“I'm afraid you inherited my attitudes toward illness, baby.” She touches my wrist, lets me go. “It's hard to know what to do for a person who's sick.”
“Especially someone—” I halt. “When she would be so afraid. So afraid.”
My mother nods. Then she leans forward, pointing. “Oh, look! It's the graveyard! Stop, stop!”
It's the graveyard from my dream, spread out on the top of a hill, far from anything. We get out, and both of us shiver in the brisk wind coming up from the valley. I take out a red sweater that Jack brought me from Ireland the last time he went. Its cottony warmth is the perfect weight. My mother needs me to open the trunk so she can get her coat out, and she shimmies into it with a “Brr!”
“Do you think we should go in?” I ask. It's fenced to keep cows out, but there are two of them inside anyway peacefully munching grass between headstones.
“I like cows,” my mother says. “They're so cute. I like their eyes.”
“They're stupid, though.”
“Not too stupid. They outsmarted the fence.” She strikes out through the long dry grass toward the gate, and I follow, thinking if anyone yells at us, it will be her fault.
Within, she pauses and looks around. “I know why she paints it.”
“Me, too.” We walk along a line of graves for children, every single one of them piled high with pinwheels and plastic flowers and dolls and toys. They're vividly bright in the dark day—pinks and purples and yellows and oranges celebrating the fact that this child once walked the earth and lived here and was loved and is remembered. “It's so joyful.”
My mother reaches out to set a pinwheel spinning, silver and red and turquoise. “I don't know how anyone bears to lose a child.”
“I know.”
She shakes her head. “No, you really don't. Not until you have a child of your own.”
“I can imagine, though.”
“Maybe.” Her smile is meant to be kind, but it irks me anyway. It's so all-knowing, so superciliously sure.
“A person doesn't have to live through something to know what it's like or how it feels.”
Reaching into her pocket, she takes out a cigarette and lights it. “There are some things you can probably understand without going through them.” She walks on through the graves, and is so sure I'll trail along behind that I almost don't. Her cigarette annoys me, and I circle to the other side. “This is probably not one of them.”
She pauses by a short iron fence enclosing three graves. Sisters, I can see by the headstones. The birth dates are not there, leaving me to wonder if they were maybe triplets born too soon or lost in some epidemic or a car accident. I find myself crossing my arms across my belly.
My imagination fills in a picture of a family in an adobe house, on the day these three died. The sun shining too hot, flies buzzing on in their lazy way as if there was nothing changed, and a mother—
“You go along in your life,” Eldora says, “thinking everything is like so.” She spreads her hands, palms up, to show an expectation. “Then you see your baby's eyes for the first time, and everything is different.” She flips her hands over, cups them to hold something precious. “Right then, forever.”
It was Gypsy my mother saw first. She was born before I was, six minutes ahead. My mother didn't even know she was having twins until, while holding her daughter and cooing to her (or so I've always imagined), the nurse said, “Hold on! There's another baby!”
“And there were two of you at once,” she says now. “My arms were overflowing and there was absolutely nothing bigger in the world. Nothing.”
My heart lurches and I nearly spill it out to her, my secret. Nearly say, Mom, I'm pregnant, what do I do? But then I think of her reaction, of her excitement, of her way of taking everything over, and I don't. It makes me angry again, that I don't have the sort of mother who would be wise and calm and easy. I move away from her, walking hard, a wash of absurd tears in my eyes.
I can be so cruel to my mother sometimes, but in a lot of ways she deserves it. She really does suck up all the available oxygen in a room. She's self-centered, the star of every stage, every set, every everything, always. She'll make it about her somehow, this baby, and I won't be able to stand it.
While we're on the subject, what kind of mother would I be, anyway, with an example like that to follow? I'm just as selfish and self-centered as she is.
Only I'll be even worse; I'll be controlling. I'll see to it that things are taken care of, by golly. I know this because other parents tease me about it. When the newspapers or television report something terrible that happened to a child, my answer is always, “Why didn't the parents take better care of him?”
