Forgiveness Road

by Mandy Mikulencak

  “Did you move around any of the clothes in the drawer where you found the dress?”

  When Martha stared at Cissy’s tapping, she put down the fork and sat on her hands.

  “After breakfast, I’ll go straight to your room and return the dress,” Martha said. “I didn’t know it’d be such a big deal.”

  Bess and Mama had known how she liked her clothes folded and put in her dresser. She trusted them to place the socks in order of color, from lightest to darkest. Cissy’s pants were always pressed with a light crease, just enough to act as guide for folding them. Her blouses and dresses were placed on wooden hangers, all facing to the right and ordered from shortest to longest.

  At the hospital, there wasn’t a closet, so she had to find a way to store her clothes without hangers. To find Cissy’s yellow gingham dress, Martha would have had to move several things in the bottom drawer of the dresser. Cissy had a long morning ahead of her rearranging anything that had been misplaced. She wondered if the laundry room would rewash and press her clothes if she asked nicely.

  “Are you going to eat your bacon?” Martha asked.

  “You go ahead,” she said. No use causing a ruckus.

  * * *

  Martha took to sitting with Cissy in the game room for a few minutes prior to her appointments with Dr. Guttman, the hospital’s psychiatrist. She said it was for moral support.

  “You don’t have to talk to him. I don’t.” Martha flipped through an old issue of Seventeen magazine because she said books didn’t hold much appeal; that they felt too much like assigned reading at school. “At least try it today. Just sit there and nod your head, or stare out the window. It works for me.”

  “What if he starts thinking I’m not crazy anymore?” Cissy pulled down the magazine so Martha would listen more closely. “They might transfer me to that reform school for criminal girls.”

  “I’m not crazy and they keep me here,” Martha said. “And like you said, you’re peculiar. That should work well enough.”

  She was right. Peculiar was just this side of crazy. For those who didn’t know better, like Dr. Guttman, it was a good enough reason to keep both of them here.

  Cissy used to think Dr. Guttman didn’t have good boundaries because he asked straight out about what her daddy did. She came to understand that’s what psychiatrists do. It was probably one of the few jobs, other than being a lawyer, where someone could ask you to talk about memories that are yours to keep to yourself.

  This posed a danger to Cissy because, as a child, she’d vowed not to lie except when absolutely warranted and had kept that vow most of her life. Luckily, she’d always been able to turn off a part of her brain when pulled into a deep, dark place. When she told Dr. Guttman she didn’t remember details, it wasn’t a lie. What Cissy didn’t tell him, though, was sometimes—when she was drawing or watching TV or playing chess with Martha—she got a glimpse of the shut-off parts of her brain and thought she might faint with fright. It was like waking up from a terrible nightmare and not being able to remember all the details. A person’s just grateful to be awake, even though the pieces of the nightmare linger and threaten to come together like a solved puzzle.

  Dr. Guttman walked into the recreation area, interrupting the girls’ discussion. “Cissy, ready for our appointment?” While he directed the question to her, he kept his eyes on Martha, like he didn’t trust her somehow.

  Cissy followed him into his office and sat in the leather chair, her usual spot. The grown-up part of her brain knew Dr. Guttman was extra smart because he had several diplomas with his name in fancy script hanging on his walls in thick gold frames.

  “I see you and Martha have become friends,” he said, settling into his chair.

  “Nurse Edna said the same thing, but both of you seem to want to say more on that than you’re letting on,” she said.

  “Not really, Cissy. It’s just that when there’s a new patient in the ward, Martha tends to monopolize her time.”

  “I’ve got a lot of time to spare, so that’s not a big deal.” Cissy sensed caution in Dr. Guttman’s voice. Did he guess that Martha had been coaching her to remain silent in their sessions? It got Cissy to thinking what advice Martha had given other new patients.

  “Would you prefer I not spend time with Martha?” she continued.

