Scream All Night

by Derek Milman

  To her, I’m a filthy, mocking reflection of everything wrong with her. This is kind of how she always saw me—as something alien to her. That’s always been part of her narrative. And I’m getting more and more of a sense why.

  She walks over to us, but instead of sitting on the edge of the bed, which would have been a more natural choice, she squeezes between us on the sofa. Oren and I both move over to make room, our clothing getting caught under us. Our mother, sitting between us now, takes both our hands. We sit there like that for a minute. I wonder what we’d look like if someone took our photo. It would probably be amazing, one of those uncomfortable-looking things that get circulated online and become memes.

  Kid Who Once Played a Zombie and His Weird Brother Visiting Their Mom at a Mental Hospital.

  “But I had another baby,” my mom says, looking off, “didn’t I?”

  “It’s just us,” says Oren, patting her on the knee. “Your two boys.”

  “No, there was a third,” she says in a thin voice.

  I lean toward her. “Did you and Dad have another kid? Did Dad have—”

  Oren gives me a sharp, bug-eyed look, like: Don’t encourage this.

  “Those babies are bones,” she says. “Corpses behind the castle walls. Poisoned wine. Masons. Bricks and mortar. Tombs and revenge.”

  “Mother,” says Oren. “Stop that! There are no dead babies buried at Moldavia.”

  “Disposed of. Behind the stone walls. Dead babies in little jester costumes. No longer drunk. With bells that no longer ring.”

  “Let’s have some tea,” says Oren, clearing his throat loudly, standing up, disassembling our odd little triptych. “How does that sound?” he says, spinning around and bending forward to face our mother, hands on his hips.

  “That sounds lovely,” says my mom. “You can go out into the hallway, speak with one of the nurses, and they’ll take care of it. I can have a little time with Dario.”

  “Wonderful!” says Oren, needing no further excuse to barrel out of the room.

  My mom stands up and wanders over to the window. It’s started raining again, and she listens to it, her head cocked to one side, her back to me. Then she turns around, rolling her eyes a little at the closed door. “He treats me like a child.”

  Suddenly I’m frozen, locked out of myself. It’s like what happened when I was trying to say good-bye to my dad. I feel panic; terrified I’m going to miss some last chance. Then I manage to speak: “I wouldn’t like that either.”

  She gives me a mischievous look. “So I play with him a little bit.”

  I laugh. “You mess with him?”

  “Maybe a little.” She smiles. “You should go to college, Dario. See the world. Learn new things. Meet new people.”

  I didn’t expect her to have an opinion on my future. It’s gotten a lot darker and duskier in the room, which makes all the portraits seem more alive.

  “You weren’t treated right by this family,” my mother tells me.

  I look at her and start to feel so awful I don’t even know what to do.

  “I’m sorry about that, my peach.”

  “You weren’t either,” I say, wanting her to stop calling me that.

  She sits beside me on the couch again. As my throat lumps up, my chest heaves, and tears spill out of my eyes. My head falls onto her lap. I’m imagining her as she was, from the past. I have to. Because I wouldn’t let this woman, the one here with me right now, ever touch me. She runs her fingers through my hair like she used to when I was little, her nails lightly scraping my scalp. “They had no right to take you from me.”

  I can never connect to her delusions. I want her like she was. If I accept another version of her, it feels like a lie because it’s not my mom, it’s an imposter.

  “No one took me from you,” I say, my voice tight and garbled, knowing she does not like her beliefs challenged. “Who do you think—”

  “Oh, Christ, Dario, I was a breeder!” she says, raising her voice.

  She takes my head off her lap—not roughly, but not gently either. “I was impregnated by them.” She stands and paces the room. “I know what’s going on,” she says, “bringing you back here like this—trying to quell me into submission. I know what they’re up to.”

  I sit up fast. “Mom . . . don’t . . .”