Not just in terms of kids getting snatched out of a front yard (Why don't they make them play in the back?) or a baby getting killed in a car accident (use a freaking car seat!), either. It's things like choking (Don't give them grapes and peanuts, for heaven's sake!) or poisonings. Watch them, watch out for them, keep them safe. Get credentials from the day care, don't let strange teenagers walk away with them.
And I can see how I'll take this into further life—battling with teachers and walking her to school and warning her about strangers.
God! How can I possibly face such a huge task? How can I keep her safe in such a dangerous world?
My mother comes up behind me and puts her hand on my back. “Something really is bothering you, isn't it, India?”
“I can't talk about it yet.”
“All right.”
A single puffy snowflake catches in her hair, and I look up to see its brothers and sisters. Not so much snow, but enough that I'm worried about the rest of the drive through the mountains. “We should get going.”
My mother nods, but she doesn't move immediately. “Listen.”
I raise my head, looking toward a line of dark pines arrowing into the sky at the edge of the graveyard. There is the distant caw of a raven, but nothing else. “What?”
“The quiet.”
There is that. It's utterly still, only the softness of a wind now and then, the faint clatter of a pinwheel spinning. I turn, looking around me, and think of Gypsy in my dream, dancing through these graves. It's so beautiful!
I wonder if one of the reasons she likes it so much up here is because of the quiet. Maybe it's easier to sort out the real sounds from the not-real sounds. Maybe if it's this quiet, she knows there's no one talking to her, that it's just her voices and she can ignore them.
There is, in me, a sudden shift. I am myself and not, Gypsy and not. She is me and I am her, and I can see through her eyes. It's a ripple up through my abdomen, then my neck. A noise comes out of my throat, and I find my hands over my middle, and I'm turning, looking at the tumble of colors—the oranges and pinks of the flowers piled on the graves, the purple and blue of the mountains, the dark blacks and greens of the pines along the edges. Mostly, I see the exuberance of the piles and piles and piles of flowers and toys and pictures on the graves—it's extravagant and excessive; it's love and dancing and laughing. I close my eyes, breathing through my tears, and finally feel my sister.
“She's okay,” I whisper. I touch my chest. “She's okay.”
Chapter Nineteen
India
When I come back to me, to now, I look at my mother. She's waiting, looking at me. “How I wish I could feel her the way you do.”
“I always tell you.”
“I know.” She shakes her head, smiles the faintest bit. “It's all right. It's what twins do. It's good that you can.”
Back in the car, I say, “When did you know that there was something really wrong with Gypsy?”
“A long time ago. How 'bout you?”
“I started thinking there was something wrong on that trip.”
“Her nightmares were terrible that time.”
“Yeah, but it wasn't that. She was odd that whole trip, just thinking strange things. Like Indians were aliens from outer space, and the crosses were
their method of communication.”
Eldora says nothing. Her fingernails pluck at her skirt.
“Did you notice it, too?”
“I had other things on my mind. Unfortunately.” She opens her purse and takes out her Juicy Fruit. “Want some?”
“Sure.” The snow is starting to fly a little thicker through the trees, and I frown. “God, I hope we don't get stuck in a blizzard up here.”
“How far is it to Santa Fe?”
“Check the map.” I point to the glove box with my yellow gum wrapper. “It's around eighty from Las Vegas to Espanola as far as I can make out. We're more than halfway.”
“It'll be all right.” She folds the map. “She was afraid of me, you know. When she started getting delusional.”
I nod.
“It broke my heart. She was sure I was poisoning her food or setting traps for her.”
“I didn't know that. When was it?”
“Right before she ran away. I'd been trying to get her to a doctor for a couple of months, but your daddy wouldn't hear of it. He kept saying she was just different and he didn't want her labeled and—”
“I thought it was the drugs, making her so weird.”
“That's what he thought, too.”
