Love Songs for a Lost Continent

by Anita Felicelli

  Maisie wanted to wait and see. The son she knew was high-spirited and sweet and resourceful. If he was challenging, wasn’t it a teacher’s job to straighten him out? Not the job of prescription drugs? “I don’t want to crush his spirit, I love his spirit,” she told Bran. He nodded, but she could see from the way he turned away and pursed his lips, he didn’t agree.

  Gwen was born four years after Drew, plump and big-cheeked. It was a delayed revelation to discover parenting didn’t have to be all tears and sleepless nights—it could be shot through with incandescent sunshine, joy. Gwen was funny and bold, too, but she could follow rules and pay attention. Before, Maisie hadn’t believed her girlfriends genuinely enjoyed their lives as stay-at-home mothers. She believed they must be at least half-lying, just as she was, to survive it.

  When Drew got kicked out of kindergarten, Maisie relented and took him to a psychiatrist. For all his fancy degrees and the $250 she paid per hour (more than she’d ever paid to see a doctor in all her life), the psychiatrist had no answers, but he recommended a childhood behavioral research group in nearby Menlo Park. At the group’s offices, the researchers put Drew in a soundproof room with a secret window and, from a clandestine vantage, observed how he played with toys. That was where he’d gotten the toy Maserati. A friendly Asian researcher had given it to him because he wouldn’t relinquish it after the observation. Mine! Mine! he’d shouted when they tried to take it away.

  Afterward, he was prescribed Ritalin, but the other children still didn’t want to play with him. It broke her heart when nobody came to his birthday parties—he entertained a bunch of imaginary characters and Gwen with fizzy bottle rockets on the front lawn instead. “Look, Wennie, wouldn’t you like to go to space, too?” The next psychiatrist diagnosed him with pediatric bipolar disorder comorbid with attention deficit disorder and added antipsychotics to the mix. The medications had an effect for a period, but then after a year, they inexplicably stopped working, and he received a new diagnosis. Narcissist. Antisocial behavioral disorder. Intermittent explosive disorder. Labels that seemed to mean nothing and everything at once.

  Whenever Maisie cheerfully advised the parents of difficult children at her daycare to stay positive, that all of this would pass too fast, she reminded herself of the same thing. Maybe these new pills would be the magic bullet. Maybe these would fix whatever was broken inside her son. But by the time he arrived at his teen years in a dark fog of testosterone and licit and illicit psychoactive chemicals, Maisie understood there was no repair, and there never had been. He would be who he was.

  ***

  As befitting an airport named after a poet, the ticket counter clerks are quirky and disorganized, all chunky jewelry and lilac lipstick. Finally, one of them, a woman with a severe hooked nose, finds them a flight with two stops—Madrid and Los Angeles—before it flies into San Jose. Six hours until departure.

  “Should we call Gwen?” Bran asks. “She can get there faster than we can.”

  “What could she do?” In her last conversation with Gwen, a month before, Gwen had informed Maisie she’d moved to Boston in order to escape the permanent drama of her brother, that his problems had defined her childhood and adolescence, and that she was too old to allow them to define her thirties, too. Maisie hasn’t yet told Bran about the fight—Gwen has always been her father’s daughter.

  “Well, talking to someone in a coma improves their chances, doesn’t it?”

  “Vivian’s there. She wasn’t hurt in the accident.”

  “Why? Wasn’t she driving?”

  Maisie shrugs, but is wondering the same thing. Vivian is a redhead in her thirties who works as a server at an upscale French bistro in town and is quite fond of the Renaissance Faire. According to the browser history on the computer in their living room, she special-orders custom corsets on a regular basis. She’s been Drew’s girlfriend for five years and might be the first girlfriend of his who has been a good fit, and yet, what makes her right for Drew—tolerant, mellow, regularly stoned, young, intelligent but not too intelligent—is probably also what led to her not being the one to drive even though Drew was high and buzzed. Side by side, she and Drew look like Jack Sprat and his wife in reverse—she’s tiny and angular, and he’s huge, overweight, and diabetic.

  As Maisie shakes her head, his one other serious girlfriend comes to mind, some Indian girl. Gwen would correct Maisie in an exasperated tone, she’s a woman, not a girl. A lawyer, uppity and mostly aloof, but occasionally too familiar, upsettingly familiar. Not right for Drew.

