B000FCJYE6 EBOK (7 page)

My mother picked Esau up by the armpits and ran with him to the bathroom. Esau screamed and kicked and wriggled and started sobbing. I ran after them and stood in the bathroom doorway, watching my mother pin Esau’s body to the edge of the sink, hold his head down with one hand, and pick glass out of his back, his legs and bottom, his sides. Esau muttered and cried and gasped when my mother turned him around and set him on the edge of the sink, facing her. His face was red and tight with tears, but his eyes were glassy and wild. He was looking around for something, but there was nothing to see. I felt like I was going to throw up again. Esau was talking about
the numbers, the answers,
one arm gesturing as he talked, shaking his head and then nodding, slowing down, laughing softly, closing his eyes.

“Mom?” I whispered.

“What, Katie?” she said, irritated, taking a wet cloth and wiping at the blood on Esau’s legs, leaning down hard on the cuts.

“Are you going to take him to Away?”

My mother didn’t answer for a minute. “He’s sick, Katie. We’ll do what’s best.”

She dabbed iodine on Esau’s cuts. The screaming and wiggling started again and Esau called out for her and she pinned his arms down with one hand and said, “I’m here, I’m right here,” but Esau didn’t believe her and kept screaming and my mother was losing her grip. I couldn’t see how Esau was suddenly so strong, his skinny limbs full of a furious force, wrists slipping through my mother’s hands like snakes. She said, “Katie, tell your father I need his help,” her voice rising on
help,
as if she was yelling for him herself. Esau wriggled off the sink and fell to the floor. I looked down at him, his face unrecognizable, not my brother, laughing but not laughing and crying at the same time, and talking, talking, talking, his mouth moving in words that didn’t make any sense. I watched my mother’s hands, white at the knuckles, circle Esau’s wrists and hold them above his head on the floor. She said, “Katie,
now.
”

I ran back out to the dining room. My father was standing at the head of the table, looking at the glass and blood on the floor. The room was smelly with my barf, still dripping off the edges of the table. My stomach heaved and I was embarrassed.

“Dad, Mom says she needs you to help.”

“Not now, Katie.” My father’s voice was calm. He turned and walked to the living room and poured himself a drink the color of iodine. “Daddy’s just having a little pick-me-up.” As he passed me, he laid his hand on my head and kept going.

I went back to the bathroom. Esau mumbled, then let out a raspy scream. I thought his throat must be hurting by now, but if the glass didn’t hurt then maybe his voice wouldn’t either. My mother struggled to hold him, one hand around his wrists and one on his ankles, Esau’s naked body stretched and arched in the middle like a bow, trembling violently. My mother looked up and said, “Where in the hell is your father?”

“He said he’s having a pick-me-up.”

She laughed. “Oh, Jesus,” she said, shaking her head. “All right. I need you to get something out of the medicine cabinet.”

I stepped over Esau, stood on the edge of the bathtub, climbed onto the sink, and opened the cabinet.

“Top shelf,” she said. “Back behind the other bottles. Brown bottle. No, the one next to it. That’s it. Get me four of those and a glass of water.”

I climbed down. Esau opened his eyes and looked straight at me.

“Three days, I was dreaming the numbers, all of the numbers,
I had the answers,
are you listening?”

I nodded, paralyzed, holding the pills and the water.

He talked to me when he had his episodes because he knew I would listen. My parents said he didn’t know who I was, but that was a horrible lie. Your brother always knows who you are.

My mother took the pills. “Katie, come hold his wrists.” I knelt on his wrists, but they pulled away. I tried to be heavier, to hold myself steady as Esau’s arms shook and yanked under my knees. My mother put an elbow on Esau’s chest and pried open his mouth with one hand, pushing the pills to the back of his throat with the other. Esau gagged and spit, wrinkling his forehead. Tears ran down the sides of his face and into his ears. She poured water into his mouth. Esau coughed and gagged, but he swallowed.

We sat in silence for what seemed like hours while he screamed, then sobbed, his cries gradually slowing down.

