The Memory of Light

by Francisco X. Stork

  He shakes his head again. A few seconds later he says, “What you did was so dangerous. It should have been me jumping after him.”

  “You don’t know how to swim, and you never would have been able to pull him up with a life jacket on.”

  “You could have died.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  He grimaces and covers his ears with his hands.

  “What is it?” I ask, worried now.

  He stays like that for a minute or so, pain convulsing his face. It occurs to me that in the past few days, I’ve started to believe that maybe his voice wasn’t all that bad. How can someone who says the sane things he says not be sane? But now I feel the same fear I felt when he first told me about the voice. This force that is gripping him now is not healthy or normal or good.

  Finally, he removes his hands from his ears. “Wow,” he says. “That was unusual.”

  “I should get Fritz,” I say.

  “I’m okay,” he says. “I need to rest. Too much excitement. I’ll see you. You were out of this world today.” He squeezes my arm, then opens the door to his cabin. He turns and waves good-bye at me. I wave back.

  Then, after he has entered his cabin and closed the door, I hear him say, “Okay, okay! I’m here.”

  When I get to our cabin, I feel a current of energy coursing through my arms and legs. I can even feel my heart beat at a quicker, more alert pace, and I slowly begin to feel myself wanting things. I want Gabriel to be well. I want Mona to be safe. I want E.M. to be fine. I want to keep Juanita from going back to Mexico. I even want to go back to school and finish the year with passing grades. I can get the necessary C’s to move on to the next grade, and I will somehow make it through the next year, and then what? It is a fragile, tentative kind of wanting and there is sadness in it, but it is still wanting and it is new to me.

  I remember Gabriel showing me the room in his house where his grandmother used to work and telling me that they were looking for someone who could move in and help take care of Chona. What if Juanita goes to live with Gabriel’s grandparents? I finish the school year at Reynard and get a summer job somewhere, anywhere except my father’s firm. I get my certification as a lifeguard and work at a public pool. I take driver’s ed and get my license and drive Becca’s car to work. I drive to see Juanita on the weekends. Mona is okay. She finds out Lucy is better off where she is and leaves her alone. E.M. is dating Margarita and they are immensely happy together. Gabriel has found a way to go back to school. After that, the images get hazy, but just seeing a few months into the future feels like a small miracle.

  I sleep the rest of the afternoon. Around six p.m., I walk over to the main house to get something to eat. “Is E.M. back?” I ask Mona. She’s making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Her eye is twitching at a faster rate than usual, and she keeps shifting her weight from one leg to the other.

  “Dr. Desai decided to keep him at Lakeview for observation. He’ll be there a couple of nights,” she says distractedly.

  Dr. Desai comes in from outside, a worried look on her face. “Gabriel has a fever. Not very high now, but …” The way she stops makes me think that she is worried about Gabriel for more than just the fever.

  “I can take him a sandwich,” I say.

  “Let him rest for an hour or so,” she tells me. Her eyes drift to Mona, who is putting half a jar of peanut butter between two slices of bread and then bites into the gooey mess as if she has not tasted food for a month. “How are you doing on your medication?” she asks Mona pointedly.

  Mona looks up with her mouth full, a guilty expression on her face. “I’ve been good,” she says after swallowing. “Ask Vicky.”

  Dr. Desai turns to me and I nod. I saw Mona put the lithium pills in her mouth yesterday and this morning. But now it occurs to me that I did not see her swallow them.

  “Let’s talk tomorrow after I get back from the hospital,” Dr. Desai says.

  Mona stays in the main house to watch TV with Fritz and Pepe. I go back to the cabin and sit on an easy chair to write, but I can’t keep my eyes open, and after a few minutes I fall asleep again.

  The next morning, I’m fixing a bowl of cereal when Dr. Desai walks in and asks me to check on Gabriel later. She has an emergency at Lakeview and has to leave, but he still has a fever, and I should make sure he drinks plenty of liquids. His temperature is 104. If it increases, I should call her on her cell.

