I'm dancing, even though my stomach is full of rotten pea soup. I'm hopping and jumping and trying to put out all of the matches that tumble, like orange rose petals, to the tile. But I've just stomped one when two more tumble. Four more fall when I get those extinguished. She's in a rhythm, striking them faster, faster. They're burning Mom's bare feet, they're catching the hem of her jeans on fire, and I'm stomping, I'm grabbing those washcloths and beating those flames on the edge of her jeans while the smoke pours from the sink, because the fire has caught on a piece of newspaper, and it's starting to singe one of the mermaids.
The smell of the smoke that trickles off the painted mermaid is acrid, chemical, sick.
"Come on," Mom grumbles as she lights and tosses. "Hurry-hurry!" she screams, like she's seeing the mermaids in the sink rise up, come after her.
The faucet, moron, I scold myself. I reach for the tap, turning the hot and cold on full-force. The running water blankets the flames that have only just started to grow. The orange danger disappears, but the smoke turns even blacker in the moment of extinction, the smell far more putrid. Like burning flesh. Like what's in that sink isn't wood, but honest-to-God mermaids. Real bodies.
"They'll kill us! Get away, get away!" Mom screams. And even though I know she's got the world muddled, that nothing she does should hurt me because she's not even in the same world I'm in anymore, I look at those mermaids piled in the sink-the ones she's tried to destroy-and I hear her words to the shopkeeper who carved them: We're just alike, me and Aura. Suddenly, my heart is in that sink, blackened into some unrecognizable, useless brick of ash.
"Stop," I tell her. "Just stop." I grab her the way Janny sometimes grabs Ethan, scooping him into her arms to keep him from crawling right off the edge of her front porch.
But Mom's still striking the damn matches. And I'm so angry at her-even as my heart is breaking, my anger gains speed. I'm in a car that left furious behind a hundred miles ago. I hit the box of matches, knocking them to the ground. They scatter like Mom's thoughts, rolling off in a hundred different directions. She falls to her knees, starts picking the sticks up off the tile, but I stop her. Wrap my arms around her, tightening my grip as she thrashes against me.
I want my arms to be as strong and overpowering as a straitjacket, but Mom breaks away from me, scampering across the linoleum and picking up a match. She tries to strike it, but the head splinters off. "Go," she says, grabbing another match. "A fire. Only way out." Just like she did back at the art museum. "Burn, burny burning," she shouts.
As our fingers tangle in our struggle, Mom starts crying, just like Ethan did that night in the grocery store. Hurt crying. Sick crying. And I know I have to be smart about this. I can't just rope her, this wild thing that'll buck me, knock me to the ground and trample me. I have to pretend; I have to play this game.
"Mom," I say. "Come on-you can't kill a mermaid with fire."
"You can too-"
"Think about it. They're wet, Mom. Right? You can't catch something on fire that spends its whole life in the ocean. They're soaked straight to the bone."
"What do I do?" she asks, her eyes as wide as wading pools.
"Suffocate them," I whisper. "Come on."
I motion for her to follow me into the hall. I pull a blanket from the linen closet, then tiptoe back through the living room, toward the kitchen, pretending I don't want the mermaids to hear me sneaking up on them.
Mom screams like some woman being attacked by a serial killer the minute our feet hit the linoleum. She scampers up one of the knocked-over chairs, nearly falling because she doesn't bother to turn it right side up. She makes it onto the table, grabbing all the mermaids above her and yanking them off their fishing line hangers.
"Hurry!" she screams. "Catch them! Catch!"
I drop the blanket to the floor, and start piling the mermaids on top, wondering for a moment how Mom sees this. I try to put on a good show, acting like they're hard to catch, like the mermaids are all flopping like fish in the bottom of a boat. Like their tails are slippery in my hands. Like they're trying to squirm away from me.
When Mom tosses the last of the mermaids down, I gather up the edges of the blanket, making a pouch.
"Oh, God-hurry!" Mom screams. "Watch-watch-"
I stand up, cradling the blanket, and head for the garage. "I'll put them in the trunk, Mom," I ramble, searching for words that might make sense to her. "I'll put them there-with no water-they'll die there. They'll suffocate."
