Suspended Sentence

by Janice Morgan

  During the last part of June, John and I travelled to a completely different world: strolls on a medieval stone bridge, long hikes up rocky hillsides, wonderful roast duck dinners at an ancient inn by a river, busy market days full of local products, friendly chats with the innkeeper every morning at breakfast over the best bread, coffee, and fruit. By the time we left, we were already dreaming of our next visit and where else we would explore in the area: caves, vineyards, Romanesque churches, perched villages. Not to mention thinking about our future lives. We eventually wanted to live in the same town together, after six years of a long-distance relationship across the state. In two more years, this could actually happen. It didn’t seem so far off now, and that, too, would be part of the changes to come. When it was time to go home, John accompanied me to the airport, then we said our ritual goodbyes. He’d be staying for another month to teach study-abroad courses, which he loved to do. I wouldn’t see him again until August.

  Driving back home from the Nashville airport, I felt refreshed from our trip together. I took stock of the fact that very soon, on July 1, I would be officially released from my Chair’s duties. As for my other life as a parent, my secret identity as a Mission Impossible Drug Court mom—well, that alternate career would continue for a while. But I was anticipating it too would phase out gradually. Yet even while dreaming of freedom, with every passing mile over rolling hills toward Croftburg, I felt the grip of that invisible mesh of home-front responsibilities closing in on me once again.

  Sure enough, in my first talk with Dylan a day or two later, he started complaining about Mike. The communal work at St. Alban’s had gone well enough; Dylan had brought a friend to assist a crew placing stones for a walkway his dad had designed. But then, as so often happened, the two had a disagreement. Dylan’s main gripe was that his dad wouldn’t let him do things his way, didn’t have confidence that he could do things another way and they would work out fine. Dylan had gotten so frustrated that he’d had to call and make appointments with Darlene Winchester at Drug Court just to let out his frustrations.

  “She probably thinks I’m an idiot, but it doesn’t matter. I just needed to vent,” he told me, already working up some steam as he spoke.

  I was beginning to be very glad I hadn’t been around during this episode. I was only half-listening to all this, anyway. I remembered what Darlene had said earlier, when we three were together at our meeting: that Dylan, emotionally, was still like a teenager, still battling against his parents. I wondered: would his emotional age ever catch up to his actual one? How long would it take for us to get past all this conflict?

  My ears perked up, though, when the topic of work and money came up. Apparently, Dylan had done quite a few odd jobs here and there, but his main job—the one he was counting on to fill his bank account—was the bricklaying job, and though he’d started it a couple weeks earlier, it had been on hold for a while. Just last Friday, though—finally—the crew was back in business. That meant the pay would once again start rolling in.

  “Too bad this masonry job isn’t steady. I made allowances for irregular work, but even my lowest estimate was way off,” he told me. He’d been thinking that the first wad of cash he’d earned would multiply every week, only it hadn’t turned out that way.

  “At this rate, it’ll take forever to make any dough.”

  And to get a vehicle, I thought.

  A few days later, Dylan came over to mow. But after two weeks of 105-degree weather, only brown, crispy stubble lay underfoot where the green lawn should be. The whole country was in the grips of a dry, red-hot July heat wave.

  “Looks like we’ll have to wait on the grass,” I told him. We were both brushing away beads of sweat from our foreheads as we surveyed the scene.

  “Yeah, a friend asked me to go to the lake later today. That sounds like a better idea.” He was munching on a sandwich, waving his arm for emphasis, as he often did. After another bite, he told me that he had a girlfriend now, and her name was Amanda. He met her at AA, and they “really hit it off,” even though she was a little younger, twenty years old.

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “Yeah, that is good.” I figured he’d had his own dry spell when it came to girlfriends.

  “Did you guys know each other for a while and then you decided to spend time together?” I asked.

  “Sort of,” he replied, wolfing down the last two bites of his sandwich. He indicated he had to get going, so I knew no more information would be forthcoming.

