by Joshua Furst
“Mom, answer me, at least!”
A chair toppled behind me.
“Your daughter's asking you a question, Julia. Aren't you going to answer her? Or can't you hear her?”
Almost there. Almost there. Remember to breathe. I was on the carpet. Past the antique table piled with junk mail. The heavy bench carved out of a tree trunk.
“Mom, are you going outside? You can't go outside!”
Her voice was shrill, pinched, as though someone had twisted a thick length of rope around her neck, like they were strangling her, dragging her by the throat up the side of a mountain, an impossibly steep mountain, dragging her quickly. And the person holding the end of the rope was me. It was tightening, squeezing the life from her. She saw it now, I could tell, the danger swooping toward us; she saw how little control we had over it. What needed to happen first was for me to make it through the crisis inside me. Then we'd be reunited with Sarah. The pain would relent. The rope would fray and snap. Cheryl would be released and I'd be redeemed.
“It's like zero degrees out there! Mom, don't go outside!”
Set down the chair. Turn the handle. The weather stripping crackled as I pulled the door open. My arm still tingled. My feet were going numb. A gust of frigid air seeped through the unopened storm door.
“Mom!” She grabbed me by the elbow and tried to yank me back. “Stop! Mom, stop! Stop! Please!”
If I'd been able to speak, I would have told her, Don't cry. There's no reason for you to cry. This is a good thing, a necessary thing. I'm doing this for you.
Instead, I shoved her.
She toppled back on her heels, tripped and fell to the floor and Robert came swooping in to slam the door shut. He blocked my way.
“Enough,” he said.
Patience. I lowered myself onto the chair. They'd get tired eventually. All I had to do was wait. I thought of Gremlin—the insistent part of her little brain that, when an idea was lodged inside it, narrowed her attention to this single thing, how to attain it, where the dangers and obstacles barring her way were and what it would take to get past them. If Gremlin wanted to escape the house, she would sit, poised, on the arm of the couch. Hackles up, she'd watch for the split second she needed. She'd swipe and draw blood if you tried to stop her. To get past Robert, I'd have to be catlike, to focus my desire and bide my time and seize the opportunity when it arose, brutally, viciously if that's what it took.
Cheryl sobbed. She wouldn't stop sobbing.
“You see what you've done to her?” Robert said. “Don't you think we've had enough excitement for one night?”
Using hand signals, I tried to remind him that I couldn't speak. I slit my throat. I grimaced and held my hands up in an oversized shrug. I twirled two fingers in front of my mouth like I was teasing a ribbon out of it.
“Julia, come on. This stopped being funny about—” He bit his lip, shook his head. “It was never funny.”
We glared at each other. A childish staredown. When he broke to glance at Cheryl, I lunged for the door. He caught me. He sat me back down.
I waited.
“Mom—”
As he turned to shush her, I lunged for the door again. He spun. He stopped me.
I waited and lunged.
Waited and lunged.
Again.
Again.
After a while all I had to do was twitch.
“Are we going to do this all night?” he asked.
I made a face to say, That's up to you.
“No. It's up to you,” he said.
Something remarkable happened then. Cheryl spoke up again. “Can't you stop?” she said. Not to me but to him. “You're hurting her.” I wasn't expecting this. I wouldn't have dared.
Robert's hands tumbled over each other, fingers pulling fingers, twisting at rings that weren't there to be twisted. And then one hand curled slowly into a fist and pounded the other. Palm grinding knuckles, he tried to walk away, turned and turned again and turned. “Fuck it.” Hearing him swear was exhilarating, painful. He couldn't even look at me anymore. “She's not going out there like this, though. Where's her coat?”
“Mom, where'd you put your coat?”
Board games came tumbling out of the closet as he rummaged through it. Ski jackets, windbreakers fluttered to the floor. Hangers twirled on the clothes rod, clattered and flew. He wasn't going to find it there, and I knew this. It was hanging from one of the dowels next to the garage door in the mess room. I'd put it there that afternoon after returning Cheryl's overdue movies.
