Fig (6 page)

He explains how she had no choice but to go off her medication once she was pregnant.

“It can harm the fetus,” Uncle Billy says. “After Annie had you, she really wanted to breast-feed, which meant not going back on the medicine right away. She'd had no problems during the pregnancy, and she ended up nursing longer than she ever expected. Three years passed and still no meds, and still no symptoms. That was when she began to wonder if she'd been misdiagnosed.”

Uncle Billy pauses, looking at me the way people do when they need me to understand.

“It made so much sense when we thought about it,” he says. “We all ended up coming to the same conclusion. We decided the first doctor paid too much attention to her family history and not enough to the fact her nervous breakdown likely resulted from having just lost her parents to a fire.”

Uncle Billy doesn't actually explain how Mama was mistaken, how they all were. He said enough when he said, “Your mother has a disease called schizophrenia.” He assumes I understand. “Sometimes the disease goes dormant,” he says. “It hides for a while before it resurfaces.” My uncle makes the sickness sound like a monster—and I can see it. Lurking in the shadows, hidden somewhere in my nineteenth year, ready to jump out and get me. Was this what was chasing me and Mama? Does this disease have yellow eyes and sharp claws and hungry teeth? Is it going to try and scare me to death?

Uncle Billy tells me how my parents asked him to talk to me about the disease. He explains how hard it is for them. “Your mother wanted me to tell you how sorry she is,” Uncle Billy says. “She didn't mean to scare you like she did. She wanted me to make sure you knew there was nothing chasing you that night.”

We're standing where I stopped to spit, and I can still see the red. I know my uncle wants to walk all the way out to the river, because the Silver River is his favorite place in the world. My favorite place was being inside my mother, where I felt safe because I didn't feel anything. Where I was safe before the scalpels cut me out like I was a piece of meat and not a baby. Sometimes Mama takes me to the Silver River too, and we play in the wading pool. When we go, she almost always sings,
“Take me down in the river to pray,”
which is weird because she doesn't believe in God.

I look at Uncle Billy. His eyes are a lighter shade of brown than mine, and as I study them his pupils turn into pinpoints because the sun is coming out. I push again at my loose tooth. I use my tongue like I did before, but this time I do not spit. This time, I swallow the blood.

Uncle Billy starts to walk again, and I follow, half running just to catch up with his long strides. We cross the ditch using a different bridge than the one by the orchard. This one is wider, not just a plank of wood thrown across the water. And now we are walking without talking. We walk until we reach the Silver River.

This is where the water is still calm and shallow, but if I followed it downstream, I would arrive at the place where it begins to rage. At this place, the water rushes forth so fast, it runs white. There, the white water crashes over the big rocks into a waterfall, and the waterfall fills the pool below with deep underwater chambers.

From the waterfall, the river splits: On the McAlister side, the river remains a river—wide and rushing onward, but our side is different. On our side, when the river resurfaces, it is channeled by curving walls of rock. Here the water calms and forms the shallow pool where Mama takes me to play. This is where Uncle Billy finally pauses. Here where the water turns white before it leaps over the rocks. The waterfall is loud, and when my uncle speaks, he almost shouts.

“Your grandfather made that pool,” he says, pointing at the wading pool below, farther down from the falls. “He hauled all those rocks and piled them into dams and walls to tame this river. He turned chaos into a place of peace.” My uncle stands there looking at the quiet pool, so I do the same. The stone wall circles out from a weeping willow that slants across the water. Uncle Billy shakes his head and sighs, and then he gestures for me to follow him down the stone steps embedded in the side of the steep hill.

When I reach the bottom, my uncle is already sitting on a rock by the pool, skipping stones. I stand on the last step to listen to the waterfall, which now sounds different from how it did when I was above it. Mama's shown me pictures of the gorges in Ithaca, where she used to live. She's in the photographs too, tiny compared with the gigantic waterfalls behind her. This is how I know how small our waterfall really is. I try to see through the white curtain of water, but the falling motion makes me look down. The water here is so deep, it turns to black.

