When You Go Away

by Jessica Barksdale Inclan

  The doctor looked up. "How are you feeling now?"

  "Tired. Sort of light headed. Sad."

  "About?"

  "All of it." She held his gaze, his eyes blue, blue as Brooke's, and she knew she had to go back home.

  "Do you have any of the thoughts you told the nurse about? The sounds? The voices?"

  "It was Brooke I heard. No other voices."

  "Do you hear her now?"

  "No. Not since I broke the window."

  "What did you think was going to happen if you stayed at home with your children?"

  Peri shook her head, embarrassed and sickened by her own insanity. "I thought I was a bomb and I was going to explode. I saw--I saw blood and glass and my baby, my youngest, flying through the air."

  "And you don't think you’re going to explode anymore?"

  "I think already did that, don't you?" She paused, a flutter of fear over her heart. “But will it happen again?”

  “With medication and therapy and people knowing now how you are feeling, I don’t think so. I think you are going to only get better, Peri.”

  “You mean my long wild trips are at an end?”

  "I believe so," he said, smiling. "Do you know what's going to happen from this point on?"

  "No."

  The doctor took off his glasses and leaned forward on his elbows. "Your ex-husband and his wife have decided to not file charges. That's why the police haven't come to talk with you. And I've contacted your doctor at home."

  "What doctor?" she asked. For the past year, all the doctors in her life had been Brooke’s. She wasn’t sure if Carly or Ryan had even gone in for a physical in what? A year? Two? What about the dentist or the eye doctor? Those people used to know the whole family by name, slipping the kids colored erasers, pencils, and sugarless gum on the way out the door. Carly and Ryan had grown unrecognizable, teenagers with no one to care for them.

  Picking up his pad and pushing back in his chair, he looked at her. "Your family has found you a doctor. Dr. Kolakowski. I've spoken with her. She’ll be meeting with you when you get home. I’ve even talked with your ex-husband about your insurance. Everything is arranged."

  Peri closed her mouth, not wanting to let the doctor see how his words made her lips pull down at the corners. She brought a hand to her cheek, pressing against the blush on her skin. Graham knew. He knew about her screams and his broken front door window. He must have been told about the children, Brooke all alone in her bed, Carly taking care of everything, Ryan floating high through the apartment. She felt as greasy and used as her un-bathed skin, the days in the hospital slinking over her. "Oh. What is he going to do about the kids?"

  "I don't know about that, Peri. You'll have to wait until you get home."

  Peri shook her head. Graham would fly into San Francisco, finally wanting his children now that she was out of the way. Because she was crazy and because he could, he would take Ryan and Carly and leave Brooke stranded in her hospital bed. Just like she had.

  They'd both abandoned her, not wanting any of the hard work, the feeding tube, the doctor visits, the five years of diapers, the way she could talk with her eyes, saying, "I love you," with a flick of her dark eyelashes.

  "I'm going to release you in a couple of days. I'm going to prescribe an anti-depressant that will help you. You'll stay on the Haldol for a bit longer. We'll tinker with the dosage. It’s not an exact science. But you're going to have to go home and talk to doctors and the authorities in California. It's all arranged. How do you feel about that?"

  "What else can I do? I can't just hop in the Honda now." Her mouth lifted and a strange sound slipped from between her lips.

  The doctor with no name laughed with her, nodding. "That will save you. Your sense of humor will save you. Hold on to it. It's going to be a long few months."

  TEN

  On Friday afternoon as Peri sat dressed and ready to go on her hospital bed, the woman in the next bed moaned, telling her sister that the bread wasn't ready. Of course, the sister wasn't there, and Peri thought of pretending she was the sister, comforting the woman with, "Now, now. The bread is almost done." But it wouldn't matter. No one except perhaps her mother could have comforted her just three days ago, promising her she wouldn't explode into terrible pieces. From anyone else, he wouldn't have believed a word, needing all the drugs that now pushed through her veins to make her convictions evaporate. She needed the drugs and sleep, and in a sad way, she'd needed the time away from the children.