He was in a frenzy now, throwing snow boots over his shoulder, flicking galoshes at my head. He jerked the plastic storage bin off the shelf and let it drop. The lid popped open, ten years of winter accessories tumbled out and he threw them at me, a rapid barrage of limp wool and fleece and leather and nylon and cashmere.
I let the clothes bounce off my body, gave him no reaction, no satisfaction. When something useful came my way—a pair of petrified ski gloves, cracked and peeling at the joints, a violet headband adorned with a smiling cartoon moon—I collected it in my lap.
With nothing left to strew at me, he stomped off. I listened as he clomped from room to room. A door slammed. Gremlin shrieked and scrambled. Thuds and pings and swooshes of hard-to-interpret sound followed Robert around the house, and all this while I sat still, full of wonder, gazing at Cheryl, her chin digging at her knees, her eyes pointed at me, wary, squinting. She'd tried to convince herself I wasn't human, that my behavior was beyond the realm of what it was possible for a person to do, that my mind—or what she understood of it—was alien, a thing to be dismissed and exiled. She couldn't manage it, though. She loved me, and for now, she'd stopped trying to protect herself from me.
I flashed her a shy little smile and something snapped in her. A frightening loathing radiated off her, coloring over the kindness. I was confused, disappointed. I'd thought she understood, but I'd been wrong; it would take months, years for her to understand.
Robert finally returned with my parka. He tossed it onto my lap and leaned in close. “From here on out,” he said, “I'm not responsible. Whatever happens, I'm not responsible. You understand what I'm telling you, Julia?”
I refused to respond either way.
Thinking, I guess, that I'd beg him to change his mind, he backed gingerly toward the kitchen, ducked around the corner and hid just out of sight, waiting to see what I was going to do.
Heft myself up. Pry my arms into the sleeves of the parka.
Cheryl rose with me, but instead of trying to stop me this time, she just stood there watching. I held her by the shoulders, and I'm not sure how, but when I opened my mouth to speak, the words were there. “You need to know this: I'm doing this, all of this, for you” was what I said.
Then I turned. I picked up my chair. I left.
Outside, the air was dry and brittle. Snow had drifted into the house's shadow and hardened into a crust across the earth, removing all the sharp edges from the landscape. The neighborhood had been bled of color.
In order not to slip on the ice shellacked across the concrete walk, and conscious of my weight, my tendency to lurch from support to support, I marched, deliberately lifting each foot and placing it back down, testing the sturdiness of each step before I committed to it. I could hear, in the quiet, something beyond sound, a rhythmic whirring with no perceivable pulse, the sound of endurance, of hardly getting by. When I reached the lip of the driveway, I tried various locations for the chair, moving it incrementally around until all four legs had a sturdy hold. Then I sat and waited for the ambulance to arrive.
It was easier to think clearly out here. The cold froze up and sealed off stray tangents of thought. Sarah. Me. Cheryl. Those were the essentials. Anything else was a false complication, a distraction inserted into my brain in order to discombobulate me. Cheryl. Me. Sarah.
My neighbors' living rooms were lit orange and blue. The TV sets were drawing families together and distracting them from the darkness
. Everyone was inside, everyone but me, all insulated and cozy and gradually, cell by cell, losing their memory of the winter numbness that had tapped their bones. But I liked the cold. Right then, I cherished it. It was purging, burnishing something within me.
I sang.
When you're weary, feeling small
And as “Bridge over Troubled Water” 's fragile melody washed through me, my symptoms receded. My heart was beating more evenly already, more slowly, easier. I could breathe again. The tingling in my arm had disappeared and my voice cut sharp and clear through the frozen air.
The cold was presenting me with an alternative. Cheryl and me both. I knew—I'd always known, now I admitted—that I was the only one to protect Cheryl, and the person she needed protection from was me.
A thought occurred to me. One last thing I needed to do.
I stood up and moved my chair, squirmed out of the parka and flapped it. Then I laid it out flat across the driveway. This would be my bridge. It would carry me across and Cheryl would be released.
Placing my chair on top of the parka, I sat down again. I didn't mind the cold. I was beyond cold now.
