Trigger

by Susan Vaught

  “After,” I muttered. “Credit card apples.”

  Mama Rush finished untying the bag and put it on the table. She didn’t react to what I said, not even a glance up to stare at my scars or anything. Instead, she yanked her cigarette out from behind her ear, fished a lighter out of her pocket, and settled herself in a chair. The green and gold robes cascaded like a waterfall between the arms and the seat. “Well, we’ll see what’s salvageable, you and me. Now sit down like I said, boy.”

  “Waterfall,” I said, and I sat.

  chapter 5

  Mama Rush lit her cigarette and smacked her yellow lighter down on the table, all the while keeping her gold-rimmed eyes trained directly on mine. I felt like she was staring into my busted brain, counting how many cells I had left.

  “You look better than you did last time I saw you.” She took a drag, then pointed to her throat. “Got those tubes out and everything.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I squirmed in my chair, pressing my good hand against the cover of my memory book. I was keeping it in front of me on the table, a white shield with my name down the spine.

  “You stupid, or you got some smarts left?”

  I smiled. My muscles relaxed, even on my bad side. Something hadn’t changed. Mama Rush hadn’t changed. She wasn’t talking to me like I was an alien or a freak. “Freak smarts. I mean, I’ve got some smarts. My words get messed up. Stuck on things, like waterfalls and credit card blue. It’s harder in the real world. Waterfalls.”

  She nodded, taking another slow draw on her cigarette. “That’s what all the pamphlets said. Stuff about how thoughts and words keep running through your head, and how you’ll say them whether or not you want to.” Drag, exhale. “I’ve been reading a lot about brain injury. And Leza pretty much gave me a blow-by-blow of your fight with Todd, before you ask.” Drag, exhale.

  Smoke swirled around her, making her look like a gold and green djinni rising out of the metal chair. A djinni with white fuzzy hair and a low scratchy voice. It would have been cool if she could grant wishes, but then, she sort of was granting a wish just by seeing me.

  “Djinni,” I said, then put my good hand over my mouth.

  “I don’t care what you say, so long as I can understand you when it counts. Put your hand down.”

  I put my hand in my lap. She fiddled with her cigarette, then stared at me in that brain-cell-counting way. “I didn’t come to see you again because it was too hard to look at you all messed up like that.”

  My turn to nod. I sort of wished I smoked.

  “Hate hospitals, too, if you’ll remember.”

  Another nod from me. I did remember. “Leza said it’s my fault.”

  “What, you shooting yourself in the head? I’d say yeah, that’s a definite.” Mama Rush cackled, then puffed her cigarette nub once more before discarding it into the stand-up ashtray beside her.

  I didn’t cackle. For a second or two, I couldn’t even breathe, and not because of the smoke. Because Mama Rush believed it. Mama Rush thought I’d been shot in the head—and she sounded pretty sure I was the one who pulled the trigger.

  Mama Rush believed I shot myself.

  If she believed it, then I should believe it, right? But maybe she only believed it because everyone told her that was what happened. Okay, so I didn’t have a car wreck, but somebody else could have shot me, right? I tried to breathe and coughed. I wondered if I should ask her how she found out, just to be sure, but then I remembered what I was really trying to ask her.

  “Not me and well—that. I mean, you.” I pointed back to the building. “Being here. It’s my fault, right?”

  This time I got raised eyebrows. Two fuzzy white eyebrows. “Hadn’t thought of it that way. Back in the day, when I first retired from the counseling center, I took care of Todd and Leza.” She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and placed them on the table beside her lighter. I couldn’t make out the label, but the pack was green. It matched her robes. Green. Green and gold.

  I tensed a little, trying not to let my nerves make my thoughts go nuts.

  “Nothing like an old social worker in a house full of young people,” Mama Rush continued. “Todd, his anger bugged me, and Leza kept staying home to look after me—then, yeah, you did what you did and all in all, I thought they needed their space and I needed mine.” She took out a fresh cigarette. “Besides, my boyfriend lives over here in the wing next to mine. It’s easier to see each other when we don’t have to drive.”

