While I was mucking zebra stalls, I tried not to think about my sister, since equine animals are especially sensitive to fear and stress. I had missed Lizzie so much when she was gone, although I hadn’t told her that, not yet. There was something so weird about her. I didn’t know how to talk to her. Her eyes were dark and vacant, like the windows of an abandoned house. Her lips were chapped so badly I thought she might have a vitamin deficiency of some kind.
One Friday, before school, I asked Lizzie if she wanted to walk me to the bus stop. I thought some fresh air could be good for her. She hadn’t been showering, and was lying on the couch with her hand in a box of Apple Jacks.
“No, thanks,” she said.
“Gimme kiss,” the parrot said.
“Ernest, tell Lizzie to wake up.”
“Sweetie,” Ernest said. “Sweetie.”
“Huh?” Lizzie grunted.
“I know you called Miss Ida.”
“Who?” she asked, still dazed.
“I know you called her, and she doesn’t know how Mom died either. She doesn’t know what happened that night.”
Lizzie started shivering violently then, as if she’d been left out in the cold all night. Maybe that was what the doctor meant when he said she’d have a bad reaction. It freaked me out, to be honest, and I’m ashamed about what I did next. I threw a blanket over her, and I left for school.
20.
I came home that afternoon to find Lizzie’s roommate from St. Cloud’s curled up on the couch with her. Her name was Vanessa and she was older than Lizzie, had just turned eighteen. She had a tattoo of a rattlesnake around her neck and she told me she was a pathological liar.
“You’re a what?”
“As part of my recovery, I’m supposed to tell new people I meet. It means I lie a lot of the time.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for telling me.”
“Vanessa’s nice,” Lizzie said in a dreamy voice. “Hey, what’s that in my room?”
“What’s what in your room?”
“It’s a man,” Lizzie said. “A silver man.”
“It’s a statue,” Vanessa said. “Made out of fish. I saw it when I put my suitcase down in there. I asked Lizzie about it; she said she’d never seen it before.”
I had forgotten to move Ocean Jesus out of there before Lizzie came home from St. Cloud’s. I’d forgotten about him completely. She had been sleeping in that room with him every night for weeks and I don’t know how she hadn’t noticed. He was in plain sight, sitting cross-legged in meditation by her desk just across the room from her bed.
“It’s the statue Mom had commissioned,” I said, feeling pretty spooked that Lizzie hadn’t felt Jesus’s red bottle cap stare. “I can move it back into my room.”
“No.” Lizzie shook her head slowly. “He’s magnificent. Thank you.”
“Okay,” I said. “He’s yours.”
When Dad got home, Lizzie told him that Vanessa was staying for a week, that she’d just left St. Cloud’s. Vanessa jumped in then, explained that she had checked herself out of the hospital when she turned eighteen, with her doctor’s blessing. She told him too that she was a pathological liar.
“Okay,” Dad said, looking overwhelmed. “We’re always happy to meet Lizzie’s friends.”
Vanessa and Lizzie didn’t move much all weekend, just lounged around watching old Tom Cruise movies. I joined them for Vanilla Sky. Lizzie laughed at the part when Tom Cruise smothers a woman with a pillow as she thrashes and thrashes for air.
“Kind of a dumb tattoo,” I told Vanessa when we were alone Monday morning in the kitchen while Dad and Lizzie were asleep.
“Oh yeah?” she asked, like she wasn’t mad about it at all.
“Do you know what’s wrong with my sister?”
“They yellow-wallpapered her,” Vanessa sighed. She explained that that was what the girls at St. Cloud’s called it when a patient was frequently administered electroshock therapy. “Fried her brain.”
“Are you telling the truth?” I asked.
Vanessa shook her head full of dreadlocks. “Nope.”
Snake hair, I thought.
“Fine,” Vanessa said. “Here’s the truth: she’s on too much medication. She’ll go back to normal if they cut her dosage.”
“The pills make her better,” I said, because Lizzie hadn’t had a sleepwalking episode since she’d been home, as far as I could tell.
