The top of the brochure says WAVELENGTHS in blue capital letters and under that in smaller print A SUPPORTIVE GROUP FOR YOUTH. A slanted crease runs just below the smiling girl’s chin, the fold from my mother’s hands still visible, although it appears that she attempted to smooth the brochure before she deposited it into the drawer, nestling it among the other odd items that amount to junk in our home, a few odd spools of thread, some pizza menus, an eyeglass repair kit, a few tealight candles.
I open the brochure, and inside, small black letters explain that Wavelengths is a free support group for children of incarcerated parents, run by licensed clinical social workers who specialize in working with adolescents and teens. There is a photo of two happy preteens on the inside—a boy with braces, a girl with braids. They are possibly thirteen or fourteen years old. It’s not clear why the two of them are posing together, but they’re both looking straight into the camera. The boy smiles wide, and the girl laughs politely. It’s not a belly laugh, but the kind of natural-looking laugh that makes the subject look organically happy, not too forced. The small black letters go on to declare that one in twenty-eight children will have a parent become incarcerated before his or her eighteenth birthday.
I hear footsteps from the hall, and I quickly stuff the brochure back into the drawer and slam it shut. I’m mixing my oatmeal when my mother appears at the threshold of the room.
“Even when I’m sick, can’t sleep in worth a damn,” she says. Her voice is louder than last night, sounds more like her. She pats my elbow as she walks past me to the coffeemaker to pour herself a steaming cup. She sits down at the small breakfast nook and takes a sip, eyeing me as I continue to stir. I think about letting it go, but that has never been my style when it comes to her.
“Wavelengths, Mom?” I sit down across from her at the table. “Really?” I swallow a spoonful of oatmeal waiting for her response.
“Okay, you saw the pamphlet,” she says. “I was going to sit down and go over it with you sometime today.” She takes another sip of coffee and straightens her spine a few degrees.
“What is there to go over, Mom?” I want to know. “This is the kind of shit I make fun of.”
“Then go and make fun of it. Think of it as material. Fodder for jokes. Whatever. Just give it a chance, Evelyn.”
“You think I need something like this? You think I need to talk to a bunch of strangers?”
“Hey, it’s not something you have to commit your entire life to. Just something you could try on for size. See if it’s helpful. You don’t have anyone to talk to, Evelyn. At least not anyone else like you. Who knows what you’re going through.”
What I’m going through. A tidy euphemism, code for my father’s condition, my condition, the current state of affairs.
“But I have you and Shea,” I say. “I swear I’ll start spilling my guts to you two as much as you want. We can talk all about what I’m going through.”
“You know I worry,” she says, and I can feel her staring at the top of my head so I finally look up, letting my eyes meet hers.
“Fine, I’ll try it on for size,” I say. “But if it doesn’t fit, I’m taking it back.”
“Way to extend that metaphor,” she says. My mother smiles and stands, taking her mug with her back down the hall and to her bedroom, where Shea is likely still sleeping under the purple quilt. On the table, a thin streak of coffee has spilled, like evidence left behind.
Chapter Three
I know my mother worries. She doesn’t have to remind me. Her worry covers the silences that arrive in those spaces when we’ve run out of things to say to each other. When we speak, my mother’s worry appears to dissipate, the fog clearing, burned up by the sunlight of our words.
But fog is made up of tiny water droplets so when it disappears, it’s not really gone. We believe the fog is gone because we believe what we see, but the water is still in the air. It has just transformed itself, shifting shape from liquid to gas. But my mother’s worry is still there—even in those moments when all seems right with the world, when my mother smiles at me, when she rubs my shoulders or curls up next to me on my bed at night to gossip about her day. The worry is still there, but in another form, one that is easier for her to hide—worry stashed into a shoe box at the back of my mother’s closet, hidden by the darkness the empty clothing casts, the limp sleeves of dresses and the empty pant legs that hang without bodies to fill them.