  The woman cried out again, turning as much as she could in her bed, her arms restrained as Peri's had been. Peri heard the rub of flesh against the cloth, and she closed her eyes. How had this happened? She'd become the butt of her own jokes. She remembered the way she used to so causally said, "This is a mad house," to another mother in Carly's first-grade class as the children scrambled around the room the minute the teacher went to the office. "I'm going to lose it," she used to say to Ryan when he and his friend Tucker tracked in mud from the creek. "You're driving me crazy."

  But they hadn't driven her crazy. Brooke hadn't either, really. In a way, Peri could almost see the time--when Broke was a baby--when she split away from what was real, slowly at first, as if she were in a boat that hadn't launched, relatives still at the dock, waving and calling out their blessings. Eventually, she had been the only one aboard, nothing in sight but black waves.

  "You all ready?" Noel walked in, putting one hand on her shoulder, the other clutching a stack of papers. "Do you have everything?"

  "No. I mean, just my purse." Peri pointed at her purse. All of the dangerous objects had been removed--nail file, Swiss Army knife, Advil, Xanax, Vitamin C, credit cards, money. She'd left the Bay Area with nothing but her purse and the clothes on her back. The nurses had laundered her jeans and underwear, and Noel had bought her a new blouse, her other shirt ripped by the paramedics and sloshed with her own blood. She had the new one on now, a pale pink button-down shirt with half-sleeves, exactly her size. He must know how to buy women’s clothes after dating all those women. Peri used to remember them, lists of names. But after a while, she’d learned to smile and node, knowing that they’d be gone soon.

  She smoothed the blouse with her hands, listening to her brother talk.

  "Let's go then,” Noel was saying. “We can have dinner and then we'll go to the hotel. But we're getting up early. Our plane leaves at 6.45. Preston—your lawyer—has it all arranged."

  "You mean they're not sending down armed guards to drag me home?"

  Noel took her seriously at first, shaking his head, saying, "No. They're expecting. . . “And then he stopped, smiling. “Fine. I'll call them to get you. They'll drive you home in a Hummer or maybe an armored truck."

  "When do I get to talk to the kids?" she asked quietly.

  "Tomorrow. Or the day after. They'll be able to come visit."

  "Oh."

  "Come on. Let's not worry about that yet. Let's leave that for when we get home."

  Peri stood up and followed him out the door, the woman behind her still mumbling, moaning again about the bread that simply wouldn't rise.

  After dinner and a quiet walk around the hotel's block, she and Noel went to bed. Noel was lightly snoring in the double bed next to hers. They hadn't shared a room since after the divorce and their mother moved them to a two-bedroom house in the Rockridge District of Oakland. But even after all these years, his rhythms of sleep were the same, the up down breath, the shifting of limbs, his occasional sighs.

  Peri turned on her side, reaching her hand out without thinking about it, her arm hovering over the bed. Who was she reaching for? Graham? After this long? Or Carly who had taken his spot in the bed, the apartment to small for any private space? Tucking her arm back against her chest, she knew she'd been looking for Brooke, her poor daughter, who tried so hard every day, smiling even when Leon made her stretch her legs or tilt her neck, who didn't cry even after the doctors put the plug in her throat. Peri hadn't cried for any of
it either, staying strong and firm at the bedside. But at night she had felt the diseases rise out of Brooke and slip along the floor, twist down the hall and come whisper to her in her dreams. It was her fault, all of it. When the doctors first sat them down, one had said, "It's genetic. Mothers carry the faulty gene that causes Muscular Dystrophy," as if she'd intentionally invaded the process of conception on purpose.

  Peri knew she should have gone to the hospital earlier, not laboring at home as long as she did. Graham had paced in the living room, and finally carried her in his arms to the car, saying, "I can't take it anymore. Something bad could happen."

  "Graham," she'd answered between contractions, which were only three minutes apart. "I've done this twice before. Nothing bad is going to happen."

  But something bad had happened. The baby's heartbeat had sunk, slowed, stopped for a minute, was it? Or seconds? First the doctors pulled at the baby with forceps, but then the monitor buzzed flat, and the nurses and doctors rushed in to prepare her for a C-Section.