*  *  *  *

I ask Daddy how to spell “schizophrenia,” and he tells me Mama has started taking her medicine again.

“Once the doctors get it all figured out,” he says, “she can come home.” Just when I think he's never going to spell “schizophrenia,” he grabs a piece of junk mail from the foyer and writes the word on the back of an envelope. It has the same
f
-sounding
ph
as “phobia,” and I wonder if
ph
is only used in words about the brain and how it works.

I try to pronounce “schizophrenia” and get it wrong every single time.

The loose tooth doesn't help. It turns the
s
and
z
into a waterfall of spit. Daddy tries to help. He breaks the word apart, syllable by syllable, and I repeat each one like an echo: “Skits.” “O.” “Fren.” “Eee.” “Uh.” Broken into five different parts, I say it perfectly, and now I know I could pronounce the word if I wanted to.

But I don't.

I'm too scared to say it out loud now that I know I could. Just like I'm too scared to say “nineteen,” I worry that saying “schizophrenia” will act like a spell and either make Mama worse or make me get sick too, or both. Because Daddy keeps trying to help me pronounce “schizophrenia,” I find a way to change the subject. I tell him there was another word I couldn't pronounce—the one I tried to read in
The Headless Cupid
.

Even though I can see the word clear as day inside my head, I pretend I can't. Even though I can actually see the word on the page, I pretend I can't. I pretend I can't remember how it was spelled, so I ask where the book is and Daddy shakes his head. “I'm sorry, Fig,” he says. “It was overdue. I returned those books a week ago.” I make a sad face, and he apologizes again and forgets all about helping me pronounce “schizophrenia.”

That night, I go to Gran's and my tooth falls out.

I'm in bed, and she's already asleep in the other room—I can hear her snoring. I hold the tooth between my fingers and use a slant of yellow light from a streetlamp outside to examine it.

It looks like the other teeth I've lost. The root is sharp and jagged and painful looking.

I put it under my pillow like I did before with Mama. I climb out of bed and find the envelope I shoved into the back pocket of my jeans, the one Daddy wrote
SCHIZOPHRENIA
on in careful lettering, and I put the tiny tooth inside. And then I put everything beneath my pillow.

I don't have to wear the splint at night anymore. Gran says I broke the habit. And sleep comes so much easier than it did before, especially tonight. The house is quiet. There is no ticking. And without my tooth, I feel lighter. I fall asleep thinking about the tooth fairy and what she will bring, but in the morning when I awake I find no silver dollar waiting for me. There is nothing under my pillow but an envelope addressed to schizophrenia.

wait
v.
1. To remain in expectation

October 21, 1982

I am seven years old today.

Gran is driving me home from her house, where she threw me a party. I've never had a party before, and I don't ever want one again.

All my other birthdays were special without a big party. And we always celebrate it on the actual day. Not the weekend right before like Gran insisted on doing. “You want your friends to actually come,” she said. As if I had friends in the first place. Usually Mama bakes a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, and the only people who come over are Uncle Billy and Gran. They sing “Happy Birthday” and I open presents and we eat cake—simple, but perfect.

This year, Gran decorated her living room with pink and white streamers and bought a cake from the grocery store that read
Fiona
in pink frosted cursive, and made me wear a cone-shaped hat that said
Birthday Girl!
And all the girls she invited stared at me and whispered into one another's ears whenever there were no adults in the room. I didn't know any of them—they were all the granddaughters of Gran's old-lady friends.

One girl gave me a bendable fake Barbie doll, which I'll have to hide from Mama because Mama hates Barbie. I don't know why. Mama hates a lot of things that other mothers like.

I stuffed the doll way down at the bottom of my backpack, under all my school supplies. I can't put her in the Dorothy suitcase, because one of my parents is bound to unpack all my clothes when I get back to the farm. I miss my normal birthdays, but everything is about to go back to how it used to be before Mama got sick. I hold my breath and cross my fingers.