I think back to those miserable days with Gypsy before she ran away. It was like something out of Go Ask Alice—she was drinking and drugging all the time, sleeping around, never coming home on time. She barely held on at school, passing with D's and the odd C. A's in Art, which was the only reason she kept going, I think. Art class was the one place, she told me later, where she felt the voices weren't totally trying to take her over. Even then, so young—fifteen, sixteen—she was winning awards and prizes for her work, her crosses and graveyards and neon signs and cactuses and sad-faced people.
And it wasn't like Gypsy was the only drinking, drugging, out-of-control teenager on the block. It was an epidemic, but this was the late seventies, and there wasn't much in place yet to get kids sobered up and back on track.
“How did you know it wasn't the drugs, Mom?”
She lifts a shoulder. “I didn't know, exactly. Just had my suspicions. Gypsy used to do little things that reminded me of my mother.”
“Like what?”
“Little things, really. Like sometimes when she'd shake her head like a horse snorting? Remember that? And the hand-wringing. It's so nervous.”
I sigh. “It wouldn't have made much difference, anyway.”
“Maybe it would have,” Eldora almost whispers. “I sometimes think about that. What if they'd gotten her on something when she was younger? Fourteen or fifteen? Maybe she wouldn't've ever had a psychotic episode and maybe now her life would be different. People sometimes do get well, you know.”
“But you didn't know when she was fourteen or fifteen.”
“I knew,” she says. “I guess I didn't want to look at it.” She turns the wedding ring on her finger. “I didn't want to tell your daddy about my mother.”
“He never knew?”
She smiles, and it's somehow enormously sad. “No. He didn't know a lot of things.”
It's selfish, but I say it anyway. “From my angle, I'm glad you waited. I lived in mortal terror for years and years, waiting for it.”
“I never really thought it would show up with you, India. That's the truth. I know the doctors scared you, talking about twins and mental illness and they watched you like hawks, but there was never the slightest worry in my mind.”
That was one of the more brutal aspects of my sister's illness—the twin of a schizophrenic is far more likely to fall to the disease as other relatives, and since it most often doesn't arrive until early adulthood, how would I know if I was to be lucky or unlucky?
I think of those years when I'd been so afraid, all through college and beyond. I kept to myself a lot, watching myself for signs of voices or obsessive behaviors, and believe me, once you start questioning normality, it's easy to find evidence of mental illness. If I found myself walking along, reciting my to-do list on my way to class, I worried, even though it was something I'd always done. If I had a terrible nightmare, I worried. If I double checked something, even the answers from a test, I worried.
And I was so isolated, too. I'd lost Gypsy, my sister, my heart, and I was afraid of anyone new, so I kept to myself. It was how I got into computers so early. They gave me something to do.
I think of the baby inside of me, think of how miserable I was, how much misery is still Gypsy's portion. How can I subject a child to that? How monstrously selfish of me to even consider it! I lean forward, resettle my hands on the wheel.
This is the reason I've kept men at arm's length, kept myself from falling in love. I never wanted to make this choice, and the safest way to avoid it was by never getting too attached to anyone.
And now I know my grandmother was also virulently ill with schizophrenia. How can I possibly curse a child with such a history?
I'll have to have an abortion. It's the only answer. I can't bear to go through it again, and I surely can't bear to sentence someone else to the worry. I will have to find some way to explain to Jack how terrible it is.
I feel nauseous for a minute, and my mother hands me a piece of Juicy Fruit.
“Thanks.”
We drive into Espanola under cover of light snow. The town makes me think of a hostile middle-aged man, eyes narrowed, signs meanly placed, a sense of deafness when you want to ask a question. But the homeless shelter is one that draws Gypsy—she's turned up three or four times here, and she loves to go to Chimayo, a few miles to the east.
There are a lot of descansos along that road. Maybe more than any other place. I count thirty-five on the way down from Truchas.
