Lucid

by Gabrielle Castania

  “So what are you saying?” I asked.

  “What I’m saying is that I’m going to be far better,” he replied almost urgently. “That day, I came home while you were out with your boyfriend and had a long talk with your mother, and we decided it would be in everyone’s best interest if I checked myself into rehab. Since then, I haven’t had anything to drink, and I’m on the right track to making sure that it stays that way. I’m tired of not knowing what’s going on in my life. I’m tired of not being man enough to handle my own pain and confusion and all of the other things that come with living life. Yeah, we got a bad hand with your mother’s diagnosis, but I didn’t have to make it worse. She’s getting better now, though, and so am I, for her sake and for yours.”

  I tried to hide it as I sniffed curiously at the air, surprised to find only the lingering stench of the oils from my paints instead of the bitter smell of booze that typically followed him around. I don’t think I’d seen him well put together at any point in the last several years, but he stood before me in a casual button-down shirt and sterile khaki pants, hair properly groomed and face shaven. His skin had color to it again, his face was far less bloated than it usually was, and his eyes were wide, bright, and focused only on me.

  It was a lot to take in, after so many years of anger and hatred and resentment. The whole thing was weird and just didn’t sit right with me. After dealing with his abuses for so long, I couldn’t just accept that he had changed so quickly and go back to being a happy family again.

  “So am I just supposed to believe that everything is different after you’ve gone a whopping few weeks without alcohol?” I probed. Admittedly, for him, that was somewhat impressive, since I couldn’t recall a time I saw him throughout my high school career without a bottle of something nearby. “After you ruined my teenage years with your neglect and your abuse and your horridness, I’m just supposed to forget it all because you went to rehab?”

  As he went to defend himself against my accusations, I was hit with a sudden, severe flash of dizziness, like the changes apparently looming in my not-so distant future were literally shifting my world. My head felt light, like I was about to fall asleep.

  “I’m not expecting you to forget, Ashley, and I’m not expecting you to forgive me for it anytime soon. My choices have had us all walking a very hard road, but I’m doing my best now to make it different.” He fished into his pocket and tossed something my way. While I instinctively shied away from what he’d thrown, Mum picked it up out of my bed sheets and presented it to me with a proud smile. The small, poker-like chip in my hand read, “One Day at a Time”. I looked to Roger for clarification, since I wasn’t sure what was going on. “That’s my sobriety chip, to track my progress. I’ll get the next one after I’ve been sober for thirty days. Those of us who are going through the rehabilitation programs for alcoholism keep those chips as constant reminders that every day without alcohol is a step in the right direction.”

  “Isn’t it lovely?” Mum asked softly. She leaned in to look at it with me, although I suspected that, if she were so giddy about what Roger had to say, she was more than familiar with it by that point. “It’s the change we’ve always wanted, Love.”

  Fighting the feeling in my head, I told my father, “You know this doesn’t change anything you did, right? This cheap little thing just changes the future. It’s not going to take us back in time and stop you from hitting us, or screaming at us, or ignoring us, or just generally being a terrible person.”

  Roger tried to hide the shift in his expression, attempting to bury the rejection beneath a relatively transparent smile. “I know that,” he assured me, “and I know to anticipate having to rebuild a relationship with you from the ground up, if you’ll have me back, but I don’t mind the effort I’ll have to put in to show you how much I love you.” When his words didn’t change my poker face, he elaborated. “I acknowledge that I missed the time in your life when you needed guidance and support more than anything, because I was too busy making things worse for you, and I know I’ll never, ever be able to make that up to you or take away what’s been going on over the past several years. I don’t expect you to forgive me for it right away, because I’m even still working on trying to forgive myself. I know I can’t change what I’ve done to you, but I can make sure it never happens again.”

  I remained silent, totally unsure of how to approach the whole thing. While he seemed sincere, it wasn’t going to take back the pain and suffering he’d put me through, wouldn’t erase the physical and mental scars.

