House of Heroes

by Mary LaChapelle

  It exasperated me that she took pleasure in exposing my more personal feelings, asking me about my “boyfriends,” or whom I was jealous of in my family, who loved whom best. After she had grilled me relentlessly, she would explain simply that she was a “Therapist’s Therapist.”

  I objected when she tracked down my office phone. But as if she understood what the real limits were, she never pushed that one. Yet even without her calling, I found her to be strangely present in my work. “That’s not enough!” a middle-aged man had roared at me during a session one day. I had just finished saying that the important thing was that he needed to feel good about himself. On any other day I might have responded with “It may feel that way” or “You just have to trust me on that.” But instead I felt winded, disoriented. Something, I realized later, in the challenge of knowing Tiffany was rattling the very detachment and confidence I had always felt was necessary to work with my clients.

  “Most everyone loves me,” she once said while pulling a cake we had made out of the oven. It occurred to me this was her way of telling me that I should love her. But it was more than that—something in the warm kitchen’s air must have actually made her feel this was true. And now she was just repeating it, making it into a certainty.

  But the absence of her mother was a hairline crack in her optimism, and some days when she remembered something awful, or when just the accumulation of time was a reminder that she had been left alone, the crack would fracture into a chasm. Then I would find her sitting on the picnic table as I pulled my car in the driveway. And I would know because she was unsettled, and at a loss for what to do with herself. There was no chance of our talking, no chance of my leaving her alone, so I would go on with opening my mail or whatever else was at hand, and she would stay, sometimes pulling the curtain away from the window to look outside, as if it were raining and she was waiting for it to stop.

  In the next few days she would give her hair another blunt treatment, take up jogging with a competitive marathon in her sights, or I’d find a regular smorgasbord of garden vegetables she had arranged at the mouth of the rabbit hole in my yard. Food for a rabbit we had seen neither hide nor hair of in weeks.

  At the end of the summer Tiffany entered what at the time I couldn’t help but diagnose as a manic phase. She began to wear her scapular, with the small image of the sacred heart, on the outside of her shirt. She had gray rings under her eyes, and I suspected she wasn’t sleeping at night. She was constantly running her hands through her hair, so that it stood up in tufts on her head. When she would visit, she would talk, she would talk and talk, as if it were the equivalent to breathing. “My mother isn’t doing very well,” she’d say. “They say she’s speeding up. I think I know what it is,” she’d say. “She’s speeding up for the wreck. I don’t think she’s gone this fast before.”

  I was afraid it might not be her mother she was talking about, but herself. I called Tobey Johnson.

  “What is happening with her mother?” I asked.

  “We hear she’s in a manic episode. Pretty bad, I guess. They don’t think it is good for Tiffany to visit her.”

  “But Tiffany knows about it.”

  “She saw her once. I guess that was enough.”

  “I think Tiffany’s in serious trouble, Mr. Johnson. You understand, even at this age it’s not impossible for the illness to kick in.”

  “Dr. O’Keefe, I know it’s hard not to be afraid of that. But I’ve known her for a few years, and I’ve seen similar behavior before. Somehow she seems to have her own way of getting to the other side.”

  But the next weekend we attended an office picnic together. I had invited her several weeks before, but when the time came, told her that in light of her recent behavior, I wondered if it was a good idea for her to go. “I’m not crazy,” she told me once again in the car on the way to the park. She had a large watermelon in her lap. I had assured her she didn’t need to bring anything, but she had insisted from the start that she wanted to bring a melon. She was wearing a sleeveless, lemon-colored undershirt and her earrings were little plastic oranges and bananas. I realized she was following a kind of fruit theme.

  My partners and their families had found an area of picnic tables under a pleasant stand of elms. Once we arrived. Tiffany immediately began to slice the watermelon and pass it to people on paper plates. The adults were drinking beer, waiting for the coals to get hot on the grill. The children were off playing Frisbee. Kathy and Steve had brought out their wedding pictures, and there wasn’t much room on the table. “Maybe we should wait with the melon,” I said to her gently.

  “I just thought,…” she started to say but stopped. I knew she felt humiliated.

  One of my partners, Keith, set his dead pipe down and reached for one of the plates. “I wouldn’t mind a little,” he said, and smiled.

  Kathy looked up from her pictures. “It looks wonderful,” she said. “As soon as we finish boring everyone, we’ll have a big plate.” She said this with a tone one uses when talking to a child.

  Steve hadn’t even looked at the melon. All I could see was his blond well-groomed head bent over the pictures. “This one should go into the reject pile,” he said, putting a photo to one side.

  “But I like that one!” Kathy said.

  The pictorial tour of the wedding went on.

  I had never seen Tiffany so reserved in a group before. She sat picking seeds out of the watermelon on the plate in front of her. She did this methodically, stripping one slice and then, without eating it, going on to another. Her pace began to pick up, and eventually she had a large stack of seedless melon slices and large pile of seeds on another plate. There was going to be trouble.

  “Why don’t you eat some of it?” One of the children, a little boy, had come up to the table behind her. She didn’t answer him.

