What I Had Before I Had You (24 page)

 

18

S
CHOOL IS STARTING.
New green Chapin uniforms for Laura and Courtney come in the mail. I skulk around the Seventy-third Street house, mostly healed but feeling wretched. Since my mother's visit, things have continued as before, in a state of suspension, when I thought they would ease back down to earth. Courtney wakes me up with her saltwater gargling across the hall at six
A.M.
I eat the last ice-cream sandwich, I hog the comfy chair, I kick off my shoes in the wrong places and people trip on them. I am forgiven.

Eventually Christie forces the issue and registers me to start tenth grade at Chapin. She puts a rush on my uniform order, but even so, I will have to start the year in Laura's old blazer, which is too short in the arms. I know there is a tuition deposit, but she won't say how much.

“We need to get your things from the house,” she says, “at least.” Christie is afraid, and legitimately so, that my mother will return some night, maybe with reinforcements. She needs me to tell my mother that the choice I've made is final. On the drive down the coast, Christie plays the Beach Boys and wears sunglasses and tries to be fun. I look out the window and think. What if everything is different? What if my absence has cured her, like a sharp blow to the head?

I watch the back of my house flicker by through the trees, and then we are past, headed for the highway exit to loop back around to the front. The parkway is broad and leafy, and the rubber-tire smell goes straight to my brain. The traffic noise, the particular whirring call of a bird, the roadside restaurants and their missing-letter billboards.

We pull into the driveway. The house stands yet, the windows taped and boarded. A blue tarp has been tacked over the hole in my room, but the bottom has come undone, and it billows outward in the breeze. Wild rabbits freeze and stare at me from the lawn. The door stands open. From inside, the roar of a studio audience. Electricity's back on. Christie unsnaps her seat belt and I grab her arm. “Let me go in first.” She nods.

As I walk the flagstone path to my front door, I feel a sudden spine-straightening attack of adultness. Even if my absence hasn't reformed her, maybe it has sunk her to a depth of woe such that she would do anything to have me back. Maybe I could state my terms. I would clear out the nursery—that would be the first thing. Somebody would come and trash-pick the high chairs from the side of the highway. I would take her not to her old wallowing ground, Creedmoor, but to the very best psychiatrist, the foremost expert on whatever would help the most. I'd tell her we were going on a picnic. Men in white jackets would wrestle her through the clinic doors, and I'd wait in the car, eating grapes and summer sausage from a picnic basket, and when she came back out, she would be calm and smiling and permanently reasonable and she would say,
Thank you. I didn't know it, but that was just what I needed.

She is not on the couch. The TV is tuned to
Wheel of Fortune,
the coffee table cluttered with crusty dishes and fast-food wrappers. I go from room to room. The Christmas lights on the wooden cross blink. I pause over the crib, an image flashing before my eyes of Laura and Courtney scrunching up their long teenage bodies to fit in there, pulling the pink frilly blanket up to their chins, laughing their heads off.

She's not in the backyard. The fire pit is a mess of ash. The tomato and pepper plants ringing the house have not died but are heavy with rotting fruit. A few at the corner of the house are crushed and bleed sap and tomato guts around the edges of terra-cotta shards. As I round the corner, I see more and more of these shards, concentrated at the base of the ladder that rises to the roof.

I climb. With each rung, my dread increases, and I make it more inevitable that this will be what I see: She has shot herself. She has slit her wrists. The roof a shining pool of blood. When my vision clears the tar-paper eave of our flat roof, I almost fall. My mother is lying on her back and she is naked. What I think is clotted blood turns, when I look longer, into dirt. Dirt everywhere, scattered around her and over her, and the curling pulled roots of strawberries and basil. A sweet, rotten smell. Dirt on her white stomach and matted to her black triangle of pubic hair. Dirt on her face. Her eyes are closed and she holds a trowel to her chest.

