Bebe Moore Campbell (23 page)

“And if you’d been told?”

“Maybe I wouldn’t have come. I don’t want Trina around somebody who’s that sick. Don’t get me wrong: Trina has an illness, but she’s not that bad.”

“Okay.”

“Trina will be going back to school in September, to Brown. She’s a National Merit Scholar.”

“Keri, we’re going to do everything we can to ensure that both Trina and Angelica can have good futures. Trust us to do our work. And we’ll trust you to do yours. But you know, there can be no healing without acceptance.”

I TOOK A WALK, A MINDLESS TREK TO THE ROAD AND BACK. Five times in all, fast enough to work up a light sweat and hear my own breathing. Leaning against one of the oaks, I pulled out my cell phone. There were messages. Orlando had called again. And PJ.

I dialed PJ’s cell phone. Fourteen years old and his own cell—but thank God, because the alternative would have included the possibility that I’d have to say hello to his mother. And ever since the drink-in-my-face incident, Lucy had been on my list of people to avoid at all costs. PJ’s phone rang, rang, and rang some more; then I had to listen to about eight minutes of gangsta rap before I could leave a message.

After dinner we watched movies. Jean and Trina played more Scrabble, and Angelica worked on a puzzle. It was clear to me that some kind of bonding was taking place between Jean and my child. I wondered if this “station” was the first stop for everyone, so that all the runaways could benefit from Jean’s inner Earth Mother.

Yawning and stretching, Trina seemed calm enough as she got ready for bed. It didn’t appear that she would need Haldol tonight. Bethany, the girls, and I had changed into our pajamas in the bathrooms while Eddie, Brad, and Jean posted themselves like sentinels in the bedroom.

“Why does he have to sleep in here with us?” Trina asked.

“It’s best,” Brad said.

“It’s not best,” Trina said. “You snore and you talk in your sleep.”

“Sorry about that.”

He rooted around in his bag for a moment and then opened a small plastic container and offered it first to Trina and then to me. Small, round pearly globs of wax.

“Earplugs,” he said. “Roll them in your hand until they get soft, then stick them in your ears.”

I took two and began rolling. Trina stared at Brad defiantly.

“I’m not going to run away,” she said.

“I’m sleeping in here tonight, Trina,” Brad said. There was an air of finality and authority in his tone that I admired. If Trina had been hectoring me, the argument would have gone on and on. He extended the container toward her again; Trina rolled her eyes and refused the plugs. Then she began pacing, as if she’d shrugged off all traces of sleepiness.

“These people are crazy,” she whispered, leaning over my bed. From the corner of my eye, I saw Angelica sit up in her bed and lean forward.

Brad looked at Trina, his head tilted a bit, as though he was measuring something from a distance.

“Really,” I said.

She began shrieking. “They’re trying to kill me!”

Brad got up from the bed, moving very carefully.

Her eyes were large, bold, daring me to contradict her.

“Trina . . .”

“Last night they came into the room. They tried to make me drink something.”

“Really.”

“Yes!” she screamed, over and over.

Brad took a few steps toward Trina.

“Get the fuck away from me, you devil!” Her body tilted toward the door. She began to shriek. Outside the room, Eddie and Jean came running. The key turned, and then they were inside.

“Trina,” Jean said, taking my daughter’s hand. “Trina,” she said, in soothing, dulcet tones.

I sat and watched. Brad and Eddie held her. Jean talked. A few minutes later, Brad gave her another shot of Haldol. How much was that? Too much? Not enough? I hadn’t risen from my bed.

I SAT IN THE FAMILY ROOM AFTER TRINA CONKED OUT. JEAN came in offering peppermint tea, two steaming cups on a tray with painted roses on it. She sat next to me, her thigh pressed against mine, even though there was plenty of room.

“She was such a smart little girl,” I said to her. Trina’s report cards, the pinnacle of my motherhood. “Trina made straight A’s all the way through school.”

Jean stared at me for a moment. Then she laughed and bumped against my thigh with hers. “Those days are gone, sweetheart,” she said, still chuckling; she stopped when she realized I wasn’t laughing. “What I mean is, move forward,” she went on, her tone gentle. “Appreciate what she’s got going for her right now, right in this moment. She’s a tremendous survivor, dear. They all are. She has battled hard to be here. Respect that. Straight A’s? That was then.”

