by Jenna Blum
And his hands. His poor hands. The second Sunday after Charles’s diagnosis, the Hallingdahls were out again with the Budges, this time at the church supper up in Little Springs, where Frank and Mr. Budge had recently won a water rights case. They were celebrating. They were showing that everything was fine. They were sitting in the basement of the Little Springs Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, at a big round table with the Budges and a quartet of farmers and their wives, and everyone was discussing the case except Karena, who was watching in horror as her brother, his barbed-wire scratches from the Starlite incident still fading on his neck and face, tried to eat his sloppy joe. He bent over his paper plate, gripping the bun in his shaking hands. Meat scattered out of it, onto the table, his lap, the floor. Conversation slowed, then ceased. Carefully Charles set down the sloppy joe and attempted some potato salad. Potatoes pattered off the fork in gluey lumps. Frank cleared his throat and smiled around at everyone. Excuse me, he said. Then he tucked his napkin into his collar and moved over to feed Charles some hamburger.
It took about twenty-four hours for the story to spread through town, that Charles Hallingdahl had gotten hold of some weird drug, like bad coke maybe, that made his hands shake so he had to be fed by his own dad like a baby or a retard. Behind the scenes the medications were quickly adjusted. Yet for every change Dr. H made to the cocktail, there was some new and horrible trade-off. Charles’s hands stabilized, but he developed a stutter. When he could speak clearly again, a rash appeared. There were night sweats, nightmares, hiccups, pustules, humiliations of such endless creativity and caliber that even Dr. H finally admitted, It seems Charles is unusually sensitive to medication. They returned him to the lowest possible dosage of lithium, but of course by then Charles didn’t want to take it. Karena doesn’t blame him. It is so unfair, she thinks, that her brother should have to pay this high a price for something that’s not his fault to begin with. Yes, Charles is a genius, and he loves his manias. But Charles’s disorder is the gift nobody wants to get given. There is no cure for it, no solution. Either Charles takes his medication and suffers, or he doesn’t and everyone else does. It is colossally, sickeningly, definitively unfair.
When Karena reaches the house it is empty and quiet, the humidity trapping and amplifying the family’s smells: the tuna hot dish Siri made last night that nobody wanted, her cigarette smoke, musty carpet. The light is sad and green, that patient watery light that precedes a rain. Karena runs down to Charles’s lair. Where is it? Where is the storm ledger? She spies it on Charles’s card table and grabs it. The lair is a bad place to be without Charles, a dead battery. Even the lightning lamps are quiet. Karena tucks the journal into her jeans jacket and thunders up the stairs.
She drives back to Black Wing just as quickly, but once she’s in the lot she sits in the Jeep and smokes her last cigarette. The nicotine makes her a little nauseous, and Karena realizes she’s had nothing to eat today, she was too nervous at breakfast. It is past three o’clock now, and the day has brightened a bit, the sun not strong enough to come out but making the sky a blinding white. Karena smokes and looks at the asylum, a tall old redbrick building on a vast green lawn. She tries to pick out her brother’s window. She fails. She finishes the cigarette, butts it, gets out. Sticky condensation dots her hair and skin from the trees.
She takes Charles’s storm ledger out of her inner pocket and grips it in both hands. Looks resolutely at the asylum. Time to go in.
But she can’t.
She does try. She really does. She tells herself, Just do it now. She tells herself, You promised. Stop being a baby. She tells herself, You have to. It’s Charles, Charles in there. Charles. Her brother. Waiting.
But Karena can’t go in.
She doesn’t know how long she stands in the parking lot, clutching the ledger, finally not even arguing with herself anymore but just staring at the asylum. Long enough for the ledger’s cover to grow damp and imprint some of its marbled pattern on her hands. Then a crow caws, and a droplet falls on Karena’s head from somewhere, and she gets moving.
She returns to the Jeep. Scrabbles in the glove compartment among the flashlights and napkins and packets of old orange crackers for a pen. She sets the ledger on the hood of the Jeep and tears a page from the back of it. Scribbles on it—her normally neat handwriting jumping all over the place—Property of Charles Hallingdahl, Rm 327. Please make sure he gets this!!!!
