by Cathy Lamb
I have never in my life seen Grandma and Grandpa move so fast as they sprinted into our room.
Another time she poked Sunshine in the stomach when she was resting in Grandpa’s arms. “She’s a gadget. She’s a sooter-dorfmanz.”
“What’s that, sugar?” Grandpa asked her, so gentle.
“It means she’s after you.” Helen touched the hearts she’d drawn on her cheeks that morning with a blue marker. “I think she’s stealing my money! I think she is. She’s a money stealer.”
“I don’t think so, sugar,” Grandpa said. “Sunshine loves you. See how she’s smiling?” And, indeed, Sunshine was smiling at Helen.
For a second, Helen froze, then she touched the baby’s nose with the tip of her finger. “It’s squishy.”
“Sure is. She’s a little one,” Grandpa said.
She touched Sunshine’s fingers. “Small fingers.” She stroked her cheek. “Soft.” She pushed the wisps of blond hair back. “A bird is soft. A chick is soft. Punk is soft with his red eyes.”
In one lightning-quick move, she yanked the baby out of Grandpa’s arms, whipped around, and ran for the door, moaning deep in her throat.
I screamed, terrified. My worst nightmare was that Helen would take my baby away from me. Sunshine screamed, too. “Give me Sunshine! Give me Sunshine!” I yelled.
My grandpa, built like a mountain, but strong and quick, had both Helen and the baby in a firm hug within seconds. “Get your grandma,” he told me, and I ran off, hysterical, and found Grandma in the barn with the horses. “She’s trying to steal Sunshine! Help me, Grandma!”
We ran for the house and I ate Grandma’s dust as she sprinted to the door, her cowboy boots flying.
Helen was baring her teeth, growling, clicking her teeth together as if she wanted to bite Grandma and Grandpa. They were pleading with her, soothing, cajoling, but Helen wasn’t having any of it, holding Sunshine way too tight while my baby screeched.
Grandpa had an arm between Helen’s chest and the baby, but I knew that you couldn’t yank a baby away from someone else without hurting it. Helen made a yip yip sound, like a coyote, then bared her teeth again, straining away from Grandma and Grandpa.
Well, I’d had enough. She was not going to take my baby. I grabbed a wooden spoon from Grandma’s kitchen and the stool and I put the stool behind Helen and brought the spoon right down on her head as hard as I could.
She let go of my Sunshine and Grandma caught her.
“Don’t you hurt my baby!” I shrieked at her, near hysteria. “You stupid Momma! You stupid Momma! Don’t you hurt my baby!” I hit her again on the head, all of my rage and fear coming out through that spoon.
A surprising thing happened then. Helen closed her mouth. She didn’t growl or grunt, and her body sagged, almost to the floor. Grandpa caught her as her tears smeared the blue hearts. Then she said, her voice cracking, “I’m bad.”
“Yes, you are!” I raged. “You’re bad!”
“No, sweetie,” Grandpa said, breathing hard, “you’re not bad. You’re a good girl.”
“It’s the truth! The truth!” she cried out, her hands to her heart. “I’m bad! I’m a bad girl.”
“You’re a bad momma!” I told her, still shaking, still scared, Sunshine’s choking cries hitting me hard.
Grandpa pulled her up straight. “Come on, honey, let’s go lie down.”
“No, no, no,” Helen said, bringing her blond curls to her eyes. “I’m bad. I’m a no-love person. I have no love in me.” Helen’s head jerked a couple of times. She said something, but her speech slurred and I didn’t get it. I heard this: “Thubadawagon. You’re a terrible thubadawagon.”
She turned, lashed at the air with her hands, as if she was scratching someone invisible standing in front of her. “I can’t stand you,” she said to the air. “You shut up! I know I should die! Die, die!” She got down on her hands and knees and whispered to me, her eyes imploring, “You hear them, too, don’t you?”
I swallowed hard and shook my head, some of my fury draining away. “No, Momma. I don’t hear the voices.”
