by Louise Corum
And what did he have to do? Sacrifice his life. Give up this wonderful love from this perfect woman just so he could continue to hide Elka away. “John,” his mother had pleaded. “If you put her away, those people will be mean to her. They will hurt her in terrible ways. She’s been hurt before and if she gets hurt again, it will kill her. Promise me, John, be a good boy and promise your mother that you will not put her in an institution.” So, he had promised. It was that simple.
“I’m sorry, Kathleen,” he said and forced himself not to run back into her arms. “Maybe one day you can forgive me.”
And with that, he left and went home. It was all over. But he’d had it for a moment; for an instant he’d had true happiness. It had been his. He was sad that it had ended almost as soon as it had begun.
Take Your Medicine
John tried to not feel anything on the way home. He tried to push everything away but still felt the tears in his eyes spilling out and then sliding down his cheeks. He couldn’t believe what he’d just done, all in an effort to protect Elka.
She was waiting in the kitchen. She was waiting at the table. He knew what she was waiting for—her food. It was past seven and she probably hadn’t eaten all day. He knew she could fix her own food, if she liked, but she preferred to wait for him to do it. That really made him angry, too.
“Hello, John,” she said. “You forgot to come home early again.”
He rolled his eyes and went to the refrigerator and pulled out stuff to make sandwiches. He could feel her eyes on his back as he took it to the counter. He turned to see her glaring at him and that made him angrier. “What the hell is your problem?” he hissed.
“You’re late,” she said. “You’re late again.” She got up and came over to him, sniffing him and said, “You’ve been out with that whore again, haven’t you?”
He had an urge to slap her. He didn’t. She’d been saying things like this to him since he’d been seeing Kathleen. How she knew was beyond him, but he had a suspicion it was because of Kathleen’s perfume which had a light and airy scent of magnolia. At least she’d stop talking about Kathleen now that he had ended it. A stab went through his heart but he ignored it.
“I knew it,” she snarled and backed away from him. “You’re a whore fucker.”
“Shut up, Elka,” he said and went back to the sandwich, then changed his mind. “You know what? You can fix your own damn sandwich.”
He got a glass of water and took it into the sitting room. As soon as he sat down, he heard her roar, then heard a crash. He groaned and put his head in his hands. God, would it ever end? How much more could he possibly take? How much more could she do? He realized that she needed more than he could ever give her and that he should just put her in an institution somewhere with people who were trained to deal with people like her. But then, he remembered the promise he had made to his mother. He didn’t think his mother ever really accepted how bad she was. And she’d been getting progressively worse.
“Come in here, you fucker!” she yelled. “Or I’ll burn the whole damn place down!”
Without thinking, he leapt up and raced into the kitchen to see her at the stove with a lit match in her hands. She’d turned on the gas in the oven and was about to ignite it. He drew in his breath just as she did and the match went out before it hit the fumes. He breathed a sigh of relief, then went at her, grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her across the room. She landed next to the wall with a thump.
“Ow,” she moaned and rubbed her elbow.
John turned off the gas, shut the oven door and leaned over the stove, ready to just give up. But he knew he could never do that.
“Ow,” she said again. “It hurted.”
He rolled his eyes. Baby talk. He hated the baby talk. She would do this whenever he had to reprimand her for something she did. Today was not a good day for her to do this.
He turned to see that she was still against the wall, rubbing her elbow. She gave him a dull look, blinking her eyes rapidly. He had a strong urge to slap that look right off her face. He wanted to. He wanted to hurt her, to show her how he felt, that deep hurt he was experiencing. He wanted her to experience some of his pain. He wanted to take back his life. How much was he supposed to take? How much was he supposed to sacrifice? Everything in his being screamed, “It’s not fair! It’s not fair!”
Usually, his rage subsided but not today. It wasn’t going away and soon he began to feel it get the best of him. “I hate you! Oh, how I hate you, Elka! You’ve ruined my life!”
She blinked again and shook her head.
There was another thing he wanted to say, something he wanted to know and she was the only person who could supply him with the information. He wanted to know what really happened that day she came home with blood on her hands. He wanted to know and he wanted to know now. He stomped over to her and hissed, “What happened to you?!”
She shook her head. “No, no, no…”
He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “Tell me what happened, damn you! I deserve to know that! I want to know! I need to know why you’ve ruined my life!”
“No!” she yelled and broke away, then turned to him, pointing her finger. “Girls like me don’t marry boys like you.”
“What?” John asked and stared at her. What was she saying? Then suddenly an image so strong came to him he almost doubled over with it. It was Elka many years before standing in the back yard, next to the wall and she was saying those exact words to someone. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to grab hold of the memory, then Elka turned to him in the vision and said, “Shh! John! Don’t tell anyone!”
Tears streamed down her cheeks now and she shook her head. “John! John! Leave us alone!”
John shook his head and stared at her. “Leave who alone, Elka?”
She shook her head again and said, “You’re mean.”
