One of Us Read online

  Please be okay, I silently beg her.

  She smiles at the cupcakes and relief washes over me. She opens the package and takes a yellow one for herself.

  “Dawnyelle’s favorite color,” she tells me.

  Dawnyelle was an unwed teenage pregnant schizophrenic. Mom immediately knitted her a yellow hat called “hope” upon her arrival at White Hospital, then set to work on a blanket for her unborn baby, who Mom told me in a whisper was going to be a “half orphan.”

  This was well over a year ago. I have no idea what happened to either of them and I don’t have the energy to navigate Mom’s explanation if I were to ask.

  “How are you?” I ask her instead.

  “I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be fine?”

  “No reason. We’re supposed to get more snow,” I say, beginning the careful small talk.

  “I remember when you were little we had snow all the time for Thanksgiving,” she says.

  Against my will my mind drifts back to my childhood again, to Thanksgiving days spent at the prison. It was one of the few times out of the year when children were allowed to have physical visits with their moms. After our strip searches, we were led to a room with sets of plastic tables and chairs to spend fifteen uninterrupted minutes with our mothers before they were taken to the cafeteria to poke listlessly at white slices of turkey-flavored mystery meat topped with gelatinous globs of snot-colored gravy.

  I’d crawl into her lap and she’d stroke my hair and hold me while I watched snowflakes fall softly in my mind and imagine what it would be like to build a snowman with her or have her pull me on a sled or have her waiting in the kitchen holding a cup of hot chocolate when I got home after playing with the friends I didn’t have, but I also knew those times would be fraught with anxiety for me, possible precursors to disaster. I’d be forced to dig even deeper into my stores of fantasies about having a normal mom to come up with something truly comforting, but once I got there those times with her were warm and safe until I’d suddenly remember the truth, and as much as I feared my father’s home, I wanted to go back there. Being snuggled up against my mother with her arms around me was somehow worse than my dad coming at me with his rage. With him I felt the fleeting panic of a cornered animal, but with her I felt the permanent agony of the obliteration of my nest.

  “It’s January, Mom. Thanksgiving was over a long time ago.”

  “I know that. I didn’t say it was Thanksgiving now. I was remembering Thanksgiving. Everyone thinks I’m stupid.”

  “No one thinks you’re stupid.”

  “I’m very smart.”

  “I know you are.”

  She finishes her cupcake and brushes the crumbs off her fingers.

  “Can you get me my mirror?”

  One of her few cherished possessions is a cheap silver hand mirror that appeared among her belongings after one of her arrests. Tommy assumes she stole it.

  I open her top dresser drawer and can’t help noticing a work sheet from one of the hospital support groups she attends called Lifestyle Choices. She’s just begun to fill it out. Under short-term goals, she has listed: buy a car, purge evil, hem striped skirt, get out more. Her long-term goal is gardening.

  I give her the mirror. She eagerly takes it from me and gazes intently at her reflection.

  “I’m getting old.”

  “You look great.”

  “I guess I am old. I guess it’s better to be old than dead.”

  She hands the mirror back to me, all the excitement she felt over it and her cupcakes draining away in front of me.

  She stares at her pale hands lying lifeless in her lap like two broken albino bats. I prefer them to be busy. I look around for the latest hat she must be knitting or handkerchief she might be embroidering.

  “Is something wrong?” I ask.

  If ever there was a loaded question to ask my mother, this was it.

  “Did you take your pills today?” I follow up casually.

  She smiles at me.

  “I saw Molly.”

  Her proclamation catches me completely off guard. I stare at her, dumbfounded, with no idea what I should say next.

  “No, you didn’t,” I tell her.

  “I saw her.”

  “Molly is dead.”

  “She was here last night. In my room. With Great-grandma Fi.”

  This information given in such a matter-of-fact manner sends a chill through me.

  My mom used to hallucinate about my sister when she was in prison. She used to think she was still alive. She’d talk to me during our visits about Molly being in a crib back in her cell, and I remember one particularly horrifying time when she sat on the other side of the Plexiglas cradling an invisible infant and cooing to her. I couldn’t get her to pay any attention to me, and when I finally cried out to her in frustration over the dirty phone receiver that always smelled like beer and french fries, she turned her burning black gaze on me and said, “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you love your sister?” Then she stood up and screamed at me, “Don’t you love your sister? Don’t you love your sister?” She was still screaming it when the guards dragged her away.

  “You know that’s not possible, Mom,” I say calmly. “They’re both dead. You probably had a bad dream.”

  “No. They were here in this room. Standing there.”

  She points to the foot of the bed.

  “They were holding hands. Molly was all grown up, and Fi was young again. Not like in her picture. They were the same age. Young women. They couldn’t talk. They stood there staring at me with their mouths open. Their skin was gray. They were angry.”

  My chill deepens to a shudder.

  “I’m sure it was a dream,” I tell her again.

  “I don’t want them to come back.”

  “Mom, it was a dream.”

  “I want a gun.”

