After our night at Villa Moderne, my shrink would prescribe my Abilify, to take if I feel an episode coming on. It works pretty well, Nick—it’s powerful shit. But even if I had it that night, I was gone too fast to help myself. You’d have had to know in advance the ways my brain is capable of breaking. Our first night, I didn’t yet have a magic pill you could give me, but even if I did, the chances I’d have told you about it in advance are none.
So instead, the first thing I remember after the last thing I remember is my voice saying, “You didn’t say anything, did you?” For me, it’s as though no time at all has passed, as though we’ve circled back exactly where we began, and the loop of dialogue can be rejoined, with everything in-between edited out like splices of tape on the cutting-room floor. Except now, weak Michigan sunlight hits the gray motel curtains, whereas the last I knew it was barely past midnight. The last I knew we were in bed holding each other like drowning children, whereas once I become aware of myself again, I’m standing alone with a TV antennae in my hand, and nothing in the room seems like it’s in the right place. I know right away what has happened except I don’t understand the time schism. Because if I had really had an episode six or seven hours in duration, I would be in a hospital, wouldn’t I? If for six or seven hours I have been talking to voices inside my head, taking things apart, moving furniture, tremoring and twitching and pacing, while you sat in a Michigan motel room watching me, I cannot think of any possible reason you would not have had me taken away.
Then I realize. I say, “Oh my god. Nick, fuck, I’m so sorry. You couldn’t call anyone. You’re not supposed to be here.”
You look confused. “I’m sorry,” you say. “Who was I supposed to call? Did you want me to call Bebe or Miguel? I didn’t know.”
It’s like I’m still talking to voices in my head. “No,” I try again. “I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s your car—you could have just called 9-1-1 and told them where I was and then driven away before they got here.”
You’re looking at me like I’m nuts, which is of course an entirely appropriate way to look at me. I watch your face, moving through stages of understanding. You try to smile but it doesn’t happen exactly. You say, “Is it okay to touch you now?”
I can’t be touched in the thick of them. Not just the episodes, but other times, too: sometimes my body just starts moving and can’t stop; I have to pace or kick my legs, and any physical contact feels almost like an electric shock, too much—it hurts; I can’t keep still or bear it.
“Yes . . . I mean, if you want to. You don’t have to.”
Your hand reaches out and strokes my back; I feel your palm traversing my vertebrae, warming me. I’m still in the kind of hangover that comes after the episodes and I won’t remember any of this later; I can only write down what you told me we said to each other. But I do remember your hand.
The things you tell me you said: That I have twenty minutes to get to the ferry. That I must still be delusional if I think you would call 9-1-1 and drive away. That I kept wanting to go outside to smoke, and you kept having to go with me because you didn’t want me to just wander off, and I smoked so compulsively that we only have one left, but I can have it for my trip. To hurry up and put on my coat if I want to make the ferry. That if I want to stay another day, I can go tomorrow. That you’ll still be here waiting for me when I get back, either way.
That it never occurred to you to be scared.
“I just figured it’d pass,” you say. “Was that wrong?”
And there are so many ways to answer that question. My shrink would say I was safest in a hospital. Bebe might even say it was arrogant of you to think you could take care of me with no training, and no idea what I might do, in a town neither of us knew, in the middle of the night. People who have seen me this way before—they loved me, too, in most cases they’d loved me longer than you have—not one of them would agree with what you did tonight.
“No,” I tell you. “You weren’t wrong.”
While I am waiting for the ferry to leave, bundled below deck, you text me from Villa Moderne. You, Nick, with your pregnant wife and two sons, write simply: I wouldn’t change a thing unless it were everything.
