by Nancy N. Rue
I didn’t tell him my mother didn’t take showers during In-Bed Phases.
“I’ll go to her bedroom window,” I said, putting up my hand to keep him from following me.
He did anyway.
Of course, once I was there I couldn’t do a whole lot. It was like Fort Knox with those bars on the window, and I wasn’t tall enough to see in anyway. I just yelled “Mom!” over and over, and although I didn’t mean for it to, my voice got higher and more freaked-out sounding every time. This was weird, even for her.
Finally Lou stepped past me and peered in. I could tell by the way his fingers tightened around the bars that he didn’t just see my mother with the covers over her head.
“Is she there?” I screamed at him. “What’s wrong? Is she– what’s going on?”
I was clawing at the back of his Hawaiian shirt, trying to pull him out of the way. He turned around and pressed me against him with an arm that was surprisingly strong. Even as I struggled to get away, he fished a cell phone out of his pocket and punched in three numbers. I didn’t have to see them to know they were 9-1-1.
CHAPTER FOUR
Twenty-four hours before, I didn’t even know I had a father. Now I was in the UAB Hospital hallway with him, waiting for somebody to tell me if my mother was going to survive swallowing half a container of pills. My hamster wheel spun with what had happened in between: him busting through the back door–okay, so maybe he had been a Navy SEAL–and giving her CPR, paramedics putting a mask on her face and hauling her off in an ambulance, and me screaming, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” until finally, in the truck, this man who said he was my father told me she’d tried to commit suicide, only he didn’t think she really wanted to die or she would have taken the whole bottle.
“Is there somebody we need to call, Jessie?” he said now.
I stopped pacing a path on the floor in front of him and said “Chelsea–no, wait, not Chelsea.”
“Who’s Chelsea?” he said.
“My best friend. Maybe Marcus. No, I can’t tell him–he’s probably mad at me for–no, I can’t tell him.”
“And Marcus is…?”
“My other best friend.”
I went back to pacing.
“I was talking about an adult,” Lou said. “Is your mother seeing anybody? Does she have a best friend?”
“She used to,” I said. “They had a fight. There’s Garry– he’s her accountant–”
“No other friends? Relatives?”
I looked at him over my shoulder. “My grandfather.”
He almost made a face, I could tell.
“He’s in Cancun or someplace,” I said. “He sent me a postcard. Mom would ground me for the rest of my life if I called him.”
“You two are really alone,” Lou said.
I didn’t answer him because he sounded like he was talking to himself. Besides, for once I couldn’t argue.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll stay until we figure something out.”
What was to figure out? I would go home and do what I always did when my mother was In-Bed. Her not being there for a night or two wouldn’t make that much difference, right?
I got a weird chill up my back.
“You cold?” he said. “I can get you a blanket.”
The door we were guarding swung open, and we both pounced on the guy in green scrubs who came through.
“You’re Ms. Hatcher’s family?” he said.
“I’m-Jessie-I’m-her-daughter,” I said as if it were all one word.
“I’m Jessie’s father,” Lou said.
The guy in the green looked at both of us and nodded. “I can see that. Okay–well, the news is partly good. She’s physically stable–no brain damage that we can determine at this time–”
“Brain damage?” I said. “Like, a vegetable?”
“There is none, thanks to whoever gave her CPR.”
I looked at Lou, but he didn’t say anything.
“Her vital signs are good,” the guy said, “so we’re going to move her onto the–”
“Why can’t she just come home?” I said. “I can take care of her.”
The guy–who I’d figured out by now was a doctor because he wasn’t actually answering our questions–looked at me and then at Lou.
Lou rubbed the back of his head. “Jessie’s very protective of her mom.”
“She’ll be in good hands here. I’m sorry–” He reached out his hand to shake Lou’s. “I’m Dr. Blah-Blah. I’ve been taking care of Ms. Hatcher, and I’m turning her over to Dr. Blah-Blah, who is a psychiatrist…”
I’m sure their names weren’t Blah-Blah and Blah-Blah, but that was about all I was catching. This guy was talking about them putting my mother in the loony ward, so I didn’t care who they were.
“She isn’t crazy,” I said. “She doesn’t need to be locked up.”
“We aren’t going to ‘lock her up,’” Dr. Blah-Blah said. “We’re just going to make sure she doesn’t hurt herself again, and we’re going to try to figure out why she wanted to in the first place.”
I turned my glare on Lou, but he was nodding at the doctor like he totally agreed.
“You don’t get it!” I said. “She just got upset. She never did this before. She’ll get out of bed in a couple of days and start cleaning our house with a toothbrush and staying up all night designing purses–”
I stopped, because the doctor was gazing at me like I’d just discovered the cure for cancer. He said, “That helps a lot– Jessie, is it?”
No. I’m not Jessie. I’m some idiot who blurts stuff out and gets her mother in more trouble and–
And–I didn’t know what. Because Lou was right. Without her, I really was alone.
“You okay?” Dr. Blah-Blah said.
