If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir

by Nelson, Jessica Hendry

  It is August 2010, and this is Delray Beach, Florida, a place inundated with recovery homes and so-called pain clinics, “pill mills” manned by crooked doctors profiting from an epidemic of pain-killer addiction. Together, the homes and the clinics are a self-sustaining economy, trading the addicts back and forth like playing cards. Of course, this is all on the periphery, away from the bustling downtown and its many moneyed tourists. My mother and I are visiting Eric, who has been in a recovery home here for the past nine months, or so we had thought.

  The whole place seems tuned to a higher decibel than up north. I feel accosted by the neon colors and blaring trumpet solos, frenetic sound bites from a nearby highway. Even the foliage seems offensive. The leaves are as big as platters and so bright I have to squint to differentiate one from another. This giant palm just might, any second now, slap me in the face. I hear a faint sizzle as I dip my head in and out of the water. A circle of light has caught a chameleon capering around a drainpipe. Curtains wave and then draw open on the third floor.

  This is not the first time I have gotten sick in anticipation of seeing my brother. I have a friend who calls me unbalanced, always with an apologetic grin. I do not argue—unless, of course, I have not been taking my Lexapro. Then I argue a lot. As a family, we have a habit of seeking each other out at just the wrong time, when one of us or all of us are about to go over the deep end. My mother, my brother, and me. This reminds me of the way my extended family tends to gather only for funerals. We do a lot of sitting around and eating. Storing up, I suppose, for what will seem a long winter’s chill.

  A yellow beetle floats past my cheek before getting tangled in my hair. I watch sidelong with one eye shut as the beetle does a frantic doggy paddle. I imagine myself in the ocean caught in a bed of cloying, endless black kelp, choking and sputtering, a monstrous pale hand suddenly wrenching me free, tossing me across millions of miles of space into a different hemisphere, a different planet, then a second of shimmering exultation before the break.

  “I hid my Ativan in the curtains,” my mother says, chewing. “You think he’ll find it there?”

  “Absolutely,” I say. I float over to the steps and open my mouth, hoping she’ll stick that bagel inside.

  She does.

  Though we didn’t know it until we arrived in Florida, Eric was kicked out of the recovery home six months ago after relapsing on OxyContin. The cops searched his car outside of a 7-Eleven after a friend was caught trying to swipe a seven-dollar bottle of sparkling rosé. Since then, he’s been living with his girlfriend, Adrienne, in her college dorm room, where they like nothing better than to huddle together on the bottom bunk, tie each other off, and shoot bumps of liquefied Oxy into their skinny arms, those bubblegum-blue veins.

  In other words, our trip was planned as a happy reunion, a celebration of nine months of sobriety, which is partially what I mean when I say we are tragically, cosmically, bound.

  But I can’t help imagining this small, pretty girl laying her head on my brother’s birdy chest as he smacks her forearm and fingers a vein, grinning like a schmuck as he loads the needle. He is twenty-three and she is twenty. They have dark hair and gangly legs and heavy eyebrows. Seeing them together, you would think they were siblings. They both walk a bit bowlegged and laugh in the same reckless way, heads tossed to the sky. They sometimes speak in tongues, it seems, and communicate with small, almost indecipherable, gestures.

  On our first night in Florida, before we knew he’d been kicked out of the recovery home, my mother and I picked them up from a corner store and took them to an Italian restaurant where Eric had recently worked and been quickly fired. Watching them across the table, I felt a moment of jealousy, such was their intimacy. In comparison, Nick and I look like the couple in the painting American Gothic, while Eric and Adrienne are Bonnie and Clyde. I mourned the days when my brother and I were in cahoots, sneaking joints on the back porch as teenagers, and earlier still, conspiring to get out of trouble. Eric can talk his way out of anything, but I anticipate my mother’s needs like no one else. Coffee? I’d offer at dawn every Christmas morning. There is a picture of me as proof: three years old, wearing a blue beaded bikini, and lighting my mother’s cigarette.

  There was a time, when we were teenagers, when our favorite topic of conversation was how we could, if need be, get away with murder. I remember it involved shaving ourselves head to toe and a lot of scattering of parts.

