In the kitchen one day, Clara opened a piece of mail addressed to Mandy. It was an announcement for an anniversary show at The Drawing Center. Artists who had shown there were invited to submit one drawing each. Clara thought of her favorite drawing, of two figures together, their intimacy expressed in their postures, the openness of their faces, the way their limbs reached to enclose one another. The picture had moved Clara even before she knew for sure it was a drawing of Mandy and her. She was tempted to submit it. But what was the point now? “I remember how excited you were when she got into that show.” Lonnie sipped his tea and leaned back on his chair’s hind legs. It was a habit Clara had almost forgotten about, and she couldn’t remember if it bothered her before. It certainly did now. She hoped it didn’t show; she didn’t feel entitled to the annoyance. “I thought it was her big break, after the opportunity with Gallery K fizzled. Her first museum show!” she said, distracting herself. “I remember her being transfixed by the waiter with the red shoes at the party.” “Hmmm. She was otherwise in a foul mood. The sight of those shoes was the only thing she responded to all night.” “She even managed to be paranoid about the friends who came out to support her, if I remember right.” “She should have been on top of the world, but she was too busy being irritated. She was even mad at me for submitting her slides without her permission.” “She never realized all the things you did for her, did she. All those submissions, all that research. You only ever mentioned the acceptances to her, to shield her from rejections. You never let her know about those.” “I knew she wouldn’t develop a thick skin from rejections. I knew she would disintegrate instead.” Helping Mandy had been a process full of false starts. One time, Clara brought an application form to Mandy, sprawled on the couch. What was she looking at beyond the balcony to the parking lot below? A man bouncing a ball on the asphalt? A child skateboarding? “This announcement from your old school came in the mail today, addressed to you. I guess you haven’t have time to read it.” “I figured they just wanted money.” “No, it’s an application for a show for their graduates. You can submit two slides.” “They probably charge for the privilege.” “It’s a tiny entry fee. We can swing it.” Clara handed the paper to Mandy, who halfheartedly took it. She gave it a glance, then put it on the floor and placed her bottle on top of it. “I’ll get to it later,” she said. She didn’t. Clara did. When Mandy was chosen for that particular show, she was more irritated with her sister for filling out the application than she was happy for the acceptance. “Why did you choose those two pictures to submit?” she complained. “I’ve got better ones.” “I chose them because you couldn’t be bothered,” Clara said. “They are fine pieces. They got accepted, didn’t they? ” On the night of the opening, Mandy dressed not in bohemian-black but in layers of grey: two grey tee shirts of different hues and sleeve lengths, and darker grey pants. Clara took it all in and said, “You look as if you’d like to erase yourself.” Her sister pointed to her fine blonde hair. “No chance, with this. It’s my beacon in the night, like Mom always says. No way could I ever be erased.” Agreed. The girl had presence, what with the hair, her pretty legs and delicate hands. But there were other ways in which Mandy wanted attention, and she would not be ignored. She pitched her latest idea about that to Clara as they sat in a booth at The Tavern later that night. Mandy was still vibrating with the excitement of the show, and did not want to go back to the apartment right away. “I think we should share Lonnie. It’s nice that you have someone and all, but I’m here dying of loneliness. It’s not fair.” Her meaning was clear, but Clara answered as if to a different question altogether. “I suppose he wouldn’t mind if you came along with us sometimes. That is, if we stay together.” “That’s not what I meant! And what do you mean, if you stay together? Why wouldn’t you?” “Well. Apparently I’ve got baggage.” “Huh. Anyways, I don’t want a buddy. I want someone to sleep with. He’s young and healthy. He could take care of both of us.” She grinned. A taunt. A dare. An inveiglement. Clara steadied her voice and said, “Oh, come on. You aren’t remotely attracted to him. You kind of hate him, actually.” Mandy stared at her sister for a moment, and then laughed the careless laugh that she would use again and again. It was if a spell had been broken, and the lights in the room had come up. “It was just an idea,” she said. It was time to go; there was nothing left to say. The sisters pushed their way out of the building, Mandy pointing to a naked girl dancing on top of the bar. “Brenda’s at it again, doing her one parlor trick.” She must have undressed fast, because all she had on were socks, grey ankle socks wet with spilled booze. She was in her own little world, oblivious to the crowd until their clapping became the accompaniment to an obscene chant. When the sound penetrated her brain, she stopped abruptly, gasped, and crisscrossed her body with her arms. She began to cry, and then ran to the restroom. “I guess I better see to her,” Mandy said. Time passed, too much of it. Tired of waiting for her sister, Clara followed a stream of people out the door. Some of them she’d seen before, but she didn’t want to talk to anyone. All she wanted was to get a breath of fresh air before Mandy came back. She didn’t mean to get caught in the pulsating crowd, traveling on what felt like a moving walkway, but wasn’t. She was hemmed in on all sides. The slow-motion stampede finally dispersed a few feet away from an old train station a couple of blocks from the bar. It looked like a ruin from another time, especially with the cold light from the moon bathing it. Clubbers milled around the fire escape, pulling flasks and bottles from the inside of their coats. They arranged themselves like props surrounding the single lit window of a lobby inside. Scratchy radio music came from somewhere, but there were no people visible. Clara moved with the rhythm, anonymous as a machine, as she made her way back to the bar. She wouldn’t want to lose her sister in the crush. Mandy was probably getting anxious about her whereabouts, but no, wrong again—perched on the staircase, there she was, untangling herself from the man she had just been kissing. She called out, “Clara?” and rushed over to her sister, holding the man’s hand. “Can you drive us to this guy’s house?” “I thought you were with Brenda.” “She gave me the slip when I told her I was here with you. Anyways, look! It’s my old friend Ron. He runs a gallery!” “There are two of you! It’s my lucky day!” The young man kissed Clara’s hand; she pulled it away. “I’m only the chauffeur.” “Too bad. I like big blondes.” “Hey!” Mandy protested. “Little ones too, of course.” Clara did as she was asked, drove where she was directed. She got out with the other two and the young man thought she had reconsidered the tryst. He clapped his greedy hands. “I just need to use your bathroom,” Clara said. He unlocked the door of a characterless brick building and another to the apartment. “It’s the second door on the right.” There was no furniture in the whole place, and only a roll of paper towels in the bathroom. Did Ron really live here? He said he had just bought it. What—today? In that case it was reasonable that it was still bare. Maybe Clara had not stumbled over a headline in the making after all. She drowned her sister’s giggles under the faucet for a minute but realized she couldn’t hide in the bathroom all night, guarding her. She couldn’t sit on the living room floor either, waiting for her, listening to her sounds. There was no other choice but to leave, get back in the car, and begin to wait. She wasn’t wearing a watch, so every few minutes she’d turn on the light to look at the dashboard clock, quickly switching it off before anyone saw her. It would be bad enough if a cop drove up and challenged her about being there, but it could be worse if someone else did. A drug dealer. A rapist. An evangelist looking for converts. If Mandy had known how vulnerable Clara felt, biding her time in the dark emptiness of an unfamiliar neighborhood, she probably would have laughed at her. It’s what she did whenever Clara showed fear—the time they walked in their high heels toward the new club in the bad part of town, or in broad daylight, both of them carrying oversized parts of an easel out of a discount store, being catcalled up and down the street by men whose hopes had long since dried up. When at last Mandy straggled out of the apartment building and saw Clara in the car, she did in fact laugh. She ran toward her sister, wildly waving her arms, laughing all the way down the street—until she began to cry. “Did I just mangle my big chance? He told me he’d put me in a show, but he won’t know how to find me again!” “No, no. Don’t worry. When you said he was a gallerist, I gave him your card with our number on it. He’ll be in touch.” “He’ll lose it. He loses everything. Once he even lost the sale of a painting because he thought the collector was arrogant.” Clara stifled a laugh. “If he loses our number, we’ll just look him up and call him. It’ll be alright.” “I really wanted someone to save me, to lead me into an interesting life.” The sisters had parked at an after-hours bar usually advertised in the arts paper with a grainy photo of a couch draped in a drop cloth. Clara and Mandy went in and sat on the couch. Since no one else was around, Mandy eased her head onto Clara’s lap and Clara stroked her forehead. “Don’t worry so much. You worry too much.” She repeated it like some lullaby until Mandy was calm. Clara thought she had fallen asleep, but all at once Mandy jolted up and out of her embrace. “We better find him before he goes back to New York!” She rushed out of the club and into the car. “We got to go back to his apartment!” Clara started the car and without a word began to drive the long route home. “You’re going the wrong way! Turn around! Turn around!” For once, Clara did not do what Mandy wanted. After the interruption of so much time, Clara was once again traveling in the direction of her own choosing: Lonnie and she, on the same piano bench, playing duets. When they played together, it was as if they still shared the same breath. What did he see when he looked at her these days? How much of her younger self had she kept and how much had she lost? Clara could see thick blue veins and the loose skin of her hands every time she looked down at the keyboard. Lonnie’s hands, the musculature she knew so well, showed the same changes. “When do you suppose we would have noticed this, if we had stayed together?” she said, pressing her thumb on a ropey vein. “Dunno. These things creep up slowly, one at a time, and suddenly you’re inside your parents’ hands, age spots and all.” Clara searched his face to see how he was really bearing up under the inevitable. The blue of his eyes had faded, and the bags grown heavy, as if he had seen too much. Overcome by tenderness, she touched them, one at a time. He closed his eyes and when he opened them, Clara recognized his expression. She’d seen it when she first realized he loved her. And now, here it was again. They made love until the room went dark; but in the dark, as the poet says, the eye begins to see. “Do you think we might have made a big career if we’d gone through with that competition?” Lonnie asked her from the hold of his narrow bed. The question jolted her. “We weren’t really all that good,” she laughed, not believing it, but making light of his thwarted ambition. The competition could have changed everything for them both; but Mandy needed her, and that’s where all of Clara’s attention had to go. A crisis, an emergency, a tipping point− it had happened about a week into one of Amanda’s furious drunken tears. She had called Clara in the middle of the night, saying, “I think I’ve alienated everyone in Baltimore. I don’t even know where I am. I’m so lost. Wait a minute…” and Clara, every cell in her body now alert, heard her ask somebody on the street where she was. “He doesn’t know,” she said into the phone. “But he’s coming over here. Stay back!” and a moment later, “It’s ok, he’s gone.” She spelled out the street signs, and Clara wrote it all down, reading back her nervy handwriting, barely legible even to her. “Stay right there. I’m coming to get you.” Clara called Lonnie to help her find her sister. “I’ll pick you up in front of your building in five minutes,” he said. When she got into the car, she could see he was upset: the set jaw, the fact he had not brushed his teeth or hair, the locked-up silence that pushed down all possibility of casual conversation. They found Mandy in a part of town they had only driven through as a bridge to elsewhere, the dirt and dark sheltering the homeless slumped against skeletal buildings. Each person was cloaked in his own misery, indifferent to the little blonde staring at them behind the wheel of the compact silver car. “I told her not to make eye contact with anyone!” Clara started to get out of the car and sensed movement in the shadows. She reached for Lonnie’s hand and motioned Mandy out of the car with her free one. “Are you mad at me?” Mandy slurred. “Everybody else is. They all hate me.” “Just relax, honey. You’ll be home soon.” Clara took the keys out of her sister’s hands and got in the car. When Mandy started to circle around to the passenger’s side, Clara waved her away and said, “You go with him.” “I want to go with you!” But Clara was already halfway down the street. After issuing a string of protests under her breath, Mandy said to Lonnie, “You’re not so bad. Daddy would like you.” From the backseat where she clutched the yellow plastic bowl Clara had brought for her, Mandy repeated her words between heaves. “Could she be hallucinating?” Lonnie whispered to Clara later, at the girls’ apartment. He had half-carried Mandy to bed, and was watching Clara tuck her in. “Well, she didn’t say she’d actually ask Daddy if he liked you. She’s not seeing him, is she?” Lonnie frowned. “Don’t think so, but she did giggle at something I couldn’t see, and her lips moved in a one-sided conversation. I could see that clearly in the rear-view mirror.” “She’s just drunk, not hallucinating. She recognized us.” “I’m not sure that’s good criteria.” “When my brother visited last month he said all she needed was a job and a boyfriend.” “I think we better get her in to see a real shrink.” Her illness escalated too fast to keep the appointment. A wild-haired Brenda burst into the apartment a week later, holding an empty-eyed Mandy by the hand. While Mandy wandered off to pour herself a drink, Brenda told Clara in a hoarse whisper that they had been riding in circles for the past two hours while Mandy accused her of stealing her paintings. Then she started honking at a police car. The cop pulled them over, and they both got out. Mandy stretched and touched her toes several times in some indecipherable ritual, introduced the policeman to her dead father, and asked the officer to help her find her paintings. “The cop asked me if she’d been having emotional problems, and I said she’d been in a pretty bad mood lately. I didn’t really know what else to say.” Brenda’s chin trembled as she spoke. When the ambulance arrived, Brenda pushed Clara aside and hugged Mandy, hard. She must have believed in that moment she’d never see her again. While the sirens faded in the distance, a howl erupted from her whole being, beginning deep within her body and tunneling up out of her like weather. Gasping through the square of her mouth, she staggered to the window and grabbed onto Mandy’s blackout drapes. She began to savage the curtains, pulling them from the rings, the muscles in her arms quivering. Clara, tears streaming down her face, pulled from the opposite side, severing the dark cloth from its fake brass rod. Finally, the panting women stared at the folds of fabric lying in waves on the floor; and together looked into the brittle glass face of grief. Neither Lonnie nor Clara could have known at the time that helping Mandy was the glue that kept them together. Once she was beyond their help, their love affair fizzled. It shouldn’t have. It made no sense. The worst was over. Whenever Clara flew home to see her sister, she came back to Lonnie wrecked. One night at dinner she told him, “Mandy said she was trying to withdraw from Ativan, and she would feel better if she could sleep in my bed with me. ‘Like we did when we were little and you kept the ghosts away,’ she said. I was horrified.” “By what, exactly?” Lonnie let the noodles he had wound around his fork tines slip off. He had lost his appetite. “Firstly, that I never guessed that was why she wanted to share a bed with me when we were children. I thought she was just being clingy, making up stories about ghosts bothering her as an excuse.” “And secondly?” “I’m ashamed to say I just didn’t want her near me. The side effects of some of her drugs make her stinky and sweaty, and she twitches all night from the withdrawal. I love her but she’s disgusting.” “You’ve got compassion fatigue.” “I guess. Mom’s got it too. Mandy wants to practically climb on her lap when they’re sitting together, and it turns Mom off.” “Doesn’t Mandy outweigh your mother by now?” Clara nodded, smiled a little, the urge to ridicule present even in her; and then went right on detailing Mandy’s latest symptoms. Suddenly Lonnie found that he had had enough. “Please don’t talk about her anymore. I can’t stand it,” he pleaded. Would he have uttered those words if he had known how deep they would cut, and that they would forever ride Clara’s skin like a scar? What’s done is done, as Mother would say. After they broke up, Lonnie took a job at another conservatory. He was a coward, he admitted, but a clean break was the only way he could fully reconnect with his music. He felt destined for a real career, and that meant he had to focus. He worked to push his grief and guilt about Clara down; some nights, unable to sleep in his new and unfamiliar place, he’d throw off his covers and go down to walk on the deserted sidewalks of his unfamiliar neighborhood. There would be no second set of steps coming to bring the night to order, no matter how hard he listened for them. Sometimes he could almost feel Clara’s hand in his as he walked along, weeping. He wanted to ask her what he should do about losing her. He stretched out his arms, imploring, but they closed on empty air. Over time, he felt less keenly his loss. He told himself he was right not to want to share Clara with her sister. He was right to turn away from the prospect of love split in half and ground under the boot of family loyalty. He could never have had Clara, not entirely. Mandy would have prevented it: the tyranny of the weak. As he gradually righted himself in the arms of a series of women, Lonnie felt a sense of freedom that gave rise to a renewed rush of ambition. He rose easily through the ranks to full professor. No scandals dogged him. Opportunities for entanglements presented themselves: the older he got, the more interested his students were in him. He was not, however, easily flattered. When his parents died, he settled their estate, taking his boyhood bed out of his childhood home to his new apartment. It was near the university where he had accepted a post, and settling back into the old neighborhood, Lonnie kept an eye out for Mandy. Everyone knew what everyone else was up to in the little town, and it was easy to track her art shows. Lonnie never attended the openings, not wanting to have to speak to her directly, but he would tour the exhibits later. He liked to think he could determine the state of her mental health by the quality and subject of her pictures. He had no idea, of course. One evening he was driving by a gallery hosting one of Mandy’s shows. He slowed his car to watch the thin stream of people as they entered the building and while he was stopped at the light, Lonnie saw Mandy and her mother walking across the intersection. Had they recognized him? No, it didn’t seem so. They were looking down, careful of their footsteps. As Mandy helped her mother step up to the curb, the old lady tripped and came crashing down on the sidewalk, her brittle hip shattering. Lonnie immediately called 911 from his car, his message punctuated by her distant screams, his voice so squeezed by panic he could barely get the words out. He sat in his car, shaking, until the ambulance came. Only then did he notice the line of traffic behind him at the stoplight, honking furiously. Once back in his apartment, it took him hours to calm down. Should he call the hospital to see how Mrs. Patterson was doing? Should he call Clara and let her know her mother had been hurt? Offer Mandy his help? He should, and he would, certainly. There was no reason to be ambivalent about right and wrong. Time passed. It was surprising, even to him, how easily the incident slipped from his consciousness. He was busy with classes to teach, auditions to hear, course evaluations to do. Every so often, the image of the accident would flit through his mind, and he’d wave it away like a bug. It was none of his concern, really. He had become an outsider. One day, in his office, Lonnie rose from his desk to stretch. He ran his fingers over the keys of his studio piano, played a few scales and then abruptly stopped. He returned to his desk and the endless papers to shuffle. Scanning the stack of applications for an opening in the piano department, he felt a shock go through his body. The electric jab pointed out a familiar signature on one application. Clara! She wanted to come home. He pushed away from his desk and began to pace furiously. He couldn’t let that happen, not now, though Mandy and her mother would benefit from Clara’s help. However, it wouldn’t help Clara to mire herself once again in domestic quicksand. That wasn’t up to him to decide, of course, and it wasn’t even the real reason that he wanted to keep the woman he had loved for most of his adulthood at bay. Lonnie was just about to complicate his life in a way that Clara should never know about. He was accustomed to living without her, and must continue to live without her for everyone’s sake. He denied her request. After the sabotage of one woman, he tried to do the right thing by another. If he could redeem his mistakes by forcing a different ending on his story, it would prove he was not a coward. “I need to say something you might not want to hear.” Lonnie stiffened, but took Clara’s hand. After the accidents that had brought them back together, they had resumed their old collaboration in earnest; and were now sitting on his piano bench, practicing for a performance at the university. Clara was to be the special guest artist-in-residence in a program series Lonnie had implemented. It was the least he could do. They were colleagues again, but her attention was once more being diverted by her sister. The closer the date of Mandy’s memorial came, the more Clara’s concentration frayed, and the more mistakes she made at the piano. Was she going to back out of this program, too? “Nobody knows this but my brothers, but when Mandy shot herself, the bullet lodged in her belly, just under a rib.” “Yes?” He leaned in, listening hard. “I was on the way to visit her, heard the shot and found her bleeding on the floor of her apartment. The paramedics came right away, but it all seemed to happen in slow motion.” Lonnie began to rub her back while she continued, between pained breaths. “They took her to the hospital and against all odds, they saved her life.” Lonnie snatched his hand from her back as though he had been burned. “You said she was dead!” “Think back. I never said that. I said she shot herself.” “You let everyone believe she died! Why?” “She is beyond reach. She’s psychotic, living in some kind of parallel world, and she’ll be in the asylum for as long as she lives.” “Why didn’t you tell me, at least?” “I wanted to. I intended to tell her friends, too, and I tried. But they all wanted to believe she was a suicide and kept shouting down my theory that it must have been an accident because she wasn’t suicidal. They kept contradicting me, insisting they knew better than I did. I got disgusted with them finally and decided to just let them think and do whatever they wanted about it. I never believed they’d go through with the memorial, and I ran out of time and courage and the chance to tell them the truth.” “You didn’t run out of time with me! Did I disgust you, as well? I swallowed your story completely, and came to the same conclusion about suicide. Where’s the difference?” “Of course I wasn’t disgusted! I knew you would believe whatever I chose to tell you but I didn’t know if I could trust you with the whole story. You did abandon me because of my involvement with Mandy, you know.” “And only now…?” Clara moved her shoulders in either a shrug or a cringe. “So, this deception was fine with your brothers?” “Yes. Since Mandy can’t respond to visitors, we thought it would be better if she had none. We don’t want her on display, and old friends she might not recognize would just confuse her more.” “What did the doctors say about that theory?” “Nothing. We didn’t tell them. None of her old doctors knew that she was delusional. They assured us she was stable. At least the new docs seem to know she’s living in a delusion now, so we’re giving them the benefit of the doubt. However, we don’t need their opinion on everything.” “Well, are you going to put my name on that permitted visitors list?” Clara looked at him as if it was an odd thing to ask. “Why would you want to look at her in that state? I always thought you’d run a mile to get away from her.” Was it her stare? Clara wanted to say. Admit it was the stare. When he didn’t answer, panic overtook her and she began to ramble. “Did you know that we caught her hitting Mom? Her only excuse was that she has a violent nature.” Clara was suddenly desperate for him to see things from her point-of-view. She didn’t want to trash her sister but he should know how and why her feelings toward Mandy had changed. “Since when?” “Apparently she used to beat up her classmates in elementary school. She blinded one little boy. That’s why her art is all about vision of one sort or another,” Clara said through the lump of tears forming in her throat. “Her personality changed after the relapse she had last year. She was in the hospital for two months. The doctors said she was stable after many more months of treatment and an ongoing protocol, and would be able to resume living with Mom as long as she had lots of help with the household. That’s why the boys and I moved back in, and hired all those aides. I suppose you think I should have told you about all that, too.” Her voice was breaking now, and she expected to feel Lonnie’s arms around her, hear reassurances in the low-slung music of his voice. He angled his body away from hers instead. “I know all about the relapse.” She trained a sharp quizzical eye on him but before she could ask him her question, he answered hers. “You should have told me.” “You can’t force a person confide in you. We all have things we keep to ourselves. Some are too upsetting to talk about, and revelations can’t be rushed.” She looked at him but he would not meet her gaze. Instead he said, “What are you going to do about the memorial?” “I can’t back out now. Brenda will go on with it anyway, whether I show up or not. I keep trying to get her to call it an art exhibit or a retrospective, but she always goes back to the word memorial, even though she thinks I don’t like it because I can’t believe Mandy’s really gone.” She and Lonnie fell into an uncomfortable silence before Clara added, “An artist often has a retrospective in her lifetime, and Brenda says the museum plans on keeping the art up for a month, like a real exhibition.” “Uh-huh.” Lonnie looked as if he was making some kind of determination, the way he leaned forward with clasped hands between his knees. Finally he said, “I know you must wonder if my dealings with your sister were restricted to selling her my old car.” No, Clara wanted to say, don’t tell me. Just don’t. Lonnie took a deep breath. “Awhile after your mother broke her hip, I stopped by the house to check on them. I had no idea your mom had developed dementia, too. Mandy opened the door, and fell into my arms as if she and I were the long-lost couple.” Clara stood up. “I was the only one she could trust in town, she said. You weren’t on speaking terms with her any longer, she said. I had no reason to disbelieve her, although I figured it must have been something huge to keep you away from her and your mother. I didn’t know you were still travelling to see them every few months. I never caught a glimpse of you, and Mandy never said when you were in town, of course, or when you moved back entirely. I thought she was alone, trying to care for your mother the way your mother had taken care of her. I felt I had no choice but to look out for her, if only for your sake.” “I suppose you slept with her for my sake, too?” He hung his head. All their lives, Mandy had tried to put her fingerprints on everything her sister touched. Wishing for a different ending, open-ended as the Chekov story…and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning… Clara rose to go.