  After breakfast, I hurry over to see Gabriel. I knock but he doesn’t answer, so I go in. He’s in bed, his eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. I pull up a chair next to his bed, and he turns to look at me.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  He nods and smiles feebly. I go to the bathroom and bring back a glass of water. He sits up to drink it, looking dazed. He lies back down, and I cover his bare, perspiring chest with the sheet.

  “You’re hot,” I say, touching his forehead.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  I smile at him. “I meant as in temperature.”

  “Oh.” He pulls himself up, and I fix a pillow for his back.

  “I should have jumped. I hesitated,” he mutters to himself.

  “Are you still stuck on that?” I place the glass next to his bed and say patiently, “You couldn’t have gone underwater to get E.M. with your life jacket on. And if you took it off, you would have drowned because you don’t know how to swim. I was the last person who saw him. You didn’t know where he was. Is that what’s bothering you, that you didn’t jump in?”

  “You could have died.”

  “So could you. So could E.M.”

  For a moment I think he has forgotten that I am sitting next to him. He’s someplace else, some sad place. I try to cheer him up. “You should have been there to hear what E.M. had to say when we were waiting for you to come back with Fritz. He had this vision that Huitzilopochtli was angry with him because he hadn’t done something he was supposed to do, and he wanted E.M. to get back to earth and do it. Then he thought that Huitzilopochtli was saving him, and it turned out it was me, so now he calls me Huichi.”

  Gabriel smiles. When he speaks, his voice is different, quieter. There are pauses between words and I can’t tell whether another word will follow. “I thought I lost you and E.M.”

  “But you were wrong,” I say.

  “Then. Now it feels weird, like you are going away. Gone.”

  “Gone as in I’m going back home, you mean.”

  “Yeah. But more. Like you’re far away. You’ll be gone. Soon.”

  “I was planning to keep in touch. Weren’t you?” The truth is that I have not thought about how I would stay in touch with Gabriel or E.M. or Mona. I’ve been trying not to think about going home.

  He’s silent. Then he says, “What if …”

  “What if what?” I have a feeling that I will not like what he’s about to say.

  “What if I’m like Gwendolyn or my grandmother?”

  “Gabriel, where is this coming from? What is the voice saying?”

  “It …”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m afraid. The voice. I’ve never been afraid.”

  “What is the voice asking you to do?”

  He massages his temples. “Nothing,” he says, but the way he says it, I know he’s hiding something. “I’m just scared.”

  “Why are you talking like this? What are you feeling? What did the voice say to you?”

  He shakes his head and closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to tell me. “I’m sorry, Vicky.”

  “For what?” I say.

  “For this.” He touches his head. “I didn’t want you to see this.”

  “You didn’t want me to see a Gabriel who is mentally ill?”

  His eyes stay closed.

  “Gabriel. So what? We’re all ill. We’re all in this together. We’ll make it.”

  I watch him a few more minutes. Some kind of frantic activity flickers beneath his eyelids. There’s a desperate fight going on in t
here. Finally, his breathing deepens and the twitches and jerks stop and I leave.

  * * *

  I spend the rest of the day painting walls with Mona and thinking about my conversation with Gabriel. There is something about him that is different, dimmer. He saw me as far away. But it is Gabriel who is pulling away, disappearing.

  Mona is even more jittery than usual. Her brushstrokes look like what Van Gogh would have painted if he’d been plugged into an electric power source. Every five minutes she steps outside to smoke from a pack of cigarettes she must have bought in Fredericksburg. At one point she disappears for an hour, and when she comes back, she’s more irritable than ever.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” she says. “Stop asking me that. Why do you ask me that?”

  “You don’t seem yourself. You haven’t been yourself since … Rudy.”

  “This is me!” she snaps. “I’m being me. Sometimes I wish people would just let me be.” She dips the brush in the paint can and begins to paint. “Damn it!” she shouts a minute later. “I got to make a phone call.”

  Through the window, I can see her walking briskly toward our cabin, lighting another cigarette.