  “Hey! Remember how we’d kill people?” I blurted out at the Italian restaurant. “I mean, how we could, you know, if we ever had to, like, get away with it?” My brother looked at me, confused, his hand shaking as he put down his forkful of spaghetti. Eric’s girl didn’t seem to hear, but kept shoveling lasagna past her plump lips, color slowly filling her cheeks. Our mother laughed too loud.

  “Oh, God,” she groaned.

  “I guess so,” Eric said, and I was, for a second, embarrassed and a little pissed off. It made me think of the family of stray cats near my home in Connecticut, where Nick and I moved after graduate school. They are each orange-and-black striped, with nubby, deformed tails like rudders that shake quickly back and forth when they dart across my back porch chasing squirrels. One of the cats, the runt I call Shitpoke, watches me through the glass door on the porch and takes off if I look up from my coffee, which I try not to do, preferring our feigned disinterest. I don’t have many admirers after all.

  Eric’s dismissal made me feel like one of the squirrels then—run down by some underweight mutant cat with half a tail, one dismembered paw tossed next to the cellar door.

  I chew the bagel, wishing I were the type to lose my appetite with sickness. I am not. “Eating, again?” my mother likes to say. When Eric called me from a pay phone the morning of our flight to Florida, I knew from his voice that he was using again, which was not part of my plan. I shoveled down two bowls of half-frozen beef stew before collapsing back into bed.

  When I had made the drive from Connecticut down to my mother’s house in Philadelphia I had been hopeful. Against my better judgment, I thought he was clean. To celebrate, my mother and I got drunk on ten-dollar bottles of wine and I woke up with a fever. That’s when Eric called.

  We are an imperfect people, full of contradictions. Do as I say, not as I do—that sort of thing. Outsiders see me as the most put together, but I harbor a secret: I am just better at faking it. I make it through the day.

  Still, we sit and wait and wait. We are in a duel and this is a standstill. Or, we are in a play and rehearsing the same scene for the gazillionth time.

  Mother and sister wait outside anxiously while son/brother gets high in tacky Florida motel room/mother’s unfinished attic/dimly lit McDonald’s bathroom/snow-heavy parked car/bowling alley urinal/New York City diner/empty New Jersey lifeguard station/suburban basement/family friend’s gold-trimmed bathroom/bathroom/bathroom/bathroom/small black space of empty and release.

  Cut.

  Take gazillion and one.

  This time with a little less weepy-weepy, please. A little less improvisation. A little less lip. A little more faith. A little more higher power. A little more prayer, a little less wine. Cut the crap. Cut the line. Tuck the chin. Look left, right, faster, slower. Pick seven dandelions on the first day of spring. Hate less or more. Work harder. Chew slower. Be better. Look to god, God, GOD. Watch your language. Watch your back. Collect rocks. Lick ’em clean. Count the pigeons in the backyard and multiply times forever. Give it up, let it go, take it back, take control. Say yes. Say no. Say no, no, no. Stick to the script. Steps One through Twelve. One through Twelve. Keep coming back. It works if you work it.

  If only you people could follow directions.

  When Eric was an infant we rode in my father’s pickup truck to an emergency room near Sacramento. He had a fever so high he left red blooms on my mother’s thighs where she held him down. I sat between my parents picking at my scratchy big-girl underwear. Eric raged until he went limp, his fat little legs kicking b
ack the tule fog that swallowed the night. My mother was twenty-six. My father was a drunk. I didn’t know enough to be afraid, but I remember that dense gray fog reflecting back the dimmed headlights. We made it to the hospital and my father and I left them there for three days. My brother’s feet swelled up like little blue loaves of sourdough. The nurse who had improperly inserted his PICC line refused to remove it. “You do it,” she told my mother, and left. When my mother refused to quit sobbing another nurse came in, fixed the PICC line, and deposited two yellow pills onto the table.

  “I can’t give you anything to calm you down,” she said, “but I can leave it here.”

  Our mother used to say that Eric entered the world screaming and didn’t stop for an entire year. When I was three, that’s all he was to me: a bundle of torrential sound.

  When he finally went quiet, I could look at him for hours. Then I knew—I loved him best of all.

