Fragmented (12 page)

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, making a face. “I sometimes get these phantom pains in my legs, especially after PT.”

“What’s physical therapy like?”

“There’s lots of massaging and stretching to keep the blood circulating. And then the therapists heft me up in something that looks like a sex swing and they move my legs on a treadmill.”

“Can you feel any of it?”

“I get tingles sometimes.”

“The tingles are a good thing, right?”

“Better than no feeling at all,” she confirmed. “I have to remind myself sometimes that I’m pretty lucky. When I was in rehab in Boston right after the accident, my roommate at the facility had lost the use of her arms and her legs. She had to relearn how to use her hands just so she could use her wheelchair. All I had to deal with was trying to stand up.”

“I don’t know how you can be so positive,” I marveled.

“I wasn’t always the poster child for paraplegia. I was really angry when I first started PT. I couldn’t do anything on my own. I thought my life was over—that I’d never be able to live on my own. I was mad all the time, and I shut out people who only wanted to help. It got even worse when I got out of the hospital. The rehabilitation center had been a safe space, but now I was thrust into the real world where people gawked at my chair or had no patience for how slowly it took me to do things. Stairs I used to run up two at a time were now like this massive mountain I would never be able to climb. My body had given up on me, and I was ready to do the same to it.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“Do you believe in karma?” she asked.

“Like the belief that bad people get what they deserve in the end, and people who are kind and good are rewarded?”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

I hesitated. It was a straightforward question that should have resulted in a simple answer, but my response was heavily weighted by a family history over which I had no control. No matter how kind or cruel I was in this life, there was nothing I could do about genetics.

“I guess so.”

“I wasn’t a very nice person in high school,” Raleigh started carefully. “And I suppose I didn’t get much nicer in college, either. When I was bullying someone, no one else could see how insecure I was.” She shook her head. “Sometimes I think the car accident had to happen for me to become a better person.”

I reflected on my own life. Did my mother getting sick have to happen for me to escape Memphis and get to college? Was I going to get her disease as reparation for all the shitty things I’d done in my life? I also couldn’t forget that Jenn had broken up with me just hours after I had masturbated in the shower with thoughts of Raleigh on my mind. In hindsight, that seemed very karmic to me. I shut my eyes before the emotions could leak out.

When I moved my hand to wipe at my damp eyes, my fingers accidentally brushed against Raleigh’s leg. I jerked my hand back just an inch or so from the unintentional contact, but it might as well have been a mile.

“It’s okay.” She let out a shaky breath. “You can touch them.”

My fingers retracted into a loose fist before extending again. “I’ve never known anyone in a wheelchair before.”

Raleigh flashed me a rueful smile. “I won’t hold that against you.”

The pads of my middle and pointer finger touched first. Raleigh’s leg was solid and warm. I’d thought it would feel different somehow. She couldn’t feel my touch; shouldn’t I be able to tell?

It seemed like such a waste. They were lovely legs underneath the skirt—long and lean and capable looking. I dragged my fingertips across her bare knee. There were no telltale marks, no scars, or any other kind of signal that they were useless.

I heard Raleigh’s sharp intake of air.

“Did you feel that?” I recoiled as though my explorative touch had harmed her.

Raleigh shook her head. “No. It was just the visual.” She looked a little embarrassed by her reaction. “No one’s touched my legs since the accident—no one besides doctors and physical trainers, at least, and my aunt when she helps me around the house. Even my parents were afraid to touch me.”

“Will you ever be able to walk again?”

Raleigh pushed out a deep breath. “The odds aren’t in my favor."

“Not even with physical therapy? Or is there some kind of surgery you could have?”

“I'm broken, Harper. And that’s okay,” she said, patiently smiling. “It’s not your job to fix me.”

I reached out again, nearly as tentatively as I’d done with her legs, and brushed a few long strands of blonde hair away from her forehead. I gently tucked a lock of defiant hair behind one ear. I bit down on my lower lip. I had never seen such intensity in a person’s eyes before. I wondered if my own mirrored the heat of Raleigh’s gaze.

My fingertips grazed down the outer shell of Raleigh’s ear and across a perfectly shaped lobe. My hand continued on that path and traced a line down a defined jaw line, stopping only when I reached her chin. The backs of my fingers touched her bottom lip with butterfly soft pressure, and my pulse quickened when her eyes snapped shut. I thought her breathing had become subtly heavier, but I couldn’t be sure over the beating of my own heart pounding in my ears.