  “I can’t drive,” I said, feeling sympathetic. “Keep failing the adaptive test.”

  “The written part?”

  “No. The therapist part. Four hours, everybody staring and taking notes.” I waved my good hand. “Yuck.”

  “You mean, to get your license, you have to drive around with a bunch of therapists for four solid hours?” She lit her cigarette and clucked between puffs. “That’s nasty. They don’t even do that to us old folks. Not yet, anyways.”

  “Brain injury.” I tapped the scar on my temple.

  “Stupid-mark, that’s what I see. Your big red stupid-mark.”

  My finger rested on the temple scar. “Stupid-mark,” I agreed. If I really did shoot my own self in the head, that was yeah, a definite, like she said.

  “So now, maybe since you got such a big stupid-mark so early in your life, you won’t need another?”

  I tapped the scar. “One.” Moved my finger to the C-scar on the other side of my head. “Two.” Then to my throat, to the healed tracheotomy hole. “Three.”

  Mama Rush let out another loud cackle. “Well, if you got three stupid-marks, I’d say you’re all through with stupid for a while.”

  “All through.” I grinned and only thought about my half-flat mouth for a second.

  A minute passed, with Mama Rush doing her impression of the gold and green djinni with white fuzzy hair. “You going back to your school when the time comes?”

  “Green Rangers. Yes.” I grinned again. “Like your robes.”

  She looked down at her colors and chuckled. “Yeah, well. Listen, about school—are your parents making you go to the same school, or are you just an idiot?”

  “Idiot?” I meant to say, what? Or, why? It really was harder to think out in the world. Lots harder to talk. Pressure. “Fuzzy white.”

  “Boy, do you have any idea—they did assemblies about you. Three or four of them. Had doctors and suicide preventers and all kinds of folks talking to the kids. Two others tried to off themselves after you—did you know that?”

  “N-No.” My hands started to shake, first the bad, then the good. I thought about Kerry Brandt hanging up on me, and me hanging up on Alan’s mom.

  Don’t waste my time.

  I’d rather you didn’t call here.

  “I’m not sure you’ll find much welcome there,” Mama Rush said.

  “But I’ve got to go back. I asked to go back. How could I go anywhere else? The answers might be there. People who knew me before I looked like … like this. I can do it. Up and forward.”

  “Oh, I see. You want me to give you platitudes.”

  “Platitudes.” I was feeling like a parrot, wondering what she wanted me to say. The stupid-mark in my right temple tingled. I pressed against the jagged dent, thinking for the hundredth time, too bad it wasn’t a magic mark like I’d read about in books. At least that would be worth something. If it kept me from being stupid for a while, though, maybe it was a little magic at least.

  Mama Rush just sat waiting and smoking, a dark djinni of knowledge who wasn’t about to share a bit of wisdom with me.

  “Smoking isn’t bad for you. Is that a platitude?”

  “No, boy.” Her huge eyes reflected disappointment. “That would be a flat lie. I’m an ancient overweight black woman with hypertension. These things’ll kill me, probably sooner than later.”

  She took a drag and let out a slow plume of smoke. I watched it curl through the air, inching toward me until a breeze blew it to nothing. Smoke. Plume.
Nothing. These things’ll kill me. I wished she wouldn’t smoke them.

  “Let’s try this again, Jersey. I could tell you that going back to your old school takes lots of courage, that the other kids might have some trouble, but sooner or later they’ll come around. I could tell you that you’re better off than you were, that shooting yourself in the head made you stronger.” She paused, drew on the cigarette, and stared at me.

  “Lies,” I said. My scars itched, but I kept still. Smoke.

  “Lies. Of a sort, yes. Designed to make you feel better. I could give you truths instead, but truths hurt a lot.”

  “That’s okay. Truths from you, please.”

  “You were a big-time athlete—and a big-time player.” She talked in a hurry, like she intended to finish no matter what. “You had a future in sports or at least in college, just like my grandson. Then, God knows why, you went home, put your father’s pistol to the side of your thick head, and you pulled the trigger.”

