The Tiger in the House

by Jacqueline Sheehan

  “Oh, come on, kiddo. I’m okay. It’s only a dragon made of leaves. What do you think I am, crazy or something?” He winked at her and tossed a rake toward her end of the leaf pile.

  They raked and sculpted the leaves, making a dragon that looked more reptile and snake than regal dragon. Her father worked up a sweat. He dropped his jacket on a plastic lawn chair.

  “We need spikes for his back, something to make him look fierce,” Delia said, standing back to admire the creature.

  “I believe you’re right,” he said, and set off for the refuse pile in the farthest corner of the yard, by the fire bushes that had overnight turned magenta. “Would you get us some lemonade?” he asked, looking over his shoulder at Delia.

  Did she take too long? Should she have searched the cabinets for the Ritz Crackers that he loved? Had she taken ten minutes to get two glasses of lemonade from the plastic pitcher? She balanced the two glasses along with a cereal bowl filled with the crackers and walked toward the dragon. Where was he?

  Delia found him shuddering behind the fire bush. He pointed to a trash heap of sticks, a broken ladder, and an abandoned tire swing. “Who put those there?” he said, looking past Delia, forever past her. “Who did you let into the yard? Were they men? Did they ask for me? What did they say about me?”

  Delia’s heart thumped, and she counted the minutes until her mother would be home.

  “No, Daddy. There was no one here. I would have seen them. Let’s go back to our dragon, please,” keeping her voice as steady as she could. She handed him a glass of lemonade. He took it and stared at it as if it might hold poison. His eyes flicked to hers and he poured out the liquid.

  “Did they tell you to give this drink to me? They’ll try anything. They slipped something in this to track my movements.”

  He walked across the yard, past their dragon, and into the house, where he filled an ashtray with his Camel cigarettes.

  One week later, after a new round of medication deflated his delusions, Delia walked into the kitchen after school, opened the fridge, and heard the muffled voices of her parents on the back porch. She tiptoed to the window. “I can’t stand to hurt you all,” her father said in between sobs. Delia edged closer like a spy and looked out the side of the window. Her mother squatted next to her father. She surrounded him with her arms.

  “She’s afraid of me, my daughter is afraid of me. I can see it in her eyes,” he said, his face pressed into his wife’s shoulder.

  Delia prayed for her father’s schizophrenia to go away, for a cure that would excise his demonic hallucinations. More than anything, she wanted her father back, the good dad, all the time. She would have done anything for her dad.

  CHAPTER 6

  It had been a bad summer for their father, for all of them. Delia was ready to start her second year of college in one week, and Juniper was in eighth grade. Public school had already started for Juniper. Delia had a summer job working at the front desk of the YMCA, checking in members and handing out towels. She wanted more than anything to live on campus in the fall, but the thought of leaving J Bird as the sole recipient of her father’s bad days was unbearable.

  Juniper’s nickname, J Bird, was new that summer. At first it had been a taunt from an older boy who called her Bird Legs. Delia’s little sister didn’t carry the family legacy of being deeply hurt by ridicule. Juniper instead tossed the insult back at the boy, flapping her arms and saying, “I’m bird, a bird, a J Bird!” The nickname stuck, and once people grew to know her, they graduated to her nickname. When Delia thought of her, she was still Juniper, but she gave in to the new moniker. Even her father, even during this horrible summer, had taken joy in her feisty name-taking.

  Her mother left her job writing the political coverage at the newspaper and now worked in distribution. The editor suggested the change when Delia’s father missed too many deadlines and the syndications fell away. “This way I’ll be home evenings for J Bird,” she told Delia with a forced enthusiasm that tore at Delia’s heart. Her mother loved the heat and drama of state politics.

  For the hundredth time, her father had decided to go off the medication that muffled the voices in his head but dulled his senses. His paranoid thinking opened a cascade of terrors for all of them. The wires were yanked out of the TV again, the batteries removed from her boom box. He insisted on a PO Box instead of a mailbox on the house. He was on a path of shutting down all of the invasive dangers from the outer world, from the government, from the UN, and from beyond.

