Crazy Love You (30 page)

“We wanted another child,” she said. My mother had been pretty once, beautiful even. Not gorgeous. So few people are truly gorgeous in the real world. Flawless beauty exists only in movies and magazines, in the comics. The rest of us are the sum of our qualities and imperfections. But my mother once had laughing eyes and a wide mouth that always seemed upturned in a smile, as if she were in on some cosmic joke. She'd had wavy dark hair that framed a heart-shaped face. She'd been shapely, full-bodied. There was nothing of that woman in the anxious, washed-out person before me. “I loved you so much. I couldn't wait to make more babies.”

She tried for a smile, but it was more sad than a smile had a right to be. It faded quickly and she looked out the window.

“But at times I have felt as if there's this terrible darkness in me. It's like a black hole, sucking in all the light, all the happiness.”

She wrapped her arms around herself, reminding me of Meg. Meg had said something like that, too, when she told me of bouts of depression she'd suffered in high school and in college.
It's like all the color drains out of your world. There's nothing you want to see or do. I just wanted to sleep forever.

“I wasn't always like that. It started after my first pregnancy. A few weeks after you were born, a kind of shroud fell over my life. It was gray and suffocating; I couldn't move. Your grandmother helped me then, too. But it passed quickly enough.”

“Postpartum depression,” I said.

“Of course, we know that now. Then, no one ever said anything like that. There was no diagnosis, no worry that it would come back. For me, it was like labor. Once it was done, I forgot how painful, how frightening it had been.”

Another patient walked through the door with the shuffling walk of the overmedicated. My mother waited for her to move away, to take a seat on the other side of the room and open a magazine.

“I saw her after I lost my first baby.”

“Priss? Where?”

“In the woods. I was out walking, close to the house because you were napping. I saw her, this pretty little thing, darting through the trees like a sprite. I called to her, but she ran away and I followed. The property is so isolated—so it was strange seeing a little girl there. I needed to get back to you, but I didn't want a little girl wandering around alone. It didn't seem safe.”

I could see Priss running, teasing. I knew how irresistible it was to chase her.

“I finally caught up with her in the graveyard,” my mother went on. “My first thought was that she must have been so cold. It was chilly and she just wore this little cotton slip of a dress.”

“White, with yellow flowers,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “That's right. She had an aura of sadness, of loneliness. And it reached out for me, connected to my own sadness and grief. She told me that she was sorry about my baby. And I asked her how she knew.”

I waited for my mother to go on, but she seemed to drift away into her own thoughts. She looked smaller, more wasted than she had when I arrived. I put a hand on her shoulder.

“She said that so many little children had died there,” Mom whispered. “And she showed me their graves.”

She was trembling a little now. “I was so afraid suddenly. I saw what she was and I ran from her, back to you. I was afraid that she had lured me away from you and that when I got home, you would be gone. But you were still sleeping when I got back, safe and sound.

“And then I started to doubt what I had seen. I took the miscarriage hard, harder than everyone thought I should have at that early stage; was I losing my mind? I didn't dare tell your father. He was so worried about me already.”

I imagined her running through the woods and bursting into the house, dashing up the stairs to find me safe in bed. I could see it all—my room as it was, with stars painted on the ceiling and a big stuffed bear on the chair in the corner, my mother pale with fear, leaning against the doorframe in relief.

“But the next day I saw her again,” she said. “She was waiting on the edge of the woods. She wanted me to follow her. But I didn't, not that day.”

“What did you mean that you knew what she was? What
is
she?”

“She's anger, Ian,” my mother said. “She's misery. She's revenge. She's a deep, abysmal loneliness.”

She was all those things; I knew that. But Priss was more. She was real, not just some bad energy trapped in the ether. She was a person, with needs and motivations. Eloise was right. She wanted something real that only I could give her.

My mother told me how with each miscarriage, she became more despondent. She started following Priss out to those graves every day as I napped. She wanted to comfort the children who lay there, comfort the souls of the children she hadn't been able to carry. This continued, on and off, for years. And then my father discovered what she'd been doing and made her promise to stop.

“He knew about her, even though he wouldn't admit it at first. He'd seen her, too.”

I remembered how he'd said to me:
There is no little girl in those woods and there never has been.

“But your father was too strong for her, too solid,” she said. “He wasn't weak like me. He never let her lure him out to the woods. When she teased him, he ignored her. He finally told me as much. He said she'd been there forever.”

But my father had never acknowledged seeing her, not to me. Wouldn't he have? I remembered him yelling at Eloise about not poisoning my mind as she had my mother's. I wondered how much of what my mother was saying was true, how much of it her delusions.

“So I started ignoring her, stopped following her when she came for me. And a few months later, I was pregnant with Ella. And I never saw her again, until the night Ella died.”

She always referred to it as “the night Ella died.” Never as “the night I killed Ella and would have killed you, too, if you hadn't run.” But some words don't exactly roll off the tongue.

I could see her drifting away as she was prone to doing, getting deeper and deeper inside her own head and further from me.

“You saw her that night?” I said. “What did she want? What did she say?”

We had never talked about that night, what delusion, what madness had led her to do what she did. It made sense that Priss had something to do with it.

“Tell me what happened, Mom,” I said.

My mom just shook her head, and her eyes grew wide and filled with tears. “She didn't say anything. It was the Whispers. They got so loud, a million voices all around me.”

“What did they say?”

My mother's doctor walked in then. He was a slim and meticulously dressed man, with sharply pressed black pants and a royal-blue button-down. He did not look happy to see me. He told me once that my visits to my mother could be “destabilizing.” I didn't know what that meant, and fuck him if he didn't think I was going to come and see my mother.

“Ian,” he said. “It's good to see you.”

