The Memory of Light

by Francisco X. Stork

  “School,” I say. It starts out as a question, but it comes out almost as a gasp.

  “Dr. Saenz recommends a return to your regular routine as soon as possible,” Barbara adds.

  “When you fall off the horse, the best thing to do is climb right back on,” Father agrees. I don’t know how many times he’s urged me to get back on that imaginary horse. It’s what he says every time he reads one of my report cards.

  “Dr. Desai thought I should stay here for a while,” I murmur.

  “Vicky.” My father lowers his voice. I get his business face now. “This is a public hospital. They take all kinds of deranged people. You don’t belong here. You don’t even know who this Dr. Desai is. The doctors who work in these hospitals are foreigners who can’t get jobs anywhere else.”

  “I should stay here,” I say softly, fearfully. I don’t know why I’m saying this. The words are being forced out by a presence so weak and new I didn’t even know it was there.

  “Why?” my father asks.

  Because I don’t want to go home. Because here people believe the words inside your head cause pain. Because there is something real about Mona and E.M. and Gabriel that is like me, that makes me feel like I belong.

  Instead, I say: “If I go back now, it will be like before.”

  My father looks momentarily lost. I can see him wondering whether I have just threatened to try to kill myself again. Barbara looks uncomfortable, like it’s hurting her to hold back all that she wants to say.

  “Good morning,” says Dr. Desai as she comes into the room. My father and Barbara stand and shake her outstretched hand. She sits in the only other available chair, and my father and Barbara sit as well. Both of them look at Dr. Desai as if she’s some shady character about to ask them for money.

  “Vicky may have already mentioned to you that I recommended she stay here at Lakeview for a couple of weeks,” Dr. Desai says. “I think it would be very good for her to stay. The type of thinking that led her to try to end her life is still there, and I’m afraid it will continue if she returns home so soon. Here, we can give her other things to think about and a way to reflect on that type of suicidal thinking.” She turns to me. “So, Vicky, would you like to stay here a couple of weeks?”

  I nod, avoiding my father’s eyes.

  “Wonderful.” Dr. Desai clasps her hands. She faces my father and Barbara. “And you?”

  “Is she on medication?” Barbara asks.

  “That’s another reason why I would like Vicky to stay. I would like some time to get to know her more before determining whether medication is needed.”

  “Suicidal thinking?” my father asks me, not quite believing what he heard Dr. Desai say a few moments before. “Is that what you have?”

  I look briefly at Dr. Desai. She urges me with her eyes to tell the truth. The best I can do is look steadily at my feet. That’s my answer.

  “Do you think going back home will make that worse?” I recognize a tinge of anger in Father’s voice.

  Dr. Desai intervenes. “It’s simply a question of giving Vicky a new environment for a short period of time. We want her to be in a place that is different from her usual life so she can see things differently when she returns home.”

  “And if she wants to come home before the end of the two weeks?” My father’s voice is still shaky. He is making an enormous effort to control himself.

  “Vicky can go home anytime she wants. She can also call you anytime she wants. But I think it’s better if she did not receive phone calls or visits.”

  I remember how she let me talk to Juanita yesterday, and I wonder whether she thinks my father and Barbara are the problem — whether she wants to protect me from them.

  “Vicky, is this what you really want?” Barbara asks.

  “Yes,” I say weakly.

  There’s a baffled look on my father’s face, as if he cannot believe that I’m his flesh and blood. “All right. Two weeks.” I hear disappointment and a residue of anger in his voice.

  Then he stands and we all follow suit. He comes over and hugs me. He holds me gingerly, as if I were expensive crystal, the kind that breaks if you look at it the wrong way, and I can tell I’ve hurt him.

  Outside, after we watch Father and Barbara walk out the front entrance, Dr. Desai says: “There’s one more thing.” She waits until I look at her. “If you’re going to stay, I ask that you do not try to kill yourself while you are here. I need to hear you say that you promise.”

  “While I’m here?”

  “While you’re here.”

  “And afterward?”

  “Afterward will be afterward. For now, I want a promise that you will not try to hurt yourself.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Okay?”

