by Cory Hiles
I think in some ways my mother believed that Joe had become an incarnation of the man she loved. I think she truly believed that somehow when John died, he’d managed to push Joe’s soul aside and insert his own soul into tiny Joe’s infant body. I think that’s when my mother’s Sickness really began.
My mother raised Joe as best she could and would often call him “Johnny-Joe” as a nickname. This nickname was, I believe, a manifestation of the Sickness that had only just begun to sink its yellowed and scaly talons into my mother’s brain, but things were okay for them for several years. It was just the two of them and they didn’t need anyone else. Unfortunately for my mother sometime in September of 1982 she stepped out.
CHAPTER 3
My mother hadn’t had much social life since John died because she had committed herself fully to raising Joe the John Child. However she did have one close friend, Katelyn Patten, the former wife of Charlie Patten who’d been blown to bits with John. My mother and Katelyn had met at the hospital the night of the explosion and in their intermingled grief they found some semblance of solace between them. In fact, I believe it was Katelyn who saved my mother from stepping fully into madness back then.
Over the course of a couple years, Katelyn had managed to pull her life back together and had even begun dating again. She tried often to get my mother to join her at the local tavern for a beer or the theater for a movie, but my mother resisted for several years. Katelyn, however, was persistent and eventually my mother agreed to go to a movie with her. They saw E.T. the Extra Terrestrial.
My mother wept through a great portion of the movie, somehow empathizing with that little alien fellow in the film; with his aching loneliness and desire to return home. She saw her own home as being in the arms of John and understood that she could not return there. That film, aside from breaking my mother’s heart, woke up in my mother a new feeling…hope.
“Why, if a little heartsick spud like E.T. can have a happy ending in his life,” she’d said to Katelyn, “then I suppose I can too.” And that was the start of my mother’s new social life.
Throughout that summer she and Katelyn went to several movies and often went dancing at the local tavern. Katelyn’s fourteen year old daughter, Bess would come over and babysit Joe while the two ladies went out.
My mother began to disassociate Joe from John and saw him again as a separate entity. She had, in essence, started to heal. Then came a night in September of 1982 when my mother had a bit too much to drink and began an instant spiral back into her Sickness.
As I was growing up my mother was always telling Joe and I stories about John, and what a wonderful husband and father he had been. After one such story, when I was around five years old, it dawned on me that I didn’t ever come into these stories and John was not my father. So I asked my mother to tell us about my Father.
Her reaction was instantaneous and frightening. It was the first time I can ever remember seeing her face pucker into that mask of anger and hate that became so prevalent on her only a couple years later. That horrible face only lasted for a second before she was able to swallow it back down and resume most of her normal composure.
When she spoke her voice was a bit strained and her eyes shone with anger and she said, “Johnny, I’m only going to tell you this story one time, and only because as a bastard child, you deserve to know. Do you understand?” I, of course had no idea what a bastard child was, but did want to know about my daddy so I nodded my head up and down and stared at her with wide eyes.
“Okay then,” she said, speaking softly in a very controlled tone. “Your daddy was a dirty sex fiend who fed me magic juice one night that made me fall asleep. When I was asleep he planted you inside me and he stole a piece of me should have only been John’s, and then he ran away. I never saw him again.”
I was mesmerized by her story and not quite bright enough yet to see the danger in her eyes so I asked, “What was his name, Mama?”
Her eyes narrowed to slits and her mouth puckered and she spat her words at me like a cobra spitting its blinding venom.
“He didn’t deserve a name!” she screamed. “He was a filthy sex fiend who only wanted one thing! He was poison! He was trash! He stole what was John’s and he ran away! And it was all because of that bitch, Katelyn! She let it happen!”
As my mother started yelling, I recoiled in fear. Joe, who was standing behind me, caught me and wrapped his arms around me in a bear hug from behind and shouted over my head, “Mama! Stop it! You’re scaring him, and it isn’t his fault!” His words seemed to hit my mother like a fastball to the forehead and her countenance went blank for a second, then it softened and looked very much the way a concerned mother’s face should look.
She stumbled forward and reached for me, crying.
“Oh Johnny,” she said, grabbing me in her arms as Joe released me from his. “Johnny, I’m so sorry.”
She pulled me in close and nearly suffocated me between her breasts as she gripped the back of my head and buried her face into my hair. When she released me a few moments later, I was fairly certain that I had snot in my hair.
She put her palms against my cheeks and turned my face up towards hers and said, “Johnny, your daddy was bad, but Joe’s Daddy was good…so good, Johnny. That’s why I gave you his name, Johnny. So that the goodness of Joe’s daddy could fill you up and push out the poison that your daddy left in you. Do you understand?”
I thought I sort of understood, was pretty certain that I somehow did not feel good about understanding, and was definitely certain that I was ready to be done with this conversation so I shook my head.
“Good,” my mother said. “Now, it’s off to bed with you, Mister.”
That night should have changed my perception of my mother, but being young and resilient, it didn’t. I didn’t notice the subtle changes taking place in my mother, but looking back now, I can see that Joe saw them. He saw them very clearly.