  Still wet from the pool, I crawl under the polyester blanket and wait for Eric to get out of the bathroom. The sun torches the tiny room and laughs—the Ubiquitous Chuckler, the Convivial Scorcher. Your name in lights! The scratch of the fibers against my burning legs is both the best and worst sensation, like picking a scab, like snorting a pill.

  “Man, my poop is magic,” Eric says, coming into the bedroom and wiping his face with a towel. “It never smells!” Instantly, I see through the line and he sees that I see it, see the whole scene played out like the seventh deadly sin, because I am either destroyed or relieved to have my suspicions confirmed. If he is still getting high, I can still be the good and grieving sibling. Even (dare I say it?) the “favored” child, the dutiful one, the angel to his devil, graced by the glory of genetics, that dark and taciturn wellspring of mysterious fortune, mightier than any god I know. If I keep playing my role, does he have any choice but to keep playing his?

  Line?

  “You’ve been in that bathroom for twenty minutes. You’re telling me it doesn’t smell like shit?”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  WHEN ERIC WAS four, he fell backward down a flight of stairs inside our grandparents’ house and cracked his head open on a giant ceramic monkey with black marbles for eyes. I watched as he fell, curious. I was six. His mouth was a big red O that chewed my heart out. He didn’t make a sound. There was a lot of blood, but the monkey didn’t flinch. After everyone left for the hospital, I tried to crack the monkey’s head with my shoe. Bad monkey. Eric got stitches and let me trace them lightly with my finger. I remember being amazed that a head could be held together with just some black thread. Also, I remember that phrase, cracked his head open, which the grown-ups repeated, and which seemed both more and less than what really happened. Sharper than a blow, say, or a thump. Something razor-edged and irreparable. Cracks are small and insidious, the start of some unforeseen disaster, like the fissures in the earth’s surface from which volcanoes erupt, craggy and molten. Or even the sidewalk in front of the ShopRite, now upended, churned through with dirt and dry, dead earthworms and rotten tree roots, something to be avoided, circumvented, dangerous. Having been weakened by that first split in his soft skull, it was as if the whole rickety job could come undone at any moment. Still, I loved that phrase and turned it over and over. Cracked his head open. I’d once thought that only eggs could be cracked open, and I both thrilled and shuddered at the image of brains, like yolk, oozing out over the floor.

  Later that night, my mother and Eric go out to dinner. I stay behind. The fever that started at my mother’s house in Philadelphia is swelling behind my eyes, banging on the door. Shark Week is on the Discovery Channel, my favorite, except watching Shark Week in Florida feels a bit like watching The Biggest Loser while gorging on cheeseburgers. Still, the slow switching glide of these silver beasts calms me down. A gray reef shark noses at a clump of coral off the coast of Easter Island. He can’t stop moving or he’ll drown, the oxygen drawn from the water by thousands of leaflike lamellae in the gills, tiny blood vessels that swell with oxygen as the water passes through. In my real life, the one outside the theater of my brother’s addiction, I can’t stop moving either: New Hampshire, North Carolina, New York, Connecticut, summers stomping through the Scottish Highlands alone, a pair of blisters belly-up along my heels. I let one of my mother’s Ativan dissolve beneath my tongue and hope for sleep. The shark makes a quick dart to the left and then dives headlong into the body of the shadow, propelled by the infinitesimal pulse of an electrical charge that can be, the narrator tells us, as faint as a human heart.

  Three years ago, Eric pulled into my mother’s driveway in her car. It was three o’clock in the morning and the car was destroyed, the roof folded in on itself like a paper airplane, the windshield and sunroof shattered, snow collecting in the leather seats. He got out and stood in the light of the driveway. Our mother squinted from the porch, her old blue robe wrapped tightly, her arms crossed. As he stumbled toward the door, iridescent glass shards rained from his shoulders onto the blacktop. Blood bubbled from a gash in his forehead. He closed his eyes against the blaze of light from the kitchen window, dropped our mother’s keys into her hand, and walked into the house.

