QUEEN OF ALL SHE SURVEYS
Amanda went home with Steven, chanting, “Gonna get my life back,” over and over. She did not call me until the eighth day after her release. “I made Eddie give me the car keys,” she plunged in. “He didn’t really want to, but Mom wanted to go out to lunch with me the same as always, so he had to give them up. Mom was happy to be back at Papa Joe’s. She had that lobster bisque she likes. She couldn’t finish everything, so I ate half her cheesecake. It was great. You can tell I’m on anti- psychotics, can’t you? Cravings!” “Uh huh,” I said. Eddie had already warned me that she was manic, and that every time she told her story, she’d scramble the details about which medications she spat out when. They forget and deny, a nurse had said, but reassured me that the drugs would continue to build up in Amanda’s blood, and she would calm down. Her mood would even out, and according to one doctor, she’d get back most of what she lost. Eddie and I promised one another we would be patient. “What else have you been doing besides taking Mom to lunch?” “I finished ten watercolors.” “Wow! Just this week?” “Yeah. Well, a few of them I started in the hospital. They’re very colorful, so I must not be depressed.” “Good, good.” “I’m going to get Mom her own watercolors so she can copy the paintings I did in the hospital. It’ll free up her use of color without all that realism dragging her down.” Did Amanda really expect that after a lifetime of making realistic paintings of people and places, Mom could or would change her style? I didn’t want to deflate my sister’s urge to connect with our mother, so all I said was, “Painting is good for her brain, according to the doctors.” “Uh-huh. So, that hotel I was staying at sent my luggage back with everything in it but my digital camera. I’m gonna complain.” To distract her from that particular absurdity, I asked, “What did you take with you, anyway?” “I had my computer, some books and CDs, and art supplies.” This was her honeymoon trousseau? She recited her list as if it was a perfectly reasonable way to pack for a trip. I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Anyways, I feel fine now. My leg doesn’t even hurt. I think that pain was psychosomatic, from living with Mom and Eddie. Eddie hasn’t been feeding Mom right, so I need to get some groceries. She hates those frozen dinners he gets. She needs me to cook a chicken breast with some lemon and fix her some mashed potatoes. I’m not cooking for Eddie, though. I hope he doesn’t try to make me.” Why would he? He never had before. I changed the subject and said, “Oh, you got a traffic ticket in the mail. You crashed a toll booth in Pennsylvania.” The ticket included a picture of the car speeding away. I had tried to make out the figure of my sister in it, but could not. It might have been anyone. “How much was it, anyways? There was nobody in the booth and it looked all decrepit, so I assumed it wasn’t working.” “Are you surprised you got all the way to Pennsylvania?” I was looking for an explanation, some way into her head. She laughed a careless laugh. “I didn’t know where I was going. I just drove.” What did the last few months look like to her, in hindsight? Lost in delusions of bridegrooms and warlocks, moving toward an ever shifting endpoint, Boston, Baltimore, Rome, she had been mauled by her disorder, and left less than she had been before. Was it better that she didn’t seem to know that? We all tried to make her feel normal. What was the alternative? “I think I’ll do that talk for the artists group, after all,” she said, her voice full and confident. “I’ll show my new watercolors.” “So it’s business as usual? Like nothing ever happened?” “Like nothing ever happened.” About two weeks later, I called the house and Mom answered. “They’ve been sawing and sawing,” she said. “They make a racket.” “Who’s been sawing what, Mom?” The house was a beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright design, but at fifty years of age, it always needed repair. A list of possibilities sprang to mind. “The men keep cutting the tree.” OK, so – not a repair. “Is it a dead tree?” A windstorm had blown one of those onto the roof a few years before. There was plenty of damage to the house, but Mom and Amanda had been unhurt. “It’s a good tree. I told her not to cut it but she didn’t listen.” The story came out in fragments over several conversations. Amanda had convinced herself that the trees on the lawn would fall through her bedroom window and kill her; and she wanted the entire thicket gone. “You’ve got the money to cover it,” she’d told Mom as she wrote out a check for two thousand dollars for the tree cutters. “Sign this.” Mandy had rummaged around for any blank check, and found an old one for a closed account. That particular detail didn’t faze her. She held the rubber check out to Mom. Eddie stopped payment on the check that would