In front of the shelter, there is a little knot of ragged men, smoking. Their hair and the elbows of their coats are greasy, and most of them carry either that almost amiable hopelessness of a longtime alcoholic, or the too-focused gaze of a schizophrenic. They shift toward us as the car draws their attention, their shoulders hunched against the cold, their eyes following the sleek fins of the Thunderbird.
These, I think, are Gypsy's compatriots. They terrify me.
“We'll go together,” my mother says, grabbing her purse from the floor. She shoves her sunglasses on top of her head and tucks in her blouse as she slams the door. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she says, as if they are bankers at a meeting. “Buenas tardes,” she adds, and I see the small Mexican in the corner, his collar once a bright yellow. Several lift their chins, measure us through the smoke of their cigarettes. Eldora takes out her own cigarettes and lights one, then holds the pack in her hand.
“We're looking for someone,” Eldora says, and points to me. “Her name is Gypsy.”
A youngish one says to an older one, “She means Gitana.”
Spanish for Gypsy. I nod.
He grins at me. “She's your sister, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“She was here last night.”
“Really. Was she with anyone?”
“Nah, man.” He snickers, looks at us, then thinks better of his joke, and an ache goes through me. I don't want to think of what she does to get by when she's out here. How they treat her, what men like these think about her. It makes my knees hurt.
He drags on his cigarette hard and blows out the smoke. “She was drinking. They made her go.”
Eldora hands the half-full pack of cigarettes to the guys. “Thank you. If you see her, you tell her that her mama was looking for her, all right?”
“Is there any point in going in?” I say.
“Might as well.” She drops her cigarette to the ground. “You never know what they'll have to say.”
I guess. But I hate this place. The odor of despair. The stench of urine inside. The hunched, shivering shoulders of a woman on a cot in what looks to be an infirmary. There is so little meat on her bones that I can clearly make out the joint of her wrist, each knuckle on her hand.
“Can
I help you folks?” A man with a white apron comes out. He's in his fifties, his black hair slicked back from a hard-lived face. Acne scars give him a particularly rough expression, and his arms are heavily tattooed.
“Yes,” my mother says. “I'm Eldora Redding, and this is my daughter India, and we're looking for India's sister. She's a schizophrenic and she's gone missing, and we're worried about her. She shows up around here pretty often, really long hair?”
He looks at me for a long moment. “I know her,” he says, but his voice is gruff. “She's drinking, so I can't have her in here.”
“I know,” I say, and take out a card and a pen from my wallet. “But if I give you my phone number, will you call if she shows up?”
He lifts a shoulder. “I guess.”
“I'm sorry, I didn't get your name,” Eldora says, leaning closer to extend her hand, her whispery Marilyn-tones suddenly penetrating his hard-case expression.
“Ramón Medina,” he says, a little less harshly, and accepts her handshake.
“You look so familiar,” Eldora comments. “I wonder if she's painted you. Did you know she's an artist, that her paintings are famous?”
“She's always drawing,” he says. “Famous, though, huh? I didn't know that.”
“She's had shows all over the country. Even in New York.”
“Yeah?” He looks perplexed. “She must have money, then. Why doesn't she hire a nurse or something, somebody to make sure she gets her meds on time?”
My mother gives him a look. Sad and real. “She does,” Eldora says simply. “When she's thinking right. Her daddy died and—” The sigh isn't theatrical this time, just heavy.
His gaze flickers down to the card I've just handed him. He nods. “If I see her, I'll give you a call,” he says to me.
“I don't have the phone with me, but I'm checking messages every evening.”
“She doesn't usually hang around more than a day or two,” Ramón says. “I don't think she likes it here much. Not sure why she comes.”
I notice the scars on his wrists, and look again at the chain around his neck. It's a silver cross, shaped to look like it's made of thorny branches. His face clicks in. Like a director who casts the same actor over and over, Gypsy often reuses faces, and this is one she uses a lot. I smile. Despite his scars and gruff manner, he is always an angel. “You must have been kind to her,” I say, and touch his arm. “Thank you.”
Lady Luck's Map of Vegas Page 14