Ezme treats me like a visitor. Ezme, at twenty-two, seems a decade older than I am, all authority and reasonableness and understanding the protocol of having (somewhat distant) family visit for the holidays. Ezme does not talk or weep loudly. Ezme knows how to cook rice and beans just like Mami makes them. Ezme knows how to change a tire. Her hair is short and frizzy; there are no hair products in the guest bathroom. Ezme does not seem to drink, but for reasons clearly different from mine. Ezme never sits down, wakes up early, doesn’t fidget or pace or smoke or swear or “work out.” She does not talk about sex; she does not read novels; she does not bring music with her when she travels. It is clear that she wears underwear. Ezme was breastfed by her mother until she was almost three and slept in a family bed, which Mami always told Isabel would make Eddie divorce her, but apparently did not. Ezme majored in economics. Whatever the fuck economics is, they apparently have jobs for it in Grand Rapids, Michigan, even though nobody in the country, especially in Michigan, can get a job. Ezme wears glasses—her contact lens case in the guest bathroom remains untouched throughout my visit. I don’t want to develop Ezme. Ezme exists in a place of opposition to. She is defined by virtue of what she is not. She is Not Me.
It turns out Mami and I were wrong about Beaver Island . . . collectively, Mami and I know very little about the ways the world functions. Naturally, there is a medical center on the island where people can get chemo: they don’t, as it turns out, have some special ferry for bald and nauseated cancer patients, all of whom would, in this Far Side cartoon of my imagination, be hurling off the sides of the boat while dragging IVs on rollers. There’s a communal section where people sit in chairs with their IVs next to them, chatting, but private rooms are also available, and Isabel requests one. They are standard-issue hospital rooms: a bed, a chair. Surely Isabel isn’t the only person here who knows private rooms exist, yet other people are sitting upright getting their dosage of toxins surrounded by strangers. I am at a loss.
For a lot of people, you text me, the desire for privacy isn’t as strong as their need not to feel alone.
I text back, I cannot imagine anything more lonely than getting chemo surrounded by strangers who think they’re kin. I’d feel like I’d been drafted into the Cancer Club without my consent, and the presumption that everyone else in the club understood me would be violating and humiliating.
Isabel says, “Who are you texting?” and I say, “Miguel,” because of course she doesn’t want to hear Bebe any more than she wants to hear about you. Maybe less.
She reclines back on the bed. Ezme and I overlapped for only two nights; she left for Grand Rapids to be home for work this morning, and Eddie is working, too, so I am the only one here with Isabel. The little sister taking her big sister to chemo; the daughter taking her mother to chemo; the crazy bisexual stripper taking the righteous Christian to chemo. I of course don’t have a job and you only teach on campus one night per week, so we aren’t leaving until tomorrow, but already I regret that. Isabel and I don’t know how to be alone together—alone is not in our repertoire.
She has brought two things with her to chemo: a rosary, and an Uglydoll.
“This is my good-luck charm,” she tells me of the toy, her voice strained, though I don’t know if that’s because of me or because she’s about to get pumped full of chemicals the nurses wear gloves to touch. “Good things happen when this doll is around.” She waves the doll a little bit, like she’s making it dance, the way she may have done to Ezme when she was small. The doll, small, green, and made of chintzy felt, with an X for one eye, looks like something cobbled together by a fifth-grade sewing class—it is an obviously ironic toy, but Isabel is using it un-ironically, and for some reason this unnerves me. She seems to me cutesy and earnest and gullible—exactly like the fo
rtysomething Midwestern mom with cancer she is—holding tight to her idiotic talisman like a child clutching a toy in the dark. Her sudden lack of nuance makes my heart pound.
I’ve been sitting there dumbstruck, but that’s okay since Isabel never seems to care all that much what I say. She tucks the doll under her non-IV arm and closes her eyes.
Eddie is at McDonough’s, buying overpriced groceries that have to be imported from the mainland, and Isabel is puking over the toilet. I thought I’d be gone by this part—they told her at the Center that she wasn’t likely to get sick until a couple of days in; she’s on steroids and Benadryl and IV anti-nausea medications, but . . . upstairs, the sound of her retching violently. I sit on the tasteful sofa, trying to be someone who doesn’t hear her.
