A Blue So Dark

by Holly Schindler

  "Shopping," I say, making the legs of my chair scream as they scrape across the linoleum.

  "Shopping," Janny repeats, shaking her head as she watches me grab my jacket, like I've just told her my dream in life is to fly solo to the moon.

  "I don't know about this," Janny says when we get back from Walmart. But I'm like a soldier, marching down the hall toward my room with all my purchases. I'm completely unstoppable.

  "Seriously," Janny insists as I start spreading new drop cloths over my bed and my dresser. "This has been here forever," she goes on, touching an enormous lady bug that scurries up a polka-dotted daisy petal. "What's your mom going to think when she comes home?"

  I pry open the lid of an eggshell-tinted flat paint and pull a roller out of a cellophane wrapper.

  "Don't you think this is sad?" Janny asks.

  No, I don't, I think. You try living here ten minutesthen tell me you think painting over this loony-as-a-bedbug garden is sad. I pour paint into a tray and wet the roller. It drips onto a drop cloth as I try to hand it to her.

  "Please don't," she says, so I turn around and start slapping on the paint myself.

  At first, it feels good. Not desperate, like I'd been when I'd painted over the mural in mom's bedroom. Just fresh, you know? Like taking a real bath after about three solid years of camping. But too soon, my arms ache. I've covered up about half of one wall when my eyes go all bleary.

  "I don't want to see her," I admit. "I can't help it. I wish I did, but I just don't. I mean, the way Nell looks when she comes home from trying to visit her-I don't think she's exactly having an easy time with the whole making-up routine, so why should l?"

  "Because you're her kid."

  I snort. "So what?"

  "So-you're strong, okay? I hope Ethan turns out to be half as strong as you."

  "Cut the crap," I tell her. "This isn't the corny part in the story when Mariah Carey starts singing `Hero' in the background. Mom has to think I'm so, so selfish-"

  "No way," Janny interrupts. "You're hers. It's different, the way you feel for your own kid. It's cheesy, but it's true. You understand what it's like, you know, to try to take care of another human being. Grace has got to know how hard it was for you to reach out to Nell. I mean, if Ethan ever did something like that for me, I'd be proud."

  My eyes turn into rain-drenched windows. "That's a dirty trick," I whisper.

  "Just get it over with already, Aura," Janny says. She puts Ethan on the floor and takes up another roller for herself. "I don't want to listen to you moan about it forever." She starts slapping paint on an opposite wall.

  I re-wet my own roller. For a while the only sound in the room is the slimy slap of wet paint on my walls. "Saturday," I finally say.

  From the corner of my eye, I see Danny's roller stop.

  "Next Saturday," I say. "I'll go."

  Consider having a friend who is less directly involved cone with you to the nuthouse. Four buddy can help you remain calm if you find you are on the brink of a breakdown yourself.

  esolutions-what a nice name for a loony bin-is housed in a brick building that sits at the end of a wide circle drive and is enveloped by enormous oak trees. By now, those trees have all lost their leaves. Their naked limbs look like skinny arms that join together in a circle. It's as if the oaks are holding their own seance, attempting to pull every last patient inside Resolutions back into reality. Hope they're more successful than I was.

  Danny yanks the parking brake. She's singing under her breath like all is roses. I could smack her for it, actually.

  I have on this fuzzy red sweater Mom always liked me in, but since it's wool, it feels like I'm drenched in the itching powder that WWII prisoners got tortured with. I've even put on some lipstick and perfume, but it's just so unlike me, it makes me feel a little like a mannequin.

  While Janny pulls Ethan from his car seat, I twist myself out of her p.o.s. The air feels like breath from a just-opened freezer. I instantly hate everything about this place.

  I grab my sloppy canvas bag from the backseat. It's lumpy from the trinket that I guess I've brought to bribe Mom. It seemed like a good idea yesterday. Now, I think maybe I ought to leave it out here.

  But I don't.

  Janny's pushing me forward, come on, come on, probably afraid I'll lose my guts. It's icy cold, but I'm sweating so much all the powder's melted off my face. I start to wish that I could be a puddle instead of a girl.

  "She'll hate me," I tell Janny. "She's got to hate me."

