The Memory of Light

by Francisco X. Stork

I go and stand beside her. The parking lot lights flicker on even though there is still at least an hour left of daylight. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “All right. But this has to be our secret, okay? Rudy knows someone who works for some agency who claims he can find out where Lucy is.”

  “But —”

  “Vicky, I got to get her back, I don’t care how. If there’s anything I can do to get her back, I will do it.”

  “Anything that you can legally do, right?”

  She doesn’t answer my question. She walks back to her bed and picks up the phone, then opens the top drawer of the dresser and drops the phone in. “Vicky,” she says, closing the drawer with her behind, “thank you for thinking I’m smart.”

  “You’re welcome,” I say, embarrassed.

  “That was nice, when you asked me if I ever thought about going into psychiatry. I know you were joking, but it was still nice.”

  “I wasn’t joking. Not totally.”

  “When I was diagnosed as bipolar a couple of years ago, I went online and studied everything there was to know about depression, mania, schizophrenia, psychopaths. Oh, and I really dug deep on the grieving process. That’s why I said that stuff about your mother at that GTH, remember? I had you diagnosed about ten seconds after I found out your mother died.

  “You know how I knew? Because me too. I’m stuck grieving for Lucy, only it’s much worse because I lost her on account of people’s selfishness, including my own, and not on account of God taking her like he did your mother. Sometimes I don’t understand why I feel the way I do, so powerfully. Why am I still so angry and sad over Lucy? Maybe she’s happy where she is. Maybe she’s better off. Why can’t I let it go?”

  We are standing in the middle of our room, Mona with her back to the wall and me facing her. She’s looking past me as if I weren’t in front of her. She looks the saddest I’ve ever seen a person look, and what comes to my mind at this moment is that, without Lucy, there is nothing holding her on this earth. I don’t know what to do. This is new territory for me. What do friends do when they finish confiding in each other? Do they give each other a hug?

  Mona sighs and then heads to the bathroom. I hop up on my bed backward and look out at the parking lot. I think about the Harvard T-shirt that Becca sent me for my birthday. It came in a manila envelope. There was no card inside, only a yellow sticky note with “Happy Birthday – Love, Becca.”

  How strange that I was not disappointed or sad. Is that how depression works? You reach a point where there are no more disappointments or more sadness because every single thing is a disappointment and there’s no more room anywhere for sadness? So I was sick. So I am sick. Is that it?

  When Mona comes out of the bathroom, she stretches out on her bed and says, “There’s one more thing I want to tell you, psychologically speaking, and then I’ll shut up.”

  “Go ahead,” I say.

  “I’m telling you now because I think it will help you, not now maybe, but someday.” She folds her pillow for better head support and then turns on her side to face me. “When Lucy was born and I decided to clean myself up, I went to this NA meeting, you know, Narcotics Anonymous. They have these twelve steps you’re supposed to follow. One of them, the one that caused me the most trouble, was about not lying to yourself. The actual words were something like ‘Make a complete and fearless moral inventory of yourself,’ which I interpreted as ‘Don’t lie to yourself about how you really feel about things or people or yourself.’”

  “You think I’m lying to myself?” A shiver of fear runs through me.

  “If you’re jealous of your sister or angry at your dad, if you think they’re all jerks, so what? You can lie to others if you want — we all have to do that to stay alive — but don’t lie to yourself about what you feel. So you’re envious of your sister and resentful that your father doesn’t look at you the same way. Those things are ugly, but we all have them. It’s the uglies. Tell the truth about them is all I’m saying. You follow?”

  “Yes,” I manage to say. A painful knot grips my stomach. It scares me to think that I may be envious of Becca or angry at my father. Why does this make me afraid? I have no idea.

  “But when you’re not lying to yourself anymore and you got your inventory of the uglies pretty much complete, you can go on to the next step.”

  “The next step?”