My mother became more withdrawn from me and clingier towards Joe. She had begun calling him Johnny-Joe again. Her sour lemon pucker face showed itself more frequently, and her outbursts became a regular occurrence. I think there may be truth to the old statement “if you keep making that face, it’ll stick that way” because my mother’s wrinkles seemed to increase daily. Even when she wasn’t puckered, her face remained deeply lined.
I seemed to be a jolly good catalyst for bringing forth her outbursts, since they were almost always directed towards me and generally had something to do with my good for nothing, sex-fiend, father. But after her outbursts she always found herself again and would come to me crying, hugging and apologizing, and always trying to explain that it was just the poison that my daddy left in me that got her so upset.
Joe protected me from my mother as best he could. Usually it was something as simple as a hand on my shoulder and nearly imperceptible head nod to stop me from saying something that would set my mother off. If subtlety didn’t work, his protection might include a hand over the mouth, and if I seemed to be really intent on pissing my mother off, Joe would sock me in the arm to completely distract me.
I loved Joe dearly. He was the perfect older brother. He shared his toys, he shared his wisdom, he shared his mother, and he shared his life with me. Most of what I know about my mother before the Sickness took her came from stories Joe told me. I idolized Joe and I lost more than a brother when he died on that December night. I lost my mentor, my protector, and my only friend…I suppose I also lost my mother.
CHAPTER 4
After Joe died, my mother’s Sickness decided it was time to quit poking its talons gently into her brain and just ram them in full force. After ripping through the grey matter, her Sickness withdrew its talons and desecrated the sanctity of her mind by spitting venom into the gashes that were left behind.
The Sickness grew rapidly and manifested itself in various ways. My mother became more withdrawn and for longer time periods. At first I didn’t mind the distance. My mother had alwa
ys homeschooled Joe and me, and as she started to withdraw after Joe died she seemed forget about schooling me altogether. Then the distance that started out lasting only minutes at a time began to last for hours, then days, and finally for as long as a week and I grew lonely.
Another manifestation of the Sickness was that it seemed to take very little effort on my part (the act of breathing seemed to be more than adequate) to send my mother into one of her pucker-face screaming fits, and it wasn’t long after Joe’s death that the puckering and screaming met a new friend...hitting.
In the beginning my mother would show an almost instant remorse after striking me and would seem to return to her normal self. Then she’d begin a regimen of crying, hugging, apologizing, and explaining that my Daddy left poison in me. In time, though, my mother’s ritual of repentant remorse began to come later and later after the beatings, and finally there were no more apologies.
The worst part of my mother’s derailment from sanity came when she started wearing her wedding dress. She’d put on the dress and wander aimlessly through the house talking to the dead as though they were right beside her. She’d lost so much weight and taken so few trips into the sunshine that her pale and emaciated frame drifting through the house looked remarkably ghost-like itself.
Although her appearance was more than enough to scare the crap out of a six year old kid, it didn’t seem to be enough for her, so to add to the overall creep factor she’d carry on conversations with John and Joe, talking as though they were really there, pausing like she was listening to a reply from them and then answering in turn.
Sometimes she’d laugh like someone had just said something funny or she’d toss her hair and put on a coy expression like she was trying to be cute. Sometimes she’d even raise her voice and wave her arms around as if engaged in some vehement disagreement with the unseen dead.
I learned early on not to disturb my mother when she was wearing her dress. The first time I saw her in it I was completely unprepared.
It was nighttime and I’d awakened with a need to pee. My bedroom was at the end of the hallway and Joe’s room was directly across the hallway from mine. In the middle of the hallway was the bathroom and at the far end of the hall, nearest the living room, was my mother’s room. The hallway was lit by a small night light shaped like Snoopy sleeping on his doghouse. It was plugged into an outlet near the floor directly across the hallway from the bathroom door.
As I entered the hall from my dark room, the dim light in the hallway proved to be too much for my night eyes. I squinted and rubbed them as I stumbled down the hall towards the bathroom. When I finished rubbing them and started to open them again I saw a ghost not more than four feet in front of me.
A scream escaped my lips as I stared at the specter. A satiny, white, strapless dress was hanging loosely on a frame of pale flesh that was barely sinuous enough to hold it up. Bony, naked shoulders were protruding at strange angles above the cut of fabric, highlighting deep hollows at the base of a long, corded neck. Skinny arms with long concaves beneath tiny biceps and strange bulging elbows were held straight out, away from the body with the palms facing out as if awaiting crucifixion. The long, gangly fingers of each hand were splayed outward, stretching straight out as if trying to flee away from the hands that held them prisoner.
The head that sat atop this macabre trunk was no less ghoulish. Dark, matted hair stuck out in multiple directions, weaved and knotted together in clumps like a bird’s nest made of black grass. This broken nest framed a shriveled pale face. Dark circles hung beneath closed, purple-red eyelids that were set deep into sunken sockets. Hollow cheeks flanked thin, pink lips like guards escorting a prisoner to his cell. The lips were pressed together and stretched tightly into what was either a grin of pure ecstasy or a grimace of pain.
The entirety of this lurid wraith was given an ethereal glow by the innocently snoozing Snoopy as he laid on his doghouse in the wall socket.