  Their mother interceded, acted like a social lubricant, soothing him, stepping between the man who sometimes resembled her handsome husband and her often terrified daughters.

  “Delia, take J Bird out tonight, to a movie or to the mall,” she said when Delia came home from the Y. Her mother met her in the driveway. Something crashed on the second floor of the house. Her little sister sat on the black asphalt, her back pressed against the garage door, with a new school backpack at her feet. Head down, picking at a crack in the drive.

  “It’s a school night. Doesn’t J Bird have homework?” They both knew this wasn’t the question that hung over them. It was the galloping paranoia exploding in her father that was the only question.

  “I have a call in to his psychiatrist,” her mother said, tucking her shoulder-length hair behind one ear. She had talked to the psychiatrist and the ER doctors a dozen times over the summer. Her father’s stubborn schizophrenia challenged even the seasoned psychiatrist. Her mother battled the conundrum of convincing someone in the grip of paranoid delusions that it was safe to take medication. Delia thought her mother might just collapse from exhaustion. They all might.

  What was worse, the tyranny of his delusions holding them all hostage by the outside invaders that only her father could detect, or witnessing the bottomless remorse of her father? The medication brought with it the horror of realizing his illness. The delusions and the medication worked as collaborators to keep her father from writing. If he wrote while in the grips of hallucinations, the result was a jumble of false starts, panicked half sentences. If he tried to write while taking Thorazine (an old drug that the desperate psychiatrist was trying after all else failed), it dulled his senses and he spent all day writing one paragraph that hit the page with a joyless thud.

  The heat of the day, absorbed into the black asphalt of their driveway, radiated up through Delia’s shoes to the soles of her feet and traveled up the bones of her legs. She was exhausted from standing all day behind the counter; she only wanted to go inside her own house and sit down on the couch, or stretch out on her bed. But no, not in this family, because her father had gone insane again. Why couldn’t her family be like others, even like the families where parents argued or someone drank too much? At least they didn’t have bare wires sticking out of the walls, they could at least use the bathroom, call a friend, watch television. Why couldn’t she invite her boyfriend in? The last time she tried to have Tyler in after a date, her father had mortified her by shouting at Tyler, “They told me about you! Stay away from my daughter!”

  Delia didn’t want to have to say it, but she longed for more time with her mother. She wanted to go to an ice cream stand, go shopping, or take a walk along the beach without her mother constantly ready to sprint back home to reel in her father. He was convinced that he heard the neighbors across the street plotting to dig a tunnel under the street and invade their house.

  “I know he’s sick, but when do we get to have a normal life? Do we all have to pay for his sickness? I know you want to leave him,” said Delia. “For God’s sake, just do it.”

  Delia had never said this out loud before, only to Tyler in a tearful state of exhaustion.

  Her mother squinted against the setting sun, putting one hand over her eyebrows. “When we first met, I knew that I had found the most brilliant, handsome, funny man. I knew there would never be anyone else like him.” She looked away and squeezed her eyes shut. A breath shuddered through her. “I have to hang on t
o the brilliant parts of him, to the part of him that loves us. If I let go, he’ll be lost. Take your sister out for a few hours. Please.”

  She handed the car keys to Delia. “Go do something fun, just the two of you.”

  “I have a date with Tyler! I already broke a date with him last week when Dad refused to let me leave the house,” she said.

  “You’ll have lots of dates with Tyler. Please, Delia. I wouldn’t ask you unless it was important.”

  In a silent acquiescence, Delia slid the keys into her pocket.

  “I love you girls. I know this has been hard for you,” said her mother, tilting her head, imploring something like forgiveness.

  Delia, honeycombed with anger, didn’t respond to her mother’s unspoken request for a hug, for an emotional understanding. She glanced up and saw her father at an upstairs window, his once angular face bloated by medication that, while absent in his system for weeks, still left its puffy mark.

  She turned and said, “Come on, J Bird. Let’s go to a movie.”

  She called Tyler’s house and left the message that she had to cancel.