  “They keep me locked up. They medicate me to keep me docile. I’m being sequestered and silenced.” She looks at one of the portraits with a tragic, knowing sigh. “I paint all the ones I know. They walk among us, disguising themselves as humans. When the siren call comes, the rest of them will rise from beneath the purple sea, transform water into blood, sand into bone, plant fiber into muscle. They’ll build their bodies from earth’s raw materials, form an elemental army, join with their fellow sleepers, and they’ll wake the dark world up.”

  “Mom,” I say haltingly, “those are delusions. None of that is true. Please . . . come back to me. . . . Mom, please don’t go away. . . .”

  She fixes me in her livid gaze like I’m part of the system oppressing her. I recognize that look in her eyes—vacant yet alert.

  “There will be a war with them—thrust from a supernova with no heartbeats, no souls,” she continues, “who we thought were our children, our friends, our neighbors—those cunning serpents from Cassiopeia. Those motherfuckers.”

  “Mom,” I say, calmly but firmly, wondering where Oren is with that goddamn tea. “I’m your youngest son. You wanted to see me. So see me.”

  “I see you!” she cries, her arms outstretched. “But I don’t know what you are.”

  “Yes you do, Mom.”

  She reaches for me, but then she retracts her hands like I’ll bite them off. “Good-bye, my peach,” she says, so softly I almost don’t even hear her.

  She looks me up and down, her face brittle, suspicious.

  I press my fingers into the back of my neck. “I’m right here.”

  “They come every night,” she says, gesturing out the window. “They nest in the trees—I see their russet eyes staring in at me. But I’m too old for them now. . . .”

  “Mom, I’m sorry.” All I wanted in the world was to have her back. I thought I could do it somehow—because it had been so long, and she’s been on all these meds, and then she was back and the world seemed calm and still and soft. And then she was gone again. She appears and disappears to me, a hologram through a faulty transmission.

  “I don’t know you,” she says, brows furrowed. And I believe her.

  She grabs my portrait, and starts kicking it—harder and harder with her scuffed, dull-blue, old-lady shoes, until my Spanish Renaissance face is pulverized, the canvas shredded to bits, ruined.

  I back away, reaching for the door. For some reason I see Hayley in my mind, a little girl again, at the top of the staircase, dropping that marble down all the way—thump thump thump—until it reaches my open, cupped hands.

  A planet and its moon . . .

  Then what seems like fifty people rush into the room and grab at my mom, trying to restrain her. I become a pinball in a nightmare arcade. But there’s a moment I come face-to-face with my mom, in the throes of her psychosis. She’s thrashing like a fish out of water, fighting all the orderlies, who are just trying to get hold of her arms.

  And I think: She’s missed her own life, not just mine.

  And this could be me one day—not being able to trust my own senses, not knowing who I am. Reality as I know it could reveal itself as an illness other people tell me I have. And they’ll fight to flush truth through my misfiring brain, drowning in a hellish matrix of my own making. So I move forward, through all the mayhem, and kiss my mother softly on the lips. They’re rough, cold, and brittle like a dead, crisping rose.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Twicking Ham Station

  OREN AND I SIT IN THE CAR, IN THE HOSPITAL PARKING LOT.

  “Well, that went well,” says Oren, sucking on his pipe.

  The engine is running; the turn signal i
s on for some reason, clicking away, but we haven’t moved from our spot.

  “I’m sorry,” says Oren, turning to me. “I’ve never seen her like that before.”

  “I guess . . . I’ve always been a trigger. . . .”

  I may have waited too long. But, weirdly, I feel almost relieved that I went, that I saw her. There’s only a small, well-lit corner of her mind that was yearning to see me. For a second she shared that part of herself with me, and we sort of forgave one another for falling out of each other’s lives. I never realized how much I needed to do that until it happened. I’ll never get my mom back. I always knew that, I think.

  “There’s always hope,” says Oren. “They’re making breakthroughs . . . new medications, technological discoveries . . . optogenetics. It’s just faulty wiring in the brain.”

  I run my hand along the seat belt. “Yeah, just.”