  "Shut up," Janny says. We're suddenly in the lobby and she's sitting in some awful plastic chair the color of rotten Brussels sprouts, jiggling Ethan on her knee. "We'll wait here. Go on."

  My feet are moving, I'm walking toward Mom's room, but I think, God, if you exist and you like me the teensiest little bit, you'll let me pass out so I won't have to endure this, her anger, her hate.

  I'm halfway down the hall when it occurs to me that Janny probably can't see me anymore from her chair in the lobby. I consider making a run for it. I start to think, What if I just bolt and am never heard from again? Why can't that be a happy ending? Why can't it? But instead of sprinting, I'm looking inside her room, and there she is. Grace Ambrose.

  And she is very much alive.

  She's inside her room, painting. Not furiously, not like some crazed maniac. More like she used to, at the easel in front of her classroom. I just stand there watching, nerves prickling all over my skin.

  "Hey," Mom says when she looks up. She rushes to me and gives me this hug-it's like she's juiced me or something, because tears instantly spring to my eyes. She's put some weight on, and she smells clean and young-God, she smells like the sun, you know? Like summer, even though Thanksgiving's already come and gone.

  "Come here," she says. "I want to show you what I've been working on."

  She drags me across the room. The familiar face that stares back at me from the canvas has Mom's long black hair. But it isn't Mom, not quite.

  "It's me," I say. I chuckle. "It's me."

  "I missed you," Mom says, wrapping her arms around my neck and kissing the back of my head. "If I can't have you in the flesh every day, I can at least have the next best thing."

  It blows my mind-missed me? She's not pissed? How can this be?

  "I missed your birthday, didn't I?" Mom says apologetically, her eyes glistening. And I can't believe it; I'm struck dumb, because she's acting like we're old friends. Some ties truly are like steel.

  But I don't want her to be sad, so I'm opening my canvas bag and reaching inside. And I pull out one of our mermaids that I've rescued from the trunk of the Tempo. Clean and dust-free, with a fresh coat of glitter on the tail.

  Mom attempts a smile, but it breaks. "You fixed it," she says, as she fights her tears.

  "A little slice of home." I shrug. "Just until you get back. But we have to hang it properly."

  "Of course," she says, playing along.

  We climb onto her bed to hang the mermaid from the ceiling. As we bring our arms down, we stand staring at each other eye to eye.

  "Thanks, Aura," she says.

  For the first time in what seems like eons, my body doesn't feel so clenched, so hot. And suddenly, I realize that the dot out there on my horizon line-the same dot everything in my world points to, like in the one-point perspective sketches Mom taught me how to draw-it's not any old spot, you know. It's not some charcoal smudge. It's peace.

  Schizophrenia is a disease that is greatly feared and not well understood. Most of what people think they know about schizophrenia is wrong.

  e're in family therapy, which means we're preparing for Mom to come home. It also means that our family is a single living organism. It means the "patient" isn't my mom, but the entire brood. It means we are regularly visiting a shrink who refuses to take sides, even though Mom wants him to. It means we invite my dad to join us, and he refuses-big surprise. And, it means we are all learning to communicate, which seems pretty ridiculous to me. />
  We're also drawing a genogram. It's a fancy word for a family tree. Actually, it's a family tree that doesn't just include birth and death dates, but all the horrible, embarrassing crap that you'd rather not ever write down at allillnesses and divorces and resentments and breakups.

  Yeah, family tree family in this case meaning me, Mom, and Nell, though Mom's still not jazzed about the Nell part. Whenever the subject of her dad comes up, Mom practically goes into hysterics.

  "You don't get to make up for what happened to him. You can't make up for that by being nice to me now," Mom screams.

  "I don't want to," Nell tries to tell her. But Mom is so furious, I don't know why her rage hasn't swallowed her whole.

  Family tree-when our therapist asks for the name of my father, I say, "There isn't one. Hasn't that gotten through to you by now?" But he makes me write it down anyway, which shows me how little the guy really understands.

  After a particularly brutal session, our therapist (who smells like a weird combination of licorice and chicken lo mein, go figure) pulls me aside and says, "Your grandmother tells me you're hesitant to sign up for art class."