  Bran liked her and said privately that an Indian girl like that would look out for Drew for the rest of his life, and they’d never worry again. But Maisie was suspicious—what did this foreign lawyer want with Drew? He was loveable, yes, but Maisie harbored no delusions that he was a catch or a status symbol or the sort who’d have success the way other people defined it. There had to be something wrong, deeply wrong, with that girl. And in fact, the Indian girl had emailed once, explaining she was worried Drew was an addict who needed help and revealing he’d borrowed thousands of dollars from them under false pretenses, solely to finance his habit. This shocked Maisie, and then it made her furious that the girl had dared butt into their family business as if she were family! Just a year later, she’d broken up with him for reasons Drew did not divulge, and Maisie had breathed a sigh of relief.

  After hours of waiting in an uncomfortable bucket seat, they are called to board their row at the back of the airplane. Maisie squishes into the middle seat because Bran has prostate problems and will need quick access to the bathrooms. Once the plane is aloft and she hears the loud ding that permits removal of seatbelts, Maisie requests a shot of whiskey. She notices Bran’s mouth is moving. He has been speaking to her, but she hasn’t heard a word, and when he asks if she’s listening, she shakes her head. “I think my friends are tired of me coming to them about Drew.”

  “I’ll call Gwen from Madrid. One of us should be with him.”

  This time, Maisie doesn’t argue. A gnawing sensation in her stomach—she is here and Drew is there, and the ocean between them is more than physical. She’s never believed in God because what God would have given her the life she had before Bran?

  ***

  Before Drew was born, Maisie had assumed her little sisters in Kentucky were simply lazy. They live in mobile parks with their husbands and one works in a hair salon and the other is on welfare. Their boys joined the Army when they were grown. Their daughters got pregnant and married as teenagers. They don’t care for Maisie’s new accent—an accent that in Silicon Valley means she doesn’t have an accent. They don’t like that she got out of their way of life. They don’t like that she’s rich, and they think it means she believes herself to be better than them. Maisie tries to feel okay about this—maybe if she’d gotten stuck there, she wouldn’t like herself either. But, uncomfortable with the possibility that only luck separates them from her, she reminds herself she’d always worked much harder than they did. They were lazy, and she was not. It’s that simple—or it was until Drew was born and turned out to be just like them.

  She’d trained the Appalachian, the color, really, out of her voice right after she moved to the Bay Area. It was clear right away that the NPR liberals where she lived looked down on her for the accent, and before she reinvented herself, it was impossible to get investors for the daycare. But every time she calls her sisters to check in, hears their beautiful, rolling, lilting voices, it feels like a punch in the gut. And it’s almost too easy to blame her father and his raging alcoholism for Drew’s problems, even if it’s true, if there’s something in the blood—or in the genes as they say now.

  Her earliest memory is of her mother shucking peas and cooking grits in a cast iron skillet over an open flame, the grits sizzling, the smell of hot fat in her nostrils. A fan set in the window over a bucket of cold water to cool the room down. Her mother humming to herself.

  “Who moved my typewriter?” Maisie’s father sho
uted. He fancied himself a novelist and believed if he could just get some quiet time away from his girls to write, just get enough money to get the damn coal company off his back for a couple weeks—he’d be rich and famous, and then they’d all see. She’d moved the typewriter from the living room the day before because they were expecting guests, but she knew better than to say anything. Her mom continued to shuck peas, but her father must have seen a trace of guilt in Maisie’s expression. He picked up the skillet and advanced toward her. She backed up, screaming, knowing and fearful of what was coming next.

  Her mother turned, shouted at him to stop.

  He grabbed Maisie’s mousey ponytail and swung the skillet sideways and low, as if he were swinging a softball bat. Heavy skillet. Pressed against her thighs for only a moment, but oh, the intense hot pain of it. She can’t remember the pain in a visceral way, but she remembers flashes of the aftermath. Picked up by her mother and run outside. Dunked in the watering hole, the mossy, decaying stench of the watering hole. Deathly cold washing over her face.

  It was sixty years ago, but she still has a red mark shaped like a banana slug where the hot iron seared her flesh.