  “How do you know that? For sure, I mean. Thick head. Trigger—me, pulling it. How do you know I shot myself?” I realized I was talking fast, too, almost imitating her. I was about to ask again because I couldn’t slow down, but she knocked me quiet with a glare that would have dropped a charging rhinoceros.

  “What did you ask me?”

  That didn’t come out fast at all. That question came out slow, trickling, each word overpronounced, and her lips barely moved. Even with brain damage, I knew better than to open my mouth. Putting on a suit of armor might have been smart, but I didn’t have one.

  She didn’t take a puff or twitch or anything. “I can’t believe …”

  Socks. Socks. Socks. Socks. Thick head. Trigger. Armor. I wanted to scream. By the time Mama Rush spoke again, I felt like I’d been sent to hell and dragged back out.

  “You listen to me like you’ve never listened before. If you ever want to get better, if you ever want to fix anything in your life, you own up to your choices. You did this to yourself. You shot yourself in the head, boy. Now look me in the eye and say it.”

  My mouth fell open. My brain shouted for me to do it that second. But I couldn’t. How could I own up to something I didn’t really believe?

  The djinni looked ready to curse me. “What, you’re chicken-shit enough to cop out on life, and you’re too chicken-shit to admit it?”

  “I’m not chicken-shit!”

  “You’re something.” Mama Rush flicked her ashes on the ground near my feet. “Just lucky you aren’t black. Whole family would have thrown you out. Church, too. Everybody who knew you wouldn’t even talk to you—black folks don’t commit suicide.” She took a drag, blew out the smoke. “Pat Parker, she wrote a poem about that after Jonestown. Black folks don’t commit suicide.”

  My eyes dropped automatically to the whiter than white skin on my arms. Maybe I was secretly black, since nobody but Leza and Mama Rush was speaking to me, unless you wanted to count my replaced-by-aliens parents.

  “They do, of course. Black folks kill themselves, I mean—but nobody talks about it.” She glowered at me. “You’ve got to talk about it. Before I saw you, I was thinking I’d have to tell you not to be so serious like you used to be, not to try so hard to be perfect. Now I’m thinking I need to say the opposite. You’d better be serious about this. Now.”

  And she went right on glaring. Glaring and waiting.

  I sighed. Felt like I was prying out the words with a crowbar. Still, I said them. “I shot myself.”

  There. That wasn’t so hard. I still wasn’t sure I believed it, but Mama Rush did, and I said it.

  “Okay. There’s a start. You were an athlete, and before you got all crabby your sophomore year, you were popular. Then you shot yourself. Now …”

  She trailed off, waiting again. She wanted me to tell her how I had changed. I knew that, but I was mad, and I really didn’t want to answer her. Like I had a choice.

  “Now I’ve got stupid-marks. I look like somebody took a hammer to my head. The left side of my body doesn’t work. I can’t see out of my right eye. No more sports.”

  Mama Rush nodded slowly. I could tell by the way she drew on the cigarette that I was on target, but not hitting the mark yet. “Leaving something out, aren’t you, boy? Something more important than how you look?”

  My left hand cramped. My fingers pulled into a fist because I didn’t think about keeping them relaxed. “I’m good at forgetting.”

  “That’s an excuse.” She flicked the cigarette into the stand-up ashtray. “Your right-now memory isn’t that bad if you slow down and concentrate on what you need to remember—and you told me you still had some smarts.”

  This time, my right hand made a fist. The anger came so fast my face burned, but I bit back a bunch of ugly comments. Going off. That’s what they’d call it back at Carter. Brain-injured patients don’t get mad. They go off.

  After a few seconds of breathing, I calmed down enough to say, “The other kids might be mad at me, treat me weird and stuff, like Todd. A lot of them might not want to be around me.”

  Mama Rush nodded. “Like Todd, and maybe Leza, too. She went through a lot over what you did, but that’s hers to tell you. And those boys you knew from football and golf and R.O.T.C., back before you got your ill temper and ran most of them off—they may have things to say. And the ones who talk to you, they’re eventually going to ask the question.”

  My breath came in a short jerk. “Don’t know. I really, really don’t know why.”

  She gestured toward my memory book. “Leza said you keep your remembering in there, like some of the folks around here at The Palace. In notes and lists.”