have bounced, and paid for the damage already done with his own money. He canceled the work order to wipe out the rest of the trees. “What do you care what I do about the trees?” Amanda asked him, missing the point. “Mom changed her power of attorney from you to me last summer, so I can do whatever I want.” How had she engineered that? She smirked and said. “I was a bad girl,” when he asked. At the time she seemed to understand the limitations of the appointment, according to the family lawyer. Now she seemed to think Mom’s property belonged to her and only her, to do with what she wanted. After the tree-cutting fiasco, this news from Eddie: “I found an interesting letter in the mail today. The lawyer apparently revoked you as Amanda’s power of attorney and she cut you out of her will.” “She fired me?” “Looks like it.” My mind flashed back to the day she told me about her little will. “You trust me that much?” I’d said, touched that she would leave me her paintings and all her worldly goods. “I trust you with my life,” she’d replied. My sister’s revised opinion of me suddenly became clear: the caseworker’s warning, the calls from Amanda becoming few and far between, and now this. Amanda was cutting me out of her life. This is what I pieced together, from Eddie and Mom─ after dinner one night, Amanda got up from the table without a word and steered Mom roughly into her bedroom. She physically sat her down on the bed and instructed her to stay there while she, Amanda, took a nap. “This is nonsense,” Mom said after sitting on the bed’s edge for a minute. “I have better things to do.” Eddie heard a scuffle of shoes and irritated voices, and bounded upstairs to find out what was happening. “Don’t tell Eddie,” he heard Amanda whisper to Mom just as he entered the bedroom. “She is strange. She does strange things. She did not attack me, but she pulled me around for a while. I think there’s something wrong,” Mom told me on the phone the following day. “Hang on, Mom. I’m coming home. I’ll be there as soon as I can make arrangements.” “I don’t know why you’d want to come into this mess.” “Because you’re my mother.” “I am? How lovely, dear!” The following day Amanda canceled her artist talk. “We drove around to buy new outfits for the reception and when we came home, she said, ‘I’m not going.’ Then she locked her door,” Mom said. That was enough for me. I rushed through the paperwork to take a leave from my teaching job, and I sublet my apartment to someone who could appreciate the grand piano in the living room. Meanwhile, Amanda was busy cancelling all her medical appointments. No psychiatrist, no caseworker, no therapy groups. Yes, she was done with being a patient, although she continued to lie to her friends about taking her medication. “She’s a good actress but a horrible liar,” one of them told me. “She looks down and fidgets when you ask about the pills, but tells you what she thinks you want to hear. She’s either stopped her medicines, or they’ve stopped working.” What are the signs that the pills have lost their effectiveness, doctor? Delusions, hallucinations, mania, difficulties with concentration and sleeping, attention, logical reasoning, and impulse control. In other words, the current portrait of Amanda. My sister was taking absolutely nothing. “Did you just get back from an outing, Mom? You sound winded.” I had been calling all afternoon. “Yes, yes. We just got home.” “Were you at the doctor?” “No. Not there. We saw a man.” “What man?” “A husband.” “Amanda doesn’t have one.” “I guess he helps me, too. We went for quite some distance. Wait, I think I have something in my purse.” I waited. She read the name from a business card. Her lawyer! “Did Amanda ask you to sign papers?” “Oh yes. Lots of papers.” I willed my voice to stay calm. “And then where did you go?” “To the bank. I needed money.” “How much?” “Three hundred.” I knew Amanda had no way now to get money now without Eddie’s signature. She must have had an argument with a teller about it. She had been banned — had she not understood that — from the bank, and by ignoring their wishes, she was playing with legal fire. I called Eddie, and Eddie called the lawyer, who reassured him that Mom had not signed any legal papers since the summer — she must have mixed up the two visits. The lawyer had looked from mother to daughter, registered that all was not well, and taken Mom aside for a private talk. He told Eddie, “Your mother explained to me that to Amanda had only recently been released from the hospital and was behaving oddly. When we came back into the office, Amanda became agitated as she laid out her demand that the entire estate be made over to her. She loudly announced to me that she was off her meds, but had the right as power of attorney to help herself to your mother’s estate. She then dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Bob Dylan is sitting right next to you. Can’t you see him? He’s right there, right there!’ I advised her to get back on her meds as soon as possible.” It wasn’t free advice. The invoice we later received was marked as review of the will, and cost one hundred dollars. Eddie let the caseworker know about the new development. He said to me, “Greg said he’s planning a surprise visit next week, in order to assess Amanda’s state of mind. It’s the first step in a sequence of steps to get our sister back on track.” “I hope this batch of authorities can’t be fooled the way all the others have been fooled.” Our sister had honed her skills at deception and was proficient in warding off all real help. “Don’t give up hope. Greg is a good guy and has been steering these people back to safety for twenty years. He tells me interesting stuff about the disease all the time. Apparently, Mandy is the repository of all the mutations in the family tree, going back forever. We’ve had a lot of random characters in our line and she’s the one unlucky enough to be housing their bits of genetic noise.” I wanted to cry when I imagined Mandy bent under the weight of all our sick ancestors—the kleptomaniac cousin, the delusional great grandfather who believed that his wife, after caring for their thirteen children all day, was out having affairs all night; the alcoholics, gamblers, cheaters; the great grandfather who beat a man to death in a bar fight, the depressives who never stopped crying. “I think if anyone can get Mandy back to normal, Greg can,” Eddie said. When I put down the phone, I looked in the mirror to see what living with this level of dread looked like. Since I was alone, I let myself cry, and the whimper became a roar. My sister once told me that a lion’s roar can travel five miles. It’s just the howling in its head that no one can hear. Eddie had an idea: he would hire more help, a nurse who would administer Mandy’s drugs along with Mother’s. He let Mandy know the plan. Insisting that she felt fine and had not hallucinated for months and months, our sister told Ed she would have nothing to do with a nurse, and he couldn’t make her. Patients have rights. Everyone said so. Maybe, but Ed could try to give Mandy another chance to recover. The nurse, Chris, came over at ten in the morning to set things up for both Mom’s and Amanda’s pill-taking. A heavy woman with a gruff manner, she immediately set to work, all business. She pulled out a stack of papers to be signed, a pile for Mom and a pile for Amanda. Mandy took the pen and began to help Mom with her signature. “Forget something?” “I’m not giving my permission. I feel fine. I’m not going to take any more pills. You can give Mom hers.” Chris said, “You know you’ll just end up in the hospital again.” “Yeah, right,” Amanda scoffed. Our sister had called Eddie’s bluff. Amanda followed up her triumph with a new behavior— staying out all night to avoid our brother, coming back only at dawn. Where did she go? When did she sleep? Did she just drive and drive and drive, her grey suitcase in the backseat jostling like a carsick passenger? We had won that suitcase as a prize for letting a vacation timeshare outfit bore us for an hour with their sales pitch. The people who ran the scam kept increasing the temperature in the room, as if that would melt our resolve against signing their contract. “We’re only here for the free prize,” my sister had insisted. Finally we got our reward. The luggage was flimsy and ugly, a particularly dismal shade of grey. “At least you might be able to use it as a portfolio to hold your drawings,” I said on the long drive back. Now, the battered thing had taken on a symbolic resonance at a time when it should have been disintegrating in a junkyard somewhere. My sister’s friends reported that she had been seeking refuge with them at night. “She showed up here at two in the morning, with that suitcase,” her friend Aurora told me. “She said Eddie was trying to poison her and she couldn’t be around him. What could I do? I let her in.” “Did she say much else?” “She kept mumbling about strychnine. It must be the only poison whose name she knows. She thinks that’s the stuff your brother is using. She says as a chemist, he knows how to make stuff like that.” “She’s got our brothers mixed up. Steven taught himself chemistry, and Eddie is a biologist.” Ed knew chemistry as well, but I couldn’t resist the urge to slap Aurora down a little. “Oh. I always think of Mandy as so sharp. I’m surprised she’d make a mistake like that.” Surprised, and skeptical, too, judging by the tone of her voice. “She’s always been smart, but she won’t be much longer, if we don’t get her into treatment.” “Amanda should go ahead and refuse medical treatment if she feels like it. She’s got rights. She should just smoke some pot. It cures cancer and lots of things, if only Big Pharma would let that cat out of the bag.” “Mandy knows that pot could drag