Bandit (11 page)

M
om told me her first memory also happened on a stairwell. The cold, dusty back steps, alone, where she’d gotten lost and sat down in her lostness. She thinks she was only three years old. “Eventually I realized I would have to just get up and find my way out or I’d be sitting there crying forever.

“No one can find you in the dark anyway. You just have to walk yourself out,” she added.

M
om left home at fifteen, for good, just walked away one February morning. Her dad dropped her off at a corner near her school and she just turned the other direction and kept going. She was wearing a skirt, knee socks, tennis shoes, sweater, coat, and had nothing on her but schoolbooks and some change. Walking slowly in the cold, aimless at first, she decided she’d walk all the way to the family cabin, three hundred miles north. Once she made it to Olivet, the next town north of Marshall, she knew for sure she wouldn’t turn back. She hitchhiked some, telling her rides she was supposed to be meeting her family at the cabin, but that she had gotten lost. She made it to the cabin in the middle of the night, with no one around the lake for miles, no lights anywhere, just silent snow. For three days she survived in the unheated cabin by
building an igloo of blankets in the living room and rationing out the half-box of saltines left in the pantry.

Her mind went foggy in weakness and hunger. She wrapped herself in blankets, tied them with fishing rope, and did nothing but look out onto the frozen lake. She made up a weird song to sing to herself, a song she has always remembered, and I have heard her sing, only to herself:

How thick and bright I loved my mom when she told me this story. I almost buckled to the floor. It made me feel exposed in the connection. My loneliness bubbled up to meet hers, as if looking for kin.

The house where my mom grew up in Marshall, Michigan, was an old six-bedroom house, now run as a bed and breakfast, built on property owned by James Fenimore Cooper. She had three brothers, but kept to herself mostly, wandering the three-acre property, climbing pine trees until they bent, just swaying atop them, or talking to the cattle on the next property over. She read a lot and dreamed of being an artist. She loved being alone, like I did, and would shut herself into a dark cabinet for hours just to hum and think.

And lifelong sadness sprung from the roots in this house. She finally told her best friend that her eldest brother
had been molesting her at night, in her bed, for years. The friend told her boyfriend, only fourteen years old all of them, but he called her and talked to her about it. He said, “Here’s what you say to him. You say, ‘You have to stop doing this. I will tell my parents if you don’t.’” She said she’d needed someone to give her the words. And she told him to stop, and he did. I don’t like seeing this uncle at family occasions. Quiet and unfriendly, he is unlike anyone else in the clan. I perceive his silence as strained or simmering, but I’m sure that is just my perception.

It’s unclear how much her parents knew about the abuse, or believed it if they did know. Mom could take only a year of silence and denial in that imposing house before she chose to flee.

Probably she would’ve come back on her own, maybe called her parents soon to come get her. But they’d already sent a state trooper to check the cabin to see if she was there. When she opened the door to let him in, she said he grabbed her arm, and she didn’t like it, so she snapped and threatened him with the hunting knife she had pulled from behind her back.

And she never went back to Marshall. She was a delinquent now, a runaway, brandishing a knife at a cop. Her parents struck a deal with the courts and got her into a hospital instead of juvenile detention. A good hospital, in fact, the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of Michigan Hospital. First she shuffled the halls of the adult women’s ward in a Thorazine haze, waiting for a bed to open in the
adolescent unit. “Thorazine kept you compliant,” she told me. “It felt like your brain had been hit with a giant sledgehammer. Brainless, but walking around, like a zombie.”

Diagnoses came and went with trends or with new doctors. First she was given the borderline personality disorder label that other troubled teens were getting in the mid sixties, then it changed to manic depressive/bipolar, which she kept for most of her life. But any breakdown that landed her in a psych ward would often come with an undifferentiated schizophrenic title too.

Mental illness is a gray cloud inside of a gray cloud. It gets sharpened into focus with different names, but names change, and with that, identities change. She felt like a shape shifter with each new name, hoping, somehow, it could pin her to her right self, and help. The names didn’t help. The drugs, as I saw it, just numbed her. Certainly they helped keep her calm and functioning reasonably well throughout her life, but I wonder what went missing under that murk.

But a state hospital would have just kept her drugged and chained to a bed indefinitely. If she had been born a few years earlier, into the previous generation, she would have been lobotomized.

She thought that if she was good and worked hard at getting better they would let her out. They hadn’t told her she was going to stay for three years, regardless of her progress. It hurts me to hear her tell this part of the story, that they didn’t tell her, didn’t think it mattered, or that she wasn’t lucid enough or old enough to consult. It would have been better for
her if they had told her. All summer and through the fall she worked, was obedient and serious in therapy, listened and gave up her secrets. She wanted to be able to leave for Christmas, a holiday that mattered to her, to be with her family.