  “I won’t try to kill myself … while I’m here.”

  Words, I remind myself. They are just words.

  My first few days at Lakeview pass more quickly than I expect. I thought staying at the hospital would be boring with nothing to do. But boredom only happens when you have some place you’d rather be. Time slows down here, but that’s all right. It’s as if the world and my brain can finally move at the same speed. The mental playlist with such hits as “I’m a Monumental Failure” and “I’m Lazy” and “I’m Bad and Worthless” and let’s not forget the very popular “I Don’t Belong Anywhere in This Here Universe” keeps on playing, but the tempo is different, slower. And slower thoughts, I discover, mean not less pain, but a different, more solid and real kind of pain. There is more time for me to remember actual examples of my failures and worthlessness and not belonging anywhere, and this makes the thoughts more substantial and less ghostlike. It’s more painful than before, but somehow more endurable, if that makes any sense.

  Not that my days are spent sitting around thinking. I listen to Mona, who stops talking only long enough to sleep a few hours at night or to watch one of her shows, which totally absorb her. I eat all my meals with E.M., Gabriel, and Mona in the fifth-floor dining room. And I have my daily sessions with Dr. Desai and the GTH — Group Therapy Healing. We meet in a small room with a row of windows on one end and six chairs in a circle.

  The GTH is like a person with different moods. Some days it is lively and funny and other days it is gloomy and dark. At first I thought it was Mona who infected the GTH with how she feels on a particular day, but after a few sessions, I think the tone is set by Gabriel. I still have no idea why he’s here, but sometimes there’s a quiet about him that quickly spreads to all of us. It’s almost as if his thoughtfulness reminds us all of the darkness we always carry within. I mostly try to listen and not talk.

  “I have something for you all,” Dr. Desai says one morning. She reaches for the plastic bag next to her chair, takes out four spiral notebooks, and spreads them out on the wobbly table. “Please, choose one.”

  Mona reaches in and grabs the purple one. E.M. takes the black. Gabriel waits for me to choose next, but I don’t move. He picks blue. I lift the green notebook and drop it on my lap. I remember the dozen or so notebooks just like this in the bottom drawer of my desk at home — my journals, the only place where I don’t lie, where I put my pathetic poems. I should have thrown them out before I did the deed.

  “What we supposed to write in these?” Mona asks.

  “Anything,” Dr. Desai says. “Pretend you’re writing to someone you enjoy talking to and who enjoys listening to you. A journal-friend. The person can be real or can be imaginary. Write something every day, even if it’s just a paragraph. I’d like you to bring your notebooks to our individual sessions. You can share what you write with me, but only if you want. No pressure.”

  Mona raises her hand. “I think everyone here picked a notebook that fits his or her personality.”

  “Could you explain?” Dr. Desai asks.

  “Well,” she says, moving to the edge of her chair, “I picked purple because purple is a royal color. It’s also the color for pain, and my life’s been one roya
l pain in the butt.”

  Gabriel laughs. Dr. Desai tries not to smile, but she does anyway. I think I see E.M.’s eyes soften.

  Gabriel lifts up his notebook. “What does blue stand for?”

  “Blue stands for mystery. You know, like the blue sky. It looks like that’s all there is, but there’s a whole scary universe with stars and planets and black holes behind it.”

  Gabriel’s eyes widen, then he says, “It’s not all that scary.”

  Mona ignores him. She’s looking at E.M., who is flipping through the blank pages of his notebook. “Black is for the darkness in your heart,” Mona tells him. She could be joking or she could be serious, I can’t tell.

  “That sounds a little like a judgment,” Dr. Desai says, “which we’ve promised not to do here.”

  “It don’t bother me,” E.M. says. He smiles at Mona and she almost, but not quite, smiles back at him.

  “What about green?” Gabriel asks, looking at me.

  “Enough personality assessments,” Dr. Desai says before Mona can speak again. “I want to spend some time today talking about our fathers.”

  I can tell by the dead silence of the group that no one is excited about the topic. None of us want to go first. Finally, Dr. Desai asks Gabriel to start.