  “Yeah. That your sister and your father may, in fact, be jerks. Or at least act like jerks sometimes. You’re not totally responsible for your uglies.”

  “That’s one of the steps in NA?”

  “No, that one I made up. Okay, that’s it. Therapy’s over.” She finds the iPod’s earbuds, sticks them in her ears, rolls onto her back, and closes her eyes. “Nighty night night,” she says.

  I lie awake, stunned by the thought that underneath all my sadness, there was anger and resentment and hurt I didn’t even know about, the “uglies” Mona named. I see in Becca’s face a mixture of fear and disgust when I tell her Mamá wants to see her, like she’s afraid of catching Mamá’s cancer. Doesn’t she think that Mamá notices? I want to grab her and shake her and scream at her, “It’s your mother and she needs you! Don’t be such a coward!”

  Don’t lie to yourself, Mona says. Okay, I won’t. For the longest time, I’ve felt like I’m better than my father and my sister. Because I feel things they apparently don’t feel, because I see phoniness and self-interest where they see only the rules that everyone must follow to get ahead. How strange that feeling superior to everyone is so like what I imagine E.M. means by feeling sorry for yourself.

  But that’s not all that is there. I also want to be close to Becca, to have a sister who will understand me and not run away. I want my father to be proud of me like he is of her. I want this alongside all my uglies.

  The uglies. It’s hard to look at them.

  I get up and try to open the window, even though I know it doesn’t open.

  Here I am, I say to no one in particular. In all my ugly glory.

  Over the next two days, I felt again and again what it was like to live in our house. I remember how it felt to come home from school, open the front door, and get hit in the face with a cold, dark loneliness. I remember the leathery, dead smell of the untouched living room furniture, the soul-piercing hum of the air conditioner at three a.m. Living there is like going to a party where you don’t know anyone and no one speaks to you and you don’t know where to stand or sit. It would have been unbearable for me long before the deed if it weren’t for Juanita and the refuge of her room.

  We moved into the house a month or so after Father married Barbara, because it was awkward for Barbara to live in the same house where my mother had lived, to sleep in the same bed where my mother had slept. Plus, the new house had the advantage of having a room for “servants” a few steps from the back door of the kitchen, separate from the house, with its own entrance. In the old house, Juanita’s room was upstairs next to my bedroom. Barbara didn’t think that was appropriate.

  My mother liked to paint, and our old house was decorated with paintings of roses she had done over the years. Only four of my mother’s paintings survived Barbara’s renovations, and those were kept out of the Salvation Army box only because of my stealth. Two of them are in my room and the other two are in Juanita’s. I put my letter to Juanita on the back of one because I knew she would take the paintings in my room and save them. The abstract paintings in the living room, bought by Father and Barbara for “investment purposes,” remind me of bleeding zebras — black-and-white-striped with dashes of dripping red. They are worse than incomprehensible. Their message is that they don’t have to have a message. They leer at you for even trying to find meaning or beauty or, at the very least, some kind of pattern in them.

  My house is how I know that sooner or later, I will try to kill myself again. Lakeview is a tiny island from which I see the sharks of suicide circling, waiting. I don’t know what brought this gl
oominess about my future. But there in front of me stands the horrible truth that there is nothing about the life I will return to that I like. I carried on day after day telling myself that my life was not so bad — not so bad at all, when you thought about it. It was even good, in comparison to most lives. But that comparison doesn’t help anymore. The truth is that I disliked my life and almost everyone in it. It’s a feeling that goes way back, but now I have words for it. I can’t lie to myself anymore. It only makes it worse.

  Should I tell Dr. Desai about the uglies? Are the ugly truths we discover about ourselves like the messages that the elves of depression wheel to the forefront of my mind? How do you distinguish between an untrue message dictated by depression and a true one that comes from the bottom of your soul? There’s no way to tell them apart without someone’s help. Are there other truths in there besides the ugly ones? Truths that will help me live?