November came and her therapist told her she would not be home for Christmas, or any time soon. Enraged, she stormed down the long hall to the sunroom, the only place on the adolescent floor without locked grates on the windows. She kicked the window out, smashing her leg through the glass in its metal frame, and jumped out of the window, four stories to the ground, and broke her leg.

It was pouring rain. She dragged herself along the sidewalk for a little while in a sorry attempt to escape until a doctor found her and carried her back in.

After months of isolation, she started over. Now more jaded, I imagine, but still hopeful about entering the rest of the world again. She finished high school in the hospital and applied for college when she was almost eighteen. They had a classroom right there in the psych ward, with some of the best teachers from the University of Michigan teaching their classes—it was not the worst place to finish high school, really. Her graduating class was eight people, the largest one yet.

How much of this early damage predisposed my mom to Dad’s cons? I suspect there is a relationship. But I assign no blame to Mom for being duped.

I found out about this when I was a teenager and I asked her about her prom. I didn’t go to my own prom because I thought the whole thing was stupid and I wanted to know
what hers was like. I sat numbly as she spilled this whole story out. “So. I didn’t go to prom either,” she ended.

She left straight from the hospital for college, in 1968, to Grand Valley State, to study psychology. For a year she did wonderfully, was so happy to be in the world, content to have schoolwork. She left college, though, perhaps out of this very confidence. She moved to Israel to work on a kibbutz for a year, a hippie dream of hers, and it was like heaven. The square, yellowy photos I have seen of her from this time seem unreal—cool, free kids playing at utopia, working the earth and forging a tiny community. During the day she picked tomatoes or packed green grapes into crates. On breaks from daily work she killed scorpions and snakes or read sci-fi novels under the pistachio trees. At night she learned to cook and dance and to repair shoes and tires, trying to catch up to the things she missed growing up in a hospital. She had come so far.

When she returned to the States, she moved back to Grand Rapids, but it was impossible to pick up her studies again. One semester in, she was failing all of her classes. A friend of hers advised her not to go back. She thought about what she wanted to do, where she’d like to be, and she decided she wanted to move to Baltimore to be with her Aunt Molly, the woman for whom I was named.

“The first year,” she said, “I just shadowed her.” Just followed her around, modeling her, learning the adult world. Soon she got a job as an assistant in a home for mentally disabled children, and the reward of it encouraged her to finish her degree in clinical psychology. She went
toward
her
own problems with an intense bravery and intelligence that humbles me, even now. She specialized in them, in order to help others.

After twenty years of working in clinics and managing her own private practice, she left it. Addiction counseling, especially, is brutal—full of failure, managing relapses, deaths. She took a job without any intense emotional requirements: in the footwear department at REI. She outfitted adventurers with boots for mountain climbing in Kenya or canoeing the Au Sable River. It was a more pleasant and low-stakes way of continuing on as a therapist of sorts. Not in spite of it all—the betrayal, abuse, deceit—but
because
of it all, she still loved people. She gave them what she could—a little help, a little conversation, some good advice—then set them off.

D
ad spent some of his seven-year prison term in Milan, Michigan, and the rest in Pennsylvania. I was probably about fifteen when my grandpa took me to visit him. My mom would not take me, and my sister did not want to go; she didn’t want to see him there. My grandpa had been trying to strike up an open communication with Dad. He’d been writing him letters, sending him books, hoping to get to the root of his choices, wanting to know
why why why.
Of course, inquiring this of the criminal himself assumes the criminal (1) has a reason and (2) is capable of articulating that reason. I had already given up my faith in these two concepts, but I was—we all were—curious to see what Grandpa could elicit from Dad.

In every way my grandpa was different from my dad. Grandpa was so smart and good, so transparent and open; he liked to ask me about my life and talk about death and
God and art. A Jewish migrant from Russia who fled with his family from their home to escape persecution, my grandpa was a hard worker, a voracious reader, and a deep thinker. He was a Marine, fought in the Philippines in WWII, married his only sweetheart and dedicated himself to her, and made a good, honest living as a salesman. He made a real life all of his family depended on, including me. He looked straight at me when he spoke. He was one of the few people I communicated with on any meaningful level as a teenager.