  As she grew bigger, she got better at avoiding him. One night he’d chased Maisie and her sisters out of the double-wide and into the watery starlight. He was drunk, armed with his shotgun. Maisie sprinted through past the watering hole and into the forest, pulling her sisters behind the trees, inhaling the sharp resinous pine and trying not to breathe too loudly. He couldn’t catch them because he kept tripping. By the time he entered the forest and stopped in the clearing ten feet from them, he was out of breath and panting. He smoothed his chestnut brown hair back from his sweaty forehead. Maisie clapped her hands over her sisters’ mouths. They all stopped breathing, huddled together, mesmerized by the chilling, bluish-green glow of nearby foxfire.

  “I put you into this world!” he hollered. He waved his shotgun. He fired into the air wildly and stood there for what seemed like hours. Finally, muttering to himself, he turned and staggered away.

  Early the next morning, they snuck back inside the trailer. Her father had gone to sleep, her mother was cooking bacon. Looking back, she can’t remember where her mother was while her father was chasing them, but that morning, fixing breakfast for herself and her sisters, Maisie realized she couldn’t depend on her. Thin mountain air, the night scents of pine and freshly mowed grass, still turn her stomach.

  ***

  In Madrid, Bran calls Gwen, and although Maisie can’t hear her daughter’s side of the conversation, Bran repeats several times that she needs to take a flight home to be by Drew’s side. “Don’t worry about the money. We’ll pay for your direct flight. Somebody needs to be there for him.” His voice, usually smooth, cracks. Maisie looks away. She doesn’t want to witness him begging.

  “Do you want to talk to Mom?” Bran asks Gwen at the end of the conversation.

  From force of habit, Maisie reaches out to take the phone, but Gwen’s already hung up.

  Bran looks apologetic. “She was upset about having to go. Did you guys fight about something?”

  Maisie considers making something up, but admits, “She thinks I always paid more attention to Drew.”

  “Well, you had to.” He’s covering for her, as is his wont. “He needed you more.”

  “She said she needed me, too.”

  Bran throws his arm around Maisie, and faintly reassured, she sits quietly for a moment before deciding to call the hospital for an update. The girl who answers the phone says there has been no change.

  “Is Vivian there?” Maisie asks.

  The nurse is summoned. She says, “The young lady who came in with him was discharged.”

  ***

  The last time Maisie felt alone, truly far from everything that mattered, was when she was twenty-three and her first husband, Jefferson, came home to their apartment in Knoxville from Vietnam. He was discharged from the Marines after losing his hand—he never explained how, and where it had been was a curiously silky, pinkish smooth stump. It pained Maisie to look at it, thinking of how he’d once thrown footballs with it. After a long struggle, she forced herself to look and to touch it, mainly so she didn’t feel awkward.

  They’d been high school sweethearts, married just a year before he shipped off. He’d been gone for three years while she went to college and started working as a receptionist at a construction company. To her new friends, Maisie described him as a bit of a clown, noting that he was MVP of the football team his senior year, that his family was rich, or seemed richer than hers at least, that what they both loved to do was go driving, long drives, fast drives through the sinuous curves of the mountain roads with his father’s car, pressing the accelerator down hard, going so fast downhill that it felt like free fall, their hearts flying up in their chests in defiance of gravity.

  For his homecoming party, she’d baked from scratch a yellow cake with fudge frosting, his favorite. There were two six-packs of cold beer in the refrigerator and a meatloaf in the oven. She’d turned on the record player, and her friends filed in, eager to meet the man they’d heard about. The little celebration she’d planned with so much care was punched through with sullen silences and gaping holes. Jeff didn’t like cake anymore. He didn’t come out looking too wonderful in front of her friends, and it was unsurprising because he was a completely different person than the one she’d described. At some point during the party, he’d flown into a rage and locked himself in the bedroom. After Maisie’s friends had left, she and Jeff had nothing to say to each other.

  The polite way to put it, the way Maisie put it to her mother, was that he was different when he returned. “Different, huh?” her father said as he walked to the stove and started laughing. “Well, you never was good at sticking with things. Why should this be any different?” She hated him in that moment, a fierce hate. When that passed, she started to feel grief, mourning what could have been and what would never be. Everything was out of her control, but she did what she could to put a positive spin on it. At least he was home. At least he hadn’t been killed.

