THE HOUSE INSIDE ME

by Camelia Wheatley

  “Do I remember cutting my hand? Did I try to hurt or kill myself? Probably not, Doc.” I half-laughed under my breath. “A more likely scenario is me trying to kill my ex. Who knows at this point? Painting my face, burning the town down. So sayeth the gospel of Edna Rollins and the rest of this goddamned gossip fest they call a town. But again, I don’t remember. It looks like I’m no help at all. Next question, please.”

  The sound of Doc scribbling on paper with her fancy pen made me jittery. Suddenly all noises seemed filtered through my ears vibrant and louder, crisp and overwhelming. The classical hum from the speaker, the ink on paper, my mind exploding. I shuffled from side to side. My squirming echoed and bounced across the room. I was in my head, sorting, sifting and observing. Doc sat in her queenly chair. She was classy. Old money, perhaps. Even if she did have reproduction paintings, they were still pricey. Her hair fell in long silky strands of black fringe. Her face was pale and oval like an egg, with almond eyes and a tiny nose. She was petite, but her mannerisms and confidence give off a fierceness forged in hardship. Her blouse was red and flowed loosely over a short black pencil skirt. Her legs were waxed and bare and had a fairy-dust sheen. Her feet were adorned with black and red peep-toe heels with fancy soles. Her fingers were long and slender with silver rings. She had a fancy gold and black pen that was more like a magic wand. When she finished writing, she looked at me, nonchalant, twirled the pen in the air like some hoodoo hypnotist, clicked it twice and the madness always began.

  “I’m going to ask you a lot of questions and if anything clicks, let’s discuss it.”

  “Okay. Let’s roll, Doc.” One after another strange questions rolled off her tiny lips, each one a mini explosion rattling my core of being, forcing me to confront things I’d never thought about before.

  Tell me about yourself. When did you first know you were depressed? Are there any family problems? What about your intimate relationships? Have you ever felt unusually good or high? Was this clearly different from your usual mood? Did relatives and friends notice the change? Have you noticed irritability? Moods? Do you feel a reduced need to sleep, pressured speech, racing thoughts, grandiosity, distractibility, increased energy and activity, and engagement in risky behaviors? Have you ever felt sad or depressed, hopeless day in and day out? Not interested in or able to enjoy your usual activities? What about increased or decreased appetite, weight loss or gain, insomnia or hyper-somnia, agitation, feelings of worthlessness or excessive guilt, diminished concentration, reduced energy? Any suicidal thoughts? Do you hear people talking when no one is around? What about hallucinations or delusions? Do you know of any medical health conditions this may be in relation to? Do you have excessive worry? Do you have a tendency to worry excessively about minor things? Do you feel terribly anxious? What about panic attacks? And how about physical symptoms, like heart palpitations, difficulty catching your breath, or a feeling like you’ll die or go crazy? Any phobias or unusually strong fears? Have you felt any of these things, Cass?

  Overwhelmed, I tried to answer the questions as honestly as I could. But mainly, I just wanted this session to end. I tensed up, expecting Doc to push a red panic button, sending in the men in white coats to cart me off to a modern-day Castle Pines. Just like Maw Sue. If I told Doc what I do remember about our bloodline and the genes of my ancestors, she’d lock me up today. Besides, my mind was starting to spin. Letting a stranger in my head terrified me and sent me to a vulnerable place. And those voices she talked about? I hear a voice inside me. Sometimes, more than one. They all warn of pain, pain, pain. And they tell me I’ll be locked up if I speak of them.

  “I don’t know, Doc. I don’t know, I don’t know.” I said grabbing my head to control the spinning.

  “It’s fine, Cass. I’m not trying to upset you. I’m simply introducing the possibility to your mind, so it can absorb the information, and ponder. The answers may come later. Right now, we’re just getting to know each other. There is no pressure. So, let’s do this. You don’t need to answer anything else unless you want to for the rest of the session. We have about twenty minutes left and I’ll do all the talking. All I ask is you give me a chance and listen.”

  I nodded in relief and leaned back on the couch. My first visit was torture. Doing this for twelve months seemed impossible. Maybe I’d have been better off in jail. Yet I had no choice but to give Doc a chance and see what happens.