  I don’t know what to do about Gabriel. I want to check on him. I know I should. It’s been a couple of hours since I last saw Fritz go to his cabin with a tray of food. But maybe it’s better if I leave him alone. Or am I being a coward? What impulse should I obey? The one that cares for him or the one that is afraid?

  Huichi would say that it’s okay to be afraid. I smile to myself. Will I ever be able to be afraid and not think of Huichi? I take a deep breath and walk to Gabriel’s cabin.

  His temperature is still 104. He makes an effort to talk, but I can tell his mind has trouble generating words. He said this morning that he was afraid for the first time. I want to ask Dr. Desai if that’s how schizophrenia works — a voice that begins with persistent suggestions and gradually increases in intensity until it ends up shouting commands.

  Just before I leave him for the night, I ask him the question that’s been on my mind since this morning. “Gabriel, who’s speaking to you?”

  He swallows and waits a few moments before he answers: “God.”

  A chill runs through my body. Then I ask, “But if it’s God, why are you so scared?”

  “God is scary.”

  “You were not scared before. This voice is different, isn’t it?”

  He hears my question. I know he does. But doesn’t answer. He doesn’t want to. Then he closes his eyes.

  When Fritz knocks on the door the following morning and tells us the cows are waiting, Mona is not in her bed. I have been awake for hours but somehow did not see her leave the room. I lie there looking at her empty bunk and a feeling of dread comes over me. It reminds me of the day Mamá died: I woke and knew immediately that something bad was going to happen.

  I get up and dress and go over to the barn, where Pepe has already started on one of the cows. “I’ll milk, you shovel,” he says, pointing with his head to the wheelbarrow and shovel in the corner.

  “Have you seen Mona?” I ask as I bend to grab a pair of black rubber boots.

  “Walking,” he says, shaking his head. “She’s got the ants.”

  “The ants?”

  “In her skin. I seen it lots of times.”

  After I finish cleaning the stalls, I go to the main house to look for Mona, but no one is inside. There’s a note from Fritz saying Dr. Desai stayed overnight in Austin. I walk outside and am on my way to Gabriel’s cabin when I hear Mona call me. She’s on the front porch, pacing nervously.

  “There you are,” she says when she sees me. “You were asleep when I got in last night. I didn’t want to wake you. I watched this old movie, Night of the Living Dead. Have you seen it? It’s like the first zombie movie. I love zombies, but then I couldn’t sleep. I had this dream that Lucy was in a room by herself. She spilled a box of Cheerios on the floor and was picking them up and eating them, her little fingers having a hard time grabbing them off the floor. Then someone came in, a man, I couldn’t see his face. He was wearing these boots that motorcycle people use, big black ones with that buckle across the front. He started stomping on the Cheerios, and Lucy began to cry. She was sitting there stretching her arms out for someone to pick her up, and then the man took the box of Cheerios away and left her there all alone, terrified, crying and bawling. My God, Vicky, it was horrible. I woke up screaming.”

  “Mona, Mona, slow down. You’re going a hundred miles an hour.” I sit on a rocking chair and point to the one next to me. She sits and begins rocking so fast I think the chair will launch her over the porch rail. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I ran out of cigarettes sometime last night. I’m like dying for a cigarette. I swear I’m going to roll up some of that hay those cows eat and smoke it. I was doing pretty good until that dream. I’ve been calm, you’ve seen me. But why would I dream something like that? That dream was telling me something about Lucy, that she’s in danger. Dr. Desai is going to be mad at me because I stopped taking the lithium, but it was making me too tired, and I honestly thought the crisis was over. I was normal again. You know how I’ve been laughing and everything? The GTH meetings and the private sessions with Dr. Desai were working, they really were. When I first got here I was like, wow, this place is so peaceful, and now all of a sudden I can’t stand how quiet it is. I’m going nuts. I have to get out of here. I’m walking over to the highway and hitching a ride back to Austin. I need to see Rudy and find out what’s happening with Lucy. I’ve never had any problem getting from one place to another. Men are so predictable.”

  “Wait! Wait,” I say. “Remember how in one of the GTH meetings you described what it was like to be manic? You’re like that now. You lied to me about taking the pills.”