her deeper into psychosis. It’s dangerous for her particular disorder. I hope she remembers that when people are passing weed around.” Silence. Then this: “Well, I’ll remind her not to inhale our secondhand smoke when I see her tonight. I told her she could stay over here again.” I thanked her as if she was an ally. I knew she thought I was trying to control my sister with misinformation she believed was correct. Her favorite drug couldn’t possibly hurt Mandy, who could stand to be more ordinary anyway. Too much intelligence and talent was elitist, in Aurora’s opinion. I didn’t think I’d hear from her again, so I was surprised when she called to say Amanda had stood her up. “She didn’t show up here last night, but the cops did.” “Wow. Did they say what they wanted?” “Nope, just that they were looking for her. I told them nothing.” What was there to tell? Neither of us had any idea at the time that Amanda, under the delusion that Eddie was going to rape and kill her and Mom, had marched into a gun shop and bought a gun. The shop owner asked if she had ever spent time in a mental institution and she lied as easily as if she had been doing it all her life. She used her real name and address on the paperwork, and she did not forget to buy ammunition. There was no waiting period and the owner simply handed her the gun earmarked for the murder of our brother. We also knew nothing of the hotel she stayed in that night, or the man she called her boyfriend who was waiting for her in the room. She would tell me much later about how she had set her package and the grey suitcase by the door and leapt into his arms. He carried her to the bed, and when he was done with her, said, “Show me your packages.” Amanda opened the suitcase and arrayed the contents on the bed: a paring knife, a butcher knife, two steak knives, and Mom’s long silver anniversary cake knife inscribed with Dad’s words: Twenty five years my bride. “What’s in the other box?” Amanda lifted the gun carefully out of its box. “Give it here.” She placed it across the twenty-seven transparent bones of his hand. It fell through his skin and sunk right through the floor. Amanda didn’t come home for the next few nights and days, not to Mom’s house, not to Aurora’s. Nobody knew where she was or what she was planning. She simply disappeared. Once again her missing person case was re-opened. We were taking a chance by involving police—in her present mood, Amanda might perceive their interference as a dare, and the news was full of stories about cops using excessive force even on the mentally ill: one addled young man begging them to shoot him, whereupon they did, no questions asked; an elderly homeless woman being punched by a big cop as he sat astride her, protecting her from traffic, so he said; another officer on a wellness check killing the sick boy holed up in his home because I don’t have time for this. Citizens shot for playing with toy guns, jaywalking, fitting the description. Even so, their presence might be the fastest way to get Amanda into the hospital. Eddie searched her room for clues as to where she might have gone. He found a receipt for a hotel room and a final bill from her old shrink. There was a butcher knife and several smaller kitchen knives under her pillow. “She was going to fight you?” I gasped. “Apparently she thought she had to defend herself.” His voice trembled. “What did I ever do to her? Why does she hate me? She’s my baby sister.” Did his grief show on his face just then? We register sorrow in so many different ways. We lose weight, develop tremors, or agitate tumors into action. When our father, as a new doctor, had not been able to save his mother from cancer, he went mute for a few weeks after her death. The man who loved language was unable to speak. There is a picture of him at thirty-six, holding baby Amanda, a cupcake commemorating their common birthday as it flickered on the coffee table. My father’s face is etched with sorrow. As for the baby on his lap, there was nothing that could make her safe now. She wouldn’t let it. No sooner had she come back than she was gone again. “She’s on the move. Her case manager came to the house after she canceled her appointment with the doctor today.” Eddie’s voice sagged and I could barely hear him. “Greg tried to reason with her but she told him she couldn’t go with him because she had to meet a friend named Dan at the Hilton. Then she started off on foot, with that grey suitcase. Greg followed her in the car, talking to her at stoplights for a while. She got annoyed, but not agitated enough for him to call the cops on her. She didn’t threaten him.” Of course not, not our gentle Amanda. She’s got great empathy, one of the nurses had told me. “Most patients will turn their backs when they don’t like what we’re saying. Amanda always listens, even when she’s not interested. She doesn’t like to hurt people’s feelings.” “Mom