  CHAPTER 7

  Delia had always taken care of Juniper and patrolled for any hint of her father’s illness. Delia watched Juniper for signs all through high school and her early twenties. If they had the bad gene for breast cancer, they could have their breasts removed in a preemptive strike. But what can you remove to stave off madness of the worst sort? Not the brain, where all the trouble is.

  What if Juniper took drugs and it jump-started a cascade effect, rumpling her brain? What if a car accident flipped the switch? Or worst of all, what if the thief came for Delia, voices warning her of conspiracies, screeching in her head? What if it happened and she didn’t realize it, and then who would Juniper have?

  Her little sister was now twenty-six, nearly in the safe zone, and aside from picking ghastly boyfriends for a solid seven years, she seemed no worse for wear. And what of Delia? Aside from her heightened sense of smell and a chin that itched a warning with difficult cases, she was past the age, at thirty-two, when schizophrenia was likely to raise its skeletal hand from her father’s grave and grab her.

  What was your risk of being doused with the schizophrenic gene if you had one parent who had schizophrenia? Delia knew the numbers by heart; she’d known since she was a twenty-year-old student in a psychopathology class. Thirteen percent. She and Juniper had a thirteen percent chance that they would start wearing aluminum hats to keep out invasive radio waves. In the general population, less than one half of one percent of people were cursed with psychosis. And it was a curse, a thief, leaving Delia with a father who was so afflicted that he believed radioactive air was being pumped through the water pipes. When Delia was a senior in high school, weary from trying to outwit his delusion, she tried to reason with him by saying, “But, Daddy, these are water pipes. . . .” He shoved his contorted face into hers and said, “I’m not stupid. There’s air in water, it’s H2O, O, get it?”

  What else did Delia glean from her early psych classes? That the life expectancy of someone like her father was ten to twenty-five years less than average. Her father hit the average like a bull’s-eye, dead at forty-four.

  Today, everyone loved Juniper. She made people laugh. Customers at the Bayside Bakery, where she worked, swooned over her muffins and her baked concoctions of raspberries and cream cheese. Delia would have given anything to shed the layer of seriousness, of too-early adulthood, that came with the death of their parents. She wanted what Juniper had, the way her perfect lips didn’t crack in the winter, the easy way she talked to men, the way she danced if she felt like it, even at the bakery, even with her huge white apron on.

  When disaster struck their family, Delia had been nineteen, almost a sophomore in college, and Juniper was only thirteen, an eighth-grade girl with small nubs of breasts. Delia had to take over. But now, she wanted someone to notice her in the way they noticed J Bird, she wanted someone to say, “Hey, you’ve got the moves, Delia!” She was ready for the unbearable weight of being the stand-in parent to be lifted.

  It wasn’t that she wanted Juniper to be someone else. She adored her little sister and was proud of her. What Delia didn’t want were the feelings of resentment, those unspeakable feelings that no one was supposed to have. There were days when her lungs couldn’t expand and she couldn’t shake the oil and water mixture of loving and resentment. The unholy combination made her heart squeeze up like beef jerky. There were days when she was jealous of her little sister, and it was wrong in every way possible. She would do anything to excise the pettiness that swamped her at times.

  Change the thought and she could change the emotion. Wasn’t that the mantra of Oprah, Deepak Chopra, and Wayne Dyer? Hadn’t she watched an entire PBS fundraising special on the power of changing thought and vibration while she ate a bag of corn chips, dipping into the salsa jar with regularity? She tried a visualization of an angry wart on her big toe (as far away from her heart as possible) and pictured a drop of liquid falling on the wart, melting it away. Everyone on the fundraising special agreed that the unconscious mind understood metaphor, and what better metaphor than a wart for the ancient, crusted-over feeling that crept over her? Wasn’t it time to be done with a coping mechanism that had overstayed its welcome? Juniper was a fully functioning adult. Delia didn’t have to keep taking care of her. Her little sister had escaped the family disease.

  * * *

  When Delia pictured Juniper, it was her thirteen-year-old version of her sister that rose up. When Juniper thought of Delia, was it the nineteen-year-old model? Maybe not. And as if the universe was conspiring to keep Delia in a perpetual do-over, she had chosen a profession where she was responsible for children who were in need of safekeeping.