  “If they could invent a seedless watermelon,” Keith said lamely.

  Tiffany finally looked at the child. “This is for you and the other kids,” she said, handing over the soggy plate that was almost collapsing under the pile of melon slices. The boy walked carefully away, holding the plate well in front of him so the juices wouldn’t drip down his front.

  She quietly watched him make his way to the others lying together in the shaded grass. For a moment I had the impression that she was peaceful. But when she turned back to the table, her face was a mask of stony contempt. “What’s wrong?” I mouthed the words to her. She ignored me and stared ahead. The other adults had barely noticed her this whole time, except for Keith, who I sensed was sharing in the tension I was now feeling.

  Tiffany had her hand in the plate of seeds beside her. She was rubbing them between her fingers, though she still looked straight ahead.

  “Are you in high school yet, Tiffany?” Keith asked, while dipping a match into his pipe.

  Keith’s wife looked at Tiffany, aware that she wasn’t answering.

  My other partner and his wife were still obliviously looking at pictures with Kathy and Steve.

  “Keith asked you a question,” I said.

  She acted as if I hadn’t said anything and slid nearer the group around the pictures. She took a picture from the pile and appeared to study it intently.

  “Ha!” she laughed, causing everyone to look toward her. I sighed heavily, as if I thought the sound of it might change the course of things. Everyone else had become very quiet. “Look at the romantic couple.” The picture was upside down for me, but I could see across the table that she was pointing at the bride and groom in one of the church pictures. “And who is this?” She pointed one of her long, thin fingers down in an exaggerated manner. From the speck of lime green under her finger, I guessed she was pointing at herself. “This is the only one in the church who’s praying.”

  “Tiffany.” I put my hand out toward the picture.

  “Auuugh!” she screeched, and pulled the picture out of my reach. Kathy jumped. Steve had his chin leaning in his hand, the hand covering his mouth, which m
ade him look like he might either burp or yawn. Keith was still holding his pipe to his mouth, but he wasn’t drawing from it. I imagined he was giving her some sort of diagnosis. I could almost see the possibilities rolling through his mind, like the music grid in a player piano.

  The little boy with the watermelon had returned. I could see the other children were also coming toward us. She got up and held the picture up to the boy, who was standing at the other end of the table. “If we could make this into a moving picture,” she said to him, “you would see everyone was only going through the motions. You know”—she looked at Kathy—“genuflect, cross your forehead, splash some holy water on your head, get into the modern guitar.”

  “Who?” the boy asked.

  “Like Peg here.” She pointed to the tiny figure that must have been me. “You’re all going to be damned!” She was standing on the bench now, her orange and banana earrings jiggling, and she seemed to be shouting to the kids who were only a few feet away.

  “Hey now!” Keith’s wife said.

  “That’s enough.” I stood up.

  “You all think that if you just remember a little of it, it will save you. Like hanging a No Pest strip on the porch.” She had her arms up, her fingers running through her black hair. I could see her navel and the white skin of her small belly. “But you’ve got to believe as much as me, as much as me.” There were little specks of spit flying out of her mouth. “Or you might as well forget it. If you don’t really believe it’s out there, then there will be nothing out there to see you. You’ll be completely invisible. Like my mom.”

  She looked me directly in the face. There were tears in her eyes. She was so unhappy and so beautiful I didn’t know what to do. I wished I’d taken her hand and, instead of standing outside of the scene, as if I had nothing to do with it at all, looked up at her, saying, “Maybe you should come down now, maybe I should take you home.”

  Tobey Johnson and I kept in closer touch. Tiffany, on the other hand, was mostly not interested in seeing me. She was going through an “isolation thing,” Tobey said. “Was she depressed?” I wanted to know. He thought that was probably true. And maybe a little ashamed, he said, about the thing in the park.

  I wrote her a letter. I used the most guilt-producing argument that I could think of. “I gave you many, many chances before I even knew you. We have a relationship. How is it you can count on me, but I’m not allowed to count on you…?” I also made a point of reminding her that she had left off owing me at least two days where I was allowed to be the designer. I don’t know if guilt persuaded her or not. She accepted, but when Tobey called to tell me, he said, “She’s going through a sullen stage. I don’t envy you.”

  I arranged a weekend at my family’s lake cottage when none of the relatives would be there. I was hoping that being alone would make it easier for us to talk again. It was a designer weekend. Fishing was the one and only activity. My plan was to fish on the lake until we caught something over twelve inches. “If it takes all day and night,” I told her, not believing it would. I had borrowed some books at the library on the subject and rented equipment at a sports shop in the city.

  Tiffany was dangling a night crawler over the water as if any moment a walleye might sit up in the lake and beg. This was her response to my asking if she wouldn’t maybe like to start using the pole that I had paid twenty-five dollars to rent.

  After about five minutes of this, I built up a feeling of righteousness. “I’m the designer,” I said. “You have to fish.”

  “Do I have to talk?” she said.

  “No, but I might say a word now and then.”