Using one of the bobby pins she also finds in the glove box, Karena secures this note to the front of the ledger. She darts up the asylum’s stone steps and starts to push open the door, but she can’t. She is such a fucking coward she can’t even do that much. Instead she sets the ledger on the top step beneath the overhang, propping it against a sad-eyed stone lion. Halfway down the steps she pauses, rips off her jacket, and jogs back up to wrap the ledger in it. She doesn’t want it to get wet. Hands shaking, throat dry, heart pounding in it, Karena again gives the ledger to the lion, tucking the bundle beneath the animal’s stone mane. Says, “Take good care of it.” Takes one last look at it. Then runs.
40
A month later, the day before she leaves for the U, Karena goes for one last drive with Tiff. Why not? She’s got time. She’s all packed, her room stripped of personal items, her suitcase and duffel sitting at the foot of her bed. And everyone’s getting together on French Island for one last bash. Mike Schwartz and his crew will be there, Tiff says, and Benji R. and Weez and Jeff Wisneski, but Karena doesn’t care. She’s going only for Tiff. She can’t believe she ever cared about these people, the guys her brother called the trogs, the troglodytes, that Karena thought what they did mattered, about a hundred years ago.
It is a gorgeous afternoon, as clear as a stained-glass window, all blues and greens and golds. Two nights ago a big wind came and blasted away all the humidity, leaving what feels like fall weather in its wake. The sun already has that September slant to it, a bright white glare like an unshaded bulb, although only a few leaves have started to turn. Karena and Tiff are in Tiff’s dad’s F-150, Tiff driving. They are on the Foss Line Road, which connects New Heidelburg to the Mississippi, corkscrewing down twenty-three hairpin turns through the bluffs. Usually Tiff—and Karena too—likes to whip around the bends as sharply as she can, so they can feel the drop in their stomachs and make themselves scream. But today, out of respect for this crossroads in their destinies, soberly conscious this is their last afternoon together, Tiff glides the big truck down the switchbacks as carefully as a grandma.
Tiff is nervous too, smoking and talking nonstop. She is flying out to Harvard the day after Karena leaves, and she has already repacked her trunk fourteen times. “. . . so I don’t know,” she is saying, “what do you think, the Keds or the Converse? The high-tops might be too, I don’t know, funky, or like I’m trying too hard. But I don’t want them to think I’m just some hick, you know?”
Karena gazes at a herd of cows standing in a muddy creek. They’ve reached Looney Valley, the bottomlands sandwiched between the Foss Line Road and the Mississippi bluffs to the east. Karena doesn’t like this part. She feels hemmed in, and the farms down here look cramped to her. This is maybe what the land looks like in the part of the country Tiff is going to: western Massachusetts, Vermont. Frankly, Karena doesn’t envy her. All those old folded mountains and sooty cities and snotty Eastern girls.
But she says, “Anh, don’t worry. It’s just Boston. It’s not like you’re going to New York City or anything.”
“True!” Tiff says, brightening. “Very true.” She flicks her Virginia Slim out the window—Karena wishes Tiff hadn’t switched to those, everyone knows they make your lungs bleed—and immediately lights another, her rhinestone bangles jangling.
“Besides,” says Karena, “you’ll still be getting your allowance, right? Why don’t you wait until you get there, then buy what everyone else is wearing?”
“Oh . . . my . . . God,” says Tiff. “Why didn’t I think of that? My brain is a total sieve. What’m I
going to do without you, Kay? I don’t know. I really don’t.”
Karena smiles. They turn north on the River Road and now she can breathe more easily. The big limestone cliffs still tower over the truck on their left, covered with brush and honeycombed with rattler dens. But the sky opens up over the Mississippi on their right. The river is a mile wide here, flowing around islands big enough to live on, until it laps up against Wisconsin on the other side.
Karena glances up the road toward Crescent City, then looks out at the water instead, at its barges and inlets. If they kept going north on the River Road, past Crescent City, they would reach Black Wing. But today she is not going that far.