“How about a blanket?” Lou said–probably because I was shaking so hard I could barely stand up. I didn’t have any choice but to let him put his arm around my shoulder and half-carry me to a chair in the hall. I couldn’t say what happened after that, except that Lou kept saying, “God’s got this handled, Jessie. He’s got it handled.”
Why, I wondered, should I trust that God would all of a sudden show up now and make everything okay?
That anybody would.
I didn’t wake up until noon the next day. When I did, I smelled bacon cooking, and I sat up straight in the bed and looked around to make sure they hadn’t checked me into a hospital. I had never smelled that in our house, not even during a No-Bed Phase. It would have made too much of a mess.
I dragged myself into the kitchen. Lou was at the stove using a black bath towel as an apron and flipping a pancake into the air. It landed perfectly on the spatula, like something you’d see on a cooking show.
“You want blueberries in yours?” Lou said without looking at me.
“We don’t have any blueberries,” I said.
“We do now. There’s juice for you on the table.”
I glanced over at the glass filled with orange juice I also didn’t think we had. It was on a green place mat–where had that come from?–next to a cloth napkin with the letter H stitched on it. Nobody had set the table since Heidi left–or was it Tammy? One of those nannies my mother had fired when she was No-Bed–until she’d stopped hiring them at all four years ago.
I drifted to the table, and Lou put a plate with a stack of pancakes in front of me. They were melting their own butter. My mouth watered.
“When’s my mom coming home?” I said.
Lou handed me a warm pitcher full of syrup and watched me pour it before he said, “Not for at least two weeks.”
I left the syrup dripping over my plate. Lou took the pitcher from me and wiped off the spout.
“There’s good news, though,” he said. “She told the doctor this morning that she wants help.”
“I said I’d help her!” I said. “I do it all the time. Except when I made the washer overflow–which wasn’t my fault. We were out of detergent and I tried to use the dish stuff–”
>
“Not that kind of help, Jess,” Lou said.
He sat down across from me. It didn’t look right, a man in our kitchen.
“What kind of help then?” I said.
“Psychiatric help. Doctors who can get her on medication and therapists who can work through her issues with her.”
“She won’t do that,” I said. “She doesn’t believe in it.”
Lou’s auburn eyebrows went up. “She’s been told before that she needs treatment?”
I chomped down on my tongue so I wouldn’t say, “No. She’s been told I need treatment–and I am NOT telling you what happened with that.”
Lou sat back and put his hands flat on the table because he was getting ready to say something heavy. It bothered me that I was already getting the way he talked with his body.
“You know,” he said, “sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you’ll admit you need help.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for that,” I said, stabbing the stack of pancakes with my fork.
“For what?”
“For making her hit rock bottom. She wouldn’t have taken those pills if you hadn’t shown up.”
He didn’t even blink. “How many days had she been sleeping all the time before I came?”
“Not that many.”
“And before that, was she ‘cleaning the house with a toothbrush’?”
“No.” She was going through my room with a garbage bag.
“I may have been the last straw,” Lou said as he leaned on the table to look straight at me with those eyes like mine. “But if it hadn’t been me, eventually it would have been something else. I’m actually glad it was me–that I was here for you.”
I gave the pancakes a slap with the fork and sent syrup splashing over the side of the plate.
“I know you’re used to taking care of yourself,” he said, “and you obviously don’t do that bad a job of it.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?” I said.
“But two weeks is a long time, and by law you can’t stay alone without adult supervision. I think you should come home with me, Jess, just until your mom gets back on her feet.”
I left the fork standing up in the stack and scraped my chair back. “I’ll find my own adult supervision,” I said, and left him there with his bacon and his butter and his bad ideas.
I called Chelsea first, because she had more adult supervision than anybody I knew.
“My mom has to be away,” I told her. “Do you think I could stay with you for two weeks?”
She loved the idea. Her mom hated it. She said the last two times I spent the night with Chelsea, we got in trouble. How was I supposed to know that website we ended up in was going to be way beyond PG-13? And that the phone calls to try to talk to the Jonas Brothers were going to run up a two-hundred-dollar bill? My mom paid it, but that obviously wasn’t enough for Chelsea’s mom.
I actually tried my grandfather next, but he evidently didn’t get cell phone service in Cancun or Aruba or wherever he was, because my calls went straight to his voice mail, and then I didn’t know what to say so I hung up.
That left Marcus. I couldn’t ask him if I could stay with him. I mean, even though he was my second-best friend he was a guy. And after I left him sitting outside my house for hours in the heat, I was afraid to call him and have him tell me to get lost. I couldn’t actually imagine him saying that, but I didn’t want to hear it if he did.
My only hope was that when I told my mother, she would hire somebody to stay with me. There was no way she was letting me go off to St. Somewhere with a guy I hardly knew–a guy who, for some reason I still didn’t get, had suddenly decided to become the poster boy for fatherhood.
So I asked Lou if I could see Mom. That evidently required the passing of a law or something, because it took a whole day and about a hundred phone calls conducted in Lou-whispers to get me to the hospital. About three steps into the wing that had a name so long I didn’t even try to figure it out, I was so creeped out I was sorry I’d ever thought this was a good idea.