  Oren chews his lip. He seems like he wants to say something else.

  “What?” I say.

  “Mom was the one who asked to be hospitalized. No one ever took her away.”

  I look at Oren, all blurry, through tears pooling in my eyes.

  “She didn’t trust herself anymore,” he says. “She was worried she would hurt you. She never wanted to return to Moldavia.”

  I frown. “Even after I left?”

  Oren nods.

  Jesus. All this time, my mom was protecting me—from herself. She sacrificed what was left of her freedom to do that, even when it didn’t matter anymore.

  “She was more comfortable here,” says Oren. “She feels safer here.”

  I lick my lips. “You didn’t want to tell me this?”

  “Because,” says Oren, adjusting his cap, “I figured you’d think she was running away from Dad . . . that she wanted protection from him. You’d go dark with it.”

  I’d go dark with it. “Would I be wrong?”

  “I think she felt safer here because she was afraid of hurting someone she loved.”

  I look at the main hospital building—all the quaint windows, with their blinds drawn, everything picturesque and dry after the rainstorm. You’d never guess the tumult and anguish raging behind those walls.

  “Just thought you should know,” says Oren.

  I tap the dash. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Oren pulls out of the parking lot with a lurch and a loud screech.

  I watch the trees flying against the gray sky. After a while, I frown out the window. “Where are we going? This isn’t the way back.”

  “Well, I wanted to take you to lunch,” says Oren.

  “Isn’t it a little late for lunch?”

  “A bit. But haven’t you worked up an appetite after watching Mom have a psychotic break?”

  “I could eat.”

  “Good. I planned this ahead as a little surprise.”

  “Planned what?”

  He turns off the highway and down a few rough unpaved roads, and then I realize where he’s taking me.

  Twicking Ham Station was the only place we’d ever leave the castle to go to, usually for a special occasion like my birthday. Beside a reedy marsh, in these protected wetlands, in the middle of nowhere, sits an old-fashioned train car. The honeyed light emanating from its windows is the only speck of warm color for miles.

  I remember minty milkshakes with cumulus clouds of whipped cream and nuclear-red cherries on top; spears of fried pickle with red-pepper aioli; creamy shrimp salad sandwiches on toasted raisin bread; waiters in green-striped seersucker jackets twirling around trays with tall burgers, discs of onion and tomato toothpicked on top, fries piled in paper cones. White Formica tables with red chairs, each with a window of its own, facing the marsh outside. When I was a kid I always begged to go.

  “And this is for you, Birthday Boy,” says Aida, handing me something wrapped in light-blue paper designed with spring flowers and shooting stars. She gives me a big, wet kiss on the cheek. People are hooting. Empty fountain glasses are everywhere, the milkshakes they contained having long been sucked away, leaving a chalky residue.

  There are so many purple balloons, they filter out the light and form a sort of giant berry over my head. Streamers and party hats and party whistles. It all sparkles and squeaks. I’m choking inside the revelry, hot and tired, at the point in my own party when what’s been looked forward to for so long is more than halfway over, and there’s only the end of it now, the slow quieting down, leaving an uncertain emptiness ahead.

  I tear off the wrapping paper. The gift isn’t what I expected, but I don’t even know what I expected. It’s a leather journal and a ballpoint pen clipped onto it with my initials engraved, royally, in gold. “So you can write down all your thoughts,” says Aida. “And maybe one day you’ll have your own stories to tell. The world will want to hear them. When you feel sad, just write. It will help, Dario.”

  “Thank you. I love it,” I tell her, even though I’m unsure at first; I wanted a video game for a console I don’t even have, and probably never will. But I know Aida is giving me all she can, and I love her for that.

  “Here,” says Hayley, grabbing the pen. She’s wearing a pointy gold party hat and a cute polka-dot dress. She writes on the cover of the journal, on the blank space where the owner’s name is supposed to be handsomely inscribed, claiming all the brilliance to follow: Dario’s Lame Emo Boy Journal.

