Crazy Love You (5 page)

•  •  •

Coffee with Megan turned into dinner, turned into her coming back to my place. She wouldn't
sleep
with me, but she did stay over. We lay in my bed all night talking. I never talked so much in my life. I had never been so sober with a woman, so wide open. I told her everything—about my sister, my mother, and Priss. There was something about her  . . . those kind eyes, the soft understanding noises she made, the way she held my hand, the way our fingers entwined. With dawn breaking outside my window, we wrapped around each other, still in our clothes. I tried and failed not to get hard, and she let me kiss her. It was the sweetest torture, so wonderfully painful to want her so badly, to have her so close.

“Let's not rush and make a mess of this,” she whispered.

“Okay,” I said, nearly delirious with desire. The feelings I had for her even then were so big, so pure, I'd have done anything she asked. She was the first woman I had ever spent the night with not drunk, not high. Pathetic, I know. With Megan, I was all myself, and she still wanted to be near me. I pulled her closer, burying my face in the hollow between her shoulder and her neck. Oh, please, I begged the universe, don't let me fuck this up. We drifted off like that. And I dreamed about Priss. She wasn't happy.

We were playing out in the woods, and the dark crept up on me. It had a way of doing that when I was playing with Priss. One minute, we were romping about in the sun; the next, night was upon us. The sky was the blue-pink of late dusk. The trees were dancing in a strong wind, the colors shifting from cheerful hues of green and white to menacing shadows of gray and black. My mother had taught me how to look at things with an artist's eye.

You see that tree?
she'd asked one day.
What color do you see?

The leaves are green
, I'd said.
The trunk is brown.

Look closer
, she said.
There are so many colors. The yellow of the sunlight shining, the black of the shadows and dark spaces, the white of the veins, the beige of the dead leaves. Nothing is ever just one color, or even two.

She was right, of course. The world was a riot of color, and always changing with the light. Nothing was still or solid or predictable. I had never seen anything the same way after that.

“I have to go,” I told Priss.

She reached out for me and grabbed my arm. Her grip was cool and strong. She hadn't touched me before and I was surprised by the feel of her. She was electric.

“Don't,” she said. It was just a whisper among the Whispers. “It's not safe.”

She was wearing that same dress again. It was threadbare and ripped at the hem. I had asked her a couple of times where she lived and she just pointed away from my house.
Over there
, she'd say. But I knew there were no houses for miles. The only building that was close was an old church that was long condemned and about to be torn down.

It didn't much matter to me then. Kids don't care about things like that. They only know the moment and whether it's good or bad. And when I was with Priss, it was all good. I could run and play, laugh, be free. I could forget about the various little miseries of my life.

I was being bullied at school and it was getting worse every day. My mother rarely got out of bed now. My grandmother had moved in to take care of Ella and me because my dad couldn't stay home from work any longer. I rarely saw him. He was gone before I woke, home just before I went to bed. And now the house smelled of cigarettes and burned coffee. My grandma Madge wasn't horrible; she just wasn't my mom. She wasn't a good cook, or much of a housekeeper. She was always reading or watching television; I was a bit of an interruption, not an unhappy one, but an interruption just the same.

When I was in the woods with Priss, none of it mattered. The simple pleasure of her companionship was a salve. She always wanted to play what I wanted to play—spies or pirates or bank robbers. She was game for looking for frogs, or climbing trees. She didn't care if she got wet or dirty. She never cried when she fell or skinned her knee. I might, though, and then she sat beside me, rubbing my back until I felt better, or goofing around until I laughed. She was a good friend, the best I'd ever had.

“Just stay awhile,” Priss said.

But the sky was dark. And I knew I had to go even though I didn't want to. I had no idea in what condition I'd find my mother lately—sleeping, catatonic, manic, seminormal. Meanwhile, no one had an adequate explanation for what was wrong with her.

“It's the baby blues,” my grandmother said. “It will pass. She had it after you were born for a time.”

