by Dan Noble
“Have a look at this.”
Dr. Pinocchio hands me a note and an envelope, which contains a CD Rom.
The letter is dated January 2, 1998. The day before Mother’s disappearance, which must have been when she died. The day before Pinocchio left the hospital for good. The day before I buried the box and told myself I would never think about any of this again. The font and the tissue thin page, I recognize from Mother’s old hospital reports. The feel of it against my nail brings me right back.
Millie,
By now, you must have noticed some remarkable things about your mother’s condition. It is no secret that I have been interested in her case. And yes, I cannot deny this interest exceeds mere goodwill for her wellbeing. I believe it’s important to be honest about these things.
My life’s work has been dedicated to the theory of consciousness and the creative brain. Our hypothesis (my definite knowledge, which I must present as hypothesis to maintain scientific protocol) through your mother’s case has always been—to say the least—exceptional.
I dared not share these findings with anyone until I knew the full breadth of what we’re onto here. With the skeptical, ready-to-be-cost-cut attitude already shined on our art rehabilitation techniques by the government funding bodies, it wouldn’t take more than a whisper of scandal to shut the whole thing down. And yesterday, purposefully or not, you managed to orchestrate that. And so here we are.
However, I know you have suffered enormously—perhaps more than anyone involved—under the conditions of your mother’s, shall we say, extraordinary state of being, and so, I would like to help you. I can see you are struggling.
Sincerely yours,
Dr. P
I look up to him.
“You were always antagonistic toward me,” he explains. “I know you didn’t want to hear the things I had to say. And I get that, but it caused me a lot of problems. I’m afraid I wasn’t as compassionate as I could have been because of what your actions had done to my career.”
I’m not fully across everything he’s saying but I nod. He’s obviously quite serious.
Pinned to the letter is an envelope, and inside the envelope is a CD-Rom.
I hand it to him and he holds it gently while he waits for the laptop to warm up. It takes ages for the suck of the CD, and once it clicks into place, it seems to spin at hyper speed, but nothing happens.
“Wait,” I say. “I need to show you something.” I want to trust him, and whatever he’s about to tell me about Kennedy. But there’s something I need to know in order to do this. I run to the car and heft out the tackle box. Dr. P is down the stairs quickly, eager to carry it for me once he sees what it is. It’s clear from the way he’s looking at me that he recognizes it.
Inside, alongside the computer, he carefully lays the box on the table. I turn back the lid and ask. “What do you see?”
“Millie, these are your lists. Your quelque chose lists. You had them with you all the time. It broke my heart to see you wanting to be like your mother, trying desperately to work everything out. You aren’t still doing this, are you?” I shake my head. Kennedy had gone along with what I said about the relics. More lies, but why?
“Why don’t we watch this?” Dr. P coaxes. “It might clear up a few things.”
Finally, a window pops up, asking him which application he’d like to use to open it. He doesn’t seem to know. The disk is old by today’s technology standards. I look to Pinocchio.
He shrugs. “Not very technical I’m afraid.”
Wavering for a moment, he chooses the first option and gets an error message. Then he closes out the window and has to search through a directory to find the file again. The wheel of death spins on the screen and my chest aches.
He clicks on the file and this time chooses the second application option. It works. A black dialogue box pops up. He clicks on the green arrow. Again, the wheel spins. But then an image appears. I’d know it right away: it’s Mother’s room at the Cuckoo Bird Hut. My entire torso begins to quiver in terror. I haven’t seen her in so long and I’ve buried so much that the idea of her image coming across the screen now is unbearable. But I must proceed. There’s no more time for denial.
No sooner do I think it, than there she is. My god, my god. I remember that sweater, the featherweight cashmere, the only pink thing she had, and the perfect pink, not too bright or dull; natural, as if everyone were born with a pink sweater, everything always perfect.
She’s propped up on a corduroy husband that I remember briefly being part of her life at the hospital. Someone had lent it to her and then taken it when they’d gone. So it was something with a timestamp, if only I could remember who the patient was.
Her hair is short. She’s beautiful, reading, otherworldly, unapproachable, and then there’s a knock at the door, and the person holding the camera puts it down, the view is of Mother’s wall. She’s got one of her chalkboards hung there, and I see the familiar names in the spiral shape: Steiner, Bataille, Coleridge.
There’s a screech of the door hinging open and then Mother looks up. Her reaction is pure terror. “No! No! No!” she yells, and Dr. P runs to secure her.
“Mr. Kennedy, please leave!” I hear Dr. P shout. Seconds later, I see Roxanne and the male orderly who was always playing ping-pong, secure Kennedy to a stretcher and then Roxanne injects him. It’s Kennedy. It’s definitely Kennedy.
“Yes,” the camera holder says, off screen. It’s a voice I’d know anywhere. Kennedy’s voice.
That’s it. The screen goes black. What have I just witnessed? Clearly, I know why I’ve witnessed it: Pinocchio wants me to know there’s something about Kennedy and Mother I don’t know. But he hasn’t let me know what. I watch once more, get the same chilling reaction, then slam the screen down and run back outside for some fresh air, gasping, bent over the handrail.
