B000FCJYE6 EBOK (18 page)

“Yes. And leave him where he can safely interpret that information.”

I pitched my coffee cup into the garbage can, furious, and leaned forward. “It’s not
information
for him to
interpret.
It’s a
death.
His father’s death. And I am not, under
any circumstances,
leaving him in this
piss-stinking
place full of
strangers
to deal with it.” I stood up.

“Mrs. Schiller, I believe you have the best of intentions. But perhaps your maternal instincts are not, in this case, well placed.”

I hid my hands behind my back to hide their violent tremor. “Sign him out,” I said.

“I can’t do that in good faith.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what kind of faith you do it in. Sign him out,” I repeated, and walked out of the room.

I ran down the stairs two at a time and flung open the door to the courtyard. I stopped to look at my children, crouched in the garden’s mud. Esau turned his face and smiled, then spoke to Kate, who turned and waved. I walked over to them.

“We’re going home.”

Esau looked stricken.

I bent. “No, no, sweetheart. All of us. We’re all going home.”

I wrapped my arms around them and closed my eyes. Tonight I would tell him. For now, I breathed in the smell of damp, fertile ground and my children’s hair. I felt as if we were a planet, spinning out of any orbit but our own. Terrified, I hung on.

W
hen I lived in the place, it was fall and then winter and pretty soon I knew for sure they were not going to take me home.

My father carried me up the stairs. I remember that.

I remember him talking to me in the car, the whole way. Like some kind of music, not stopping. I closed my eyes in the backseat and clung to his voice, feeling like I was spinning, like I was on a carnival carousel, those scary painted horses at the county fair, and it was going too fast and I wanted to get off, and so I pictured my father standing at the edge, spinning past, spinning past, and I tried to get to the edge so I could jump and he could grab me, like when I was little, and we were in the lake and he was trying to teach me to swim. Reaching his arms out: Come on, you’ll make it, he said. And because he said so I closed my eyes and jumped and I didn’t drown. His hands around my rib cage in the green water, lifting me up and out into the blinding sun, holding me over his head while I spat and laughed and gasped.

So we swam through the dark, in the car, with his voice like his hands, guiding me, keeping me afloat. And he promised me I wouldn’t drown and I didn’t.

He did.

And he carried me up the stairs and laid me down on a bed in a dark room. Then there were lights everywhere and there were bars on my bed and I liked that. I checked every edge with my fingers and feet, bars all the way around, I wouldn’t fall out. My father’s hands on my head. I heard him say he would be back.

But I never believed him. Every time he left, they’d tell me again. He’ll be back, they said. He’s only just gone for a little while.

So I sat on my bed a lot waiting for him to get back. I made my bed superwell and sat on it with my back to the wall. My window looked out on the sky. Every so often I’d get up and stand by it and look down at the parking lot. I’d watch the highway for blue cars. There are a lot of blue cars. So I trained myself not to believe it was him. Because I am a person who likes math and I am good at it, and so I knew the statistical likelihood of it being him in a blue car out of billions and trillions of the blue cars on the planet that could potentially be driving south on County Road 10 was very very small. The statistical likelihood was that it was not him, and never would be him, and in the event that it was him, it was practically a mathematical miracle. I would see a blue car and watch it shoot down the whole thin ribbon of road that cut across my windowpane, north going south, and I wouldn’t blink until it had crossed to the southeast corner of the pane and out of sight, not even slowing at the driveway to where I was. Then I’d blink. Then I’d wait for another blue car, and know it wasn’t him, and prove it by watching it speed past.

So when he died, I already knew he wasn’t coming back.

He left me there, but he didn’t want to. I know that. I always knew that. He left me there because I couldn’t get better. So I stayed there and tried to get better as fast as I could because I knew he didn’t want to leave me there and it broke him all to pieces because he thought it was his fault and it wasn’t his fault. At all.

And the only thing I am mad about is that I am better now and he is all dead. When he could have just hung on a little longer. Like he told me to do. And I did what he told me. I hung on. I came home, just like he promised I would.

Now everything is different. Here are the ways things are different.

First my routine. There, I would wake up in the morning and they would unlock the shower room and let me take a shower. After which I would get dressed. Before which, while I was still in bed, I would lie there for a little while in the dark and watch the light turn blue in my room. My sheets, blue. My white walls, blue. Staff had taped up a lot of my drawings on my walls and I would wait until I could make out their shapes.