Shea works to manage my mother’s worry. She relieves the pressure in my mother’s worry, poking small holes in the shoe box, puncturing it slowly to allow some worry to escape. It makes a hissing sound, the worry slithering away for a bit only to return the next day and the next day and the next.
Some nights, I can’t escape my mother’s worry, and I wake in the small hours of morning, my heart pumping fast and loud with worry, like a hummingbird beating its wings against the cage of my chest. I’ll lie very still, slow my breathing, and keep my eyes closed, attempting to clear the worry from my body, trying to send my thoughts to some far-off place. I’ll imagine I’m on a small boat on the open sea, the sky clear blue and cloudless and the sun warming my skin.
Some nights it will work. The worry will drain slowly from my body, and I’ll drift back to sleep. Other nights, the clear blue sky will turn dark, and thick clouds will roll in. I’ll look up and see lightning above me, spider veins of bluish white flashing against the black. I’ll hear thunder in the distance, moving closer and closer with each rumble.
On those nights, I can’t sleep until I flip through that archive in my mind, The Catalog of Everything I’ve Done Wrong, pick an entry, any entry, and remember. I’m seven years old again, on the playground at the Montessori school. Kids run through the chain-linked area, weaving around the slides and climbing walls, kicking up bits of shredded tire with their heels. I sit on a swing and stare at the fence, trying to get my eyes to snap out of focus so I can look through one of the individual chain links. I close one eye like looking through a telescope, holding one eyelid down manually, my eye muscles refusing to operate independently. They come in a pair, after all, so they have to work together, blinking and crying in rhythm, sharing a secret language like twin sisters.
I start to swing, back and forth, back and forth, picking up momentum by pumping my legs to power my movements, propelling myself up and then back and up again, falling with gravity like a pendulum swinging through the air. I lean my head back and close my eyes because the sun can blind me if I’m not careful.
When I open my eyes, I notice something dark at the base of the fence, something that looks furry. I dig my heels into the dirt beneath the swing to slow down, a low cloud of dust rising around my feet until I come to a complete stop. I walk toward the fence, and when I reach it, I kneel down. I brush the leaves away with the back of my hand and find a dead mouse, its body curved into a C shape. I see the pointed snout and the whiskers, the black eyes that are open and shining like the tiniest black marbles I’ve ever seen.
I pull a paper clip from my pocket, and straighten the curves until it becomes a small, blunt needle. I jab the mouse’s bloated belly with it, pushing harder each time, testing to see if it’s sharp enough to pierce the skin. I just want to see what’s inside. I slide the paper clip into the creature’s mouth, parting its lips to see the teeth, which are long and yellow and slightly curved.
Then I push the paper clip into one glassy black eye. I push and push until the paper clip pokes clean through the back of the mouse’s small head, and thick yellow liquid seeps from the corners of the eye socket.
I hear footsteps along the ground behind me and hear a teacher call out.
“What are you doing over here?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I say. I dig into the ground with my fingernails, covering the dead mouse with dirt as fast as I can, but my hands aren’t strong enough, and the dirt is too densely packed for me to penetrate.
“That doesn’t look like nothing to me,” she says. “Show me what
you have.” Her voice gets louder, attracting the attention of other children until there is a small circle of them assembled and watching, waiting to see what I’ve found.
“It’s nothing. It’s nothing!” I keep repeating the words, but they sound muffled, like I’m screaming underwater. I pick up my left foot and stomp on the mouse as hard as I can. I pick up my right foot and stomp again. I stomp and jump and jump and stomp until my small weight has flattened the even smaller creature, his body now smashed into the ground, his fur soaked red and yellow with blood and pus. Then the teacher grabs me by the wrist and leads me back into the school.