  “A gun?” I cry. “What are you talking about? No, Mom, you can’t have a gun.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, because—”

  “I know. People think I’m crazy.”

  I don’t comment.

  “Then I want a dog. A dog would warn me if they come back. I don’t like the idea of them walking around while I’m asleep. Do you think they’ll hurt me?”

  “No one’s going to hurt you,” I promise her. “It’s all in your head.”

  “Don’t say that to me,” she says, irritation mounting in her voice. “Everyone’s always telling me everything’s in my head. I know what’s real.”

  “I know you do.”

  “Stop saying what you think you should say! I’m not stupid!”

  “I know.”

  “You wish I was dead.”

  Her words cut through me. There were times as a child when I wished she were dead. Not because I hated her, I told myself, but because I loved her. If she were dead maybe there’d be an end to her pain, I’d reason, but deep down I knew it was my own pain I wanted to ease. Maybe I wouldn’t have to think about her every day if I knew she was safely in Heaven instead of locked up in jail. Maybe people might feel sorry for me and be nice to me because I was a boy without a mother, instead of giving me dirty looks and calling me names behind my back because I was the son of a baby killer.

  “Please, Mom. Don’t say that. I don’t wish you were dead.”

  She gets up from the table and for a moment I think she’s going to slap me, but she steps up next to me and peers intently into my eyes.

  Who is she seeing? Who is any mother seeing when she looks at her grown son? The baby she nurtured, the little boy she knew so well, the stranger he became.

  Is she disappointed? Does she see my failure? Does she hate me for not being able to help her?

  She gives me a quick hug then drops to the floor where she retrieves something from under
her bed.

  “Here.”

  She extends a brown paper lunch bag toward me. My name is written on the outside in crayon.

  “I made you a hat,” she says. “Don’t open it until you get home.”

  I take it from her and say my good-byes. Visits with Mom can drag on for hours or be over in a few minutes. She gets distracted easily and either wants me to leave or doesn’t care if I leave or demands that I stay.

  I’m on my way down the corridor to the elevators when her attending psychiatrist, Dr. Versey, calls out my name. I’ve only met him once but have spoken to him on the phone several times.

  “How nice that you’ve been able to find some time to see your mother,” he says to me, the implication being that I don’t find the time often enough.

  We shake hands and eye each other up and down. He’s wearing a gray plaid, polyester-blend department store suit and some type of unidentifiable black shoe with white salt stains on the sides. I’m wearing dark wash Burberry jeans, a Ferragamo turtleneck, a Calvin Klein tweed jacket, and Dior Homme sneakers. I win.

  “Doesn’t it make you feel good? Aren’t you glad you got to see your mom?”

  “Yes,” I answer him.

  I’m not lying exactly. I’m always happy to see my mom, but it’s a wretched kind of happiness, similar to what a wounded soldier must feel when he wakes up and finds out he’s going to live but without his legs.

  “How is your mother?” he asks like an old acquaintance who hasn’t seen her in years.

  “Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?”

  He laughs.

  “I think she’s doing wonderfully.”

  “She seems good.”

  “Did she discuss her plans with you?”

  My mind jumps back to the work sheet. Which ones? Gardening or purging evil?

  “Her plans?”

  “I see.”

  He clears his throat.

  “Patient privacy laws being what they are, I shouldn’t even be telling you that she’s about to be released.”

  “What?”

  “We only have a hundred and twenty-eight beds.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Your mother is fine.”

  My scalp begins to prickle.

  “‘Fine’ is a relative term.”

  “I realize that. What I mean is, considering her illness, she’s doing very well right now and we simply can’t justify keeping her here any longer, and once the legal restriction is removed, she’s free to do what she wants, and she wants to leave. She’s made that very clear. I can give you the names of some excellent private facilities.”

  “Believe me, I have all the names. I really have to get going.”

  Before he can say another word, I walk quickly away from him down the corridor and turn the first corner. I lean against the wall trying to look as nonchalant as possible and take deep breaths. It’s been a while since I’ve had a panic attack, but if anything could trigger one, it would be this information.

  I open the paper bag my mother gave me thinking I can use it if I start to hyperventilate and find an orange hat inside. Along the band is stitched A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR.

  seven

  AFTER VISITING MY MOM I always try to dwell on a good memory and disregard the fact that now I know most of them were the beginnings of one of her manic episodes that were destined to end in disaster.

  Driving back to Lost Creek today, I think about the time we painted the garage pink. I wasn’t sure Dad would like the color, but Mom kept assuring me he would. She painted like a fiend and by the time we finished, I agreed with her that he would have to love it. Who wouldn’t love a garage the same color as Bazooka bubble gum?

  She was so pleased with the results she wanted to share our good fortune with others, so we went next door and started painting the neighbor’s peeling front porch. It was a perfect sunny day and as I watched the old drab gray flecks beneath my feet disappear beneath a pretty, glossy coat of pink, I felt anything was possible. Even this bleak, run-down town could be given a new life. With Mom and me leading the way, this could become the most beautiful place in the world.

