I stared at the coat, then gaped at Sarah. She censured me with flashing eyes.Was I with her or with him?
Her challenge wrapped around me and choked my already wavering self-assurance. Aiden grabbed my arm. I shook him off, picked up my red racer, and moved away from him.
Sarah had done it, sundered the tentative bridge between my brother and me. But that wasn’t enough. She wanted more.
“Come on, you little baby,” she hissed at Aiden, “don’t you want this?” Eyes flashing, power restored.
Aiden whimpered. I sat in the corner. My thumb and forefinger gripped the red car and rolled it back and forth across the carpet.
“Guess,” Sarah said, yanking an arm so hard it hung from the coat like a loose limb.
“You.” She ripped at the other arm with such force it was completely severed.
Aiden burst like a dam.
“Don’t.” Her index finger dragged down the inside lining.
“Want.” Sarah found fresh material and pulled her finger down again.
“This.” She crumpled what was left of the coat and dropped it on the floor.
“Stop it! Stop it!” Aiden screamed, hiding his face in the crooks of both elbows while his hands reached around to cover his ears.
If you took away the scream, hiding his face like this was how Aiden responded every morning when my mother tried to beat the bed-wetting out of him, every time my parents had one of their loud arguments in front of us, and probably the nights when my father smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey in his room because Aiden had yelled, “Daddy, not Holly. Please not Holly,” to stop him from delivering the beating my mother demanded I receive for whatever minor transgression I’d committed that day. Sometimes I wondered if getting my father to spank me for any stupid thing was her way of making the punishments equal in our house, because I didn’t get the morning bed-wetting beating Sarah and Aiden got.
My mother walked in just as the coat touched the floor. Her stolid gaze swept over us like a cop’s flashlight in a dark alley. Her eyes passed me first, Aiden second, and then came to rest on the wrecked coat.
Aiden lay on his side whispering, “Aslan, please, Aslan.”
“What is going on here?” my mother said abruptly.
“Nothing,” Sarah said. “They are playing. Holly’s winning. And, as usual, Aiden is crying.” Sarah tilted her head to the right and lazily met my mother’s stare. “Oh, and I found another one of those filthy coats.” She pointed to the floor.
“I thought I told you to throw those out,” my mother barked at Aiden and me as she picked up the coat.
Sarah sauntered past me to the stairs. As she went down, her fingers danced on the green shag carpet lying flat underneath the railing. Before Sarah’s head dropped below floor level, she stuck out her tongue.
My mother turned and left the room.
“Do you want to keep playing, Holly?” Aiden asked.
“No,” I said, kicking the tracks.
“Okay,” he said. “Well, good-bye.”
“Good-bye.” I didn’t look up. He left the room.
About an hour later, I heard Sarah telling my mother she was leaving to go to her friend’s. Her friend was just across the street and up the block. Sarah was old enough to cross without an adult. Aiden and I were not.
When she left, Sarah opened the front door enough to squeeze out and then shut it with a soft click. I waited just around the corner so I heard it anyway.
I opened the door in time to see her look to the left, right, and then dart across the street. I threw open the front door and ran right after her. I passed Aiden, who stood in the front yard. “Holly,” he called after me.
I didn’t look back. I ran into the street without looking left or right.
I heard a horn honk. The beeps came in rapid succession. I stopped. Everything around me slowed. I turned. The black car crawled toward me. I stood glued to the asphalt.
The staccato horn beeps had changed to one long groan. I felt like I had cardboard over my ears, dulling the sound.
I stood there.
The car inched forward. The colors around me faded. All I could see was the black monster creeping closer.
I stood there.
I heard a sound like nails raking across a chalkboard. It mixed with the scream of the honking horn. A bitter smell pricked at the inside of my nose like a thousand little needles. I knew I should move but my feet were stuck.
The car fishtailed toward me. My mouth opened but the scream I wanted to release stayed stuck somewhere in my throat. I turned to see Sarah on the opposite side of the street. Her face was ashen, her eyes as big as plates. She waved her hands and yelled. Her words sounded like static on a radio.
Then something slammed into my back, knocking me into the air. I hit the sidewalk with a thud accompanied by a loud crunching sound.
Sarah screamed, “No!”
I was lying on the sidewalk, still on my back.
Sarah screamed, “No!” over and over. Her hands covered her ears as if she were trying to block out her own cries.
I sat up.
The front door of our house popped open like a vertical jack-in-the-box top. Uncle Dan shot out and ran toward the street. My mother followed a few seconds behind him.
My uncle’s pace slowed to a jog, and then he stopped short of the front bumper of the car. I couldn’t see his face.The driver of the car opened his door slowly.Then he stepped around this obstacle and advanced toward my uncle right as my mother hit the ground, sliding on her knees.
I didn’t understand. I was on the sidewalk.
I sat there gasping for air.Why were they standing there talking? What was she doing? I wanted to yell, I’m over here, but the words wouldn’t come out. I waited for them to find me. I became angrier by the second. Uncle Dan and the man whispered to each other at the open car door. I couldn’t see my mother.