  I think about all of this while waiting for my session with Dr. Desai. She’s running a little late. Her desk is full of half-elephant, half-man figurines in different poses. Sometimes the figure is sitting down, his legs crossed like a Buddha, and sometimes he’s dancing, his four arms and trunk dangling in the air. He has a good-size belly in all of them. I don’t know how I can tell he’s a man, but he is. I pick one up and study him.

  “Lord Ganesh,” a voice says behind me. I think I jump a little. I drop the figure. Gabriel stoops down, picks it up.

  “What?” I ask, recovering.

  “This little guy is Lord Ganesh.” He holds out the elephant-man in the palm of his hand. “He’s a Hindu god. More like a manifestation of God. The human part represents the part of God that we are able to see in the world and in others, and the elephant part is the unknowable part of God.” He lowers Ganesh gently onto the desk and pats the elephant head with his index finger.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Dr. Desai asked me to come to her office at eleven fifteen.”

  “She told me to be here at eleven.”

  “Ah,” Gabriel says, thinking.

  “What?”

  “Maybe Dr. Desai wanted us to talk to each other.”

  I stare at him for a few seconds. “Or maybe she got her schedule mixed up.”

  “No.” He reaches over and picks up another of the elephant-man figurines. “I don’t believe in coincidences. Everything happens for a reason.” He grins as he studies it for a moment, and then he places it in the exact spot where he found it. He continues grinning at it, forgetting completely that I’m sitting next to him, or so it seems.

  “Well,” I say, “what did Dr. Desai want us to talk about?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we should analyze each other. I’ll be Dr. Desai.” He sits on the chair next to mine, leans back and crosses his hands over his stomach. “Now, Vicky, what was going through your mind just before I came in and scared you?”

  I look at him hard. The way he asks, it seems as if he knows exactly what I was thinking, about how much I hate my father’s house and how I’ll try to kill myself again. I try to come up with some kind of joke, something funny, but instead I find myself saying, “I was thinking about how this place, Lakeview, how it’s a little unreal.”

  “Mmm.” He strokes his chin thoughtfully. “Yes, yes. That’s absolutely true. But how does that make you feel?”

  I laugh despite myself.

  “No, really? Is that what you were thinking?” He sits up, stops acting.

  “Kind of.”

  He turns his chair slightly toward me. On the right side of his sneakers, I notice a hole with grass stains around it. “Unreal, as in here it’s not like it is out there? Here you’re insulated somehow?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “It’s a little oasis in some ways.”

  That’s the difference between Gabriel and me. He sees Lakeview as an oasis and I see it as an eroding island surrounded by sharks.

  “On the other hand,” he continues, “there’s some harsh, painful realities you face here that you never have to look at out there.”

  “True,” I agree, thinking of the uglies.

  “Not to mention the fact that you meet more loony people here than you do out there.”

  “I’m not sure about that.” I don’t mean to be funny, but my words make Gabriel laugh.

  Dr. Desai has a clock shaped like the Tower of London on one of the shelves behind her desk. It makes a grinding noise every fifteen seconds before the minute hand moves, as if forcing itself to keep time, to inch ahead one more minute even though you can tell the poor old thing has had it. Gabriel and I watch the clock in silence.

  “I know what you’re worried about,” Gabriel says, still looking at the clock.

  “I’m not really worried about it.” It’s true. Worry only comes when you’re not sure if something bad will happen or not. When you know it’s coming, there’s no worry. I know I’m going to go home. I know I’m going to try again. Why worry?

  “It could be that things will be different for you after Lakeview.”

  “No,” I say quickly, decisively. “Everything and everyone will be exactly the same.”

  “But … you may be different.”

  “Maybe,” I say. I’m already a little different. Calmer, more honest somehow. I catch myself laughing with Mona. But is that enough?

  “Hey,” Gabriel says suddenly. “Tell me something you like to do.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you, Vicky. What do you like to do out there?”

  “Out there?”