  When it was clear I wasn’t going to be saying much on the matter, Mum piped up. “Your Art teacher rang me earlier, Love.” While she spoke, Roger dipped out into the hallway. “He sounded real concerned about you, and he asked that I go to school to chat about your issues with him.”

  My father came back into the room holding the cartoon piece I’d presented to my class just a few hours before. “While you’re very good at all of this art stuff, your picture for his class definitely concerned him,” Roger said, carefully moving the portrait of Danny and I so he could replace it with my project. “He told your mother that you guys had a talk after class, and that he was worried sick about you because of the way you were talking.” He tore his eyes off the painting and found mine once again. “Do you mind explaining everything to us like you did to your teacher?”

  I droned on once again about the various elements of my painting, although I had the funny feeling that Protoccelli had already explained them all to Mum when he went behind my back and talked to her. I suppose breaking down the issues at the root made more sense than scrambling to show the guidance counselors, and I appreciated that he was putting himself out there and taking steps to help me try to better things without making them too messy.

  As Roger went to speak once I finished my explanation, Mum cut him off, turning to me with fire in her eyes. “Why would you paint such a thing?” she asked incredulously. “Instead of dealin’ with your problems like an adult, you want to just paint about them and hope that fixes things?” She gave me the opportunity to defend myself, but I remained silent, somewhat shocked that she was coming at me like that. I figured, if anybody, she would understand needing an escape that didn’t work to fix the problems but also didn’t make them any worse. “I told you yesterday that we would talk things out as to what to do about your depression and such, and in the meantime, you go off and paint this for class, and then stand there and tell everyone what a shoddy family we all are? I mean, what is this meant to be, a cry for attention or somethin’?”

  Even Roger looked offended by what she was saying. “Michelle, don’t you think that’s kind of an unfair question?” he unknowingly verbalized what I was thinking. “She obviously really likes making art, and you told me yourself that the teacher said she uses it as a relatively healthy escape. She could be doing far worse things to take her mind off everything, so I, for one, am glad she’s chosen to try some self-therapy through creative expression instead.”

  “Our assignment was to use a cartoon style to depict defining things about our lives,” I spat acidicly at my mother, “and this is what I am lately.”

  “What I just don’t really understand is, why’d you let a stranger into our business?” she asked, not at all put off by my response, or even by Roger being on my side of something for once. I don’t know how she ignored his valiant protection, because I certainly couldn’t. “This whole mess is a family affair, and it’s somethin’ we all could have worked out ourselves. This isn’t somethin’ we talk about, Ashley; the whole thing just is what it is.”

  “Be reasonable about this, Michelle,” Roger interjected, crossing his arms. “Ashley clearly needed some help, and it’s good she’s able to connect with someone at all. If it makes her feel better, who cares where that help comes from?”

  Mum turned to him, a somewhat deranged look on her face. “She made you a monster, Roger. How can you just stand there and defend that? I know you’re not
a monster, and somewhere under all that anger, she does, too.”

  He looked almost baffled by what she was saying. “If you were willing to get her help for all of this from a therapist, someone who’s technically an ‘outsider’, why are you upset that she’s been talking to someone of her own volition?”

  “Someone like a therapist is different,” Mum said, shaking her head. “You pay them to know what they’re doin’ with stuff like this.”

  “So,” Roger began, “you’re upset that she saved us a couple hundred dollars by talking to someone that she already trusts free of charge? She’s got someone she feels comfortable talking to who’s willing to listen to her, and you’re sitting here making her feel bad about it because you don’t like what he had to say.”

  “He’s an art teacher, Roger!” Mum continued, snickering a bit. “His area of expertise is in colors and shapes. What’s he possibly know about problems and how to solve them?”

  I couldn’t help but to feel a little disgusted by her casually degrading the one person I could always fall back on. Protoccelli was a genuinely good person, someone who didn’t have to listen to me rant about my life for fifty minutes of his free time at the end of the day, but he did it, more than once, and that meant something to me. I wouldn’t let her sit there and besmirch him.