And she was back to reality. Or what she considered reality. John watched her retreat to a corner and hunker down. As he stared at her, he thought about the bond they had, brother and sister, but it was greater than that. It was caretaker and invalid, wasn’t it? And sometimes enemies. As he stared at her, he realized she was a stranger, even if the blood that ran through both of their veins was the same.
A sense of her pain, of what she’d been through went through him. He was overcome with it, overcome with his own feelings of loss. Why were they even here, in this room? Why were they cemented together? It wasn’t fair to either of them. They didn’t belong together but they didn’t belong anywhere else, either.
“Who were you talking about, Elka?” he asked, hoping that for once she would tell him what had happened.
But she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t give it up. Whatever it was would stay locked inside of her, perhaps tormenting her on a minute to minute basis.
To hell with it, he thought. To hell with all of it. He thought about leaving her, getting in the car and just leaving. But then his thoughts changed. What if he took her away? Could he put her in the car as he had a stray dog once? He remembered the dog, a little mangy thing that had tried to set up home with them. He felt badly for the dog, badly about what he had done. He had put it in the car and taken it off and put it out in the country. The dog had whimpered the whole trip. It had been so happy when it had been at their house but he knew they couldn’t keep it. He wondered if he should have just shot it and put it out of its misery. But then he put that thought out of his head. He had dropped it off and left it to tend to itself in the woods. It was an awful thing to do but he couldn’t have it running around the yard, messing things up. Elka sometimes went into the backyard and the thought of her stepping in dog shit and carrying it back into the house for him to clean up was too much. He had enough to do.
Elka made a sound. He stared at her and said gently, “Tell me what happened.”
She muttered, “No, no, no.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and begged God for an answer to this problem. There wasn’t any option. He cou
ldn’t do anything, his hands were tied. He was tied to Elka and that meant there would never be a him and Kathleen. He didn’t even belong to himself. He only existed to take care of Elka. She owned him, always had, always would. Just as his mother had owned him. Fury began to stir inside of him and he began to shake.
It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t fair, none of it! This life he had wasn’t worth living! He wasn’t even allowed the basic human needs and desires. He couldn’t even begin to think about fulfilling any of his wants. It was a burden, this life he led and he wondered why he held on to it so tightly. Why couldn’t he just do something about her? Something had to be done.
“Sandwich,” she ordered. “Make me a damn sandwich.”
“Make it your damn self,” he muttered and started into the sitting room. As he walked away, he heard her go into fits. Another tantrum. She’d go on half the night. He stopped. No, she wouldn’t. Not tonight. She was going down. He wasn’t about to listen to her scream any more.
He went back into the kitchen and went to the cabinet where he kept her medicine.
“Sandwich, you bastard,” she hissed.
“Shut up,” he told her and opened the cabinet.
“Now!” she screamed. “You can’t starve me like this!”
He shook his head at her. Sometimes she spoke in complete sentences, not just the gibberish she preferred, which he sometimes thought was a little put-on. Sometimes he wondered if she was really out of her mind or just pretending. Was it all an act? He thought about it for a second, then shook the thought out of his head. He was almost to the point of not caring whether she was really crazy or not. If she wasn’t and she was putting on, then that in and of itself made her crazy. If she was crazy, truly crazy, then she was. So, she was. Either way, she had him.
“Oh, I hate you!” she yelled and fell to the floor and gyrated about. “I hate you so much!”
“I hate you too,” he muttered and took out the pills.
She caught sight of them and squealed, “No! I won’t take them! You’re trying to kill me! I’m telling Mother! Mother, he’s trying to kill me again!”
That was one of her favorite fantasies, how John was always trying to kill her for some reason. She always made sure that she told this to the doctor and every maid they had. She usually did this when she wasn’t in the mood to take her medicine which was almost every day now. It was getting so tiresome.
“Shut up!” he yelled.
“I will not take them,” she said and crossed her arms in a huff.
“Yes, you will,” he said and stepped to her.
She leapt up and ran out of the kitchen and into the sitting room. He followed close at her heels and managed to grab her, turn her around and force a few of the pills into her mouth. This wasn’t unusual. He usually had to make her take her medicine. She gulped and sputtered, all the while glaring at him from the corner of her eyes.
“Swallow!” he roared. “Swallow them now!”
“No!” she screamed. “NOOOO!”
He grabbed the glass of water he’d brought in earlier off the table and pushed it to her mouth. She gulped and swallowed. He breathed a sigh of relief and backed away from her. In ten minutes or so, she’d be calm again. She glared at him then jumped on him, wrestling him to the floor like a wild animal. They fought for a moment until he gained control and threw her off but not before she bit his arm.
She got up off the floor and said, “I’m telling Mother.”
“So tell her,” he said and started back into the kitchen with the medicine.
“I’m telling Mother, you bastard!” she screamed. “You dirty, rotten son of a bitch! You’re no better than those boys who fucked me!”
He froze and turned around. “What did you say?”