Raleigh’s eyes were still shut, and I leaned forward and closer until our mouths nearly touched. I could feel the heat of her breath against my lips. I knew I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t want to erase the final breath between us. I shouldn’t want to feel the soft warmth of her knee beneath my hand. I had just been dumped—via text message. I leaned back and the springs of the mattress squeaked with the movement.

Raleigh’s eyes opened and trained on me. She seemed not to have noticed the near-kiss or at least made no comment about it. “Do you want to get together over Fall Break and study for midterms?”

“I really wish I could,” I said in earnest, “but I have to go to Memphis over break.”

“What’s in Memphis?”

“My family.” I rarely talked about my life before Chicago, not even with my closest friends, but Raleigh had been so transparent about her own life that it made me want to tell her all of my secrets. “There’s some stuff I have to take care of.”

“You’re from the South?” She cocked her head and regarded me. “I don’t hear the accent.”

“Get a few beers in me, and it’ll slip out.”

“That’s what
she
said,” Raleigh laughed at her own joke.

I shook my head and smirked. “Yeah, I kind of walked into that one, didn’t I?”

She grinned cheekily, and once again I found myself wanting to kiss her perfect mouth.

“Are you going to be gone the entire time?”

I bobbed my head. “I’m heading out Saturday morning, and I won’t get back until late on Tuesday.”

“That must be some pretty important family business if you’re willing to sacrifice study time,” she observed. She was clearly curious about the reason for the trip, and as much as I wanted to be totally open about my family and my past, I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. Some secrets were better left unsaid.

“I’ll find time to study on the train,” I assured her and myself.

“You’re not flying?”

“I don’t like planes.” The train from Chicago to Memphis was nearly a ten and a half hour trip, one way, but I had never been on an airplane before and I wanted to keep it that way. Driving would have saved me about two hours, but I could be productive on the train; I couldn’t do that in the car.

“Well, since this will probably be the last time I see you for a while, I have something for you.”

“But it’s not my birthday.”

She ignored me as she moved from her bed to her chair and maneuvered herself across the carpeting to a bookshelf lined with paperbacks. I could have achieved the task in a fraction of the time, but I knew enough to let her move at her own pace. I was in no hurry anyways.

She pulled a well-worn paperback from one of the shelves and pressed it into my hands.

I read the cover aloud. “
To Kill a Mockingbird
?”

“I figured it was about time you read it, Harper Lee,” she explained. “And this way you’ll have a reason to come back from Memphis to give me back my book.”

I had more than enough reasons to leave Memphis without the book, but I didn’t tell her that.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The train rocked me back and forth like a mother’s lullaby—not my mother—but someone’s. I’d told myself I would never go back. Wild horses couldn’t drag me back. Yet, here I was on a night train to Memphis.

Beyond the glass pane of my window the world slept, much like the fellow train riders with whom I shared the sparsely populated passenger car. I should have been sleeping as well, but anxiety about what I’d be facing at the end of the line kept me vigilant. I hadn’t seen my mother since my high school graduation. My brother had signed her out for the day from her residential program so she could be at the event. I’d been so nervous about her presence, worried she might relapse in a new environment with so much energy and excitement around her, that I hadn’t had time to be worried about mundane things like tripping across the stage to receive my diploma or on which side of my graduation cap the tassel was supposed to hang.

I had thought I’d left it all behind me. I’d thought if only I could run far enough and fast enough and never look back that I could be free of my past. I’d changed my accent and cut off almost all my ties to friends and family from Memphis, but nothing was ever that easy. You can’t run away from who you are or what you’re going to be.

I rummaged through my school bag in search of the appropriate textbook. When I returned to Chicago I’d be faced with midterms. But instead of pulling out my cumbersome anatomy text, my hand fell to the thick paperback Raleigh had lent me. I looked at the abstract cover—a pocket watch, a ball of yarn, and a bird that I assumed was a mockingbird. The cover’s corners were gently rounded from use, and the inside font was typewriter black on yellowing pulp. I imagined Raleigh’s hands touching the book, and I placed my own hand on the front cover as though I might be able to sense some residual heat.

Ignoring my studies for the moment, I opened to the first chapter. I intended to only read the opening pages, but I found myself being sucked in by the familiar rhythm of the southern dialect that had been my native tongue until I’d entered college. Somewhere in my mind was a reasonable voice reminding me that I needed to study for midterms. But the louder, more familiar voice wanted to know why Boo Radley wouldn’t come out.

My brother was waiting for me at the Memphis train terminal. With his nose buried in a newspaper, he didn’t notice me until I was standing in front of him. He looked fatter than I remembered—balder, too.

“Hey.”