  Peri wasn't sure how at what second Brooke’s chances for some kind of life disappeared. Muscular Dystrophy was a degenerative disease but usually gentle with girls, not the devastating illness that finally wore boys to death in their late teens or twenties. With the CP, everything changed. Of course, they’d known initially something was wrong, Brooke’s birth followed by test after test after test. Even so, Peri had hope. Brooke seemed like every other baby except for her size. But then she hadn't done what Ryan and Carly had so easily--flipping over on their stomachs, lifting their heads--and at the four-month doctor visit, Peri had listened carefully to the doctor, even taken notes, calling experts immediately.

  While she seemed to take on Brooke's illness as she had every other mothering task, for weeks after the diagnosis, Peri couldn't bear to look at her own body. She was disgusted with her arms and legs and stomach and breasts, hated her own womb, the terrible incubator that had ruined a child. And now, as Peri lay listening to her brother sleep, the knowledge that Brooke was the way she was because of Peri's genes and body--the way she'd held the child in her womb and her very blood--filled the dark room. She'd passed on nothing that was whole. Without her, Brooke would be living a normal life.

  Clutching herself, Peri cried as she hadn't been able to cry before because she was supposed to be the strong one. While Graham, his mother, sister, and her own mother cried and worried over each and every one of Brooke’s prognoses, Peri stood firm, calling parent resource centers, joining the local MD and CP parent support groups, chatting online with doctors and nurses, hiring Leon, speech and occupational therapists, contracting with the school district for teachers. Maybe she'd have been able to hold on, ignoring the blank fuzz of her brain for anything but Brooke, but then Graham had sat her down, said, "I can't take it anymore. I've found someone else."

  Maybe if she'd begged him, gotten on her knees and promised she would change, she wouldn't have ended up bloody on his doorstep. As Graham had spoken to her, ending their marriage, it had been like watching a movie, the sad story of a relationship gone wrong. Peri had viewed it from a great distance, seeing her own dead eyes, the way she lifted her hand and then let it fall to her lap, the way he kept looking at her for a reaction. There hadn't been one because she wasn't even there.

  But she was here now, in this hotel room, sleeping next to her younger brother, hundreds of miles from her children, on drugs because she was crazy, hours away from facing the cops who would lock her up so she could be evaluated and arraigned.

  If only her mother was here; her mother would have stopped this from happening, and even if it had, she would sit on the side of Peri’s bed, lean down and whisper the right words. “You didn’t mean it. It’s not your fault. I’ll take care of everything.”

  Then she would whisk the hair out of Peri’s eyes, and say, “This is nothing you can’t handle. I know you’ll figure it out. You are my girl.”

  But Janice wasn’t here. Her mother’s spirit wouldn’t come to such a horrible place, Arizona dry and sad and full of despair. Bringing the pillow to her face to avoid waking Noel, she let the years of holding strong and still turn into liquid, her tears hot and full of the image of her daughter, her red hair a wild rose against the sheets.

  "Peri? You awake?"

  "Yeah."

  "Have you slept at all?"

  "A little. I think the anti-depressant is keeping me wired." Peri turned to face Noel, the only light in the room coming from outside, a wand of yellow eking out from behind the thick curtains. After a moment, she could see Noel's face, his eyes that were like their mother's, so blue they were almost white just before turning black around the pupil.

  "Well, we went to bed so early. Maybe we should just stay up. We have to get to the airport two hours in advance now."

  "Yeah."

  "How are you?"

  "I'm okay. I mean, don't be worried. I'm not like I was before. I'm just so sad. I can't believe what I did and what it's going to do to the kids. They've been through enough."

  Noel was silent, and Peri could almost hear him trying to find the right thing to say. She felt sorry for him because what could possibly be right here? What words wouldn't be a lie?

  He rubbed his nose and sat up a bit. "It is going to be hard. I guess there's no getting around that. But I talked to Dad, while you were in the shower. The kids are doing okay. They've talked with the social worker and some psychologists or something, and it looks like the judge wants you to have a thorough evaluation, too."