“You fucker, that’s what I said, you fucker!” she hissed. “You fucking boy! Fucking boys fucking me like that! Fuck you for it!”
“Elka,” he said calmly. “I’m John, your brother.”
She scrunched her face up and said, “You’re a fucker.”
He approached her precariously and said, “Who were the boys, Elka?”
“Mean little fuckers,” she hissed. “Mean little no-good fuckers!”
“Why don’t you tell me about them?” he said. “Who were they, Elka?”
“Who were they?” she said and laughed. “Who were they, John? Did you know them, too? They were probably your friends, you fucker. I didn’t know them, but there the fuckers were, where they weren’t supposed to be. You see, it wasn’t anything like that. I didn’t want it. I didn’t ask for it.”
“Ask for what, Elka?”
She laughed again, this time hysterically. She doubled over with it, slapping her knee. She stopped suddenly and said, “Where’s Daddy?”
Oh, God, she’d retreated again. She would mention the “fuckers” every so often, maybe once a year, then she’d slip away again and not go any further. He sometimes thought if she could admit what happened, she might be cured, like in the movies. That was, if she was even telling the truth. Regardless, a cure would definitely not be happening tonight.
He watched as she went to the mantel and took down an old photograph of their father. She traced a line across his face and said, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy…come home, Daddy.” She stopped and said, “Where did he go, John?”
He shrugged.
She looked back down the picture and smiled. “Remember the pony, John?”
He shook his head.
“The pony he brought home,” she said and sounded sane for once. “It was only about four feet tall and he put me up on it. Oh! You were too little to ride it! That’s right. You were too small so I had it all to myself.”
“What was its name?” he asked and smiled gently at her. This was her favorite story to tell.
“James,” she said and laughed. “I named it James.”
She was wrong. The horse’s name had been Teddy. He wondered why she’d changed its name but then figured it didn’t matter and let the thought drop from him mind.
“It was pretty and sweet,” she said, her eyes beginning to tear. “But then it fell and broke its little leg and Daddy had to shoot it in the head.”
He winced. This was the part where she’d start roaring again.
“He killed my pony!” she hissed and threw the picture across the room. It didn’t break because she’d done this before and the glass had already been broken. After the first couple of times, he had stopped replacing it.
John took that as his cue and walked back into the kitchen and sat down as she screamed and yelled about how horrible their father had been to her. Then she turned to scream about their mother, then about him. He waited and in ten minutes or so, her cries got less and less violent and then she became quiet and he knew she’d fallen asleep. The medicine had worked.
He breathed a sigh of relief, got up and went back into the sitting room where she was collapsed on the floor. He picked her up and took her upstairs and put her to bed. She was already in her pajamas, the same ones she wore day in and day out until they fell apart, then they’d be replaced with a new pair that looked exactly like them.
“Goodnight, Sis,” he said and stared at her, in a deep sleep.
She didn’t respond. He was glad. He went to bed himself and as he laid there and waited for his own sleep, he made a decision. The next morning, first thing, he was putting her in an institution. He would call her doctor to make all the arrangements. He didn’t care if meant breaking his promise to his mother, either. It was time and they both knew it. He had done his best and failed, it was that simple. Moreover, he wasn’t going to apologize for it. This was something that had to be done, that should have been done years ago. Elka needed help and she needed more than John could ever give her. Who knows? With the right medicine and doctors, she might be cured and live the rest of her life normally. He doubted it but there was always hope.
He got up from bed and went downstairs and found a bottle of whiskey he kept hidden in the back
of a kitchen cupboard. He poured himself a stiff one, gathered his cigarettes and an ashtray and sat down at the kitchen table, drinking and smoking until the early morning hours.
*
The next morning he awoke early, just before dawn. He was on the couch in the sitting room, still dressed. His head ached a little from a slight hangover, so he got up, went into the kitchen and drank several glasses of water.
As he looked around the room, he realized that Elka hadn’t eaten the previous day and that she was probably starving. She had gone to sleep really early, so the medication was probably wearing off and she’d be up earlier than normal and starving. He’d make her a good breakfast and then he’d…
He put the thought out of his head. He knew what he was going to do and though it was going to be hard, he’d have to do it. It was time for both of them to go in the direction they had no choice but to go in. There was no sense in delaying it. But first breakfast.
After he had made a good, hearty meal of bacon and eggs and toast, he went upstairs and quickly washed his face and brushed his teeth, then went into Elka’s bedroom. He glanced around at all the frou-frou stuff, the pink canopy bed and the toy chest filled with dolls she still played with from time to time. It was sad that she was over forty and still played with dolls, but that was to be expected.
He approached the bed slowly, wondering if he should wake her. She looked so peaceful. He knew that if he woke her out of a good sleep, she’d give him hell. But she did need to eat and he needed to get to the office and get his work done so he could leave early to make the arrangements to put her away. He’d also like to clarify things with Kathleen and prayed that she would forgive him or at least permit him to talk. He planned on telling her everything and allowing her to draw her own conclusions. He hoped that she would understand and have him back.