  “Not at all,” he said. “It’s just that Martha doesn’t think her sessions with me provide any value. I’d like you to give therapy a chance and make those decisions on your own.”

  She hadn’t been at the hospital long enough to know if there was any benefit to her time with Dr. Guttman, but she had become increasingly alarmed at his expertise in getting her to talk about things she’d rather not talk about. What if he eventually found a way to open up the shut-off parts for good? The thing about deep, dark places in a person’s mind was that you never knew what it might be like there. It could be just dark enough you’d never find your way out again. Some of the girls at the hospital lived in that dark place. Cissy figured it was safer to talk about them than about Martha.

  “I noticed some patients never laugh, not even when we watch Happy Days or Laverne & Shirley. Sometimes they scare me, shuffling through the halls, arms hanging heavy at their sides.”

  “What scares you about that?” he asked.

  “They don’t seem awake. It looks like they’re trapped inside themselves.”

  “Some of the patients here are taking powerful medications,” Dr. Guttman explained. “It can make them appear without emotion, but they’re not being harmed in any way. It’s for their own good.”

  He seemed pretty sure of himself, but the way they hollered out in their sleep made Cissy think they weren’t getting any better either.

  “They have lots of nightmares,” she said. “I hear them. We all hear them.”

  “Do you have nightmares?”

  “I thought we agreed that you’d tell me things about New York and in exchange, I’d answer your particularly hard questions.”

  “I didn’t say I’d do that each and every session,” he said.

  “That’s what you implied.”

  He smiled while rubbing his nose. Cissy had seen that move a time or two. It meant she was testing his patience, but that he’d eventually give in.

  “Okay. What do you want to know today?”

  “What’s the tallest building?”

  “You already know that. It’s the World Trade Center,” Dr. Guttman said.

  “Yup. Thirteen hundred and sixty-eight feet.”

  “You’re stalling,” he said. “Answer my question.”

  “Wait,” she said. “Tell me about the elevators. Is it thrilling to go to the top? A magazine article I read said you can see fifty miles away on a clear day.”

  “Actually, Cissy, I’ve never been to the top. Not many people know this, but I’m afraid of heights. I’ve shared something with you. Now let’s talk about whether you have nightmares.”

  Since he’d been so honest with her, Cissy thought it’d be all right to admit she’d had nightmares since she was a little girl. Most were about the devil, but she called him Old Scratch because the D word was on her List of Banned Words. “Old Scratch just sounds like a mangy old dog looking for scraps in an alley, don’t you think? That’s what Bess always said.”

  “Do you think maybe Old Scratch is symbolic for your father?” he asked.

  Dr. Guttman readied his pen as if she was about to say something profound, but he should have known better than to sneak the conversation back to her daddy. “I don’t want to talk about that right now.”

  Surely it was being brought up in the Catholic Church that solidified her fear of Old Scratch. From an early age, she thought religion should be about uplifting people’s spirits and not scaring them to death. The nuns made religion ugly by concentrating on sin and hell, and how to avoid both. They even had students sprinkle holy water over their beds at night so Old Scratch wouldn’t stop on his rounds.

  Cissy would
have rather heard Bible stories about Moses or Noah or Abraham. She liked going to Saturday night mass best. Father Isadore wasn’t a fire and brimstone sort of priest, so she didn’t mind his preaching. She did find it strange, however, that priests could come across as loving and kind while nuns were mean. Did their schooling differ that much? Or did kind and loving nuns exist outside her parish and she had the misfortune to be born in Biloxi? Cissy told Dr. Guttman she was still forming opinions on how the Catholic Church shaped who she was today, and he said it’d be an excellent idea to discuss it in future sessions.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” she said, changing the subject in case he started in again about her daddy or Old Scratch.

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  “I’d like us to agree not to use the word murder during our visits, because it’s also a banned word. I usually just say I shot my daddy.” She didn’t like to use the word kill either, but there was no getting around that. Killing was killing even if done for the right reasons.