“Do they?” Vanessa asked, jutting out her chin defiantly, like Lizzie used to. I took a glug of Coke straight from the family-sized bottle. The soda had gone flat.
“So what’s stupid about my tattoo?” she said, as she peeled a clementine.
“Well, a rattlesnake wouldn’t strangle you around the neck, they’re venomous snakes. They’re not constrictors, like a boa or a python, for example.” The zoo’s green anaconda liked to wrap his two already dead rats in his coils and soak them in his water tub for hours before he swallowed them.
“Who says I want to be strangled?” Vanessa countered, before stuffing the rest of the clementine into her mouth. “You know,” she said, once she was nearly finished chewing, “it’s okay if you were glad she was gone.”
“Who?”
“Lizzie. It’s okay if it was kind of nice when she wasn’t around. She’s a hard person to live with, I know. I love her, but she’s not easy.”
“I love her,” I said, as if loving someone were a race.
When Vanessa and Lizzie came down for dinner that night both of them were missing their eyebrows.
“That looks bad,” Dad said. “Ugly.”
“It feels good,” Lizzie said dreamily, stroking her smooth forehead. “I look like myself.”
“Sorry, Dad,” Vanessa said. “I got carried away.”
“Don’t call me Dad,” Dad huffed. “I’m not your dad.”
Vanessa explained that she had a hair-pulling disease, said it was a reaction to stress. Before St. Cloud’s, Vanessa said, she used to pull out her own hair and make birds’ nests by placing the tangled clumps in a tree. She said a starling laid eggs in one.
“You’re lying again,” Dad said. Vanessa had told us to call her out on it whenever she lied.
“Maybe she isn’t,” I said. “Starlings don’t always build their own nests. They often steal from other birds.”
“I’m not lying about the hair-pulling disease,” she said. “That part is true.” She explained that her dreadlocks were supposed to be a type of therapy for her. She could build something with the hair on her head. “The eyebrows were what we call a relapse,” Vanessa said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not mad,” Dad said, blushing. “Not if it’s really a disease.”
“I feel beautiful,” Lizzie said, looking at her reflection in the curve of a spoon.
The next day, I was eating lunch on the giraffe platform when Pamela, the ZooTeen supervisor, cornered me. I was worried I had cleaned one of the cages wrong. Some of the animals were allergic to pine shavings and needed aspen chips instead. But Pamela said the whole staff was impressed with me and asked why I was in the enrichment program anyway, since I was such a smart kid.
“My guidance counselor didn’t think I should spend too much time at home with my sister. She just got back from the hospital.”
“Ah,” Pamela said. “I’m sorry to hear that. Is she still sick?”
“Sort of,” I said. “It was a mental hospital.”
“Huh,” Pamela said. “Sounds like my brother.”
“What happened to him?”
“Never mind, it doesn’t matter,” she said, shaking her head. She handed me a white bucket full of butternut squash chunks to give to the giraffes. “You should be good to your sister,” she said before she climbed off the platform.
The two females ate the cubes greedily, shouldering each other out of the way, but they both backed up once Harrison approached. Harrison took one piece from me and dropped it into the dust. He nosed my chest, leaving a long string of snot
on my ZooTeen shirt.
“Harrison,” I said, putting a cube in my mouth, “watch me.” I’d never heard of a person eating raw squash, but I figured it couldn’t hurt me. The chunk was spongier, sweeter than I expected.
Despite my demonstration Harrison dropped the next cube. I chewed up another squash chunk, spat it back into my palm, and held it out, fingers flat. Harrison rested his lips in the orange puree, but he didn’t lick it or eat it. The sign tacked up to the side of the tower said Masai giraffes eat up to seventy-five pounds of vegetation a day.
I wasn’t sure why it mattered to Pamela that I was nice to my sister, but it was easier to be near Lizzie with Vanessa around. Lizzie was less like a lump of clay. She had facial expressions again. She looked more awake without her eyebrows.
“Earth to Lizzie,” Vanessa would say, when Lizzie spent too long staring at the ceiling.
A week after Vanessa arrived, Lizzie asked Dad during dinner if Vanessa could move in with us. She still hadn’t unpacked her little red suitcase.
