by Ines Vieira
Why did I always have to ask questions that I fully knew the answers to? It wasn’t that Isaac told me he loved me that freaked me out. It was knowing that I loved him just as much and once I told him, I would no longer be in control of my own life.
Because when it came right down to it, I was still a control freak just like my mother had been. And when we lost control of our destiny, of ourselves, that didn’t look pretty. We could either fly or drown in this helplessness. To us, losing the ability to control our fate is just that – helplessness.
I take a quick peek at the boy that holds my heart in his hands as he pulls up my driveway and in those few seconds, I know that I will fly. I have my own wings; I know how to fly on my own just fine. But having Isaac with me, having his love and giving him my own, well not only will I fly, but I feel like I could soar through every sky there ever was. So maybe this weekend I was much of a coward to tell him, but soon I’ll be brave enough to shout it to anyone that will hear me.
Soon.
“Babe you okay?” he pulls my hand to his lips and all of me lights up again.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I honestly am. His stars beam back at me, so I lean in and give him a chaste kiss. Anything more would make me it impossible to leave this car.
“Okay. I don’t want to leave so you better get out before I do something crazy and go in with you.” I can't help but let out a small laugh.
“I think Nicky walking in on us in bed was bad enough the first time. I don’t want my mom to walk in on us too.”
“Ah Cass, you know you should really live a little.” He teases me. I grab my bag from the back seat and swoop in for one more kiss.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.” I sigh.
“I’ll be here.” I can't stop grinning as I open the car door and start making my way to my front steps. I know he won't leave until I’m safely inside, so I give him a little wave and go in.
Everyone must be out for the night. The house is dark and quiet, a total contradiction of how I feel. Bright and boisterous.
I leave my bag beside the stairs and go into the kitchen to grab a water bottle before bed. Since I don’t want to wake anybody up, I don’t turn on the lights and I try to make as little noise as possible. I open up the fridge and start to rummage through until I find what I’m looking for. All of a sudden the kitchen lights are turned on and it takes me a couple of seconds for my eyes to adjust.
“Mom?” I turn around and see my mother staring back at me with panic in her eyes.
“Mom, you okay?” I close the refrigerator door behind me yet I still feel a cold shiver run down my spine. My mother’s face looks awkward. Slanted somehow. “Mom?” I take a step towards her and this makes her jump out of her skin.
“Who are you?”
“How did you get into my house?”
What?
“Mom, what are you talking about?”
“I asked who the hell are you!?” That cold shiver has just turned arctic. I don’t move. Something is yelling in my ear not to move a muscle. I have never been scared of my mother. I’ve been scared for her, never of her. Right now, I’m a mixture of both.
“Mom, it's me, Cass. Mom?” Somehow me mentioning my own name makes my mother look up at the stairs as if she is waiting for someone to come down. No, that’s not it. She’s terrified that I may want to go up the stairs. Her whole body is position in a way that makes me feel trapped. One arm is clenched on the counter while another holds her up on the kitchen island. My back is now fully against the fridge. I can probably move to my left and put the island between us, but my feet are frozen to the ground. What the hell is going on?
“Mom…” She furiously shakes her head. My throat is now clenched tight as I take the rest of her in. She’s wearing a similar nightgown to that awful night that she showed up at Jess’s. I don’t know why that troubles me, but it does. That night, she was confused but docile. Most of the times that she has these little episodes of losing touch with reality; she is still my mother so there is always a touch of sweetness to her. Not tonight.
Her hair is wild all over her face and the sockets of her eyes are too deep to look remotely pliant. She looks like a caged animal waiting to pounce on the first threat of attack. I have to calm her down, make her lay down and rest. Tomorrow she’ll be back to herself, she just has to rest. My thoughts are all over the place, but my eyes never leave her.
“Why are you here?”
“Mom, look at me. It’s me. Cass.” She takes another step and I see her eyes skim all over the kitchen counter searching for something. When her eyes lock to the kitchen knives, my heart leaps out of my throat.
“Mom! LOOK at me!” Nothing. Nothing but a small grunt escapes her lips.
“I don’t know how you got in, but I won't let you anywhere near my babies.” Her words are barely audible, but her tone is clear enough. If I yell for Nicky, will he hear me? Will he hear me in time to prevent my own mother from hurting me? I could yell. I could scream. With every step, she closes in on me and I know that I should scream. So why don’t I? Why am I frozen in place glaring into my mother's eyes praying for any recognition? The frail broken woman before me is not my mother, though. She doesn’t see me, because she is no longer here with me.
Instead, the woman that I love so much has been replaced by something terrifying, almost animalistic. I feel the cold sweats all over my body as I place one hand behind me, moving slowly from the fridge to the counter, while the other is stretched in front of me preserving a safe distance between the two of us.
“Mom, listen to me. I know you’re scared. I know that right now you´re not seeing things clearly but it’s me, mom. It’s Cassandra. Please. Please, mom look at me.” But what I really want is for her to not only look but to see. See me! She looks over to me, and then again to the kitchen knives, and I know in that instant my mother doesn’t see anything but the black handle of that sharp blade. So I yell
“NICKY!!”