I scramble up, banging my knees. She would think of dirt in this way: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. My first response is not sadness, as I am acutely aware that it should be, but a towering wave of fury that she would do it here, in such a way that I might find her. Christie's voice from the ground: “Everything okay?” My hands fist at my sides. I kick the dirt as hard as I can. The wind picks it up and rains it down on her.

She opens her eyes. Dirt slides from her eyelids and the lines of her face. She looks at me and yelps. Her body, which an instant ago seemed overwhelmingly
dead,
now seems overwhelmingly
naked
.

“Why are you naked?” I scream. Christie's head appears at the top of the ladder.

“Thank you,” my mother breathes, but she is talking to the sky, not to me. And I understand: This is some kind of ritual. She thinks she conjured me. She won't even let me own my return.

Christie and I gather my things from the house. We put my clothing in trash bags and heave them into the trunk of Christie's car. I pack up what is left of my darkroom, but I leave my prints behind—boardwalk portraits, gulls in the sky, my friends laughing, my sisters walking in the dark. The pictures feel like dangerous contaminants. To take them to New York would be to invite my old life into my new life, to grant a power and a proof to memories that, right now, I'd rather erase completely.

In the bathroom trash, I see the pill bottles from the hospital, which my mother has not bothered to dispose of secretly now that I am gone. Thorazine, Tegretol. I pick the orange and pink pills from among the balled Kleenex and dental floss. I put them back in the bottles, fifty-fifty chance I've got the colors right, and put the bottles back in the medicine cabinet. My mother appears eventually. She slumps on the living room sofa in her pink robe, her legs crossed on the coffee table looking like somebody else's legs, skinny and showing patches of a mean sunburn. She watches us carry objects out of the house. Her face droops as if she's had a stroke.

When the car is packed, we walk back into the living room and stand waiting. I can hear the kitchen clock slow-ticking. I tilt my foot out of my sandal and dig my pinkie toe through the carpet loops. Finally, my mother says to Christie, “You win, I guess.”

“No, Myla.”

My mother jolts to life. She screams, “I have a lawyer who will have her back here in days. Days!”

“A lawyer's not going to change Olivia's mind,” Christie says in a level tone that I know she means as gentle but that my mother will take as condescending.

My mother laughs. “You shouldn't fuck with me, you of all people should know not to fuck with me. I know the method and the minute of your death.” She rests her face in her hands, elbows on the table, and sighs long. She raises her eyes to Christie and talks through her spread fingers. “She doesn't even look like me. She looks like you. You put her in me as a trick. You're like one of those birds that lays its eggs in other birds' nests. So I would feed her the most, so the others would get nothing.”

Christie looks at me. I can't speak. A tiny demon in my mouth is hanging on to my top and bottom teeth, clamping my jaw shut. My mother lolls her head sideways on the sofa pillow and closes her eyes. “You want to go with her?”

I nod, but her eyes are closed, so she can't see it. I wait for her to open them, and she waits for me to speak, and neither of us will concede. She doesn't move for the longest time. So I leave.

And that's it.

I ADOLESCE. I
become a Mader, though there is no legal transfer of custody. I always expect her to come for me—I hope for it and I dread it—and I dream out the window during classes at Chapin: my mother swooping in on a broomstick, a man in a hat on the street lifting an elastic mustache and winking at me, taking my hand, a long strand of auburn escaping from a short wig. But she does not come.

Neither do I go to her. At first I think I will be forced to visit—that Christie will drive us all down at Christmastime or next summer. But Christie is as avoidant as I am, and she doesn't bring it up. I am so busy, always, with courses and camps and trips. It is easy not to think about the decision I am making, and besides, I am still so angry. I am angry that my mother does not come, and I would be angry if she came. In the grips of this new normal, I can see every way she slighted me, everything my sisters had that I did not have. I picture myself as a little girl, alone in the house, unbathed, eating cereal out of the box, lying to the neighbor lady when she stuck her head in to ask why the car was gone. I think, My mother can come to
me
when she's ready to apologize. Only, she never does; she never will. Is it pride that keeps her away, even after six months, a year, two years? Shame? Some psychic intuition of misfortune to come? Or is this the first and only time that she has taken a decision of mine seriously? I do not have the wherewithal to ask her, so I will be left with this bitter puzzle for the rest of my life.