My mother arrives to pick me up. I sit on the bright blue rug in the middle of the classroom, staring at my shoes as the teacher talks about me as if I’m not in the room. On the car ride home, I lean my head against the window, and I wait for my mother to raise her voice, wait for her to get angry with me. I wait and wait, but I only hear the sound of my own inhaling and exhaling. I watch my breath fog the glass. I wait and wait until I finally feel something—my mother’s worry changing states, from solid to liquid to gas.
Chapter Four
Wavelengths meets in Tampa, on Monday nights. My mother and I don’t talk much on the way there, the radio tuned to classic rock, my mother singing softly to Led Zeppelin under her breath to mask our silence. As we cross the Howard Frankland Bridge, the long concrete connection between St. Pete and Tampa, the sinking sun casts its colors on the canvas of the sky—pinks and reds and purples that last for a few minutes before they disappear until the next day. You can get used to sunsets in Florida, where the land is flat and the sky is wide. You can get spoiled being able to watch the sun’s movements from anywhere.
It’s dark when we arrive, and we get out of the car, my mother pausing to stretch for a moment. She stands, hands on hips. She tilts her head back, her face pointed toward the sky, while I reach inside the front pocket of my jeans for the red Jolly Rancher I’ve been hoarding all day. It looks like a small jewel in my palm, and will taste like wild strawberries, glossy and wet on my tongue.
The parking lot is not well lit; the dark reds of taillights and bright whites of headlights illuminate our way toward the entrance. The group meets in an empty office space in a strip mall near downtown Tampa. The space is nondescript inside, the only furniture two desks and a circle of institutional seating, those simple, neutral-colored chairs you usually find in waiting areas, those places people often find themselves in against their will.
Greg, the social worker and group leader, greets us. I learned his name from eavesdropping on my mother’s phone call to enroll me in the group. Tall and thin, Greg leans over a bit while saying hello, an attempt to look me in the eye. “Hi, Evelyn. It’s very nice to meet you, Evelyn,” he says. I can already tell he’s the type of person who will overuse your name in conversation, an obvious ploy to build rapport.
I take a seat in the circle while my mother chats with Greg for a moment, and then waves good-bye. She’ll wander nearby WestShore Plaza for the next two hours, exploring the wide walkways of retail, perhaps reminiscing about her own adolescence, all that time she spent hanging out at shopping malls with her friends, her generation that wore ripped jeans and flannel shirts and called themselves mall rats.
There are twelve of us at the support group, all teenagers—five boys and seven girls, including me. I don’t like sitting in a circle like this, feeling more comfortable in classrooms where I can lower my energy and sit in the back row. I can blend into the wall if I try hard enough, become something other than a murderer’s daughter, something bright and full of air, something that feels lighter than my actual body.
I feel exposed here, like everyone is watching me, sizing me up from the bare toes sticking out of my sandals to the top of my head. This fiery feeling, which erupts in my stomach when I get nervous, spreads toward my mouth, giving me the sensation of hot, hot coals inside my throat. If I were to speak right now, only smoke and ash would come out.
“We have a few new faces tonight so let’s begin by reviewing the ground rules,” Greg says. He smiles, a flash of teeth appearing briefly between his lips. His voice is even and smooth, the kind of voice that can put me in a trance if I’m not careful. Once, in elementary school, we had a firefighter visit our class and talk to us about fire safety. His voice was pure buttery gold. I couldn’t tell you the first thing about evacuation plans or fire extinguishers, but I remember the feeling of a thousand tingles on my neck and back and arms as he spoke. His voice was warm and inviting, a lullaby I could feel with my entire body, hushing me into a dream, a state of almost-sleep.
Greg takes a manila folder from his canvas messenger bag, one of those soft-sided cases with a shoulder strap. It’s tan and worn and faded with use, or it might be secondhand. Any thrift store worth its salt has a healthy bag and purse section, those items people spend far too much money on, according to my mother. She’d never spend more than five dollars on a bag.