Suddenly there’s a hornetlike buzzing—ffzzzzmmm, fzzzzzmmm!—and a swarm of motorcycles passes them on both sides. Probably headed up to the ice cream parlor in Alma that for some reason is a popular hangout for bikers. Karena cuts her eyes at the motorcycles as they pass. She waits to be overtaken by the shakes, like the strange cold fit she had yesterday. She was at home then, no cycles in the vicinity—she wasn’t even outside, just in the bathroom packing her extra shampoo and crimper in her bag. But then Siri slammed a cupboard in the kitchen or dropped a cookbook maybe. Either way there was a bang! and Karena had to sit down on the floor, right on the pink shag rug, she was shaking so badly.
Nothing like that happens now, though. Just a light ripple of goose bumps, as if Karena’s skin had been touched by a breeze that is not gone. Karena can’t say she’s surprised. She has discovered something over the last month, since leaving her brother in Black Wing: Time will fold over the past if you let it. Sure, they are still there, the day of the storm, the man on the road and the green tornado, and part of Karena will always be stuck on that road, and in the Jeep and the lair and the boy bathroom. And in her brother’s room in Black Wing and on the steps outside it too. But the images are embedded deeper in her now, and Karena senses she could let them go, sink, let everyday events close over them and hide them from view—even as the great muddy water to her right has been said to swallow fishing shacks, boats, even railway cars, pulling them down to its silty bottom where the muscular current carries them away.
“Holy shit, did you see that asshole?” Tiff is saying. “Like that last guy, he wasn’t even wearing a helmet! Well, rock on, buddy. Thin the herd, I say. . . . Hey,” she says to Karena. “Are you all right?”
Karena nods. “Sure,” she says, “I’m fine.”
She lights another Marlboro, feeling Tiff looking at her.
“It’s okay, you know,” says Tiff in a lower, more somber tone—Tiff’s Therapy Voice is how Karena thinks of it. “It’s healthy to talk about it—if you want. Him, I mean. Charles.”
Karena resists rolling her eyes. Oh boy. The gossip situation must be really bad if Tiff is referring to Charles as Charles instead of Thing Number Two. “Nothing to talk about,” Karena says. “There’s nothing else I can do for him right now. So it’s over.”
“I’m sorry about what happened, though,” Tiff says.
Karena sighs out a nasty-tasting stream of smoke and looks at her cigarette. The cherry is burning unevenly, only on one side. Somebody is thinking about her, this means. She takes a fierce drag to fix it and the paper crackles.
“Does everyone know?” she asks. “About Black Wing?”
“Well—yeah,” Tiff says.
“So everyone’s talking about it?”
Tiff checks herself out in the mirror—freshly maroon-streaked hair, navy eyeliner, feather earrings—for reassurance.
“Well—yeah,” Tiff says again. “But only nice things,” she adds hastily. “I mean, saying how much they support your family, stuff like that.”
Karena smiles. It’s not true, of course, but it’s nice of Tiff to attempt the lie. Tiff is a terrible liar.
“Thanks, Tiff,” she says.
“No sweat,” says Tiff.
They drive for a few minutes in silence except for the radio, which Tiff has turned down low so they can talk.
Then Tiff says, “It’s probably for the best, you know?”
“What’s that?” Karena says.
“What happened with Charles,” says Tiff. Her cheeks start to mottle and flush, but she forges gamely on. “At least he’s got a diagnosis now, right? It explains a lot. Like, he’s not just obnoxious—kidding, kidding. Seriously, now we know he’s got an imbalance. A medical problem. And he’s where they can help him, right, Kay? That’s a total positive, that now they can really do something for him, get him on medication.”
She shakes out her hair and glances sideways at Karena.
“That’s got to be a relief at least,” she says. “Right?”
“I guess,” says Karena. She tries to take a last drag on her cigarette but it has kept burning only on the one side and extinguished itself. She feeds it to the slipstream. Maybe at the U she’ll give up smoking.
“After all!” says Tiff in her psychologist voice, sticking her forefinger in the air. The bangles slide down her arm, jangling. “Have I not always said Charles needs clinical treatment?”