  “Oh, and by the way, my AA group just celebrated my first twelve months of sobriety.” He dropped it casually, just like that.

  “Wow, that’s great!” Of course, I cheered this milestone for him and for the support others were giving him to stay on his path. Did Dylan realize how fortunate he was to have that? And here he had me thinking all his plans and projects were going awry just a few days ago! Unwinding the hose to water a parched flowerbed, I fell to wondering how this new girlfriend situation would unfold. If they met at AA, that could be either good or else really bad.

  A few days later, during one of my office-dismantling episodes, I fielded a call from Dylan. Again, he was frustrated about how things were going. A whole litany of woes spilled out: he didn’t have steady work, hadn’t been able to save much money for a car yet—and, to top it off, the promising relationship he’d started with Amanda in AA just ended. She said he “didn’t have his act together quite yet,” and she needed to be with someone who did. I listened to the avalanche, trying hard not to get swept away by it myself. Instead, I uttered what I hoped would be consoling words. “Don’t worry. Things will get better; you just have to have patience.” But how consoling would they be? Not to mention, I felt an edge to some of what he said, an edge directed to me as his parent, something along the lines of “Hey, don’t you see how hard I’m struggling here? Why aren’t you helping me more?” Was I imagining this?

  Things got worse the next day when I stopped by Dylan’s apartment in the late afternoon to pick up the utility bills. Come to think of it, I was already helping quite a bit. I’d agreed to pay his rent and utilities for the summer. That way, any earnings he could keep for a future vehicle. He came outside, his spiked hair still wet from the after-workday shower. His construction site work buddy with the maroon truck was somewhere inside. Despite the shower, Dylan didn’t seem very chill. He noticed that one of the bills he handed off was already past due.

  “Well, I can only pay them when I get them,” I said. Next, he launched into a jeremiad.

  “It’s not fair; Fate is against me, I do everything right and then I’m punished! Every guy I know has a car, a girlfriend, and then look at me. Look, I’ve got a job, I’m working, look at my hands all torn apart laying bricks. Do you see that?” He held his hands with broken skin near the open window of my car to make sure I got the point.

  “And then, you expect me to save money. Don’t you get it? I don’t make enough money to save anything!! How is that supposed to happen? All I’m asking is to have a normal life for a guy in the U.S.A.: a car, a girlfriend, and money for a change of clothes or some shoes every now and then!”

  Before I could respond, he stepped back into the apartment and then, with the flourish of a trial lawyer, produced Exhibit A, a torn pair of tan chino shorts. According to him, this was the second or third instance of very nice $65 shorts getting split open by his doing a heavy moving job recently. Clearly, his clothes weren’t holding up any better than his morale. In different circumstances, I might have laughed at the distressed-beyond-all-functionality shorts, but as I sat in my car, surveying the scene, I happened to notice that Dylan was swinging his laniered key chain around like a high-speed propeller, his jaw set in barely contained anger. I decided this was not the moment to laugh—or even smile. One wrong word, one misplaced inflection or gesture from me, and he would launch the nukes.

  It was clearly my turn to speak in court, and I had to somehow deflect the whole weight of the
world’s injustice in the next two minutes. Directing my attention to the sorry-looking chinos, I gamely launched the idea that for the rough work he was doing, he should get some cheap but sturdy clothes from either Goodwill or a local consignment shop. That way, he could save his regular clothes for other occasions. Given his agitation, it took several moments to bring him around. Finally, he acknowledged that maybe this would be a good idea. But it was clear that a few sand bags of common sense were no match for a tidal wave of financial angst—and I was right in the path of the deluge.