  My mother called me. It was four o’clock in the morning and I was asleep in my apartment in New York. I heard her dogs barking and my brother screaming in the background. I heard her breathing into the phone. I heard my windowpanes shift to adjust to the rising temperature. I heard the clacking of pipes in the walls and the nearly inaudible click of the earth returning to orbit.

  “You fucking cunt!” he yelled. “You fucking self-righteous bitch! This is your fault!” He was out of his head, cracked open, scraped clean. My mother’s voice was calm and even and stern. By then, this sort of thing was almost routine.

  “I think,” she said to me slowly, “I need you to come home. I can’t do this one alone.”

  She gave me the damage report: one stolen credit card, two missing bottles of Ativan (hers and her sister’s), a bottle of pain-killers swiped from my grandmother’s house, and $200 taken from my grandmother’s nightstand. In his pockets, one forged check, two remaining pain-killers, a tiny contraption for grating pills into a fine powder, and one emptied, hollow pen. And of course the stolen car, the keys taken from my mother’s purse in the middle of the night. I heard him bellowing wildly from somewhere and my mother hung up the phone.

  I drove home. The cold yellow sun spread beyond the city skyline. I drank a thermos of stale coffee. I’d tossed a couple of sweatshirts and a toothbrush onto the back seat, an afterthought. Despite the distance I’d put between myself and my brother, I woke every morning with the fear that this was his last day on earth. The phone call was confirmation that my dread was not unfounded, was maybe even necessary. My dread, I’d thought foolishly, could be a force much stronger than his will. I’d never considered his dread, what power that might hold.

  By the time I pulled into my mother’s driveway I’d forgotten how I got there. Suddenly I was in her living room drinking coffee. The police were gone. After the accident, miraculously, Eric had only damaged his hand with all the wailing and flinging of his body against walls, the punched holes in his closet door, and the lines of Percocet snorted off an old Fleetwood Mac CD case. He slept and his women drank coffee, called insurance companies, and made plans for the next rehab. He slept and we waited. He slept and we watched.

  The fever will soon break, I can tell. I am slick and swollen as a jellyfish, the one Eric sliced open as a kid on the beach with his brand-new Swiss Army knife, tearing through his finger in the process. I saw it happen, all that young blood spilling onto the cool sand. He ran back to our mother, who was sitting in her chair with a book, smoking peacefully. She was the color of cinnamon then, her chest still the palest pink from the blood vessels rupturing there, in slow motion and over time, like exploding stars. As she ages, her chest will turn deep red, a road map of every soothing cigarette. Eric’s reaction to his misadventure with the jellyfish was quick, impulsive,
and childlike. He buried his knife in the sand and cried out, “The jellyfish bit me! The jellyfish bit me!” My mother sighed and put out her cigarette in the sand and kissed his bleeding pinky. All of that was fine, normal, healthy then. But over the years, Eric’s default response to his own behavior remains the same. It wasn’t my fault! And the lies, so many lies—he believes his own bullshit. Really believes it. That’s the disease talking, they say, and I try to believe that, too.

  For years I believed, but all I see, finally, is my brother’s hard familiar face and the illness that my mother continues to try and kiss away with love and money and blunt maternal strength until she, we, are all as sick as Eric—the dead father’s legacy, this disease. For a while, I’d felt responsible for Eric’s addiction because I handed him pot for the first time, but I realized it would have happened anyway. My brother was born with a homing device for drugs. Self-medicating is only one symptom of his bipolar disorder. There’s an old joke in AA: The difference between an alcoholic and a drug addict is that an alcoholic will steal your wallet, while the drug addict will steal your wallet and help you look for it later. In this way, the lies become the truth. They are his truth, the facts having crumbled to ash.

  In Florida, it is morning and the three of us are weary. We must walk. We walk and hold hands on the beach. We look like the album cover for a family folk band. We meet a guy named Jeff. He lives “where the wind blows him, man.” Says, “Woah, what’s wrong with you, man?” I tell him I am sick. Jeff has a ponytail and bums a cigarette. We watch the ocean and smoke. We don’t talk. Eric puts a towel over my shoulders. I think of the footage of a tsunami I watched recently. It was difficult not to sense some malevolent deity here, rising up and mouth agape, ready to swallow us for our sins.