But even as I'm running, it's like the whole world has turned to freaking quicksand.
And Mom's still screaming, Mom's still screaming.
As van Gogh 's talent began to manifest itself so, tragically, did his declining mental state. Poor Vincent. The classic example of how art takes a person's mind and turns it into cream of chicken soup.
he slam of the Tempo's trunk kills Mom's terrorized wail. She stands in the doorway to the garage, the screen door making her face look gray and hazy.
"We did it, Mom," I say, but when I open that screen, her face doesn't look any brighter.
"It didn't work, Aura," she mumbles as I steer her back through the kitchen, away from the broken threads of fishing line and into the quiet of her bedroom. "I thought it would work, but it didn't. I was so sure, and now, I'm just so tired." Her voice is low and thick. If her voice could be a color, it would be deep midnight blue. A blue so dark, it looks black until you get something else-a sock or a sweater-next to it to compare the shades.
"The mermaids? They're gone, Mom. I suffocated them. You watched me, right?" I push the sketchbooks and canvases off her bed.
"The room, Aura," she says as she crawls across her comforter. "Don't you know anything? The tilty floor that tilted. It didn't work. I had to cover it up."
"It's all right, Mom," I try to soothe her, petting her head. "It's just fine. It's you and me in this together, remember? Just you and me, and we'll work it out." To prove my point, I stay with her on her bed, working her hair loose from its knot. See, Mom? See? Its okay I can make everything all right and smooth and I will even brush your hair and rub in some leave-in conditioner so it smells like apples like a clean schoolroom when you were whole you were you before all this and it was fine.
I clean up the bathroom, tossing out the mat, picking up the matches, dousing the whole house with air freshener. When I'm finally done, I check on Mom. I'd hoped she'd sleep it off, you know? Sleep and then wake up and maybe even think that the whole episode with the mermaids had been like some screwed-up dream. A bad nightmare, something she could just wake up from, sweatsoaked, moaning, "Glad that's over." But I really should know better by now.
No, after the mermaids, Mom becomes a curlicue. A real curlicue in the middle of her bed. She reminds me of those twirling ribbons I used to doodle down the margins back when I actually went to school. The blankets are piled at her feet, and she just lies there, as the hours slide past, refusing to even roll over.
I don't sleep at all that night-or even try. Instead, I sit in a chair by Mom's bed and watch her. When dawn breaks, all fuzzy and soft, I'm still there, staring at Mom's shoulder blades.
October 27, I scrawl late in the day, in one of the journals Dad gave me. Mom hasn't spoken in more than twentyfour hours.
I pour some Gatorade in a glass and drop a straw into it. "Mom," I say, raising her head from the pillow. "Mom, please."
She takes some-but two sips don't seem like enough. I want more-I want to make her do more. I want to put a turkey dinner, with dressing and green bean casserole, the works, into a blender until it's soup, and I want to pour it down her throat. But I can't, I have to play her game, because she'll buck me, like a horse at the rodeo. She'll throw me off, and then I'll never get back on again. She'll lock me out completely.
The whiskey bottles haunt me as I continue to plead with her. Two empties, one half-full, one never opened. You're so lucky, I remind myself. She didn't hurt herself-not yet, anyway. This time you could put out the
flames. Lucky. Do you even realize how lucky? Do you know the whole house could be a pile of ash if you hadn't come back? Lucky-one crisis averted. But not so fast, look at her here-so depressed, so sad. You still have a decision to make, you know. What are you going to do, Aura? This isn't something you can slam a lid on and walk away from, like you did with the Pilkingtons' bottles. You can't shrug and say it isn't any of your business. You've got to do something. Anything, Aura. Anything.
"I'm going to leave this Gatorade here on your nightstand, all right, Mom?" I say. "Right here where you can get to it." Because maybe, I think, after last night, me watching like a hawk, she needs to be alone.
She doesn't answer. Part of me wants to bite her, just to get some sound out of her. Mom, I feel like shouting, where the hell did you go this time?
"How about a little music, huh?" I ask as I head toward her stacks of records. "Something from the archives."