  I already feel like a nail that's been hammered at from all sides. And I'm thinking, Now? You want me to talk about this now? So I get kind of snotty and I say, "You want me to put that on our genogram, too?"

  He sighs and looks at me like I'm some mean-ass personal trainer that's wearing him out with wind sprints. "Look," he says. "You're a smart girl. I'm not going to patronize you. It's true-there are some ongoing studies that are examining the link between creativity and schizophrenia. But creativity in itself is not a cause of schizophrenia. A by-product, maybe-a positive side effect, perhaps, but you show no signs ... Art class won't hurt you, Aura. I promise."

  "Great. Got it," I say, but he grabs my arm.

  "You don't seem convinced," he says, raising an eyebrow.

  I just stare back. "Have you even looked at our genogram?" I ask him. "An artist and a writer, okay? Two stupid branches right above me. What am I supposed to think?" I turn away so that he can't see the tears that are coming, like two shiny babies insisting on being born.

  He cocks his head. "Renoir, Annie Leibovitz, Raphael, Isadora Duncan, Steinbeck, Paul Newman, John Lennon, Toni Morrison-"

  "What is this?" I interrupt.

  "Artists, every single one. A bit rebellious and wild, some of them, but none with any kind of mental illness that I'm aware of. Shall I go on? Let's see," he says, rolling his eyes toward his widow's peak. "Clint Eastwood, Tony Bennett, Les Paul, Pearl Buck-"

  "Are you making fun of me?" I snap.

  "No," he shrugs. "The point is, Aura, the list of sane artists far outnumbers the list of unstable ones. I can tell you in all honesty there is no link between mental illness and the actual process of creating. Okay? None. I realize you have some concerns-rightly so-based on your family history. But art class will not hurt you, Aura."

  I really don't know what to do-I guess I'm a little like a bird who's railed against her cage her whole life, only to cock her head to the side in confusion when somebody finally opens the door.

  I hurry to catch up with Nell, who's always so emotional after our sessions, I figure she'd probably drive off without me.

  At home, Nell's shining everything up-dusting and scrubbing and rearranging. She hangs some of Mom's finished paintings. She vacuums, she spit polishes. She buys new mirrors for the front hall and the bathroom.

  She goes everywhere but Mom's room.

  It looks exactly like it did the night the paramedics came, door closed so neither one of us has to address it.

  Sometimes, though, avoiding something becomes more work than actually looking at it. So I finally turn the knob and step inside. I pick up all her scattered brushes, take down the paint-spattered curtains. Tear off her pillowcases, tuck the corners of fresh sheets beneath the mattress, and pull her covers up all tight and neat. Dust and vacuum; pick up all the crystals I'd used during my seance.

  When I'm done, there's still the problem of Mom's mural. It continues to glow through the single coat of white paint I'd slopped up there in my lame attempt to just make it all go away. Mom had used so many of van Gogh's yellows that her wall now looks like a lamp with a filmy scarf thrown over it. I sigh, staring at it until my eyes start to feel foreign and sticky in my own head.

  Art won't hurt you. Our therapist's words echo, like a voice in a shower stall. I mean, even the crappiest voice sounds good in a shower, you know? And right then, those words actually start to resonate in a melodic way. Art won't hurt you. I like the way that sounds.

  Nell shows her work at December's First Friday Art Walk. I show up, too, wearing another Nell ensemble-the woman likes to shop for me, and who am I to discourage that? Tonight, it's an A-line dress, a funky orange number, which is retro enough to actually fit in with the self-portraits Nell took of herself back (as one might say) in the day. She's even loaned me a few of the political buttons that had filtered down to the bottom of her jewelry box, the way raisins work their way down toward the bottom of the cereal box as it's being shipped from the warehouse to the grocery store.

  It's a pretty stuffy affair, frankly, with a bunch of snoots (mostly from the university) toting wine glasses around and staring at Nell's life like it's just an object. Just some two-dimensional images. I feel like twisting my hair into a bun, sauntering up to them, and telling them to get their pseudo-intellectual asses out of my grandmother's studio. Take their judgmental attitudes somewhere else, because this is my life, too, that they're looking at, not just Nell's, because we're all so tangled, the three of us. Me and Nell and Mom.