  “Oh, Hayley,” says Aida, waving her off with both hands, but laughing a little as she goes, rejoining a cluster of drunken adults near the bar. I’m laughing too.

  “Maybe you should write me something inside,” I say. “Just for me.”

  She laughs. “Maybe I will.”

  “Something important . . . too important to say to my face.”

  There are way too many adults and way too few kids here for this to be a normal kid’s birthday party. But I’m not a normal kid having a normal childhood. A magician they hired got a flat tire and never arrived, and someone ordered a birthday cake, but something went wrong and that never came either. But everyone tried, although I haven’t seen my dad in hours and have no idea if he left. And he forgot to get me a present. But everyone else is here at Twicking Ham Station, fighting to bring a semblance of celebration to my tenth.

  Hayley leans forward and kisses me on the cheek. “Happy birthday,” she whispers in my ear. I touch a finger to my lips, and then to my heart. I saw a guy do this in a movie and thought it was cool. Hayley puts her hands to her mouth, stifling a giggle.

  We sit there while I get a few more small gifts from kind and generous crew members as the party rages on around us, pretty much forgetting about me, and I wait till it fizzles to nothing and it’s over so I can go home.

  Oren swerves into the mostly deserted parking lot. When we go inside, we’re shown to a booth in the back. The place is pretty much like I remembered, but it’s quiet inside—the time of day when old people wearing baseball caps chow down on what could be their last Thai chicken noodle soup. Any place is different when it’s quiet and too bright. Oren takes off his coat, folding it neatly beside him. Then he takes off his cap, setting it on top of his coat, and starts flipping through the forty-five-page menu, humming. He orders us some burgers and fries and milkshakes and then orders himself a slippery nipple.

  “There’s alcohol in that,” I tell him.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Don’t you have to drive us home?”

  Ignoring the question, Oren produces a package wrapped in plain brown paper, tied with string, like a parcel from the Great Depression. He pushes it toward me. “Happy birthday. It’s your birthday, isn’t it?”

  I gasp. Oh my God. It’s June second. I turned eighteen today. Today.

  “Jude!” I say, grabbing the sides of my head.

  “Jude?”

  “His birthday is two days before mine. I forgot. We all forgot!”

  “Okay, relax, I’ll get him something when we return.”

  “I can’t believe I lost track of time like that. We
were so busy moving in and—”

  “Open your gift,” says Oren, impatiently.

  I tear off the brown paper and stare at a book, totally confused. Oren leans back against the booth looking pleased and smug. “It’s the autobiography of the popular actor Colin Hanks,” he says.

  I blink a bunch of times. “This exists?”

  “Obviously! I ordered it from Amazon dot com.” He holds up two fingers. “There were only two copies left.”

  Colin Hanks is on the cover, wearing this black Henley, his head propped against his fist, a wry smile on his face. The book is titled Wake Up, It’s Me.

  Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to spend a day in Oren’s world. Everything would seem possible. You could lift a finger and expect a butterfly to land on it. “What made you get this for me?”

  “I just knew you’d like it,” he replies. “He’s an actor, you’re an actor.” Oren shrugs like the choice was so obvious it was painful. “You know he’s the son of Tom Hanks? The award-winning comedic actor?”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Did I do well?”

  I look up at him. “I can’t wait to dive in. Thank you.”

  “Oh, good.” Oren smiles broadly and then flings the car keys at me, which hit me in the face, right below my eye.

  “Ow!”

  “Also, you can have my car,” he says nonchalantly.

  “Your car?”

  At that moment, the waiter places Oren’s drink in front of him.

  “My slippery nipple!” he says way, way too loudly.

  The cocktail looks vile, layered with different shades of brown cream. I feel sick just looking at it. He lifts the glass. “There’s sambuca in this!” he says excitedly. “Cheers! Do you have a driver’s license, Dar?”

  “Yeah.” I made sure I got mine while I was still at Keenan.

  “I don’t use the Bug much. I thought maybe . . .”