  Doc began telling stories about other people with similar issues as mine, beginnings and endings, life stories with metaphors and lessons. I listened intently. Somehow the child in me, long ago denied, pushed the adult in me aside, and took interest in what Doc was saying. Storytelling was as familiar as my blood type. Knit in me, running through me, binding me to parts unknown, but felt deeply inside. As a child, my sister and I always joked if we were dying and needed blood, we’d need type (S+), the timeless classics, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Twain. It started when Maw Sue told us we had the (S+) blood type. She was referring to our ancestors who were seekers, but I thought she meant storytelling. I didn’t know it wasn’t a real blood type. At doctor visits, the nurse would ask my mother medical questions, and when they got to my blood type, they’d say, Cass is (O-). I’d scream out, “No I’m not. I’m (S+).”

  My mother would say, “Shut your mouth, Cass. There is no such thing.” I’d throw a wild-eyed fit, my mother would go into spasms of embarrassment and the nurse would get a good laugh; all the while, I was stone-cold serious.

  Although she’s long dead, Doc’s way of storytelling connected me to my childhood and my great-grandmother, Maw Sue. As a child I sat at her feet with my sister listening to outlandish tales of worlds, places and people long ago. We’d take long walks behind the pine curtain in the safety and terror of the woods behind our house. Listening to Doc tell stories gave rise to a yearning in me to remember, to pull up roots of things I’d long ago erased. A gap of time was missing, gone from memory for reasons I can’t recall, and not only the fire, but my entire childhood. It suddenly stunned me to realize deeply, inside and outside, that I don’t know who I am. I am Cassidy Cleo Collard by name and birth, divorcee, town arsonist in the making by face and social status, but otherwise, empty, nonexistent, as if I have no core, unconnected to anything or anyone. Just bits and pieces of a childhood that eludes me.

  Brrringgggggggg! A loud pulsated noise echoed in the room. I shot off the couch like a bottle rocket! Lately, I jumped at everything, even little noises. I glanced back at the door expecting the men in white coats to pounce on me. Castle Pines, the ghosts say. Time to go. Frazzled, I rerouted my ears to the noise clacking on top of Doc’s side table. A loud clanging bell timer bounced across the surface until Doc’s hand stopped it.

  “A little warning, perhaps…” I said, shaken and disturbed.

  She laughed. “Sorry. It is a bit loud. But this bell timer signals the end of our session, so most of my patients look forward to hearing it.”

  “Yeah, no doubt.” I sighed in relief, but mainly because I wasn’t being carted off to Castle Pines.

  I went back to work at the bank, only to constantly dodge and avoid co-workers who wanted to talk about the fire, my ex, and God forbid, the newspaper article. Five o’clock came and I slipped out unnoticed. All the way home, my mind pondered the session with Doc, her questions, my questions, and all the unknowns. It was exhausting. I didn’t know it yet, but this day would mark a crossroad in my life for irrevocable change for better; but everyone knows, before it gets better, it always gets worse. Doctor Trish Telford, MD, PHD, would become a big part of that journey too. She’d scribble in my file with her fancy hoodoo pen documenting the various details of the devil. As for me…I was still dancing with his demons.

  2

  Adapt and thrive

  If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.

  ~Virginia Woolf

  I began to have meltdowns. Fits of grief, strange, unusual grief without a source. Just im
ages, memory pieces that come briefly, then burn up in flames. The more they come, the more I think I’m going crazy. Like seriously, something is wrong with me kind of crazy. It continued to get worse. I could barely keep it together through a day of work, my mind disoriented and dejected. By the time I got home, it was full on. These strange, violent images hit me like an electrical surge, so much I had to hold my head to steady myself. It was as if this portal in my mind had been opened. It’s sudden, a flash of light, then quick bursts of images and sounds. God, the sounds. A mixture of laughing, crying, screaming, music, my voice, other voices, bangs, clangs, screeching, so many sounds. Then my mind tunnels in to view a slow movie, actions recording from the past, memories fading in and out. I see a small fire. Inside the flames, a skull of hollow eyes. Another flash. Blood dripping into a wooden bowl like drumbeats. Another flash. A girl screaming, the hollow of her mouth is a dark abyss drawing me closer and closer until I fall into it. The darkness swallows me, and then suddenly I snap back to myself. I’m stunned and shaken. My head is bobbing, my heart is racing. I have a sense that it isn’t over yet. I am right. Like a gentle wind after a raging storm, a memory enters in not with force but like a warm, inviting hug. That ghost hug is Maw Sue. Her squeeze to my skin fills me with warmth and a glow that embraces whatever she is trying to tell me. Windows and doors open inside me, letting all sorts of feelings and memories emerge. It’s like she wants me to remember something, but what? Even so, I trust her, even though she’s been dead for years, I take a deep breath and let myself go where-ever the memories take me.