  “If you wish, Cissy,” he said. “But you’ve got to trust that you can talk about anything in our sessions. You’re safe here.”

  When Cissy didn’t want to pay attention to Dr. Guttman, she thought about how many things in the room begged to be touched—the sheet of thick glass that covered his cherry desk, the rough pile of the carpet beneath her slippers, the sleek coolness of the black leather couch. Although smell was her favorite sense, touch was a close second because the surfaces of things sometimes spoke louder than words. A porcupine’s quills said, “Back off!” while rabbit fur said, “Squeeze me carefully.”

  Her favorite part of the office was the wall behind his desk, which was covered from top to bottom with books—even more books than the library in the recreation room. She hadn’t asked him if he’d read them all, but she suspected someone so smart had read at least most of them. Some must have been very old because old books put off a special odor, a cross between cigar smoke and tree bark. While she’d always had an especially keen sense of smell, the summer humidity likely coaxed the scent out into the open.

  “Cissy? Are you paying attention?”

  “Of course,” she said, looking into his face. “I can talk about anything in our sessions because I am safe here.”

  He stared at her for so long that she thought they might be having a contest.

  “You have an awful lot of books.” She began counting, starting with the very top row and going right to left, just to mix things up.

  “Cissy, you’re welcome to count my books another time,” he said. “But I’d like you to be brave and share something that’s been on your mind. Would you do that?”

  She thought about the thing that kept entering her mind over and over recently. “I’ve been missing the beach. Something fierce.”

  Growing up in Biloxi meant Cissy could smell salt in the air all the time, and it became a part of every other scent. She smelled lots of things at the hospital. The strongest odor was of people who’d messed their pants on days the nurses were too busy to clean them up right away. When the hallways were freshly mopped, they smelled of stale water and pine cleaner. When the sheets were washed, they smelled of hot water and bleach. Nothing compared to the smell of the ocean, though.

  “Tell me about the beach, then,” Dr. Guttman said.

  “A few times each summer, Mama takes us to the beach even though she doesn’t like what she calls the hordes of vacationers who should keep driving until they hit Pensacola.”

  Dr. Guttman chuckled, which put Cissy at ease. She told him how she and her sisters were made to wear wide-brimmed straw hats while they played in the sand and water because all three were freckled and fair-skinned. She told him she was often embarrassed that her mama made Bess carry their picnic basket and set up their beach umbrella when other families didn’t have their housekeepers along. Some of her classmates’ families didn’t even keep house help at all anymore.

  “Did your father ever join you?”

  “Not once,” she said. “He was always working. Mama didn’t work, so she had plenty of time to take us to the shore, even though she never seemed to enjoy it as much as us kids did.”

  Cissy was grateful her daddy wasn’t part of her beach memories. Too many other memories—like birthday parties and Christmas mornings—had him attached to them. On those days, she wore her happiness on the outside. She did like looking at old photographs, though, because she could sometimes trick her mind into believing other parts of her childhood were happy.

  “Are you okay, Cissy? You look very sad,” Dr. Guttman said.

  “I was just thinking it’s hard to enjoy anything when you think you’re at least partly to blame for the bad things that happened in your life.”

  He put down his pen and notepad, and leaned forward. “It’s normal to think there was something you did or didn’t do to deserve what happened. I’m hoping our work here together will convince you that just isn’t so.”

  She wanted to believe that was possible because Dr. Guttman seemed especially smart and he’d worked with lots of people who were crazy, and perhaps some who were just peculiar like she was.

  Cissy’s mind went back to a time when she was younger, sometime before her tenth birthday. For a very short time, she decided to stop being sarcastic and be the best daughter she could be. She studied her schoolwork day and night. She took on so many extra chores that Bess asked if she was trying to take over her job. She acted so polite sometimes she felt her smile would freeze on her face. Her mama probably thought she was going through a phase, while Mimi and Grandmother probably thought God had answered their prayers and she’d finally become a civil child with good manners.