  She read things. Leza read what she’d picked up. Heat trickled across my face again, this time because of embarrassment. Snot, snot, snot! Go off.

  But I didn’t. I couldn’t, no matter what, not at Mama Rush. I shoved the memory book over to her.

  Raised fuzzy eyebrows. Another slow lighting of a cigarette.

  She flipped open the book and glanced at things. After a few minutes, she pulled out one folded sheet from the pocket and laid it to the side. She even weighted it down with her lighter and pack of cigarettes. Then she handed the book back to me.

  “Tell you what, boy. We’re gonna start right here. While I open my presents and lay them out on this table, you take that pen on a string attached to that white book, and you make me another list. A list of why. You understand?”

  “Possibilities.” I made myself breathe slowly, try to think slowly. “Not pragmatics. Not platitudes. Not credit cards or djinnis.”

  “Right.” She tapped the piece of paper she had taken and weighted down. “This is your To-Do List from the hospital. It’s good, but I think you have to make a better start. So, I’m going to keep it for now, and go over it with you later when the time is right. In the meantime, you’ll make me a Why List and work on that.”

  “Pragmatics.” I tried to smile, but my throat and lips felt tight.

  “Good enough. Now you get busy, and so will I.”

  I got busy. All the while, in the background, I heard the rustle of plastic, the clink and crunch of pottery, and Mama Rush mumbling to herself. No way would I look up, though. She might have smacked me right in my stupid-mark.

  In between chewing on my pen and trying not to look up, I wrote a new list.

  1. Secretly gay.

  2. Did something awful I felt guilty.

  3. My life sucked.

  4. Heard voices telling me to off myself.

  5. Parents really brother and sister/aliens/abusive.

  When I was finished, I dared to raise my eyes.

  Mama Rush was between cigarettes. She had covered the left side of the table with pieces and lumps of what had been seven or eight things I had made for her in recreation. I recognized part of an ashtray, pieces of the trivet and ceramic flowerpot, bits of a toothbrush cup, even halves of a really funny-looking pig that I had intended to be a bank—I think I made it way back at the first or
second hospital.

  “Broken,” I said, miserable and not miserable at the same time.

  Mama Rush gave me the fuzzy eyebrow treatment and said, “You first.”

  I passed her the list. My heart started to beat really hard. Maybe she knew something I didn’t. She was smart, and she’d known me for a long time.

  She read, her eyes moving line to line, back and forth. I think she even read the Why List twice. After a few seconds, she grunted. “Is that the best you can do?” She shoved the list across the little round table, crashing it into my bad left hand. I felt the paper crumple against my stiff fingers. Her dark, wrinkled skin pulled tight with her gigantic frown.

  I winced. I’d grown up hating to make her frown like that. It usually meant a call to my parents, being banned from her yard for a few days, or a lecture that made me wish for a beating instead.

  “You put a gun to your head, shoot your fool self right in the brain, and all you can come up with is incest-alien parents?” She grunted again, like an exclamation point.

  “There’s other stuff.” I squirmed in the metal chair. “What about gay? Or guilty? Credit cards! Thick head.”

  “If you’re gay, I’m big black Santa Claus flown down from the North Pole. Think. When did you ever want to pinch a boy’s butt?”

  “I don’t remember almost a whole year.” I shrugged. “Maybe things changed. Everything changed After. Maybe Before, too?”

  “Well, nothing changes that much.” Mama Rush snatched out a cigarette and lit it with one motion. “You were acting funny, but not that kind of funny. More mad and snappy. Didn’t eat much, didn’t sleep much, looked all tired and grungy. Stayed to yourself, too. Todd wouldn’t tell me why he quit hanging around with you, but I knew you were depressed. Figured it might be drugs or something. You sure were trying to do a lot, and some kids take stuff to speed up or slow down, or get stronger—you know.”

  I uncrumpled the list, picked up the pen on a string, and revised the first item to read, Secretly gay Maybe on drugs. What kind of drugs, though? Pot, steroids, heroine, meth—lots of choices. I wondered if I should make an entry for each one.