“I’m not talking about some inner-city public school wizard who didn’t crack a thousand on her SATs. Trina scored fifteen thirty-five out of a possible sixteen hundred.”

There, I thought. There.

Jean opened her mouth and then closed it. She reached for my hand and squeezed it. I pulled away. There was condescension in her touch. She knew I’d felt it.

“My son was an average student, average ballplayer, average kid. But he had a killer sense of humor. He could turn everything into a big laugh-in. At the dinner table, he’d keep Eddie and me in stitches. We just knew he’d grow up to be a comedian. He started playing the comedy clubs in college, and he was doing great. Then he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. We had some bad days, real bad. But now my son works, he has his own place, he has friends. He has a different life; I’ve accepted that. For your daughter, more is possible. Bipolar isn’t the same as schizophrenia. But I had to accept my child’s diagnosis, with its limitations.”

That’s you, I thought. My child will recover; her life will move forward.

“My son is independent. He lives in a duplex next door to his sister. He takes his meds on his own. He has a part-time job. And he has a girlfriend. So.”

So I’d slit my wrists if that was Trina’s future. Maybe she saw that in my eyes. She smiled at me. “Trina’s life has value just as it is, Keri, the same value it had when she was making straight A’s and got into Brown.”

“Don’t tell me what to want for my child,” I said. “And don’t tell me what to want for me.”

Jean just nodded and smiled her “it’s all good” smile. “I didn’t mean to upset you, sweetheart.”

For some reason, after she left, I thought of Crazy Man, lumbering down Crenshaw Boulevard, out of his mind and unperturbed, maybe even happy at times. Did his chaotic life have value?

I knocked on the barracks door to get back in. Bethany opened it, which surprised me. I’d expected Brad.

We stared at each other until I looked down and then away.

“She’ll be okay,” Bethany said. She waited, waited until I looked straight at her. It took a little while.

“Yeah,” I said.

20

DR. WILBUR ARRIVED THE NEXT MORNING. TRINA WAS doing yoga with Jean and Eddie in a multipurpose room at the back of the house. Angelica, Bethany, Brad, and I were shelling sunflower seeds in the Health Bar factory. The doctor asked to speak with Bethany first. Neither the music nor the aromatherapy had soothed Angelica; she seemed agitated. She had been mumbling to herself while Bethany sat next to her. After her mother left, she stared first at me and then at Brad.

“Where did my mother go?” she asked, looking at me.

“She went to see the doctor; she’ll be right back,” I said.

“She’d better be careful. That doctor is a rapist. He tried to rape me when I got the medicine. He wanted to feel me up.”

“Angelica, you finished shelling your pile?” Brad asked.

The anger that flared in her eyes was sudden. “I want money for this.” She waited and then stood up. I heard a zipping sound. In what seemed like less than ten seconds, Angelica was completely naked.

“Angelica, you need to put your clothes back on,” Brad said.

“This is all they really want,” she said, looking at the Latinas, who averted their eyes and whispered softly in Spanish. She dug her nails into her arms and began scraping them against her skin, making angry red streaks. She didn’t draw blood, but that was only because her nails weren’t long and sharp enough. Brad rushed over and grabbed her wrists and held them behind her back, which is what Bethany saw when she walked in.

“Angelica,” she said, from the doorway.

Angelica’s body was sunken, carved. Illness on display.
¡Dios mio!
one of the Latinas said, her words underscored by nervous laughter. Bethany made an attempt. “Angelica . . . Angelica. . . .”

“It’s okay,” I said to her, and turned to Angelica. “I’ll help you get dressed, and then you can have a cigarette.”

Angelica stood perfectly still for a few moments and then bent down, picked up her clothes from the floor, and handed them to me, one at a time. “Who works for free?” she asked me.

I was pondering her question when I saw Wilbur at the door, beckoning me. The psychiatrist led me back to the barracks, where he sat down on the plain wooden chair closest to the door. There was another hard-backed chair right next to his, and I sat in it.

“The blood tests reveal that your daughter has only trace amounts of medication in her system.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means it will take six to eight weeks for the meds to be at a really therapeutic level. You say she was in the hospital recently. For how long and what did they give her?”

“The same drugs you’re giving her, lithium and olanzapine. She was only there for seventy-two hours, and I suspect she was doing some cheeking.”

Wilbur nodded and jotted something on the small notepad he was carrying. “I’m going to switch her to an antipsychotic that dissolves instantly on the tongue.”