“What do you mean you don’t hear the voices?” Helen asked, her voice now strident. “You have to hear them. I hear them all day long. They’re bugging me, being mean, telling me what to do, and I can’t stand it! You don’t hear them?” Her voice pitched and she shouted at me, hands cupped around her mouth, as if she was trying to make herself heard over a cacophony of noise. “You don’t hear them? They’re yelling!”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Momma.”
“How can you not hear them?” Tears sprung to her eyes. “They’re everywhere. All the time. No one can think, no one can talk!” She turned to my grandma. “Can’t you hear the voices?”
“No, sweetie, I can’t,” Grandma soothed. “Now hang on, let me hug you. We’ll make the voices be quiet.”
“Can’t you hear the voices?” she yelled at Grandpa, cupping her hands around her mouth again.
“No, sugar, all I can hear is my love for you.”
Helen froze, her face crumpling, her body sagging. “No one can hear the voices? No one but me! Only me. Why me?” she asked Grandpa, her voice breaking. “Why me and the voices? Why? Am I alone?”
“No, sweetie, you’re not alone,” Grandpa said. “Not at all. We love you.”
“I’m all alone,” Helen said, not giving any indication she had heard my grandpa. “I am all by myself. And them!” She fisted a hand. “I’m all by myself with them! And I don’t even like them! I don’t want to be with them!”
“You have us, sugar. Me and Grandpa and Stevie, we’re here. We’re always here.”
“But the voices, they keep us apart.” She stomped her feet again, wobbled her head, because she wanted to get the voices out through her ears. “I know they do. They’re here now. Being mean. They want me by myself so they can kill me.”
“No one wants to kill you, darling, no one. We love you. We need you,” Grandma said, blinking tears out of her eyes.
“They want me to give in and do bad things to that Trash Heap and that girl kid.” Helen sobbed and pointed at me. “They’re an army and I’m just a Helen.”
“We know you won’t do bad things. You’re a good person, a strong person, my darling.”
Grandma was pale, and Grandpa was gray. They both sagged. Maybe the army was beating them, too.
“I’m just a Helen. I’m a no-love person. I have no love in me. Who can love me? They won’t go away. Never will they go away.”
At that moment, on Helen’s devastated face that day, I got my first, true understanding of how sad, how unutterably sad, her life was.
In the next moment I realized that she knew it, too.
“I’m just a Helen,” she said again, broken, shattered. “Just a Helen.”
It was one of the most devastating moments of my life.
Most people, maybe even everyone, would think that my grandparents’ decision to keep Sunshine in the same house with Helen, who was suffering from schizophrenia, was a colossal mistake all the way around, even if now and then they could get her medicine down Helen. (Medicine that had its own set of lousy side effects, by the way, and which was often changed, for a variety of reasons.)
The schizophrenic person should be sent to live with someone else, somewhere else, they would say. Other people, my grandparents, or people who were living the nightmare, people who knew of the complexities of this terrible disease, people who were in the position to know there was no black or white here, only a very murky, painful gray, might choose to make another decision.
My grandparents, into their seventies, learned the hard way about the horrific, appalling conditions in the hospitals, asylums, and treatment centers for the mentally ill at that time. Put Helen back in one of those? Put Helen—their beloved, cherished daughter, who had been raped, impregnated, beaten up, locked up, attacked, neglected, overdrugged, poorly drugged, tied down, handcuffed, isolated, and shattered—back in “treatment,
” knowing she would resume living in a constant state of well-founded fear, pain, and hysteria?
“What should we do?” I heard them asking, again and again, their hands clasped together. “What should we do?”
Save a baby granddaughter at the expense of their daughter, when their daughter might well die in such a place? Endanger the granddaughter by leaving the daughter at home? And what about Stevie, they kept discussing. What’s the impact on our “darling Stevie”? The impact now, the long-term impact. Do we have Helen leave so the granddaughters’ mental health is saved? Can we counteract the negatives that Helen heaps on them by wrapping them up with love and kindness? Are we making a terrible, terrible mistake that will have awful repercussions we can’t even see?
These, folks, are not the conversations anyone ever wants to have.
Eventually they told themselves they could keep the baby safe because they could not get their minds around committing Helen to hell again, and they decided to double their efforts to keep Helen from Sunshine, her Trash Heap.