Pinocchio’s hand is on my back.
“I always liked how you called me Pinocchio.”
“What do you mean. That’s your name!”
“No. It isn’t. It’s Dr. P, for Peters, plain old Doctor Peters. Way back in my student teaching days, they called me Dr. P and it stuck.”
“Pinocchio?”
“Yes?”
“What was that I just watched?”
“Kennedy did not like your mother because everyone loved her. He undercut her every chance he got. I don’t think it was any coincidence he took to you, given how poorly Emily often treated you.”
Had Kennedy planned our meeting at Two Guys?
“Why don’t I remember him?”
“There’s a lot you don’t remember from your mother’s stay as well as your own.”
“He was there with me, too?”
“We often had to guard your door. He was always standing there, watching you. We didn’t know what he might do.”
“You’re telling me my marriage is a sham? That it was never real?”
“Did it feel real?”
He takes my silence for assent.
“Then it was real. This is what you always miss, Millie. Your experience is the real one, even if it doesn’t always make sense. Even if it isn’t like anyone else’s. Maybe, now that you know the truth, you can begin to be comfortable with yourself.”
“But Kennedy and my father believe I’m a danger—to Rose and to myself.”
“Well, I have a feeling that’s not entirely true. He can be very manipulative, Kennedy.”
“I’m going to go to the police tomorrow,” Dr. P says.
“Please give us a few days. What difference will it make now?”
He dips his chin and we part ways.
In the car ride home I tell myself that if Dr. P were really worried about what Kennedy would do to me, he would have insisted on going to the police immediately. He must think he’d never harm me or Rose.
In Mother’s office, on the far corner of her desk is a photo of her. In it, she’s twenty-one years old. Her hair’s wavy and thick with uneven, sultry b
angs that seem to just fall in a way others spend hundreds of dollars trying to achieve.
You can’t see, and she never told me, but I know. She’s looking down at me, to where I’m gestating in her uterus to the size of an unshelled peanut.
The next morning, Kennedy handles it for a long time, his finger marking the glass.
“Originally, I came across this photo in one of those trash bags hunched five wide by our back door in the days after my father left,” I tell Kennedy. I want to gauge his reaction. “It was a day a child welfare officer was coming to check on us and I had to make the house look respectable. When I tried to haul the trash to the bin, this bag busted on account of moldy pea soup and too many glass ginger ale bottles—an anthropologist would have had a field day.
“Grumbling, I’d unrolled a new bag and tried to shove everything inside. As I tipped in a dustpan full of limp tea bags and take-out chicken bones, the picture skittered gracefully out. I felt its slick surface, mottled only by the slightest ketchup smear. The residue had faded a spot which added to the photo’s patina—like the symbol of a rose in a religious painting, the image revealing more to a trained eye, but something indescribably enhanced to the average observer.”
When I see Mother and myself in that way, so in love, so smothered in ketchup, I know threw away this photo because she’d lost the hope pictured there. I was all she had left, and I’d failed her. She’d made that clear. But if you destroy an image, can you destroy its intention? I hoped not, which is why I kept it. I knew that she thought it possible, and that’s what gave her gesture power. But my keeping it had power, too. I often glanced at it as a possibility that I might be loved again one day. And I was, wasn’t I? Despite it all, Kennedy loved me, had decided to whatever it took to build a life with me. But what would happen now?
35
MILLIE
On the way home from Dr. P, a memory dislodges itself: a day on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with my parents: fancy shop windows, ancient diners with formal waiters serving ten deep on each arm plates of glistening thick-cut fries and toothpick-skewered chicken salad sandwiches. I must have been about seven.
Along Madison Avenue, where I remembered so clearly walking between Mother and my father, while each pulled an arm and raised me so I walked on air, my feet furiously shimmying, Mother said, “We’re here. This is it.” Only later did I learn that this outing was to accompany Mother to the city so she could attend her therapy group at the end of this street, one she’d just begun a few weeks earlier. Father had already told her he was going to leave if he didn’t give it a good try.
She’d stopped in front of a luggage store with a particularly enticing travel display. The cases were floating, suspended by invisible thread, adorned with glittering, dip-dyed wings.
“The man who owns this store hates me. He’s in my group and has it out for me.”
My father and I had exchanged one of our looks. Here we go, it said.
Beneath them was arranged a picnic scene of furry animal figurines, each with their own luggage. It felt like something from another world. Any place that could make suitcases into such a dreamy image was someplace I wanted to see. I begged my parents to go inside.
Mother said, “Absolutely not. I have no idea what he’s after. I told everyone I was coming here with my family this week, and he must have done this for my benefit. Or hers.” She thumbed in my direction.
Even by then, I knew my father’s tactic for Mother was to “not engage” when she said such things.
“Dad, please. Please! Please! Please!” I got quite agitated.
“You’re getting too excited,” he said. This was his code for ‘you’re making me think you’re like your mother.’ I knew this because she often screamed those words at him. I wore them like a badge of honor.