“I didn’t know there was such a thing,” I said.

“It’s been around for a while. Unfortunately, the mood stabilizer isn’t available in that form. We’re going to have to make sure she gets it in her. Jean’s pretty good at that.”

“How long before she stops being so paranoid and impulsive?”

“Remember, it’s not every day that she gets taken someplace against her will. Most of us would be upset.”

He had a point. Maybe I had become so used to dealing with Trina’s abnormalities that I’d overlooked the fact that her brain could still react normally to life’s ups and downs. If my mother had snatched me off the street and driven me to parts unknown, I’d be screaming, too.

“Some of Trina’s problems can be worked out with medicine, and some will take therapy, Keri. She’s fortunate. Bipolar disorder isn’t curable, but it’s highly treatable. Is there anyone else in your family with a mental illness?”

I shook my head.

“No? On her father’s side?”

“Oh, well, they’re all a bunch of nuts. But,” I said, seeing Wilbur lean forward with interest, “I’m talking about garden-variety crazy, as in ‘Will you loan me five hundred dollars that I know you know I have no intention of paying back?’ That kind of crazy.”

Wilbur laughed. “I’m familiar with the type.”

He stared at me in the way counselors do when they’re trying to elicit more conversation. But I had caught myself before I told him that my mother didn’t hesitate to beg me for money. The last person on earth I wanted to talk about was Emma.

Not talking about her didn’t mean I wouldn’t think about her. Later—after Wilbur had described in detail the stages of Trina’s healing; after he’d answered my questions, the ones he could answer; after he’d assured me that I should have faith in both the program and Trina’s ability to heal—when I was alone, that’s when my mother inserted herself in my mind.

Good ol’ Emma, pressing so hard against my thoughts that I could see her slim frame, resent her for still looking good, hear her wisp of an almost-old-lady voice pleading with me to answer her calls, give her another chance. My list of rebukes was as much a part of me as my skin.

But you left me home alone when I was three. You didn’t come to my open house at school when I was five, six, seven, eight, nine. You threw up all over my prom gown. You were drunk at my graduation. You didn’t show up at my wedding. You didn’t come when the baby died.

As I sat on the hard-backed chair, my arms began to ache. That’s where the hurting always started.

I put on the sneakers and jogging suit I’d brought, and when I went outside the cool morning air on my face startled me in a good way. Music was playing. I could hear Jean encouraging someone, with her soft, gentle “That’s right, sweetheart. That’s just perfect.” There was no one in the front part of the house, no one to watch me go out the front door.

I ran through the rows of sunflowers. Ran fast, without stopping. I sweated a lot, and after a while my muscles began to strain and hurt. That kind of pain was welcome, it really was. That kind of pain didn’t make me remember things I didn’t want to remember; it didn’t cause me to mourn a man, a marriage, and a child.

When I got back to the house, Bethany was standing on the front porch. “They were looking for you,” she said.

“Who?”

“Brad, Jean, and Eddie. They don’t want us to go wandering off. Somebody might see us.”

“Out here? We’re in Boonieville.”

Bethany shrugged. She lit a cigarette. “Listen, that’s what they told me.”

“Where are the girls?”

“Angelica is making jewelry. Trina’s working. They’re all right. Nobody’s screaming. Nobody’s naked. Nobody’s hacking away with the razor blade.”

“Bethany, I’m sorry about what I said.”

There was silence for about five seconds.

“Don’t you just fucking hate it when they get naked in front of company?” Bethany said. We laughed. “What did the doctor say to you?”

“That Trina doesn’t have the proper level of medication in her system. He asked me about my family background, if anyone else had mental illness.”

“My whole family has it, both sides. My dad had six siblings and only two don’t have some kind of brain disease. They covered it up with drinking. My sister’s son was strung out on crack when he died. He was manic and high, and he either fell or jumped from a rooftop parking lot.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Yeah. So that was—what, six months ago? When that happened, I started making plans to get Angelica in the program. A nurse on one of the psychiatric wards had told me about it a long time ago, but I never followed up.”

“Your aunts and uncles who were alcoholics, did they ever get a diagnosis?”

“Some of them. You know, someone would be hospitalized—once, twice—and then the attending psychiatrist would say, ‘It appears that so-and-so has bipolar disorder, or depression.’ He’d prescribe medication, and they’d take it for a little while and then stop, and the craziness would start all over again. They’d rather admit to being drunks than to having mental illness.”