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Ed and Steven began to track down documents about the sale of Mandy’s car, in an effort to piece together a paper trail that could uncover Richard’s whereabouts. “We’d like to have a talk with him,” the brothers said to Clara, punching their fists into their palms. “Me too,” she said. They went out onto the driveway to search the crevices between the cushions in the car, under the floor mat, in the trunk and glove box. “We should have brought a trash bag with us,” Steven said, holding his nose at the smell of discarded fast food hamburgers and pizza boxes on the floor and shoved under the seats. There were candy wrappers and dirty socks, and like a diamond in a lump of coal, a notebook of architectural sketches. “I didn’t know she was interested in this kind of art,” Clara said. “What do these represent anyway? Cabinets? Bookcases? They look like storage systems for an underground bunker or something.” “She was probably redesigning that storage facility of hers. I think she mentioned it to me one time. Has anybody paid the fee, by the way? I guess we should do something about striking the set. Or else we could just keep it.” “We shouldn’t rush into closing anything down,” Eddie said. “You never know when the doctors will turn out to be wrong. They can’t predict outcomes in every case.” Hoping. Losing hope. Clara stood alongside the car and stretched. “There’s nothing here we can trace to Richard. Maybe the car really was a loan, or else an actual gift, like Mandy said. She probably didn’t buy it, and if she did, she wouldn’t have necessarily remembered to keep a receipt.” Steven said, “I remember, a long time ago, when we abandoned one of her other old clunkers. It was in much worse shape than this one. It was giving off stinky fumes and she didn’t want to pay a fine, or use up her money for repairs. “It’ll be cheaper to buy a new one,” she said with the kind of logic I knew I couldn’t argue with. So we took off in the middle of the night to abandon the car somewhere that wouldn’t be traced back to us. We drove through a field of wheat taller than the car, and we ended up by a thatch of trees, stuck in mud. I remember being thankful there was good cloud cover, but then the bridge overhead kind of gleamed when the moon came through and shone on it. It was like a spotlight in those prison movies when someone escapes. Mandy liked the look of the light and shadow, and she stared and stared until I had to pull her away. We weren’t done with our job yet. We still had to run up onto the highway so we could hitch a ride back home, but she acted like she wanted to stay right where we were forever, watching the shapes and shadows play on the bridge with all the homeless people setting up tents underneath.” “Speaking of her clunker series, remember the green car that had a huge hole in the floorboard?” Eddie joined in the storytelling, coming at it sideways. “I’d have to push off it like it was a scooter whenever we’d come to a stop and had to start up again. I wonder why Mom put up with the way our driveway looked, what with your old van, Steven, plus Mandy’s clunkers, and the green Galaxie500 Dad bought me just before he died. Mom told him it was an old man’s car and he should have bought me something sportier.” “Wow, first world problems!” Clara wondered if anybody remembered she had been the only one without her own car. She had been expected to share. “At any rate, I pretty much stank up the interior with beer and Brut pretty quick,” Eddie said. “Dad wouldn’t have put up with the way we all acted out after his death.” Pulled back to all the Saturday nights that began at eleven pm, they reminisced about going to bars to dance and drink, until the girls, in their cups, ran into the restroom crying over their father’s death, and the brothers found someone to fight. Some nights the brothers ended up in the emergency room; some nights the other guys did. They had been inconsolable over losing their father, but gave little thought to his widow waiting in the empty house for them to come back. Listening for the garage door to go up, and then judging the children’s degree of impairment by their gaits, she cursed her husband for leaving her alone to deal with the mess his leaving caused. A lull settled in the family’s reminiscences. Whenever their father came up in conversation, there was a held breath of silence, remembering. How to flush out a man living on the wind? Clara stirred her coffee at the cafe, her eye on Mandy’s car parked just outside the glass door. Where was Richard? If he had nothing to hide, why was he hiding? Over the past two weeks, during which there had been no official news, the general verdict of the coffee klatch girls had swayed from suicide to murder. Clara’s “accident” theory had been drowned out as wishful thinking by the whispering drama queens, and they decided not to help Clara find Richard. That was a job for police, they said. So Clara had only a vague plan when she began to drive Mandy’s old car around. Someone who recognized the car as Richard’s might stop her to ask about him, or about Mandy. In the spirit of throwing mud against a wall to see what stuck, Clara parked the car where she could see it, and waited at the café for something, anything, to happen. After sitting in the same place at the same time for several days running, Clara sensed a change of light, registered a flicker of color, and then heard a noise in the vicinity of the car. Someone was rapping on the window. She snapped to attention and hurried from her booth out into the weak winter sunshine. “May I help you?” she demanded of the man peering in the window. One hand still shielding his squint, he straightened up, and moved his fingers from his salute to his wavy grey hair. His face broadened with a smile that quickly crumbled in confusion. His hands fluttered to his sides and he said, “Clara? Don’t you recognize me?” What she recognized was his voice, that familiar rich bass. “Lonnie? Lonnie!” she said, her voice breaking as she stepped into the cradle of his arms. The two of them walked back into the coffee shop hand in hand, and for the next few hours would fill the hole in which time had stranded them. “How are you?” Clara said. “Tell me everything.” Lonnie looked at her with such an intense, complex attention she couldn’t decipher its full meaning. The sunburst of little lines at his eyes gave him a cheeriness he’d never had before, Clara observed; leaving her hadn’t ruined him after all. Did it bother him that she hadn’t recognized him until he spoke? Had it made him feel forgettable? “You haven’t changed a bit. I would have known you anywhere,” he said. Was he scolding her? They had been so young, and so much life had happened since. They ordered coffee. “Do you still like it with two creams, no sugar?” he asked, claiming their past. “I take it black nowadays.” He nodded, and began to drum his fingers on the table: a pianist’s nervous tic. She patted his hand, and named the piece he was playing in his mind. He grinned. “I woke up with that Partita in my head.” “What? Not one of our duets?” She meant it lightly, and wanted to call the words back when he flinched. She hadn’t intended to pick the scab of their past; only to remind him of the happy times. He pulled his hand out from under hers and tipped his chair too far back. She caught her breath. Good, she still worries about me. “Do you remember our first review?” he said. She playfully accepted his challenge, and called up the words on their nearly note-perfect recital, “The duo-pianists, Patterson and Jones, play as if with one breath.” Lonnie smiled, and so did Clara, her skin pinking up like a woman in the bloom of youth, and for a long while they spoke of things known only to the two of them, the private and the deeply felt. She reminded him about their most memorable rehearsals, he reminisced about their slippery falling in love. The sun slowly sank behind the parking lot. “Where did you just go?” Lonnie asked when Clara, dragged away by a memory, failed to answer one of his questions. “You checked out for a minute.” “Sorry. I didn’t hear you.” Lonnie smiled, and signaled the waitress to refill her mug. He had always been attentive to her small needs. Although they both had been avoiding the subject, at last they began to speak about Mandy. “Remember when she turned your second bedroom at the apartment into an art studio?” “I wound up sleeping on a mattress on the living room floor.” “What was her excuse for that, again?” “She had developed anxiety attacks and needed a bedroom with a door that shut.” “I always thought it was because she didn’t want me staying over.” “She was very possessive of me, there’s no denying it.” When I love someone I want to crawl under their skin. “However, the anxiety attacks were real. And as for setting up the studio, she just always liked to work where she lived.” Clara had never admitted to her own irritation when Mandy edged her out of her space, the space she was paying for with her first real job. To her, it was a problem of logistics, not some kind of sisterly coup. When Clara rented the apartment, she assumed Mandy would find a separate studio for her artmaking. There was simply not enough room in their new digs. But one day Clara came home to find her mattress propped up in the hallway and an easel set up in the middle of her bedroom. Mandy shrugged off her sister’s protests. “We can share the other bedroom. We slept in the same bed as kids, after all.” The extra mattress would come in handy when Mom or their brothers visited, she pointed out. Later, when her panic attacks began to come in fast and thick, Mandy decided that sharing a room wasn’t good enough. She needed to be absolutely alone whenever, or in case, they struck. She needed the room with the door that locked, plus blackout curtains on all the windows, to keep the daylight out. Clara found herself exiled by her sister’s need, sleeping on the mattress on the living room floor, wondering each night how she had let it happen. The girls continued to live together, with Clara dutifully taking care of the little sister who searched for inspiration in the local bars, awaiting her big break into the art world. It was a relief to Clara when Mandy’s old classmate from art school, Brenda, became Mandy’s drinking buddy. Loud and full of energy, Brenda had made the night come alive for Mandy during their college years. She pulled Mandy into the center of things, showed her how it was done. Clara was too conventional for the two of them, they decided. “We’d invite you along,” they’d tease her,” but we’ll be up way past your bedtime.” Brenda had an entrepreneurial bent, and was always on the lookout for opportunities for Mandy and she to both show their art. When they had racked up a stack of rejections, she decided to organize her own exhibit for them, before they gave up and lost their ambition in the bottom of a beer mug. It didn’t matter that Brenda was not yet a gallerist. She lived in one of those spacious old Baltimore brownstones with enough wall space to mount a respectable number of paintings, and enough floor space for viewers to mill around. And she knew people. So Brenda hung Mandy’s still-wet paintings on her walls, along with her own recent work, and invited their old classmates and current crop of friends to the “show.” Clara and Mandy arrived with a bottle of wine and two cases of nerves. The room was packed, humid with sweat. “Sorry. The radiator is stuck and one of my friends is trying to fix it,” Brenda explained, taking the wine and ushering them in. “It’s cooler over there,” she said, pointing to the other end of the L shaped room, where a cluster of guests bent over a coffee table with photos fanned out across the surface. The people looked up at Brenda’s approach and one of them tried to hide what had them so absorbed: a collection of art nudes of the hostess. Brenda snatched the pictures up, bellowing her huge laugh. When she caught Mandy’s eye, she marched over to her, waving the photos, and kissed her full on the lips. “The woman of the hour!” she shouted. “She is a true visionary.” She erupted into another laugh, loud enough to make Clara, already shocked by the kiss, jump. She didn’t know where to look. Not at her sister, certainly, who seemed less embarrassed that she should have been. Turning away, Clara saw a man in the corner holding his hands over his ears, protection against Brenda’s noise. He approached her and said, “My name is Lonnie Jones. Don’t we go to school together?” Of course! He was one of the other piano teachers. “Indeed we do,” Clara said. “How do you know Brenda?” “I don’t. I’m here with Tom, the violinist over there. He knows her. They used to go out. I wondered if the featured artist Mandy Patterson he was talking about was related to Clara Patterson. Imagine my surprise…” The colleagues talked for a while, aiming the words directly into one another’s ears with cupped palms, an intimacy necessary every time someone turned up the music. The gesture shaped the space until it felt like it held just the two of them. They barely noticed it when Brenda hopped on the furniture to dance, but somebody once again had turned the music up so loud that Lonnie put his hands over his sensitive ears. “Would you like to get out of here?” he mouthed. “I would, but I can’t. I’m my sister’s designated driver.” Mandy whirled by just then, and Clara caught her by the wrist to make the introductions, pretending as if Mandy’s stare was an ordinary thing. Later, Lonnie would admit the stare made him feel like prey, and Clara instantly gave up the fantasy that he and her sister would ever become friends. She also found it easier than she expected to lie to Lonnie: my sister and I are not that close. In that moment of picking sides, it was true. She had given up so much for Mandy, and she was sick of it. She deserved to have something she didn’t have to share. “He’ll grab all the glory and then leave you flat,” Mandy viciously predicted when Clara and he began to play together. “He’ll break your heart and I’ll have to clean up your mess, as usual.” Clara never imagined that in her sister’s mind, Mandy was her caregiver, not the other way around. It should have been no surprise, coming from someone who insisted I’m always the dominant one in my own paintings. “Where is Mandy, by the way?” Lonnie asked Clara now. “What do you mean?” Lonnie laughed. “It’s not a trick question.” “You didn’t know? She shot herself.” Color drained from his face and his hands began to shake. “No. No, no, no.” Clara lowered her eyes. “It’s true.” “But I just talked to her a few months ago. I saw the car parked outside, just like today, except with her inside it. I asked her how it was running.” “You thought she was here at the coffee shop and that’s why you were looking in the car?” “I just wanted to know how she was doing with the car. It’s a good car, even though it’s short on looks.” Clara cocked her head. What was she missing? “At least I didn’t overcharge her. She paid me $100 for it.” Clara took this piece of the puzzle to her dumbfounded brothers that night. “Let me get this straight. Old Lonnie sold Mandy the car. Richard did not give it to her,” Steven said. “Yes. Mandy lied about that too, big surprise.” “Maybe it was wishful thinking. She wanted Richard to care for her more than he actually did, I guess,” Ed said, still giving her the benefit of the doubt. “Did Lonnie mention anything Mandy might have said about Richard? We still need to find him. I’d like to know how he and Mandy were getting along, which one blamed the other for the failure of the last show, things of that nature.” Steven wanted a deeper dive into the subject than his brother could tolerate. “No. He seemed too devastated by the news of the shooting to tell me much of anything.” “Damn! The car connection was our best bet.” “I’ll probably get more out of him later.” “So you’re going to see him again?” If they were going to tease her, she would pretend to scowl at them. “Mind your own businesses.” After their first encounter at the café, Clara and Lonnie had avoided too much reminiscing about the early stages of their romance; and steered far away from the time when their future together became so murky with Amanda’s disease they could barely breathe. They were starting over. Perhaps they could write a different ending. They had grown up three blocks from one another in the little town. Having found their way back home again, they spent hours showing each other their favorite childhood places— the hiking trail in the park, the zoo, the fabled historic mansion. “Remember Chrissy Hynde’s song about this town?” “What, this one? I went back to Ohio /But my city was gone /There was no train station /There was no downtown /South Howard had disappeared …” “You’re full of surprises!” “Her music was one of my guilty pleasures.” Lonnie laughed and held Clara’s hand tighter. She started to say something, but Lonnie dropped her hand to point at a landmark stone church as they passed it. It was set back from the sidewalk and beribboned in yellow police tape. It had recently been burned. They got out of the car and slowly approached it. It was a sentimental place for both Lonnie and Clara. They had grown up hearing and playing recitals there, but not together. Clara stood in front of the red wooden door and tried the handle. It moved with a creaking sound, but she hesitated. “Will they let us come in? Is it safe?” Lonnie pushed through the door. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” They found that the part of the church that had been used as a recital hall had survived. The wood pews were mostly intact, although a campfire fragrance clung to them. “It’s almost like I remember it,” Clara said. Time and distance, more than the fire, had smudged some details in her mind’s eye. “Me too. It’s impossible that we each performed here so many times when we were kids, but never together.” “Let’s fix that.” When they fell in love all those years ago, it was first with one another’s playing. Now as they joined hands and walked down the aisle separating the two sections of pews Clara could have sworn she recognized the piano on the stage from an old scratch on its lid. They settled themselves on the bench and began to play Debussy’s Petite Suite, their signature encore from days gone by. A custodian started clapping in the middle of it, but it was not applause. Rather, he was trying to get their attention. “You should not be here. It is dangerous. Leave now!” “We used to play here…” “I don’t need your life story. I need you to leave!” So they left. “Do you think he knows our taxes pay his salary?” “I don’t imagine he knows much about anything. At least this one wasn’t armed.” Instead of getting back into the car, they walked for a while to settle their nerves. They came to a restaurant they had each frequented years before. “It’s still here!” It hadn’t changed much: pink leatherette seating and speckled Formica counters, a glass case of pastries in the front. Clara slid into a booth, Lonnie tumbling in after her on the same side, the way he used to in their early days. Clara smoothed her shin with her hand. Good. She had remembered to shave. Lonnie noticed the gesture and with a twinkle in his eye, hurried her through her snack, suddenly in a very good mood. Once in his apartment, where the baby grand in the corner grinned at Clara as if she was an old friend, Lonnie walked her backward into the bedroom. The years between them fell away as easily as clothes. Clara touched the lines that had appeared along either side of his mouth. “They just showed up one day,” Lonnie said, faintly embarrassed. She kissed each one, and then smoothed the line between his eyebrows. “I knew this would happen one day,” she chuckled low in her throat. “You always frowned when you listened to music.” She pulled the sheet up, feeling a sudden awareness of her body. He pulled it down again, meaning to look at her slowly and deliberately, but the feeling took on urgency as blinding as a first time they were together. He sank into her; soon the only sounds were their quick breaths and the rumble of traffic outside. Afterward, they stayed as they were for a long while before she wriggled out from under him. The bed was a tight fit but she thought his narrow mattress was touching. She couldn’t resist imbuing it with a meaning beyond what it actually represented. It was a souvenir from his childhood bedroom, kept for sentimental reasons. It did not mean he’d lived like a monk since their breakup. Someone must have taken her place from time to time. You have no right to be jealous, she told herself all the way to the bathroom. None whatsoever. In another era, Clara would have been more careful letting Brenda into Mandy’s studio, but she opened the door now with something close to anticipation. Brenda’s company had grown on her over the past weeks, and even Mom liked her. “Are you happy with us?” she asked every time the visitor came over, when she only meant How are you. Brenda had brought an armful of blank forms on this particular day. She was ready to inventory some art, her hair pulled back with an elastic band, body swaddled in brown overalls one size too big. The studio itself always seemed to disorient her for a few minutes after entering; that smell of old paint and chemicals, the swirl of colors that had chronicled Mandy’s creative life. Brenda nearly lost her balance this time, stubbing her toe on several black catalogues haphazardly piled on the floor. She winced and said, “Mandy’s early pictures need to be listed too. It will save you trouble down the line.” Brenda scooped up the books and put them on a metal table ( a reminder to thumb through them later?) and then quickly climbed the ladder, pulling down a stack of old canvases from the highest shelf. Clara recalled another feat of her physical daring, from an ancient afternoon: the three of them at The Tavern, and Brenda, finding a smudge on her glass, growling “Filthy bastards!” She’d jumped onto the bar, straight up like a cat, to get a clean glass. On the way back down, her fake ponytail fell off. “We better pick out the rest of the work for the show, first order of business,” Brenda said. “Oh, there’s no rush for that, is there?” Brenda shot a quizzical look at Clara. “Except for all the obvious reasons.” The date had been chosen, arrangements all made, and still Clara was dragging her feet about it. It was too late to explain why−she had missed chance after chance to come clean to Mandy’s friends. Each time, Clara had felt her courage wither, her nerve fail. She cast around for an obstacle to help shore her up. “I don’t know why the director offered to host the show at the museum. That’s a lot of expense to go to for someone she wasn’t very interested in.” “Why do you say that? She was interested in Mandy. She admitted she made a mistake when she rejected her for a show all those years ago. But they were both barely out of college then, and trying to fill roles that were too big for them.” Brenda rifled through the stack of older paintings propped against the wall. She pulled one out. “This is nice. Did she ever say anything about it?” “She said she wanted to see if she could make a white painting that wasn’t cold.” Mandy had made the picture in a single sitting, working through the night. The sisters had just come in from a gallery opening featuring Mandy’s paintings. Brenda came late, dressed in yellow tights and a scowl. She drank everybody’s wine, picked a fight with the curator about aesthetics, and loudly pointed out what she considered weaknesses in her friend’s work. When the curator defended his choice of pictures, Brenda stormed out of the gallery without a word to him or the sisters. Once home, Mandy slid into the studio. From time to time, her quick sobs disturbed the quiet, but by the time the sun rose, she had a wet painting to show Clara: a pair of white figures, embracing, protective of one another, melancholy. Was one of them sick? The warmth born of devotion rose up out of the white oil paint. “It’s not cold at all,” Brenda said, now. Looking at the small third figure in yellow tights at the bottom of the picture, she wondered aloud who it represented. “I had a pair of yellow tights like that. But it looks like that figure is trying to tear the other two other figures apart, so it can’t be me.” My work is always autobiographical. “Well, Picasso said that painting was another way of keeping a diary, so you never know,” Clara said. After Brenda left, Clara told her brothers, “That show−it’s like a train barreling down the tracks. There’s no way to stop it now without all of us looking really bad.” She held up the large photograph of their sister that Brenda had made for her to use at the memorial. “The weird thing is that Mandy used to have a fantasy of faking her own death just so she could see what people really thought about her,” Eddie said. “That’s the weird thing?!” Steven laughed bitterly. “Well, among others, I guess.” “I guess we’ll just have to go all in, and turn the service into the museum retrospective Mandy always wanted.” “What does Lonnie think about all this, under the circumstances?” Eddie asked. He had been tracking the progress of Clara’s relationship. Mom, too, had somehow caught wind of the rekindled romance, and asked her daughter, “Do you have a man, dear?” The question startled Clara. She gave her mother a mischievous smile and a quick nod, and Mom patted her hand approvingly. Turning to Eddie, Clara said, “I haven’t told Lonnie anything. He made the same assumption everyone else did when I told him, so I let it stand. I may have to fill in some gaps later, do a mea culpa, but for now, I think it’s important to be consistent. I hope neither of you have said anything to your friends.” “Friends?” Steven laughed again. He had just been served with divorce papers earlier in the day. “I haven’t told anyone anything,” Ed said. “In any case, with Mom at the service, most of the attention will go to her. And since she can’t really answer nosy questions, people will probably back off.” “Yeah, in a perfect world, maybe.” Steven was in a worse mood than usual, not just because of his divorce, but also the fact he had run into Brenda on the way out of the house that afternoon. She had begun to load Mandy’s pictures into her car to take to the museum. “Apparently the art needed professional photographing, but she couldn’t explain to me why, exactly. When she left I saw her laughing as she revved the engine,” Steven told Clara. “Maybe I’m just in a paranoid mood, but she had the look of someone getting away with something.” “Hmm,” Clara murmured. Brenda had volunteered many hours to organize Mandy’s pieces, and steadfastly refused payment for her work; this is the least I can do for Mandy, she repeatedly said. Brenda doesn’t do favors, Mandy once told Clara. A memory surfaced in Clara’s mind, blurry at first, but then snapping into focus. The sisters, on their way to a celebratory dinner years before, had run into Brenda on the street. “So how are you?” Brenda said in a tone that indicated she was not very interested in the answer. The friends had been on the outs for quite a while. “Couldn’t be better.” Clara spoke first, to buy Mandy a few moments to un-tie her tongue. “Yeah,” she managed to chime in, a beat behind. “I’ve got a meeting with the director at Gallery K tomorrow.” “Isn’t that something,” Brenda said. “Which one of you pulled the strings?” “Neither one. Mandy’s old professor made the connection. It’s the gallery he shows at, too.” Brenda sucked in her breath and breathed out again, slowly. “How about that. Didn’t he have the hots for you, Mandy?” “I was his favorite student, but not for the reason you think.” “Well, I hope everything goes ok. The director of that gallery has a boyfriend who eats lunch at the same place I do. He’s not a practicing artist but he has influence over what gets on the walls for the group shows. I’ll put in a good word for you.” “Oh, my old teacher put in all the good words I need. And it’s not for a group show. Representation is pretty much a done deal. Hey, could you give me back the paintings you still have of mine? There’s a few I’d like to let these people see.” Brenda squirmed with a manufactured embarrassment. “Oh Jesus, I forgot to tell you they were lost during my move. Sorry about that. Do you have insurance? No? Well, your new pictures are probably better anyhow.” It was a mugging, the knife hastily withdrawn. Brenda made a quick exit while Clara guided her sister into the restaurant as if she was physically wounded. A man seated across from them immediately sent over a bottle of champagne. This happened often enough, and sometimes one thing led to another, but not tonight. The sisters both waved the gift away. “I can’t believe she stole my paintings,” Mandy seethed. “We gotta get back at her.” “She said she lost them.” “She’s lying. She stole them.” “Any ideas? We haven’t got the money for small claims court.” “I need to figure out something that will really hurt her. I just don’t know what, yet.” “Maybe this is Brenda’s revenge for you breaking away from her and spending so much time with me.” “Well, duh. She always thought she could just swallow me whole, and I’d be grateful for the attention. It worked when we were back at school. Having her around brought me out of my shell. She probably still thinks we’re more alike than we actually are because I imitated her a lot. Pretty soon, I couldn’t see where she ended and I began.” “That’s a little too close for comfort,” Clara said. “Why do you say that? It’s the same way with you and me, but even more so, because we’re kind of like twins.” Mandy took a forkful of filet mignon, voluptuously put it in her mouth, and swallowed it almost without chewing. If she saw her sister’s face grow pale, she didn’t comment on it; but looking down at her plate, she said in a near-whisper, “Do you think I’ll crash and burn?” “Of course not!” Clara said. “Yes, what was I thinking? Of course I won’t screw up.” The sisters would always wonder what Brenda said to the gallery’s board members to make them unanimously reject her. Clara lived through the days after Amanda shot herself as if her hair was on fire, her body underwater. When she broke through the surface, gasping for air, she felt the full force of grief hurtle through the ground beneath her feet. It aimed straight toward her, and settled in her gut.
She couldn’t eat. She slept fitfully. Anger showed on her face, distorting her features. There was no privacy in her physical being, no place to hide her feelings, so when she met with Mandy’s friends at the coffee shop, her lips were pinched into a grimace only distantly related to a smile, and the women approached her as if she was some untamed creature. Clara slipped into her sister’s old place like a spy, warding off the proffered hugs. She couldn’t bear to be touched, especially in such a crowded space, and they seemed to understand that. She took off her sunglasses but quickly put them back on again. The bright lights that usually made the shop so cheery blinded her now. “I’m so sorry,” one of the women began to say. ”I can’t believe it.” “We just saw her last week…” Clara heard the phrases as from a great distance, vibrations in a chorus, echoing syllables divorced from meaning. A lukewarm interest was all she had expected, or at most, a wave of fabricated sympathy. Looking at their faces, she wondered why she had sold her sister’s friends so short. These were the same people who had challenged a psychotic Mandy when she characterized Clara as a thief who had stolen her art. That doesn’t sound like her. Your sister would do anything for you. “Are the authorities sure it was suicide? I can’t find any official news about it. I never thought I’d miss my policeman ex-husband, but he would have known what’s going on.” If we made a pact, who would be the suicide and who would be the murder? The back of Clara’s neck prickled. When a shooting occurs, suicide is only one explanation, but these women had already settled on it. They would need more information if the scope of possibility was to be stretched. They would need to be convinced. The flow of information should go both ways. Clara wanted to pick the women’s brains as well. She had plenty of questions; what she wanted now were answers. The whole point of coming here was to uncover something she did not know or had not absorbed about her sister, some detail to help her to understand what had really happened to Mandy. “It might have been an accident,” she said in an almost inaudible voice. That possibility was swallowed by a commotion in the corner. The manager was loudly shooing a homeless man away from the door. “Suicide is so hard on the survivors,” said one woman, whose voice rose above the disturbance. The voice itself startled Clara more than the words. Harsh and grainy, it reminded Clara of quicksand somehow. By the time both the sound and sense settled into the folds of Clara’s brain, the woman had already moved onto her next thought. “We all think it must be our fault, the way little kids look at their parents’ divorce.” “I bet that any catalyst in Mandy’s case had more to do with her last show flopping. Wasn’t all of that Richard’s fault? He was the one who arranged it.” “The review mentioned an anonymous collaborator wrecking the pictures. They were talking about him, am I right?” “Right. So why didn’t she shoot him, you know, for messing her work up? Or maybe they had a suicide pact and he chickened out after she went through with it?” “Maybe he’s hiding while his wounds heal.” “You’ve been watching too much Netflix! Seriously, though. Has anyone heard from him directly? He should know there’s interest in what he has to say for himself.” “Not to speak of his moral and civic duty. I don’t know what kind of a man he is, and I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.” “Mandy never really showed him off.” “Let’s not turn this into a whodunit, people. Show some respect.” Cherie jerked her head toward a stony-faced Clara. A half-beat of silence, followed by another opinion: “I always thought Richard was an imaginary friend.” “Mandy was calling all men Richard for a while. It was like calling guys John Doe.” “That’s her sense of humor, alright.” “The police should want to speak with Richard about the death. Also, to find out if there’s anything to the art forgery rumor that involved Mandy.” To Michi, the conspiracy theorist of the group, the mere suggestion of a crime surfacing in their small community excited her, whereas it only embarrassed the other women. “The authorities probably have spoken to everyone involved.” “Even if there are two different cases?” “Sure. They wouldn’t bother to report on either one to us. We don’t figure in the whole mess.” “Nobody’s asked any of us what we know, true enough. They probably think we’re not important enough to question. And as for anything to do with the art world, we’re dilettantes at best.” “Yes. Mandy was the only real artist among us hobbyists,” said Aurora. Michi flushed with irritation, and shoved the sketchbook she had brought to show them deeper into her bag. ”We probably seem like casual friends to outsiders. We only have coffee together once a week. Most people wouldn’t think we’re all that close.” “I felt close to her, but none of us looked out for her enough. We knew she was sick. Did any of you have any inkling this was going to happen? And how did she manage to score a gun with her record of mental illness?” Kim, although she had known Mandy the longest, had the least information. “She’s had it for ages. The guy at the gun store just handed it over. Haven’t you kept up with the news? It’s easier to buy a gun nowadays than practically anything! You can be crazy or blind or still in your teens, it doesn’t matter. The NRA doesn’t care how many innocents get murdered as long as all the fear and loathing increases gun sales!” “And thar she blows! Come back, come back, Michi, we’re trying to discuss suicide here. As I was about to say, suicides plan it all carefully and then feel better because they’ve made a decision. They get all cheerful, and so nobody is suspicious about their plan.” Aurora looked at Clara for some response. It came in a voice knotted tight. “My sister was not suicidal. Neither depressed, manic, unusually cheerful, nor resigned. The doctors considered her stable. She was living in the actual real world, not in some hallucination. She was not psychotic when she pulled the trigger, I’d bet my own life on it. There must have been a reason. We’re missing something. It doesn’t make sense.” Clara cursed the quaver in her voice. She had not forgotten how Aurora had advised Mandy, in the throes of her breakdown, to exercise her political freedom and just spit out her drugs if she wanted. Now Clara wanted to spit her own words in Aurora’s face, in all these women’s faces. How dare they think of her sister as a freak, and therefore less-than the likes of them? Had their friendship merely been extended to her out of pity, or even worse, voyeurism? Had Mandy known? “Yes, there could be something we’re missing. It’s best not to take things at face value.” The woman with the loud voice had modulated it, but the voice itself bothered Clara. It was so familiar that it made her ask, “Have we met?” “Yes. I’m Brenda, Mandy’s old friend from art school. You and I knew each other too, from when you sisters lived in that apartment with the blackout drapes and the foam mattress on the living room floor. The grand piano in the corner always looked like a ship lost at sea in the midst of all that makeshift stuff.” Clara focused her memory inward. Mandy had insisted on those blackout drapes, the better to sleep all day after drinking all night. Her drinking buddy was most often Brenda, until they fell out, first over a competition for a place in an art show; then Brenda’s jealousy over the sisters’ own attachment to one another. Mandy and Brenda always made up in the end, and Brenda was the one who witnessed Mandy’s first psychosis on the day she was admitted to the hospital. Did she remember tearing down the blackout drapes from the window after Mandy was carted off screaming about stolen paintings? “Brenda! Of course I remember you.” Brenda: drama queen, would-be star-maker and saboteur. “Do you live here now?” “No, I heard about Amanda, and came to attend whatever service you’re planning for her, and to see if you needed help with cataloging her work or anything. That’s a big part of my job now that I’ve got my own gallery. But for however long you need me, I’m here. I’ll be staying with my old friend, Lauren.” She patted Lauren’s arm, who added, “Yes, we were all wondering about the memorial. We certainly understand if you want a private funeral, but we’d all like to pay our respects.” Who gave this stranger a vote? Clara wondered. Mandy never mentioned a Lauren. “Did you know my sister well?” Lauren blinked the way people do when they’re about to lie. Then she reconsidered. “Not so much,” she admitted, and the image of a churchgoer who stalks funerals just because she can, flashed through Clara’s mind. The director of the art museum came by the table. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said, looking at Clara, “but I couldn’t help overhearing. I’m so deeply sorry about Amanda and I’d be glad to arrange a memorial show for her at the museum, if you’d like. She was one of the city’s bright stars and her loss is a great wound for the arts community.” “Thank you kindly, Director,” Clara said. “How about we organize a celebration-of-life kind of a thing?” Brenda suggested, looking from the director to Clara and back. “We could put Mandy’s art up at the museum, especially since she hated church. Mandy never did get religion, did she? So I suppose a church setting would be hypocritical. Remember when I organized that show in my apartment for her, Clara?” Clara remembered. She also remembered how, when Mandy’s pictures dwarfed the response to her own lesser works, she had turned up the music, taken off her clothes, and danced on her sturdy wood dining table. Redirecting attention from Mandy’s work had always been her goal. “An art-themed memorial is a great idea!” This from Kim, Mandy’s oldest friend. From the second grade onward, Kim had attended all Mandy’s events and shows, celebrated her birthdays, and later posed for portraits. “She was always trying to get people to look at her work.” Kim didn’t mean it the way it sounded, but her words were enough to ignite a memory for Clara: Mandy explaining her pictures to an audience made of thin air, like an actress playing a part against an actor not on set; turning, bending, pointing out elements on the canvases. Clara, standing in the doorway, knees just beginning to buckle, a strangely calm question floating through her mind: Does the rule to never interrupt a sleepwalker apply to this kind of altered state? As in a dream, she had tried to scream, but no sound came out. It was the first time she had witnessed her sister hallucinate. Remembering, Clara covered her face with her hand. Brenda was the first to misunderstand the gesture. “Sorry, girl. We didn’t mean to overstep.” Clara glared at them all, to acknowledge that indeed they had. “It’s ok, but it’s not as if Mandy will come back if only we throw a good enough party. She’s not ever coming back.” “We didn’t mean it like that. Oh god, we didn’t mean to make you cry.” Clara leaned back in her chair, dabbed at her eyes, and then opened her mouth to say something about accidents versus suicide. Before she could, Cherie had jumped in to ask everyone in general, but nobody in particular, “What are the stages of grief, by the way?” To delay a discussion of Mandy’s details in favor of the universal experience of sorrow was a good move. The general is always the safer choice. People want to relate things to their own lives. “There’s shock and denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, right?” The pride of the good student, third seat on the left. “By that token, having a memorial does seem like bargaining with God to let her come back.” “That’s more like acceptance.” “What about not throwing away the deceased person’s shoes, in case they might need them when they finally show up again?” “That’s more like magical thinking.” Aurora always needed the last word. Her restless fingers clicked her phone, and she pulled up an article about Kubler-Ross. “Five stages. Looks like you’re in for quite a trip.” She read more about each of the stages, aloud. Then, this: “Hey, it sounds like the country’s reaction to the orange yam in the White House!” “Yeah, America’s abusive boyfriend.” “He’s like Mandy’s Richard. Two huge losers, twins separated at birth.” A tentative wash of laughter. “Also take into consideration the various types of grief. What you’re suffering from is called complicated grief.” This one’s tone was authoritative, and the company came to attention, backs suddenly meerkat straight. Clara stifled a giggle at the sight, and fumbled for the speaker’s name. She often saw her marching across campus in hiking boots; they’d nod but had never spoken until today. Susan? Sharon? Stephanie? “It’s not the same as anticipatory grief, like with your Mom’s Alzheimer’s, which can only end one way. But they both involve mourning the final loss of somebody who’s already left the building in important respects, like the case of your mother’s faculties, and your sister’s mental health. It’s a real pile-up.” Sharon (yes, that was it— Sharon) looked down at the balled-up napkin in her hand. The gesture related the subject at hand to her own experience, whatever it was, but nobody wanted to hear about that. Michi rattled the newspaper featuring a gossip column blaring Which local artist is suspected of making art forgeries? Watch this space. She shook it as if the whole truth could be forced from it. “They really are talking about Mandy here, aren’t they?” “What, because she’s the only artist you know?” snarled Susan. “Fake news!” Feigning ignorance was the safest move when Clara didn’t know whom to trust. She could have given a fuller answer about the origin of this rumor. She could have talked about the day she unrolled the many paintings taken from Richard’s closet, and Mandy was as outraged as if they had caught him cheating. “How many artists must Richard be using anyways? There’s no way all these are mine.” “Maybe some of them are much older, painted over who knows how long ago?” Clara had gently offered. Mandy examined the pictures closely and pronounced a sharp “Nope. They’re fairly new, even the ones painted to look old.” The Art of Cracquelure. “And you’re sure they couldn’t all have been painted by one person?” “Impossible. Not by me at least. Look how long it’s taken me to do the few reproductions Richard wants, to decorate our walls.” But when Clara, without the knowledge of the family, had taken the paintings to a lab outside the city, the expert had said, “These are all done by the same hand. And she signed them very cleverly and imperceptibly. She wants to be caught, but only by the worthiest of sleuths.” Nobody at this table filled that particular bill, and the gossip columnist was only that, a small town gossip. To Michi and the others Clara said, “Since my sister is not able to defend herself, or explain, please regard all this as mere speculation, or worse, idle trouble-making. I’d like to know who started such a vicious rumor.” She shook her fist at the unknown perpetrator, and the women shrank back. None of the women wanted to be pasted with a label like gossip, or to be considered gullible, so they sat in their seats, chastened. No one spoke. Michi winced at the coffee grinder’s noise, as if she wished she could shush it. Did any of the women remember that spreading rumors is part of schizoaffective disorder? Clara glanced at Michi’s newspaper. How long had she been carrying the column around, anyway? Did she show it to everyone she met? It was a strange way for the would-be artist to claim connection to Mandy. Michi unfolded the paper and handed it to Clara, who had not asked for it. “Who would start a rumor like that?” Michi thought she found an opening. “What would they have to gain?” She looked at Clara, who stared back this time, both women unblinking. “It’s probably Richard, doing misguided public relations for Mandy.” Aurora wasn’t ready to let her own tangent go; she wanted to compare-and-contrast Richard with the president. “Like our great leader. Did you read that Trump used to impersonate his own PR person? These guys are both psychopaths, gas-lighting everyone in sight.” Aurora’s quirks and leaps of logic were tolerated by the women who had gone to elementary school with her. “Amanda’s very ambitious, and she probably thought Richard could deliver on his wild promises, whatever they were, by whatever means.” “Richard was more likely blackmailing her,” Brenda, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, said. “It couldn’t have been blackmail. What could she have that he would think was valuable?” Susan said. “Her talent. He preyed on artists with talent,” Clara said through gritted teeth. Susan saw her mistake and stuttered an apology, or something close to it, ending with, “Of course. We all know she’s a genius! We each have a portrait by her! She gave us the friends-and-family discounts!” “Friends and family? You mean the people who should support the artist most fully? Then again, I suppose everyone wants a bargain.” An uncomfortable silence spread across the table until it had stretched so thin, anything could have broken it. “It seemed like Richard was doing a good job for Mandy’s career, at least.” “What was his job title anyway? I heard her refer to him as her agent, her gallerist, her broker, her manager, and her boyfriend. Seems like a lot of hats for one guy to wear.” “The whole relationship was confusing. Was Mandy afraid of him? Forgive me, but is it at all possible he abused her?” “The cops would have looked at that.” “Not necessarily, if they knew she was sick. Her whole point of view on everything would not be credible in that instance.” Clara thought of all the times the police had come to determine Mandy’s mental state during some emergency or other, and left without believing what they saw with their own eyes. “Cops know those folks live in some kind of alternate reality that seems real to them.” Those folks. “You mean like the alternative facts that are currently all the rage?” A dodge by Aurora, backed up with snickering from the gallery. In another era, it would have been called cackling. No wonder Mandy had sometimes referred to these women as The Coven. Brenda cleared her throat. “Be that as it may, the docs probably wouldn’t have discharged her to go live with an Alzheimer’s patient if she wasn’t up to it. But she wasn’t even in charge of your mother, was she, Clara? You hired lots of aides, and you and your brothers were on site. Mandy knew that she didn’t really have to do anything other than paint. You said she was free as a bird, I bet. She could’ve even got a job if she wanted. I bet a few of us wish someone would make us an offer like that.” Have I gone mad? I’m afraid so…All the best people are. “It would be so cool to have a patron!” Several women laughed in agreement. Clara understood they thought Mandy had been too spoiled to consider something as mundane as an ordinary nine-to-five. The possibility that the family was protecting her, and had always protected her, didn’t occur to any of them. They had no idea that when she moved back home after art school all those years ago, she took a job as a waitress and it nearly broke her. She would be so wound up by the end of her shift that she couldn’t sleep until dawn, so she’d spend the night drinking in the local bars and obsessing over whichever young man had last attracted her. When one romance backfired, her paranoia erupted and she bought a German shepherd for protection. She took the big dog everywhere, like an eccentric from the jazz age strolling with her leashed leopard. The guard dog waiting in the red Camaro outside the strip of bars had taken on the mystique of an urban legend. Bar-keepers still had a customer or two who kept the story alive. “She had limitations that most of you can’t imagine.” Clara’s voice came in low and dangerous. “You whine about your headaches and colds, your stiff muscles, bad choice of men and thwarted careers. Talk about thwart! My sister was capable of extraordinary art, but ordinary things threw her for a loop. Yet her doctors said her disease was in remission and she was stable. Not suicidal. How many times do I have to say it? The shooting must have been an accident.” “Don’t get mad. It just goes to show how fluid the medical definition of stability must be.” Susan saw things as black or white, and had no use for fluidity in definitions of any kind. Leaning forward on her elbows, Clara put her head in her hands. She realized she had come to the wrong place at the wrong time. She had come hoping these women could give her insight about her sister, somehow mitigate her grief. She had received nothing she could use, and still the voices droned on. “If she hadn’t shot herself first, wouldn’t she have had to go to prison for the forgeries? If all that’s true, I mean. Or would they just have hospitalized her?” Someone stage-whispered the phrase criminally insane and someone else hushed her. Suddenly, Clara couldn’t stand to be with her sister’s friends for another moment. Pushing away from the table, she stood up and walked away without a word. The women’s eyes followed her out of the door. “She looked like she didn’t even recognize me.” “Did you hear what she said to me?” “She’s usually so nice.” At dinner that night, Ed dangled a piece of broccoli in front of Mom, cooing about little trees. Mom giggled and pried the vegetable off the fork with her fingers. “How was your visit with Mandy’s artistes?” he said, not looking at Clara, unwilling to break eye contact with their mother. “They decided it was a suicide, unless Richard was involved. In that case it might have been a suicide pact, with him backing out of it. Those are the two main theories. That it may have been an accident is too basic for them. I kept saying the one thing and they kept insisting I meant something else. It was surreal.” “Sounds like the whole taking-the-knee debate.” “Yes. Also, now they’re experts on grief. They googled it right in front of me.” “Really. Like, the stages and all?” Eddie’s mouth turned up in a smirk. “Yep. They want to plan a memorial service.” Eddie shot his sister a sharp look. “What did you say to that?” “Nothing. I just went with it.” He didn’t respond for a moment. “Are you going to tell them not to?” “I wasn’t planning on it.” She had gone to the café with a view to telling them everything, but she was too angry now. Besides, she didn’t owe them a thing. They were Amanda’s friends, not hers. “I suppose I should, though. I’ll get around to it later.” Eddie considered this, and finally said, “Well, it’s not as if they’ll ever see her again anyway.” “No.” And so they were agreed. I come into Richard’s apartment alone on the night of the launch. I come into the space that I can’t bring myself to call home. I guess that point is moot now, considering Richard doesn’t seem to care where I sleep. The rooms are completely transformed now. The place looks like any other gallery, what with the lights and white cubes and smell of vanilla covering over the scent of paint and plywood. At least he hasn’t changed the locks on me or anything.
My sibs have decided to boycott the exhibit and Richard, since they think they’re the only ones who should have any influence over me. I stand by the door in my new black dress, my red high heels, and my buzz-cut. I let the doorway frame me for a minute, the way people do when they’re trying to make an entrance. Richard did not let me see the exhibit after he hung it. I would have liked to have mounted it myself or at least given him some input, but he acted all secretive about it. He tried to pass off all the cloak and dagger stuff as a surprise. Now I kind of wish I had a blindfold to hide my eyes from the glaring white walls gouged with my dark paintings. There’s a row of them along each wall, all but the one of me abusing Mom altered by Richard. I barely recognize my original concept for any of them. I clamp my hands to my shorn head and stifle the urge to cry. The museum director’s sister greets me, telling me she finds my new work interesting. That’s my least favorite descriptor in the world. “Have you spoken to our Richard yet?” I shake my head. Richard comes into view. She points him out and says, “There he is! Just follow his red shoes with your red shoes!” I mince over to him in my idiotic shoes. Why did I wear these things? Richard likes my pretty feet but it’s not a fetish or anything. He probably wouldn’t have minded my usual sneakers, although I’m not so sure about his interest in my comfort anymore. I stop to pull off the shoes and continue to walk toward him, dangling them from my wrist like a purse. I wonder if he remembers the fairy tale about red shoes. Richard, encircled by museum staff, lifts a hand in greeting. Maryann is huddled close to him, almost under his arm. He throws off her off with the rest of his people and gallops over to me. “You cut your hair!” he accuses me, with a frown. “Well, yeah. You told me to.” “What? I’d never suggest that. I loved your hair. Are you feeling ok?” He taps his finger against my temple. I’m confused. Was it Clara, then, who told me to cut my hair off like some prisoner? “Prisoner of love,” I mumble. Richard doesn’t hear me correctly. “Yes, everyone loves the show!” “Oh, really?” I point to a viewer who stands transfixed in front of one picture, only to turn away, shaking his head. Richard says, “He’s obviously culturally blind.” He calls over Maryann. “She did a lot of work for the show. You should thank her. She’s a great protégé.” “What happened to your other protégé?” I’m referring to myself, but he doesn’t understand that. It occurs to me once again that I don’t know a lot about Richard. “The press is here, so you’ll have to talk to them. OK?” He looks at me as if he thinks that might be too much to ask. “Better put your shoes on.” I lean on his arm to slip each foot into its leather case. If he moved his arm away for a second, he could send me sprawling across the polished parquet floor. He doesn’t, of course, and I turn on my red high heel to introduce myself to the reporter. After the pleasantries, I steel myself for questions, as if this tampered-with show is on the level, which it is not as far as I’m concerned. “So, who are your inspirational models?” “My model is figurative-abstract fusion like Miles Davis’ jazz fusion–a blend of jazz and rock.” “Do tell. I’ve never heard of this fusion.” The reporter is so young, it’s no wonder. There are lots of things he hasn’t heard of yet. “There has always been figurative-abstract fusion, going back to Turner with his mature work of storms, fire and vague buildings in the background.” “So he was the first?” “Yes. Turner was the daddy of figurative-abstract fusion painting. Probably, we next see it in Picasso’s cubism. The Dames d’ Avignon was certainly both abstract and figurative, as was all ensuing cubist painting.” “Oh, I see. After cubism, I guess lots of artists–fauvists, German expressionists, Klee, Kandinsky – had figuration and abstraction. Am I right?” “Yes. All figurative painting, even the old masters, had an abstract base– concern with color, line, value, composition, etc. Some painters took those concerns and turned them into the subject matter and came up with entire abstract paintings – first Kandinsky, with his improvisations-and later the abstract expressionists.” “What about Gorky?” “Gorky painted a little before the abstract expressionists, and combined subliminal imagery with lyrical color. So he was a figurative abstract fusionist. So was de Kooning, with his women’s series.” I’ve collected a good group of people around me by now. This must be what it feels like to be a docent at a museum. Richard hovers around the edges of those gathered, trying to reconcile their interest with the confusion and disillusion on the faces of the people slowly passing by the pictures. “That’s very interesting, and I get it,” the reporter says, “but what’s with the black marks cutting through your compositions? They seem like they don’t belong there.” “Oh, that’s the contribution of my personal muse.” He’s within reach now, so I tug him close to me. He can’t pull away in front of all these people, so he puts his arm around me and digs his fingers into my flesh. With a scowl, Richard negates my characterization. He struggles to save face, coming up with an arty sounding theory that might apply if the listener has a shallow enough understanding of art. Why didn’t he prepare a better explanation? I could have helped him with one. People nod politely and some of them take a second look, trying to reconcile eyes to ears. They want to be polite. They don’t want to be part of the group who doesn’t get it, so they play the emperor’s new clothes game. One or two give up, shrug their shoulders and shake their heads. More guests see that, and draw courage from it. These are the ones who don’t wait for refreshments, although the director sends out waiters to circulate around the small room with their trays of pretty food. These guests are the ones who mumble graffiti, their voices louder and louder, and begin to leave the show in a long slow stream of disillusionment . “What does she mean about the personal muse?” “We don’t care who’s financing her show!” “It’s a vanity show.” “Such a fall for the artist.” Richard disappears, too, which is funny since he lives there. Maryann goes with him, grabbing for Richard’s hand. After he’s gone, the director comes up to me, her face wrinkled as a brain. “Why did you disown your black marks? After all we’ve done for you. You have no idea! We’ve gone to huge expense to put you on the map. And now you accuse ‘a personal muse’ of basically destroying your paintings?” Her hands fly to her head in exasperation. I really don’t know why she’s upset. I mean, I do know why, but it’s not her fault that Richard overstepped, and it backfired. It wasn’t her hand in my studio swirling nonsensical black paint over my pieces. “It is what it is,” I say. This time, I know Richard and I won’t be reading reviews in bed together. A few reviews come out immediately, and they are scathing, even gleefully vicious. The writers heckle Richard, “the muse,” about tagging my paintings and destroying my intellectual property. I come out looking pretty good because of my lecture, knowledgeable, and generous enough to pretend that Richard did not ruin my work. I’m the angel and he’s the devil. For the next few days, he doesn’t answer his phone. I have no choice but to go to the apartment if I ever want to see my paintings again. I’m pretty sure we’re over as a couple, but what about my art on the websites? Will he take it all down and plunge me back into poverty? Or did my brother fix all that? What happens to the new gallery? Is Oranges & Sardines still in business without my work? We’ve got a lot of loose ends to tie up here. People should be more definite about breaking up with a person, not just ghost them. I always was. Definite, I mean. I sent my high school boyfriend a dozen dead roses, completely blackened, when I was done with him. The End. I knock, but Richard doesn’t answer. I use my key, the one he gave me even though I would not give him Mom’s. He is not glad to see me. At first he pretends he doesn’t know the show flopped. I see he has marked many of my pieces with red ‘sold’ circles. Did he really manage to sell them, or is he just trying to make it look like he did, to interest other patrons? Richard clearly hasn’t slept or bathed or shaved in a while. He’s kind of repulsive like this, if you want to know. I don’t get near him, but I don’t intend to kick him while he’s down by holding my nose or anything. I play along with his routine, but don’t look at the labels by the pictures or ask any details. That doesn’t leave much to talk about, and the silence seethes between us. It also doesn’t last very long. He starts to blame me for the failure of his apparently sold-out show. “Why did you tell people I made marks on your work?” “Because you did!” “No. You did. I watched you do it, all the while spouting your theories about your need to be punished, or some such psycho-babble! You really had me going, convincing me that you were being so daring and wild and high-concept.” “You must have egged me on.” Suddenly I’m not sure about what’s true and what’s not. I point out that there was one painting that received praise in the reviews, the one about hitting Mom, and it was the only one he did not touch with his black mark. The significance of that was not lost on me even a minute ago, but now it’s fading. My voice, too, fades as his gets stronger. He can’t hear me over his own stream of abuse. He’s saying horrible things to me, throwing every lie I’ve ever told, every cruelty, all my betrayals, back in my face. It’s as if he’s turned me inside-out and knows intimately all the darkness of which I’m capable. The more he insults me the more his features distort into those of any vicious man, manipulator, or poseur. I used to be able to spot those kinds of creatures so easily. How could I let a guy so similar to me swallow me whole? “Oh, and Maryann said there was a rumor you went nuts a couple of years ago. Maybe what people see as genius in your work is actually madness.” “Maryann?” I suddenly can’t place the name. “Yeah, Maryann, my protégé, the woman who did the article on you, the one who helped me hang this show. You just saw her, for chrissakes.” “My breakdown is common knowledge among the small town gossips. I’m surprised you claim you didn’t know, especially when there’s another rumor going around that you’ve been stalking me for years.” “Stalking you? Who says? Did the museum director tell you that? She’s always been jealous whenever I take an interest in another woman. She can’t stand being relegated to my business partner.” “What business is that?” Ah, I’ve hit a nerve. He looks confused for an instant, and can’t come up with a reasonable answer. Finally he blusters, “Can’t you tell when people are gas-lighting you? What’s wrong with you?” “You mean besides my taste in men?” He slaps me. The sound snaps our connection and frees me from him utterly. The blow unbalances me and has me reeling backward; but I recover and drive toward his torso. I grab his crotch and twist his testicles. He stumbles and falls moaning to the floor. “I suppose you’re going to cry about this, too,” I say over my shoulder as I head for the door. “Just like you cried the first time we had sex.” I drive toward home, shivering with fury. Revenge is all I can think about. My brothers are too old to beat up the bad guys anymore. Lawyers would be involved, and I never do well with them. But I need to vent, I have to damage someone. I stop outside the coffee shop, the image of Maryann rising in my mind like a poison planet. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a man about my age, driven out of his mind by something. Screaming obscenities that make no sense, he drops his white cane and feels for the gasoline can at his feet. He pours the gas over his head. As the crowd he’s gathered surges forward, he strikes a match. A roar goes up and the crowd flows backward. People are screaming or calling for help, everyone’s little phones glinting. The burning man turns to take a last look around, as if there is still a way out. Two men knock him to the ground and smother the flames. There are sirens and stretchers and now I’ve forgotten what I came for. I inch homeward leading a line of honking cars. I’m in the middle of a panic attack, I can’t go any faster. I leave the car running on the driveway while I stagger into Eddie’s room. I left my heavy black pea-coat in his closet and I need it now. Rain has turned to sleet and I’m shivering with cold. I see the shape of my coat in the closet and I pull the string on the lightbulb to make sure that’s what it really is. My old madness clings to it like remnants of fabric, hiding in the collar, in the lining, in the pockets. Why is a wood handle sticking out from the closet shelf? Why would Eddie keep a hammer in his room? No, that’s not it, the handle is too long. I grab it carefully and see that it’s a gun. My old gun. I shrug on my coat, shove the gun in my pocket, and crawl toward Richard’s apartment. As I drive through barely visible streets, each streetlight with its golden halo burns out as I pass, leaving a trail of darkness behind me. I burst back into Richard’s apartment. He rushes at me and I point the gun at him. He freezes. “Pack up my stuff and put it in the car,” I order, waving the gun in the direction of my drawing board. I see him glance at his phone on the counter, calibrating his chances. I lunge at the silver rectangle and grab it before he can. He makes an excuse for his slowness. “You injured me,” he says, cupping his crotch. “You slapped me!” “Asymmetrical warfare.” “Shut up. I don’t want to talk to you ever again.” “Your loss. I could have made you a star.” I indicate the box of art supplies with my gun. “You mean I could have made lots of money for you with your stupid little cons. Not gonna happen. They know everything now.” “Who? What do you mean?” He can’t tell if I’m bluffing or not. Neither can I as a matter of fact. I don’t actually know what I think I know, but everything I’ve absorbed from half-truths and naked lies, whispers and air-ducts, contraband in the backs of closets and confessions in ledgers, has suddenly clicked, and spills out of me. “I mean, you line up good artists who are vulnerable, and then you use them. You find their weakness and convince them you’re to be trusted. What a laugh. You get us thinking we can’t manage without you, and then you work your little scams. But you’re not even good at it. Your cons have never taken you where you want to go, no matter whose coat-tails you’re riding on. Taking advantage of your more gifted but desperate betters, that’s your bread and butter. But all that stuff is small-time. The little stuff distracts everyone away from your main venture. You get your artists to copy pictures and you sell the forgeries. The museum director helps you find buyers, right? That’s what you meant when you said business partner, right?” “Wrong. What nonsense. You know nothing. You have no proof. Your hallucinations are manipulating you.” I wobble and waver, feeling for the boundaries of my parallel existence. Sensing my mind sliding out of its grip, I smile, and Richard looks confused. He may embody my disease, but he does not contain all of me. “Of course we have proof. Have you checked your closet lately? There used to be more tubes of paintings than there are now. More black ledgers, too. But don’t worry. The police are taking good care of them.” Richard lunges at me. “Are you sure you should attack someone who is both armed and dangerous?” In the air, I describe a question mark with my gun. His lips tighten over his mouth, shut at last. “Better be a good boy and take the paint box and the drawing board and put them in the car. Keep whatever you paid for. I can’t be bought so cheaply.” He has no choice but to do what I say. He carries the paint box under one arm, my drawing board under his other one. His stringy biceps quiver with the effort, and the cold. I haven’t let him put on a coat. On the way back to the house, I realize the car I’m driving still belongs to Richard and I must give it back. I will have to unpack my things, retrace my route and return the car, and it suddenly seems like too much effort, it feels like I’ve been wandering in circles for years. I start to cry, but I press on through my windshield of tears, and unload my belongings from the car. My brothers see what I’m doing and help me do it. They don’t make me talk. They just help me for once. One final time, I aim the emptied car toward Richard’s apartment, my gun in one pocket, his phone in the other. It buzzes relentlessly. Who can be calling him? I realize I no longer have to care. I park the car and open the door to the apartment quietly. I don’t want Richard leaping out at me. It occurs to me that I could have slid his keys under the door. What made me think I had to come up? I could have spared myself one more fight. Do I still want the chance for a different ending? But Maryann has already taken my place, lying naked on our bed with him. I don’t make a sound, although everything in me screams. In a moment, they will see me standing over them with the gun. Before I start shooting, I will toss the car keys at Richard and laugh as he tries to catch them and misses. Richard and Maryann will roll off either side of the bed while I shoot six holes in a vertical line down the mattress, dividing it in two. I’ll see blood ooze from the down as the cops kick through the walls of the building, guns drawn. One of the cops looks just like Clara. On the wall, the alter-egos in my paintings break free of their frames, and reproach me with my crimes, carrying Richard’s big black marks before them like crosses. Mother is the last to climb down from the cruel collar I painted to imprison her. She shuffles toward me dragging a cloud of alizarin crimson behind her. I reach out to her with one hand, the other fumbling with my gun. She comes as close to me as she can. She raises herself on her toes, and slaps me with a deafening crack. “We got an invitation today, and I think we should accept.”