“Oh,” Dad hesitated. “I don’t know if her parents would like that.”
“I’m abandoned,” Vanessa said. “A regular Orphan Annie. My stepfather thinks I’m still in the loony bin, and he’d try to kill me if he knew I was out.”
“Are you lying?”
“No.”
“Then sure,” Dad said, cutting into the steak that Vanessa had made. “Stay as long as you like.”
I wished I could be the one to wave my hand in front of my sister’s face, remind her that she needed to remember to blink. I was jealous that Lizzie responded only to Vanessa, but somehow I liked Vanessa too.
21.
March, April
Pamela gave me some more responsibilities, since she said I was such a good worker. One of my new tasks was to feed Nacho and Yoyo, our two California black bears. Bears are omnivores, so we gave them buckets of vegetables and dog chow, a cattle leg bone to chew on, and a platter of several fish, salmon or trout. Our bears were well-fed, so they wouldn’t eat all of the fish, just the brains and skin, the fatty parts. A hungry bear will eat the entire fish, discarding only the intestines. It made me feel good that our bears never had to feel real hunger.
Once I was done arranging the food in different parts of the enclosure so the bears would have to hunt a little to find it all, I locked the cage door behind me and held my ID badge up to the scanner, which let the bears out of their sleeping chamber. They came galloping out, heading straight for the plate of fish.
Nacho and Yoyo had both been raised as circus bears. We tried to treat them as wild animals now and never went into their enclosure when they weren’t locked in the sleeping cave. Pamela told me that sometimes you could catch Yoyo doing her dance routine, standing on her hind legs and rotating in a circle. Yoyo the Ballerina Bear had been her stage name. She’d been kept chained up when she wasn’t performing.
Pamela said that Nacho’s only skill was that he could smoke cigarettes, several at a time, blowing the smoke out of his big round nostrils. He’d drink vodka too, gallon jugs of it. The circus had said Nacho was unusable after he’d drunkenly mauled the trainer, which was why the circus had given both of the bears to the zoo. Once at Serengeti Park, Nacho had been forced to quit smoking and drinking cold turkey, which must have been hard, but at least he had Yoyo with him.
“Good girl, Yoyo,” I said through the cage bars while she bit into her salmon. She looked up at me and waved her paw. It was another circus trick.
I was not happy when I came home from the zoo one afternoon and saw the rabbit cake pan resting on its aluminum haunches on the kitchen counter. Lizzie must have found it hidden underneath my bed. She knew my hiding places, even if her brain was fried.
“What’s wrong?” Vanessa asked when she saw my expression as she sprayed PAM into one side of the rabbit mold.
“The rabbit cake is sacred in our family,” I said.
“Nothing’s sacred,” Lizzie said, unwrapping a stick of butter.
“I don’t think she should use the stove,” I said to Dad, trying to remind him that Lizzie had almost burned the house down in her sleep.
“Leave them to it, Elvis,” Dad said. He was sitting at the table doing the books for the store. “I could really use some cake.”
Vanessa and Lizzie decided that they’d make two rabbit cakes, one for us to eat after dinner and one for their friends back at St. Cloud’s. I sat on the kitchen stool to watch. When Lizzie pulled the first cake out from the oven, its head fell off, lopped right over to the side. Don’t be alarmed if the head falls off, the rabbit cake recipe noted, the one Mom had circled in her Country Living cookbook. Reattach with a hatpin.
“What’s a hatpin?” Lizzie asked. The head was in the rabbit mold, the rest of the body perched on the counter.
I went upstairs to grab a few of Mom’s old bobby pins, but stopped when I found long blonde hairs tangled in their pinchers. Maybe they aren’t Mom’s, I thought as tears welled up in my eyes. Lizzie could have borrowed the hair clips; my sister was always taking things that weren’t hers.
“I miss her,” I said to Boomer. He whined, and I realized he probably hadn’t been walked all day.
Lizzie yelled from the kitchen, said that she’d fixed the rabbit cake with frosting. I wiped my eyes, and reminded myself we weren’t a family of criers, not on Mom’s side anyway. I came downstairs to see that the whipped icing wasn’t much of a fix. Lizzie insisted it would taste the same.