I toss aside a Simon & Garfunkel and a Joni Mitchell-too quiet, too soft, there's got to be something in here that will wake the dead, maybe Janis, maybe she will scream Mom right back to life.
I tear through the records too desperately in my search for Pearl. The stack teeters; as I race to keep the tower of vinyl from toppling, my hand brushes the sheet Mom's tacked to the wall. Old rusted nails from one of the coffee cans in the garage are pinning the white sheet in a tangled, wrinkled mess. The fabric's actually so crumpled and twisted it looks like a piece of paper somebody wadded into a ball, then tried to smooth out again.
"Is this-is this what you were talking about? What you covered up?" I croak, but she doesn't answer.
I have to look, the same way a doctor has to look at the long, bloody, slimy trail of intestines flopping out of a car accident victim, so that he can try to figure out how to go about putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
I slide my fingers underneath the side of the drawntight sheet, and tug. Put my foot against the wall for some leverage. Bite down on my lip and really heave. The material finally starts to rip, pulling free of the nails.
A wounded moan oozes out of my mouth when the sheet falls to the carpet. Mom's painted a mural. A whole mural, top to bottom, with shadows and light. She hasn't just left a hundred and thirteen works half-finished, undone, so that she can start yet another. She's finished a project. And now that I'm staring, I can't quit. It sucks me in, steals my breath, and refuses to give it back.
It's van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles. And then again, it's not. The pictures no longer want to fall from their hangers. The chair doesn't sink into the back wall. The corners are all at perfect right angles. The floor doesn't tilt at all. Everything is as it should be.
I can see her standing at the front of her classroom, telling her students, "That's not the assignment. Draw what you see, not what you think you see."
And it suddenly becomes so clear-the truth climbs up my arms, slides into my ears, and takes root in my brain. In the midst of her madness, Mom's tried to fix her life by painting exactly what she wishes it could be. Nothing out of focus, nothing off-kilter. Nothing off-balance. Nothing skewed. Perfect perspective. That's what she's put in her mural.
"Balance," I mumble. "You were drawing what you want to see."
But in the end, she can't paint a scene that will smooth out all her frightening highs and lows. She can't paint away her madness. Can't paint a scene that will finally make her normal. Whole. A scene that will make her turn back into herself.
That's what she wants, though-that's what she's asking me for. Her mural is a flare in the nighttime sky, a message in a bottle, a scream from the far shore. Mom wants me to help her. Wants me to rescue her.
I'm in the kitchen, suddenly, flipping through the phone book, the yellow pages, photography, and there it is: Zellers, in a half-page color ad. But before I even reach for the phone, I'm thinking about the time when I was twelve and Mom disappeared. The final-straw episode. The event that brought meds home. The event that, looking back, must have allowed Dad to start scouring the earth for a something-better woman. That led him to Brandi.
I could mark how long Mom had been gone by how many half-eaten ham sandwiches were piled on the kitchen table. How many flies danced over the mayonnaise-laden wheat bread. The flies, they didn't care that Mom was just an empty seat, a faint smell, a person who should be there but wasn't.
No, the flies didn't care, but I did-so much, I hardly had enough room in my body for all my fear. I had terror crammed inside me, shoved as tight as a bulky winter sweater in a vanity drawer meant only for a hairbrush. Even Dad, who'd already refused to rescue me on the soccer field, he couldn't sleep. Pretended he wasn't smoking again. Each night, he slapped together sandwiches for dinner and we tried to eat them, tried, but wound up only taking a bite out of the top corners and leaving the rest on our plastic plates.
We went through this frantic searching back then, like, say, you can't find a family heirloom-a ring, passed down from your mother and your mother's mother before that. And you're tearing the whole house up, tossing bedspreads back and running your hand along the carpet and draining the fish tank and even taking out all the chuck roasts from the freezer because you got food out of there yesterdayand who knows? It could have slipped off anywhere.
Dad called Mom's old yoga instructor and a friend who'd moved to Wales.
"She took money, Aura," Dad told me. "She could be anywhere. Anywhere in the whole world."
"Maybe we should call Nell," I said, reaching into the dustiest corners of my brain for an answer.