  Cissy didn’t care what anyone thought except her daddy because she did all those things for him, to show him she was a good girl. She thought that it’d put an end to their secret special time.

  Later, when she suggested he stop coming to her room—that her mama would probably not like it—he turned mean. He no longer called it their special time. He said she deserved the bad touching because she was a bad girl. She should’ve had him clarify what he meant by bad. Instead, Cissy tried being good at everything. When none of that worked, and her circumstances didn’t change, it messed up her idea of how the world should be. She dropped into what her mama called a blue funk. She stopped trying to be the perfect student and the perfect daughter. She just stopped trying in general. Cissy didn’t feel up to being around her friends. After school, she would come home and lie on her bed with the covers up to her ears. Lily tried everything in her power to coax Cissy out to play. But even she gave up after a while and decided to ride out the blue funk like one rides out a hurricane. Lily tiptoed around Cissy, not knowing if she was the calm before the storm or the storm itself.

  While Lily might have noticed a change in Cissy, her mama did not because she was too busy with baby Jessie. She didn’t even care when Cissy started getting bad grades except to tell her she was probably reading too many storybooks and needed to crack her school books open more often.

  Then back in August of 1969, the winds of a real hurricane named Camille blew away Cissy’s blue funk and most of South Mississippi. She guessed it took something that significant to wake her up again.

  “Camille,” she whispered.

  “What was that, Cissy?”

  “Nothing. Just a storm I was remembering.”

  “Would you like to stop for today?” Dr. Guttman asked.

  Cissy nodded and left his office. She appreciated that one of Dr. Guttman’s talents seemed to be in knowing how much questioning one person could take in an hour’s time. It was one of the reasons she decided she could trust him no matter what Martha believed.

  * * *

  Later that afternoon, a thunderstorm rattled the hospital windows and lit the skies with angry lightning. The nurses warned patients to stay away from the windows, but Cissy thought they were exaggerating the danger. She found it strange that she was just thinking
about Hurricane Camille in her session with Dr. Guttman and now the howling wind was dredging up even more memories she’d just as soon forget.

  That was seven years ago, but the sound of that kind of wind couldn’t be forgotten. It made the hair on her arms stand on end, and she couldn’t imagine feeling more alive. While her parents argued about whether or not to evacuate, Cissy had stayed on the front porch watching the August sky turn dark as charcoal.

  When the heavy rains and wind began, she begged her parents to let her stay outside. She wanted the storm to wash over her; to tear apart their proper Southern home and bury her former life in the debris that would later be carted away.

  Bess’s brother drove up in a spray of gravel and mad honking just as Cissy turned to go inside. “Bess, if we’re gonna die in this storm, you ought to be with family instead of those white folks,” he had screamed above the wind. “They don’t need no damn housekeeper in a hurricane.”

  Cissy couldn’t argue with his logic and she half thought about asking if she could join them.

  Lily, who’d just turned five, and the newborn Jessie cried the entire time they were holed up in the pantry, and no amount of shushing from their mama eased their fear. Her inability to hug them in a soft and gentle manner made things worse. The saving grace was that the noise of the rain and wind often drowned out their wailing.

  Cissy sat perfectly still in one corner with her eyes closed, imagining the destruction going on outside. She heard the crack of trees falling and shutters being blown open. They all screamed when they heard glass from the front windows crashing to the floors. They screamed in unison again when the electricity went out at around 8:30 p.m. Cissy hoped she was safe from her daddy’s touching since her mama and sisters were trapped in the dark, too. It’d been going on for a little less than half a year, every few weeks or so. The visits to her room, though, had grown less frequent when the baby started disrupting everyone’s sleep.

  Four hours into Camille’s rage, Cissy thought she’d suddenly gone deaf. No more howling wind or thunderous rain. Just silence. Her daddy had said the eye of the storm was overhead. He left the pantry to assess the damage to the house, garage, and yard. Cissy scrambled out after him.