  Then the neighbor came home and she and Mom got in a big fight that ended with Mom throwing the remaining paint on her and running away.

  Mom still hadn’t returned by the time Dad got home from his shift. He stood in the driveway for the longest time and just stared. His gaze was so intense and his stance so fixed, I started to think maybe he liked it after all.

  Tommy’s truck came rumbling up a few moments later. He parked and slowly got out, unable to take his eyes off the offending structure, too. He held out a hand to me, still grimy from a day of work, and said to my father, “I’ll take the boy.”

  I spent two days at Tommy’s house and when I returned the garage was painted mud brown and Mom was in her bed silently staring at the wall plucking loose threads from her sweater.

  I can hear Tommy’s voice in my head trying to comfort me as clearly as if he were in the car with me now.

  “I know your mother has her share of problems, but at least you have a mother. Your great-great-grandfather Prosperity never knew his mother because she died before he was born.”

  This was the way Tommy always began this particular story. He doesn’t have to be with me for his words to soothe me. I settle back behind the wheel of my car and listen.

  “Prosperity’s mother wasn’t one of these women who died during childbirth. This, at least, was a phenomenon a fellow could try to begin to understand once he finally learned that women carried babies around inside themselves before finally expelling them into the world in a manner no one dared to seriously contemplate.

  “To expire during the commitment of an act was common enough. Soldiers were often shot dead while in the middle of soldiering. Prosperity’s friend Billy Kelly—the more reliable of the Kelly boys—loved to tell of his own uncle falling down dead in the middle of haying. Everyone had heard of the woman in Goleen who died while in the middle of pouring out tea for the parish priest.

  “But to die before you began to do something, this was something entirely different, and Prosperity was greatly impressed by the idea. Throughout his young life, he would raise his fists to anyone who failed to give his mother the proper respect due to a woman who had shown such willpower and foresight. As far as he knew, very few people accomplished anything of worth after they were dead.

  “He would never know the exact facts of his tragic beginnings, although Fiona would eventually unearth the details after they were married through a correspondence she struck up with the aunt who raised him.

  “The truth of the matter was that his mother did die during childbirth—not before—but she was half-starved, frail and sickly, and lost consciousness after the first wave of pain and passed away shortly thereafter. The doctor had to cut the infant from her body, a procedure so gruesome for the times that the two neighbor women attending him were struck dumb by the sight of it and could never bring themselves to gossip properly about it in the future.

  “Whenever they tried, their minds would fill with the poor young girl’s face, looking as pale and quiet in death as a sleeping child’s, sitting atop the flayed, bloody carcass, and all they could manage to do was cross themselves and mutter ominously that she died before the child was born.

  “Like his mother dying before he was born, Prosperity’s father had left before he was born. He had gone to England to look for work, since there was none to be found in Ireland. He hadn’t known the girl long or well, just long enough to marry her and well enough to get her pregnant, although no one was ever quite sure of the sequential order of these events. People tried to contact him after the birth of his son and the death of his wife, but he was never heard from again.”

  I feel a little better after recalling Tommy’
s story, although I still dread having to tell him Mom is getting released again. He’s too old to deal with her anymore and I can’t have her live with me in the city. She needs to be watched constantly. I don’t know what we’re going to do. The enormous expense aside, facilities for the mentally unstable have become few and far between, and many of them are terrible places not much better than the prison where Carson sits waiting to die.

  Tommy seems physically fine. We talked last night over dinner and decided there’s really no reason for me to stay, but I can’t leave him here alone with Mom. At least not at first.

  I’m distracted and not paying much attention to the drive, but even so, I can’t help noticing the commotion going on at the gallows.

  One of the town’s black-and-whites is parked there along with Rafe’s car. The surrounding streets are also full of cars and pickup trucks. A crowd has gathered inside the prison yard and formed a motionless chunk of rapt parka-clad humanity with a hundred arms, all of them holding phones aloft taking pictures and video of the gallows.

  I don’t see Tommy’s truck anywhere and I decide to stop partly out of curiosity but mostly because I might be able to learn some town gossip before he does.

  A woman in a winter coat and rubber boots is sitting on the gallows in a chair and a man is sitting on the edge of the scaffolding holding a rifle with his feet kicking casually at the air.

  I recognize the woman as Birdie Connolly, the activities secretary for the NONS, a plump, pleasant grandmotherly sort with soft white hair like a cap of cotton balls. She’s tied to the chair with what looks like clothesline, but she doesn’t seem to be in any distress. Her lower arms poke out from the layers of rope and she’s busily knitting.

  The man is the NONS volunteer groundskeeper, Parker Hopkins. He’s in tan winter coveralls and an orange ball cap with an expired hunting license pinned to the front. His gun rests in his lap and his head keeps drooping forward. Despite the cold and the fact that there’s a bound woman behind him, he looks like he might fall asleep.

  Looking around me at the expectant audience and back again to the two patient players on their empty stage, I almost feel like I’m attending a Lost Creek interpretation of Waiting for Godot.