“NICKY!!”
My scream comes out haunting and it takes my mother aback. She stops just two feet before me, dazed. Her confusion suddenly disappears and all I see is the focus and resolve in those dark pools that are sunk deep on her face. I continue to hold my stance but skid to my right aiming to escape from the kitchen and reach either the stairs or the front door. I’m not fast enough though and my mother swerves from the island counter well enough to almost reach my coat. But she doesn’t touch it with her free hand. She uses the one holding that razor sharp edge and as it swings I feel it cut through my gray wool coat. I swallow the panic down and focus on the fact that no part of my body has been sliced open.
“NICKY!!”
“You get away from there! You hear me! You get away!” The stairs. Every step closer I get to those damn stairs, my mother becomes more primal. More lethal.
“You are not going anywhere near them. I won't let you!” Gibirish. Nothing coming out of her mouth makes any sense. I grab onto the wall and walk back slower, this time not taking my eyes off the knife instead. I’m so close. Just a couple of more steps and I can run upstairs and lock myself in my room. Then it hits me.
Nicky hasn’t come down. I screamed loud enough that he must have heard me. Hell, I’ve made less noise before and he would have been down here in a heartbeat. Nick was a night owl, so why hasn’t he left his room?
Unless…
Unless he can’t hear me.
Unless something happened to him.
My mother is so frightened that I would even attempt running up the stairs, I can only imagine if she caught Nicky already up there. Since this nightmare started, I haven’t shed a tear. Not one. Not for this predicament that I walked into in my own kitchen. Not a tear was shed for the realization, that my mother has lost all grasp with reality. Nothing to show how truly scared I was that my mother would hurt me, gut me with a kitchen knife like a fish. Nothing.
But the idea that my little brother was upstairs maybe too hurt or worse, to come to my aid whe
n I needed him most, that was the trigger that did me in. My knees give in, right there between escape and total peril. They buckle in a way that the thump to the tile floor will guarantee two very ugly bruises in the morning. I don’t care. I probably won't even be alive to see another sunrise, much less black and blue marks on my legs.
I just I don’t care anymore.
All I see is my baby bother’s black hair in the wind with the window pulled down in my car.
All I hear is his voice annoyed with my choice in music when he enters my room.
All I smell is the scent of paint coming out of his room when he is wrapped in yet another exquisite portrait.
All I feel is the fabric of his stupid black t-shirt of every band he ever loved as his own personal homage to them.
Tears give way to hysterical sobs. I hold my arms tightly together, trying to hold some of the pain away, but I’m just too broken. Every piece of my soul is scattered into tiny pieces on this cold tiled floor. Nick… My baby brother.
The brother I protected from every playground bully until he was brave enough to fend for himself and then some. The baby brother that would sing every stupid song of every Saturday morning cartoon. The brother that in all his fifteen years showed more compassion and strength for what we had been dealing with at home, than I ever could. I would probably never know what happened to him. Did it happen tonight? Or did my mother lose herself last night when I was in Isaac´s arms, safe and free? Did I lose my brother yesterday, without even knowing it?
No. I would have felt it. The ache in my heart tells me that I would have felt his loss instantly. Like I do now.
“Christopher?” It takes me a few seconds to fully understand what she is saying. At first, I think that it's just another delusion of hers as she calls out my father’s name, but then I hear the front door shut. My eyes are too blurry with tears to see the dark figure coming into the kitchen and my whole body is too mangled to truly move in hopes of catching a better glimpse of my father.
“Thank God you’re home, Christopher. I didn’t know what to do. I found this intruder in our home and I didn’t know what to do.” My mother’s voice is pure panic. For some reason, dad came home out of the blue. Maybe because he couldn’t stay away any longer while knowing that his sweet wife was losing her shit. But he’s too late. The damage is done. If I wasn’t feeling so empty, I could have probably had enough sympathy for him for walking into this horrific scene. What must we look like? His first born crunched down on the kitchen floor, crying madly from grief, while the woman he loves hovers over her with a knife in her hands, ready to attack.
Yeah, I bet it's quite a sight. Not the homecoming he predicted to receive from his unexpected visit. He can’t even say anything. Even though I’m crying insanely, I don’t hear him say one word.
“Christopher! Help me! What do I do? The kids are upstairs sleeping in their cribs. We need to protect them, my love. Tell me what do we do?”
I hear his footsteps slowly approaching my mother, bypassing me altogether. I don’t even raise my head to look at him. I can’t. If he sees my face, he’ll know that this little show in his kitchen, is nothing compared to what nightmare I have already imagined that the upstairs holds.
“Jules…. Honey… I’m here now. I’ll take care of this.” I swallow hard and pray that my ears aren’t fooling me. «Please God! Please!»
I have never prayed so hard in my life, but I shut my eyes and silently beg, hoping that I’m not having a psychotic break of my own. Or am I? Could grief make me hear things that weren’t there? Could me wishing to hear my brother’s voice one more time, make me hallucinate it?