  “So what if he’s an art teacher?” I argued, the exertion of energy intensifying the feeling swirling around in my brain, and I paused for a moment to regain my composure. “At least he isn’t the one sitting here pretending everything is peaches and cream with this family. You don’t like him because you want all of this to just be swept under the rug so we can be a happy family again, but that isn’t how this works. Protoccelli saw that I was struggling and he tried to help me by reaching out to you about it. What about him wanting me to be okay is bad?”

  “Why didn’t you tell him about it before, then?” Mum asked, stroking my hair with fingers that chemotherapy had reduced to skin and bones. “You could have told him a while ago, but instead, you pretended that your father just didn’t exist. I think it’s because you’ve been waitin’ for the day he goes back to normal, and it’s here now.”

  The breath caught in my throat when I digested what she was saying. At present, I hated Roger with a passion, despite that he seemed to be on my side of the whole Protoccelli thing. When I was younger, though, I was the quintessential daddy’s girl, and he loved every moment of it, but when Mum got sick and he turned to liquor to cope with it, it changed him. I didn’t love him at present, who he had become, but I had always loved the person he was before he let alcohol and grief overtake his life and consume him from the inside out, leaving behind the mangled carcass of a man I barely recognized.

  Maybe someplace deep down, I, like my mother, was yearning for the return of the man I so sorely missed. When it first began happening, it stung like nothing else to believe that my dad could do things like that to her and I. Perhaps the little girl that still lived inside of me still held to the belief that her daddy was coming back to save her any day, a day like today, when things finally seemed like they might start looking up.

  When Mum would tell me in private when we spoke about Roger that she still held onto hope for our broken family, I told her it was ridiculous. Maybe my pride just refused to let me admit to being part of it, too, leading me to ask her, “I don’t know, Mum. A better question is, why didn’t you make a big enough fuss when all of it was going on?” Her jaw popped open a bit in disbelief. “You were too busy sitting there, praying for the day that things would change to really care about how bad they’d gotten in the meantime. I told you outright how much I hated Roger for what he was doing, and you didn’t care. You saw what he was doing to me, and you didn’t care. You watched him chase my boyfriend and me with a makeshift dagger, and you didn’t care. There were nights I didn’t come home just so I didn’t have to deal with the fighting, and you didn’t care.” I swallowed hard, trying to combat my emotions. “I know you were busy being sick, but why didn’t you ever care, Mum?”

  Her face dimmed immediately, shifting into a very dark, unfamiliar territory. She was visibly upset by my accusations, and the look in her eyes was a bit frightening. “I cannot deal with you right now if you’re goin’ to be like this, Ashley Elizabeth,” she spat, climbing off my bed. “I had faith in this. Don’t you dare go crucifyin’ me for lovin’ my husband and not givin’ up on him.” With that, she stormed out of my room, stomping noisily down the stairs.

  Roger turned to me, his expression cautious. “Ignore her for now,” he told me. “I think she has herself tricked into thinking this family reunion would be easy for any of us. I tried telling her on the way home that you were absolutely going to be upset with me, and that I was ready to deal with that, but she wouldn’t listen. And I know all this bickering doesn’t feel like progress, but it is. Once we all calm down a little, I was thinking we could all go out for a bite to eat together as a family, for the first time in years, if you’d be willing to try that.”

  “No,” I told him, beginning to shake under the increasing lightheadedness I was feeling. Things around me began to blur, and staying awake was becoming something of a conscious effort. Thinking that maybe calling it an early night and getting some sleep might help me, I continued, “No, I just want to sleep.”