said she couldn’t find any weapons under Amanda’s pillow this morning. Maybe she packed some different knives in the suitcase. She must be furious that you confiscated them,” I said. “Maybe she thought the warlock took them. I wish she had threatened Greg with them. Just unpacked them at a stoplight and started brandishing away.” “Yes. That would have brought things to a head. Poor Greg, what a job! It must be exhausting to try to anticipate the movements of someone who can’t think straight. But isn’t carrying a concealed weapon enough to bring the cops, especially if you’re a known mental patient? Doesn’t it go to intent or something?” It was beginning to seem that nothing would be enough until it was too late, bodies bleeding in the street. “I’ll mention it to Greg, but don’t hold your breath that anything will be done. At any rate, he’s going by the book so the commitment will stick.” He paused, weighing whether or not to tell me something, then continued. “I saw a laminated copy of the car registration—not the title—and lots of lawyers’ names and numbers scrawled on scraps of paper on Amanda’s bed. There were ads for subsidized apartments, too. She wants to get away from me. The irony is I would have been back in my own condo by now if she had just taken her pills. I guess I’m back to being the bad guy again. I guess I’m her all-purpose warlock.” “Try not to take it personally, Eddie. I know it’s insulting. She’s made me out to be some kind of art thief to her friends. And this lovely news came from women who are my acquaintances too. They stuck up for me, though, saying stealing her art didn’t sound like something I’d do. ‘There’s nothing that your sister wouldn’t do for you,’ they reminded her. Mandy didn’t try to convince them otherwise. She dropped the subject, the way she does now when you don’t buy what she’s selling.” “Ouch. Will the real Amanda please stand up? No wonder families give up on these people.” “Starting rumors is part of the disease, I read. But, you know, if she’s planning to move, well, that’s OK, especially if the commitment fails to go through, and she won’t let herself be treated.” I tried to picture Amanda in a little apartment, off her meds but coping somehow. Could a life like that be possible? Some people just live with their psychosis. They make space at the table for a hallucination and perhaps serve it tea, the way Mandy did as a child when she hosted imaginary friends. I felt a kind of diluted hope for my sister’s future emerge. The fact that it’s no use watering a dead blossom was a truth I could not fully embrace. Not yet. Amanda returned home, and then continued to come and go as she pleased. One day, as Chris was making Mom tomato soup, Amanda came in with a pizza. Chris cut a slice and handed it to Mom. Mom had taken only one bite when Amanda grabbed it out of her mouth and pushed it into the garbage disposal. She turned back to the pizza, cut a slice with her own hand, and handed that one to Mom. “She was getting a little jealous there,” Chris told me. “She scared the nurse,” said Mom. “Did she scare you, too?” Mom burst into tears. “Yes. Something is wrong. Can’t anyone fix that poor little girl?” I wondered if an intervention by Mandy’s friends would help. Two of them visited her at my request, to feel out the situation and encourage Mandy to get back on her meds. Cherie told me, “She seemed pretty well, pleasant and well-kempt.” Much later, Mandy would tell me that her friends had showed up with the express purpose of throwing acid in her face. How could she have remained so cool, so close to normal, with chaos like that going on inside her head? “Did she bother to lie about her pills?” “Yes, she said she was taking them, but she wouldn’t look us in the eyes when she said it.” No surprise there. “We noticed a tube of paintings all ready for mailing on her desk. It was addressed to one of the big New York art galleries. She saw us looking at it and that seemed to make her nervous. She usually wants to talk about her art, but not this time. There was a piece of paper taped to the outside of the tube with her handwriting on it.” “One other strange thing was that she said she bought a generator. She’s worried that Eddie would be mad about that. She asked to stay the night with one of us to avoid a fight with him.” How could she have paid for a generator? Another rubber check? The money was all locked away. And why would she need assurance that the lights would stay on? Her friend had mentioned the three lights burning in the bedroom when they visited, although it was a sunny day. “It was like a tanning bed in there!” A wave of sorrow caught me then, to think of my little sister suddenly so afraid of the dark, afraid of falling trees in high winds, afraid of everything, yet fighting back with all the ferocity she could muster. It was an odd kind of bravery, the unhinged energy with which she