  But Juniper was safe now, wasn’t she? Weren’t they both safe at last? Weren’t they in the blessed doldrums of adulthood?

  The sisters had no physical artifacts from their family home. No favorite chairs, no dishes from Great Aunt Heddy, no photos of the four of them, no clothing except what they had worn that night, no trinkets, no sports awards, school records, hairbrushes, toothbrushes, shoes, or hair clips. No copies of Goodnight Moon. No food from the fridge. No fridge.

  Pick off the thinnest scab when the sisters were together and their little girl selves burst out, sticky with sweat and braces.

  * * *

  The phone chirped in Delia’s pocket. It was Ira. Thanks to caller ID, she had a few seconds to prepare. Nobody could pull her back to the present like Ira, offering her disasters other than her own to focus on.

  “The blood tests are back,” he said. “None of the three people in the house were related to Hayley. None of them were her parents.”

  CHAPTER 8

  J Bird

  Juniper’s soulful golden retriever, Baxter, was due for his rabies shot. They had been together for three years after Ben called her from his vet clinic, saying that someone had just brought in a stray dog and would she be interested. Ben was the family hero, helping Delia through college and telling Juniper that she deserved the best boyfriends, not the worst.

  Ben was as close to a parent as Juniper would have for the rest of her life. He’d been there for her when she couldn’t even call Delia for help. He’d picked her up at a high school party when she was so stoned that she could barely stand and some guy she didn’t know pushed her onto a bed. Ben came to get her, taking the last ferry over from Peaks Island. As soon as she saw his car pull up, she rushed to the door, collapsing inside, sobbing.

  “It’s okay, J Bird,” he had said. “We all screw up sometimes. I’ll always be here for you.”

  Now, there was a question about Baxter. While she had avoided the question since the day Baxter came into her life, others at Bayside Bakery dropped subtle and not so subtle suggestions about the dog’s fertility status. Technically, Baxter belonged to both of the sisters, since Delia never balked at walking Baxter in even the worst possible weather, but like
a biological parent versus stepparent, Juniper was the ultimate decision maker about his welfare. At least with Baxter, she was the grown-up.

  Baxter was an intact male. He was the proud owner of a mighty set of testicles that he tended to with such frequency and care that Juniper couldn’t help but think that the dog was showing off. They were the first bit of business for the golden retriever in the morning, just a sniff to see how the mighty sacs fared overnight. He nudged them with his black nose, as if to say, Good morning, boys.

  Wasn’t the very cornerstone of all responsible pet owners to spay and neuter? And Juniper had been, until Baxter’s arrival, the most strident advocate of neutering. Wasn’t she an unbearable hypocrite, advocating one thing for the masses but offering a privileged existence for her dog?

  Baxter had not, to her knowledge, ever procreated. Nor was he aggressive with other dogs. He walked through life with the easy confidence of a large, barrel-chested dog, sure in his ability to safeguard his pack if he had to. He didn’t need to bark in a histrionic fit like a small dog, or put up his hackles when another equal-sized dog approached. In fact, Juniper wished she were more like the consistently happy dog, sure of her place. Maybe if she were more like Baxter, Delia would stop hovering.

  Baxter was a dog unlike all others in her life, and even considering the end of his life was excruciating. Big dogs squeezed a lot of living into a relatively short life. Would it be so terrible, Juniper asked, just this once, if she had a dog who could pass on his DNA, if a lovely sweetie was found to Baxter’s liking and, if the moment was right for both the four-leggeds, there could be a happy moment of dog humping with a litter of puppies as a result?

  It was time to talk this over with Ben. Since Baxter needed his rabies vaccine, Juniper would broach the subject.

  She was twenty minutes late; an accident on the bridge had delayed her. And she had purposely scheduled at the end of Ben’s office hours. She was relieved to see his truck was still in the parking lot, so it was worth a try. She pulled in next to his ten-year-old Toyota and turned off the engine. Baxter, riding shotgun, raised his eyebrows up in a peak when he saw where they were.