  "But what about Graham?" Peri hated how her mouth still held his name, the way she loved the air high against her palate with the H.

  "From what Dad said, Graham will want custody. I won't lie about that."

  "Brooke, too?"

  "I don't know--I don't think so. No one's said anything."

  Slipping onto her back, she tried to stop the anger that rippled from her chest into the rest of her body, but she couldn't. "Goddamn it! Goddamn him! He couldn't even wait to talk with me." She hit the bed with her fist, grimacing as the stitches throbbed.

  Noel didn't say anything. He let her yell and cry, and after a minute, she sighed, wiping her eyes. "What would Mom think of me?" she asked him.

  "If Mom hadn’t gotten sick, I can't see this turning out the way it did. When Graham left, she would have moved in with you. Or she would have moved you into her house. She wouldn't have let you slip away like I did. Like Dad did. Like everyone did."

  There were silent for a moment, the long moaning wind of the air conditioning wrapping around them. Her mother had still been well when Brooke was born, her diagnosis coming when Brooke was two months old. But up until then, she came over every single day. She picked Brooke up out of her crib as if she were any other baby, singing the same songs Peri sang to her kids, taking Brooke outside in the snugglie, staying to eat lunch with Peri, listening to her talk about nothing but the baby this and the baby that. Just before all the tests came back on Brooke, Janice had test results of her own, and before Brooke turned one, she was dead. A week before her mother died, Peri brought her home, thinking she would want to be surrounded by those she loved best. But with Janice dying in one room and Brooke struggling to live in another, Peri felt stretched between love, pulled and battered and sore, her heart full of loss. But none of this was Noel’s fault.

  "Don't think that. I didn't call anyone, Noel. I was in a fog or a dead zone or someplace where I couldn't feel anything except what Brooke felt. And then I couldn't feel anything. I let poor Carly take care of so much. She'll never forgive me."

  Noel shifted on his bed, the mattress creaking under him. "You were sick. You've been sick all this while, Peri. It was bad, but everything is going to get worked out."

  "Brooke will never get worked out. She's always going to be like that. She's going to get worse." Boys with MD eventually curved into themselves, their muscles turning to fat, the leg muscles too weak to carry them, their hearts and lungs slowly shutting down, no musc
les to move them anymore. Maybe none of that would happen to Brooke, but already, she needed help to breathe and eat; she'd never know what it was like to run around a playground with a friend or swim without Peri holding her. She would never date or get married or have children. She would never live on her own. There was no way Peri could work those facts into her mind, even as she sat in support groups and listened to the experts. She hadn't wanted to believe, but now, on drugs in a hotel in Phoenix, she did.

  "Periwinkle. Don't think that way."

  "But that's the point. I never have before. But it's true."

  Noel sat up and turned on the light, running his hand through his still -blonde hair. She blinked, watching the way his fingers made grooves through the curls. "Dad will be glad to see you. He's been out of his--he's been so worried."

  "You can't offend me, Noel. I have been out of my mind."

  "Are you still mad at him?"

  She pulled her pillow up and leaned against it, her hands empty in her lap. She wanted a cigarette. She hadn't smoked since before meeting Graham, taught in her senior year in high school by her best friend Michelle, but now she needed that feel of smoke and heat in her lungs, a reminder of how life felt on the outside. "Do you know why he left Mom?" she asked.

  "They didn't get along? They married too young? I don't know. Mom's stories."

  "Dad had an affair with a secretary, and supposedly she got pregnant, even though Mom never heard about any baby. Dad told Mom about it, and that was the final straw. She'd suspected other affairs, but she had proof this time."

  "What kind of proof?"

  "The woman called the house. That kind of proof."

  Noel looked at the clock nervously and cleared his throat again as if his cough could clear the room of the idea. We're the same, she thought, neither of us wanting bad news.

  "How do you know this?" he asked after a moment.

  "Mom told me when she was sick. She was on morphine during those last days, and she either talked or slept. She still loved him, too. After all that time."