“Chris, what will you do? I’m scared.” I hear him take another step, and I see his big black boots reach my mother’s naked feet and I recognize them immediately. I have yelled at him so many times to move those same black biker boots off my dashboard on our way to school.
“It’s okay now, Jules. It's okay.”
“I need you to go upstairs, get dressed while I deal with this. After you’re dressed, check on the kids, okay? Can you do that for me, Jules?”
“But what will you do with this intruder? I don’t want to leave you alone. I'm so frightened Christopher.” I hear my mother sobbing on his chest as he holds her tight attempting to comfort her in any way he can.
“You don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I’ll call the police and all of this will be settled soon enough. Now please go upstairs and get dressed before the police arrive.”
“Yes, right. The police. Of course. I’ll go get dressed. Then I’ll check on the kids.” I hear her kiss his cheek and feel the weight of her stare go through me.
“Jules?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Leave the knife. You don’t want the kids to see their mom with that thing in her hand, now do you? They’ll have nightmares for the rest of their lives.” Too late for that.
“Oh God Christopher, of course not!” her voice sounds grief stricken with the idea. She places the knife on the counter squeamishly as if holding the thing had been excruciating for her. Five minutes earlier, I would have thought that it was a direct extension of her arm, but now the mear sight of the blade makes my mother sick to her stomach. How ironic, since I’ve been trying not to heave since I walked in through the front door.
She slowly passes me by and I feel her look back just once before she runs up the stairs in a mad dash. Before I can pick myself up from the floor I feel my brother’s arms around me. He sounded so strong, so sure of himself, but as I feel his body next to mine, he’s shaking furiously making me mimic every tremble.
“Cass? Are you okay?” The fear in his voice has that same heart-stopping tone as what I was feeling not a few minutes before he had stepped into the kitchen
“Oh Nicky, I have never been so happy to see you!” I hug him fiercely, making sure that he is as real as the tears keep cascading from my eyes.
“I thought… Oh God Nicky I thought…” But I can't say it. The doubt alone that my mother could have harmed him had crippled me beyond words.
“Cass, we don’t have time for that now. I need you to move. We need to leave and we need to call an ambulance. Do you hear me, Cass? I need you to get up!” I wipe my face on the sleeve of my coat and grab onto his shoulders as he lifts me up. My body is rigid and sore, but I make my way to the door and then we hear it. I loud crash and thump coming from upstairs. Coming from my mother’s room. Nicky puts his cell phone in my hands and yells at me to call 911. I start the call as he starts running towards the stairs. Panicked, I grab his arm.
“What are you doing? You can't go up there!”
“Cass, I have to check on her. She’s our mother. She’s sick. I need to know that she’s okay.”
“But…” I feel powerless to stop him, but I’m too petrified to let him go up there.
“Cass, trust me. It’ll be okay. Mom won't hurt me.”
“Nicky, how can you be sure? She almost hurt me!”
“Well, that’s because you’re a pain in the ass.” He winks back trying to be nonchalant about the whole thing, but I still see his hand quaver on the rail with every step he takes.
The only news we’ve had so far is that my mother suffered a seizure. The paramedics arrived in time for them to handle the situation to the best of their ability, but ever since we arrived at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital an hour ago, we’ve had nothing but radio silence.
I sit in one of the most uncomfortable chairs imaginable as I stare at Nicky pace back and forth. I haven’t been able to open my mouth since we left the house, too exhausted to put two words together, that I left the ordeal of telling our father what took place tonight to Nicky. My little brother is the one that calls our family doctor, he’s the one that calls Jess telling her I’ll need her, and he’s the one that takes care of everything.
So now beside me, sits the Silva clan all praying for some good news to arrive. I silently thank that we are still waiting for it at the IC
U, and not the mental ward, not really knowing if I should be grateful for that small mercy. I know that soon enough that’s where everyone expects they’ll take my mom to. My loving, joyous mother. Trapped in a white room. Isaac keeps holding my hand, squeezing it every so often to make sure I’m still here. I am. I’d prefer not to be, but I am. As much as Nicky’ has stepped up, me losing it would only leave him alone. I can't let that happen.
“Dad’s about to board his plane. He’ll be here later in the morning. Hopefully, we’ll have some news by then.” I look up at my little brother and it seems that he has grown up into a man overnight. I feel as if someone has reached inside me and squeezed my heart into a pulpy fist with the unfairness of it all. I nod, my head falling to my chest as I count the little blue squares on the hospital floor.
“Babe, do you want anything? Water, tea, coffee? Anything?” Isaac’s voice seems so far away from me even though I feel his arm on my shoulders, gently rubbing them. I shake my head. When we arrived, one of the doctors had offered to examine me for any injuries, but I told him I was fine. I didn’t tell him that all the bruises that I had were deep within me, and aside from a valium, I doubt that there would be anything that they could do to ease my pain.
I suddenly feel everyone rising up from their seats around me, and even before I see the white coat, I know that mom’s doctor has finally come to give us some news.
“So Doc? Is our mom okay? When can we take her home?” This is when I hear the trace of a scared boy voice leave my brother’s mouth. I stand up and lock my eyes on the man before me demanding answers.