The craziness in Ma Missy’s house, without long pauses or any reprieve, came to mind. I considered for a moment the possibility that Emma’s drinking masked deeper pain, but I didn’t probe very deeply. I wasn’t prepared to empathize with a woman I despised.

For much of the day, Jean and I stayed clear of each other. Being around Jean made me feel as though I needed to explain myself, a feeling I hated. Maybe she sensed my resistance. She wasn’t as garrulous as she’d been the day before.

Dinner that evening was sumptuous. In a low bowl, Jean had arranged cut flowers surrounded by tiny green oranges as a centerpiece. There was a curried spinach-and-potato casserole, fried trout with some sort of lemony sauce, corn on the cob, and homemade corn bread. For dessert, Jean served pears poached in apple juice, cinnamon, and honey.

Trina didn’t say a word at the table. She ate mechanically, two helpings of everything that was offered. I sensed that she was wired and fractious and that whatever was on her mind would bear monitoring. Jean followed her when she got up from the table. While I was loading the dishwasher, I could hear the one-sided conversation. Her tone was pleasant, as though she expected a response from her listener. A few minutes later the front door opened, and when I looked out the picture window in the living room, Trina and Jean were walking toward the road. When they returned ten minutes later, Trina went back to the room with Brad, and Jean came into the kitchen.

From where I sat, I could see that Jean’s face was serene as she began putting away the leftovers and wiping off the stove. Maybe she never really expected much out of life, I thought. Maybe that’s why she can be content with her sunflowers and her boy who will never be the same.

“How did you get Trina to take a walk?”

Jean looked surprised, then thoughtful. “I don’t know. We were talking, and then I just took her hand and said, ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ and she came with me. It helps not to be Mom,” she added.

“Right.”

“Are you still angry with me?”

“I’m not angry with you,” I said, rinsing plates and putting them in the dishwasher.

Prickles of annoyance pulsated just below my skin. She was trying to lead me down a touchy-feely path I didn’t want to follow. I could feel my cell phone vibrating in my back hip pocket and took it out.

“Keri?”

“Clyde, where are you?” I could have bitten my tongue. I didn’t want him to ask me the same question.

“I’m back in LA. I called the store. They told me you were away. Where are
you
? Where’s Trina? How is she doing?”

“She’s with me. I’m . . . we’re . . . she’s getting treatment.”

“Where? Why didn’t you tell me about this? You’re going to want me to pay for it.”

“No. I can manage.”

For a moment he was silent. Disappointed, no doubt. “I’d like to see her this weekend.”

“This is a different kind of place. For the first couple of months they don’t allow visitors.”

“What the hell are you talking about? How did you find out about this place?”

“One of my support group members sent her daughter here. I’ve met a lot of people who had family members come. It’s a great facility.”

“I want to talk to my daughter.”

“It’s not possible right now. You’re just going to have to trust me.”

“You always need to be in control,” he said. He hung up without saying good-bye.

Jean didn’t pretend to be occupied with busywork. She stared straight at me as I pocketed my cell phone, making me feel self-conscious.

“That was my ex-husband. He doesn’t know about any of this. He’s upset because he can’t talk with Trina.”

“Ex-husbands can be a challenge to your sense of harmony.”

There was no sense of irony in her comment. Maybe that’s why we both laughed.

“You’ve been married before?” Ma and Pa Kettle weren’t their only ones? This was a surprise.

Jean gave a short laugh. “Honey, Eddie is my fourth and last husband. We’ve been together for twenty years; that’s twice as long as any of the others.”

“So he’s not your son’s father.”

She shook her head. “That would be husband number two, Ralph. He lives in South Africa. Does something with diamonds. Makes a ton of money. He still sends me some. Of course, he doesn’t come to see his son—who Eddie raised, by the way. Ralph gets to absolve his guilt, and I’m grateful for the cash, because sometimes Eddie and I run short. People do what they can do, dear.”

Jean had inserted her little New Age lecture so subtly I almost didn’t notice the message she’d planted. Maybe I was ready to hear it. “I want to stop being angry with Clyde. I try. My rage is like a drug for me. I take a hit, and then I’m out of control.”

“I’ve done a lot of things that I’ve regretted when I’m angry. If your ex doesn’t hear from his daughter, is he likely to go looking for her?”

“No one knows where I am,” I said. “Not even me.”

“There’s a lot at stake,” Jean said.