I don’t blame them for their decision. Even now, even after the bridge incident. They could not have possibly conceived of what was going to happen.
But they blamed themselves every single day afterward.
I loved Sunshine and spent all my time after school and on weekends with her. I pushed her stroller, I rocked her to sleep, I read her stories. As she grew older I taught her how to play with stuffed animals and how to kick a soccer ball. Grandpa or Grandma would take us to family parties in town, and all my cousins hugged her. We worked with Grandma in the garden and we played in the stream.
“I love you, Sunshine,” I’d tell her.
“Love you, Evie.” She couldn’t say Stevie, so that’s what I got. “Love you, Evie.”
I taught her what the animals were and their names.
“Bob the Horse,” I’d say.
“Aw da Hor,” she’d say.
“Sheba the sheep,” I’d say, pointing.
“Eba da eep,” she’d say.
“Horny is Grandpa’s dog,” I’d say.
“Porny pa’s da,” she’d say.
I taught her songs, too, and I was teaching her the alphabet and numbers.
We continued with art time together.
Grandma was a talented artist. She could draw anything—the Schoolhouse House, the barn, the town, our wildflowers that sprung up every summer—but she always put a fairy-tale spin on it. She hid a gnome behind a flower, a leprechaun on a leaf, a magician casting a spell on a frog. Watching Grandma work was like watching a storybook come to life.
This is what Grandma told me about art: “Make it your own, Stevie…. Let the art tell people who you are, what your moodis, what you think of life, the world…. Your art can be serious or funny, or both. It can tell the truth or poke fun. It can be sad, or it can offer joy. Make sure your art is true to you, Stevie, it must be true to you.”
One afternoon, on a four-by-four-foot canvas, Helen painted a cliff. It was black, gray, jagged, dangerous—even the grass blades were sharp and dangerous. Around it were thick, looming, curving trees, resembling the bars of a jail cell, a dark shadow looming between the tree trunks.
At the very bottom of the rock was an arm. No body, only an arm and a hand. A left hand, I noted.
She named the painting “Night Night.”
Then she glared across the table at Sunshine, who was two years old, and whispered, “Night night.”
A few months after that, Helen’s behavior escalated. At dinner one night, the rain drumming against our windows, she decided she didn’t want her left hand.
She was eating toast and raspberry jelly because it was red, Kool-Aid because that was red, and an apple, also red, when she suddenly slammed her left hand on the table and said, “Who put that there?” She held up her hand and studied it, teeth bared.
We explained that was her hand, but that didn’t work. “I don’t like it. It’s a spy tool, isn’t it?” She shook her hand. “I want that off.” She slammed her hand back down, three times, then picked it up, keeping it limp. From then on, she carried her left hand limply, halfway up, swaying back and forth.
In an abrupt change of subject, which I was so used to, she glared at me and said, “I don’t have a daughter. I don’t want a daughter. I want a shoypertobarn,” she told us.
“Helen, that’s enough,” Grandpa snapped.
“Helen, do not say things like that, sweetie,” Grandma said, angry. “I forbid it.”
“Fuck you, sweetie,” Helen said, gently, sweetly, reaching out to grab my grandma’s hand with her right one. “Sweetie, fuck you.”
I swallowed hard and then coughed. I tried to clear my throat, but I couldn’t do it. I started crying at the table, the tears streaming out of my eyes. Helen had said mean things so often, but this one stuck. I cried because I was so worn down from the constancy of Helen’s delusions, illusions, shouting at voices, strange reactions, hitting, and her hatred of my sister, my best friend. And I cried because I could feel something black and sinister lurking over all of our shoulders. I could feel it.
Grandma grabbed my hand, then said, her eyes furious, “Helen, leave this table right this minute.”
And Grandpa said, his voice raised, “Out, Helen, now. Right now! You will not hurt Stevie!”
But Helen didn’t move, even though Grandpa yanked out her red chair from the table and grabbed her under the shoulders to haul her out.
“There’s water coming out of your eyes,” Helen told me, astonished, peering straight at me.
“I know that.” I hastily wiped the tears away.
“Why is there water coming out of your eyes?” Helen asked.