It’s a few days later, and I haven’t been to Mom’s house once. I’ve just been here, alone with this man. I put my brush down. How can I work when he is always interrupting me? It’s strange enough to be working in a corner of the unfinished gallery we live in. “Stanley is doing one of his nude landscapes. He wants volunteers to become as one with the huge piles of plowed snow outside the museum.” “Oh god. Then what? Will he photograph them or send them straight to the hospital for hypothermia?” “He’ll throw a party first and get us pleasantly drunk, so we don’t feel the cold. Also, we will generate body heat from our sheer numbers.” Richard seems to have made up his mind that we’re going to this thing. He can’t tell a good concept from a cliché, looks like. And does he even know that the liveliest art spaces are in lofts and warehouses, burnt out train stations and bombed churches? It’s the people and art that make a scene, not hype. “I don’t drink, remember, and I’m susceptible to bronchitis. This level of silliness is contra-indicated for me.” “Come on. It would be great publicity, a nice bridge between your previous and forthcoming shows. You were a nude model in art school, for god’s sake. This shouldn’t make you uncomfortable.” Is he really double-daring me? “Except physically.” He should want to protect his investment, shouldn’t he? “If you catch cold, I’ll make you lots of chicken soup and rub your chest with Vick’s.” He gathers me in his arms and I feel a steely insistence where the cajoling should be. I sigh. Some things aren’t worth the fight. He takes my exhale as agreement, releases me, and goes to the computer to RSVP. The first twenty minutes of the reception are annoying. Richard immediately leaves me to bend over some nude girl with a glass of champagne. She doesn’t like him, clearly, but accepts the drink while she scans the room for someone to save her. I’d do it, but I’m chatting up the artist/photographer, the only person in the room with clothes on. “It will be a comment on collective behavior,” Stanley is saying to me. He is refining his verbal artist’s statement for when the arts writer from the paper gets here. “Is that why you made the waiters strip down, too?” “No. That was pure whimsy.” “Was it whimsy when one of them resisted the mandatory nakedness and you immediately kicked him out?” “At least he was dressed for it.” “Dressed for what?” “The cold.” Stanley excuses himself. He doesn’t want to talk to me anymore, and besides, the reporter has appeared, shucking off her clothes at the door. Stanley tries to tell her it’s unnecessary, waving his arms wildly as if to shield her. From the corner I see Richard miming applause at her striptease, and only then do I notice that this naked woman is Maryann. Her body is better than mine, but mine was as good when I was her age. She really has her heart set on Richard, I see. It must be because she knows about me and him. Unavailable men are sexier to some women. She loses no time in wafting over to him in a cloud of spicy perfume. Why I should put myself through this, again? Maybe I shouldn’t. I should just leave. But that would mean defeat. Something in me always wants to win, even if it’s a booby prize like Richard. Well, he’s not really a booby prize, but I can’t help thinking he’s no prince. I try to listen to the conversation between Maryann and Richard. Words form in their mouths and slant downward with their frowns. My brain doesn’t get it and my body seizes up with a clenching apprehension. I head for a bedroom, any bedroom, to lie down. Stanley has other ideas for me, and everyone else. He calls us to order. We all file out in a single line and begin to climb an enormous, hard-packed snowdrift. The photographer wants a neat line but soon people are slipping off the cold grey mountain, leaving gaps in the procession. I’m already shaking and every time I try to latch onto a knob of ice to pull myself up, I lose my grip and begin to fall. Hieronymus Bosch-like hands beneath me shove me back up. When I finally fall all the way, it feels like the distance to the ground is longer than it actually is. The strongest muscles of the crowd keep ascending, digging a color-swatch of flesh tones into the side of the snowy rock-face. At the very top, the first man who reaches the pinnacle dances around in the pale sun, penis flapping. That man is Richard. The pictures taken, point made, we run back into the building to put on our coats. My panic has backed down, surprisingly. Sometimes my anxiety acts like a cutter who trades psychic pain for a smaller, immediate, physical pain from tiny slashes. Inside, our company feels more like a regular gathering now, with small fights breaking out, slurred words about aesthetics and politics. One woman drunkenly lets in a stray dog from the street, several of the men chasing it back outside, yelling “Refugee! Deport it!” and laughing wildly. Since we are now clothed, some of us encourage the photographer to strip; to be the only nude in a room full of winter coats might make a statement complementary to the nudes on snow mountain. His eyes widen, and there are many hands pulling at him. He’s blinded by the flash of many tiny cameras. I’ve got to look away; his terror is real, and my symptoms rise up and sink again like waves of grief. I’ve got to get out of here. I take a cab to the apartment. I pour a hot bath, but the thing that really warms me is a sense of simmering anger. The experience with all those bodies did not make me feel at one with humanity. Quite the contrary. What I now feel is humiliation. I pick up a CD, thinking music will calm me. The disc is titled with a favorite song of mine and when I open the jacket I am delighted to see many other pieces listed, too. It takes a minute for me to realize my glitch. An album always has more than one song. I throw myself on the bed and give myself over to an anxiety attack. When Richard comes in, it’s very late. I have been suffering for hours, and my episode is only just now sputtering to a halt. He roughly pries me out of the fetal position. Is he angry? Why is he angry? I smell spicy perfume. “Why are you acting like that, all sweaty and twitchy? I can’t talk to you when you’re like this!” Richard’s voice is shot through with ill will. “Can you snap out of it, please? I need to ask you some questions.” He yanks my head toward him so I will look him in the eye. He’s too close. All I see is a bald eyeball, with green veins dangling just under the skin. I stare at him for too long and Richard heaves an exasperated sigh, finally pushing me away. He has already begun to abandon me. I knew he would. They all do. His figure fades as he walks toward the door, and disappears entirely when he slams it behind him. My mouth opens on words sticky as syrup, closing down on silence. With Richard gone, I can’t get out of bed. I mean, every morning I stagger to the door to let the construction workers in, but then I crawl back under sheets that smell of Richard. The noise the men make is punishing, but I make myself take it. I must deserve it, but I no longer can remember why. Hours or days later, my family troops in with soup, as if I’m sick. Have we all made up, then? Clara cajoles me into getting washed and dressed. I can’t really focus on what the boys are talking about between themselves, and when they talk directly to me, they choose their words so carefully, it’s like they think I’m a child. They act like I can’t understand. I may not be able to speak much, but I can listen. That lyric about how you can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need, plays in my head as I listen to my family speak. Eddie, who is thumbing through one of Richard’s ledgers, asks “Is this yours, Mandy? The book you record your anxiety attacks in?” “No. That’s Richard’s. He doesn’t let anyone touch it. My record books are still at home.” Steven moves with studied nonchalance over to Eddie, to look at the book. Eddie runs his fingers down the rows of data, and the three of them clearly understand something I don’t. To me the symbols are nothing but scattered insects on the page. Clara helps me pack a few things in my grey case. ”I remember when we got this piece of luggage,” she says softly. “We gave that girl Phylandra such a hard time about it,” I smile. “She couldn’t believe we wanted nothing to do with her time-share, and we were just there for the free gift.” “Remember how her boss kept turning up the thermostat? She thought she could sweat a commitment out of us.” “Uh-huh. So where are we going now?” I realize I don’t care. I’m ready to be led wherever they want to lead me. “Come home for a while. Why not? Mom misses you. You have lots of art supplies there and you don’t know when Richard is coming back. When he does, he’ll know where to find you.” “What about the workmen? Who will let them in?” “That’s Richard’s problem, isn’t it?” “I guess.” “Can I see the red shoes before we go, just for fun?” Clara asks. “They’re in the closet right in front of all the copied paintings,” I say. “What copied paintings?” All three of them rush to the closet. The red shoes are not there. Did Richard take them all with him? Does that mean he’s not coming back? The air is full of electricity. My skin prickles. The family’s faces reveal nothing, but I’m missing something, I just know it. “The paintings are like the ones Richard is always trying to make me do.” Clara unrolls a painting, and I identify the artist and title of the painting. She’s excited. Why? I don’t get it. “We should get out of here. Ready to go?” Steven’s voice is urgent. We lock up the apartment. The boys each carry out a ledger and an armful of mailing tubes. When I protest, Eddie says, “We’re not done with them,” in the same voice Dad used to use to end a discussion. It’s good to be home. I don’t know how long I’ll be allowed to stay, but it feels like I belong here, the same as always. I wander the rooms to check that everything is where it’s supposed to be: the curio cabinet in the corner, Mom propped up on the white sectional with her can of Ensure, all my objects marching along the dresser as usual. Everything is the same, just a little more faded somehow. Maybe I just need to clean the windows. They’re not letting in enough light. I get a sponge and glass cleaning spray from the kitchen and start to work. A pall clings to the glass and I have to really put all the strength of my arms to get it clean. I destroy a sponge with all my rubbing and go to get a new one from the drawer. I forget which drawer holds them, and I open the wrong one. It’s full of knives, collected over a lifetime: steak knives, paring knives, butcher’s knives. I wonder why Mom or Eddie didn’t change the drawer they are stored in, after the fuss they made when I was sleeping with them under my pillow, or when I cut my tongue that night after the show. I take out the cake knife I last used. I look over its serrated teeth and a shiver climbs my spine. I run my thumb over the mother-of-pearl handle and cradle it in my hand. It has a certain heft. A gleam that’s mesmerizing. I’m horrified as I watch myself draw the sharp side across the inside of my wrist. Before I can do much damage, I become aware of an insistent ringing in my brain. Through the window above the sink I can see the figure of Richard. It’s not my imagination. He’s standing on the porch, in the flesh, poking the doorbell like an eye. I put the knife down on the counter, and unlock the door. “What happened to you?” I say, pointing to his black eye and scabbed lip. “I walked into a door. Why aren’t you at home? The contractors haven’t been able to get in for hours.” “First off, I am home.” Being under the shingled wings of the house gives me lots of courage to back-talk him. When did I lose my knack for that, anyways? It used to be my forte. Richard blinks, surprised. Then he stares at me, unblinking, for longer than I ever imagined a human could. He dismantles me, brick by brick, with that stare. Then he pulls me to him as if he expects me to kiss his bloody lip. My fists are against his chest, but turned in the wrong direction for pushing him away. He takes his hands from my waist and puts them on my shoulders. He pushes down and I sink slowly past his unbuckled belt and unzipped fly. I’m unconvinced the linoleum floor will catch all the pieces of my disintegrating flesh. He changes his mind about what he wants from me as I dissolve beneath him. He has heard voices coming from the other room, coming closer. He pulls me up by my hair, and quickly rights his clothes. “When will you grow up and quit running home to mother?” “You were the one who left! What was I supposed to think? You’re the original enigma wrapped in a conundrum. I can’t read you.” “You could if you had any empathy.” Empathy. That’s one quality where the doctors tell me I’m deficient. But it’s not a vitamin. I can’t just find some and stock up, so I don’t go home with Richard, and he doesn’t try to make me. I stay put, but two days later, he’s in my kitchen again. I put the bag of groceries I just brought in on the counter, and say, as mildly as I can, “How did you get in?” “The door was wide open. You should be more careful. I just stopped by to see how the big project is going. Your studio is locked.” He waggles his fingers, which are holding a lit cigarette. I didn’t know he smoked. Doesn’t he remember I’m allergic to smoke? I peer into his face, which today bears no evidence of being in a fight or walking into a wall. “Yeah, I keep the studio locked when I’m not in it,” I say, pulling out my key. I curse the quaver in my voice. I know he’s mad that I won’t come home with him but he doesn’t seem to think we’ve broken up, either. “I can’t really work at the apartment. I know you’re remodeling it for me and I’m grateful. It’s just that right now there are too many construction men around making too much noise. I’ve done some good work here, while you were away. You said you wanted wild. Come in, and I’ll give you wild.” The studio door squeals open and I silently present my new pictures to him. He scowls. The contortion of his features confuses me. It’s not what I expected. I review the possibilities and decide he’s scowling because his bruised eye hurts. “These aren’t really wild enough, Amanda. This one is too muddy,” he points out. “This one is much too brushy. And this portrait is too disjointed.” “I think you’re missing the point,” I say, offended. “In my portraits, I use color freely to express the subject’s personality while the facial features remain realistic.” I look for the change in his posture, the surrender I always feel in his body when I talk about art. It’s not there this time. “Here, let me show you what I think the point is.” He loads a brush with black paint and paints over my marks on the canvas. “What the hell!” “What? You don’t mind do you? Our work is basically collaborative, after all.” How does he figure that? Richard puts the brush down and stands behind me to pull my hair out of my collar. “We’ll have to do something about this hair, too,” he murmurs. By the time we come out of the studio, my new pictures have all been mangled, and I have been left as burned out as the ash on Richard’s cigarette. I’m still fuming when I describe his trespass to Clara, and she reflects the anger right back at me. “What nerve! He’s a control freak! A vandal! I knew you shouldn’t trust him,” she says. She picks up the brush still dripping with the black paint Richard used to ruin my pictures. She carefully wipes it on a rag and places it in a glass jar filled with turpentine. “Look. He left your favorite sable brush in a shambles.” She peers more closely at the mutilated painting. “It looks like he was trying to imitate your style here, with this gesture. Over here too. What nerve!” “He must have picked that up by watching me paint at home.” Clara stiffens at that characterization of Richard’s place and I smile inwardly. “That’s why I don’t like to be watched. It’s like a chef giving away her secrets.” “That’s why you don’t like to join art groups?” “Yeah. Look at this. What is it? Remember when I was in school, and I’d imitate Kandinsky and Klee, all those guys? My homages even then were so much better than Richard’s puny marks.” “Well, you’re the real thing, and he seems intent on hitching his wagon to your star. What that phrase you always use about people who want a piece of you, take a number?” Funny, Clara’s fallen right back into her cheerleading role. “Yeah, except now I can’t even give it away. There is no other gallery knocking at my door, and Richard’s already gone to so much trouble to put together the new show. I guess I’ll have to put up with his interference. What do I have without him? Who else would turn his apartment into a gallery for me?” “Take a look around this house, why don’t you. Every wall is covered in your work, from your student days onward. It’s like a retrospective in a museum. Can’t you want what you already have, for a change?” No, I can’t. If I stop moving forward, I’ll get stuck, I’ll sink. People need to see my work. If I can’t get them to look, it will be as if I’ve blinded them all. I get back into my studio the following day to erase Richard’s influence. To get in the right mood, I stare at my reflection in the mirror until the features distance themselves and I can no longer recognize my own face. That’s how I know I’m ready. I swipe the canvas with color, vibrating, saturated hues that mean something, I don’t know what, not yet. I want something spontaneous to happen. I wait for an image to form in my mind. I paint it. After developing the space and losing and getting back the image many times, I can recapture the original image, and merge the figurative with the abstract. But first I have to turn on some music. My senses overlap, and I begin to paint the way the music sounds. My perpetual theme of vision emerges. Pursuing the idea of vision, to find what blocks understanding, raises the memory I’ve spent a lifetime pushing down. The little boy I blinded would be an older man by now. He’s spent decades trapped in the dark and this act of mine is the only way I can lead him out of it. With my brush, I build an igloo of blue blocks housing two figures. Their bodies are made of the same blocks and one is leading the other off the page. I use blue, black, and white. The only other color is pale yellow, applied to the corner of the eye of the dominant figure, and streaked across the forehead of the other, whose eyes are empty. Clara knocks on my door, which she never does when I’m painting. A breach. “What do you want?” “Can you help me with Mom?” It’s hardly an emergency, but I guess the standards for interrupting my work have changed here too. Mom has decided to go without her dentures again, and Clara wants me to get her attention while she, Clara, inserts the teeth from the back. “What good is this going to do?” “It’s supposed to be less traumatic if the old person can’t see what you’re doing. Otherwise, it feels like an attack.” “So you’re sure I’m allowed to touch her?’ Clara nods, curtly. “Why didn’t you take her to the dentist? He said he would put her teeth back in any time.” “He won’t do it anymore because she just takes them out. Lots of dementia patients quit wearing their dentures. Nothing awful happens to them. Old people all over the world are toothless. She’s already eating only soft food and milkshakes, so she doesn’t really need teeth. But let’s try one more time.” “God, she looks so old without them. It makes her lose all her looks.” “So? She is old. And she’s not going to enter any beauty pageants. The sight of her toothless face probably just reminds you she is on her way out. If this doesn’t work, we’ll all have to get used to it.” Already, Mom is pushing our hands away, along with her last chance at having a smile. “The last dentist wanted her to get a new set of dentures.” “I bet he did. They’re expensive. But she’d take the new ones out, too.” “Well, there’s no point, then.” “Why are you so disappointed, Mandy? Think about it, how would any dentist get Mom to open her mouth long enough to create a mold and all the other steps to making a new denture? She’d have to keep her mouth open for a long time, over several visits. She’d have to be able to follow instructions.” “He could put her to sleep.” “What? Anesthesia? That stuff is what made her slip off her Alzheimer’s plateau when she broke her hip! Even the pain pills she took for her recent fracture deepened her dementia! How can you even think of putting her through that?” “I guess I can’t, if none of you wants to but me. I know I don’t get a vote.” “If Mom takes the new dentures out anyway, plus her brain is further damaged by the anesthesia, it would have all been for nothing. It’s way too high a price to pay.” “But the last dentist said she has practically no bone left in her jaw and he has to build it up or it’ll just cave in or something.” I curse the whining tone creeping into my voice. “That’s better than losing the last bit of her mental capabilities.” “Oh, you’re so dramatic!” I explode. We still have no luck getting Mom to accept the dentures, so Clara takes them to the sink, rinses them, and sets them on a paper towel on the counter. She pauses as if she has something more to say but leaves the room instead. I pick up the teeth from the counter. Mom shows her gums to me in her new version of a smile, and I shake the dentures at her, and then open and close them in a parody of biting. Mom looks puzzled, so I pretend to hit her with them. I keep doing it until she raises her arms to protect herself. I put the dentures in my pocket and leave the kitchen before Clara comes back. In the studio, I set the false teeth on the table with my brushes and pigments, and begin to paint a small face, mouth open, trapped in red and black circles. On the right, in the foreground, I make a green figure tormenting the helpless one. The sadist has a vicious look on its face. Richard will like this one, I bet. It’s perfect, he’ll say. “So, remember when you almost dropped out of art school to marry your boyfriend because you didn’t want to lose him?” Clara is helping me pack to move more of my stuff to Richard’s, but is trying to talk me out of my relationship with him at the same time.
“That was different.” I pick up the jeweled elephant from my dresser, and try to decide if I should take it with me. How do I choose? Clara’s given me all of my most favorite little things in this room. “Yes, it was. You were actually in love.” I think of Don, his dark hair and six-and-a-half feet dwarfing my small blondeness, and have to smile. We lived together one summer, with Mom’s blessing, which she normally wouldn’t give for a situation that naughty. I worked in a doughnut shop, rising before dawn to go to work, and he pieced together part time jobs to make the rent. We had completed our sophomore year in college, and that was enough elitist education for him. “It’s a workaday world,” he’d tell me, the opening salvo in his campaign to get me to drop out and marry him. I very nearly did. Clara folds the teal sweater she gave me for my last birthday into my grey suitcase. I pick it up with two fingers, as if it stinks, and shovel it back into my drawer. “Who says I’m not in love now?” I glare at my sister but she doesn’t wilt. Neither of us speaks for a long moment, a moment filled with our history of goodbyes. I drop my eyes first and resume packing. I pull what I need from the drawers of the white bureau she chose at seven, excited to have her own room before I made her share it. Little girls want their own rooms, but I only wanted to climb into a bed with my sister. It was the best way to make the ghosts leave me alone at night. “Remember, you’re the reason we all came together to be a family again, to support you and help you with your recovery.” She scratches an old label under the lamp that spells out LAMP. It was there because one drug made me forget the names of everything and Clara suggested putting labels on my objects. “Come on! You came home to help Eddie with Mom. You thought I’d be in the halfway house for two years! Steven was the one who came home because he thought I might need help. And now he’s just waiting for the cops to kick me out of the house so he can take over my room.” “He’s not doing that. You really think he has a thing for frilly canopy beds? I’ve told you a hundred times that I only alerted your doctor to the abuse in case there was a clinical reason for your lack of control. We didn’t want to involve Family Protective Services, we only wanted treatment for you. Your doctor is the only authority figure in your case so far. You’re still allowed to live in this house. You just have to make sure you don’t touch Mom.” “I’d be crazy if I did, right?” I laugh my most insane laugh just to scare her. And then I say, “Well, if none of you will even let me near her, what’s the point of me hanging around, now that I have another place to go?” She’s a runner. They never stop running. It had been a tough day at home. There were tons of new aides swarming the place, trying to figure out how to look after Mom. It’s hard for me to hang back when I know the answers to their questions: yes, she likes cheesecake but not grilled cheese, she’d rather have vanilla Ensure over chocolate, she won’t take her shirt off anymore during a sitz bath and she thinks the water hurts her, she sleeps in odd positions but there’s no need to wake her up and turn her around. Once when I went into the kitchen while the aide was feeding Mom, I heard her tell Mom how beautiful she is. Mom repeated the word ‘beautiful’ a few times so I went into her room and brought out a photo of her at age twenty-four, looking like Rita Hayworth. I showed it to the aide and said, “See? She really was beautiful.” The woman turned her shoulder away from me as if I was contagious or something, and mumbled, “Still is.” So I have to try to remember to steer clear of the aides. They’ve obviously been instructed to steer clear of me. It only winds up hurting Mom in other ways, all this separation from me. If she’s in the kitchen and I pass by in the hall, she’ll start to wave and all I’m allowed to do is wave and smile before I disappear into my studio, still hearing her voice going, “She’s my little…” She says it over and over, never finding the syllables for daughter. So why should I stay? I look at the family photos tucked in the corners of my mirror frame. If Richard doesn’t deliver on his plans for my career and the whole thing blows up, I’ll be glad I didn’t take more things like that with me. Something tells me that, if my objects are not right where they’ve always been, I might lose the trail back home. Does that make sense, or is it what they call magical thinking? How would I even know? My sister interrupts my thoughts with some of her own. She bites down on her words, so she’s irritated. “You can go or you can stay. You can toggle between the two places. It’s entirely up to you. We’ll still try to look out for you, the same way we protect Mom.” “Bet you never thought you’d have to protect Mom from me, did you.” Clara hangs her head at my words, as if she’s the guilty one. My bullying is working so I keep it up. “You told the shrink on me, Eddie called the cops, and Steven wants me gone.” I repeat their crimes, counting on my fingers. “Didn’t he just volunteer to help you take your things over to Richard’s?” “Yeah. So? He just wants to get me out of here.” “You’re being unfair to him. He didn’t have to upend his life for the family. I’m surprised you’re so happy to be giving us the slip.” “Patients have rights, the docs all say, and I need to get my life back.” “You don’t have to rush into a relationship with a virtual stranger to do that. I haven’t even met Richard yet, for God’s sake.” “So? He’s way too old to be vetted by my sister.” She pats the side of the suitcase absently. “Well, we’re still all here for you, regardless.” What does that even mean? I zip my bag hard, almost tearing it, and drag it down the hall until Steven takes it from me. He puts it with my other belongings in his car. I don’t tell Clara this, but I’m not that committed to the move. Besides, Mom’s house is nicer than Richard’s, and I’m not sure that being so involved with him is the best way to get my life back either. He may look like the only game in town, but turn out to be no more than one piece of the puzzle. Not necessarily Mr. Right, but Mr. Right Now. “How do you want to do this?” Steven asks as he backs the car out of the driveway. “First stop is my storage unit. I have to get a few pictures that need work.” “Sure thing.” He turns on the radio but I can’t stand the sound when it’s mixed with the smell of gasoline and the movement of traffic. I shut it off. We drive in silence, but once in a while, he hums under his breath, catches himself, and smiles. Steven and I get out of the car and climb a steep hill to the unit, our breath visible in the chilly air. This barren, isolated, rundown place always makes me nervous. I hand the key to the unit to my brother. “My hands are too shaky to work this thing.” He takes the key, and stands in front of the lock. He swears. “What’s wrong?” “Someone’s broken in. Look here, look at the lock.” It dangles off the door like a broken finger. I step into the space to see which pictures have been stolen. “The oldest ones are gone, just the oil paintings, but no drawings.” “So, the thief steals in chronological order?” “Those were the simpler compositions. More realism.” “The thief must know who you are.” “Why do you say that?” “He was careful not to damage anything, and he seems to have reorganized the work he didn’t steal. It’s neater than it was the last time we were here.” We report the break-in, and get a new lock that Steven says is better than the broken one. I’m glad he’s with me today, I guess. When I tried to tell the facility’s manager what happened, my words got all garbled like they do when I’m stressed, and Steven had to explain the situation for me. After our detour, we finally arrive at Richard’s. “Oh no! We didn’t get all the pictures I needed. I wanted two others,” I say as we put down our boxes on the floor. “We’ll get them later. Don’t worry.” Steven assembles my drawing board while I try to take his advice. The tension between us has eased, and soon we’re prattling on about the family and our memories of Dad. “After he died, for months I’d drive to his grave and talk things over with him,” Steven says. “I remember Mom ran into you there more than once. She said you looked so much like Dad, crouching down in the snow, a cigarette dangling from your lips, that for a split second she believed he had come back from the dead.” “And now she doesn’t even recognize me at all.” “She likes you, though. Didn’t I hear you playing piano for her the other day?” “Yes. I was tuning the instrument with our old tuning fork and she came out and stood by the piano the way she used to when Dad played for her. I started playing some of the old torch songs she liked and she started to hum along, snapping her fingers and twitching a little. I think she likes those songs even better than when Clara and I play classical music for her.” Steven sighs, and stops talking. I wonder how often he does this, escaping into his own thoughts so completely. Not as much as me, I hope. At least I’ve got a medical excuse. “Do you remember the time my first wife beat you up?” His question, after the lull, makes the skin on my arms prickle. “How could I ever forget? She set back my recovery by two years.” Mom and I had been tidying up the little house across the street from the one Janice and he had lived in for most of their marriage. They had just separated, and Steven had not wanted to move too far from his young sons, so he bought the house directly across from his old one. The floor plans were identical. The only difference was that the old one was white and the new one was red. Janice decided that Mom and I were trespassing on her marital property and rushed at me when I opened the door to her furious knocking. We traded blows and I got the worst of it, all up and down the street. I knocked her glasses off her face and Mom came out, picked them up, and handed them to her. Why would she do that? It was like siding with the enemy. Treason, or something. Janice went home to make up her face to simulate bruises, a technique she had used before to get Steven in trouble. I don’t know who coached her either time. Probably it was her one and only girlfriend. Her sisters couldn’t be depended on, since they were always busy disowning each other. Anyways, Janice called the cops and I wound up shackled and handcuffed, interrogated by an official who said, “I have my own opinion about what happened here, but go on and tell me your side of the story.” I did, and Janice sensed her plan was about to backfire. She dropped the charges. She didn’t want to traumatize the kids, she said, but she never cared about those boys. “So, tell me the truth,” Steven says, looking straight into me. “Who hit who first?” This was the big question the cops were fixated on, too. I didn’t see why it mattered. “I hit her first,” I say. “That’s what I thought,” my brother says. He knows that while other people say I’m fragile like a flower, I’m actually fragile like a bomb. “Remember, right after my wedding, you got mad about something and insisted that Clara drive back with you to Maryland the next morning? What was all that about?” I try to recall. “Let’s see. It was before my first breakdown but I was already in a bad mood all the time. Clara was trying to get something going with some guy and live with me at the same time. She was exhausting herself going between the two apartments. I wasn’t doing well romantically, myself, but I showed up at the Tavern or else Club Charles every night in case the boy I had a crush on showed up. I wasn’t painting much at that time. I don’t remember why. After being out all night, I’d sleep all day, so the only chance I got to see Clara was before I went out to the bar. Clara’s boyfriend thought she was too involved with my life, waiting around for me all the time, and I thought she was too involved with his. Anyways, I was looking forward to the wedding, but Mom ruined it for me the morning after the ceremony when she told me to leave Clara alone, and let her try to close the deal with the boyfriend. She needed to get some security in her life, Mom said. As if marriage is more secure than sisterhood! I woke Clara up right there and then and pulled her physically out of bed. ‘We’re going, let’s go!’ She went along with it even though she didn’t want to, probably because I was acting all manic and she didn’t want to make me worse.” “So that’s how you turned her into your sidekick?” “I guess. She’s always been scared of my moods.” “So what happened when you finally got back to your apartment?” “I’d given my key to a girl from the bar who I thought was my friend. She trashed the place. She’d had a big party, pizza boxes stinking everywhere, and she’d stolen some clothes. She left a leather jacket that was too small for me as payment. The nice jacket made us even, she said when I confronted her.” Steven nods, but doesn’t have any more to say on the topic, apparently. I want my brother to plug back into the present again so I go, “See these?” and point to the reproductions on the wall above the couch. “They aren’t my actual paintings. Richard copied them and he thinks I haven’t noticed. They’re both a copy of a copy.” Steven gets up close. “Yes. But what has he done with your originals? And why didn’t he put those up? Didn’t you say they were supposed to be gifts from you?” “Yeah. He’s always trying to get me to paint these kinds of pictures, you know, copy the masters. It’s like an exercise you’d give students. Maybe he thinks I need the practice. Or he’s trying to get me to change my style. I’d rather do my real work. I don’t mind if he sells that, like he did with the pictures from the show.” “How is he paying you?” “He made a trust at the lawyer’s and gives me money from it when I ask.” “What? Like an allowance?” “I guess. He’s trying to make sure I don’t lose my benefits.” “You have a contract, then? I mean, if he’s your dealer or agent or something, you need tax records and stuff, don’t you? What papers did you sign? And by the way, weren’t your pictures insured for the show? Where’s your protection?” “My protection is the trust between us,” I say in a prim voice I barely recognize. I’d like to believe it. All the time he’s talking to me, Steven’s fiddling with Richard’s computer. It’s like how a doctor distracts you from the pain of the giant needle he’s putting through your skin. Steven logs on after only two tries at Richard’s password, Redshoes. “People should choose their passwords more carefully,” he murmurs. But it’s so easy to remember, I argue silently. A minute later, he says, “Bingo. Well Mandy, it looks like you’re pretty successful on these gallery websites.” He scrolls through the sites on the recent history tab. “They’re auctioning off that one we photographed last month right now. Let me look at the bids.” “That painting is practically still wet!” I know I’m missing the point but I can’t tell where it is. “You’re not rich enough to pay all your own medical bills, but you’re making headway.” “That’s wonderful! So I could ask Richard for the money to buy a bigger easel?” “Think bigger. Way bigger.” “Maybe I could get a car that would hold more canvases at one time.” “Bigger.” I scratch my head, literally and figuratively. Steven chuckles. “You need to see a lawyer and draw up a business contract. Agents get a commission. The rest is yours.” I try to take all that in. He clicks and taps for a few minutes, and turns to show me the screen. Photos of my paintings come up, including the missing ones from the storage unit. My brother is proud of himself. “Right now, Richard Redshoes is officially stealing big profits from you. Your work is probably paying for all these renovations.” He taps the buttons that will redirect the payment of my work directly to me. “He wouldn’t use me like that!” I explode. “Why do none of you want me to get famous, or think a guy might like me for myself?” “Hold on a second. I’m trying to help you right now! You’re talking like a teenager. Of course, we know a guy might like you for yourself. We like you.” In spite of the fact I’m not a good person? In spite of the fact you caught me hitting Mom? In spite of the fact you practically threw me out of the house? He goes on, “And that’s not the point. You work hard, and we don’t want you to get fleeced. We’re just looking out for you.” “Well, quit it! Leave me alone!” “Before or after I haul the rest of your stuff up out of my car, and provide any other services Your Majesty requires?” They all want to be thanked for every little favor, all the time. I never got the hang of that kind of politeness. Now, when he exits the apartment, leaving me stranded, neither one of us says goodbye. After pacing and fuming for a while, I log off the computer and then take a cab back home to get my car. I see Steven there, lying on the yellow leather couch, trying to stretch out his back after all the heavy lifting he did for me. I snub him. He hates that. I drive to the coffee shop first thing. I can’t believe Steven thinks Richard is a con-man. Why would he say he set up a trust like the one Daddy set up for me if he hadn’t? And why should Richard break into my storage space? He knows I’ll give him whatever he wants. No, someone else must have broken into it. I look around the cafe reeking of coffee. It’s brightly lit, glaring even, and I imagine everyone with a bullseye on his forehead. In the corner I see the boy from the hospital parking lot. He looks flustered. He can’t ignore me this time, but when I beckon to him, he pretends he’s blind or stupid. I get up from my chair and stomp a threatening step toward him. It’s meant to be comical, and he catches my drift; takes a deep breath and slowly comes to me like some fish I’m reeling in. “Did you steal my paintings?” I pose my question and his face drains of color. His hands start to shake. I’m congratulating myself on finding the real thief so fast, while he snakes his trembling hand into his jacket. The word gun flashes across my mind, but he’s pulling out my exhibition catalogue, dog-eared now. I bark a derisive laugh and he jumps. “Oh, keep it,” I say. “I’m trying to find someone who stole my actual paintings.” “Someone robbed you?” He’s horrified and it’s no act. “Yeah. Took my pictures out of storage and sold them online.” “That’s crappy! Will the police help you? I have a cousin on the force.” I let him write down this cousin’s contact information. When he passes the paper to me, I see the mark on his forehead disintegrate. I wave him away and he slinks out the door. I sit back down to my coffee and hope I don’t see anyone else I know. No such luck. Everyone in the neighborhood comes to this place for happy hour, although there is no liquor. So what’s so happy about it? There are little fried snacks they give to customers, for free, for one literal hour. They don’t have to be actual paying customers, either, as the line of homeless people now forming at the buffet table knows. The museum director catches my eye. As usual, she’s well-dressed enough in her artsy-craftsy style so that the less pretentious customers give her a wide berth. I flick my wrist at her and she takes it as an invitation to sit down with her plate of free food. The buffet tables are already being put away to discourage any gorging. “Poof! It’s like a mirage,” she jokes. I don’t respond. Seeing as I have no food, she plucks a morsel from her plate, puts it on a napkin, and pushes it toward me. “Did you hear about our colleague Nancy, the woman who does intaglio?” “What about her?” “She got caught in an e-mail art scam last week and lost several pieces, as well as some money.” My mouth is full so I gesture for her to go on. “Someone from Milan sent her an email to say they had looked at her online portfolio and wanted to buy some specific pieces. The con-man offered to send her a check, banker’s draft, or credit card number to pay for the art. The payment he would give her was for the cost of the art work and the cost of shipping overseas, he said. He then asked her to send the overpayment to his shipping agent. So he essentially got her to send him money before she discovered the payment was fraudulent.” I can’t really follow all this, but I swallow the rest of my snack and make the appropriate sympathetic noises. “We must protect you from this kind of trickery!” You and what army? I silently ask. We are interrupted by the director’s sister. They are dressed like twins, but they are not identical. In fact, they are opposites in coloring and height and girth. Nobody would guess they were related. The sister says to me, “We’re sure our friend Richard looks out for you in these matters. We hear he has taken you under his capacious wing.” “I suppose you might say I’m protected. Richard and I are now an item, as they say.” The sister raises her eyebrows while the director furrows hers, intent on her snack. The twin goes on, “Oh! We thought it was purely a professional relationship.” She also bites into a crunchy appetizer, rather viciously. “Well, isn’t it nice, and fitting, that the pair of you got together. He’s been following your work avidly for years.” “Hmmm.” I toy with the rest of my finger food. I already know it’s too greasy to eat, and anyways I’ve lost my appetite. “He’s got quite an eye. He noticed your work at the Drawing Center. He says he met you there, when he was a waiter working his way up in the gallery system. Perhaps he was beneath your notice in those days. You were very up-and-coming.” Why is she being so familiar with me? She doesn’t know me. I wonder which twin Richard had to sleep with to get me a show. At the first flare of my jealousy, the light in the room dims. A girl comes to the table to ignite the candle on the red checkered tablecloth. The shadows distort the director and her twin’s faces, but the flame gives the waitress an angelic glow. “Did Richard ever tell you the story about his signature red shoes?” the sister asks. I shrug. I try to ignore his shoes, mostly because they scream for attention. They actually do amuse me, but I would never admit it to Richard. I think of my old professor, who looked me up and down whenever I wore Mom’s fake fur tiger print coat. It was too flashy for him, but he was attracted to it all the same. My long blonde hair and good legs bothered him enough that he would mutter “Sensory overload!” when confronted with all the erotic symbols at once. The twin goes on. “When we were all young and hungry in New York, he sought high and low for an accessory to make him stand out and get noticed. We tried out hats, cravats, wild socks, and then we told him a fairytale about a girl who finagled a pair of red shoes, went out dancing in them, and could not stop. The shoes could not stop dancing, I mean. And she could not take them off. The shoes, I mean. So, she danced to the town executioner’s house, and talked him into slicing off her feet. Which he did, being blood-thirsty by both nature and vocation. The red shoes, with the girl’s feet still in them, danced away. So the shoes became a talisman for our Richard.” There’s too much information crushing my mind. I start to say something but forget what it was. My hands begin to sweat and shake. I excuse myself. The director barely notices my leaving, and ignores her sister as she leaves too. I wobble to a standing position and begin to move toward the exit. I drive slowly back to the apartment, accompanied by honking cars lined up behind me that cannot pass me on the narrow road. When I unlock the door to the apartment, I think I’m in the wrong place, but then I remember the apartment is part gallery now. I throw my body across Richard’s bed, wishing he’d come home. He’s the only one who can soothe me. He’ll tell me about the director and her sister. At last, his key turns in the lock. I’m half asleep by then, but I startle fully awake. “Did I scare you?’ he laughs as if that was his intention. “Of course not. I knew it was you.” “Do you want to go back to sleep, or shall I make tea?” He’ll make it anyway, whether I want it or not, so I stretch and yawn and sit up against the pillows. We settle in with our cups. “How was your day?” “Well, I found out that my storage facility was broken into, for one thing.” His voice drops to the pitch he uses when he’s paying attention. “Did you report it?” “Yes. Steven was with me and helped me out. I wanted to bring a canvas or two here to work on.” He raises an eyebrow and glances over at my easel. My half-finished copy of a de Kooning is propped up there. Finger exercises, scales, and arpeggios is what I think of all that. Once, I suggested he let me do my own painting in the style of the famous artists, not copy the actual famous painting. He said that’s been done to death, even more so than the ordinary kind of copying. I don’t care. It would’ve made it more interesting for me, but that’s not the point, it seems. “So you think someone broke into your bin. Did they take your work?” “Yeah!” “And you think they might have sold it?” He asks the questions like he’s trying to get me to piece together a puzzle, or like my shrink does when she wants me to answer my own question. “Why else would they break in? To tidy up?” “That’s my job, isn’t it, to sell your pictures?” “And nobody else’s.” I snuggle up against him, but his body is as unyielding as cement. “Do you mean to say I must clear the sale of each piece with you first?” “Well, uh…no, I guess.” I’m beginning to understand. “Because, you know that would really slow things down. If I am to continue doing what I’m doing for you, I need complete access, no second-guessing of my motives on your part. And for God’s sake, ease up on the paranoia!” “Oh. Ok.” “I am sorry about the lock. I intended to have it fixed this week. Make me a copy of the new key, will you? And, as for the disorganized finances, you’ll get what’s coming to you, of course. I can’t believe you would think otherwise.” I could have done with a little more reassurance, but Richard has set down his teacup by the side of the bed, turning away from me. In seconds he’s asleep. It makes me jealous, how easy sleeping is for him. I listen to him murmur in his dreams as he sinks in deeper, and I picture the workings of his brain. I wish I could comb his synapses for clues about how he feels about me. Whatever it is, we’re too entangled to separate now. He’s my last chance. Why am I so afraid of breathing on my own? Why does he want to devour my life, how did he catch my disease, is he my creation or am I his, is evil real, why do I feel like I’m melting? I’ll never be able to sleep now. I get up and quietly open the bedroom closet. The line of red shoes looks different to me tonight, smaller somehow, not as amusing. It must be the influence of the museum director and her sister’s dancing shoes story. I crouch down to look at the shoes more closely. I want to catch one moving. I reach out to jiggle a patent leather heel. What makes me reach deeper into the closet, and wave my fingers through the dark air beyond the row of shoes? I’ve never done that before. A scent travels toward me, a faint whiff of oil paint rising from a shape, solid and cylindrical. I reach my hand in deeper and feel dozens of mailing tubes leaning against the closet wall. I pull one out from the thicket. I unroll it, synchronizing the noise with Richard’s snores. I’m careful not to make a sound. It’s an abstract by Helen Frankenthaler. Even before I take it out of the closet and into the light, I know it’s a fake.