  Gabriel speaks quickly but distractedly, his thoughts and words on different tracks. I’ve noticed that he has different speeds that switch from one moment to another. “I don’t know my father, so I’ll talk about my grandfather. My grandfather is seventy-four and still works as a gardener — Romero Landscape. That’s what he’s done all his life, since he came from Mexico. He’s been married to my grandmother since he was eighteen. She has some kind of mental illness. She forgets things. She sees things. But it’s not Alzheimer’s. Some kind of senile schizophrenia, maybe.” He looks at Dr. Desai for confirmation. She nods, and he continues, “My grandfather loves her. It makes him happy to take care of her. He works twelve hours a day so he can pay to have someone stay with her. His life is for her, and for my mother when she was alive, and now for me.”

  He breathes deeply and then continues. “My mother and me, we always lived near my grandparents. When she died, it broke my grandfather’s heart, literally. A month later, he had a heart attack. I quit school to help him out. We have forty yards. We mow four lawns a day, five when we can. We work Saturdays and sometimes on Sundays to catch up. That’s pretty much it.”

  Dr. Desai asks E.M. to talk next, but E.M. flatly refuses. “I got no real father” is all he says.

  Mona says, “Okay, I’ll go,” and takes off. “I’m like Gabriel, I never knew my father. That only leaves Jerry, my stepfather, to tell you about. He’s the definition of Mr. Jekyll and Dr. Hyde, or is it the other way around? He’s a flipper. One moment he’s hugging us all and buying us giant teddy bears, and the next moment he’s yelling because we woke him up at night. The only good thing he’s ever done is get my mother pregnant, and the one good thing in our miserable lives was Lucy.

  “I’ve already told you how I took care of Lucy since day one. But I couldn’t be with her every single second. We were getting welfare, but that wasn’t enough. Someone had to work in our sorry family and that was me. So one day the social worker shows up and they take Lucy. I cry and beg, but it’s no use. Then, just before she goes, the social worker, this fat lady, she says, ‘I want to show you something.’ She shows me these purple marks on Lucy’s arms. ‘Those are finger marks from someone shaking her,’ she says. That’s when I realized what Jerry had been doing. I had to leave her alone with them sometimes, even though they were addicts and all that. But how could it be that I never saw those marks?”

  We are all silent while Mona sobs quietly. There is not supposed to be any pressure for anyone to speak in the GTH. But we have gone around the circle now, and I feel like I owe it to the group to tell them about my parents.

  I hesitate. Then I look up and see Dr. Desai nod. It is the smallest nod, just a tiny movement of her head, but it’s as if she knows exactly what I’m thinking and she’s encouraging me to go ahead and let the words come out. Yes, my circumstances are very different from the others’; yes, I am privileged in comparison to the rest. Yet here I am at Lakeview, in the psychiatric ward, after I tried to kill myself. No matter how good my living situation is, something isn’t clicking. I inhale deeply and begin to speak.

  “My father is in the real estate and construction business. He’s been in real estate and construction all his life. My grandfather owned a brick-making factory here in Austin, and when he died, my father inherited it and grew his business from there. He takes buildings that aren’t in great shape, fixes them, and slowly fills them with people who can pay more rent. The money he makes, he invests in bigger buildings and so on. He has a knack for finding out what part of the city well-off people will want to live in, and he goes in there and buys property that is not worth much. He does it with houses too. He buys the homes of people who can’t pay their mortgages, fixes them, and sells them. He makes deals. All day long, that’s what he does. He makes deals.”

  I glance quickly around the room. E.M. is looking at me as if everything I said proved that what he thought about me has been right on. Mona is biting her nails, or what is left of them, but she is paying attention, waiting for me to continue. Gabriel looks sad — I don’t think I’ve ever seen that sadness on him before. Dr. Desai has a worried look on her face.

  I might as well go on now. It’s the most I’ve ever spoken at a GTH and I feel an energy pushing me to continue.