“Because I’m sad. Don’t you get that? Don’t you get sad?” My voice raised, a rush of emotions flowing right out, a waterfall of pain.
She looked confused, then suspicious. “Why are you sad?”
What to say? I’m sad because you’re my momma and I don’t have a normal mother and maybe it would have been better if I had no mother, as I have no father? I’m sad because I’m so tired? I’m sad because you hate my sister?
“I’m sad because you make me cry a lot.”
Helen didn’t say anything, but her eyebrows rose and her mouth opened a little bit. She reached a hand out to me. “I’m sorry I make you cry, girl kid. I’m sorry.”
I was too shocked to say anything.
And I could see her then, in a flash, the mother I wanted to love. I could see a little bit of sanity in the backs of her eyes.
“I don’t want to make you cry.” She let go of my hand and slapped her cheek, one, then the other, quite hard, then held the heels of her hands to her eyes and arched her neck. “I’m just a Helen,” she whispered. “I don’t know. I don’t understand. All the voices. It’s so noisy in my head. They’re telling me what to do. I’m scared. I’m scared all the time, and I’m wet and I’m gooey and I don’t want to be in a can. Do you think my friend Tonya is in a can? And I don’t like your chairs and this thing”—she waved her limp left hand—“and it’s a bad thing in me. I’m bad. Bad Helen. I am a bad girl, and I made that girl kid cry.” She conked her head on the table. “He’s going to kill me. He will. I will be dead.”
I felt my breath catch and that familiar feeling of sickness overwhelmed me. Through the tangle of my harsh emotions, I often felt overwhelming pity for Helen. How would it be to be her? To listen to that cacophony in her head twenty-four/seven? She was living in hell. Absolute, white-hot, nightmarish hell.
Why can’t the voices that schizophrenics hear be kind and gentle? Why couldn’t they praise my momma, encourage her, tell her to hug her daughter and bake cookies? Where did those vicious, violent voices come from? Why?
She whipped up her head and wiped the tears off my cheeks, so gentle, so sweet. “You’re a good cuddly animal.” She cupped her hands around my face, and for a sweet second I let myself believe that Helen was the same as all my girlfriends’ mothers, kind and ni
ce, the type who made cookies and wore blue dresses with heels, who smiled and helped out at school.
“I like you,” she told me, her eyes slipping back into nowhere again. “But not her.” She glared at Sunshine, who was clutching a stuffed tiger. “I don’t like that one. She’s a chair. She has tentacles. Trash Heap has worms. I think she eats them. Kerboomalot.”
Shortly thereafter, Helen kidnapped Trash Heap and hid her on the cliff near the trees that looked like the bars of a jail cell.
24
Ashville, Oregon
Helen continued to hold out her left hand in a weird way and told us it didn’t belong to her. “Get this off. It isn’t mine.”
I said, “Okay, Helen, I’ll take it off for you finally, but I have to find a hand screwdriver.”
Do you see how I had to buy into her insanity at times, how I had to talk to her, manage her?
“A hand screwdriver?” she asked. She tilted her head. She was wearing a kids’ red cowboy hat.
“Yeah. Grandpa has one, but it’s a special one to get rid of hands and he’s not home, so I can’t get it.” I pushed back my hair, and the charm bracelet that Sunshine gave me clinked.
“You’ll get the hand screwdriver later?”
“Sure, I will.”
We sat down and did our artwork. I drew a picture of a miniature fairy village. Sunshine painted with her fingers. Helen drew a picture of a black bridge with a turbulent, dark sky and a moon with a reddish-orangish haze. Under the bridge, in the cresting waves, she drew two left arms and two red dots. I knew the red dots were eyes.
On Monday Helen felt bugs running up and down her body and scratched herself so bad she bled.
On Tuesday she tried to climb up on the roof of our barn to jump. Grandpa scrambled up behind her and caught her in the nick of time. I saw the whole thing. He could have died trying to rescue his daughter.
On Wednesday morning she said, “I will kill myself before I let Command Center get me.” She was eating blueberries in a row, one by one. The row stretched across the table. Every time she ate a blueberry, she ate a bite of peanut butter. She stopped abruptly and put her hands in her lap. “I’ll take you away from Command Center.”