On the phone today, Daddy said, “Mama coming home is your biggest present of all.”

And he is right. I can't wait to see her, and I'm not worried about Alicia Bernstein from Social Services anymore. It's been four months, but Mama is back on her medication, which means she is all better. Because Mama is better now, I too, get to move back to the farm for good.

Daddy keeps saying, “Everything is going to be okay.” And I believe him. I'm not even worried about turning nineteen. Inheriting the disease wouldn't be so bad. All I'd have to do is take the medicine and I'd be just fine.

Gran takes the interstate, and I ride in the back. When we left her house, it was raining, but now it's not. The sky is a wash of gray, and Gran's car glides along and you can barely hear the outside world the way you can in Daddy's truck or Mama's rusty Volvo. Part of the sky is as green as a bruise, and there are black things coming down that look like lassos, and Gran says, “Those are tornados.”

I look at the plains, where gigantic shadows sweep across the land as Gran watches me from the rearview mirror with sharp eyes. She tells me how safe we are.

“Perfectly fine,” she says.

She guides the long car off the interstate and into a gas station. From the backseat I watch her struggle with the pump—her hair and jacket ready to blow away. She knocks on my window even though I'm looking right at her. Muffled by wind and glass, Gran says, “Don't get out of the car.” She looks at me funny, tilting her head and squinting, and she says, “Promise me, Fig.”

And I nod my head. With my fingers, I make an X to cross my heart.

Gran never talks like this, and she never calls me Fig—just Fiona, which Mama says is only my name on paper. Daddy wanted to name me after his mother, because she'd been named after her mother, who had been named after hers, and that list goes on: forever backward. Somehow this list is more important than naming me after the grandmother I never got to know.

The name
Fiona
is the only thing Gran and I have in common.

I watch my grandmother make her way through the pumps and across the lot, toward the station to pay. A piece of tumbleweed rolls past before getting sucked into the sky like there is a God and he's drinking the world up through a straw. For a moment, I think Gran might blow away, but then she's inside.

That's when I break my promise. I get out of the car. I have to see how it feels.

The wind picks me up and throws me. The next pump over stops my body. My hair and yellow sundress are blowing away, and I've scraped both knees. The blood rises up in little dots.

I see Gran coming for me—steps like slow motion. Trash flaps through the air, and when she calls to me her voice is stolen by the wind. She reaches with one arm and I grab hold of it with both of mine. She pulls me up and drags me through the wind, shoving me into the car as if I'm trying to resist when I'm not. As we drive away her angry eyes glare at me from the rearview mirror.

Daddy is always talking about how strong nature is, and I finally understand. I want to tell Gran, but every time I try she puts her hand up to stop me from talking. And then she's just struggling to drive against the wind, and I know better than to talk. I practice silence as I watch her fingers clutch the steering wheel so hard, her age spots disappear by turning back to white. And wrapped around her right hand I see her beloved pearl rosary.

This rosary has been in Gran's family forever—passed along from mother to daughter, from one Fiona to the next, a procession that had to stop when Gran only gave birth to sons.

This rosary does not bear the Passion of Christ but Mother Mary instead. Like the chain connecting all the shiny pearls, Mary is made from silver, and her image dangles in the air right now. She bears her heart for all to see, and she stares at me. Exposed and wide open, her heart is trying to tell me a story. Swords and wounds and blooming roses, her heart is like a shooting star.

*  *  *  *

When we get home, Mama doesn't come downstairs to greet us, and Daddy acts like she isn't even here, even though we all know what a big deal it is that she's come home. Instead, he mixes his mother a tall gin and tonic, and when she takes it the pearl rosary is still wrapped around her wrist.

Daddy says he's been watching the news. “No need to go into the cellar,” he says. “But I do think you should stay the night.” And he hands Gran one of Mama's nightgowns and leads her to the guest bedroom. I can tell it's weird since this used to be Gran's house where she raised two boys and lived until Mama and Daddy moved in to have me and live together happily ever after.