Dad glared at me like I'd suggested maybe we were better off without Mom. And then his face softened out, like he was reminding himself I was only twelve years old, and I really didn't know what I was saying.
"Anywhere in the world but there," Dad said. "Grace would never go to Nell's. And don't you dare call her, either, all right? If Nell knows your mother is gone, there's no telling what she'll try to do. Look, I know Grace never said this right out, but-Nell put someone away before, Aura. Grace's dad. We don't want that, do we? We don't want Mom to go away?"
I shook my head, my face quivering like some little baby's.
"All right," Dad sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. "It's okay-we'll figure it out, just-don't ever call your grandmother, all right? Don't ever call Nell."
We reported it to the police-missing persons. No, sir, no tattoos, no scars, just long black hair and an even longer, even darker history with schizophrenia. And still, then, Dad cared enough to want her back. Cared enough not to want her locked away.
It took two days (felt like centuries) for the call to finally come. Mom was in Colorado. It was the first plane ride I ever took.
"She said that she thought if she got up high enough, she could leave it all behind," a police officer told Dad when we rushed in and there she was, in the Denver police station, all wrapped up in a blanket. "She said she thought a mountain would do it."
"She said, she said," Mom snickered. It had been a shock to see her all hunched over. I'd never seen anyone look so defeated before. Because even then, I think, she knew meds were coming. How could she not know, the way the fear in Dad's face had instantly been replaced by fed up when they'd looked at each other?
I stare down at the phone book's yellow page entry, remembering how Dad had told me, even as he must have been sketching the blueprints for his escape plan, even as he was deciding he'd had his fill, Never call your grandmother.
I slam the phone book shut, dip my head into the fridge, grab the Gatorade. I carry it to Mom's room where I top up her already-full glass, replacing the two measly sips she's taken.
The Sylvia Plath effect refers to the phenomenon that creative writers are more susceptible to mental illness. Especially females who write poetry. I am such a goner.
ctober 28, I scrawl in one of Dad's journals. I fed Mom an orange and some chicken broth. It's the only highlight of the day.
I pace, I watch, I pet. The clock ticks.
I try to eat. I gag when food
hits my tongue.
October 29, I write. I think if I could justget some sleep, I could wake up with an answer. Id be able to figure this mess out. But sleep doesn't come-not for me, not during the day, or even in the dead of night. Sleep plays hide-and-seek with me. I hunt for it, rolling fitfully on the couch, or curl ing under a blanket in the chair by Mom's bed. I even try to crawl into bed with Mom, taking up Dad's old place, hoping that having another body so close to her-warm and breathing and real-will help her turn toward something solid and true.
But it doesn't. And lying next to Mom doesn't help me catch a single wink, either. Sleep is crafty-it's sneaky-and even as I call its name, it refuses to show its stupid face.
Somewhere close to midnight, after having paced through every room upstairs, I wander down into the basement. The whole place is just as cluttered and scattered as Mom's brain. I hate the junk we've hung onto-a bicycle with no wheels, canvases Mom's gessoed, half-used tubes of oil and acrylic paints, laundry baskets full of dirty clothes, even an open two-liter of flat Coke sitting on the bottom stair. But what's the point of cleaning up? It'd be like shoving a metaphorical Kleenex into the bullet hole that has become my life with Mom.
I kick at the dusty, stray branches of an artificial Christmas tree, finding an old journal beneath the plastic greenery. Little does Dad know, I don't usually fill the pages up with Mom's every waking mood (and the fact that I have been taking notes on Mom's condition lately shows just how deep my fear is starting to sink). No, for the most part, I sketch in the journals, and write poetry. Just like a junkie who will get high on anything-even glue.
I plop on the once-loved orange velour couch that's now sprouting stuffing, and open the journal to find Jeremy staring up at me from the first page. Last summer, I'd penciled in his gorgeous face, his beauty mark, the wind blowing his hair across one eye. Looking at the drawing, everything I wish I could tell him explodes through me. And even though it's honestly the last thing I want to do, I'm scrawling a poem right over his cheek ...
A Blue So Dark Page 13