I still think of him as Red Shoes, but his name is Richard. We’ve been together four times now. I’m teaching him how to touch me without taking me over. When he pushes into me, I resist the idea that he’s also pushing into my mind, taking possession, unscrewing my brain and rearranging things. Usually, I like the merge and mingle. Usually by this time, I’m in love. Clara says that the fact that I’m not proves my meds are working.
Richard and I are in bed when he says he’s sure he’s met me before. “When I was young and beautiful?” “You’re still beautiful, and who could forget that stare?” “That stare? Don’t you mean the bottomless blue of my eyes, or the deep and solemn expression?” I get this a lot. One guy told me I seemed so deep, it scared him. “Nope. It’s the stare of some wild thing selecting a particular victim.” I don’t know whether to take this as a compliment or not, so I throw it back to him, “You do a variation on that, you know. You don’t blink, not hardly at all.” He wraps me in his arms. That circle of skin and sagging muscle is my new favorite place in the world, except that right now it feels too clammy and way too tight. “If I blink I might miss something,” Richard says. When he looks at art, he doesn’t miss much, I’ll grant him that. He can identify the influences in my work, knows the differences between abstract and German expressionism. It’s what he’s yammering on about right now. I wait until the lull in his stream of words tells me it’s my turn to speak. “Yes, they call me an expressionist, but I’m not just that. There’s subjectivity, realism and logic in my work, too.” He agrees, but then he launches into pseudo art-speak, starts in on the quality of controlled randomness in my work. He compares me with Degas. “I think of that Degas painting where the dancers are arranged in what seems to be a sort of randomness, but the composition is still very much controlled. That’s what I’m getting at,” he says as if I’m the one somehow missing the point. As if his opinion matters to me. Not yet, it doesn’t. My turn. “Talking about controlled randomness, I find that same quality in nature, too, like the trajectory of a star. There is some chance in my work when I put, say, white acrylic over grey chalk and charcoal, slashing the white with more charcoal to finish up with a texture and a degree of dark- light that works well with the whole thing. That moment of chance is stored as experience.” He cuddles up real nice, drinking in every word I say. When I’m done, I get the sensation that, in this moment, we’re all the other one has. I read once that we’re ghosts driving skeletons of stardust; so what the hell do we have to be afraid of? I begin to touch him the way I’d like to be touched. He gets the idea, and we stop talking entirely. Afterwards, I am still empty of words and I hope he doesn’t start speaking again. He has the ability to pick up where he left off, conversation-wise, no matter the nature of the interruption. I really don’t want to hear any more of his opinions on art, but when he casually mentions that he has pull with some people at the local art museum, I perk up. “Why haven’t you gotten me a show there, then?” I demand, arms crossed over my bare chest. My mind supplies the rolling pin and bandana. Ordinarily, I’d let him tease me with possibilities, but ordering people around comes more naturally to me now. Maybe it always did, but I vaguely remember a time when I was polite. Considerate. Demanding what I want is a more efficient means to a quicker end these days. No crossed wires or ambiguities. “I’m one step ahead of you, babe.” He snaps to attention and salutes as if he’s here to serve me. I like that, but I hate it when he calls me babe. He gets up and goes to his desk. He opens a heavy notebook and runs down a list of dates. “How’s the 22nd? Give you enough time to get enough work together? The 22nd is my birthday, by the way!” He grins, and years fall from his face. “Is it? Well, yeah. That would be fun to have the show on your birthday.” I can afford to be charitable here. We get dressed and I take Richard to the house for a studio visit so I can pick out pieces for the show. He’s impressed by the beauty of the house, the beams and cathedral ceiling, the original sixties fixtures that once looked futuristic and now look retro. We go into my studio. It used to be the room my sister and I shared when we were girls, before Clara wanted her teenage privacy. I still don’t know what for. I never took up much space in our white canopy bed. Anyways it’s my studio now, and I keep it locked up. I think Richard understands that I am making a rare exception to my own rule by ushering him in. It is overflowing with canvases. They aren’t the only ones; the room where Steven used to sleep is stacked high with pictures, too. And the studio he built for me in the garage is also chock-full. Plus, there’s the storage room I rent for a monthly fee, to keep my most daring work safe. So I think I have enough for a show at the little local museum! “These are wonderful!” he says, picking each canvas up in turn and peering closely at my marks. “The colors are so rich. How did you get this red? I want to eat it!” “Careful of those. They’re still wet.” “OK. Look at this one. Interesting. Still the luscious color, but the subject is so dark.” “Really? What do you think you see?” “The green figure in both of these seems to be tormenting the second figure.” “Maybe the second figure deserves it.” “Ha! I wouldn’t want to be on your bad side, baby girl.” “No, you wouldn’t.” It’s probably only in my imagination that the hair on the back of his neck seems to stiffen. “So, what about pricing the pictures?” “Oh, you won’t make money from this exhibit. Did you really think you would? No, the pictures are always donated or at least lent by the artist.” “I don’t want to just give them away!” “They would be seen in a prestigious place. Otherwise they’re warping in a locked room in your mother’s house, right? Like beautiful Rapunzels in a fairytale tower.” He picks up a painting and examines the stripping I had put on it. I don’t do things like that very well anymore; it’s all kind of lopsided. Which drug made me do that again? The same one that tugged me over the curb on right turns? I can’t remember. “We’ll be framing these again at our expense,” Richard says. “I’m surprised you didn’t know all the usual conventions. I thought you had shown in museums before.” “Only two. A long time ago.” “Which ones? Or can’t you remember that, either?” Why would he needle me now about my bad memory? I thought he hadn’t even noticed it was a problem. I wrack my brain for the museum names, and finally spit them out. “The Drawing Center? In New York? What year was that?” I do a quick calculation. He says, “I was working there around that time. I may have curated your show.” He sits back on his heels and looks up at me. “Perhaps that’s why you seem so familiar to me.” He looks back down at my canvases and makes a list of the pictures he wants to include in the show. I guess I don’t get to choose. “Do you have any memorabilia from the old museum show?” he asks. “Postcards, announcements, reviews?” I think of the desk in my bedroom stuffed with the flotsam and jetsam of many shows. “If I kept any of that for a while, I’m sure I don’t have it now. There was a good review in the Times but I never got to see it. One of my friends read it, but didn’t send me a copy. She said it was very positive.” “Where is this friend now?” “Oh, she moved to the coast. She slept on a bed propped up on stilts in her apartment in NYC for a few years. The place was so tiny, she couldn’t fit her boyfriend in it, and so they moved.” “Too bad you never saw the review. So many documents disappeared when information went digital.” He finishes his list, with dimensions and medium neatly written beside titles. He takes out his iPhone, quickly duplicates the information to his files, tears off the handwritten page and gives it to me. “I’m guessing you’re not very computer-savvy, so this copy is for your records. Try not to lose it.” After Richard leaves, I tell Clara that he possibly curated my first big show. “Too bad I didn’t keep the catalogue or anything.” “You have it, actually. It’s in Mom’s big desk. She kept a record of all your successes until she couldn’t anymore. And I put everything else into a big computer file. All your reviews, articles about you, shows, grants, resumes, artist statements, image list, and magazine publications are there. Everything is up to date.” “I’d like to see that file sometime.” “Sure. How about now?” We open the drawer, and there’s the catalogue. I lift it out and search the names of the organizers and everyone involved. Though it’s such a common name, there is not one ‘Richard’ in the book. So, it’s a few days later and already I’m exhausted. Once the preparations for the show got underway I thought I could just relax and let the museum’s team take care of the details. “They do have staff for that, don’t they?” I say to Richard as he lists all the tasks he thinks are my share of the work. “Staff is severely overtaxed right now. The artists are usually glad to help with their own shows.” “We’re the ones supplying the actual work. I think that would make up our share.” I watch the storm gather in his eyes. He says nothing but looks as if he’d like to say plenty. I wonder how hot his temper runs. Not as hot as mine, I’m guessing. And he has better control, I see that already. Anyways, it turns out that I have to pitch in to make the show happen. All the tasks that come with a big exhibit—getting the word out with posters and flyers, sending invitations—most of that work falls to me. Steven and Clara volunteer to help me, but not Eddie or Mom. Mom used to do this kind of thing for her arts groups, but apparently she can’t anymore. The rest of us make postcards and mailers, and then run around town putting announcements up. After a few hours, we take a break at the coffee shop. I go to order at the counter, leaving the other two alone at the table. Over all the noise, I can still hear the rumble of Steven’s voice. It sounds a lot like Dad’s, and it carries. “I have a question,” he is saying to Clara. “Why did you have to go and put Mandy’s picture up on Facebook when she ran away last year? It was really embarrassing to see her giant face in my feed.” “Her detective suggested it.” Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. It’s the first I’m hearing about it. “Anyhow, Facebook is a lousy place to put her art. There are always the same few people commenting. She needs a real website. Her art career is all smoke and mirrors anyway. I just hope you keep doing whatever you’re doing for her. If you stop, she might take it out on Mom.” I hold my breath, waiting to see if Clara follows Steven’s clue. She doesn’t. She rushes past it with this: “First of all, she does have an actual professional website and a blog. I know you don’t know anything about art, but she’s done well, especially in view of the fact that she’s been disabled by this awful disease for so long.” “I thought she stabilized after her first breakdown and was able to live a normal life.” Steven was good at taking a few facts and weaving them into a theory that’s plausible, but still a good distance from the whole truth. “Hardly. Mandy’s first breakdown sidelined her permanently with anxiety attacks and other fallout. But with a lot of help and the money Dad left her, she’s been able to manage. She got this museum show all on her own for instance.” “But she’s not doing it all on her own, is she? Otherwise, we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing for her right now.” “This is like giving a friend a lift to the airport!” “It still takes time out of my real life, and yours. How long are you going to keep looking after her? Are you just going to run between her needs and Mom’s? What about your career? It looks like you’re giving up a lot for a couple of lost causes.” I don’t want to know Clara’s answer to that so I don’t listen to that part. I know my mind has lost its stickiness. My thoughts are stalled. There are traces of dead cells left in my brain from the psychosis and I can’t remember things like what Mom ate at what time, or how much. Eddie and Clara ask me and I have no answer for them. I get mad at them for bothering me, but they say they’re trying to help me rewire my brain. They think it will help my concentration back if I answer their questions. They say my psychosis scarred my brain and made me lose empathy and patience. Like when a friend was diagnosed with cancer—all I could think of to say to her was, “What are you going to do now, lie around and wait to die?” I can’t remember hardly anything, like the names of things. My logic is shot, too, and sometimes I can’t even tell. One of my friends went blind, but I sent her some of my pictures anyway. She said, “Don’t you remember I can’t see?” and I said, “Well, can your husband look at them for you?” “He can look at them,” she said, “but his ability to see doesn’t make me any less blind.” I didn’t understand the concept for a long, frustrating minute. When I finally got it, I gasped and clicked off the phone. I haven’t called her back since. Maybe I should. I’m better now, and she might like to know about my show. She might like to come. Anyways, after a day of doing these little jobs for the opening, I collapse on Richard’s bed. I glance at the threadbare, dingy surroundings. This guy is going to make me a star? “You’ve got that look on your face again,” he says, settling some pillows at his back. “What’s bugging ya? Wouldn’t want to bug ya.” He likes to incorporate song lyrics into conversations. It’s cute, he thinks, and maybe it is. I smile just in case. “Just wondering why your decorators don’t want your money.” “There have been no further renovations because I’ve had no time to oversee the project. I’m besieged with myriad tasks for a certain show.” He puts his arm around me and squeezes. I think girdle. I think python. “One wonders why you care about such flourishes. One wonders if you are experiencing the nesting impulse that so often follows mating.” He thinks I’m sizing up the place so I can move in with him? I laugh. “Don’t flatter yourself. I already have a nest, and it is way nicer than yours.” Richard removes his arm from around me, props himself up like a block of ice against the pillow. After a beat or two of sullen silence, he asks in a hard-edged voice, “Did you tack the announcements up where I told you to?” “Yes. It took longer than I thought it would. I had to make each little drawing, the ones you asked for, different from one another. That was the biggest time-sink. To think all Picasso had to do was scribble on a napkin and people would hand over all their money.” “The drawings were just a suggestion! The important thing was to put the show info on the paper. You didn’t forget that, did you, in your creative fervor?” “Of course not. My point is, it took time. My brother and sister helped me with some of the grunt work earlier, but I had to do everything else by myself.” I got up from the bed and started for the door. “Leaving, are we?” “Clara’s been calling for me to bring back her car. She says I made her re-schedule Mom’s medical appointment.” “Why didn’t she take a cab?” “Maybe she didn’t think of it.” “Strange, when that’s exactly what she expects you to do most of the time. Has she always kept you on such a short leash?” “No leash. She just trusts me to do what I promise.” It went both ways. I trust you with my life. “I’ll see you later.” I fumble for my keys. Richard comes up behind me and lays his hand on my arm. “Spend the night,” he says. It’s more like a command than an invitation or seduction, although he does remember to smile. As if it’s settled, he pats my arm with a touch meant to remind me that although I may be talented, I’m not as bright as I think I am, or even as bright as I once was. It’s a theory he’s come up with lately. Intelligence and creativity are two different things, he says. He says it when I have trouble reaching for a particular word, or when I mix up the order I’m supposed to do things in. But right now, I am fully functional, and I have no difficulty in finding the word for goodbye. An hour later Clara and I are tucking Mom in, and I pause to stretch my back. I know I’m going to regret this, but I say, “I’m not sure about Richard. He’s making me work too hard on my own show.” I don’t want to complain about him but I can’t resist it, even if Clara thinks I’ve gotten involved with yet another guy she’ll have to rescue me from. It’s happened before. I think back to the one guy my old roommate from art school set me up with. I didn’t know he was bi-polar at the time, but my roommate Brenda sure did. I thought she got us together to punish me for being a better artist than she was. She was the jealous type and it was a dirty trick. Anyways, he just moved right into my little efficiency and wouldn’t get out. Clara had to come get me. The guy argued with us the whole time we were packing up the apartment. He wouldn’t give back the key and I worried he’d trash the place after I left, but my first priority was to escape. It was winter and the roads were covered in black ice. Clara and me, we made a slow getaway, picking our way over the glassy road to the car, the guy in hot but slo-mo pursuit. So, I moved back into Clara’s and my old apartment, which I should never have left anyways, but it was a while before either of us girls felt safe again. “Your Richard probably doesn’t wield any power over the actual museum staff,” Clara says to me while we fold over Mom’s covers. “He probably has to cajole the director in letting him have one of the volunteers help him. It’s a very small museum, and they all operate on shoestring budgets.” “It may be a small museum but it’s a very big deal to have a show at any museum!” “Of course it is!” She stops her tucking-in and hugs me, as if she could gather all my broken bits together. She didn’t mean to belittle me, she never does, but suddenly her hug feels shallow and condescending. Sometimes I wonder if she’s really on my side. Richard’s voice whispers in my ear. Trust me. I want to tell him that I do, but I know he can’t hear me. “I’m getting anxious,” I announce to my mother and sister. I leave them to lie down on my bed. My excuse isn’t true for once, but I want Clara to feel guilty for ruining my excitement about the show and for not trusting Richard. For all I know, she’s the one who can’t be trusted. From my bed, I watch the red numbers on my clock pass the time. I try to let the sweep of seconds regulate my breath. When I finally fall asleep it’s to slip in and out of the skin of a dream in which Richard is a security cop in a museum. He stares at the paintings on the walls until he has absorbed all he can about art, and then he turns his back to them. All of the pictures are by me. Fakes, he mouths, and I jolt upright. Richard has a surprise. We’re in the parking lot of his complex, and he’s trying to make me guess what it is. I’m not in the mood for his games, but just before I tell him to just spit it out already, he points to the new car parked alongside us. I noticed it when we first pulled up. It’s a nice hatchback in my favorite shade of blue. He pulls the keys out of the ignition of the car we’re in, and hands them to me. “Now you won’t have to depend on your sister’s largesse.” I’m confused; didn’t he buy the new car for me? “The new blue one is mine.” He reads my face and comes to his own wrong conclusion. “We can do the paperwork whenever you feel like it. I could sell this car to you for $100 or something. If you don’t want to be bothered with any of that, you can consider it a loan.” “Thanks, Richard. I’ll think of it as a loan, then.” He had been very pleased with himself a few moments before, but deflates pretty fast from my lack of enthusiasm. I don’t really need a borrowed car. Clara lets me use hers pretty much whenever I want. Besides, her car is nicer than Richard’s. Nicer even than his new one. He’s lucky I’ve always kind of liked junkers anyways. They’ve got eccentricities I can relate to. “Oh, I made you a key to the apartment, too.” He loosens it from his chain, and hands it to me. “You can give me yours later.” “What? You want the key to my mother’s house?” “You always refer to it as your house.” “It isn’t, not legally. I’m not authorized to give out keys. My sibs make those kinds of decisions for Mom.” “Why? Do they think you’re some kind of second-stringer kind of child?” “As a matter of fact, they do.” For a moment I’m tempted to explain my medical situation, but I lose my nerve. He waits for more words, then harrumphs, “I see,” seeing nothing. Now I’ve made him mad. He can’t have really expected I’d just hand over the house keys, could he? That’s pretty presumptuous. We aren’t even officially exclusive yet. I mean, neither of us has said anything about it. Besides, the whole family lives in that house. He’s not family. We enter the apartment and he occupies himself in the kitchen for longer than necessary. While I wait for him to come back into the living room, I pick up the topmost volume from his pile of books and ledgers. All of a sudden he leaps out and across the room like a dancer, and snatches the book from me. Is he trying to make me laugh? No, that’s not it. Why would he hide the fact that he’s reading a book on the art of cracquelure? I’m just glad he’s a reader. A wise man once said that if you go home with someone and he doesn’t have books, don’t fuck him. Richard picks up another art book, this one full of color plates. He turns on the lamp and motions for me to sit beside him on the sofa. We thumb through the pages together until the rhythm of turning them begins to relax us both. We look over a painting of a woman surrounded by her children. “Did you come from a big family?” Suddenly I want to know things. “Nope. Just me and Mother.” “That must have been lonely.” “Wrong again. Mother had lots of company. My main issue was getting enough privacy.” That’s odd. “I thought I heard you telling a story about your two brothers and a sister when we were at that opening last week.” It struck me as funny, because I’m the one with two brothers and a sister. “Are you calling me a liar?” he snarls. A chill fingers my spine. I don’t want this guy to bare his teeth at me, so I casually say, “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” He laughs an unexpectedly full laugh and squeezes my shoulder. We are on the same side again. Relieved, but eager to change the subject, I point to some elements in the painting spread across my knees, deconstructing it and reconstructing it until the parts jell again and it becomes a painting once more. I make soft comments about technicalities. Technical talk seems to soothe him. “Think you could paint something like this?” He turns the page to a Francis Bacon painting. “Sure. We did lots of copying in art school. That’s all it was, basically, copying and nude modeling.” “So you were one of those girls?” “Lots of us did it. One woman who had just given birth posed for the class a lot one semester. Milk coming out all the time.” “You weren’t shy about getting naked?” “I’d get mad when the non-art students gawked as they passed the room, but you get used to the nudity.” We look at a few more pictures. “You could copy this one. It’s my favorite, and I do have a birthday coming up.” He’s mentioned his birthday a few times now. A man his age! It’s sneer-worthy, but I look at the picture closely enough to make him think I just might do what he wants. I can’t imagine why he would want a copy of someone else’s painting when he could have an original by me, though. I thought he liked my work. He’s making a point with his request. I just don’t know what it is. Later, I watch him sleep, trying to figure what goes on behind his bulging lids. In the morning, I drive back home in his loaner car. Anyways, Mom can’t really walk very well after the fracture. She lists down the hall like a shipwreck. Steven’s helping her, I have to admit. He’s like some kind of mother-whisperer. Mom seems fascinated by him without knowing who he is, and she follows him around the house, holding his hand. She still cannot call him by the name she gave him. That used to be his reason for not visiting her much. Now he is finding out there are ways of knowing a person besides reciting their name, rank, and serial number.