It was winter, and we drove to Pennsylvania slowly. The night before our visit we went to see a movie in a tiny, empty theater. I can’t remember much about it but I am certain it was a disaster movie involving an earthquake or volcano, and I remember watching the actors running while computer-generated lava oozed over the streets of their town. I remember crying a little at that in the dark cold of the theater, wishing that would happen. I was in high school now, and I wasn’t seeing a therapist anymore, nor was I talking much to anyone. The appeal of total annihilation as a viable alternative to my current existence didn’t seem worrisome to me. Inwardly, I was as miserable as a teen could be. Outwardly, I was fine, didn’t care, didn’t care about anything.

Over dinner that night at a Denny’s near our hotel Grandpa tried to draw me out. “Molly,” he started, “are you angry at your father?”

I stopped poking at my food to look at him. He was smiling, patient. “No. Well. I mean, I am angry about what he did to my sister.”

“… but you’re not angry about what he did to
you
? He did this to you, also, Molly, not just your sister. You talk like he’s only your sister’s father.”

I drew my arms in. “No, because I already didn’t care about him. She cared. He was her world. He was never my world. He was nothing to me.”

We let this utterance sit between us, both feeling how false it was. I regretted saying it, and felt old in that moment, too old for myself. “You know, Molly, you are allowed to be angry. He is your father. He abandoned you.”

I looked at Grandpa: his kind brown eyes, his gentle smile radiating calm love. I wished so much he was my dad instead. I was jealous of my mom that she’d had him for a father—wise, understanding, caring, strong. I didn’t know at the time he’d failed to protect her, too.

“No,” I said, trembling, tears in my eyes. Just no. That’s all I could manage. We left the conversation at the table and returned to the hotel in silence.

The next day we pulled up to the prison, a long, low building, surrounded by fields of unmarred snow in all directions. Official as school. We filled out the forms, passed through the metal detector and into the visiting room.

Up until that point I thought the room would be like it was in the movies—telephone stations with plexiglass partitions that mournful wives would press their palms to melodramatically. But this was not maximum security. Instead it was open, with long lunch tables with fixed stools exactly like the ones in the school cafeteria.

I looked into the faces of the prisoners around the room, trying to recognize one of them. Some of them were sharing snack cakes or chips from the near-empty vending machine in the corner. The visitors were smiling and talking softly, with an uncanny pleasant sadness, as if today were some tragic holiday. Grandpa held my hand and pulled me toward an empty table, where we sat to wait for Dad to come out.

He seemed so short and small, like a boy, when I saw him in his jumpsuit. He smiled and asked Grandpa about the trip, the weather, and they talked about adult things while I watched their faces quietly.

Dad was talking about us girls now, as if I weren’t there. He didn’t look at my eyes, even when he did turn to talk to me.

“Hi Dad,” I remember saying, as if I had been invisible during the entire first half of the conversation. I kept a smile on as he asked me general questions about my life, like nothing at all was wrong, like we weren’t in a prison but at home, on the couch.

When all of his questions about who was in what grade and who liked what subjects and who better not be dating yet were answered, Dad sighed heavily and said nothing for a while. Grandpa brought a paperback book out of his leather coat pocket and handed it to Dad, who turned it over calmly to the guard who’d rushed over to inspect it. The guard took the book back to his station and passed some small electronic device over it and then returned it, a little annoyed. Grandpa was holding back, I could tell. It was supposed to be just a nice visit, nothing too serious, I reasoned. Soon we ran out of unimportant things to say.

“If I did it, it was an out-of-body experience,” I heard Dad say when Grandpa asked him what he thought about the crimes. The sentence sank on us. All three of us looked at the floor. No one said anything else after that.

The sunny photomural of a woodland scene on the wall I had been glancing at all during the visit, I learned, was a backdrop for photos. An inmate squeezed hard the two young boys he was having his picture taken with, and they laughed and squealed in mock pain. It was heartbreaking to me, the photomural, that fake forest. I watched the other kids line up with their dads for photos. Very young kids seemed happy, oblivious, but the older kids were sad. I watched their eyes when the camera flashed. Their inmate dads smiled proudly. The kids were hurt, under their smiles. I looked at my grandpa and my dad and thought about myself. I was hurt too, I decided. I wanted to scream it to both of them, to the whole prison. Instead, I smiled, and put on my coat, and hugged Dad goodbye.

Outside, we walked back to the car, along a perfectly shoveled path scattered with salt grinding underfoot. For sure, I thought, that would be the last time I’d ever do that. He’d get out of prison, and this part of my life would be over, and I’d never have to visit my dad in prison ever again. Before we split paths to either side of the car I turned and hugged my grandpa hard without saying anything.