We–Lou and I–had to go through three sets of locked doors that clanged shut behind us like they do in prison movies. All of them had tiny windows in them and buzzer things that had to be pushed before anybody would let us go any farther. Dr. Blah-Blah had lied when he said my mother wasn’t on lockdown.
Finally the guy leading us–who looked like he should be in the ring on WWE instead of in a hospital–told us we could go into this one room, and that he would be right outside in case we needed him.
“For what?” I said.
Lou started to go in with me, but I planted my hand on the doorjamb.
“I want to talk to her by myself,” I said.
WWE shook his too-big head. “You have to have an adult with you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re underage.”
I opened my mouth to tell him he was the one who was nuts, but Lou nudged me into the room. I made a mental note to tell him later that I didn’t like people touching me, and then I forgot, because I saw my mother.
She was sitting in front of a window in a blue chair. It was the only piece of furniture in there except for the bed. The walls were blue too, and the bedspread was flowered, and I was pretty sure she hated that décor.
And then I knew she hadn’t really noticed it. Although her hair had been washed and brushed into a neat ponytail and the light-green sweats she was wearing didn’t look like she’d slept in them, her eyes were still smudgy underneath and her bony shoulders seemed to be reaching for each other in front of her. If she was any better than she was before they stuck her in here, I sure couldn’t see it.
Especially when she looked at me and burst into tears-with-out-tears. She put her rickety arms out to me.
My mother and I were never snuggly with each other, so it took me a second to figure out that she wanted to hold me. I leaned over and sort of patted her back while she hung on. It was like hugging the coatrack in our foyer.
“I’ve messed up my life, Jessie,” she said into my neck. “I have to fix it.”
“You will,” I said. “You always do.”
She pushed me to arm’s length to look at me. Her almost-no-color eyes seemed to have a hard time focusing.
“I really have to fix it this time,” she said. “It’s going to take a while.”
I shrugged, which was hard to do with her hanging onto my shoulders with hands like claws. “That’s okay.”
“Longer than you can stay by yourself.”
I glared back at Lou, who was leaning against the wall and staring at the floor like he was trying to be invisible. But he was listening to every word–I knew it.
I knelt in front of Mom and tried to get my face up close to hers. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” I whispered. “You could get somebody to stay at the house with me until you get fixed. I was thinking Millie. I know you fired her a long time ago, but she was the best of all of them and you didn’t fire her because she did anything wrong–you just thought I was old enough not to have a nanny anymore, which was true, but since they say I can’t stay by myself for two weeks”–I tossed another glare back at Lou–“she would be perfect…”
My mother was shaking her head. “No, Jessie. In the first place, you can hardly be trusted to stay two hours by yourself, let alone two weeks.”
I clamped my teeth together to keep from screaming. Even when she was at–what did Lou call it?–rock bottom, she could still reach up and scratch my heart out.
“And I don’t know how long I’m going to be in here,” she was saying, “or what kind of work I’m going to have to do when I get out–just–no, that isn’t going to work for me.”
“I’ll cooperate–I swear I will. I’m not going to drive a nanny nuts like I did back then.”
No, I did not just use the word nuts on the psych ward. I put my hand over my mouth, but Mom didn’t appear to have noticed. Her eyes were losing focus again.
&nb
sp; “I don’t have what it takes to argue with you,” she said. “I’ve already agreed to send you home with Lou.”
What happened to me then can only be described as a nuclear meltdown. WWE came in from the hall. Lou pulled me off my mother. Mom herself turned back to the window while somebody hauled me out of there. By the time Lou deposited me into the front seat of the truck, I was hoarse from screaming at him.
Through it all, he never said a word–not until we were back in my driveway. Even then, all he said was, “I’m so sorry, Jessie.”
“You’re not that sorry,” I said, “or you wouldn’t make me go with you.”
“That’s not what I’m sorry about,” he said.
Over the next two days, as Lou did all the stuff he had to do to become my temporary guardian, I didn’t ask him what he was sorry about. It wasn’t going to change anything, and I was too busy doing what desperation made me do. I wasn’t good at planning. I just knew that if had to go to St. Somewhere with this almost total stranger, then I had to do whatever it took to get back here to my own life as soon as possible. Back to where I had at least a little bit of control over what happened to me. I had to have that, or I was going to end up in the room with my mother. I might even have gone for that if I hadn’t wanted to flush her down the toilet for setting this up behind my back. Like she said, she’d messed up her life. Now she was messing up mine.
I could only come up with two things to do. First, I called Marcus.
“I know you probably hate me now, and I don’t blame you,” I said the very second he answered the phone. “And I swear I’ll make it up to you when I get back–”
“Where are you going?” he said.
I stopped and blinked because Marcus never interrupted me when I was on a roll.
“Uh, my mom’s…away,” I said, “and she’s making me go off with this…relative I hardly even know–”
“How long are you gonna be gone?”
His voice was sounding panicky, at least for Marcus.
“Not long if I can help it,” I said. “Or if you can. I know the last time I asked you for help I ditched you, but that wasn’t my fault, trust me–”
“What do you need?”