I was drawing: plants, and bodies, and atoms, and cells. For school, since I was not in school, they had given me some books. Since I was too crazy for the adolescent ward, I lived with the adults, which was fine with me because I didn’t want to be around anyone my age anyway. So I was studying hard. I had
National Geographic
s and an
Encyclopedia Britannica
that was missing volume W. My favorite drawings were: a drawing of a foot with all its bones; a drawing of a man-eating plant; a split atom, the best part of which was the shattered cerulean-blue nucleus; and a raptor, which is a bird of prey, such as for example a hawk.

Then after I was showered and dressed I would go sit by the window in the dayroom. Sunrise. Blue clouds, orange and purple sky. It was my special time. My only time. Everyone asleep.

I missed my chair. I would not tell my mother I missed my chair. No one ever sat in my chair. When someone new came, they said, That’s Esau’s chair, don’t sit there. At first, Staff tried to make me turn around my chair to join the group. Then they came over and turned around my chair, but they only did that a few times because I would get up and turn it around facing the window again, so it was a waste of their energy I guess. Someone probably said, That’s his chair, why don’t you just let him face the window in it? If he wants to. But I don’t know that for sure, I never heard anyone say that.

The day did not begin until someone else was up. It didn’t count. When everyone else is sleeping, time stops. Nothing moves. Not even me.

Then someone else woke up, and came into the dayroom with their knitting or their talking-to-themselves conversation, and snow started falling past my window, and the day went sucking into its hole.

Here, it is different. Time is different here, it doesn’t take so long to get from morning to night. Everything counts whether anyone else is awake or not because even when they aren’t, there’s my father. Somewhere in the room. There and not there.

He is not a ghost because I am too old and logical a person to believe in that. So he is not a ghost, but he is not gone. Either.

There are so many sounds.

Out in the yard, there’s the birds. And in through the window, the light comes up earlier, because it’s spring, and the lilac tree outside my window rubs against the screen and sends in smells. I lie in bed and wait for Kate to wake up. She scrabbles around like a rat. She thumps out of bed in the night, and then makes a rustling, just before seven, every day, and then she stops. To hear if she can hear me. We lie there listening for the other one. I hold my breath. She has no patience, because she is a girl and six and Kate, so I know she will give first.

“Esau,” she whispers through the wall. Then the day begins.

When a bad thing happens you wake up with it in bed. You wake up and while you’re still all foggy and half asleep you feel around because something is in bed with you, making you uncomfortable, crowding you out of your spaceship sheets. You don’t even have to open your eyes, because the bad thing is not visible. It is not a visible material object. But it is strange and bulky and you know it is there and you feel around with your hand for it and you find it. And there it is. The bad thing. The bad thought.

And it doesn’t even have to be the whole thought. For example, before when I was crazy I didn’t have to wake up and think:
I am crazy.
All I had to do was feel the crinkling plastic sheet underneath my hospital sheet and think:
Here.
It was the logical deduction.
Here. Not there.
My father is the same. All I have to do is wake up a little and listen. And I can hear him, not being there. Being gone. It is a loud gone sound. And all I have to think is:
Gone.

I can turn my head to the left and face the wall. Through the wall is Kate. I can wiggle one arm out from under the blankets and peel the wallpaper. If I look hard enough, she will rustle. If I think,
Cough,
she will cough. I am not crazy. It’s true. Or I can turn my head right and look at the homework on my desk, which I stack in alternating directions for different subjects. I am not allowed to do my homework again once it is done. I am not allowed to get up in the morning and work on it all over again, erase all my answers and redo the problems and tear up the book reports and start over once I have done them, because I did them well enough the first time and it’s not efficient to do the same thing twice. I made up that rule. Because doing my homework twice is not magic and it will not make me any more right and it will not make my father less dead.

I don’t know what the date was when I went to the place. The next thing I remember was a Thursday, because there was Salisbury steak. The next thing I remember, I was sitting at a long rectangular table eating my peas, which came in a small dish on the tray next to the Salisbury steak. Also, there was a carton of milk, a square of orange Jell-O, and rice. It was the best thing I had ever eaten. And all of a sudden I woke up eating it, so at first I thought I was dreaming I was eating peas.

Then I was startled awake.

“Hungry?” asked the man across from me. He was Geronimo, but I didn’t know that yet. I looked up at him.