  * * *

  Her given name was Susannah Josephine Worrel. She stood all of four foot nine. A hundred pounds of piss and vinegar. Fire and ice. Wishy and washy. Rose petals and rusty nails. Mystical and mad. Her moods metered up and down like the red bubbles in a weather thermometer. We learned to tiptoe lightly around her till we established what frame of mind she was in. She was schooled in the ways of old, the ways of seven. This strange way of seven descended from a particular bloodline on her mother’s side of the family tree, the Ainsley clan. Everyone has their spiritual beliefs, religious traditions, their crosses, wailing walls and temples, and the Ainsley’s were no different. They believed in God, a majestic, all-powerful being. A supreme higher power. They believed in divine messages from God, and held a strange belief in numbers. Numbers held meanings just as messages carried divine revelations. The Ainsley’s had their stories, traditions, their beliefs, just as others do. Like some say seeing a red bird is being visited by a recently deceased loved one, or how the Jews wrap up tiny pieces of paper filled with prayers and stick them into the crevasse of a rock wall, or how the Baptists dunk people in water, or the Catholics pray to the Mother Mary. It’s all the same.

  To the Ainsley’s if you were a believer, you were called a seeker. Seekers believe in numbers and earthly events coinciding that lead to a particular pathway in life. These special meanings are to be sought after, interpreted and applied to life. My sister Meg and I learned all about the ways of seven in our youth, long before our belief system was tainted by the world’s view of religion and its stifling methods of making converts and unbelievers. Long before we learned of hatred, and divide, judgment and shame.

  Maw Sue was a direct descendant of this strange bloodline of mystical women. Not everyone in the family received the attachments of the gifted and cursed bloodline because it seemed to choose its subjects with care. No one knew how or why. Everyone had heard the old stories passed down, but not everyone believed them; therefore, some say, belief held the key and was the power to receive it. It was like a seed. The best seeds are pushed down into the soil of darkness and they must find their way out, straining upwards toward the light, reaching where their wholeness is found, sprouting, growing and maturing, and then the hurt comes. Pruning, snipping, cutting. Maw Sue told us by this process, a seed grows and becomes what it ought. But if a seed is not pressed into darkness, it will be eaten by birds, or left to rot, never becoming what it should. Remembering this made my skin pimple and shudder.

  May Dell is Maw Sue’s only surviving daughter. We call her Mama C. She did not receive the seeker bloodline, though she held some interest in the old stories. My father, Gavin, her firstborn son didn’t receive it either, although he did receive a precious gift of being a water diviner, or rather a well-Witcher. That man can find water with a forked stick in twelve counties and made numerous fat wads of cash doing so. If people need a well or need to find water underground, they call my father, Gavin Collard.

  My story is different. The bloodline didn’t skip me. It hit me full on. Cassidy Cleopatra Collard received the entire package. The whole kit and caboodle, the full shebang, me, the town arsonist in the making, the crazy collard girl took all the gifts and the curses, a complete seeker treasure trove. If truth be told, it’s more than I ever wanted. As a child, knowing all these things was fun and belief was easy. Now that I’m an adult and my life is a crumbling wreck, nothing about it is fun, and my belief is tainted. Is it possible? Is the bloodline real? And could this be why I’m losing my mind? As a child it was part of my natural nature to believe those around me, but what if Maw Sue was just crazy like people thought she was, and if so, am I? Regardless of my thinking, belief or lack of, it didn’t stop the memories from flooding in. Like seeds sprouting from the dark, they rose up in the dirt of my mind seeking the light, and looking for a way out.