Tom spends less and less time at the Seventy-third Street house, and my sisters don't know why. They stop believing that he works such long hours; they recognize the frailty of his alibis. They conference gravely when he is gone, and when he does appear in the foyer, stamping off snow, they flutter to bring him his Scotch and take his coat. It is not hard for me to keep the secret of my parentage from my sisters; I am a facile secret-keeper. They will learn the whole truth from Christie in a few years, once they're living on their own, and they will be angry. I will be a wedge driven between Tom and his family. For now, though, he doesn't know what to do with me. He worries his hands and reads the paper. He jumps when he finds me in unexpected places. I can't say I don't enjoy making him squirm.

Sometimes I find Christie sitting in the backyard doing nothing, with the watering can or the shears in her lap, and I feel sorry for something I'm not sure I should feel sorry for. At these times I go back inside and pretend not to have seen her.

I wear my camera less and less. I find myself taking photos only when other people might, at parties or on trips. I stop needing to pin everything down. My split with Jake, Pam, and Kandy is complete, as it must be. I see them in dreams, but in daylight I learn to keep the past out of my thoughts. I do not want anyone to call me crazy, not anymore. I do not want to be a visionary or to be notable in any way at all.

Despite all this, I am not a different girl in New York. I can't stop lying. I smoke, I drink, I make questionable friends. I buy hallucinogenic mushrooms and share them with my sisters. Courtney becomes convinced that she is following a green glowing path below the sidewalk, and Laura and I follow her, snickering, all the way to midtown. None of this has the character of the summer, though, and it is not until a year and a half later, when I am seventeen and have my first documented manic episode, that I understand why. Christie is the one to point it out to me after a few days: my sleeplessness, my darting attention, my flashing temper, my rapid rhyming laughing speech. I will never know if my mother understood what was happening to me all summer and refused to address it, or if she was so deep in herself that she couldn't see it in me.

I sit opposite my first psychiatrist, Dr. Kaiser, a short, glowing man. He describes for me things I thought were mine alone: the glimmering and speed of things, the sense of being chosen, the aching thing that seems like love but isn't. He uses the term “pressured thinking.” I am embarrassed, as if he has seen me naked. Dr. Kaiser hands me my diagnosis, my inheritance. I make my own chart, and there is nothing divine about it. My lines spike and plummet randomly, and for long, long stretches they plateau. My chart looks like an EKG—a strong but irregular heartbeat. Soon I have my own little orange pill canisters full of my mother's poison: lithium. For me, it works. It is not the dull muffling thing it was for her. They prescribe smaller amounts now than they used to, and it doesn't feel like anything to me so much as the absence of a threat. Some small dark thing that used to crouch in the corner of my brain stands up and walks away.

WHEN JAKE MADE
it home in August 1987, he went to my mother's house looking for me. I didn't know this until years later, when he looked me up at Penn State and we sat drinking thin coffee in the student union. I apologized, but by then it didn't matter. He had a Mohawk and a graduate fellowship in economics at the University of Oregon. I was a bitter story he told each new girlfriend, a failed first love. He said he'd driven to my house the morning after his parents collected him from New York. He found my mother asleep in the sunny backyard, burned pink, and she told him I was safe and sound and coming home soon. He said she made him a grilled-cheese sandwich on the fire pit. I asked him what they talked about, and he shrugged, but I don't believe he'd forgotten. I imagined it and felt a guilty solipsistic thrill: two adversaries, my brokenhearted lovers, drawn together to mourn my absence. My mother was still alive then, and I could afford to think that way when I allowed myself to think of her at all.