Then she says, “Hey . . . oh no . . . oh, I’m sorry, Kay, I didn’t mean . . . hang on,” and she puts her left blinker on and swerves into the lot of Leidel’s Apple Stand, not open yet, though in a week it will be packed. She puts the truck in park and turns to Karena and holds out her arms.
“Oh, sweetie, c’mere,” she says.
For Karena is crying now, really crying, whooping and sobbing and gasping for breath like a little kid. The tears pour from her in a rush, and she lets Tiff pull her in, lays her head against Tiff’s shoulder and wails. The gearshift pokes Karena’s hip and she smells the smoke in Tiff’s coarse straight hair, and Tiff’s apple shampoo that comes in pink bottles and her hairspray, and when Karena opens her streaming eyes she sees the River Road with the cars whizzing by and the railroad tracks beside it, the blue sky with its puffy white clouds, the steel bridge to Wisconsin and the islands with their brushy trees. The Mississippi flows slowly by and the sun shines clean over everything, and Karena knows Tiff thinks she is crying because of Charles, because her brother is stuck in a mental asylum instead of out and about on this beautiful day the way he should be, healthy and alert and comfortable in his own skin. And this is true; she is. But even more Karena is crying for herself. She cries because of her cowardice, because she told Charles she would come back and never did. She cries because of her selfishness, because she has turned him in not just so he could get help but so she would be free to go. She cries because of these things she has discovered in her own cold heart, and most of all she cries because there are so many things she will never be able to tell anyone, not even her best friend; because her whole life long, there will be so much nobody will ever know.
PART III
KARENA AND CHARLES, AUGUST 2008
41
They drive into the Twin Cities on the early afternoon of July 22, Karena behind the wheel in her Laredo with Kevin, Charles following in his canary-yellow wagon. Karena starts to head home automatically, but Kevin points out it makes more sense for them to drop him at his place first, since he doesn’t have his car. He lives on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, and he directs Karena along the wide old boulevards, through the leafy streets.
Karena is edgy, twitchy, looking all around—especially in her rearview, to make sure the bright wagon is still there. It is. Tailing her sedately, serenely, almost at walking pace, Charles perhaps steering it with one finger. Karena meanwhile is driving defensively, as if under attack at rush hour. She hunches forward, sitting too long at four-way stops, slamming on the brakes at intersections. Every time she does this, her brother gives her a blip on his horn, but she can’t help it. She can’t get over the amount of parked cars lining the streets, the houses and brown brick apartment buildings crowded so close together. There are so many trees. Karena thinks again of what she told Kevin in Austin, about feeling like a war correspondent, and Kevin replying that reentry can be rough. When Kare
na looks over at him now, she feels stranger than ever. She’s used to seeing Kevin’s profile against sky, clouds, grass. It’s as though they’re out for a drive in one of those old movies in which the car is stationary and the backdrop changes, except the scenery here is all wrong.
“Cognitive dissonance, Laredo,” Kevin says, when Karena comments on this—and even her nickname gives her a pang, as though she’s hearing an old song in a new place. “That’s what my shrink buddy calls it. I get it every time I come back from chasing.”
“You guys should put a warning label on the Whirlwind website,” Karena says. “When does it go away?”
“The worst of it? A couple of days,” says Kevin. “But it never really goes away completely. There are flashbacks. Like you’ll be standing in a coffee shop or something and all of the sudden you’ll be in Kansas, under a meso. You get used to it, though. It just gets integrated into who you are.”
He laces his fingers through hers, and Charles beeps—although they are cruising down the middle of a one-way street with no stop sign in sight. Karena glances in the rearview. There’s the real cognitive dissonance, following her in his yellow Volvo. She can’t believe Charles is actually there. Every time she looks back it’s like a gift.
They glide to a stop in front of Kevin’s house, a duplex. He owns the upper floor. Karena leans forward and inspects it with curiosity. The house is dark brown and sits on a hill, very tall and narrow yet almost dwarfed by an even taller old black fir by its front steps. The roof is A-frame, steeply pitched, and Karena is bemused to see a border of impatiens straggling along the walk, as well as one of those mirrored orbs on a stand. The ball is hot pink.