I pushed myself up off the ground and stood there with my arms akimbo. They still didn’t notice me. I gave up and walked toward the car. In front of it, a pool of thick burgundy liquid spread across the asphalt. My mother crawled around in it, pinching at bits on the ground and holding them up to the sunlight. Guttural sobs heaved from her throat.
My heart beat a dull thud in my chest. I watched my mother open her fist, drop one of the bits in it, and then snap it closed again.
I took three steps forward. A few feet from my mother was a red Converse sneaker lying sideways like it had been kicked off.
I held up my hands, palms flat, trying to block the image before me. I couldn’t.
My heart beat faster. I closed my eyes and took two more steps. I touched the warm metal side of the car. The sharp corner over the headlight dug into my palm.
My heartbeat lodged in my throat. I opened my eyes.
His leg was twisted at an odd angle. His sock covered in blood. His head like the hamburger I poked at in the store.
I started to hyperventilate.
I knew where I had to go.
I ran.
I yanked open the front door. She always threw clothes away in the laundry room. I bounced off the wall when I tried to make the turn.Where was it? Where?
I saw it on top of the wastebasket.
I grabbed all the pieces and ran to my father’s closet. I pushed back the hanging clothes, then shoved the boxes aside, making a space so I could reach the wall.
I crouched there on my knees and slipped on the dismembered sleeve and then the rest of the coat. I pressed my hands against the wall and begged. I pleaded. I scratched the wall until my fingers were bloody. I importuned until my throat was raw.
Nothing.
I finally curled up in a ball and started banging my head against the wall.
I woke up the next day with a pillow under my head and a blanket covering me. My uncle sat next to me, his back against the wall and his knees bent. He must have heard me stir. He turned to look at me. His face was etched with grief, wearier than I’d ever seen it.
> “Aiden?”
My uncle shook his head.
Inside my head I saw an underfed-looking man in a white robe. He comforted the small boy next to him. I couldn’t see the face, but I could see the shoes. I blinked my eyes and saw my uncle looking down at me.
I turned toward the wall. It held the bloody marks from my supplications. Anger raged inside me. I knew then that there was no God. If there were, he would have listened to me. He would have saved my brother.At that moment, I turned my back on that wall, those pleas, and the one who would not answer them, and forgot all of it.
Until now.
{ 25 }
Holly?” Milton said softly.
I opened my eyes slowly and concentrated on the white ceiling, breathing and counting as I had learned from the Silent One. I repeated this about five times as the sharp edge of impatience increased around me. I was lying on the couch. My hair was soaked from the tears that spilled over.
I closed my eyes, pressed my balled hands into the couch cushion, and then pushed myself up.
“Did you know?” I said to the ceiling.
“Sarah told me about it years ago, before we started our work together.”
Of course she did. It hadn’t occurred to me. “You never said anything, though.”
“I knew you would tell me in your own time.”
I sat there with my eyes closed so tight, spots of light floated behind my lids. Someone had told me once that those spots were angels. I hadn’t closed my eyes tight enough to usher in those ethereal specks since the day Aiden died. I listened to the clock tick and wondered if they were happy to find the door open again.
Milton’s slacks scraped the chair fabric as he changed positions. I guess it’s time.
The room inside my head filled my vision. I held my breath. I knew that he would be sitting on the left side of the Committee’s couch, as he had been for the last three and a half months.
Still holding my breath, I shifted my gaze to the pink commode on my right. My blood turned to ice water in my veins and froze like a lake across my heart. Betty Jane sat there looking pressed and polished. Her sunflower pin mocked me with its little yellow bonnet.
I nodded my head. The person directly to the right of me tugged at the corner of my eye. I turned and the familiar crew cut came into focus. On his neck was the scar diving from the corner of his jaw into the band of his white T-shirt. A thousand tiny cracks erupted across the glacier that was my heart. I sighed and lifted the corners of my mouth slightly while nodding.
Sarge winked.
I reversed my gaze back toward Betty Jane and then down to the floor where the Silent One knelt on his prayer altar.
“Hello,” I said. He bowed his head. A warmth radiated out from my heart, melting the last of the winter in my body. The Silent One bowed his head again.
I inhaled deeply as he had taught me, and for the first time, I felt a calming warmth drop over me. I exhaled and looked down at the pink Oriental rug. I inhaled deeply and looked at the Silent One once more. His face was very serious. His eyes remained fixed on me. I transferred my body weight to my left side, pressed my hands against the couch, and focused on the Committee’s therapy room.
I saw a beat-up red Converse sneaker, and on the other foot, a blood-soaked white sock. The sound of screeching brakes and shattering glass rushed at my mind like the Furies from Greek mythology punishing me with their secret stings because I had escaped public justice for my crime. Then a thud that sounded like a piece of fruit splattering on the ground knocked the air from my lungs.
Most people can’t help but look when they come across an accident. I couldn’t help but run.And at that moment, sitting on Milton’s couch, I wanted to do it again. I wanted to get up and run as fast as I could. Crash through the closed door, leaving an outline of my frame and nothing more. But I was anchored to the couch by an overwhelming need to, now, look.