“Now what?” I whispered. Esau’s body jerked awkwardly.

“Now we wait,” my mother replied. Her face was drawn.

I slumped where I sat on Esau’s arms. “Why does this happen?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, why does he get sick like this?”

She sighed. “He has a sad-sickness.”

“Why?”

“Because it runs in the family.” She looked at me. “You know how you have red hair like mine and Esau has black hair like Dad’s?” I nodded. “Well, that’s what it means when something runs in the family.”

“Did he get it from Dad?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Why do you think that?”

I studied her face and decided she was lying. I only asked because she had told my father to his face that this was All His Damned Fault.

“Was it Aunt Rose?” I asked doubtfully.

“Maybe. We don’t know.”

“Am I going to get it?” I panicked a little and looked down at Esau. He was breathing more deeply, his eyes low lidded like a frog’s.

“No, you’re not going to get it. You’re born with it. It’s not like catching the flu.”

“I have the flu.”

She laughed a little. “I know.”

“I don’t want to go to school today.”

“No, you don’t have to.”

“I want to stay here with Esau.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Esau’s staying home today,” I told her. “Esau,” I said, watching his face. His eyes didn’t move.

“He can’t hear you, baby,” my mother said.

“He can so. Esau,” I said again, shaking him. His chest was narrow and caved in, the ribs moving under the skin when I shook him. He looked like the drawing of Jesus that hung on my grandmother’s wall. Skinny and dead. “Esau, you’re staying home with me to play Monopoly and have SpaghettiOs and take a nap. We’re not going to school. We have the flu. We have a sad-sickness. Dad has a pick-me-up. He’s not mad about the coffee. Right?” I looked at my mother. She nodded.

“Esau,” I said. His mouth moved slightly.

“He wants to talk to me,” I said, louder. I felt my chin start to wrinkle and pursed my mouth to stop it. “He has something to tell me.”

My mother reached out to touch my head. I jerked away.

“He’s not here, honey,” she said.

“Yes he
is
here, he is
so
here,” I cried, shaking him some more. “He has something to
say,
he said we should
listen,
you’re not
listening
to him.” I put my head down by Esau’s mouth to listen. I felt his breath on my ear, the hissing sound of words that wouldn’t come out.

“Katie, he’s sleeping.”

“Liar!” I yelled. I stood up and went to the door and turned to face my mother. “You’re going to send him to Away, aren’t you?”

“Katie, we—”

“You are. You’re going to send him to Away and then I can’t sleep and we eat fish sticks and Dad goes for a drive for forever and everyone
leaves
me and and and—,” I wailed, and started crying too hard to talk, so I gasped and hiccupped and sat down on the floor and put my head on the bathroom tile and watched it get all wet from tears.

She picked me up and carried me to my room. We walked down the hall, through the dining room, past my father in his chair. I bawled, “He hates Away, he told me the food is awful and the beds are hard and everyone’s sad there and he hates the white room,” and my mother said, “Shhhh, you’re tired,” and I yelled, “I’m not tired, what about Esau, he hates the white room.” I was falling asleep as we walked, as my mother set me down on the bed and pulled the pink quilt over me. She leaned down and put her hand on my forehead and said, “You’re giving yourself a fever, honey. Just try to sleep. I’ll be back in a little while and bring you Seven-Up,” and I said, “Everybody just leaves me,” and my mother said, “I’m not leaving,” and I nodded and closed my eyes. My mother began to move away and I said, “Mom,” and I had something to ask her, but I forgot what. The morning light came through the curtains, a cold winter white. She leaned down and kissed my forehead.

“I’m not going to go away,” she said. And shut the door.

I could hear my parents talking in the living room. I slid off the bed and opened my door.

“Arnold, we have to take him in.” My mother stood with her back to my father, looking out the window with her arms crossed. My father let out a long breath.

“I know,” he said.

“How long do you think it’ll be this time?” my mother asked.

“I don’t know, Claire. How would I know?”