He looked up from his newspaper and light blue eyes met mine. He and my mother had the same eyes. I’d ended up darker than all of them, like my father. I couldn’t remember anything about my dad, but I thought about him sometimes when I stared too long at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. How could my mother stand it, I’d wonder, to look at her child and be reminded of the man who’d abandoned her?

Damien kept the pleasantries and small talk to a minimum on the drive to his house. He lived in a subdivision outside of the city dotted with cookie-cutter McMansions. In the dark I could see no distinguishing features besides the numbers on the mailboxes that differentiated one house from the next.

Damien helped me with my wheeled bag, lugging it upstairs to the second floor. The guest bedroom was a good size—nearly larger than my entire apartment. I would be sharing a Jack-and-Jill bathroom with his son, Austin, whom I’d only ever seen in pictures.

Damien stood awkwardly outside of the room that was to be mine for the long weekend. His face was red and his forehead was slightly sweaty from the exertion of carrying my luggage to the second floor. The house was eerily quiet, save the constant tick-tock of an unseen clock. It was late, and everyone else had been in bed long ago. “Do you need anything?” he asked me.

A dozen inappropriate responses came to mind, but I shook my head. We were strangers, he and I, connected by blood ties and DNA, but we’d never been close. He had practically been a teenager when I was born, and now more time and geography separated us.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he said before disappearing behind his bedroom door.

That night I had a dream that I was hanging out with Raleigh at the twenty-four-hour diner where my Uncle Jerret and Aunt Olive used to take me for special occasions. Everything was as I remembered it from the surly waitresses to the faux jukeboxes on the tables.

It was just the two of us, sitting at a booth across from each other. I ordered the blueberry pancakes and she ordered a burger. I remember wanting to hold her hands across the table, but was too afraid someone I knew might see us.

When our waitress brought us our food, I dove into mine, and immediately poured a ton of syrup on my breakfast food, even though in real life I didn’t like the stuff. Raleigh laughed at my enthusiasm, but not maliciously. It was the kind of laugh-and-shake-your-head thing as if to say, you’re ridiculous, but I still find you irresistibly charming.

I told her to dig into her food, but she made a face after she bit into her burger. When I asked her what was wrong, she dropped the sandwich back on the plate and the meat fell out of the bun. It was completely uncooked—raw ground beef jammed between a sesame seed bun.

When I looked back up at her, blood started dripping out of her mouth. I panicked, worried she was hurt, but she told me not to worry about her and to keep eating. My own food had become inedible, however; the maple syrup had also turned to blood. I looked up again to say something about it, but the words got stuck in my throat when I saw that Raleigh’s eyes were completely blacked out.

She smiled vacantly at me and her teeth were yellowed and not all there like a carved jack-o-lantern. My skin crawled from the sight. Every fiber in my being told me to get away from her. Then she leaned across the table and tried to kiss me. I jumped up away from her, and she stared at me, sticking her lower lip out in a pout that under other circumstances would have been cute.

Her hazel-green eyes had been replaced with black marbles, and she noted sadly, “I thought you liked me.”

I tried to talk again, but it was like my tongue wouldn’t work. Then, as if the bloodied food and Raleigh’s appearance weren’t frightening enough, dark red liquid started pouring out of her open mouth. She continued to sit in the booth, nonplussed, while thick blood gushed out of her mouth like her face had turned into a waterfall.

The room filled up with the liquid and I tried to swim out the front doors. I’d never been that good of a swimmer even though I’d grown up near the Mississippi River. I was too afraid as a kid to go swimming because I was convinced that a jellyfish would sting the bottom of my foot, and I wouldn’t be able to use my legs, and I’d sink like a rock and drown. No one had ever bothered to tell me that jellyfish didn’t hang out in freshwater rivers.

In the dream I tried to doggie paddle through the red stuff, but it was like trying to move in quicksand. I just kept getting stuck, and worst of all, it was pulling me back towards Raleigh.

While I struggled, she somehow was able to float on top of all of the thick, sticky liquid. She had her arms wide open like she wanted to hug me. Her bottom jaw was slacked to one side like she’d broken her jawbone, and she just kept saying, “But I thought you liked me,” in one of the saddest, most pathetic voices I’d ever heard.

When I finally shook myself out of the dream, I was drenched in sweat, and the bed sheets were tangled around my limbs. I wasn’t normally someone who put a lot of stock into dreams and their deep hidden meanings, but that shit was seriously fucked up. I decided that my subconscious mind was trying to tell me that Raleigh was no good for me. Or maybe it was the other way around—maybe this was my brain’s way of telling me that she’d be better off without me.