“She did?” This had seemed like hopeful information.

My grandmother shrugged. “Not this bad, though.”

My mother drifted around like a ghost, when she left her room at all. And Ella wailed all the time. She wanted Mom, too. And I felt sad for my baby sister, almost as sad as I felt for myself.

Of course, now I know that my mother was in the throes of postpartum depression, heading fast toward postpartum psychosis. Why no one knew this at the time, I'm unsure. It wasn't unheard of in the eighties, even if it wasn't the media buzzword that it is today. Maybe that's what happens when you live in a backwater burg. Substandard medical care is no joke. Why didn't anyone help her? Why didn't anyone help us? There isn't anyone left to answer for it now.

“What do you mean it's not safe?” I asked Priss that night.

“Just stay here with me.”

She was moonlight, almost translucent in the dark. And her eyes glowed with intent. “You belong here with me.”

I liked the way it sounded. And a part of me believed it was true. But the thought of Mom and Ella, even my dad, pulled me away from her. That was my home and family; I knew I belonged there with them more than anyplace else, imperfect as we all were.

“I have to go,” I said again.

“Not yet,” she pleaded.

“You should go home, too,” I said. “Won't your mom be waiting for you?”

“No,” she said. “She won't.”

There was something about her then—something angry, almost possessive—and the Whispers grew louder, more insistent. They didn't want me to go either. A strange, dark dawning cast a shadow over me and I started to run.

I ran with the shadows turning into ghouls and the world growing blacker all around me. I fell once and skinned my knee on the ground, tearing my jeans. Even now, I don't know why I ran or why I was so afraid. Some shine, some psychic connection to my mother or my sister maybe. I believe in that shit, you know. That we are connected to each other in twisting and indelible ways even if we are too stupid to know it most of the time. Maybe Ella was calling me, and a part of me, deep inside, heard her.

When I got to the clearing where our house sat, my grandmother's old minivan was gone. Later she'd tell me that she went out to run some errands. Both my mother and Ella were asleep last she checked, and she needed some things for supper. She'd called for me but I hadn't answered. She hadn't planned to be gone more than half an hour, but the store was crowded and traffic unusually heavy in town. She was gone closer to an hour. It shouldn't have mattered. It wasn't her fault, though I know she blamed herself until the day she died.

I saw my mom on the porch, rocking in that chair she loved. She wore the long white nightgown that I swear she'd been wearing for a month. I was washed over with relief when I saw her. She was fine; everyone was fine. Then the silence hit me like a hammer. It was so quiet.

“Where's Ella?” I said as I approached my mother. She looked like shit, seriously. Her face was drawn and her cheekbones jutted out beneath the blue-black valleys under her dark eyes. Her mouth, usually so full of smiles and words of love, was just a tight black line. I remember feeling a little angry with the woman before me.
What did you do with my mom?

Her collarbone strained against her skin, and her dirty nightgown hung off of her as if she were just a wire hanger.

“She's sleeping,” she said.

Through the window, I could see the television with the VCR sitting on top of it. It was just after five, according to the glowing green numbers of the digital clock. Ella should have been wailing for her bottle.

“Did you feed her?”

She stood up then, and put her hands on my shoulders. “Don't worry about Ella,” she said. “Ian, I haven't been taking very good care of you. I'm sorry.”

Her voice was flat and her eyes glistening.

“It's okay, Mom,” I said.

“No,” she said. “It isn't. I need to take better care of you. You're my baby, too. My first baby.”

She put an arm around me and led me inside. I almost went with her. I leaned against her and she tightened her grip around me. “A mommy needs to take care of her babies, no matter what,” she said. “Come inside. It's time for your bath.”

But then I heard that voice again, calling from the woods. And I looked out and saw a glowing orange light among the trees. My mother didn't seem to hear. It was Priss; it was the Whispers.

It was something else altogether.

