The Feathered Bone (26 page)

She does as I ask, and we continue the exercise. She tells me her hurts, and I record them.

“My husband won't go to the cemetery with me. He won't talk about Ryan. He acts as if we never had a son at all.”

I write on the card. When I hand it to her, she reads and nods. Then she puts it into the box.

“Anything else?”

“My daughters say I'm stuck in the past. That I can't let go of my son. It's the worst. I love my children. All of them.”

“Of course you do.” I write on the card, and she adds it to the box.

“What else is causing you to feel hurt? Anxiety, anger?” I let her process each emotion.

“My parents. It's almost as if they blame me. They tell me . . . they say I didn't raise him to fear God. That we weren't Christian enough.”

I listen as she fights tears.

“But I did my best,” she continues. “I brought him to Mass every Sunday. We rarely missed. We prayed together before every meal. I don't know what more I could have done.” She's crying hard now as she moves her right hand in the shape of a cross.

“That's the thing about suicide. It's an irrational act.”

“Yes. It is.” She nods repeatedly.

“People don't know how to make sense of it. We try to frame it around our traditions of faith.”

“That's true.”

“And anytime a child makes an unfortunate choice, people tend to blame the parents. Usually the mother. It's how we convince ourselves it could never happen to us. What happened to Ryan is not your fault.”

“I know. But sometimes I feel like it is.”

“From what you've explained to me, it's clear your son was suffering from depression. Would you agree?”

She nods again. “Yes, that's what the doctor said.”

“So it sounds to me as if he didn't take his own life to hurt you.” I pause here. She waits for more. “Ryan wasn't enraged or seeking revenge. He was suffering. And he couldn't find any other way to end the pain. It's as simple as brain chemistry.”

“I know, I do. Because I know Ryan. I know my son's heart. But how can I make everyone else understand? They think I'm making excuses. That I can't face the truth.”

“But that is the truth. Your son had an illness. No different from cancer or diabetes.”

She sighs.

“Maybe it will help to think of it this way. Let's say you have a disease. You live every day in pain, suffering, even in your sleep. You could be in this kind of pain for the rest of your life. No way to numb it. This is not a bearable pain. It's the unbearable kind. The kind that makes people want to pull their own abscessed tooth.”

“Exactly. Yes.” She holds the box with two hands, as if she's guarding a treasure.

“That's what his mind did, Mrs. Hosh. It pulled the tooth. The only difference is, in Ryan's case, the root of the pain was his own brain. An imbalanced chemical reaction. It had nothing at all to do with how many Sundays he sat in those pews. It was an illness. He died from that disease just as others die from cancer or pneumonia.”

I write on another index card:
People's cruelty and criticism
.

When I pass it to her, she reads it out loud and then puts it into the box.

“Anything else?” I pass the cards and the pen to her, and she accepts.

She writes another card, reading it to me as she adds it to the pile.
I am ashamed of my weight.
Then a second.
I am afraid my husband is about to leave me.
And another.
I'm not sure I believe in God anymore.

As she drops the final card, she looks to me and asks, “Too many?”

“No such thing,” I assure her.

She stares into the box. “I think that's it. For now, anyway.”

“Okay, let's close the lid.”

She does as I suggest.

“Now, what do you think the point of this might be?”

I wait, letting her think it through. When she says nothing, I explain. “I want you to learn to control your pain instead of allowing the pain to control you.”

She sits up, intrigued.

“From this point on, you are the only one who can open this box. You control when you open it, where you open it, how you open it. Only you can release these thoughts. When it's not an appropriate time to face them, you keep them locked away. When you need to process another part of the pain, you confront it. But on your terms only. Make sense?”

“Yes, actually. It does.” She laughs a little at the absurdity of it all.

“Now I'm ready to listen. You can pull out a card and talk about one of those hurtful issues, or you can keep them locked away and talk about something else entirely. You are in charge.”

With this, Mrs. Hosh pushes the box under her chair and says, “As silly as it seems, you just set my mind free for the first time in years.” She moves her purse to her lap and pulls out a mini photo album. “How about I show you my new puppy?”

I lean to see.

“His name is Milo. We call him our holy terrier.” She laughs and shows me the pictures, each one depicting a scruffy Jack Russell being loved to bits.

We talk about the puppy, the joys of expecting her first grandchild, and the plans to surprise her husband with a deep-sea fishing trip for his fiftieth birthday. By hour's end, she picks up her shoe box and says, “I'm going to beat this. I'm going to fight for me.”

Chapter 18

B
Y THE TIME
I
PICK
E
LLIE UP FROM HER THEATER PRACTICE
, I
STILL
haven't heard from Carl. I called several times between truck stops and hotels, but I've had no better luck finding him than I've had finding Sarah. So now, as Ellie and I arrive home after this long and difficult day, I'm surprised to see his truck parked crooked under our carport. Walking past, we notice it's full of boxes. He comes out of the house, hang-up clothes in hand.

“Carl?” My voice trembles.

“What are you doing?” Ellie asks.

“I'm leaving.” He shows no emotion.

“Carl, honey?” a woman's voice calls from the kitchen. “You want these glasses?”

I fall straight to the ground, slamming my knees hard against the concrete.