  According to Maw Sue it came natural to me, because I shared similar traits to Joseymae, her mother and my great, great-grandmother. Maw Sue said that my birth was just as traumatic as hers and filled with mystical events, both strange and unbelievable. Because of this, Maw Sue paid particular attention to me as a child. Sometimes I’d catch her staring at me as if some long-formidable ghost was haunting her. I wasn’t the only one. My younger sister Meg received the genetic bloodline as well, which included attachments such as curses and eccentric gifts, but no-one could convince Meg of this. She was straight up a realist. From birth it was evident to Maw Sue she had considerable doubts as to the validity of the events described so often in our walks and story time sittings; therefore, her disbelief skewered and stifled the seed within her, causing it to be stunted and never produce the magic and mystery of the gift she talked so much about. She determined not to give up on Meg because she believed her natural sparkle and jackass stubbornness would allow her to accomplish the impossible. Maw Sue did her best to teach us everything she knew about the Seventh Tribe, the bloodline and all the mysterious attachments, but Lord knows—it wasn’t enough to stop the darkness from trying to destroy us.

  As a child, I loved Maw Sue with an intensity so strong it felt like magic, something beyond anything I’d ever felt before, or since. We were connected by something neither of us could describe or discern. To this day, I remember every detail of her. Short and feisty. Square face, proud cheekbones, gray eyes like a storm cloud, a crooked smile, curly white hair swept behind her ears. She dressed in straight-line lounge dresses pelted with an assortment of flowers and snap buttons in front. She smoked, drank, dipped snuff and took pills like candy. Most importantly, she taught me to believe in the power of magic. The power of numbers. The ways of seven. By her storytelling, she convinced us our lives individually point to something bigger, something way bigger than ourselves. Her favorite saying was only four words, but they were the most poignant words I'd ever heard. Then…and now. Long before I ever knew what they meant.

  “Make lovely your losses,” she’d say with conviction. For two sisters prone to believe their great-grandmother over everyone else, those words made us believe we had the power of magic. To make a bad day lovely. To right a wrong, to redeem a loss. We thought we held this tremendous gift inside us, so when troubles prevail or the bottom falls out of our lives, we can easily turn it around and make it lovely. Easy peasy. Sour lemons into sweet lemonade. As a gullible, imaginative kid, I believed those four words had power. Now that I'm an adult my belief is tainted, tor
tured, and those four words make me sick to my stomach. It makes me angry she made us believe such nonsense. In my mind I argue with a dead woman. I scream into the void where no one is listening. I can no more make lovely my losses than I can change the color of the moon. I lost Sam. How do I make it lovely, Maw Sue? Tell me? I almost burnt down the town. Set a fire, supposedly. I’m the talk of the town. How do I make it lovely? And now I’m losing my mind, and seeing a shrink. Pray tell, Maw Sue, how do I make lovely all my losses?

  The memories shift something inside me. My nerves are on fire, my body tingles. It happens like before. A surge hit me. Again, the flashes, the images, the same as before, dismantling me to stillness, only to subside and return. I brace myself for the next onslaught. Quick bursts, images of fire, dripping blood, the horrible sounds and the child screaming, me falling, darkness, then gone. This time I can’t catch air. It’s almost too much. Then as gentle as rain the memory enters in. For a split-second, I start to believe I might be plum crazy after all, but deep inside, Maw Sue reminds me of things long ago hidden as a child behind the pine curtain of the forest, and my mind.

  Maw Sue had a coop with chickens roaming the yard, a wild vegetable garden, an herbal garden and a huge strawberry patch. Her property seemed straight out of a Grimm’s’ fairy tale. Adorning the tree limbs hung various objects of meaning, chimes, rags, beads, bells, jewels, bones, feathers and more. Her house was plain, a simple salt-box square, white with red shutters and black doors. A small step-down front porch, and a good-sized back porch for a washing machine, a freezer and two chairs. Walking inside was like stepping into a haunted box of crayons. I kid you not. Every room was a different color, unique in character, with its own language, smells, and embodiment. This house particularly took on Maw Sue’s personality and moods. It became one with its owner. The kitchen was bird’s egg blue, the bathroom a Pepto pink, the living room a sunflower yellow, the spare bedroom was green like blades of grass, and Maw Sue’s bedroom was the brightest lily white I’d ever seen. Her house was truly alive in many ways. Herbs and scents. Candles and crosses. Slinks and shutters. Clicks and clutters. Bells and beads hung on windows and doorknobs to fight bad spirits. Meg and I would run through the house smelling each bundle of plants and herbs hanging from the ceiling, sage, rosemary, lemon balm, spearmint and others. We’d follow her as she would burn them in a bowl, walking through each room praying some ancient rites to rid away the bad.