Instead, I screamed all the way to one of those diners. Calmed down out the front, and we then ate silently at an upstairs booth, looking out the window at everyone walking by below. I can remember clearly feeling more deeply upset than I ever had before. That was the beginning of the end for our family. And right in the midst of it, there was all this wonder, all this action, held out—just for me, I’d felt—and then suddenly, because of her, it was yanked from reach. Now there was anger, silence. I refused to eat my french fries and my father had said we’d sit there until I finished, like a normal kid. Mother had defended me. “Who wants to be normal?”
After twenty minutes Mother had scooped me up and raced out of the restaurant to her therapy. We waited in the diner until five minutes before she was due to come out and stood there at the ordinary wooden door to a brownstone, in a row of others just like it. When she emerged, there was a dark-haired man behind her.
“And who’s this beautiful girl?” he said.
Mother ignored him, like he simply hadn’t said anything. “This is Rose,” my father said, while Mother bored holes through him with her eyes. He kissed my hand. Nobody had ever done that to me before. He excused himself and then bowed before me. “My lady,” he said, and winked before he walked away.
“Yes, he looked just awful,” My father said, when he was, in fact, down the street, in front of the luggage shop.
Father said he had things to do and Mother and I rode the train home without him. I screamed the whole way, until my throat was raw and I fell asleep. I didn’t know why I was so upset. And when I woke up I never thought about it again. Until now.
As I clicked the memory back into place, I realize why I’d felt drawn to that shop years later, when I went in and bought that Quelque Choses paper. Could Mother have been right about Kennedy? Could our whole life be an elaborate final fuck-you to her? And all the while, could I have been so pathetic that this was this the start of my manic search for meaning in it all? Pathetic. I really was. Poor Rose, what would become of her, with an unfit mother like me?
Even as I thought it, I couldn’t help but admire the beauty of our story’s pattern—the reversal, a powerful literary setup.
Inside the luggage shop, on the day I’d bought the papers, I rebuffed an offer of assistance, made my way to a glossy gray suitcase that caught my eye, past the image from the window—a mirror that reflected me in a floppy hat, a passport, a book, and a small suitcase—that I’d been trying to work out: how had they done it? There was no floppy hat there, no book, no small suitcase, and yet I’d been reflected with them in the mirror, a fantasy version of me. It looked like a magical mirror, but certainly must have had some intricate illusion set up behind the scenes. I hadn’t realized I’d seen this place before.
I checked the price tag on the gray case, which inspired a discreet gasp, which propelled me to the sale rack at the rear.
Rummaging through the cut-price merchandise, between travel Scrabble sets and ingeniously rolled Totes bags the size and shape of a croissant, yet printed with baguettes, I found stacks of notepaper topped with the words Quelque Chose, which is French for “something.”
It seemed significant. Not only the paper itself, but the experience of finding it, the atmosphere, the grounding of words in life.
Feeling I was getting something important, for a very good bargain, though I wasn’t exactly sure why, I bought all the stock.
“Quelq’un achete quelque chose,” said the narrow man in black plastic frames and a blue Mohawk, wearing a name tag that read, Seb, who rang me up. I was someone buying something, sure.
“Could be the opening of a great novel,” he said, as he handed over my change and my purchase in a pretty paisley paper bag. I gave him a tight smile. All of this clicked into meaningful patterns for me. Too bad I’d missed the most meaningful bit. It would probably be my undoing.
36
MILLIE
The next day, I’m negotiating the tight side streets toward the Long Island Expressway on my way to New Jersey General for some answers. Back to Roxanne, and all the clusters of memory that will alight at yanking at that strand of history. I’ve left Rose with Kennedy again. I seem to
be solving his problems by making myself scarce.
This morning, at the breakfast table she had her “writing” of smiley and sad faces in front of her. I could see her practicing her own smiling and frowning. When I caught her she said, “Don’t look at me!”
I shouldn’t come back here. I feel it deep in my bones. I’m a few feet away, holding my breath, when a honk startles me. It’s Roxanne, in her ancient Toyota. She circles her fist, bulges her eyes, so I’ll lower my window. She looks the same, but her hair is grayer.
“Well, hello. I was wondering when I’d see you again.”
I think I’m going to be sick. Roxanne leaves her car idling, door open, to stand over my window and smooth my hair. In her embrace, she bends me over the open door and I want to vomit all over her shoes. The ungentle feel of her hand sparks off more memories. She steps back and I cut to the chase. “John Kennedy; was he a patient here?”
“You know he was, dear. You and he had a special bond. Didn’t you?” Roxanne says—in her strange, gruff, register. “Which I’ll never forget because he didn’t like your mother much, did he?”
It’s true. It’s all true.
“Are you okay?” Roxanne demands.
“I’m fine,” I say. I need to get out of here immediately. I may not recall much of my time here, but I can sense deep down in my bones that this place is poison to me. And if I stay here, I may say too much and right now trouble feels like it’s hiding around every corner. Roxanne’s the woman people bare their souls to, the one patients confess their most tortured thoughts to on sleepless nights, when they’d rather string themselves up with a bedsheet than hold it in one more second. I shrug and feel the pull of a frown.