  Dylan went on to inform me that he was getting tired of depending on other people for transportation. I wasn’t surprised. As one of the transportation providers, I was getting tired of it, too. I had grown suspicious that Dylan was asking for rides because he wanted to convince me how hard it was for him to get around without a vehicle. By summer, he’d decided to sell his moped because it was becoming a liability; he didn’t want to be tempted to drive it without a legal license. In order to get his license reinstated, he needed to finish his alcohol-counseling classes. He’d been attending those at $25/week, and Dr. Beaumont, the instructor, told him the license he could probably get would be a hardship license, which he could do by August … maybe. The special license would allow him to drive only to work, to classes, to his Drug Court and AA meetings, and to buy groceries—only necessary trips. But from Dylan’s standpoint, that would be a big improvement. He could be independent.

  Dylan made it volubly clear that he wanted to be able to save money this summer so that he could purchase a vehicle “sometime before doomsday.” He intimated it was time to “get another plan in place.” Remaining as steady but flexible as I could manage, I suggested that we should get together when we were both calm with some ideas to see what was reasonable.

  “Well, it better happen soon,” he said. Then he took a new turn. “How about we meet with Darlene Winchester and have a three-way talk? She keeps telling me I should be able to work this out.”

  “OK, see if you can arrange it,” I said, brightening my tone. The idea of having a third person arbitrate seemed like a useful idea. From what he just said, it seemed Dylan had been over some of this ground with the Drug Court director already, and I just hadn’t heard about it. It sounded to me like I was out of the loop, but very much caught in the net—at least from Dylan’s perspective.

  I complained to my friend Sandra later about this exchange. We often observed that somehow our kids thought they deserved to have everything they wanted. Provided for them, by us. Entitlement. Sandra commiserated; she’d heard many such irritated demands from her own son, Brad. Despite his irrational tendencies due to schizophrenia, Brad remained an unerring accountant when it came to comparing parental favors for his sister or for him. Disregarding the difference between their situations, he judged simply that if his sister had a car or a vacation, he should get one, too. Whenever a confrontation happened with his mom, which it did fairly often, Robert (Brad’s stepdad since he was five years old) would step in to declare the discussion over.

  “So if you have the chance to have a third party there to arbitrate, that will be a very good thing for you,” she told me. “It will keep things on track with his expectations.”

  “I hope so,” I told her. At least I’d gotten the chance to vent. And I really did want to know what Ms. Winchester thought about all this. Time for another visit.

  Just when it seemed our conversation was about to wind up, suddenly Sandra brought up a new topic, one that made my blood freeze.

  “Did you hear about that violent crime that just happened here in town? A murder; it was just around the corner from Walgreens in a building on that little street near Dairy Queen,” she said.

  “No, what murder?”

  She told me a fifty-five-year-old woman had been stabbed to death in her apartment at about 7 p.m. the previous evening—by her son, who later told police he’d heard voices telling him to kill her. He was obviously not in his right mind, and it sounded like schizophrenia.

  “Rita called to tell me about it right after she heard it on the Channel 12 news last night,” Sandra said. Rita’s son had schizophrenia, too; the two women had bonded like sisters. Very scary stuff for us NAMI moms, especially those whose sons had that particular illness. Who could imagine such a ghastly crime right there in the middle of town, so close to a place hundreds of folks went on a summer’s evening?

  “Well, maybe we’ll find out more, and we’ll talk about it at our next meeting. Remember, this Thursday,” Sandra added.

  “Sure,” I said, still feeling the tremor. “Take care.”

  I checked the online newspaper, read that the neighbors were shocked. According to them, the mother and her son, who visited every week for dinner, had a completely normal relationship. No particular warnings, nothing suspicious. That evening, they heard cries, then shouts. A man came out of the apartment with a knife, then someone called the police. The man cooperated with officers and was taken into custody. A detective had been assigned to make an investigation.

  “I wonder if the public will hear much about the mental illness behind this story,” I thought. About how the illness wasn’t being treated.

  At our next NAMI meeting that same week, parents were eager to talk about the incident.