  “My father married Barbara about six months after my mother died. She was my father’s assistant before he married her. Barbara is pretty, real pretty. She works out every day. She was married to a lawyer, but they divorced sometime after she started working for my father. She’s smart also. My father never went to college, but Barbara has a degree in business.” I pause for a moment. “I don’t know how I ended up talking about Barbara. When I think of my father, I think of her, I guess.”

  “What’s she like? Is she nice?” Mona asks.

  I shrug. “Barbara? She’s nice in her own way. My sister, Becca, gets along great with her, but she makes me nervous. She’s always thinking of the next thing she has to do.” Then I say impulsively, “She doesn’t sleep. The sleeping pills I took were prescribed for her. My father takes them too.”

  The group is silent. I can hear Dr. Desai’s labored breathing next to me. E.M. clears his throat. “I know your father’s company,” he says. “They bought a whole bunch of buildings over on the east side and kicked the poor people out. Then the rich people moved in.”

  “Yup, that sounds like my father’s company,” I say.

  “What about your mom?” Mona asks.

  “My mom?” I swallow. My stomach muscles tense.

  “Only if you want,” Dr. Desai says.

  “I remember my mother as quiet, maybe a little shy,” I say, my eyes on the floor. “I thought she was beautiful, with her short black hair. Let’s see. She helped me with my homework because I’ve always needed help. I used to ask her to read to me from whatever book she was reading. She liked to read poetry in Spanish. Her favorite was love poetry from famous Latin and Spanish poets, some modern, some very old. What else? She loved to play Scrabble. We played it all the time.” I glance at Dr. Desai, who smiles at me. “She got breast cancer when I was eight. It went away and then it came back, and the second time it was in her brain. She died when I was ten. The last three months she was mostly in bed. She wouldn’t eat that much either. Juanita, that’s my nanny, would bring her dinner up to her room. I would read to her.”

  “Go on,” Dr. Desai gently urges me.

  “That was six years ago,” I say.

  “You still miss her,” Mona says. “You’re still sad for her.” I notice that she stopped biting her nails while I was speaking.

  “I don’t feel sad,” I say. “I don’t feel anything. I hardly ever think of her. How could I feel sad after so many years
?”

  I look at Dr. Desai, but E.M. speaks before she can say anything. “You don’t feel sad, you just feel sorry for yourself.”

  “You’re a jerk,” Mona tells him.

  “Because I tell it like it is? If that makes me a jerk, then it does. Me feeling sorry for her is not gonna do her any good.”

  “You’re about as sensitive as a worm,” Mona continues. “Besides, what do you know about feeling sad? Psychopaths don’t feel sad.”

  “Psycho what? Psycho pat? Is that what I am? That doesn’t sound too bad.”

  “Psycho-path! Not psycho-pat!” Mona corrects him. “Idiot.”

  “Okay,” says Dr. Desai, “let’s do this without calling each other names. Gabriel, would you like to say something?”

  Gabriel shifts in his chair. He speaks slowly now, with choppy pauses, as if he’s just climbed a hundred steps. “About six months. After my mother died. I noticed. I was no longer feeling sad. Missing her. Like I used to. I didn’t feel anything. But that was worse than feeling sad. When I was sad, I felt my mother. Next to me. Helping me. When I stopped feeling sad. She was gone. I was all alone.”

  His eyes redden and then moisten. I wish I could feel whatever it is that he is feeling. I remember how I tried to picture my mother’s face when I took the sleeping pills. I closed my eyes and waited as I sank deeper and deeper into the silent darkness, but her image never came.

  “People mourn in different ways,” Mona says. “You could still be mourning your mother after six years while others mourn for just a few months. I mean, hey, look at your dad. Six months after your mother dies, he marries somebody else. I bet you a hundred dollars that your stepmother is younger than your father.”

  “She’s ten years younger,” I say.

  “Told you!” There’s a triumphant look on Mona’s face. “Pardon me for asking, but do you think he was having an affair with her — before your mother died, I mean?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say quickly, almost defensively. Then I stop to think. But no — the one thing I know about my father is that once he gives his word, he sticks to it. “If you knew my father, you’d know he’s not the type to do that.”