In September, it had seemed like a very long time. The longer it was, the quieter they were, until they were almost whispering when they sat at the table. As if the words were so heavy they couldn’t be said out loud, they would be too hard to lift. I had heard them talking about the doctors. My father had spat out the word
institution.
He had spat out
facility.

Institution, facility, episode.
Also,
medicine, court order,
and
They.

You could arrange the words to mean different things. I arranged them in my head, filling in the blanks like I did in my vocabulary workbook. The way they went, if I had it figured out correctly, was: The
episodes
are occurring with
increasing frequency and severity.
(Sometimes there were long phrases or whole sections of the conversation that I didn’t get.) The
facility
where Esau usually went was
low security. They
said that the
patient
might soon require a
high-security facility.
Otherwise known as an
institution.
Or simply
State.

My
brother,
in other words, would be
institutionalized
and, my father spat out, turned into a
zombie,
handed over to the
experts
who could take care of his
son, goddammit,
better than he could himself.

On the other hand, you could arrange it this way:
They were having increasingly frequent episodes and the patient would institutionalize the zombie experts himself. Goddammit.

It was good to have a word.

There was a pause. My mother asked, “Do you think they’ll put him into State?”

My father shook his head. “Could be. I almost hope so. We can’t keep paying for this.” He put his head in his hands. “Do you know what this means?” he said quietly. “I will have failed. Do you understand that? Failed.”

My mother turned from the window then and looked at my father. “No,” she said. She touched his shoulder, and went down the hall to the bathroom.

I went out to my father where he sat and waited at his elbow until he picked me up and put me on his lap. Together, we looked at the place where my mother had been.

Somehow the day disappeared. My father’s voice rumbled on the phone, and then he went into the bathroom and wrapped Esau in a quilt. He carried him, looking like a quilted cocoon, to his bedroom. I listened to my mother in the kitchen and went down the hall to sit where I could watch her. I heard my father close Esau’s door and watched him go to the bar.

His voice sounded like someone talking underwater.

“I’ve put him down,” he said.

“What time are we taking him in?” asked my mother, accepting the drink he handed her as he entered the kitchen.

“They said early afternoon. Need to leave around ten.” He leaned back against the counter, set his glass down, and put the heels of his hands to his eyes. “Do you know what he said to me?” he asked.

My mother shook her head, staring down at the pan on the stove.

“He said—he looked right at me, you know how he does? How he gets clear for a minute, like the fog just lifts for a second? He looked at me and said, ‘Dad, it’s better in here.’ Like to reassure me.”

My father laughed as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying. “And I didn’t know what he meant. Better where? In the blankets? In the hospital? He doesn’t know where he is, Claire. In his mind, maybe? He said, ‘It’s quiet now.’ Before he fell asleep. ‘It’s quiet.’”

He fumbled behind him for his drink, his mouth moving.

My mother turned and offered him a plate of mac and cheese, and he knocked it out of her hand. A splat of yellow hit the wall by the new avocado-colored phone that matched the fridge.

Then he cried.

My mother’s hand hovered in midair. She put it on his arm. He jerked away, bumping into his drink, the glass skidding on the counter, sloshing a little. He leaned against the hallway wall and bent over, his fists against his stomach.

“What have I done?” he said.

Then he walked into the living room and put his fist through the window.

Cold wind exploded into the room as if it had been pressing up against the glass, a dark animal rubbing its skin against the house, looking for a way to get in.

He stared at his arm, distracted. What little blood there was, what with the cold, froze to his skin in black dribbles of ice.

He walked down the hall. The front door shut and the car started, its wheels crunching through the snow.

My mother came into the living room and rested her hands on the back of the couch, looking at the black hole where the window had been. The oak tree behind the house seemed to have come inside to stand between the La-Z-Boy and the TV, its boughs sagging with snow, blue in the moonlight that poured into the room. Wind picked up the dry snow and sent it hissing over the windowsill, small drifts piling against the furniture, settling into the corners of chairs.