Ian.
And the voice was inside my head somehow, and outside, too, all around me. But my mother kept moving us inside. She opened the door.
She's going to kill you.

And even though it was so far from any reality I had ever known with my mother, I knew in my bones that the words were true.

Still, I didn't break away from her right away. I loved being close to her; I wanted to be near her. I had missed her so, so much. I almost went inside with her. I wanted to go with her, wherever she planned to take me. And, if I had, what would have happened? Would she have led me to the bath she'd drawn for me? Would I have climbed inside, sunk into the warm water? Would I have let her bathe me, even though I had long since started taking my own showers, shutting the door when I used the toilet? Maybe. I might have let her, the way I let her lie beside me when she read my stories, the way I climbed into her bed at night when my father was away. Even at ten going on eleven, I was still more baby inside than big kid and I was nowhere near not needing and wanting my mom all the time. I might have let her do anything to me, just to be close to her. Isn't that how it works for everyone? We'll let our parents do anything to us.

But it was that light, that voice, that led me away from her. It grew louder, more ubiquitous, more urgent. And finally, just before I crossed the threshold into the house, I ducked from underneath my mother's arm, and ran to the woods toward that light, and answered the call of that voice that sounded like the tinkling of bells.

I heard my mother calling after me, her voice frantic, panicked.

“Ian,” she shrieked. “Come back here.”

But I didn't. I ran and ran and ran back to that small house in the woods. She wasn't there. Priss was nowhere to be seen. I found a corner and huddled there crying and cold.

After a while I wasn't sure what had happened. What had I seen? Why had I run? When it was fully night and the moon rose and the sky was a field of stars, I must have drifted off. Or maybe I was in a kind of shock. But that's where they found me, my father and the police. I heard them moving through the woods, calling my name in big, booming, urgent voices. Ian! Ian Paine!

I tried to hide, to make myself very small. I remember not wanting them to find me, because once they did, my life was going to be different. I didn't want to hear the horrible things they were going to tell me.

That was the night my sister died. They called it crib death; that's what they do in a town like The Hollows. They hush, they keep secrets, they don't tell. They bury it all deep in the ground where it rests, but maybe not forever. We all knew the truth. My mother killed my sister that night, and she would have killed me. The bath was drawn and waiting. But Priss saved me; she called me to her, called me into the woods. It was the first time she saved my life, but it wouldn't be the last.

•  •  •

“So, when do I get to meet Priss?” Megan wanted to know.

Wow. Never
, I wanted to say.

Meg was the only person who knew everything about the history of my relationship with Priss. And she was understandably curious. As things were getting serious with us, it was a topic that came up more and more. But Priss had disappeared. After the events that caused me to stand Megan up, Priss had kept her distance, as she was prone to do when she'd misbehaved. And that was fine with me. It wasn't like I was going to call her and ask her if she wanted to meet my new girlfriend.

“We're not really speaking at the moment,” I told her.

Meg and I were meandering through the Union Square farmers market. It was a lazy Saturday morning. We'd gorged ourselves at the Coffee Shop and now we were grocery-shopping. Megan shared my obsession with food, which is important to a crazed foodie like myself. Food is life. If you don't like to eat, you don't like being alive. That simple.

“Yeah,” she said. “But you've been friends a long time. Friends don't break up forever, do they?”

“Don't they?” I said. We walked past a stand with farm-fresh eggs. “I think friends break up all the time.”

“So that's it?” she said. “She's just not a part of your life anymore?”

“She'll always be a part of my life,” I said with an easy shrug. “She's the main character in my books.”

In the next stall, Meg picked out some kale and an earthy-looking gentleman with dirt under his fingernails and thick-muscled forearms stuffed the vegetable into her reusable sack. How green this girl was. She was as crunchy, recyclely, fair-tradey, organic as you could get and still be fun to hang out with. How I despise the self-importance of all those greenies. Really? You think you're going to save the planet with your hybrid car and recycled toilet paper? It's too far gone, my friends. Way too far.