He’s up to something. He always has a plan. When he first got here, he shuffled through the rooms like some demoralized old man, clicking his camera at the disrepair. Now he’s hired carpenters to fix the hole in the kitchen ceiling and all kinds of stuff, to get the house up to code for when we eventually sell it. Workers barge in, all day every day. Mom doesn’t like it. She hushes everybody all the time. One morning, I’m gathering up Mom’s bedding to carry to the laundry room. Steven takes the bundle from me. They all do this, take things out of my hands to do themselves. We go downstairs to load the machine. “So, how are you doing, Mandy? I mean, really?” “I’m ok. I just came across Mom’s eyeglasses! She hid them behind her bedside table. She hides things now, like her dentures and her glasses.” “Were they damaged?” “They were kind of oddly shaped, yeah. She must have sat on them. I don’t think she can read out of them.” “Read? Mom can’t still read, can she?” “I thought she could. I thought she just wasn’t reading the paper because she didn’t have her glasses.” “You’re talking about the same paper she likes to compulsively rip to shreds? Uh, Mandy— Mom’s too far along in her disease to be able to read.” His words jolt me, but thinking about them, they make sense. “I did catch her tearing up that nice book you gave her yesterday.” “The one on the coffee table?” “Yeah.” “I’ll just move it to the piano. Tearing up stuff is an Alzheimer behavior. Is that why I heard you yelling at her? To make her stop?” I nod. I didn’t think anyone heard me yelling. I wouldn’t even call it yelling. I barely raised my voice. “Well, don’t yell at her. She doesn’t understand what you want. We just have to baby-proof the space. We did that for my kids when they were little, remember? We didn’t expect them to anticipate outcomes of their actions. Same thing here.” Steven turns from me and sets the washer going. On the way out of the laundry room, we nearly trip over some boxes he plans to take to the second-hand shop. “I think our old deck of cards is in that one,” he says, pointing. I open the lid and lift out the pack. My past leaps up dragging memories behind it. The school pool we filled with soap, the metronome left ticking slowly in our sister’s locker, shoplifting at the drug store. I didn’t know at the time we were making our best memories. We always think that one good time will lead to an even better time. We never foresee the fun ending. The empty seats I keep in my brain fill up with ghosts. “Let’s play some of those games we used to like,” Steven says. So we do. We cut, shuffle, and deal, and I feel better the whole time we’re doing it. It’s a nice moment, but it’s the lull before the storm. That night at dinner, Mom slumps forward onto the table, and loses consciousness. “Call 911!” Eddie shouts while Clara is doing just that. “Is she breathing?” she says, repeating the questions the operator asks as he asks them. “Yes, she’s breathing. I’m taking her BP right now.” Steven crouches beside Mom, holding her so she doesn’t slip off her chair while Eddie takes her pressure. “They say to get her flat onto the kitchen floor.” The brothers lift her smoothly as if they had been a team all their lives. While the paramedics speed to the house, Mom becomes so pale and still, we’re afraid that it’s the end. Steven is white as a sheet. Finally he sees what we go through. Mom wakes up just as the paramedics carry her out to the ambulance, wakes up long enough to resist. She means it too. At the hospital, she’s still making a fuss, yanking her IV out and slapping at the techs. No no no is what she says to everything. The doc says she had torpor, but can’t say much more about it. It’s some blood pressure issue and he warns us we can expect more of these episodes. They’ll keep her overnight this time. Then the doctor clears his throat and adds, “While she has not injured herself this time, I’m sorry to say that your mother has developed normal pressure hydrocephalus. Sometimes it happens as a result of head injury. Has she taken any blows lately?” Three siblings trade shocked expressions while the fourth’s head shakes a vigorous denial. “Hydrocephalus can tamper with your mother’s disposition, wreak havoc with balance, and consequently interfere with walking. It produces headaches, causes hearing loss, things of that type. We are not considering shunting, but her decline will accelerate now. I’d like to take her off Aricept, since it is obviously no longer working.” Eddie quizzes the doctor, “What would happen to her brain if her drugs were withdrawn?” “I worry more about what the drugs are doing to her body. Her sleep disturbances are probably a side effect of Aricept. Cardio-vascular problems such as bradycardia, extrapyramidal symptoms, and behavioral disturbances can all develop.” “I asked about the effect on her brain,” Eddie digs in. “We understand from friends whose parents stopped their drugs that there is often a rapid, steep decline. The patients’ personalities change and they become too aggressive to handle at home. We don’t want Mom to die in a nursing facility.” “You’ll just prolong the inevitable if you keep her on the Aricept. She has no quality of life as it stands.” “She has things she enjoys! She’s not in pain, she recognizes the family, and seems to appreciate us. Quality of life is always subjective and she’s entitled to every minute nature gives her. She doesn’t need to be hurried on her way.” The doctor, only half-listening now, offers, “We can find some place to put her. You don’t have to keep her at home.” “We want to keep her at home. It’s her house!” “As you wish,” the doctor says. When she does come back home, Mom’s more depressed than she usually is after one of these events. The emergencies take a cumulative toll, Clara says, but how can they, if Mom forgets about them as soon as they happen? Still, some trace of trauma must remain. Otherwise, why does Mom stand at the window and cry for a few minutes whenever Clara pulls out of the driveway? The sight of her at the smudged glass, watching the car retreat into an ocean of light and shadow, makes me wonder if she thinks that she has lost Clara for good, that she is never coming back. She doesn’t know that she is the one who’s lost, a woman adrift in a drowning world. A few days later, I say to Clara, “When I have no more responsibilities around here, I’m going back to school and get a master’s degree in art. I might as well go to New York for school. One of my friends lived there for a while. If he can manage NYC in a wheelchair, I can manage it with my problems. Anyways, my friend Michi might come with me if the school has an undergraduate program she’d like to study.” “Have you mentioned this to your doctor?” Clara takes her cue from whatever the doc says, I notice. She’s careful not to say anything that will upset me. “The doc says it’s a great plan, but to be careful because New York is so chaotic. I can handle chaos. And who knows− maybe I’ll meet a boy there.” I get no encouragement about that from Clara. So I drill down a little to what’s really bothering me. “I keep getting the feeling that I’m going to be left alone to take care of Mom, even though the whole family is living here again. I don’t want to be the one to watch her die.” “I’ll be here. What am I, chopped liver?” “I know you do a lot. You give Mom her bath and you feed her, you’ve taken over all my old jobs. Maybe I’m just crabby because I can’t get Dad to nod in my head lately. I ask him questions like always, but he never materializes anymore. There’s just a wavy grey light where he used to show up. I know he was only a hallucination, but I miss him.” “But that’s great news! It means your medicine is working and your brain is healing!” “Except that my head feels empty instead of clear, the way it should. It’s like the more I get involved in ordinary life, like with Mom and household chores, the emptier and more depressed I feel.” Ever since we were young, Clara’s believed my happiness was all up to her. Where do these ideas come from? She thinks for a minute and offers me her advice: “Family life can’t fill all your needs. It isn’t very interesting by itself, but it can give you structure and some peace. Maybe you should go into your studio more. That’s where the real excitement is. I can look after Mom most of the time, and we can always hire Chris the nurse to fill in the gaps. With so many helpers, none of us has to exhaust ourselves.” I take her at her word. Next time everyone goes out, I call Chris to stay with Mom so I can work in my studio without being interrupted every five minutes. I may as well work, because otherwise they will complain that I’m snapping at Mom. She’s not that hard to look after, if you really want to know. All she wants to do is sit on the big white couch anyways, but she won’t stay still. She wedges herself in the crack between the sections, and falls through onto the floor. I keep telling her not to do it, but she does it all the time. I come out of my studio at the end of Chris’ shift just as she’s getting ready to leave the house. “Your Mom sure was a handful today.” “What happened?” I say, peeling bills off the wad of money Eddie left for me to pay her. “She went downstairs even though I told her not to. Then she picked up the wastebasket and for no reason threw the junk all around. I made her pick it up, and she kinda lost her balance when she went to kneel down, and kinda fell. It was really hard for me to yank her back up. I might have hurt my arm.” She rubs it to illustrate. I open my mouth but no words come. I freeze as the scene plays out in my mind in slow motion. Chris standing over Mom, forcing her down on her ancient worn knees, destabilizing her injured back, her artificial hip twisted. Chris browbeating her, just because she can. “I made her pick up the garbage so you wouldn’t have to,” Chris simpers. I can’t move. The money is still in my hand and Chris pries it out. She changes her tone, snarling at me, “Don’t you dare tell your brothers about this. If you do, I’m quitting.” Why don’t I fire her right then and there? Slap her, trip her, push her down the stairs? Threaten to report her? Actually report her, right in front of her fat face. Instead, I ask her to come back on Thursday. After Chris leaves, I stretch out along the couch opposite Mom and try to calm down. Mom seems recovered already, but I need a pill. My down jacket is scrunched up behind the throw pillows, and I sit up and search the pockets for medication. No luck, so I get up to look in the bottles in my room, but before I go, I float the jacket over the sofa cushions over the trouble spot where they easily separate. Mom smiles and swats the jacket away. The cushions part and she falls through the crack onto the floor. A few days later, Clara is interviewing aides to replace Chris. She doesn’t really care what I have to say about the candidates. Last night, I overheard her and Eddie talking about how I’m not the nurse I used to be. They’re saying things like I staged Mom’s kidnapping, that I bark orders at her. “Did Mom fall off the couch a lot before I moved back in?” Clara asks Eddie. He says, “Never,” and I feel the urge to flee. So I borrow Clara’s car and go to the coffee shop to take another stab at getting my life back. Who knows, I might find a new face to paint. I’ll wait for a while to see who shows up. Two of the women who were regulars recently moved, another one died, and my friend Cherie, who organized the whole art salon/coffee klatch idea, rarely comes anymore. “Her husband got sick. She sticks to him like glue, now,” says her best friend Sue. I wish he’d just die so we could have her back. Today, there are two new girls here. They are sisters and they sing to patients in hospitals, hymns and all like that. I think we might be interested in one another, so I unzip my grey case to show them my new pictures, plus the catalogue from the portraits show. They didn’t go to the opening, and I get the feeling they think they should apologize for it. They should. They really don’t know anything about art, and can’t give me sensible comments, so I change the subject and start to tell them my recent medical adventures. I generally don’t want people to know how crazy I was, but some people I just like to freak out. Like these two. They shrink back and angle their bodies away from me to discourage me from talking, so I keep going. I give them the most exciting highlights from the newsreel in my head: the thousand dollar cab ride, how to recognize a warlock, all the hiding places for pills in a person’s mouth when faking a swallow. I watch the girls’ eyes the whole time. Watch them wince and widen, wince and widen. “After I’m fully stable, I’ll wean myself off these drugs.” The sisters gasp, and Susan’s eyes flicker with interest. “The state will never let you. You’re their bitch now.” “I doubt it. Did I tell you I bought a gun? I thought Eddie was going to rape and kill us, so I bought a gun and some ammunition.” Susan stares at me, hard. The new girls fidget. “How did you get cleared? You were psychotic.” “I don’t know. There was no waiting period like I thought.” “Did you write down your real name?” “Yeah.” “Didn’t they ask you about mental illness?” “Yeah, but I just lied. They never caught on.” “Where is the gun now?” “I forget. In the back of a closet, I guess.” “You’re not sure? Is it loaded?” “Dunno. Boy, I can’t believe I was ever that nutty.” “Oh well. As Alice said to the Mad Hatter, all the best people are.” Susan’s comment seems a good one to adjourn on. The two sisters can’t get away fast enough. Susan saunters out at a more leisurely pace. She wouldn’t want me to think she’s afraid of me or anything. She’s pretty tough, but I enjoy finding the limit to people’s bravado. I’m not done with my coffee, so I look around to see if there is anyone interesting to talk to while I drink it. I need to get my mind off Eddie and Clara. Their words, never meant for me to hear, grab me by the throat over and over again. I shouldn’t have responsibilities for Mom, not hardly at all, they say. I’m not up to it, they say. I don’t care. I’m a painter, not a caregiver. I look up from my mug and glance around the room. I notice the red shoes first. My eyes travel the length of the man in them. Lots of long grey hair, faded from the original blond I bet, pulled back in a ponytail like mine. Pale blue eyes, haggard face but broad in the shoulders. Beautiful hands, long tapered fingers like a violinist. He’s talking into his phone about art and auctions, furiously writing in a black ledger just like the one I record my anxiety attacks in. See, we already have lots in common. I know I’m staring. My stare usually makes people uncomfortable, like I’m sizing them up for dinner, but this guy likes it. He quickly ends his telephone call, smiles, and comes over to my table. He sits himself right down. “You’re the painter, right?” “Yeah, I paint.” “I saw your show the other day. Are you as mysterious as your work?” “Me? I’m an open book,” I say with what I hope is a mysterious smile. I flip my ponytail for good measure. His pupils enlarge. “I’d like to read that book.” “Open mic or private reading?” He’s already rising out of his chair and offering me his hand. This is one advantage of having reached a certain age. No cat-and-mouse games. We both know there’s no time to waste. We drive to his apartment in separate cars. There’s no reason for me to mistrust him—after all, his intentions are clear— but I like to have an easy exit. I notice that Clara’s car is nicer than his. With all that grey hair, shouldn’t he have a better one? Oh well, maybe he’s driving his coffee shop car, and the Mercedes is in his garage. What garage? He turns into an apartment complex like the kind my after-care organization uses for their subsidized housing program. Two long tiers of the kind of space people rent when they’re waiting for something to happen in their lives, or else when they’ve just given up. How many of these apartments are simply storage facilities? Maybe there’s a studio or two tucked in with them for starving artists living off the grid. He eases out of his parked car and motions for me to take the space next to his. He does it with a little bow and I laugh outwardly but cringe on the inside. You know how homeowners in Britain like to name their houses? I’d name this apartment Cold Coffee or something. It’s bare, beyond austere, with only the essential pieces of second hand furniture tossed like dice across the brown indoor-outdoor carpeting. “I’m in the middle of renovations,” he explains as he sets his ledger down on top of a stack of similar volumes on a table. He takes off my jacket, and then my sweater. His lovemaking is as plain as the surroundings, except for some biting, which I don’t really like. At least he doesn’t complain about creaky knees or back pain like other men our age do. He does, however, cry after we’re done. I try not to act repulsed, and simply say, “Been awhile, has it?” He acts like he doesn’t get what I mean, cocking his head and raising his eyebrows and all. I pull my clothes back on, and pull out my keys. “Was it something I said?” “What?” “Where are you going?” “Home. Aren’t we done here?” “Methinks we have not yet begun. Not if we continue with our precedent of doing things backward; sex first, getting-to-know-you afterward. I’ll make tea.” He gets up, his withering muscles desperately clutching at the bone. His chest is covered with fine white hairs that make him look blurry and soft focus. “I’m not thirsty. What do you want to talk about anyways? My sister is waiting for me to bring her car back. I’m kinda behind schedule.” “Is this going to be like dating a teenager with a curfew? One way for a Humbert like me to stay young, I suppose.” He grins, to let me know he’s being clever. I don’t think it’s very funny, and hearing the word ‘dating’ come out of his pursed lips grates on me. I’m ok with the Lolita reference, though. “You should be so lucky,” I snap back. I take a last look around the place to make sure I haven’t left anything behind. I jangle my keys at him in goodbye. I’m always amazed by how good leaving feels. When I get home, my sister is frantic. “Where have you been? I was sick with worry!” “Why? Did you think I ran away again?” She hates it when I sneer at her. She doesn’t respond in words, just folds her upper lip over her lower lip to make a long thin line. Clara is such a goody two-shoes. I throw her a crumb. “Actual men are not nearly as good in bed as hallucinations are, did you know that? They never do what you really want them to do.” I feel the air vibrate with shock as I walk out of the kitchen, laughing, into my room. I stretch out on my silly canopy bed and think about the one touch of brightness in the guy’s dingy apartment. How many pairs of red shoes did he have all lined up in his closet anyways? He kicked the door shut on them when he saw me noticing, before I had a chance to count them. Was he worried I might think he was too quirky for me? You want quirks, I’ll show you quirks. Ha! We’re sitting at the kitchen table with our mother one morning, oil pastels rolling over the large pieces of paper we’d spread out. “Remember when the three of us used to make pictures in this same spot?” Clara says, wistfully enough to make me want to shake her. “Those silly lessons! It took me years to prune away all that realism.” I look over at our mother’s picture. “I don’t know why we’re still making her do this. Half the time it only frustrates her.” “What are you painting?” Clara asks Mom gently, to show me how it’s done, I suppose. Mom holds a pastel crayon in one hand and a can of Ensure in the other, but tips her chin toward the paper. “It’s my Mum.” Clara takes the can out of her hand so she can hold up her picture to show me. “See? What’s the point?” “It’s good for her brain, Dr. Monte says. And it’s a creative escape.” “Oh, what does she need to escape from? She’s got it made.” “Escape from the pain of dying, maybe.” Clara sidesteps her own observation by pointing to my picture. “That’s lovely! Look at the colors!” “Yeah, I can’t be depressed if I’m using such bright ones.” “They’re like jewels! I like the movement here, too.” “I’ll help you,” Mom says, pulling my painting close to her. She begins to draw curly lashes on the eyelids of the only figurative face in the picture. I cover my eyes with my hands and swear softly. When Mom finishes with the eyelashes, she slaps down the paper with an exhausted little “Phew!” She looks around the room and says, “Where’s my purse?” “Right where you left it,” I say, nodding in the direction of the counter. Clara hands it to her when I don’t get up to fetch it. “Oh dear! The latch has torn off!” “I see that. Well, you have lots of other purses, Mom.” Clara goes into the closet and brings out another one, a red and gold embroidered bag. “Here’s one you like.” “It’s beautiful! We should put things in it.” We empty her old purse. There’s a battered photo of her mother in it, a tube of red lipstick, tissues, expired membership cards, an old piece of paper on which she had practiced writing out all us kids’ names, and at the very bottom, five copies of our father’s death certificate. “Has she really carried this with her all these years?” “I guess so.” I put one copy of the death certificate into the new purse and hand it back to her. “We should probably put the others in Mom’s big desk. There’s one copy for each of us.” “Maybe the safe deposit box would be a better bet,” Clara says, one-upping my suggestion as usual. I remember taking the will out of that box the time I tried to get the lawyer to make over the estate to me. Clara shouldn’t mention it. She should know it might bring up bad memories. I must be glaring at her now because my cheeks feel hot and she’s lowering her eyes. Mom takes the purse, and clatters out of her chair. Swinging the handbag, she makes for the front door. She twists and pulls the doorknob. “Don’t do that, Mom,” I say. “Why shouldn’t she? Have purse, will travel.” “Yeah, I guess,” I say, followed by a sharp “Mom, don’t DO that! Stop it, Mom. Remember what happened last time you yanked on the door.” A flicker of memory quickens the faded hazel eyes. “Yeah, what actually did happen the last time?” Steven appears, climbing up the stairs with a bag of groceries in his arms. He gives me a piercing look, the kind that could make a person believe that he can read minds. “Oh, she yanked the door off its hinges once. I must have told you that story.” Our brother stares at me, trying to read the subtext. All he says is, “Unbelievable.” I can’t decipher the look in his eyes. Those hooded lids hide everything. Steven puts the groceries away and opens a package of light bulbs. He climbs on a chair and replaces a bulb that had burned out several days ago. Mom comes away from the door to stand next to his chair, purse still dangling from her wrist, her hands cupped to receive the burnt bulb. I start to say “Don’t…” but Steven has already deposited the lightbulb in Mom’s palm. He climbs down and gently takes it from Mom, then flicks the switch on the wall to check if the new bulb works. Light floods the table, and our mother’s portrait of me as a child comes alive on the wall above it. “Remember when you were about seven years old, and you fought all the kids in your class?” Why bring that old story up? Clara jerks her head, zig-zagging a line of red crayon outside the paper and onto the table. “Damn.” “Damn,” Mom echoes. “I remember you setting up fights for her and charging money,” Eddie, just in from a run, reminds Steven. He has a mean streak. Both boys do. “How come nobody ever told me this story? How did I not know? And what do you mean when you say fighting?” Clara says. “I hit the kids with my tiny little fists,” I say. “They were all afraid of me. Sometimes I’d beat up the same kid twice on the same day. One boy even landed in the hospital. Even though I was so skinny, I’d thrown a lucky punch right in the eye he’d previously damaged, and the kid lost his sight. The parents sued Dad, I think.” “How awful! Why would you do a thing like that? You’re not the violent type!” The boys look at Clara, incredulous that she had missed the obvious for all these years. “Yes, I am. It’s my nature to be violent.” Clara is the angel and I am the devil, I told our mother at five years old. “Even after the kid’s accident, I kept beating up my classmates. I only quit it when we moved here, because I wanted to have some friends.” No one speaks while Clara absorbs the shock. I look at the painting on the wall above the table. I am seven, playing my violin, dressed in a blue velvet dress with a white lace collar. No one ever mentioned the bruises on my knuckles. A tube of rolled-up pictures arrives at The Gallery. An intern picks it up. It’s her job to investigate the unsolicited work that comes through the doors despite the warning on The Gallery’s website, now common knowledge: No unsolicited art.
The girl is about twenty, an art student with family connections to The Gallery’s owner. She is dressed in black, as usual. She is afraid of wearing anything else. Color might label her as someone less serious than the artist she wants to become someday. She carries the package through the rooms bright with white paint and carefully placed spotlights, to the smaller, dimmer room in the back. Pictures hung on the unpainted walls there are lopsided as coats on hooks. Along one section of a wall, there are samples of frames, colorful edges of cocked eyebrows. The girl hides her smile as she passes, and climbs deeper into the part of the gallery nobody ever sees. Spread out before her is expensive camera equipment, a complicated system of lights, and a white backdrop for the staff to photograph the artists’ works. The information on each piece of art shown is carefully recorded along with the corresponding photos of the individual pieces. The stack of black ledgers containing all the information is so unwieldly that none that none of the staff wants to tackle shelving the many volumes. It seems the employees’ supervisor would rather do it himself, anyway. His own people help him, several burly men not associated with the gallery but who appear as if summoned by some kind of silent whistle. The men never talk or smile and nobody has ever seen their eyes behind the dark glasses. The supervisor also takes the photographs, rather than waiting for the drink-addled pro to stagger in off the street to do it. The boss takes a pretty good picture, everyone agrees, but they are also unanimous in the opinion that there must be something wrong with a guy who does so much more work than required, especially when the pay is so minimal. Not that they’ve ever seen his paycheck. He keeps the details of his personal life quiet, too. He doesn’t do the see-and-be-seen circuit of shows. He doesn’t wear a wedding ring. There are no family photos on his desk. The only time he seems approachable is during a staffer’s birthday celebration. He makes sure the cake is ordered and decorations hung up, he always shows up on time and stays throughout the entire party. Emboldened by these isolated expressions of warmth, the intern asks him for the date of his birthday, so they can all have a celebration for him, too. He will not tell her the date. “Maybe he wants us to track it down,” says one of her friends. “What—like a treasure hunt?” says another. “On the other hand, he could be hiding something. A person’s date of birth can be used for finding out all kinds of other personal information.” “We should leave it alone, then. He’s entitled to his privacy.” This is what is on the intern’s mind as she weighs the mailing tube with her hands. She is still a girl given over to fantasies featuring happy romantic scenarios. She has a terrible crush on Richard (at least she thinks that’s his name) and finds him a tantalizing mysterious figure. She places the tube on the worn work table. It’s stained with dirt and coffee and crushed in a couple of places, but is not heavy. She grunts anyway, more as a comment on her life than from physical effort. The postmark is months old. Where in the world has this package been? There is a loosened piece of paper hanging off the outside of the cardboard, barely holding on with two strips of Scotch tape. She pries the paper off with her black polished nails and pushes her glasses higher up on her nose. Dear The Gallery, the message reads, I forgot to put this in my cover letter so I’m sticking it here. I hope you see it. I need to get a gallery as soon as possible because my brother is trying to kill me. This is no joke. I hope you like my pictures and can help me escape my brother Eddie to come to New York. I tried to drive there already, but I got lost and crashed Mom’s car. Thank you. Amanda Patterson The intern’s hands begin to shake and she drops the paper. It flutters past her knees to the floor. “What’s wrong now?” The man asking is also dressed in black, but zaps the monotony of his uniform with red shoes, one of which he places on the notepaper to trap it. He is the only one who still wears red shoes, according to the intern’s friends. It’s so cliché, worse than his ponytail. Someone should get him drunk and cut his hair. The intern would like to be the person with the scissors. I bet you would, her friends would say, collectively smirking. “It’s got a letter attached like some kind of cry for help or all like that.” The girl bends down to pull the paper out from under his shoe, and hands it to him. The man draws his features into an interested expression, not especially concerned, but curious. He flips his ponytail out of the way as he leans in closer to the note. Frowning, he opens the tube. All at once a look of delight crosses his face. “I’m aware of his woman. She’s got a good resume and lots of experience. I hope nothing awful has really happened to her.” The intern says, “It’s probably just someone who stuck the note on her submission for a prank, or it’s her own misguided way to get our attention.” “The package itself looks like it’s been on quite a trip.” He carefully unrolls each watercolor, as carefully as the intern has ever seen him handle anyone’s work. “These are beautiful! Sophisticated, expressionistic. A wonderful use of color.” She hears the satisfaction in his voice, a kind of burrowing warmth that pricks her with jealousy for the unknown artist. “Too bad we’re not taking on anyone new right now,” he says. “These fit right in with our aesthetic. Tell her that, and add something complimentary about the work itself. It’s very good. And don’t be such a snowflake, Maryann.” Something has happened back home; a misstep, a fall, a trip to the ER. So when Clara tells me that Mom has been admitted, I offer my help. She will need it during Mom’s recovery from her injury. I can move in before she gets discharged and get everything set up. We still have equipment from the time Mom broke her hip. There’s a bath chair and bedside commode, transfer belt and all kinds of useful plastic things. Besides, I should be the one to help Mom get well. I am a better nurse than Clara. I have our father’s instinct for doctoring. My sister is frazzled enough to jump at the idea. “But are you sure that you’ve gotten everything you want from the aftercare program and you’re ready to come home?” Clara loves to get me to answer her questions as if they’re my own. Here’s one—why do I get the feeling that she doesn’t really want me around? Every few months, she breezes in and upends everything. She thinks she knows what’s best for everyone and believes she’s making improvements in the way we all do things around here. Maybe Steven is right when he says she just wants control over Mom. Eddie is the one who says that Clara is saving the day by moving in. We’re supposed to be grateful for her martyr complex. But Mom isn’t that bad off. I can take her to lunch soon, the same as always, as long as somebody gives me a ride or cab fare. Clara should buy me a car. Why is she making me ask for things? She never used to. There was a time when all I had to do was look at her dessert, for instance, and she’d hand it right over. “I don’t have to stay in the program. All they’re doing is teaching me how to be poor. Shopping at Goodwill, discount movies, how to take the bus. These are the skills they think I need. And most days we’re herded together for some silly excursion. It never works out for me. Tuesday, we went swimming and I got sunburned; Thursday, there’s an outdoor concert and I know the loud music will give me an anxiety attack. The Saturday treat is usually some horror movie that only amplifies the one going on in my head. We take a nature walk and my leg hurts so much it won’t move for two days afterward. My roommate tells me I should be in a nursing home, what with all my physical problems.” “Wouldn’t you miss the group therapy with all the colorful characters?” “All they do is talk about their hallucinations.” “Do you talk about your own hallucinations?” My sister is one cool customer, but I’m a step ahead of her and her trick questions. “I don’t have them anymore. I told you.” “At all? After all these years of hallucinating? That must be a first. Hope your docs are getting a research paper or two out of it.” I’m a little shocked that she doesn’t believe me, but I don’t respond. I just wait for the next dumb question. Here it comes. “But what about the art therapy sessions— don’t you like them?” “I hate them. The other day they had us making collages that represent some issue. Forgiveness was one of the themes, like it always is, so I chose that. Nobody got what I was getting at. I’d hate to be an art therapist.” “Well, you’re already something much more to the point—an actual artist. So, if you come back home early, what services will the outreach program continue to provide?” “I’ll let my caseworker keep handling my bills, and I’ll go to the weekly support group. That’s good enough.” “And see your doctor. And take your shot. They’ll send someone to take you to the hospital if you try to skip, remember.” “Yeah, yeah. I may not remember much, but I remember that.” Once I get back home, everyone will stop micro-managing me. They will scatter. I have that effect on people these days. I’ll sit down next to somebody at a park or in a movie theater, close my eyes for ten seconds, and when I open them, the other person will be gone. It’s like they can hear the chaos in my mind. How? They can’t understand what my soft curses mean. I might as well be whispering in Greek, like Virginia Woolf said the birds did whenever she got sick. My sister says, “Speaking of which, isn’t it time to go get your injection?” So I get my shot, I see my shrink. The doctor is very sneaky when she asks me questions. She reads the answers in my face. My words don’t count. She knows everything I say is a lie. I awake on moving day and ask Dad if he’s mad that I hoped an accident like this would happen just so I could get back into the house. He shakes his head, in my head. At least I didn’t engineer the accident myself. It would have been so easy. Mom is very breakable these days. I carry my boxes out of my old room in the halfway house, and one girl grudgingly moves her broom from the front door to let me pass. I grimace, and another patient stares at me. I hope he doesn’t think I’m smiling at him. We both know I’m out of his league. And these are the people I was expected to make friends with, to prove the counselors wrong when they said I tend to isolate. I pull up at the house in Clara’s car and begin to lug my boxes up the thirteen front steps. My brother and sister won’t help me because they’re