I had to get better. I had to fix my mind. Until then, for both our sakes, I'd stay outside, sit here, a sentry, guarding the door. I'd wait. I'd refuse to let the vandals squirming in my brain back inside the house.
The ambulance would be here soon, and when it arrived, the handsome young men—overworked, bleary-eyed, going on two or three days without sleep—would leap out and find me waiting for them. They'd take my blood pressure. They'd ask me where it hurt. They'd rotate my arm above my head and glance quizzically at each other behind my back. They'd tell me that there wasn't anything wrong with me. Physically I was fine. A little overweight—they'd lecture me on that. But I would be adamant. I'd demand they take me away with them.
And when they asked, Robert would tell them the truth. He'd sign the forms, and then I'd be gone.
Sail on silver girl, I sang.
They were almost here. I could hear the siren twirling out on Hemlock Lane. Heads were popping up in my neighbors' windows, backlit, in silhouette. They were riveted.
Cheryl was watching too. How could she not be?
I sang about how I would ease her mind. And at the time, I thought that was what I was doing.
THAT WAS THE DAY on which she should have left. Her reasons, her logic, would have made sense then. She'd watched me disintegrate, over a three-hour span, from the capable, loving woman who'd driven her to school when she missed the bus and helped her sign up for tap lessons, jazz lessons and Suzuki lessons; who'd washed her clothes, folded them and put them in the drawers, never once asking her how they came to be so saturated in smoke; who'd included a treat each day with the granola bars and yogurt of her packed lunch; who'd sat with her, eyeing the metronome, while her violin squeaked, and patiently talked her through her frustration, hiding the headache the instrument gave me and lying when she cried that she had no talent; who'd done all these sacrificial motherly things while still teaching her not to let boys run her life or trust the media and its codes of beauty, reminding her constantly of what she could become if she remained intrepid and uncowed—an astronaut, a poet, a rock guitarist, physicist, feminist, doctor, lawyer like her dad—who told her, as every woman should tell her daughter, that she could be president if that's what she wanted, but if she chose (it was her choice to make), there was nothing wrong with being a homemaker, the hardest job on earth, let no one tell you different. She'd watched me revert from sometimes-wise, sometimes-lovely sometimes-weird Mom into the smaller thing I'd always been, the frightened animal I'd kept hidden from her. I'd winced and cowered. I'd shivered. I'd quaked. I'd shown myself to be, at least for a time, incapable of doing her any good.
And I can't fathom, I don't understand at all, why she didn't leave then when everything was broken, why she waited instead for everything to be fine.
BEFORE HE BROUGHT ME HOME, Robert had told her to try to “act normal” around me, and maybe that's what she'd thought she was doing by hiding in her room each day from the second school got out until I called her to dinner. It wasn't really so different from normal—the same furtiveness, the same teenage sullenness—but in my nervous state, I felt very much like her reasons for avoiding me were more localized, less dismissible than run-of-the-mill teenage angst. “Let her come to you.” That's what Robert had said, and that's what I did.
On the first night—well, not exactly the first night, the very first night was spent out as a family, Cheryl, me and Robert crammed into a booth at Outback Steakhouse, Cheryl sulking and gazing at the parking lot through the whole thing, Robert fidgeting, and me aching in helpless shame; when, finally, she did deign to open her mouth, it was only to spew out her hatred for Outback and all the evil she claimed was packaged inside it. But on the first night the two of us were alone, Robert having returned to his habit of staying at the office until late into the evening, she looked at the care I'd taken in the place settings and said, “Dad lets me watch The Simpsons during dinner.” I couldn't argue—I wasn't sure what authority I had anymore—so I sat alone at the table in the kitchen and tried to block out the cackle of the TV. On the second night I got up the courage to join her in the living room, but once I'd settled in, she stood up with her plate. “I've seen this one already” was her excuse before stalking back to the kitchen table. Robert had said, “Don't push her.” Remembering this advice, and wishing he were home to help me follow it, I let her go. I let her do whatever she wanted and made special meals: mac and cheese flecked with crumbled bits of bacon; burgers and oven-roasted tater tots; tacos, each fixing held in its own bowl— meals she'd begged for in the past, meals I hoped would please her. And slowly, over the next four days, it seemed like things got better. We became used to each other.