  “Don’t mother me, okay? I hate it when people mother me. But don’t take it personally about me lying to you. I haven’t lied to you about anything else. I’m not manic. You should see me when I’m manic. I’m a little revved up, that’s all. I went off the pills for a while because I need to be ready. I’ve been talking to Rudy and I have a feeling, a real strong one, that we’re going to find Lucy. I need the energy to do what it takes to get her back.”

  When she stops to take a breath, I jump in. “I’m going to call Dr. Desai.” I stand and take a few steps toward the door.

  Mona springs out of the rocking chair. “I’m going to take the van. I’ll leave it in a place that’s easy to find. Tell Dr. Desai thanks for everything, nothing personal. I have to find my Lucy.”

  “Mona, do you know how dangerous all this is?” I say. “You had a bad dream, that’s all. And what are you going to do when you find Lucy? There’s no way you can get to her without breaking the law. And think about her, if you love her so much. Maybe she’s happy now and you’ll upset her.”

  There’s a flash of anger in Mona’s eyes. “You don’t know that! You don’t know anything about my dreams. Those kinds of dreams are messages. I’ve had them tons before and they’ve always been right. Remember what I told you about mental people being smarter and more perceptive? It’s true. You should know that by now. I wouldn’t have had that dream if something wasn’t wrong. She’s with a family that’s not hers. And even if she’s happy, she belongs with her family, and that’s me.”

  She brushes past me into the house. I stand there paralyzed, not knowing what to do. A minute later she comes out with the van keys dangling in her hand. She runs down the porch steps and then stops, turns around, flies up the steps again, and gives me a hug. “Okay, yes, I’m kind of mental this morning, as in I got upgraded, and I know it doesn’t look like I’m in control, but I am. I’ve never felt better. I’m not going to hurt myself or anyone. I’ll find Lucy. Without Lucy, I have nothing.” She looks at me intently for a few moments, pleading for me to understand. Then she runs to the van.

  “Wait, wait!” I say. “At least give me a number w
here I can call you.”

  She digs Rudy’s phone out of the back pocket of her jeans and hurriedly reads out a number. I look around for Fritz, for Pepe. How can I stop her? She starts the van, backs it out of the side yard, then turns around and heads down the long gravel driveway, leaving a cloud of dust behind her. Julius and Cleo begin to bark.

  I go inside and write the number Mona gave me on a napkin, then call Dr. Desai. She’s on her way back to the ranch when she picks up her cell phone.

  “Mona’s left,” I say. I feel suddenly out of breath, like I’ve run up three flights of stairs to get to the phone. “She took the van. She’s going to meet this guy named Rudy. He works in the cafeteria. At Lakeview. She thinks he can help her find Lucy.”

  “Do you think she’s a danger to herself or others?” she asks me.

  “No,” I say, remembering what she said to me just before she left. “I don’t think so. But I’ve never seen her like this before.”

  Dr. Desai sighs. “There’s not much we can do other than arrest her for taking the van, and I don’t want to do that. She’s eighteen. She’s in treatment voluntarily. I’ll call her mother.” Her voice sounds tired, defeated, as if she’s lost a battle she was hoping to win. “Let Gabriel sleep until eight, and then could you check on him?”

  “Yes.” Then I add, “It’s more than just a fever. He said God was speaking to him.” There is silence on the other end. “Hello?”

  I think maybe we’ve been disconnected. Then I hear Dr. Desai exhale: the sound of someone whose worst fears are turning out to be true. When she speaks again, she sounds discouraged. “I’ll be there in an hour or so. Sooner if I can.”

  I look at the clock in the kitchen. It is seven forty-five. I step outside. The bay horse I touched with Gabriel sticks her head over the top of the corral. She’s nodding at me, inviting me to come. I approach the corral slowly with my hand outstretched so she can run if she wants to. But she doesn’t move, and when I’m close enough, I place the palm of my hand on her forehead between the eyes. I reach between the rails and rub her neck and feel the breath from her nostrils on my hair. Then I touch her neck. There’s so much strength, so much life in this horse.