challenged her demons even as they pulled her deeper into her own destruction and blocked off every exit. One afternoon, Amanda ran out of her bedroom to warn Mom that someone was coming to murder them. She started to yank all the curtains closed and duct-tape the window. “They’re going to kill us,” she hissed at Mom. “I have to do all the windows in the house.” “No, no!” Mom protested. Amanda ignored her. Mom knew she could go to the neighbors’ house if Amanda frightened her. I had called them and warned them of our situation. This time, the task proved too complicated for Mom. “I forgot where to go. I went next door instead,” she told me. The neighbor was out. “It was mild outside, so I just walked around. I sat on the patio and looked at Amanda’s tree stump. It cost quite a bit. I was upset when the people cut and cut. When I went back inside, she was in her room. She was quiet. She was fine.” Not for long. Eddie heard her roaming the house at three in the morning, running through the living room above his downstairs bedroom, right over his head. Then she rummaged in the garage, now she was on the patio, glass doors left wide open, the late winter breeze billowing through the curtains with threats only she could hear. Would she try to run? From what? Toward what? She slid back into the house and locked her bedroom door behind her. Although Amanda was hardly speaking to Mom or Eddie by this time, she came in the house one evening with the car keys but no car. She slapped the keys down on top of the TV beside the door, pushed her thinning blonde hair over her shoulders, and mumbled to Eddie, “The brakes won’t work. I left the car at McDonald’s and took a cab home.” She trudged upstairs to her room and locked the door. “I went to get the car and the brakes worked fine,” Eddie told me. “I have no idea why she thought they wouldn’t work.” And this, a little bit later in our conversation: “She’s been parking the car in strange ways at odd angles on the street lately. It’s a new thing. At any rate, last night I went to the end of the driveway and looked in the driver’s side window after she had parked in the depression by the big tree. She jumped, as if she didn’t recognize me. Maybe she mistook me for her warlock! I told her the car wasn’t safe there. It could get stuck in the ditch if it rained and why didn’t she just let me bring it into the garage. She scowled at me, but got out of the car. I turned the key and noticed the glove compartment was gaping open, so I opened it all the way, in order to shut it properly. A gun fell out.” “What? Oh, my god!” “Guess her knives aren’t lethal enough. I tried to keep a poker-face and I don’t know if she saw me tucking the gun in my pants or not. Who knows what she was seeing or how to interpret it?” “Oh my god! Oh my god!” “As soon as I had the car in the garage, she demanded the keys back. I said, ‘No way!’ and she gave me a black look, but didn’t argue.” “Was that the end of it? She didn’t hotwire the car the next time she used it?” Our sister had suddenly come into a skill set we never suspected her of having. “No. Instead, I find out the next day she got her friend to take her to get a second set of keys from the dealer. Her friend, that psychiatric patient Max, you know who he is, the guy who lives with feral cats, the one who told Amanda he’s only attracted to girls who are extremely troubled— he told me that Amanda said I wanted control over the car, and it made her mad.” Nobody could have predicted exactly how mad. Eddie said this into my answering machine, later that same night, in a near whisper, “You won’t believe this. I went to change my pants and pulled clean ones on. They fell apart in strips, right off my body. Amanda cut them with one of her art matting knives. She must have cut herself too. I can see some blood by the door, right where she dropped the knife. Wait a second—she cut the netting on my tennis racket as well. Is this a threat or what? Let me look in the closet.” A silence, held breath. “Yep. I just waved my hand through the rack of clothes and they all fell apart. Your old dresses at the far end of the closet were not touched. Neither were Mom’s fancy blouses. But there’s blood spatter, a spotty trail on the floor of the closet. It’s just drops. She must not have cut herself badly enough to go to the hospital, I guess, because she’s upstairs sleeping it off. I doubt I’ll be getting much of that particular commodity myself tonight.” Much later, Amanda would tell me, her voice thrilling to the recaptured excitement, “I cut his clothes and I loved doing it! I hated him. I thought he was poisoning us and raping Mom. That’s why I was eating out at restaurants all the time, because the food was safe, and why I was trying to find other places to sleep. I knew I was in danger. It gave me great satisfaction to cut up his belongings, even though I cut my hand, too. It left a scar. It’s