  And suddenly, I know exactly what to do with Mom's bedroom wall.

  When Nell and I finally get back to the house, I crack open a small can of green-can't rely on little tubes of acrylic and oil, because what I want to do is far too big. My arms feel wobbly as I dip a brush inside the can, and my heart beats so hard, it hurts. I press the brush against the wall. Am I really going to do this?

  " Art won't hurt you," I tell myself.

  I lick my dry lips and put a shaky hand against the wall, make a long sweeping horizontal line. It looks so pitiful up there, but I hear Mom's voice: Don't get frustrated at your first line on the page-of course that first line doesn't look like anything. It won't until you shade it in and get the shadows right.

  I open a can of blue, dip my brush, mix, stroke. My hand starts to even out, like I've been miraculously cured of Parkinson's. My strokes grow quicker, more sure. I mix, I blob, I use my fingertips when the brush just isn't doing what I want it to.

  I grab one of Mom's charcoals to help me sketch the faces. I've got some of Nell's photographs to help me with this part. As I draw, I keep my eye on the self-portraits Nell snapped three decades ago, and the images she captured of my mother when Mom was about my age.

  I draw their young faces, and mine, too, using a mirror, remembering other lessons Mom taught me, about how far apart the eyes are, and how to put shadows around noses, and then I'm painting again, long hair, arms, three chests, but one tail-one long shimmering green mermaid tail. Because we are all three different, but so much the same. We all come from the same skin, the same history.

  It's been so long-a whole century, it feels like-since I've lost myself in a painting. A real painting and not some sketch thrown down in a journal, only to be tossed under my bed in embarrassment. I mean, all I've done is pick up a paintbrush, but what I feel is that I've been away so long, a weary traveler, stranger in a strange land, and here I am, I've just pulled my car into the drive, and I'm running up the front walk, and I can barely even calm down enough to get my key in the front door, because I've made it.

  I'm home.

  Having a support system is essential for the survival of a fruitloop.

  he thing about elliptical trainers and birds and shoes and big red jasper necklaces is that they go out as easily as they come in. We pack up all Nell's stuff the day before we're
supposed to go pick Mom up from Resolutions. Seems stupid now to have brought so much for what feels like such a short stay. I figure she's the kind of woman who packs fourteen trunks of junk just to go out of town for the weekend. We cart it all back to Nell's house-everything but the trainer and Cockamamie, who Nell stares at sadly that last night as she drinks a rather large vodka tonic.

  I think I could maybe make some crack about not wanting to have to start taking care of her, too, or about how I sure hope she didn't catch alcoholism from staying next door to the Pilkingtons. But Nell doesn't look like she'd find much humor in anything tonight-and besides, that's really not so funny, anyway.

  I ought to join her at the table, but I wind up lingering in the doorway, fidgeting like some cafeteria nerd who can't get up enough guts to ask a table of kids if it's okay to sit down.

  "Her meds are working," I blubber. "There's no reason for her to be at Resolutions anymore."

  Nell nods and runs her fingers through her stark white hair. She looks really old, like she's suddenly feeling as though her life is an anchor.

  "Did you sign up for that art class yet?" Nell asks.

  I shrug.

  Nell ages another forty years in that moment. She sighs over her ice cubes as she slurps down the rest of her drink.

  When we finally do pick Mom up, she lets Nell carry her suitcase. I carry the mermaid, the fishing line hanger twisted around my index finger. We put it all in the trunk of Nell's Toyota and pile in like we're getting on a bus. Like we've never seen each other before; we're all a bunch of kids headed out to our very first summer camp and we're terrified and want to seem tough but also don't want to accidentally bump anyone, because we just might get killed.

  We don't say anything on the drive home. I stare at the dead brown grass along the edge of the street.

  Mom wants to unpack on her own, so I help Nell with her crazy elliptical trainer. I buckle Cockamamie's cage into the passenger's seat of the Toyota, and turn to find Nell giving me this funny stare. "You want me to come with you?" I ask. "Help you unload it at your house?"