“No,” I said. “It won’t.”
Lizzie wasn’t listening, her head halfway in the oven.
For the second cake, Lizzie and Vanessa mixed an unopened bottle of Tylenol and two permanent markers into the batter. Vanessa said that was how people used to sneak metal files or shovels into prison. I asked how Sharpies would help the St. Cloud’s girls escape.
“They aren’t trying to escape,” Vanessa said. “Not most of them, anyway. Our friend Colleen likes to sniff markers.”
“What’s the Tylenol for?” I asked. We had tons of Tylenol in our medicine cabinets, since Mom bought a new bottle practically every time she went to the supermarket.
“Headaches, duh,” Lizzie said. At least Lizzie could still roll her eyes, I thought. She wasn’t broken completely.
Vanessa explained that Tylenol was forbidden at St. Cloud’s, even for period cramps. They were afraid of overdoses. But Vanessa said that overdosing on Tylenol is a terrible way to try to die. It is painful, slow, and rarely successful. Most girls at St. Cloud’s wouldn’t bother with the attempt, not when there were better drugs for suicide.
I wasn’t thrilled that Vanessa and Lizzie knew the best drugs for suicide. “What about the girl who had the seizure during Finding Nemo?” I asked. “What drug caused that?”
“Antidepressants,” Vanessa said. “That one was the hospital’s fault, a bad mix of pills. Her family is going to sue the pants off of St. Cloud’s.”
“She died?”
“In my arms.” Lizzie looked off into the distance of the other room. “I felt her spirit leave her.”
“Lizzie has had a rough time with it,” Vanessa said.
So Lizzie had seen another girl dead, someone her own age, like Ms. Bernstein had warned. Maybe that was what was so wrong with her; maybe that was why she’d turned so strange, so alien.
I wondered what it had been like, to watch the girl die, to feel her spirit leave. I pictured a stream of birds flying from the girl’s open mouth after the seizure stopped, one bird after the next. The birds that had been in her brain could be free now, balancing somewhere on a black line of telephone wire.
I stayed up Googling all of the causes of seizures: epilepsy, drug overdoses, low sodium levels, venomous snakebites, high blood pressure, a brain tumor.
I clicked on the link to the brain tumor page. Other symptoms of a brain tumor included chronic headaches, changes in sexual activity, and new religious beliefs. Mom had suffered from migraines, was always popping pain relieve
rs. She was having an affair with Mr. Oakes, a new sexual activity. She had ordered a Jesus statue, even though she’d never seemed to care much about Jesus in the years before.
“Yahtzee,” I said to myself.
I ended up on the message boards at LivingwithBrainTumors.com. The user Stephanie9866 asked when she should tell her family, and how. She got 184 replies. Another user, Luving Husband, posted that his wife was planning on killing herself to escape the last few horrible months of life with a brain tumor. LuvingHusband was looking for a doctor who might help his wife. No one had replied.
From my previous research, I knew that cancer was considered one of the best reasons to kill yourself. So maybe my mom had known she had brain cancer, and she wanted to beat it to the punch, staged her death to look like an accident. If she’d had a tumor in her brain, a lump the size of a bird’s egg, it would explain her seizure, her affair with Mr. Oakes, her interest in the naked mole rat’s natural resistance to cancer.
It would explain a lot.
“You have no basis for this conclusion,” Ms. Bernstein said, at our next meeting, when I told her about the brain tumor. “Elvis, you’re not a doctor. Where did you get this idea?”
I told her about the conversation I’d had with Lizzie and Vanessa, about the girl who had died. I said I’d then researched the causes of seizures, since Mom had once had a seizure too.
“You need to remember that your sister is mentally ill, and her friend Vanessa must be as well.” Ms. Bernstein added that anyone who had been on a tour of St. Cloud’s could tell you how troubled the patients there were.
“They let you take a tour?” I asked. “They don’t allow visitors.”
“I’m a medical professional,” Ms. Bernstein said.
“When did you visit?”
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