Greg pulls a small parcel of white paper from the folder, and hands it to the kid next to him, who takes one and passes the rest on to the next kid, and so on. The papers float along a conveyor belt of hands until they reach me. The handout looks like it was typed on a typewriter and photocopied badly. There are stray black streaks and smudges around the corners. Greg reads the ground rules out loud, and my eyes follow the words on my paper.
WAVELENGTHS GROUND RULES
What is said in the group is not to be discussed at any other place, at any other time.
We are here to share our own feelings and experiences, not to give advice.
We each share the responsibility for making this group work.
We try to accept people just as they are. Our goal is not to change people.
We try to give everyone an opportunity to share.
We have the right to speak and the right to remain silent.
We give supportive attention to the person speaking and avoid interrupting.
We have the right to ask questions and the right to refuse to answer.
We talk about what is present to us now, rather than the past.
We do not discuss group members who are not present.
“And remember, we really must strive to abide by these rules,” Greg says. “They are the foundation on which we build a supportive environment. And within that environment, we can do the work. Together.” Greg glances around the circle, nodding a little too vigorously. Some of the teens nod and smile along with Greg while others appear to look right through him. “You may choose to participate at any level you wish. You may ask questions, answer questions that are posed, or simply listen and observe. Sound good?” he asks the group but he’s looking at me. I whisper the word yes, my throat still too hot to make audible sound.
“Excellent!” Greg says cheerfully, his voice taking on a higher note now, a few shades brighter than the voice that read through the ground rules. “Let’s get started. Our topic tonight is acceptance. I’ll begin by discussing a few things that will help us understand the topic, and then we can have an open share.”
Greg is the sun, and we are fixed bodies around him. Like tiny planets without orbit, we are forced to remain in place while the sun sets off solar flares, sudden flashes of brightness ejecting clouds of electrons toward us. Greg wants to bathe us in sunbeams, a red-hot glare that dazzles and burns. He seems to know about the shadows within—the gloom and murk and muck that lives inside of every person—whether your parent is incarcerated or not—and his mission is to extinguish all of our shadows with the light of support and acceptance.
My mother has checked books out of the library on incarceration over the years. Some have been clinical and evidence-based, written by doctors and other experts in the field. Some have been more self-help or “new age” as the section usually reads in the bookstore. There’s an entire business built around helping the friends and families of prisoners—helping us with our grief, our guilt, our anger. People see us as the ones left behind, the
widows and widowers, the motherless daughters, the fatherless sons.
I understand the idea of getting help, of asking for support. I understand that it might help some people to realize that they aren’t alone in all of this. But I’ve never understood why I have to accept it. Acceptance is heavy, an anchor that sinks to the bottom of the sea. When you accept something, it becomes real, permanent, and unmovable, a boulder you push and push up a mountain until you reach the top and you stay there, staring at the giant rock that will never get any smaller no matter how many times you try to chip away at it. Acceptance is Virginia Woolf walking into the river, her pockets weighed down with rocks. She walked into acceptance, one step at a time, acceptance up to her knees, her waist, her chest, and over her head, until she was submerged in it—acceptance finally filling up her lungs, stealing her breath.
I won’t accept that chemicals will flow into my father’s veins, a current of drugs that will feel like an anvil placed on his chest, heavy and unyielding, to make sure he stays submerged, to make sure he never comes up for air.
Greg is a confident leader, although at the beginning of the open share period he looks a bit nervous, beads of sweat appearing at his hairline like a message in Braille. The group members also seem to be experiencing various levels of uncertainty. Some are exhibiting the classic signs of avoidance, shrinking and sinking and hoping not to be seen, lowering their energies so they won’t be called upon against their will. Others look restless and fidgety, twirling strands of hair around their fingers or bouncing their knees up and down rhythmically, a sign that they can’t bear to be still. A boy who looks about my age raises his hand. His ears are stretched by wooden discs the size of nickels. Greg smiles and calls on him. “David, great. Thanks for sharing,” Greg says.
Girl at the Edge Page 3