still kinda pink.” Eddie called Greg with a description of what happened. Almost immediately, Greg knocked on Mom’s door. He had planned to come over anyway, to assess Amanda for extraction to the hospital. After a month of tracking her, he hoped he had numerous enough, and serious enough, examples of mentally ill behavior to make a commitment stick. This had been the stumbling block to getting her in treatment against her will. As horrified as we were at Amanda’s disintegration, her crimes up until then had not reached the level to where the law could intervene, but “This will do the trick!” Greg said when Mom, fingers splayed against her cheeks, showed him the damage. It was more than enough evidence. He shook his head and said, “It’s just terrible.” Mom led Greg upstairs to talk to Amanda. “I hope I can convince her to come with me. It would be nice if I could leave the cops out of it.” He knocked on Amanda’s door. No answer. He pushed it open. She was not there. Amanda had left during the night for NYC, grey suitcase packed with drawings, paintings stacked in the trunk. She carried in her pocket a poem she wrote about hanging herself. She got as far as Butler County, PA, before she crashed the car, totaling it. She also demolished the car she rear-ended. The police came and gathered the details of who Mandy was and what her circumstances were. “They said I was at fault, but I wasn’t. I was just taking a nap at the intersection,” she would tell me later. “I think the cops stole one of my paintings from the trunk.” “I thought Steven got them all when he went to clean up your mess.” “Oh, the cops had people to clean up everything, all the broken glass and stuff. I don’t know why they made me sit on the curb in handcuffs for so long.” “Were they cruel? They didn’t use a Taser on you, did they?” “One of them yanked my arms behind my back pretty hard. But they all called me Ma’am while they were yelling orders at me.” She had called me, and the answering machine caught her voice yelling, “Nobody’s picking up,” and “What’s this place called again?” to someone in the distance. “I only heard you on the answering machine the next day.” “Uh-huh. The nicest cop directed me to the Comfort Inn by the side of the road and told me I could call someone from there. So after I called and you wouldn’t answer, I walked around to the bus depot in the back of the hotel and hopped on a bus. I had to change buses three times before I finally got home. I didn’t know where I was. I just figured I should keep moving.” Karen said, “She got away before they found out about the warrant? She was lucky this time. One of my clients, a poor lady who just got out of a nursing home after treatment for ovarian cancer, suddenly became psychotic. She was making a lot of noise and a neighbor called the cops on her. The landlord let them in. She locked herself in her bedroom. They demanded she come out. There was a small hallway outside her bedroom and she came out into it holding a dull kitchen knife. All six cops in that small space demanded she drop the little knife. She just froze. Then, when she didn’t do what they said, every single one of them shot her dead.” After Mandy’s long bus ride, she got to the house, fumbling in her pocket for her key. Not finding it, she smashed the glass pane on the side of the front door to let herself in. In her mind, it was the only way to gain entry. That house is a fortress! Without a word to Mom or Eddie, she locked herself in her bedroom, and duct-taped her window against whatever might happen next. After about an hour, she came out of her room and washed her hair in the bathroom. It was still wrapped in a towel when the cops came. A female officer, six feet tall, came through the door. “Where is she?” she boomed. “I’ll get her,” Eddie said. He knocked on the bedroom door. “Mandy, the police are here. They want to talk to you.” “What do they want?” “We have a warrant for your arrest.” The big woman bore down on our little sister. “Why? I’m not doing anything wrong. Can’t you see I’m in my own house? Those are my paintings on the walls. I just washed my hair. I’m home where I’m supposed to be. My brother’s the one with the gun!” “You’re schizophrenic….” The big woman’s voice continued to bellow while the cops circled Amanda, their guns drawn. My sister will fight. She will lose. She will disappear into the circle of uniforms leading her past our sorrowing family, out the smashed door into a screaming car with spinning red and blue lights, and enter an overburdened system of courts, forced injections, and halfway houses. I wish she could speed away in her broken car instead, mind lit with absurd possibilities, outrunning for a time the disease that could not have been otherwise.
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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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