We are private beasts, the women—and one man—of the Guerra clan, so at first it does not occur to me to go to her. It’s just that the vomiting goes on for such a long time. It’s just that there seems to be no end, so that I worry by the time I get up the stairs, she will be turned inside out. When I peer around the corner of the upstairs bathroom, Isabel has her head on the raw porcelain bowl, and she is sobbing so nakedly that it’s like she isn’t wearing any skin. Vomit clings to the geometric edges of her flapper bob. What must Ezme have felt like, growing up with a mother so beautiful? “Isabel,” I say, “can I help?”
She is looking right at me but it’s clear she hadn’t noticed me until that moment. Her eyes open wider, taking me in. Isabel has always stopped crying more quickly than anyone I have ever known. Some phantom has to have been doing that sobbing, not her—she is incapable, a wide-eyed statue of unfeeling stone.
“Can I get you anything?” I ask, and I hate myself, the way I approach her, my entire goddamn life, like one might a rabid dog, creeping, maybe she won’t see me coming closer. I get down on the tile floor next to her, and she smells so much like the inside of herself that I want to lick her. My mother. My fucking mother. Die, you hateful bitch, go on and die. “Some water, or one of your pills,” I explain, hating the tentative of my own voice. “Do you need me to call Eddie?”
“This is nothing,” Isabel says flatly. She has become, you see, a woman with nothing left to lose—whose hand is already forfeit. “I’ll be praying for the mercy of days like this when I’m in hell.”
Miguel answers his phone, “Yeah.” He can see my number, sure, but I suspect he answers every call like that. I tell him quietly, in the snowy parking lot of the closed Beaver Island library, what Isabel said.
My brother makes a startled noise of alarm in his throat. “What the fuck? Do you think she’s cracking up? It’s a . . . lot of pressure, you know? Knowing you’re going to die.”
I don’t say anything for a while. Fat snowflakes like little shredded pieces of Styrofoam float down around me, stage props; I don’t feel cold. At Villa Moderne, you are working on a new play or reading on the bed or sitting on the snowy bench outside getting your ass wet while smoking a cigarette or talking on the phone to Emily.
Miguel says, “I’m sorry—hey, Lina, I’m sorry . . . that was a really negative . . . I don’t mean to be so pessimistic . . . I know we have to keep a good—”
“Come on,” I say, “we all know she’s going to die.”
“Okay,” Miguel says. I hear him dragging on a cigarette. “If by everyone you mean only you and me and that we’d better not admit it to Mami, then all right, sure.”
“Something doesn’t add up, though—it’s not just me, right? This shit she’s saying. The way she’s been living her whole life in a kind of incognito . . . what does a woman like Isabel have to feel so guilty about? What does hell want with her? If it’s me she feels so badly about, I’m right the fuck here, why doesn’t she make her goddamn amends?”
We play a game of exchanging silences. The air crackles, a shitty connection full of loud static, or maybe it’s just my head. Why isn’t my big brother here? In what sick scenario would I be the only Guerra on the scene? But abandonment is like a game of telephone in our family; we all just keep passing it along.
“Miguel?” My voice is rising; the hairs on my arms stand up all the way under my ten-pound coat. “What don’t we know?”
“I’m not sure how to bring this up.” He barks a little laugh. “I think she was a prostitute for a while in Caracas. I could be totally full of shit, but I think . . . Isabel is the queen of the cryptic remark, but she said some things about having a police record. I think after Mami didn’t come back for her, she ran away from Papi and that for a few weeks she must have been living on the street, turning . . . uh . . . you know, tricks to survive.”
“Jesus! Why didn’t you ever say anything about this to me?”
“Lina,” he says. “Think about it. You know why.”
“Great.” And I’m crying even though I’m about to tell him how ridiculous it was to think I’d care. “So I’m not just the bastard she didn’t want, I’m the offspring of some pedophile john, too?”