too busy getting Mom discharged from the hospital and settled in at home at exactly the same time I’m moving in. My leg hurts but everyone is focused on Mom. Finally, after what seems like hours of effort, I get to lie down on my bed and close my eyes. How many times have I moved in and out of this house? My brothers and sister, too, even Steven’s sons, have all come and gone and come back again—this house is like a dog that recognizes us even after long separations. I can’t even remember why I wanted to run away from it in the first place. It’s nice to be in my own bed again, and now that Mom is home too, I will probably sleep better. I don’t know if she will. She’s supposed to mostly stay in bed with her back brace on for the next four months. She won’t though. She’s always been restless. It’s her nature. We all have our true natures to contend with. It’s no use to fight against them—they always win. I start to doze when I hear Eddie whisper to Clara as he passes my door, “She’s baaaack.” Clara hushes him but I think I can hear her giggle. I turn on my side and sink into quicksand sleep, but as soon as I wake up, here comes Steven. He makes a showy entrance, carrying a big TV and setting it on Mom’s dresser. We already have a TV. It’s downstairs. “This one should keep her in bed. Just turn it to some gardening show or slapstick comedies. Do you still laugh when people fall down, Mom?” He smiles at her and she smiles back. He doesn’t realize that Mom won’t cooperate about that or anything else. She won’t stay in bed, no matter what show is on. She won’t drink enough Ensure. She won’t tell me or Clara when she’s wet. She’ll rip apart her Velcro back brace and kick off the blankets no matter how tight I tuck her in. So when Steven says, “You’ll do most of the caregiving, right? I’ll stick around for a while to help you. You deserve a break,” I laugh in his face. The idea of my brother as rescuer wasn’t always so laughable. He was devastated by my first breakdown, after it dawned on him that I was destined for only a limited recovery. So they all thought. I remember him bringing his little sons over all the time as an incentive to make me want to live. They were cute kids, sure, and could sometimes cheer me up. But just as often, when they banged on my bedroom door, I had to ignore them. I couldn’t stop crying for a couple of years and I didn’t want them to look at all that misery. What I remember most about Steven from those days was that he never really connected with me again. He just basically faded away. He divorced his wife, married another, and seemed to forget about his original family. He had never been able to juggle his attachments very well. A new one meant the end of an old one. But now, for some unknown reason, here he is again. That first evening, the four of us sit around the kitchen table together, updating one another on our mother. We each think we’re the world’s expert on what she needs but at least we’re all ready to pitch in. Maybe that’s a good thing. Dad used to say, “Many hands make much work light.” He nods his head in my head. I wonder when the boys will start to fight. It usually doesn’t take them long to start snarling. Clara must be nervous about that, too, from the way she’s running around dishing out the food, spilling it on the floor, the table, the rims of the plates. I feel the urge to start something to egg my brothers on. The doctors say I have poor impulse control, so I try to relax and let the hum of the familiar voices vibrate in me without trying to influence them. “So, Ed, are you living part time at your condo?” Steven asks. Small talk, ultra-polite. It always starts like that. “I go check on it every weekend, and it’s still my legal address, but I live here, more or less. Mom and the girls need me.” Steven looks at me for confirmation. I shrug. Steven grins. Eddie frowns. He’s about to deliver the fine points of his contribution to the family, I can tell. Steven distracts him by saying, “I think we should set up a fund for Mom’s future nursing care and sell all the old stuff in the garage. My kids’ bikes are still in there, my riding lawn mower and snowmobile, stuff like that. Ed, you could help me with the physical work. We could put the money from the sales into the fund.” “Oh, I don’t think there’s any hurry. Aside from dementia, Mom’s in pretty good shape. She hasn’t had to spend much time in a hospital.” “She’s already broken her hip once, and now this spinal fracture. Once they start falling, they don’t stop.” “What’s your source for that?” Ed’s face flushes. This is getting interesting. “My father-in-law, who ended up in a facility; and then there’s ordinary common knowledge and anecdotal evidence. I’ll leave it to you to look up the statistics, if you want them.” Eddie holds two degrees in science, and the family, since Daddy’s death, has considered him to be the expert on medical things. I see that Steven is no longer automatically ceding that position to him. Steven abruptly turns to me. I guess he doesn’t want to fight Ed tonight, though there’s a dangerous light in his blue eyes. I’m slightly confused. “So, how are you doing, Mandy? Do you like your new doctors? Still painting?” “Yeah, I’m ok. My leg bothers me a lot and I’ve got anxiety. I don’t get to paint enough because of Mom.” “We have a nurse, the one we used before,” Eddie says, annoyed now at both of us. “Also palliative care nurses come in every other week, and a podiatrist who comes to the house because nobody else can cut Mom’s toenails.” “Plus, I’m here for the duration,” Clara chimes in. “I gave up my place, so if you kick me out, I’m officially homeless.” So that’s that. She’s staying. She’ll probably start giving piano lessons right there in the living room, so she can stick to Mom like glue. Too bad she never got married, but I always came first with her. I’m like Mom’s Aunt Ruth. She wrecked her son’s engagement when he was young, and he never tried again. He just stayed with his mother until she died. Clara’s more stubborn than that. She’ll keep trying for a normal coupled-up life, and I’ll keep reminding her that she can always get another guy, but she’s only got one sister. We’ve always taken care of each other. Earlier tonight, I caught her looking at the long row of amber medication bottles on my dresser. When she turned away, she had tears in her eyes. I look at her face now, to see if the tears are still there, maybe hardened into diamonds in the corners of her eyes, like that Man Ray photograph. She doesn’t see me staring, because she’s also staring: the big window frames a sudden storm moving in. The boys look worried. They look for markers of climate change the way our grandmother scoured the Bible for signs that the world was ending. The boys have come to see weather as an enemy, and when lightning strikes close enough to shake the house, they lurch out of their chairs and bop against each other like balloons. We all turn away from the sight of the blinding zigzag in the sky and toward the sound of our collection of family pictures tumbling off the wall in the hallway. Broken bits of our relatives are strewn all over the floor. There is glass everywhere but it reflects nothing. I can’t breathe. I gotta get out of there. By the time I get to the gallery and out of the storm, I’m almost calm. I do not have to live exclusively in my family’s house, or in my frilly girlhood bedroom. I can wrap myself inside my other, more real life as an artist. Right now some of my work is in this show, and tonight’s the opening reception. It’s a nice, new space. Clara found it for me and submitted my slides while I was in the hospital. She wanted me to have something to look forward to when I got out, I guess. As if whatever she throws my way is my only option. But at least she knows how important my work is to me. She’s not one of those people who ask “Are you still painting?” if they haven’t seen me in a while. There’s a coffee shop and a dancefloor for the musicians here. I see the red wall where the curator’s helper hung my paintings. There are matching couches below the pictures, but nobody would mistake my portraits for over-the-couch art. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind the bar. My hair is growing in fast and thick after all my ups and downs with medications, and it’s long enough now to pull into a ponytail. Even after everything I’ve been through, the mirror shows that I don’t look my age. I look up to see the reflection of my friend Michi over by the red wall. She’s crying her eyes out, not because my work moves her, but because she can’t paint. Not that she’s ever tried. “Oh why can’t I be an artist? It’s all I ever wanted,” she whines. I think of my breakthrough show in NYC years ago. Clara, Mom, and me had traveled by train to come to the reception. It was in a beautiful space, and Clara kept thrilling to the fact that the Center had museum status. The staff had taken off the wood stripping on my pictures and framed them in brushed silver. A pony-tailed waiter, obviously a poseur wearing all black with his red shoes, circulated trays of champagne among my friends, the few who came. They were so jealous. They couldn’t deal with my success, but they let Mom buy them dinner after the reception. Freeloaders. Now I look at the young bearded artist shaking my hand like he hopes my talent will rub off on him, saying “These are miraculous! I’d be honored to sit for a portrait sometime,” I think to myself, Take a number, pretty boy. What the hell, and now there’s a mic in my face. I try to push it away, but the guy holding it is insistent. “Tell the people where you get your ideas!” “What, right now?” “Yes, the tape is running.” “Oh I dunno. Images just pop into my head.” I feel him sag with disappointment. He turns away before I can come up with something more interesting to say. This is not how it goes in my head when I imagine my shows. I never expect to get tongue-tied, but I always do. I want to say things the public eats up. I want to be applauded, really. But it’s not happening here, and now all I want is to leave, before the band starts up and gives me anxiety. I look at my paintings again, and see that somebody has done something to the lights on them. They’ve aimed footlights at them, in addition to the usual spotlights over them. They look too exposed. It’s like there’s nowhere for them to hide, and they look like they’re being tortured or something. The light hurts my eyes. I have to put on sunglasses. Michi is still crying so loud I can barely hear Tom Waits through the speakers. Luckily I don’t need speakers to hear him. I can summon him up in my head anytime I like. I could still take him away from his wife if I wanted. I’m not that crazy anymore; I could do it. Hey. There’s a guy in a belted trench coat thumbing through my catalogue at the counter. Will he say anything to me? No? He’s got an interesting face, an angular jaw his beard can’t hide, and wide green eyes. Young. Twenties? I might want to do his portrait. Did he really just put my book inside his coat? I stand behind him like a shadow. “Are you really going to steal my book?” He doesn’t blink an eye−a thick-lashed, gold-flecked green eye like a marble. “I’d rather steal you.” Well, that’s different. I put my hand through his arm and we walk out into the weather together. It’s still raining and the clouds are bearing down, heavy with a message I can’t read. The guy prattles on about how lucky it is for me that he likes older women. Cougars, he calls them. It turns out he’s an art wannabe who’s followed my work for a long time. Followed, not stalked, he reassures me. To him, I’m famous in our small town. “The director of the museum downtown called you one of the treasures of the city, did you read about that?” I hadn’t, but I like the boy’s smooth voice and I want him to keep telling me about myself. I wonder where he’s taking me. He’s old enough to have his own place, isn’t he? I wouldn’t want to meet his parents, although I’m sure they’re very nice. They’d probably turn out to be old classmates of mine. It could be embarrassing. We pass Dad’s old hospital and I wave discretely enough so the guy can’t see. Dad sees, though. He nods his head in my head. From here I can see the brass nameplate that marks his old parking spot. They’ve kept it for him all these years, like some kind of shrine. The guy suddenly veers into the lot and parks sideways across two spaces, and starts to tug at my clothes. “Wait. This is my dead father’s old parking place. Nobody is allowed to park here. Let me out.” I stand at the sign and trace the engraved letters of my father’s name. I wipe the rain away from the brass surface but other drops blur it. I look up at the lightning clawing the air. The sky flashes, the car honks. A security van is aiming straight at me, red and blue lights spinning. My guy peels out of the lot, leaving me standing beside my father’s name, the letters flickering through a sheet of rain. When I get home, I shuck off my muddy clothes the way I shucked off that boy. He did not get what he came for, did he. He did manage to make off with my catalogue, though. Maybe that was more valuable, anyways. I take my pills. In twenty minutes I should feel drowsy enough to sleep. That gives me plenty of time to check on Mom. She’s sleeping in the twin bed she’s always slept in. Clara sleeps in Dad’s bed now. They’re both up. Have they been waiting for me to come home? Only a thin wall separates their room from mine and I can overhear them easily. I listen because I want to know what they’re saying about me, but on most nights I don’t even come up in the conversation. Tonight it’s even worse than that−Mom has awakened in tears. “Mom, are you crying?” Clara says in a sleep-thick voice. “Yes.” I hear my sister bounce up from the mattress. I bet she’s holding Mom’s hand now. “What’s wrong?” Clara says. “I used to be a special person. Now look.” Mom shakes the railing on the bed. “No, Mom! You’re still a special person! That’s just a safety rail so you don’t fall again.” “I fell?” “Yes, and you had to go to the hospital. Now you’re getting better, and almost ready to walk around your house.” “I have a house? Where is it? Let’s go see it!” “OK, but wouldn’t you like to stop off at the kitchen first and have a waffle?” It’s a reliable distraction. Mom loves waffles. And cookies. “Oh yes, I would.” That’s when I come into the room. I push past Clara to help Mom out of bed. “Sorry. We didn’t mean to wake you!” Clara says. “It’s alright. I just got in from the gallery and haven’t slept yet. You go back to bed. I’ll take it from here.” “What’s happening?” Mom questions the pile of cushions on the couch as we pass through the living room on our way to the kitchen. Steven has made a temporary bed for himself on the couch, since his old room is so full of my paintings, there’s no room for him. He snores as loud as ever. Mom jumps at the sound, but she’s more interested in the shapes the pillows make in the dim light than in the stranger on the couch. The moonscape of stacked couch cushions does look other-worldly, with the big window shepherding the outdoors inside. Mom likes the strangeness of it, in the same way she likes the shadows of wind-tossed trees on the walls, and the dance of fireplace flames. We pass by her curio cabinet, and she stops to run her fingers over a favorite Hummel figurine. A collector tried to buy it from her at a generous price once, and Mom wouldn’t hear of it. “What would I be without my memories?” she said. We all say stuff that turns out to be ironic. Like that poem about the anniversary of our own death, how every year we live through the date without knowing what it will someday mean to our survivors. As I settle Mom into her chair in the kitchen, she protests, “This is not my house. Whose house is this? Does it belong to you?” “It’s your house, Mom. Daddy bought it for you fifty years ago.” What a joint! he had said on first look. “I did have a husband once. I was amazed I got someone so good! Did you know him?” “He was my father. I was his birthday present. He drove you all over the bumpiest roads to make you go into labor on his birthday, just so he could have me as his gift.” “He was very affectionate. Do you have a mother, dear?” I nod. A brief silence, then this: “Where is your mother?” “You are my mother. That’s why I call you Mom.” “I wondered why they call me that.” “It’s because you are our mother.” “I know, but I mean…” and she makes the universal gesture for pregnancy. “Yes, you gave birth to me. I am your child. You have four children, and I am your youngest daughter. I’m the skinny one who had blonde bangs, and braces on my teeth.” Mom studies my face for a long moment, and finally says, “Well, hello there! Where have you been? I haven’t seen you. Why did you leave me?” “I never did, really. I never would.” Mom seems to consider this, looking into the middle distance. Who knows what she really sees there. She yawns, all at once drooping in her chair like a blown dandelion. “I’ll tuck her in,” says Eddie, who has come into the kitchen for a snack, or else to check on me. I get out of the way so that he can pick Mom up and carry her to bed. It’s not the first time I’ve been pushed aside. Not even the first time today. Once he’s gone, I turn the lights off and sit alone in the dark kitchen. I can hear my brother and sister whispering as they settle Mom under her covers. “Did Mandy go back to bed?” “Nope. She’s sitting at the kitchen table with the lights off, having a chat with the overhead beams.” “Eddie! That’s not nice.” They don’t know the half of it. About three in the morning, the sliding glass door to my bedroom opens from the balcony, and a policeman in full gear shouts at me to get up. “What’s going on?” I try to climb out of bed and cover my body at the same time. More police burst through the unlocked front door and swarm the house. Eddie comes up the stairs two by two, already punching numbers on his cellphone. “He’s got a weapon!” one cop bellows and they all point their guns at him. He raises his hand and shows his phone. “It’s a phone. I was calling the police.” “We are the police!” “I see that. What seems to be the problem?” “An elderly woman called from this address, saying she had been kidnapped.” “Mom thinks we kidnapped her?” Eddie’s shock must have sounded convincing, because he is not thrown to the ground, nor handcuffed, nor struck with a Taser. “She’s in her nineties and we just brought her home from the hospital. She must be disoriented.” “I should check on her.” Steven appears in his underwear, draped in a blanket. An officer’s gloved hand on his arm stops him. “That’s our job.” He and his backup enter Mom’s room where Clara is holding her, trying to soothe her. I hang back until the female cop beckons to me. “Your mother needs you both,” she says. Another cop quizzes Steven. He wants to know why, if this is the family home, he’s sleeping on the couch. “We’re reorganizing. My sister’s artwork is taking up all the space in my old bedroom.” The cop pulls out his pad and pen. “Show me the room.” Steven shrugs and says, “Right this way.” In the kitchen, Eddie spreads out Mom’s house documents on the table. Besides the ownership papers, he opens a family album to a group picture. The cop laughs, “We don’t need all that.” Steven and his cop climb back up the stairs. The cop writes out a ticket and Steven whispers to me, “Did you know your pictures are a fire hazard?” “Yeah? Critics can call them incendiary as well as visionary now, I guess.” It’s hard to take any of this seriously. It’s not going the way I thought it would. The police conclude their business and leave through the front door, not my bedroom balcony. “I’m amazed Mom knew how to call 911. She hasn’t made a telephone call for months,” Eddie says after they’ve gone and the house breathes a sigh of relief. “We have the numbers in big print right on the phone, though,” I rush in to say. “So it’s possible.” “Well, obviously, since she did it. I’m just surprised she was capable.” He flips through the pages of the album on the table. We use it to help with Mom’s memories, which are like wallpaper always curling off the wall. We try to paste them up again, reciting family stories about big moments in our lives. They bind her memories, and become hers again, if only for a little while. Mom pulls the book toward her. She points to a picture of her father, and says, “I keep thinking he was not a good man. Is that true? Did you know him?” “No, Momma. We only knew your mother.” “Where is Mum?” Nobody answers, and in a moment she has forgotten her question. She lets us put her to bed easily, and then we reassemble in the kitchen. Clara wants to hash things out some more. She’s no good at letting sleeping dogs lie. “Mom must have been running on adrenaline to have figured out how to dial. I wonder what upset her this time. I never sensed her getting up again after we got her back to sleep the first time. I never forget to lock the front door, either, but the police said it was unlocked. Mom couldn’t have done that. If she tried it, I would have heard her fumbling from the bedroom. And how did I not hear her whisper into the phone? It’s right between us on the bedside table.” I glance at the kitchen phone, a reflex. I quickly look away. “I wonder if she’ll try it again. We better pull the plug before we go to bed. If she can’t make the phone work, she’ll forget how to use it pretty fast.” Steven says, thinking outside that box everyone talks about. “Or else she’ll get frustrated and break it,” I say. Three pairs of questioning eyes lock into mine. They don’t think Mom is strong enough to break anything, but I know she is. It’s the tyranny of the weak. People always underestimate the damage an impaired person can do. Seven weeks later the doctors grant me a day pass. It’s my birthday, so I leave a message telling Mom to get a cab and come pick me up. I want a birthday dinner at Papa Joe’s. I’ll have my petite filet mignon and lava cake with a candle in it. People will sing me that little song.
I wait and wait but nobody comes. I say to a nurse, “Mom wouldn’t celebrate my birthday. I called and she never called back.” “You thought she could work a phone and drive a car? All of that’s too complicated for her now.” “No it isn’t! Everyone keeps saying she’s so frail, but I just saw her last month and she was fine. She was glad to see me.” “Just because she recognized you doesn’t mean she’s fine. Dementia only goes in one direction,” says the nurse. She’s got a mean streak. Other nurses say it’s because of compassion fatigue, but I think she’s just a bully. Marie, a patient who likes to sneak up on people, taps me on the shoulder. I hate it when she does that, but she is the only one with a car in our group, so I don’t over-react or anything. I try to stay on her good side. “I’ll take you to see your mother if you look at some apartments with me.” She’s a deal-maker, that Marie, always striking some bargain or other. She’s almost done with treatment and will be taking her car with her when she leaves, so I grab my chance to ride while I can. I figure Marie will get hungry well before I get sick of looking at rentals, so we can go get Mom and celebrate my birthday at Papa Joe’s then. We go to see a few places, and we make all the landladies nervous. Marie suggests we wear sunglasses when we greet them so we look less drugged-out. It backfires. It turns out our bruised eyes only put them more on edge if they can’t see through to the pupils. One mutters something about the devil you know being better than the devil you don’t. I whisper to Marie as I push my glasses on top of my head, “She doesn’t trust people who won’t show their eyes.” “Eyes are windows to the soul,” Marie answers vacantly, and for a minute I’m not sure who she’s talking to since she still has her shades on. One landlady isn’t put off by our cloistered eyes. She looks to be a hundred years old and maybe can’t see much anyways. She unlocks a dismal little unit for us, points out the obvious, bathroom and a sleeping alcove for those who don’t want to use the pull-out couch in the living room; then she offers us tea. “I like this apartment the best of all,” she says while she clangs around in the kitchenette. “I often sneak away and have a snack here or take some rest.” I look over at the narrow iron bed. The chenille bedspread is disturbed, and I can see the impression of her body’s small comma in it. She motions us toward the chairs around the dining table. “The sun hits my favorite chair just right in the afternoons. It calms me down. I’ve been so nervous since my husband died.” Her features contract and I wait for her to cry, wondering what it would take for to her stroke out. She doesn’t. Cry, I mean. Instead, she ducks back into the kitchenette and brings out a tea tray, landing it from a weird angle onto the table. What shaky hands she has. Thin, too. It would be awful if her wrists broke with the weight of the teapot. She’d cry then, I bet. “You girls aren’t a romantic couple, are you?” She peers at Marie while pouring a stream of tea into the cup, spilling some. Marie blushes stupidly. “You can’t ask that. It’s not allowed,” she says, drawing her brows together in a frown. “She’s the only one looking for a place,” I explain. “I already have a house.” “I only ask because I can never tell about these things. I didn’t realize my husband preferred men until our first anniversary had passed and I was still a virgin.” This is vaguely interesting, so we sit there and listen. With her memory unlatched, she tells us all she knows about men and love. It isn’t much, but it takes her a long time to spit it out. She talks until our tea turns cold. Marie decides to take the place. When we’re done with her paperwork, I tell her I’m surprised that she wanted this particular apartment, with this particular landlady. The old woman already gave us her whole life history, so her entertainment value is gone, in my book anyways. “Why pick her?” “She reminds me of my granny.” “Was yours as clueless as this one?” “I don’t remember.” “You know she will just let herself into your place any time she wants to take a nap or sit in her sunbeam. She’ll tell you she forgot the apartment was yours, or deny she ever rented it to you.” They forget and deny. Who said that? I know I’ve heard it before. Next stop: home sweet home. We go to pick up Mom. She recognizes me just fine, but knows Marie is a stranger. A very strange stranger. We drive with Mom to the bank, and on to Papa Joe’s for lunch. It’s our old routine, from the days when she would pop into my bedroom before I was even ready to get up, wanting to know “Where should we go today, dear?” At the table, Marie hunches over Mom the whole time, talking nonsense. Everybody hovers over Mom because she is so pretty, and dresses so well, even at her age. She never forgets to put on her red lipstick. She must not be as bad off as everyone says if she can remember the damn lipstick. Marie keeps up a steady stream of suggestions for Mom. “You should look after your daughter,” she repeats like a broken record or something. Mom shrinks away from her and keeps looking at me like she expects me to do something. What, I don’t know. I can’t think of anything, so I go on eating my petite filet mignon. Mom hardly touches her food, but I still want us to order a birthday dessert. The wait staff sticks a sparkler in the cake when I tell them it’s my birthday, but nobody sings to me. Once home, I get rid of Marie, even though it means I won’t have a ride back to the hospital. I’ll worry about that later. Maybe I won’t go back at all. I don’t have to. I’m supposed to move into the halfway house tonight anyways. I seat Mom at the kitchen table with some drawing paper and oil pastels, and push a straw into a bottle of Ensure for her. The remains of her lunch go into the fridge. She probably won’t want her leftovers for dinner. I’ll have to eat the ham sandwich with the little crescent-shaped bite mark, and then the birthday cake with some of the frosting licked off. She’s gonna make me gain weight. I leave her in the kitchen and walk down the hall to my room, to get some springtime clothes out of my closet. The winter things I’ve been wearing are too heavy now. I stuff some cotton pants and short-sleeved shirts in a big trash bag designed for dead leaves, choke it closed, and tie it tight. When I rise from my crouch, I look at the objects and ornaments on my dresser and desk, all where I left them. Why do I feel so disconnected from them all of a sudden? I haven’t been away that long. It feels as if I left them in the past where everything fades and takes on a musty smell. I pull them back into the present, handling the objects carefully. That’s because of my tremor. The ceramic elephant pasted with tiny mirrors and the miniature Carnival mask─ I wouldn’t want to break either one or disturb them even a tiny bit. Because I know that although they are motionless now, they might come awake at any moment. They’ve done it before. The green curtains on the sliding glass door seem to move when I stare at them. The phantoms that erupted in their folds last fall are long gone now, so I know it’s just my mind playing tricks on me. I pull the curtains aside to look out over the balcony. There is a stack of firewood still in the neighbor’s backyard. I count the logs lolling in the sunshine. I can’t always count them, especially at night, because they are too black against the dark to see. How many times have I had to run outside to check them? I’d stand over the pile and count, but then lose track and have to start over. Mom was always coming out of the house to pull me away before the neighbors called the police. I don’t know why anyone would do that. I was always careful to stay on my own property, and it wasn’t like I was screaming out the numbers or anything. I bet nobody even noticed. Mom was probably the only one. The creaking of the heavy front door, opening and closing, startles me. My heartbeat quivers in my neck. Who’s there? That can’t be my sister’s voice floating in the air, can it? It sounds exactly like her. Am I hallucinating? I better not be, or somebody’s getting sued for malpractice! I step into the hall and glimpse the curve of Clara’s back as she slides into the kitchen. She senses me, turns around, and practically skips to me. We awkwardly hug, with the present she brought wedged between us. “Did you come just for my birthday?” I say, taking the box from her. What I really want to know is how long she plans to stay. If it’s long enough, maybe she can chase Eddie away. She’ll help me with Mom so he won’t have to, and then he won’t have an excuse to hang around anymore. He’s always ready to let someone else pick up the slack, anyways. “What better day to begin my visit?” I didn’t even realize she was planning a trip. Why didn’t she tell me? She should have told me. We try to make small talk as I open her gift, a soft teal sweater. “It’s just what I wanted!” I say, and pat her hand in thanks. I don’t really need another sweater, but she likes to pay for things. She smiles, and for no reason, her eyes film over with tears. She quickly wipes them away and I can read her face again. We take our old seats at the round glass-topped table. Mom is still there, drawing her picture. Clara greets her gently, instead of smothering her in a hug she might mistake for an assault. I’m sure she came prepared for our mother not to recognize her, but she looks disappointed all the same. Clara won’t push Mom for a response, though. She’s good at waiting things out. She’s got a lot more patience than I do. Mom reaches out to tug at the new sweater but I pull it away from her. Clara says, “I think she wants to try it on.” “Oh. I guess she does.” I feel a pang for the old days when my sister would give me everything, and never take anything away. It didn’t matter who else wanted whatever it was, even if she wanted it hrself. I drape the cashmere over our mother’s thin shoulders and she shivers with pleasure. “She’s cold all the time now.” “When did that start?” “I can’t remember. I’ve lost track of some kinds of time. You know, like a blackout drunk does. My counselors call drinking a kind of self-medicating behavior.” Clara winces and I register her discomfort. “I don’t do any of that anymore, in case you’re worried.” The muscles in her face immediately unclench, and I giggle at how easy it is to get a rise out of her. She doesn’t get the giggle and looks at me quizzically. I know she remembers all those years when I’d lock myself in my studio, turn the music up loud, and paint with a brush in one hand and a beer can in the other. Lots of times, I’d work myself into a drunken rage, and destroy the work I just finished, or couldn’t finish. I’d scribble over my marks with black or red paint. I ruined plenty of canvases that way. You could call those paintings my Drunk Series. Seriously. Clara asks me what the deal is with day passes. She's trying to change the subject from drinking. “I thought I’d have to go to the hospital to see you.” “You probably wouldn’t have found me there. I’m moving into a halfway house tonight. What did you just ask me, again? Oh, about the passes. The day passes are not a privilege you have to earn. It’s more like a courtesy, so that staff doesn’t worry if you’re not where you’re supposed to be. But there’s nothing holding me at the hospital at this stage of my recovery. Yesterday one guy just walked away from our group. We were all on the little bricked-in patio to get some air, and he just left. Nobody went after him. It’s allowed—you can just leave whenever you want as long as you come back for your monthly shot of anti-psychotic.” ”What I’d like to know is what will happen to the patient who walked away.” “He’ll probably just go home and pick up wherever he left off.” “Hmm. Or a more likely scenario—he leaves without learning the skills to protect himself against another episode, and breaks down again. See many familiar faces coming and going?” So she’s going to get all shrink-y on me, is she? She used to trust my decisions. “Oh, I don’t know. Not every face interests me. I remember this one guy who always called me Pretty Lady in group. He came back so crazy looking that I almost didn’t recognize him.” Clara looks at me like she’s waiting for me to add two plus two. I throw this out instead: “People think you’re less crazy when you’re pretty, ever notice that?” I watch lines of worry scrawl across her face. She nods, but changes the subject again, this time to Marie. She wants to know all her details—who, what, when, where, why. “Marie’s boring. All she ever wants to do is talk about her mother,” I say. “What about her mother?” “Marie says she was trying to kick her out of the house, and tricked the cops into arresting her. Kinda like Eddie did.” “Hmm. What’s Marie’s diagnosis?” “She’s paranoid schizophrenic. She’s officially stable now and after a little more time at the halfway house she’ll move into a subsidized apartment. We went to see a few of those today, to get her on a waiting list. The places are all interchangeable little boxes, and the landlady who showed us the one Marie picked was probably weirder than Marie. Maybe that’s why she liked her. Anyways, Marie has a car and I wanted her to take me to see Mom after we were done with the housing stuff. I wanted her to drive us to the bank and to Papa Joe’s. Mom didn’t seem to like Marie, though. Maybe Marie is too crazy for her. She kept leaning into Mom saying weird things while we tried to eat lunch.” “The people scared me,” Mom pipes up. “I really must discuss it with the men.” I have a show coming up and plenty