His voice was cautious, suspicious as he stepped closer to us.

“Everything all right?” he asked. “Miriam? Everything okay?”

My mother wasn't looking too good. She was rocking in her chair, staring at some point far off into the distance. She glanced over at the doctor but didn't answer.

“What have you been discussing?” he asked.

“That's really none of your business, is it, Doctor?” I said. I was surprised by the edge to my voice, and from the look on his face, I could see that he was, too. He plastered on a shrinky smile, but his eyes were twin laser beams of disapproval. I was sick of that look from people—from teachers and doctors and cops. I'd had a lifetime of it.

“Your mother's well-being is indeed my business, Ian. And she does
not
look well at all.”

“Mom,” I said gently. But she was gone, way gone.

“We've talked before about upsetting her, about showing up here unannounced.”

Have we? If we had, I didn't remember it. But I stayed silent. I didn't want to seem crazy in this crazy place. What if they didn't let me leave? On the other hand, what a nice little escape it would be. Just say you're nuts and need to lie down for the foreseeable future. I could see the appeal of the situation my mother had chosen for herself. Nothing was required of her. She hadn't truly answered for anything. She'd killed my sister and destroyed my life. When it all became too much, the white coats came and took her off to rest for as long as she needed—like forever. Did that sound bitter? You know what? I
was
pretty bitter.

“How about we table whatever you're discussing until tomorrow or the next day?” he suggested when I didn't say anything.

“Mom?” I said. I couldn't leave without asking. “What does she want?”

The doctor moved over toward my mother and took her arm, gently eased her to standing. “I really must insist.”

“Mom,” I said. “Please.”

She walked over to me and wrapped her arms around me. I held on to her tight. In spite of it all, I loved her. You never love or need anyone in this life like you do your mother. And no one ever quite loves you the same way she does—even if she does go crazy and try to kill you.

She whispered fiercely in my ear: “Sweetheart, why don't you just ask her?”

In my senior year of high school, I developed a serious soul-destroying crush on my advanced-chemistry lab partner. Her name was Marley and she was the first person to be nice to me in a hundred years. Her family had just moved to The Hollows from South Carolina, and she was almost as much of an outsider as I was. Well, not quite.

I was a ghost at The Hollows High, moving through the hallways unseen, lurking silent in the back of classrooms, sitting alone at lunch eating enormous piles of food. No one came near me, but no one messed with me anymore either. It was understood that if you earned my wrath, bad things happened to you. So by senior year, there wasn't as much as a snide glance in my direction. Even the teachers were terribly careful with me.

And so I lumbered through my life. My only saving grace was my weekends and summers in the city. I was taking art classes at Parsons School of Design, where I hoped I would go to college. It was a massively expensive proposition. But my father never said a word about the cost. He knew I was an artist and he wanted me to pursue that dream. He knew it was the only healthy, productive thing I had in my life.

When I look at my old yearbooks now and I see a morbidly obese, acne-masked monster, I am surprised people didn't come after me with torches. Maybe in another era, they would have.

But, oddly, Marley didn't seem to view me that way. We were assigned to work together since I was the only one in chemistry class who didn't have a partner. Usually, the teacher, Mr. Gardener, worked with me. I expected Marley, pink-cheeked and petite, to register some revulsion, but instead she shook my hand and smiled, warm and sincere. She looked right past the external me and held my eyes.

“Nice to meet you, Ian,” she said. There was the loveliest lilt to her voice. She moved a self-conscious hand to sweep a riot of black curls away from her eyes. “Thanks for being my partner. Chemistry is
not
my best subject.”

“I'll help you,” I said. My voice crackled as if from disuse.

“Oh, you're a doll,” she said. She lowered her voice and whispered as if I were her intimate pal. “It's so
hard
to be new.”

That day, she came and sat with me at lunch. “Do you mind?”

The Hollows was not a welcoming place. Provincial and backward, people didn't do well with outsiders. But Marley had looks and charm going for her. Eventually, I knew she'd find someone else to sit with. In the meantime, I enjoyed her company as she chattered endlessly about how much she missed her friends back home, and how mad she was at her father for moving the whole family for his job, and how happy she was to have me as a friend. I'm not sure I ever uttered a word.

Suddenly I was looking forward to school every day. And there was something about Marley, or maybe just my feelings for her, that made me look at myself differently. It was the crush, however ill-fated, that got me to start taking better care of myself. I stopped eating so much junk food when I got home from school. My grandmother didn't live with us anymore now that I was old enough to take care of myself. But she still did our grocery shopping. I asked her to get more healthy foods.

“Like what?” she asked, genuinely not sure what I meant.

“You know fruits, vegetables, granola. Maybe some fish and chicken that I can cook. I'm going to start cooking for my dad at night.”

She shrugged. “Sure,” she said. I started making her a list, and she bought the things I requested.

I went to the library and got a cookbook:
101 Healthy, Easy Meals
, and
Arnold's Bodybuilding for Men.
It's amazing how love can inspire us to change ourselves.

Of course, I never had a chance with Marley. I was simply the first person she met in a new school. I was easy, desperate, a sure thing in an unwelcoming place. And sure enough, she slowly developed other friendships.

She wasn't quite cheerleader or prom-queen material. But she was smart and pretty in a nonthreatening way. And soon she was sitting with the brains—the college-bound, student-government, debate-team crowd. Not the cool kids exactly, but the kids that the cool kids went to when they needed help with their homework or else get kicked off the squad, team, whatever. They held a place of not coolness exactly, then at least respect within The Hollows High hierarchy.

She must have heard everything about me from the other kids, but she never once stopped being kind to me, remained my chemistry partner, and still occasionally sat with me at lunch, just to be nice, I'm sure. She was like that, kind of a natural politician and networker.