“It might not be that. It might not be anything. She’s kind of . . . Lina, she’s sort of crazy, you know? It’s not just us. She’s crazy in a different way. She’s crazy for real.”
I think I could make a pretty good case for my own Crazy for Real, but I don’t say that now. I just demur, “I know—I mean, poor fucking Mami. Isabel’s going to die estranged from her, for what? What’s Mami so guilty of? Raising me so Isabel didn’t have to? If you don’t want to go to hell, try not cutting off your long-suffering mother.”
Miguel says, “If you don’t want to go to hell, try not believing in your long-suffering mother’s god.”
I intend to be vigilant the rest of the time I’m here. In the picture of myself in my head, I have every manner of cathartic intention. I am going to somehow break through Isabel’s reserves, which clearly she is beginning to allow to crack anyway. Maybe she wants to know me at last—to confess. All this time, I’ve felt like the black sheep of the family, when it turns out my biological mother was more of a sex worker than I’ve ever been . . . when maybe we should have been . . . bonding?
But of course it doesn’t happen that way, Nick.
For the rest of my time on Strong’s Landing—only that night until the morning’s ferry—Isabel avoids me, is “resting.” Eddie rushes around tending to her with one tea mug after another, mainly I think to create the illusion of movement and not have to sit down and engage in small talk with me, and then finally he disappears into their bedroom and closes the door, and I wait, I have silent conversations in my head in which I write both Isabel’s dialogue and mine and they correspond perfectly, but soon it is clear no one is emerging from the no-man’s-land of their marital bedroom and my head just buzzes, bounces, aimless. You and I sext until nearly morning.
By the time I am running late for the ferry the next morning, I am preoccupied and bleary and looking at my phone as Isabel and I say good-bye. She isn’t making the drive, so I’m off alone with Eddie, in the midst of telling you about my arrival time and plotting how we can get a little privacy before we hit the road. The thing is: two years to live is not a long time, but it’s not a five-alarm fire, either, exactly. I’ve seen more of Isabel this month than I had in the past four years. It seems like a trajectory we are simply on now, and that whether I like it here or not—whether I can bear it or not, even—I will soon be back. My eyes scan again for the pink bicycle as I’m leaving, but I haven’t seen it since 2005; I don’t even know whether it still exists. My eyes evade Isabel’s face, which looks different already than the night before, being claimed by degrees. Whatever toxins she was vomiting into the toilet also seems to be trying to escape her pores, and she’s broken out like a teenager, maybe the teenager I never knew her as, though the circles under her eyes are darker. It’s like there’s a bubbling kettle of toil and trouble under her skin, and all at once I imagine her darkly: a pimply, homeless, flimsily dressed streetwalker in mythical Caracas, which I have never even seen, getting into the backseats of old-fashioned
cars. In my head, the cars in Caracas circa 1978 look like those in Cuba in the 1960s, because I don’t know anything about anything. In one frame, Isabel is thirteen and wrapping her legs around a john, her beauty hidden behind acne and sweat in the backseat of a car; in another, Isabel stands in her wellies, the pink bike propped and picturesque, more domestic and appropriate and beautiful than I can ever be. In the final frame, as I wave to her weakly before she closes the heavy oak door, I’m supposed to be looking at my sick biological mother, but really I’m looking at the screen of my phone, where I don’t have to look into the face of death or envy anymore, where nobody is in charge of the secrets except for me. Where you, quieting and quickening my pulse at once, are waiting on the other end of this body of water.
GRETCHEN
REQUEST FOR ORDER
PETITIONER/PLAINTIFF: Troy Fox Underwood
RESPONDENT/DEFENDANT: Gretchen Merry-Underwood
OTHER PARENT/PARTY: _____________________
9. __________ I request that time for service of the Request for Order and accompanying papers be shortened so that these documents may be served no less than (specify number) _________ days before the time set for the hearing. I need to have this order shortening time because of the facts specified in item 10 or the attached declaration.
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