The sound of my scream hit my mother as though there was physical substance in the sound waves the scream produced. Her entire body convulsed like a shock wave had just ripped through her. Her eyes popped open revealing too much white and too much pupil. Her tightly stretched lips snapped into a pucker like a rubber band that has been stretched from both ends into an elongated shape and then had those ends released simultaneously.
The rebounding force from the rapid puckering was too great to hold the lips in a pucker for more than a millisecond, and as her lips smashed together into a pucker the shockwave of flesh slapping flesh caused them to immediately peel open into a snarl revealing rapidly yellowing teeth.
A shrill, unwavering note emanated from somewhere high in her throat and her arms that had appeared to have been patiently waiting for the hammer and nails suddenly snapped forward towards me, the formerly straight fingers bending themselves into claws.
That was the image I saw with my eyes, but in my mind, I saw the unassuming librarian ghost that transformed into a malevolent demon at the beginning of the first Ghostbusters movie.
As recognition washed over me I screamed louder, for when I realized that this was my own mother, and not a ghost, I was even more terrified. I tried to back away from her but I stumbled and fell. My mother, still shrieking that singular note, rushed towards me. When she reached me, she gave me a swift kick in the stomach that knocked the wind out of me.
As I was busy folding up like a lawn chair, gasping for breath, and suspecting that I suddenly understood how a fish plucked from the water feels, my mother finally stopped screeching and started screaming at me.
“YOU…LITTLE…BASTARD!” she screamed. “YOU SCARED THEM AWAY! YOU SCARED THEM AWAY!” With that she turned and marched down the hall to her bedroom, slamming the door after her.
I laid there for a bit, crying silently and staring at Snoopy sleeping peacefully on his little red doghouse. Eventually my breath returned to me and I sat up and wiped my face. As I got up off the floor I noticed that a trip to the toilet was no longer necessary but a change of clothes was. I walked back to my bedroom to change clothes and go back to bed but paused at my door. From down the hall I could hear my Mother sobbing behind her closed bedroom door and I felt sad for her.
The next day my mother seemed normal again. I was sitting at the table eating a bowl of Lucky Charms when she emerged from her bedroom. She had bathed, combed her hair for the first time in a week, and dressed in her normal clothes.
Although she had dark, puffy circles under her eyes, was still far too skinny, and seemed to be gaining more wrinkles on her face, I thought she looked beautiful. When she saw me, she smiled broadly and came over to tousle my hair and kiss my forehead.
“How’d you sleep, Johnny?” she asked me. I was uncertain how to answer so I just diverted my eyes and shrugged my shoulders. She cocked her head and looked at me. “Well,” she said, “I slept like the dead. I don’t think I’ve slept that well in ages.”
‘Yeah, you looked like the dead too Ma,’ I thought to myself with a certain morbid cynicism.
I suddenly understood that she had no memory of the previous night. I would have thought I’d dreamt it, had it not been for the bruise on my belly. I figured it might be best not to mention it to her and simply hope that it never happened again. But it did happen again…and again...and again. Fortunately, I’m a quick learner and I never interrupted her dress clad wanderings again.
When she wasn’t wearing her wedding dress and conversing with the dead, my mother’s behavior was erratic. Sometimes she was sweet and loving. Sometimes she was pucker-faced and violent. Often she was simply so withdrawn that it seemed as if she’d forgotten that I existed at all. When she went into extended periods of secession from the human race I took care of myself.
Long before the Sickness had taken her, she’d set up bi-weekly deliveries of groceries from the local grocer. The order never changed so she was able to pay several months in advance.
After Joe died we didn’t need quite so many grocerie
s but she never changed the order and we soon began to have a surplus of food. Once the cupboards and the fridge in the kitchen were full I started loading up the cupboards and freezer in the basement.
So whenever my mother withdrew, I simply spent my days watching television and feeding myself from our stockpile of bread, and cheese, and peanut butter, and hot dogs, and cereal, and so on, and so forth. In the end, it turned out that I was very lucky that we had such surplus.
That was pretty much how things went on for the majority of the time after Joe died. My mother had a few moments of lucidity here and there, but for the most part you couldn’t trust those moments. If you tried to talk to her while she was lucid there was a very good chance that she was going to snap and turn suddenly and unrepentantly violent. And if you interrupted her while she was wearing her wedding dress and conversing with the dead there was a good possibility that you’d wind up as dead as the dead she conversed with.
Fortunately for me, my mother had taught me how to read fairly early in my home schooling and I had a genuine lust for it. I read every book in our house multiple times after she went bonkers. I had discovered that reading was a good way to keep out of her way as well as help me forget to be afraid.
Watching television was another favorite pastime of mine while my mother’s brain was AWOL. We were lucky enough to have cable television and I suppose that at six years old I probably shouldn’t have watched the programs I watched, nor read the books I read, but without anybody coherent enough to stop me I was pretty much free to do what I wanted.
I thought life was pretty good for me during that time, actually. I only had to eat the foods I liked, which just so happened to be foods that I could easily prepare. I could watch the television any time I wanted, and watch any program I wanted. I could read any book I wanted (with the apparent exception of Playboy Magazine anyway).