+ + +

I tiptoed downstairs the next morning, not knowing Damien’s family’s sleep schedule, and not wanting to wake up anyone who might be sleeping in on a Sunday. As I stepped past Damien’s closed bedroom door, I could hear the sound of a hairdryer blasting on the other side. Damien hardly had any hair on his head, so I assumed it was his wife, Sandra, inside. I’d met her a few times—the first time being at their wedding when I was in junior high. She didn’t strike me as particularly cheerful, so I didn’t bother knocking on the door to say good morning.

Downstairs in the kitchen I found Damien and his son, Austin. Damien hovered over the kitchen island, reading the same newspaper from the night before and slurping a noisy cup of coffee. Austin sat in the breakfast nook silently eating his colorful, sugary breakfast. A couple of action figures were on the table and in between bites he moved the plastic figurines around and made noises that sounded like gunfire.

“Morning,” I announced. Both Damien and Austin looked up from their respective breakfasts. I immediately saw the resemblance in the dimpled chin and wide-set blue eyes, but Austin had the same strawberry-blond hair as his mother.

I was good with kids, but I got the impression that Damien wanted me to have as little interaction with his son as possible. I wondered what his parents had said to him to explain my presence because he didn’t appear at all curious or concerned about the girl in the kitchen.

I helped myself to a bowl of cereal when it was clear Damien wasn’t going to offer more. Family didn’t have to entertain each other, but I was estranged family. It bugged me that he didn’t appear to be putting in much of an effort to make me feel at home when he’d been the one who’d insisted I come to Memphis and stay with him.

The house phone rang while I checked my e-mail on my phone and avoided eye contact with the other two people in the room since it seemed like that’s what they were doing to me.

“Are you gonna answer that?” I asked around my cereal spoon. The wall phone continued to ring in the kitchen, ignored.

Damien continued to noisily slurp his coffee. “No. Let the machine get it.”

An off-white plastic box on the kitchen countertop made a clicking noise and Sandra’s recorded voice droned through the built-in speaker.

“You still have an answering machine?”

Damien shrugged, nonplussed. “Why get rid of it? It does the job.”

“Do you still have a VCR?”

He ignored my playful taunts in favor of more serious subjects. “Are you going to be gone all day?”

I hadn’t really thought about the day beyond just getting myself to Riverside Estates. “I don’t know. I thought I’d play it by ear.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “I’d come with you, but Sandra’s pretty insistent about us going to church every week.”

“It’s okay. I can handle this on my own.” I scraped my spoon around the bottom of my empty bowl. “What’s it like? You’ve visited her before.” I didn’t need to elaborate on my question.

Damien’s lips twitched. “It’s not fun.”

+ + +

In the first half of the twentieth century, people with schizophrenia often lived out their days in mental institutions. By the 1940s the media had begun to publicize the deplorable conditions in some of these places. Had my mother been born in an earlier generation, she would have been subjected to electroconvulsive shock therapy, causing mental confusion and loss of memory. Between 1959 and 1962, the Schizophrenia Research Project had explored which of five treatment options was more beneficial to patients suffering from the illness: psychotherapy, drug therapy, psychotherapy plus drugs, electroconvulsive shock, or social and environmental support. Eventually prescription drugs became the magic bullet.

Riverside Estates was located on a few acres just outside of Memphis. It was the seventh place my mother had been admitted to since my tenth birthday. She’d been to four hospitals and Riverside Estates made for the third board and care facility. We’d experimented with independent living, but each time we’d received a phone call a few months in that she’d had a relapse and needed to be picked up.

I took a taxi out to see my mother because I was too afraid to drive one of Damien’s fancy cars for fear of putting a scratch in the paint. My cab driver kept looking at me in the rearview mirror as we drove out to the residential facility. He probably wondered what my story was—if I was visiting someone or if I was a future patient myself. Either way, he wouldn’t have been that far off.

Riverside Estates was a far cry from the asylums and mental hospitals of earlier generations. It looked more like a country club than a residential program for the mentally ill. The grounds were immaculately manicured and a large fountain was out front. I wondered if the sight had formerly been a plantation or if they’d simply designed the buildings and surrounding grounds with the area’s history in mind.

I had never been out to the facility before, but Damien had showed me a brochure when he’d made the decision to put her there. He’d thought Riverside would be a good fit because of the amenities it offered. She received supportive psychotherapy or talk therapy to strengthen her coping skills and behavior therapy to help change or replace unwanted behaviors.

A man dressed all in white—an orderly I guessed—held the front door of the main building open for me. “Welcome to Riverside Estates,” he greeted.