the barmaid and Eddie threw himself across the counter and beat up the guy.” Oh, so he rescued a woman, I could imagine Vicki thinking. She tapped her pencil on the papers several times before plunging back into clichés and formulas. She was done with Amanda. “You have to promise two things, Amanda,” she said, switching the subject. “First, not to run away again. It upsets your family.” She’s a runner, one of the nurses had said. They never stop running. “I won’t,” my sister promised, exactly the way she’d promised the staff at St. Thomas the month before, when they threatened her with an extended stay in the state hospital if she threw out her pills and ran away again. “And you must take your medication.” “I will, I will. I don’t ever want to be in a hospital again.” “Also, we would request the family not hover too much.” That was meant for me, and I wondered what grievances my sister had manufactured against me, what rumors she had spread. I said, “Since those are exactly the same amounts of the same drugs she’s been taking for three months with no improvement, what symptoms should we look for when she really begins to decompensate?” Amanda broke in, volume turned up high. “I TOLD you I haven’t taken any of those medicines since September.” Now it was September? I was shocked all over again. She clearly believed it. It might have been true. On the other hand, the sister who never lied could now do nothing but. Standard of Care by Cheryl Snell http://www.amazon.com/author/cherylsnell And after dinner, the maid puts the family away like linens. She creases each member along their wrinkles and angles, edges and curves. The children are folded like origami birds for good luck and sweet dreams, and the parents are stacked one on top of the other tissue thin double thickness. The grandmother is long and narrow and must be rolled, yellow stains turned inward like shame. As time wears on, the shelves in the linen closet give more to the family than a just place to sleep—they are a refuge, a hideaway, a vacation home. The ledges groan with time and from the children’s growing, so it is more and more difficult for the maid to get them up in the morning. She grows old with the effort. She must admit now that she does a less efficient job when she tucks them in at night: the children want to be folded into origami computers, and that’s only the beginning. The parents are forever slipping their own neat stack of selves to tangle up in each other. There is slippage and mismatching and nothing remains where it was. This makes it hard for the maid to separate the parents in the morning. As for the grandmother, she has her own problems. She has curled into a stiff ball that cannot be straightened out and refolded, for fear of breakage. I’m set in my ways, can’t you tell? she says. The maid comes to believe she could never leave this family, her family, and get another job, especially since she’s so bad at this one. But a sense of time unfolding pulls at her, and one night, after she’s tucked her people in, she slams the closet door on them and locks it; she opens it again almost immediately, like a last word snatched back. She quickly spreads out a large blanket and wraps the stunned family in it, knotting the corners, east to west, north to south. She slings the bundle over her shoulder. She calls it the past and drags it with her into the future.
painting by Janet Snell
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AuthorCheryl Snell is an award-winning poet and novelist, author of the new family saga Bombay Trilogy, a retelling of her previous novels Shiva's Arms, Rescuing Ranu, and Kalpavriksha. Archives
October 2020
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