  Roger squinted at me suspiciously. “Are you okay? You look like you’re about to fall over.” I tried to say something to him, tried to make him leave so I could go to bed, but my words came out as rushed, indecipherable babble, so jumbled that not even I understood what I was trying to say. He raced to my side, putting a hand on my shoulder to keep me sitting upright. “Ashley, what’s going on? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m sleepy,” I managed to get out. By that point, the haziness at the edge of my vision had spread farther into my eyes. It was like I was seeing through a straw, with a dwindling swatch of clarity nestled in the center. It was just enough to see my father stare into my eyes for a second before glancing rapidly around my room for something to explain what was happening to me. I was too busy trying not to give into the feeling to try to remember why I was feeling it at all.

  Roger’s search ended when he got to the trash my nightstand, which the gravity of him coming home and trying to make amends had overshadowed. He grabbed hurriedly for the empty box of pills and what little remained in the bottle of Svedka. “What’s all of this stuff?” he asked, his eyes intense from what I could see.

  I think he might have wanted an answer from me, but all I did was mumble. “I… uh,” I stammered, fighting hard against the urge to fall over. “I don’t remember.”

  But I did remember; my body couldn’t forget the chemical cocktail I’d made for myself. It still had an iron grip on me, promised certain victory over my body in an hour’s time. It was screaming at me, threatening to take me down before I could assure Roger not to worry about it, to just let me sleep for a while.

  I continued to yammer my nonsensical sounds at him, and his eyes bugged from his head when he put two and two together. “Michelle!” he screamed loudly, worked up into a genuine panic, leaping up and running to the doorway. “We need to take our daughter to the hospital, right now!”

  “Why’s that?” she yelled back at him, still audibly irritated with me.

  “She took an entire box of sleeping pills and washed them down with vodka!” Roger explained, his voice beginning to drop away, out of focus. The last thing that registered in my tired mind was the sight of him in tears, sobbing as he shook me to try to prevent my inevitable sleep as Mum’s footsteps rushed back up the stairs. “She tried to kill herself, and she’s going to succeed if we don’t do something right now!”

  I didn’t want to die, just to sleep, and I wished they’d just leave me there and let it happen. Maybe I’d taken too much, and maybe mixing them was a bad idea, but I didn’t have control over anything anymore. I made my decision, I followed through on it, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop w
hatever was about to happen to me.

  Everything faded slowly to black, and I slipped tiredly away from the world.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  As the depression had been making it do, time passed me by in a blurry haze. I knew there was a lot of therapy, a lot of personal progress in painful leaps and insurmountable bounds, but I couldn’t tell if I was purposely blocking things out or if I genuinely couldn’t remember. The last thing I could consciously recall was curling up in my bed, and the next thing I knew, I was looking out a window at a courtyard several stories below me, enjoying the warm kiss of early summer sunlight. I felt well rested and ready to meet my life head-on, and I could only almost remember why.

  As soon as I tore my eyes away from the mother pushing her child on the swings in the courtyard and climbed from the bed by the single window in the room, my new reality demolished my hopeful, feeble smile. In stark contrast to the scene outside, I sat surrounded by white-painted concrete walls, and even the sunshine wasn’t enough to brighten the innate dreariness of the atmosphere. The room was void of decoration almost entirely, save for a spray of vibrant orange lilies and fat sunflowers, sitting in a Styrofoam cup, surrounded plentifully by lush, green leaves.

  I was so distracted by the flowers that I almost didn’t notice that someone else was with me in the room. Their back was to me as they repetitiously took clothing from the dresser and piled it all into my duffel bag. I identified my company right away, slightly taken back by her presence.

  Cautiously, I asked, “Ellie, what’s going on?”

  She spun immediately toward me, a thousand-watt grin on her face. “Sorry to just crop up like this, but you were asleep when I came in and I didn’t want to wake you,” she beamed, consumed with glee as she rocketed off the ground, advancing toward me and constricting her arms around me as soon as she got close enough to do so. “They finally let me in to see you, on the day you’re getting out. I’ve been trying every single day, and I didn’t even know you were getting released today, but they let me come help you pack everything up so you can go home.”