The pain behind my eyes pushed out like the runoff from a particularly fierce storm held back by wooden planks. Then the dam broke. I lifted my head slowly as if it were being pulled from the ceiling by an invisible cord attached to my crown. Through my tears I confronted the face I couldn’t look at all those years ago.
One side of his head was caved in and the skin looked like it had been run across by a cheese grater. It was a mixture of blood, pebbles, and shards of glass that caught the light like tiny stars. Aiden’s bloody blond curls were caked and matted, making his hair look like a Gorgon helmet of living, venomous red snakes. One eye disappeared behind the mangled mess of his face, and the other dripped with blood.
Staring at him, I heard the echo of Sarah’s screams mixed with the tearing sound of my mother’s pants as they ripped across the asphalt. The wailing and tearing beat at me like a thousand horrible wings, indicting me as the perpetrator of the hideous crime of fratricide. I wanted Aiden to join their lament. I wanted him to point his finger at me and say,“This is your fault.” I wanted him to strike out at me with a demand for justice.
Aiden smiled instead.
Aiden’s smile was always one of his best features. His teeth were large and perfectly straight. At age five, he had what used to be called the “Pepsodent smile.”
I leaned forward, wheezing as I bit my knuckles.Aiden’s mouth was gaping and mostly empty. I remembered my mother telling me that after she saw Aiden’s crushed head, she crawled through the blood collecting his teeth. She said she was ashamed that this was all she could do while her only son lay dying on the street.
“Right when I pushed you, the car hit me so hard I flew into the air,” Aiden told me. “I landed on the hood. My head hit the windshield and shattered it.Then I bounced onto the street.”
His words were not meant as an indictment, but each one of them etched into me, leaving scars like the marks I left on the wall at the back of my father’s closet.
“And that is where I died,” he said quietly.
“Aiden, please forgive me. Please forgive me,” was my anguished plea. “Please forgive me.” I closed my eyes again. Aiden’s mashed face remained.
I remember Sarah telling me I had to forgive myself. But I couldn’t. I needed Aiden to forgive me. But how could he?
“Who will forgive me now?” I said to the Committee. All eyes were fixed on me. Nobody said a word.
“Somebody, please forgive me,” I cried.
Nobody said a word.
I opened my eyes. My body started shaking as I gulped ragged breaths of air.
Milton pulled his chair over so that he sat directly in front of me. He put his hands over mine and squeezed.
“I remember . . . I remember . . . them . . . trying to tell me . . . what happened.” Milton squeezed my hands a little harder. I inhaled deeply and then exhaled, repeating this until the tremors in my body stopped. After a while I said, “When they did, I retreated and let the Silent One have control. He scared my parents with the praying and vacant stares.They finally gave up.”
“Holly,” said Milton, “I believe you have been in a state of protracted grief for the past twenty-seven years.The Committee has protected you from your grief and kept you mired in it at the same time.”
“And the Boy, Little Bean,Aiden, he can’t forgive me because he is a part of me?”
Milton nodded. I waited for him to say the next obvious thing. But he didn’t.And I was relieved. I hated new-age crap, and Milton was a NewYork City psychoanalyst—the closest he would ever get to anything touchy-feely was sitting close and taking my hands, as he’d done at that moment.
Milton moved his chair back to its original position. He knew I was safe.
“How did the Committee come here for group therapy?” I said.
“Ah, yes,” said Milton. Up went the finger church. But this time it didn’t bother me. “When you didn’t return my third call from abroad, I called Sarah.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust her, but you guys seem to talk a lot more than I realized,” I said.
“Holly, ar
e you aware that before you started seeing me, Sarah wanted to be declared your legal guardian so she could get you”—Milton cleared his throat—“help?”
I sat there gaping. Just when I thought I had my footing, I found out my sister wanted to lock me up.
“She and I discussed it during our initial consultation about you,” said Milton.
Betrayal and understanding braided together as I tried to assimilate this new piece of information.
“Ah, you were not aware. And because I anticipated a reaction like the one you are having, I never mentioned it. I suspected that Sarah didn’t either, but I never asked her.”
“Well, obviously something changed her mind,” I said.
“Someone.” Milton smiled. “Me.” He pointed at his chest. “After meeting with you, I was convinced that you could be helped by rigorous psychoanalytic treatment.”
Sarah’s sometimes irrational vitriol toward Milton made a lot more sense now. She’d signed on the dotted line for this devil’s bargain.
“So, what happened when you called Sarah?” I said.
“She assured me that you were depressed, angry, still without the Committee, but coping all the same.When I heard this, I had an idea.”
Here we go. Another one of Milton’s brainstorms.
“Since I’d already radically departed from standard treatment methods—”
“I’ll say,” I said.
“I decided to take a risk and try a new path into your psyche,” continued Milton, ignoring the comment. “What did I have to lose?”
A couple of things popped into my mind.
“To pursue this new treatment path, I needed Sarah’s help. I convinced her that this new course was the right one, and then we set up regular calls for the last couple of weeks I was in France.”
“What did you talk about?” I said.
“Who Sarah thought the Committee members represented for you. As we now see, her guesses were right on target.”
Sounds Like Crazy Page 28