  One night, about two weeks after Jeff’s return, they’d had sex and gone to sleep. After midnight, Maisie woke to a strong hand clutching her throat, sharp nails digging into her skin. Airless. She could hear crickets chirping merrily through the open window. She thrashed, but he slept through it and kept cussing. She pushed against his chest, fighting him off, realizing as she struggled to get her breath he was going to kill her in his sleep. With one swift movement, she’d kicked him in the balls. Startled, he awoke. He said he was sorry several times, but it was like a stranger who apologized for bumping you on a bus but was secretly angry with you for calling the bump to his attention. Eventually he grabbed his pillow and stomped out to sleep in the living room for the rest of the night, and Maisie lay there stunned. They didn’t talk about it the next day. It happened again, once more, and then she moved out with nothing but a suitcase full of clothes—she wanted nothing to remind her of that life—and took a bus to stay with a girlfriend who she wasn’t sure was happy to have her. Anything not to go back to her father’s house. When she told the story to her friends, she tried to relay it in comic terms, describing the one-handed stranger choking her while she slept. She tried to make them laugh, but once they laughed, she started crying. She filed for divorce, wondering, Is this how it’s going to be from now on?

  Maisie met Bran a month later. He was a civil engineer and his brother Cadfael was an architect who owned a share of the construction company where she worked. She was helping one of the other girls at the company host a weekend barbecue when a sturdy man, older than her, with an unusual accent, approached her with a glass of punch. He and his brother were recent Welsh immigrants who’d moved to Knoxville for work. On their first date, he brought Maisie a bouquet of red and pink gerbera daisies. Nobody had ever brought her flowers before. A great weight lifted from her, and she stepped into a dazzling fairy tale with a handsome, ch
ivalrous prince whose mellifluous accent and stable job kept her from ever looking back. They married a month later, honeymooning by the river near where she’d grown up and moving into a butter-yellow cottage. Bran made so much money—more money than her family had ever seen since she’d been born—they could afford to hire a girl to clean. Shortly thereafter, she realized she was pregnant with Drew, and while perhaps, technically, it might have been her first husband’s son, she always considered him Bran’s.

  ***

  En route to Los Angeles. The whirring of the air conditioner annoys Maisie. She huddles under a blanket with headphones on, watching a funny stand-up routine on the tiny overhead screen. “Damn Wi-Fi connection is so spotty. I should get a refund,” Bran says as he sips his coffee. “Goddammit! I burned my tongue.”

  “They can’t predict whether a Wi-Fi connection will be good in the air,” she says. Bran’s an engineer, and he probably knows this, but it makes her feel better to contradict him, to suggest he’s being irrational.

  “I don’t understand what happened.” Bran looks angry.

  “With the Wi-Fi?”

  “With Drew.”

  “I told you, he was racing someone in the mountains after a few beers, and a semi crashed into him.”

  “No, I mean, we managed to keep him alive all these years, but it’s always been hard. Where did we go wrong?”

  “We didn’t. No parent can predict this kind of thing.” She pats his arm.

  “I want to travel back in time. I want to see what we could have done differently.” He has tears in his eyes. She’s never seen him so distraught, and perversely, this makes her feel less alone.

  ***

  When Drew and Gwen were small, Maisie had driven them to the aquarium in Monterey. It was summer, and in the spacious aquarium children and tourists walked shoulder to shoulder. Drew wanted only to stare at the octopus turning a florid reddish-purple as it oozed over the glass wall, while Gwen preferred sitting in the dark room with its wall-length tank, full of green sea turtles and blacktip reef sharks and hammerhead sharks in their slow, surreal exploration. They stayed in front of the octopus for fifteen minutes before Maisie noted that they needed to take turns doing what they wanted to do. Drew flung himself on the floor, screaming as she dragged him toward the room with sea turtles. He kicked Gwen, and she howled. A few families turned and stared. They were thinking what she would be thinking, that she was a bad mother. She had a brief vision of simply walking away from Drew and Gwen, of pretending she didn’t know them. She would just disappear into the crowd.