  “That’s one more reason we have to lobby our legislators in Frankfort,” Sandra said. “Nobody else is going to connect the dots, explain how it is that if someone like Burke doesn’t get the right psychiatric care when they need it—before they have violent, psychotic episodes—there can be big trouble ahead.”

  “Someone at work knew this man was a war veteran, too,” Nancy chimed in. “You’d think at least a veteran would get good medical care, some psychological support. Look at what all they go through in combat. And then they come home and can’t get the care they need.” I wondered if and when his mental illness had even been acknowledged. Schizophrenia isn’t usually diagnosed until a person hears voices or experiences an hallucination. How old had he been when that first occurred? Had he ever received a treatment plan? Had he gone off it because no one was checking up on him?

  It wasn’t lost on any of us that it had been a mom who was on the front lines of this particular battle. That’s who the terrible voices in Burke’s head told him to destroy, and he didn’t know how to quiet those voices, how to get away. So many times it was either the mom, or the wife, or the girlfriend facing this terror.

  “Burke wasn’t the one who killed his mom,” Angie said. She was our resident saint. “It was his illness. According to what everyone said, he loved his mom and they got along. But he was having a psychotic break; he didn’t know what he was doing.”

  “But he needed help before he got dangerous,” Rita said. “That’s why I always carry this with me.” She held up her key chain with a small can of pepper spray on it. That pink canister was going to be her first responder to any possible violent behavior by her son that could put her in danger. Rita was a realist. She loved her son dearly, but she also knew he didn’t take his meds regularly and wasn’t always in control of himself. Truth was, none of us knew for sure how far our sons’ anger might go someday, and we parents could find ourselves facing it, point blank.

  By the next evening, the rains descended—finally. Some of the showers were soft; you could feel the earth soaking up as much water as it could, the sunburnt grass a parched sponge. Other times, the rain came in sheets. I could see streams running down my yard into a small creek along the road. During the rainfall’s peak intensity, the whole street flowed like a river. Even the morning afterward, on my way to the office, I could hear the sound of rushing water in what was now a roadside creek. As I passed by the culvert that carried it away across a nearby field, I thought about how humans are such skillful engineers within the physical world. We can plan for storms from nature; we know how to build infrastructure all around us to divert torrential waters. But where are the culverts built to handle the storm surges that can occur i
n someone’s mind, especially if the person has a psychiatric disorder?

  When Dylan came by on his bike to mow the grass the following weekend, the lawn had turned green almost overnight from the sudden rains. I noticed right off that there was an extra bounce in his step that day. It was Friday, so after he finished, I asked if he’d gotten paid at work. “Yes!” he said, beaming. He went on to say it wasn’t in cash this time. He’d received an actual paycheck with money taken out for taxes and social security. For Dylan this made all the difference: it meant he was actually on a payroll now. Wow! It had been a couple of years since he’d laid eyes on a printed paycheck with his name on it. He underscored the marvel of it by stating that he’d actually gotten more than usual because it was a check for two weeks of work.

  “Good, you see, you were making that amount all the time. You just had to wait to get officially paid,” I told him. We were both relieved.

  “I know,” he said. “I have to get rid of this fear I have. Even the fear of taking a job as a bricklayer’s assistant because I see it as the first step toward being a bricklayer’s assistant forever. Like that’s going to be my lot in life.”

  “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that,” I said, sounding confident. We jumped from bricks to stepping-stones. How you have to hop from one stone to another sometimes, just to see where you can go next.

  “Guess I just have to put my fears aside and trust that it’s going to work out,” Dylan concluded. “Even that girl at AA: what she said, well, at first it made me mad. Of course, I felt bad. But then later after I thought about it, what Amanda said made sense, and it sounds like a good idea for her. So we’re friends; we still talk. It’s OK.”

  Before he took off, he agreed to put his week’s allowance as well as $120 of his pay into savings. He decided to entrust it to me, because otherwise the whole wad could get spent in one weekend. Guess he didn’t trust himself.