“I guess so,” I said, pushing my finger across the plate to get the last bits of sauce.

“Ate like you ain’t had a square meal in a year.”

“Well, it’s good to see,” said the grandmother next to him. She wore gloves with lots of rings on her fingers, and a pillbox hat on top of her stiff gray hair. I couldn’t imagine what a grandmother had to be crazy about. “He’s growing and he needs plenty of protein. I have sons, three sons, and one summer they ate me out of house and home, grew a foot. All I ever saw of them, they wanted something to eat. Swore I’d never cook again, ha! Famous last words. This one, they should send him up two dinners, he won’t go hungry.” She cut another strip of steak in half and placed it daintily in her mouth. “Doris, this steak,” she said, “is really quite satisfactory.”

I looked around for Doris, wondering if they could find me another dinner. The only other ladies in the room were a nurse and a woman who sat on the other side of the young, agitated man to my right. His knee bobbed rapidly under the table and his left hand worried the fabric of his gray wool pants. He stared at his plate. Every so often, in a rush, he’d take a bite, looking fierce. Then he’d go back to looking worried. The woman who was maybe Doris wore a pink-flowered housecoat with snaps. Her bosoms rested low on her chest and embarrassed me. She sat slumped over her plate, her gray hair wandering out of the loose bun knotted at the back of her head. She didn’t look clean. She looked crazy.

She did not even lift her hand to wipe away a tear that rolled off the tip of her nose.

The nurse sat at the head of the table with a stack of blue folders, one of them open, and she was filling out a form. She laid down her pen and looked at me.

“Esau, would you like to introduce yourself?”

I ate my Jell-O. Maybe if I didn’t look at her she would forget me.

“Esau,” she said more firmly. I decided to hate her.

The man to my left leaned close and said into my ear, “She’s a witch. More or less harmless. The trick is not to say her name. It gives them more power.” He glanced over at her, then leaned in again. “Witches. Naming. You know what I mean.”

I nodded. She didn’t look like a witch, and to be totally honest I was not sure there was such a thing in the first place, but then again, better safe than sorry.

“Darling,” said the grandmother, wiping the corners of her mouth, folding her paper napkin neatly, and placing it on her plate. “I’ll start. I’m Ellen. I’m up from the city because I tell you my sons are plum out of their mind and they’ve gone and put me here because all I did was went and fell down. That is
all.
I was wearing my fur coat and getting ready to go out for the evening and wearing a low heel, just a little wedge, and just that afternoon Mavis had come by and she must have waxed the floors a little thick because I tell you, I stepped up to the landing and that little wedge heel went out and I was on the ground, boom, down I went. And for heaven’s sake I wasn’t down there but a minute when all of a sudden.
All
of a sudden.” She threw her hands up and looked around the brightly lit room. “And now, here. Here, of all places!”

“Terrible,” said Geronimo, shaking his head.

“Ellen, we’ve been over this.” The nurse at the head of the table had her hands folded in her lap.

“You, missy, can shut your smart little mouth,” Ellen said, pointing a finger at her. “You have
no
idea.” She sniffed, studying her hand, out in front of her. “Darling, look at this pretty one. It’s a topaz.”

She stretched her gloved hand across the table to me and I leaned over to look. In among the cluster of gems on her fingers was a fat square yellow one the color of amber.

“Amber happens from the pressure of the earth’s plates shifting and squashing the skeletons of dead insects and plant life, which is why you can sometimes find a piece with a whole preserved fly or mosquito for example in a chunk of amber.”

She stared at me. “Is that
so,
” she said, shaking her head. “I had
no
idea.”

I loved her forever.

The man next to me leaned in and said, “Name’s Bob Thornton. Paranoid schizophrenic. Nothing to worry about. Shock therapy, meds, just in for a checkup. They put cameras in my shaving mirror, bastards, caught me. By the by, she was drunk.”

“Who was?” I whispered.

“Tch, tch, tch. No names!” He tipped his head meaningfully at Ellen. “When she fell.”

I looked at Ellen. “Oh,” I said. She saw me looking at her and smiled. She held a hand up and waved, although we were only separated by the table.

“So. Now. Geronimo, introduce yourself. Have some manners, for pity’s sake,” she said, slapping him lightly on the arm.

He stood up, pushed his chair in, tucked in his shirttail, and bowed. “Geronimo,” he said. “It is a great pleasure to meet you.” He sat back down. Ellen patted his knee.