  The lake was everything I would have wanted it to be for someone who had never been there before, dark but crystalline, like the deep-colored marble we used to collect. And farther out the light lay on the surface of the water and rolled along as if it might eventually reach us. I was used to days when the cloud cover constantly changed overhead and the wind slapped water against the boat so that even while you were anchored you were pushed like a whirligig in circles. But this day was still.

  The loons were out fishing, creating a sense of camaraderie. They were a pair of black shapes on the glaze of light in the distance, and I wondered if we were the same to them.

  “Watch when one of them dives,” I said.

  But neither of them did. Instead of facing me, Tiffany faced the back of the boat. Her line was dutifully in the water and that was about all.

  She had grown a little taller since I had first met her, she was wearing her hair longer, she had rolled up her T-shirt sleeves. There were a few specks of lake water glittering on her forearm. A smudge of sunburn was darkening on each white shoulder and I thought how I might have to remind her later to cover up.

  “I can only imagine that the worm on the end of that line, Tiffany, has died of boredom.” She was quiet. “I mean you have to play with your line a bit.”

  She turned around, her hand shielding her eyes from the sun, which was shining behind my head. “You don’t know that much more about it than I do.”

  “Ohh, ho.” I was determined to be good-natured. “Fish catching—and I’ve done some significant research—is the simple result of a precise combination of factors: where, when, what, and how. Sometime today, one of us has to hit it right.”

  But something went wrong. The loons disappeared in the afternoon and came back in the early evening for their dinner, craning their necks back and swallowing it whole. It was getting very dark, and still neither of us had even a glimpse of a fish near our boat. Tiffany was silent, and this added to my sense of foolishness.

  We’d eaten all the sandwiches. Everything in the cooler was warm. “I suppose you would like to go in,” I said.

  “It’s up to you,” she said, without expression.

  I started to row back, forgetting to pull up the anchor. And there were a few awkward slaps of the oars which splashed water on her back. She reached around with her hand and quietly wiped it away. I set my mind to an efficient rhythm of rowing, but I couldn’t avoid the discouragement I felt, like an ache, as we approached the shore.

  In the twilight, with her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms wrapped around her legs, Tiffany looked like one of those gray cocoons you find broken away from its branch. Everything that I had known to be alive about her appeared to be wrapped and dormant. When we finally bumped against the shore, she was upset in her seat and had to reach for the sides of the boat.

  “The day’s not over,” I said. And I felt like you might feel when your lover has left, and you still believe you could somehow make him love you.

  There was no electricity in the cottage, and while lighting the kerosene lamps, I anticipated the trip we would need to make to the outhouse. “Tiffany, I have another plan,” I said.

  “You want to frighten me,” she said, when I told her.

  “I’ll have a flashlight, and I’ll be right behind you.”

  “No,” she said.

  “You don’t have a choice, though,” I said, and she knew this was true.

  Even before we had come, I had thought of the outhouse as a new experience for Tiffany. When I was a child on our weekends at the cottage, the nightly trip there had always been a kind of odyssey. It was a necessity and yet something terrifying because of the woods we had to travel through to get there. One of my parents would always lead me with the flashlight. But somehow they didn’t have the power to dispel the phantoms I saw silhouetted in the undergrowth along the path.

  “If you had a flashlight,” I said to Tiffany, “it wouldn’t be the same as it used to be for me. It looks different when you don’t hold the light yourself.”

  On our way, she stopped dead in her tracks, and I bumped into her. “What?” I said.

  “Didn’t you see that?” she said.

  “What?” I felt exhilarated that this was working so well.

  “Let’s keep moving,” she said. “Keep the light in front of my feet, for God’s sake!”
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br />   Every few steps I’d twist the beam into the foliage along the path, just barely, knowing that my parents would never have done this to me. Her indifference had vanished. She had her hands out at her side, she was listening to everything.

  Then, when we finally reached the outhouse, and after she had taken her turn, I made the mistake of giving her the flashlight. Before I was finished, everything went dark. When I stepped out, she placed the tube of the flashlight in my hand. “Here you go,” she said.

  The batteries were gone.

  “Now nobody has a light.” She was cool and still. She had taken my power away.

  The trees were looming over us, shuddering erratically in the wind. We found our way to the cottage only because we could hear the lake lapping against the dock.

  Before I went to bed, I took the lamp into her room. She was lying, still in her jeans, on the top of a bedspread that used to be mine when I was young.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed. “You should cover up.” I felt awkward, reaching over her to pull up the blanket when she hadn’t asked.

  “Tiffany, I wish we could talk.”

  She looked sleepy. She had her arms behind her head, and her eyes were just barely visible under her lashes.

  “I was wondering,” I said, “if I were to tell you something, would you tell me something similar in return?”

  I could see her eyes go sideways, under her eyelashes. “Is this a designer thing?” she asked.

  “Yes, I guess it is.”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Okay,” I said. “When I was in second grade, I used to talk to a statue of the Virgin Mary.”

  “Is that it?” she said.

  It seems there were to be no bounds to my humiliation this weekend. I realized this was a tame admission to be making to someone with her experience. So I paused, trying to think of a way I could express it better.

  “But, you see, when I talked to her, I absolutely believed someone out there could hear me.”