The thermometer hit eighty on that final day, and when Cheryl returned from school, she changed into her swimsuit, the cute lime green bikini with the pink trim that we'd bought for her the summer before, not knowing that in a matter of months she'd reject all cute-ness in favor of tatters.
I'd been making cookies—peanut butter, her favorite—planning to leave them without comment on the kitchen table, one more act of kindness, one more example of my capablity. And just in case my care slid past unnoticed, I'd saved her the beaters too; I was going to leave them on a saucer in the fridge, her name in a heart on the note taped to the Saran Wrap.
“You look nice in that,” I said, and she rolled her eyes, but she stopped herself from making a snide remark. The current issue of Rolling Stone coiled in her hand, she headed out onto the wood-slat deck that Robert had built around the pool. This restraint on her part was, I thought, a good omen. Her resentment had begun to dissolve into a less exhausting apathy. “Just holler if there's anything you need,” I called after her.
While I finished my baking, I watched her from the window. For a while, she leafed through her magazine. Then she began reading a longish article I later figured out had been about the band Rage Against the Machine. She'd talked about them before, their political engagement, which she was impressed and inspired by. After reading a few pages, she gazed off toward the creek at the end of our property and thought for a long time, her brow furrowed like she was working out some uncomfortable new knowledge that had caused a breach in her understanding. She frowned. She blinked and shook the thought away.
Her magazine spread under her head like a pillow, she laid herself out on her stomach and trailed one hand along the dimpled blue tarp that we hadn't yet rolled off the surface of the pool. Her leg twitched, and while she reached around to scratch it, she peered out of one eye, searching, suspicious, maybe wary of me. I waved through the kitchen window, grinning huge, and she closed her eyes and dozed off.
She seemed so peaceful out there on the deck, and the day was so perfect and sunny and warm, that I figured she couldn't hold it against me if I wanted to join her in sunbathing. What was she going to say? “No, you're not a
llowed”? If she did, I could roll out her favorite self-defense: “It's a free country, I can do what I want,” and who knows, this might lead to an interesting debate, maybe about morality and human interdependence, or a roaming inquisition on how free we really are in this country.
“She's mostly just scared” is what Robert had said, and on this day she'd seemed slightly less so.
I took a risk. I changed into my swimsuit and whipped up a pitcher of Crystal Light—another of Cheryl's comfort foods. Then, once the cookies were out of the oven and arranged on the platter, I carried the beaters out onto the deck. One in each hand, I stood over her. She was content and I knew she was dreaming by the way her eyes twitched under her eyelids. It would have been a shame to interrupt her.
An intermittent breeze was blowing through, one of those breezes that come in like clouds, blocking the sunshine just long enough for the body to register the chill before pushing off again. Though she didn't open her eyes, it must have woken her. “What do you want?” she said.
“You're awake!”
“I've been awake.” Then, peeking, “Why do you have to stare at me like that?”
“Cookies!” I said. “To celebrate! Here, I saved you the beaters. It's peanut butter. Your favorite.”
“Peanut butter cookies aren't my favorite.”
“Sure they are. They've always been your favorite.”
“I like Nutter Butters. There's a difference.”
She shut her eyes again. The conversation was, apparently, over.
“Mom,” she said a few moments later, “I know you're watching me.”
“I'll put them in the fridge. You can have them later.”
“Fine.” She sat up and stretched her arms behind her back, clasping her hands together to crack her shoulders. “I'll have one. But only if you leave me alone, okay?”
As she scooped the sugary dough from between the tines, she made a big production of her resentment. She stared diffidently at each bulb of goo on her finger, careful not to break her frown or glance in my direction or do anything that I might possibly be able to construe as gratitude. But once she got started, she couldn't stop herself. She teased every last fleck of dough from the beater, and when it was gleaming, she moved on to sucking the sugary residue from her knuckles, chewing it out from under her nails.