“Who's that?” Ellie yells, running into the house.

“How can you do this to us?” I whisper, looking at my husband, the man I have loved since I was a teen. In a flash I am ten years old again, screaming at my own father as he packed his things into the trunk of his car and left my mother and me crying in the driveway. “We're your family, Carl. Your family.”

He puts the clothes into the cab of his truck and hurries back
inside. I am unable to follow him. I can no longer feel my feet. My knees are bleeding, and my legs fail to hold me.

I'm still on the ground when Carl returns with a young woman by his side. He is holding her hand as Ellie runs behind him, screaming, calling him terrible names. I've never heard my daughter curse, but now she uses all the words we've declared off-limits, and I don't stop her.

“Get in the truck,” he tells the woman. She obeys, climbing in from the driver's side.

I cannot move. Instead, I sit on the concrete, watching it all play out around me. “How long have you been with her?”

“Six months,” he says. “Her name's Ashleigh. We've got an apartment in Baton Rouge.”

He moves back into the house and comes out quickly, holding his guitar. An acoustic six-string. I gave it to him, a gift for our twelfth anniversary. “Why are you doing this?”

Ellie stands in front of his truck door, arms crossed, defiant. “You aren't going with her,” she says. “You're my father. You can't up and leave us.”

“I'm sorry, Ellie,” Carl says flatly. “Your mother can tell you why this is happening. Talk to her.”

I pull myself to my feet. “What do you think I know? I don't understand this at all. We have everything.”

“Amanda, stop pretending. Our marriage has been dead for years.”

This knocks the wind from my lungs. “What are you talking about?”

I look at Ashleigh. She's not all that much older than Ellie, early twenties at most. About the age Carl and I were when we said our vows
.

Ellie opens the truck door and starts to yell. “He's my father! My father! What right do you have?”

I'm not sure what I would expect someone to say in this situation, but the words I hear are the last thing I'm prepared to process.

“He loves me,” Ashleigh says, shrugging. As if it makes perfect sense.

“You'll understand one day. When you're older,” Carl says to Ellie. “Your mother and I, we're very different people. It was never a good fit.” He might as well be asking her to feed the cat.

I look at the girl in his truck, Ashleigh. So young. “Who are you?” I ask.

“Don't blame me. You didn't give him enough attention.” She looks at me as if I should have known better.

Without another word, Carl cranks his truck and leaves Ellie yelling after him in the driveway, crying and chasing him out to the road. Exactly as I did when my own father drove away.

And just like that, he is gone.

“He did what?” Raelynn yells with an intensity that causes me to drop my cell phone. I fumble to pick it back up as she continues. “I'm on my way. Don't do anything stupid.”

Ellie slams doors and yells. She's releasing every pent-up emotion she's banked for the last year. I don't stop her. I am beaten down, a mess.

Within minutes Raelynn is at my house. “I'm packing you a bag, and we're going to Jay's camp. He's on his way to meet us there. Ellie?” She gives my daughter instructions, and Ellie obeys.

“What about your boys?” I follow Raelynn to my bedroom,
where she pulls a suitcase from my closet and begins to fill it with clothes.

“Not a problem. They're with my brother. I'm getting you out of this place.”

While Raelynn and Ellie pack, I sit on my bed, trying to understand. “Of all days for him to do this to us, Raelynn. He had to choose today?”

“I heard a story on TV last summer,” Raelynn says. “
The View
or
Regis and Kelly
, I don't know, but there's this lady who sees a snake in the road, right? It's been run over, but it's still alive. Writhing on the blacktop. So she stops and she goes over to save the snake.”

Raelynn pulls socks from my drawer and adds them to the luggage. Then grabs a pair of jeans. “So the lady, she did all this work to save the stupid snake, and you know what the snake did? After she saved his life and took care of him and nursed him back to health and all that?”

I shake my head.

“He bit her! He did. And then the woman started crying and was all upset and she asked the snake, ‘Why'd you bite me? I saved your life. I took care of you. I loved you.' And you know what he said to her?”

The hum of the refrigerator grows louder than Raelynn's voice.

“He said, ‘You knew I was a snake when you picked me up. What'd you expect?' ” She pulls a couple shirts from my closet. “You married a snake, Amanda. A snake.”

We hit the highway in Raelynn's minivan. The moon is covered with clouds, and a delicate drizzle begins to fall, just enough to slick
the blacktop. It seems to make her hurry faster, determined not to let anything stop us from reaching the river.

We head down Highway 447, where water tops the ditches. Tucked tight behind the trenches are beautiful homes, most built in traditional Southern style with massive front porches. In many of the yards, mobile homes are perched next to the larger house—a typical LP scene as families share their acreage for generations, adding trailers onto random parts of their land until younger relatives can afford to build a home in their designated spot.

Cutting left at the 16 T, we head through Port Vincent and on toward French Settlement, the original river village founded by a group of Acadians that included Raelynn's ancestors. Some of them later ended up staking claims a little farther north, in Walker. As soon as we take the turn, the parish vibe shifts to nearly all Cajun. The land changes too. Houses are now built on piers to withstand rising floodwaters. Many of the wooden homes have raised porches, high slanting rooflines, and outdoor ladders characteristic of Acadian architecture.