  “Yeah. There must be something you enjoy doing.”

  That’s a hard question. My mind goes totally blank. “I can’t think of anything,” I say. “That’s pretty pathetic, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s not pathetic.”

  I focus inwardly for a few moments, searching, searching. “Swim,” I finally answer. “I like to swim. We have a pool in our backyard, and I go swimming every afternoon. The pool is heated, so even when it’s cold outside, I go in.” I stop, wondering whether I sounded as if I was bragging about the heated pool in my backyard.

  “What do you like about swimming?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it. It helps.” I can see from his face that he’s not satisfied with that. “The water clears my head. It wakes me up. I do a few laps and then I just float there on the surface without moving.” Like a dead person, I almost say.

  “That must be nice,” he says. There’s no envy or sarcasm in his voice. “I never learned how to swim.”

  “No?”

  “There’s a public pool not far from where we lived, my mother and I, before I moved in with my grandparents, but we never went. My mother was afraid of the water, and I think she passed the fear on to me.”

  “How long ago did you move in with your grandparents?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “And your mother?”

  He grabs a figurine of the elephant-man and closes his hand around it. “She died,” he says, suddenly serious.

  There’s a moment of silence. It strikes me that I know more about closemouthed E.M. than I do about Gabriel. I don’t even know why he’s at Lakeview. Now and then, he shows glimpses that something is not quite right inside his head, but most of the time he seems as normal as anyone. “The other day, when I was delivering linens to the children’s ward, I saw you planting rosebushes,” I say. “You looked like you were talking to them.”

  He laughs. “I was wishing them well. Those kinds of roses don’t usually like Austin.”

  “We used to have lots of American Beauties at our old home. They do okay if you water them frequently.”

  “You know roses?”

  “My mother loved them. We used to plant them together. But I’m not an expert like she was. She knew all their names.”

  “Some of the names are crazy, aren’t they? My favorite is Hot Cocoa. The petals actually are the color of hot cocoa.”

  “Have you ever hea
rd of a rose called Miss Behavin’?” I ask.

  “No,” he says, laughing. “Have you heard of Rosie O’Donnell?”

  “Betty Boop?” I counter.

  “Hot Tamale?”

  “No. You’re making that up. There’s no rose named Hot Tamale.”

  “Honest there is. My grandpa and I planted a yard full of them. That’s all the guy wanted, Hot Tamales.”

  “Heaven Scent was my mother’s favorite.”

  Gabriel’s face brightens. “I’m planting Heaven Scents tomorrow. You should come by. You can help. Heaven Scents respond better to a woman’s touch. It’s kind of traumatic for them, you know, the trip they make from the growers to the nurseries until they’re finally in the ground.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. Next to the new Alzheimer’s ward, the same place where you saw me before. Come after you finish in the laundry room.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Maybe.”

  “I know something else you like,” he says mysteriously.

  “What?”

  “You like to write.”

  “What?”

  He keeps his eyes down on the floor as he speaks. “Yesterday, I went to the chapel. I like going there. It’s the quietest place in the hospital. I saw you there writing. I sat in the back and looked at you for a while.”

  First I’m embarrassed, and then I get annoyed. The chapel is my secret hiding place. “I was just writing in that notebook that Dr. Desai gave us. Don’t you write in it too? You shouldn’t just sit there and look at a person when they don’t even know you’re there.”

  “Says the person who was spying on me while I talked to roses.”

  “I wasn’t spying. I happened to look out the window. I like looking out windows.”

  “You were really into the writing. You were lost in it. You’ve done lots of writing before. I can tell.”

  “In school. Everybody has.”

  He smiles a knowing smile, and at that moment I have the strange feeling that he has somehow read every single one of my awful, self-absorbed poems. I look at Dr. Desai’s clock. “I have to go meet Mona,” I say suddenly, standing up. “I told her I’d meet her at the hospital’s beauty shop. She wants to fix my hair.”