“It’s just travel—I had to get up early and I lost two hours.” I handed her another plate. “I can’t believe you still have these dishes.”
“I can’t believe I have any left.” Lew and I had dropped a lot of them over the years, and when they hit the tile they exploded into millions of needle-sharp slivers you could only find with your bare feet. I was uncritically nostalgic for everything in the house that I’d been oblivious to when I lived here: the cheap dishes, the Formica furniture, the thin carpets furrowed in the hallway. Every new thing in the house—like the oak magazine basket next to Dad’s recliner—struck me as presumptuous and suspect, like a stranger wearing my mother’s bathrobe.
Mom closed the dishwasher without switching it on—she wouldn’t run it unless it was packed tight.
“What’s wrong, Del.” This was the first nontraditional thing either of us had said to each other since I’d arrived. The starting gun for the real conversation.
I had a plan. Start with the car crash. Hint at the stress I’d been under. Then bring up the hospital—I had to tell her about the hospital, it was too likely that she’d find out about it somehow—but make it seem like the visit was my idea. Just something I needed to clear my head. End of story.
“I’ve just had a tough winter.” She didn’t say anything, waiting for me to fill it in. “The first snowfall, I spun out and crashed into a guardrail—” I kept talking through her gasp. Thank God I hadn’t said through the guardrail. “It’s okay, I was fine, just scraped up my arms when the airbag went off. The car was pretty banged up, though. And after that, I had some trouble.”
“Have the noises come back?” she said.
I opened my mouth, shut it. So much for the plan. When I was a teenager I had a swimming accident, and after that I started hearing the noises. That’s what I called them, anyway, what everyone in my family called them. But they weren’t exactly sounds. I didn’t hear voices, or humming, or music, or screams. It was more physical than that. I felt movement, vibration, like the scrape of a chair across the floor, a fist pounding against a table. It felt like someone rattling a cage in my mind. But that was too hard to explain, even to myself.
“Oh, honey.” She dried her hand on a towel and pressed her hand to my neck. “When do you hear them? At night, when you’re tired . . . ?”
“It comes and goes.”
“Right now?”
“Right now, not so much.” Another lie. Every few minutes, I felt a lurch and a flurry of clawed scrabbling, like a raccoon in a cardboard box.
She studied my face, as if by concentrating she could hear what was happening in my head. Her left eye, the glass one, was fixed on a point just beside my right ear. “You should talk to Dr. Aaron,” she said.
“She helped you so much last time. You could do some therapy with her.”
“Mom, it’s not like getting a lube job, you can’t just drop in for some quick therapy.”
“You know what I mean. Talk to her. If you’re worried about the cost—”
“It’s not the money.”
“I can lend you the money.”
“She’s not going to charge me, Mom.” I rubbed the side of my head. “Listen, I already called her. I’m going to see her tomorrow.”
“Then why are you arguing with me?”
“I’m not arguing! I’m just saying that I’m not ‘doing therapy.’ I’m just going to stop in and say hello.”
“Maybe she could recommend somebody in Colorado. There must be good psychiatrists that—”
“I’m not going to see anybody else.”
She blinked, waited for me to calm down.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to . . .” I opened my hands, closed them.
“What happened back there?” she asked quietly. Amra and Lew were coming back soon. I didn’t want to be in the
middle of it when they walked in. I weighed what I could tell her. Enough to be plausible. But too much and I’d have to manage her reaction.
“It’s complicated.”
She waited. I sat down at the table, and she sat next to me.
“The noises weren’t bad at first,” I said. “They came mostly at night, but I was handling it okay. Then they started to get worse, more persistent. I missed some days of work.” I kept my tone matter-of-fact.
“So anyway, my car’s totaled, the people at work want to fire me, I wasn’t sleeping well . . . I knew I was stressed out. The doctor who took care of me after the accident referred me to a shrink, a psychiatrist. I told him my history, you know, the stuff from when I was five, and the stuff from high school. But if it’s related to possession it’s something he’s never heard of before, so we had to spend a lot of time talking about what I think is going on. And in the meantime he’s teaching me meditation techniques, ordering scans of my head, having me try out medications. And of course none of it worked. The MRIs and fMRIs and CAT scans didn’t show anything, no tumors or blockages. The meditation exercises were all things Dr. Aaron taught me years ago, straight out of some post-possession handbook they all must read—and I’d been trying those.
“The drugs, though. He opened up the whole medicine cabinet: antianxiety, antipsychotics, anti-everything. Nothing was too horrible, but the worst combination made me sleep sixteen hours a day and then wake up with a dry mouth and a queasy stomach. But the noises didn’t go away.
“After one particularly rough night I went in to see him and he says, why don’t we try some environment that’s less stressful, where people could watch out for you? Like on Wild Kingdom, why don’t we tag you and bring you to a safer environment? And the next thing I know I’m in the psychiatric ward of the hospital, hanging out with schizophrenics. There was a guy there, Bertram—nice guy, maybe fifty, totally whacked. One minute we’re having a perfectly normal conversation, talking about Pakistan or the weather or something, and the next second his head would jerk up and he’d stare at the lights and say, ‘Did you feel that?’ ‘Feel what, Bertram?’ ‘They just scanned us.’
See, he believed there were these super-telepaths named slans . . .”
I was rambling.
Mom sat silently, her mouth pulled tight. She’d sat through the recitation, absorbing the facts like blows. Her face had hardened, and her gaze had shifted from my face. I didn’t know what I’d expected—not tears, my mother was not a crier—but not this. Not anger.
“What is it?” I said.
Headlights slid across the front window. Lew and Amra’s Audi coasted into the driveway, bass pumping. The stereo cut off. Mom stood up quickly, walked past without looking at me. “I’m going to make coffee,” she said. “It has to be decaf, I can’t drink caffeinated at night.”
Amra followed me down the dimly lit stairs, one hand on my shoulder. Sometime during the run to Jewel, she and Lew had decided to stay the night instead of driving back to their house in Gurnee, about an hour away. Dinner had become a slumber party, and slumber parties required board games. Amra was trying very hard to treat me the same as she did before she knew I’d escaped the loony bin. At the last step, I reached out and found the lightbulb chain. “The vault,” I announced.
The basement was a maze of shelves, and the shelves were stacked with the treasure of our childhood—Lew’s childhood and mine. Mom saved everything, not only every GI Joe and Matchbox car, but every Hot Wheels track, Tinkertoy, and puzzle piece. Anything that didn’t stack neatly was sealed in clear plastic tubs. Farther into the dark were our baby clothes and old toys, Dad’s army uniforms and paraphernalia, Mom’s wedding dress, boxes of letters and books and tax returns, and odds and ends with irregular silhouettes: elementary school art projects, bicycle parts, an arbor of golf clubs and fishing poles. I was itching to explore farther, but not with Amra.