of work to do, so I go to the house a few afternoons a week. I’m not there to visit the family. I’m there to work. Today I can hear music seeping under the door even before I unlock it. Inside, Clara and Mom are sitting on the yellow leather couch in the family room, listening. In a space with an electric organ, piano, drums, a violin, guitar, and clarinet, the notes rising up are from a cheap CD player. For years, I was the one listening to music with Mom. Clara has taken that over already. Well, she’s a trained musician so maybe she tells Mom interesting things about the pieces that I couldn’t, though the phrase trained musician makes me think of circus animals. I wave to the girls and run upstairs to my studio before they can make me talk. A few minutes later Eddie comes in. I hear the rumble of his voice, interrupting everybody. He doesn’t know how to listen to music. Too bad. It would be good for his blood pressure, but it’s just background noise to him. Even when we were kids, he ignored the music coming from different rooms in the house. Deaf to it all, he would keep on doing his homework in front of the television. It’s probably how he developed his concentration. I wish I had more of that these days. Mine used to be as good as his. So was my memory. His presence makes me feel all prickly. I don’t trust him, but he probably doesn’t trust me, either. I shouldn’t have cut up his clothes. He probably won’t ever forgive me for that. I wrote him an apology, but he never responded. How rude. I don’t have to talk to him today. It’s like I’m invisible when I’m in my studio. They can’t see me but I can hear them from a certain corner of the room. People call a spot like that a whispering gallery, I think. No matter how quietly my family talks, the sound floats up through the vents into my room. That spot is the whole reason I always know what goes on in this house before anyone else does. I know everyone’s secrets. None of them know mine. “Have you spoken to Mandy about her plans?” Clara is asking Eddie, all serious and focused. She’s keeping her voice soft but it reaches me, not loud, but clear. “No. I get updates from the caseworker, Greg. And you usually know her status before I do.” “Do you know that she just graduated from the hospital to a halfway house?” “No! Isn’t it too soon?” “I sure think so. What happened to the projected two years of treatment?” “Maybe they meant two years including the halfway house.” “That must be it. Have you noticed that they’ve stopped saying she’ll get back most of the function she lost during the beginning of the big relapse? Now they say she’ll never be the same.” “Greg says she still has no insight into her own situation.” They stop speaking for a minute. Then Clara says, “How many checks did the cops do, with no follow-through? They could have got her into treatment faster and saved some brain function.” “At least now she’s securely in the system and can’t refuse her meds. But I can’t help thinking it’s basically a lost cause.” My head is hot. My brain is burning. My own family thinks I’m lost. I move away from the corner and my siblings’ droning voices. I stand in front of my easel to watch the nostalgic sepia tones of my underpainting move. The color of an old photograph trying to remind me of worn-out loyalties shows me the image of two figures crawling up from the depths of the canvas. On the right, I layer in the figure of my brother, in pain. Lots of black background, the figure dressed in black, face drained of color. I paint my own image on the left, slightly suspended above him with a light of white, yellow, and pink surrounding my face, also whitened to reflect his pallor. The colors reach out to him. They make me think of the sympathy I once felt for him, but my witchy black clothes and a background of angry orange make it impossible for us to connect. I wait for the abstract elements to meld into the figurative, but they don’t. They won’t. It’s no use. I slash black paint diagonally across my brother’s image. I cross him out. Then I call a cab and leave without saying goodbye to anybody. The door to the halfway house where I have signed up to live cracks open, inviting me in, but this is not my home. It is old and crumbling, and it stinks of mold. The grey rooms can’t hide their ghosts, the suicides and patients who died from poison pills and electric shocks. Some of their spirits talk to me, others brush my hair the way they did when I was a child. They praised me back then whenever I drew their likenesses on paper. Now they are silent. The space here is opaque and dense. To someone with no real vision, it might seem organized, all of a piece, tightly woven. But to someone who can see, the threads are loose, the pattern in disarray. It is disorganized as the thinking that redefines everything—threats soughing through the wind, trees perpetually falling, one sibling’s double-cross. I climb the steps to my room. My roommate is there. She keeps staring at me, bony knees pulled up against her chest, rocking and rocking in the chair in the corner. She won’t talk. She only stares, never blinking, forever rocking. I stand behind her and tip her chair all the way backward and then all the way forward. She slides out of the seat like a pudding onto the floor. She doesn’t protest, so when she climbs back into the chair, I do it again. On the walls, the greys have begun to shimmer. They are telling me that something good will happen very soon. They are on my side and they will help me move back home. “There’s nobody to let me in, again.” I’m calling Clara from the steps of the group house on an ordinary Tuesday, dusk falling all around me. “The inmates aren’t back from the festival they went to. It was way too loud and gave me anxiety, so I walked back. Can you give me another hundred dollars? I only have thirty-six in my account. Steven told me to keep getting as much money and stuff out of you as I can.” “Oh he did, did he. You don’t have to trick me into doing what I’ve always done for you, you know. I wasn’t planning on ignoring your needs just because the government is supposed to take care of you. So. Is your caseworker getting your bills paid on time?” “She’s doing everything ok I guess, but I’m going to petition to get control of my own income. I’m stable now. Riding the bus anyplace is killing my leg, so I need to take more cabs for a while. That’s why I need money. But if you don’t want to give me money for cabs, I still need some for more clothes. The counselors here are making me get four pairs of pants and seven shirts, and seven pairs of underwear and three pairs of socks for the summer. They want me to go to Goodwill with them to get everything.” I have clothes at home, my real home. The one Clara is living in with my mother. In my brain, my father nods his see-through head in agreement. He’s my oracle, the doctors say. I ask him questions and he nods yes or no. Sometimes he reaches out his hand to me the same way he did on the shower floor while he had his first heart attack. I was only a kid. Anyone that young would have run away. People shouldn’t expect so much from children. Clara is saying something I don’t feel like listening to, so I cut in. “Maybe if I buy something it will shut the counselors up. But they keep making other demands on me, too. I have to do chores even during an anxiety attack, but I need to close the door and curtains when the attacks come. I lie on my bed and watch the red numbers on my clock pass the time. You know all this, and now the team does too, but they don’t care. They order me to scrub floors in the middle of my attacks, if it’s my turn for housekeeping. They are the guards and we are the prisoners.” “Can’t you get your doctor to excuse you?” “My doctor wrote a note saying that I can’t do physical work when I’m having an attack. The counselors ignored it, and they keep on ignoring it. I’m too exhausted to fight back so I give in. And then last night one of the crazies kept jumping on my bed. I told her to quit it, but she jumped on top of me. She’s way fatter than I am and she made weird sounds. I pushed her away and made a run for it. This is the third time I’ve had to go get the nurse. She had to hold the girl down with the help of two orderlies to give her a shot.” “What are you telling me? You’re not safe there?” “I don’t feel safe.” “They have to be able to guarantee your physical safety, at least! You have rights. Do you want me to find out about filing an official complaint?” “Sure, if you want to. The physical danger is just one side of it, though. Like today, one power-hungry counselor tried to humiliate me at lunch. I happened to scratch my nose but continued to eat. ‘Go wash your hands!’ she yelled. ‘I washed them already.’ ‘You just scratched your nose. I saw you. So get up, go into the bathroom, and wash your hands again.’ I felt all the eyes in the room burning holes in my back as I left.” Next time, I won’t come back. I don’t have to live there. I already have a home, even though someone else is living there instead of me; and right now she is crying. 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. 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
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 Chapter One--Runaway amazon.com/author/cherylsnell
“Hold on, honey-bun, we’re almost there.” Startled by the hiss of language, the baby turned his head under the sailor cap and blinked his black eyes. He liked the sound of his mother’s voice and was willing to wait patiently for it to come again. She had been so quiet lately. The car sputtered to a halt. Cathy cut the motor, looked out at the familiar landscape, took its deterioration as a personal rebuke. You can surely believe a widow lives here, she thought as she took in all the details: peeling paint, diseased fruit trees, the overgrown bushes hiding the small house behind spindly green fingers. “Up you go!” she crooned to her son as she deftly scooped him out of his car seat. The baby kicked his legs gleefully as she swung him onto her hip. “You’re such a good traveler, aren’t you? Yes you are yes you are.” The baby stuck his thumb in his mouth and sighed. His mother pulled her camera out of its bag with her free hand, framed her childhood house, and shot it from the long safe distance of the street. Cathy felt the pulse in her temple throb rhythmically as she closed the distance from the car to the front porch. She rang the buzzer twice. No response. She slammed the flat of her hand against the bell and held it for a long sustained cry. “Mom!” she yelled. “I know you’re in there!” The door opened slowly, horror- movie style, and an eye peered out beneath the chain safety latch. “Yes?” came a prim, suspicious voice. “ Mom!” Cathy barked. “It’s me! Let me in!” The exposed eye blinked rapidly; a flurry of scratching sounds, and the two women grabbed each other, baby wedged between them. The mother pulled daughter and grandson into the hall, slamming the door behind them. She fastened the vertical row of locks, mumbling, “The neighborhood has gone down a little. You locked up your car, didn’t you?” Cathy nodded. This old-lady fussiness disoriented her. She had expected something else, something familiar and feisty. The women walked through the worn rooms to the kitchen. A floorboard creaked exactly where Cathy expected it to creak; its tiny dip made her seasick. She tried to concentrate on the sound of her mother’s voice, hear it through the silly subject matter – some nonsense about a forgotten old friend. It was the sound of her mother’s speech that Cathy craved, the way it spilled into her consciousness like silk from a spool. She imagined the inner workings of her ears as prisms, reflecting and refracting her mother’s words like light. She wanted this comfort for her and her son. She had traveled miles to get it. “I’ll make tea!” the mother declared. She indicated Cathy’s old place at the table, and Cathy pulled the chair out dreamily. She looked around at familiar objects from her childhood, animal canisters, the rooster- and- hen shakers. The same linoleum was on the floor, yellowed now, corners curled up. Shifting on her seat’s rough spot, she could feel where duct tape had bandaged a rip in the plastic. “That new?” Cathy asked, nodding at the tea -kettle. This one had a handle that burst into a bouquet of ceramic flowers at the tip- not her mother’s usual taste. “ Are you kidding me?” her mother replied. “I’ve had a dozen kettles since you flew the coop.” Cathy busied herself with guiding her son’s fat little legs into the booster seat and made no reply. It would be safer that way. The older woman poured out the tea. She had never been a crier, but now sudden fat drops flowed down her cheeks and dripped off her chin. Cathy looked up; it took her a moment to register what was going on. She could usually deal with anything, even with her mother’s blindsiding remarks, the casual ones that cut so deep and clean the wound would seem painless for one delirious second. But these tears-- Cathy simply obeyed her instincts. She rose from her chair and folded her mother in her arms, cupping the back of the old lady’s head. Wracking sobs came out scratchy and hoarse, unpracticed. There were words, but Cathy tried not to understand them. It would have been like eavesdropping. Suddenly the baby took in an enormous breath and screamed. Cathy pushed her mother away, maybe more roughly than she should have, but the bright red baby took precedence. She cradled him like she had just cradled her mother. “You’re good with him,” her mother murmured. “Surprised?” Cathy asked. “Not at all. I always knew you’d be a good mom. Even though you insisted your dolls be bare- naked at all times. Remember?” “Got any apple juice?” Cathy replied. This wasn’t going the way she expected. The baby sucked at the juice greedily. “Look at him go!” said his grandma. “You hated apple juice. Always so finicky.” Cathy’s mother tongued a tooth noisily, a tic that Cathy had forgotten. What did it mean, again? She couldn’t remember; she couldn’t remember for the life of her. The grandmother bent over her grandson. “He doesn’t look like you,” she said doubtfully. “ Is he even American? He looks a little foreign to me.” Her breath tickled the baby’s ears and made him giggle. Cathy steadied the bottle while her mother continued to peer at the boy. “All Americans are a little foreign,” Cathy shot back, neck and shoulders tensing up. Home sweet home. “Can I hold him?” the old woman asked. Cathy handed the baby to his grandmother and he settled in her arms with a little sigh. “Do you know that we girls are born with all the eggs we’ll ever have, right at birth?” she whispered to her daughter. Cathy shook her head. “We carry those eggs for years before they become our children. I think that’s why we love them so darn much, when they finally do show up.” Suddenly there was a fumbling at the back door, some muffled words. Cathy froze for a split-second, then quickly gathered her mother and son in a huddle. “Speaking of children! That’ll be Barb, from next door,” the mother said as she tried to loosen her daughter’s grip. “I told her you’d be here today.” Cathy nodded, relaxed a little. She reached back in her memory for details about this neighbor. I probably won’t even recognize her after all this time, she thought. Why should I? But then Barb burst into the kitchen, and her grin was indelible as an image on film. She swept Cathy into an unceremonious embrace, squealing greetings. The sound of her deja-vu voice brought history flooding over Cathy. “And who is this handsome little man?” “That’s my son, Roger,” Cathy said. Her mother began to cry. Barb turned to the older woman with soothing words and a hug. She explained to Cathy in such an intimate tone it gave Cathy goose bumps, “Jean still cries whenever she hears your father’s name. It’s so cool you named the kid after him, though. Roger would have liked that.” What have we here? What’s with the house keys, the hugging and first- names? Maybe I’ve made a huge mistake. “I’ve got to put the baby down now,” Cathy said, staring at Barb. “You and ‘Jean’ have a nice chat.” It had been five years since Cathy entered her childhood bedroom. She looked around at things she had put out of her mind: the ballerina lamp, the chenille bedspread, cheap ceramic dogs marching across the dresser. The walls were bare, just the way she liked, exactly as she had left them. Cathy set her tote bags down and carefully placed her camera on the dresser. The desire to record the room before the next thing happened, whatever would change her memory of it, rose from a cache of recollections. When Barb moved in next door, both girls had been seven years old. Cathy had taken her new best friend by the hand and proudly walked her around the neighborhood, introducing her, for some reason, as her new little sister. Barb took that status seriously, deciding, for one thing, it meant that their rooms should match. For the first week, whenever Cathy looked across the hedge that separated the houses, she could see Barb in her room, grabbing at her parents and pleading,” But she’s like my sister!” So the bedrooms mirrored each other. Cathy sneered at the copycat, but felt betrayed by any show of individuality. Barb put posters on the walls – pictures of horses and ice- skaters. Later, it was boy-bands posturing in absurdist hairdos, Madonna in her muscled phase. Cathy made fun of her for that. You’re so immature, she had said. When the baby had been changed and dressed for bed, Cathy pulled open a bureau drawer, hoping to find something she had left behind, a pack of stale smokes, maybe. And there they were, just waiting, a blast from the past: Kools menthol, her old brand. She palmed the pack, and wondered vaguely why it wasn’t stiff with age. When she pulled out a cigarette it smelled fresh. She whistled low and murmured, “Who’s been sleeping in my bed?” The baby kicked his legs and gurgled as if he recognized the line from his favorite story. “Aunt Barb will tell you your story tomorrow,” Cathy said as she tucked her son in. “Apparently she’s a member of the family now.” In the morning, Cathy woke in that state that affects travelers: she couldn’t place the bed she was in, didn’t understand why the window was on the wrong wall. Little Roger began to whimper. “It’s OK, honey,” Cathy cooed as she leaned down to touch him. “We’re home with Gram. She’ll take care of us.” Mother and son descended the stairs, bundled together as if they were one creature. “Who’s visiting this early?” Cathy whispered, startled by the sound of voices. She rounded the corner and strode into the kitchen, saw Barb and Jean at the table, deep in conversation, heads inclined toward each other. “What are you doing here? Don’t you have your own house?” Cathy muttered, waving away Barb’s greeting and the hurt look that followed. A photo she had once taken popped in to her mind: a camera pointing toward a mirror set directly above it, yielding a smaller photograph of the room’s components, all hopelessly incoherent and distorted. Yep. That’s us, right this minute. “Sleep well, Mom? I slept like a log. Except for some weird blinking light that woke me up once. Can we go shopping today?” “You can do anything you want,” Jean replied absently. “I wasn’t asking permission, Mom,” Cathy huffed. “I just assumed you’d like to spend some time with us. Plus, I need to get Roger a few things.” “Of course I’ll go with you, wherever you like,” Jean said, trying to set things right. “I don’t drive anymore, though, so you drive and I’ll navigate. How’s that?” She slapped her hands cheerfully on the table. “OK,” said Cathy. “But if you don’t drive anymore, how do you get around?” Jean paused for a second. “Barb takes me to appointments and things. She’s been very good about it since Dad died.” Barb grinned at Cathy, her mouth full of cereal. It’s a funny thing about memories, how static they stay. Cathy and Jean tooled around town all day, hit the K Mart, Wal-Green’s, the old Dairy Queen – all where Cathy had left them. She could have driven those streets blind, or blind drunk. Only the trees had grown and changed: Cathy found that she resented them for taking up so much space. It was rude somehow, the way they made the buildings look so tiny and insignificant. If I were fish eyed, I’d be better off, thought Cathy. Yes, panoramic vision could report on the entire picture, put everything in its place, make absolute sense. Everybody knows everyone else in a little town. Jean exchanged hellos with friends who greeted her in the shops or hooted at her at the stoplights. Cathy, surprised that many of these were her old classmates, asked her mother, “Didn’t anybody leave town after high school?” “Well, sure, most of them did, and they mostly stayed gone for awhile, finding themselves, y’know, but then they came home again. Everyone on our block grew up in the houses they live in now. They either bought the houses from their parents, or else they moved into the basements or attics. In fact, the rest of the town calls our street Boomerang Avenue, cause of all the returnees.” Cathy was aghast. “It must be something in the water,” she mumbled. They stopped at the food court in the mall. “I just need to sit for a minute,” she said. Her mother’s eyebrows shot up quizzically. “I’m OK,” Cathy said, but, really, she wasn’t. The town had taken on a sci-fi feel to her. The landmarks were there, the basic structure, but it was populated with people who had morphed into their parents. She was suddenly unsure of her perceptions and their identities. She felt herself grow transparent, tempted to expose her secrets. It might be a relief to tell her mother where she had been. She was a little surprised that the gory details hadn’t been dragged out of her by now. To start something, Cathy asked, “What’s Barb’s story?” When her mother’s features hardened stubbornly, she found herself whispering, “How could you let her take my place?” When they opened the front door that evening, both women were exhausted from the strain of managing the news. Neither one had given in to easy bonding. Maybe this is that formal feeling that comes after great pain, like in the poem, Cathy thought. The baby had fallen asleep in his car seat and fussed at being wakened. The women carried Roger and the shopping bags into the house silently, as if they were afraid of disturbing the equilibrium of their world. “So we’ve run out of things to say already?” Cathy teased her mother. Jean began to smile but changed her mind. “ Who’s that arguing with Barb in the basement?” she whispered. Cathy flew downstairs to find out. A bulky man, dressed in a denim shirt with his name embroidered on it, stood by the furnace. He seemed stunned to see Cathy. With a cartoon gesture, he slung his enormous thumbs through the loops in his tool belt as Barb tried to explain his presence. “This is Bobby- you remember, from school! Don’t you remember? He used to run the audio-visual machine. He’s looked after us since your Dad died, helped with all the yard work and the handyman stuff.” Barb’s voice took on a desperate tone and she seemed on the verge of tears. Cathy grabbed her by the wrist. What did she mean by “us”? The shiny seam of a scar on Barb’s wrist suddenly caught Cathy’s attention. It shut her up, and she raised questioning eyes to Barb, who was already answering the unspoken question. “That’s from our blood- sister ceremony, remember? We were nine, and you cut me too deep. I had to get stitches. You felt so bad.” Fighting back a lurching nausea, Cathy suddenly couldn’t see her own hand in front of her face. She blinked rapidly to clear her focus, though that trick always gave her a headache. She saw Barb’s sympathy, undiluted by time. It was the second time she had seriously hurt Barb. At the hospital, after all four parents were sure Barb would recover, they turned their attention to Cathy, who sat sucking her thumb in a chair much too big for her, unable to speak or cry. Her father had yanked the digit out of her mouth and slapped her hard. ‘I thought you learned your lesson with that stupid William Tell game! You nearly blinded her then! And this time you nearly let her bleed to death with that silly ripped up bandage! When someone doesn’t ever say No to you, you have to be all the more careful what you ask of them.’ Jean invited both Bobby and Barb to dinner, which they all prepared while Cathy rested on the couch, a cool cloth on her head. Their cheerful bickering reminded her of cranes flinging balls of mud at each other as homecoming gifts. She endured Bobby’s heavy- handed flirting as punishment for her earlier inhospitable behavior, and answered his innocent, intrusive questions honestly, in a way she could not have answered the women. Not yet, anyway, not this soon. By the end of the meal, she found she had shot a whole role of film at the table, as she often did when she had a good time. Later, when the pictures came out, she would give a little in her judgement of all of them. Maybe this is what a family looked like now. Who’s to say? That night, after the baby had been tucked in, Cathy suddenly realized what the blinking light that disturbed her sleep the night before must have been: when she and Barb were growing up, they signaled each other goodnight with a ‘secret code’ of light pulled from their matching ballerina lamps. Now, as Cathy looked through her window at Barb in her identical room, reading in her identical bed, she patiently waited for her friend’s light to click off. Then, she waited for the message in the stuttering dark. Nothing. Cathy took a deep breath and reached for the chain on her own lamp. Hoping that the velocity of light was still the fastest thing in nature, and that she was not too late, she began to pull the goodnight signal. It came to her easily, even after all this time. It rains diamonds on Neptune, Zoe reminds herself. She knots her face and clamps her hands on her thighs, the better to ponder the impossible through the streaked windows of the bus. A small bird bounces off the glass, and Zoe looks back at it twitching on the road’s yellow line. She watches it recede into the distance; she knows what it is to feel small.
The guy next to her is coughing up his TB or whatever, and Zoe concentrates on statistics that have some bearing on that, i.e. the fact that a simple sneeze can propel itself through the air at 200 MPH. Or maybe those are stats on an orgasm. She wracks her brains while he hacks away. They have not made eye contact the whole trip, and maybe Coughing Guy doesn’t know she’s there; she can’t know for sure, but he doesn’t even try to draw in his knees when Zoe crawls over them at her stop. She signs in at the dental office, and the receptionist pushes the new-patient form at her from the hole in her window. Zoe carries it to the seat at the end of the receptionist’s finger, and spreads the paper across her knees like she wants to spank it. How do you feel about dentures? How well do you tolerate pain? She writes out the same answers as she did last time, and the time before, her purple sleeve dragging across her green plaid knees. When she dressed this morning, she’d stared at her mirror until the clash of colors began to vibrate. She wanted people to see her. She was sick of being invisible. In the examining room, the hygienist who always matches her make-up to her uniform beams the overhead light into Zoe’s face. “You’ll enjoy being a new patient here,” she says. “The staff is very caring.” Does she rehearse that line in her sleep? Zoe wonders. The zebra-finch dreams of its own song while it sleeps. A high-strung drill screams from the next cubicle. Last night she had the crumbling-teeth dream. What does that mean again? Powerlessness? Anxiety? She breathes through the nose while the dentist’s familiar voice, muffled, floats in under the door. Spit! he says. Spit! Spit! In the corner, a pillow with an embroidered tooth has a hypodermic aimed at it. Zoe smiles because that’s what it says to do on the pillow. She focuses on the fact that while frogs have teeth, toads do not. The dentist enters without a greeting, motions to open wide. Electrical impulses travel from the skin toward the spinal cord at a rate of up to 425 feet per second. Dentist and hygienist divide and conquer Zoe’s mouth expertly. There’s sucking and stretching, buzzing and puffing at the usual intervals and in the usual order. While the professionals work over the abyss of her mouth, Zoe realizes she is witnessing an affair. It’s in his showmanship and her admiration for it. They finish up, congratulate each other, and move on out together like shepherd moons herding the particles of Saturn’s rings. Zoe manages a wide grin, even with all the instruments stuck in her mouth. Many minutes pass. The screen on the dentist’s new computer reflects his image from the next room. It’s the room where they keep the records, and the door is cracked open. Zoe watches her dentist slide in behind his assistant. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the lovers fuse. The dentist moves his hands over the woman’s body, and Zoe keeps her eyes open voyeur-wide, all the while thinking about phantom kisses in mathematics. A moment later: “How could we have forgotten you?” the hygienist groans. She hastily removes everything from Zoe’s mouth, brandishing the instruments so that Zoe has to duck. Someone has turned up the muzak and the heat. Zoe lets herself believe that’s what annoys her most. She gives the lead apron a smack as she heads for the lobby. Syllables slide over her swollen tongue; she’s practicing for the last hurdle – how to get the receptionist to look up out of her hole and take the money. A familiar voice a man wakes up the little hairs along Zoe’s forearms. “Wait here. I’ll handle this,” he stage-whispers, wrestling the bills out of her fist. She does as she’s told, though she eyes the door like a fugitive while he transacts her business. She tries to decode the message her brain is straining to explode into words, but nothing comes. The brain uses up 20% of the body’s energy although it makes up a little more than 2% of the body’s weight. Zoe waits for the man to play his pointless game with the receptionist. She waits on his say-so. The man begins to walk her, and she recalls that seeing-eye dogs are color blind. They lead by watching the flow of traffic, not the lights. The man unlocks his car door for her, and she just stands there, dazed. Suddenly she shoots her hand out at him, a warning flare. He takes her hand, shakes it a joke. “We need ice-cream” he declares. “It’ll be good for us.” Inside the car, the air won’t move. It’s clamped down like a lid. The two dental patients travel for awhile on a road she could have driven blind. The man points out the tourist attractions anyway. She doesn’t respond. The man says accusingly, “You’re a lot quieter than you used to be.” Zoe points to her swollen cheek, and he says, “Oh yeah, Novocain. Never touch the stuff myself.” Zoe once admired his abnormal pain threshold—nothing seemed to hurt him. Not like her. “You’re a bleeder,” he had once said with satisfaction. On the road, he softly curses all the other drivers, and they pass too many ice- cream stands to count. Zoe sees the old apartment building looming stonily on the horizon just like it does sometimes in her dreams “I knew that was you in the dentist’s office today,” he says, as he parks the car. “You give off a certain smell when you’re scared.” She gets out and walks the gangplank to the front door she never thought she’d open again. What was she expecting? She’d never let her fantasies get this far. She searches the living room for signs of herself, pieces that might have gone missing. He goes straight into the kitchen, bangs around in there looking for something not past its expiration date. He hates to part with anything. The fact diminishes her. The aquarium still has no fish or water. Her books, which she had smuggled over one at a time so as not to startle him tower on the sagging shelf. She picks up her withered African violet from the windowsill, and its single remaining petal crumbles off with just that slight motion. She had stacked two months worth of casseroles in his freezer the morning he told her goodbye “Now this is truly interesting,” the man had said, finding her still there when he came home that night. “Zoe, you’ve finally piqued my interest.” “You look awful,” he smiles now, handing her a cherry Popsicle. In the face of this cruel observation, the one good memory Zoe has of him pops up. She had been sprawled across his bed, in tears again after a fight. He had crawled in tight beside her and taken her in his arms. He had smoothed her hair, murmuring comfort words, nonsense words that always calmed her down. But he never asked what was wrong, that time or any other. “Too cold?” The man points at the Popsicle. “You get used to it,” Zoe shrugs. She feels the pins-and-needles of Novocain beginning to wear off. She has a long way to go before she can really feel anything. The prickling in her jaw continues to maul her like a bad day, and she closes her eyes, shuts them down. She sits there in pieces, trying to connect the dots. A point is that which has no part. “You’re all swollen.” The man enjoys his observation. A prickle runs rapidly along her spine, and Zoe notices he hasn’t once called her by name. She gets up heavily and goes into the bathroom. She puts the Popsicle in the basin and examines her features in the mirror. She wants to find out what he means, but she has trouble finding her true face. The mirror shows a template of features no more specifically hers than an eigenface on a computer screen. She could be anyone at all. The bathroom door cracks open and the man slides in behind her. Zoe keeps thinking about the properties of heat, but now that’s taken a turn. Neither pair of eyes leave the mirror. When the man’s hands fall away from her body, Zoe still feels untouched. “What a mess,” the man says, scowling at the red-streaked basin. A few years ago it was decided giving a character in your novel a Twitter account was a good idea. I made one for Amma and had her tell the story in Tamil proverbs on the feed (along with other info, of course). I was surprised that there was a proverb for all the plot points, and actually made sense. Here are the ones from the first volume of the Trilogy. If you read Shiva's Arms, they'll make sense. If not, make of them what you will.
There is medicine for diseases, but is there any medicine for fate ? She who is ever active is never moved. Every man hath his own planet. Since the letters of fate are on your head, will your fate leave you because you shave your head? Though one weeps, will the fate written (by Brahma) be removed ? If you are noble you will find the world noble. The ox pulled to the shore, the buffalo pulled towards the water. Though dirt may be got rid of, inherited fate will not expire! There is neither cotton nor thread, yet weavers are fighting. If the mother-in-law breaks it, it is a mud pot. If the daughter-in-law breaks it, it is a golden pot. It is like a cat drinking milk with eyes closed. God's justice and love smite with one hand, and embrace with the other. The invisible God is made to shine by the revealed God. Do not use Brahmaastra weapon on a sparrow. What does a monkey know of the taste of ginger ·Lentils still in the market and the Brahmin is beating his wife. Excessive familiarity causes disrespect. One should not show his diamonds to a greengrocer! The elephant should not marry the mouse. · . |
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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