MY FIRST DAY BACK TO SCHOOL is a mess. My new friends are ecstatic I'm out of the hospital. I am despondent for the same reason. At lunch, I walk into the cafeteria with Missy and… Surprise… a welcome-back party with Twinkies, King Dons, Swiss Rolls, and pizza. I put on the smile but I am dying inside, dying to tell them. I hold back my tears until they rush forth and my girlfriends uncomfortably dismiss themselves, one by one, miffed that I am crying at their party.
The only one left is Missy, arm around me, trying to get it out. What's wrong, is there something wrong with your heart, are you going to die? We dissolve into the sea of orange and yellow lockers and I tell her between sniffles some of my confusion. Missy is speechless. The bells are ringing. She'll write me later, she says, and she vanishes, weaving through the lockers and out of sight.
The rest of the day my other friends are cool to me. In fifth period history I am passed the note. Missy's fat script letters pen out: “We know you made the whole thing up, trying to get us to feel sorry for you. It won't work. Nobody's mom does those things and we hate you for lying. You are scumbucket trash. We want nothing to do with you.” Scratched at the bottom are all ten of my girlfriends' names.
HEART SURGERY, IODINE INJECTIONS, tubes shoved, slits sliced, blood drawn. These things change a kid. At the cellular level. You forget what you were like before they cut you, before they shaved you. The past drifts away; inaccessible. You only look to the future when they'll find what's wrong so it can all be over; the tests, the trying, the meds you swallow without knowing why.
At home, a kitchen cabinet has been cleared for my medication. Where food used to be is now a cupboard full of Julie food: meds, weight-gain wafers, and six-packs of chocolatey Ensure Plus, the canned supplement drink they gave me in the hospital to complement my brimming meals.
Mom says I may be allergic to regular food, but I can drink as much Ensure Plus as I want. One little can is like eating an entire three-course meal. There's no difference, she says, absolutely none.
SWALLOWED. HOOK, LINE, AND SINKER.
WE STAND IN THE CORRIDOR of Ohio iV State Hospital, me, Mom, and my cardiologist. Sometimes teens are just tired and rundown, he says. I don't have a heart murmur, he says. And he can't really do any more for me.
Mom talks in soft confidence like a colleague. She leans in close, just like old times. She's considering the tests they've been through together and pondering the disappointing outcome of this one.
“Hmmm. Well, Michael. Let's get a plan of attack together here. In the face of these inconclusive test results, now is the time that I think we really need to move in with the open-heart surgery and finally, once and for all, get to the bottom of this thing.”
He stares at her.
“Ms. Gregory, Julie does not need heart surgery. I'm sure you're pleased to hear that.” He clears his throat. “There is nothing in these tests that leads me to believe that she would benefit from such an invasive procedure. I believe, in time, her heart condition will clarify and become more pronounced so we can assess it, or she may just outgrow it on her own. At most, we could consider her a possible candidate for an early precondition of mitral valve prolapse.”
“You're kidding me.”
“No, I'm not. Julie is within normal range of our tests.”
“I can't believe it! I cannot believe this! You're not going to dig into this and do the open-heart? I thought we had agreed to follow this through to the end, Michael. I thought you said you were committed to me on this.”
“I'm committed to finding Julie's illness, Ms. Gregory, but Julie doesn't need heart surgery. Usually parents are thrilled to—”
“Oh, that's just it? That's all you're going to do? Just drop me like a hot potato? I mean, for crying out loud, why can't I just have a normal kid like other mothers? I mean I'm a good mom, 4-H, horses, swimming pool, camping trips. I do and do and do. You act like I'm doing something wrong. What did I do to deserve this?” She thrusts an arm back to me.
I'm standing behind my mother's left leg, my eyes glued to the doctor, boring an SOS into his eyes: Don't make me go, don't let her take me.
“Ms. Gregory, I didn't say you weren't a good mother. But I can't do anything else here. You need to drop the heart procedures. Period.” And with that he turned on his heel.
“Well, you're the one who's going to be sorry,” Mom screeches, “when this kid dies on you. That's what. ‘Cause you're going to get sued out the ying-yang for being such an incompetent idiot. Can't even find out what's wrong with a thirteen-year-old girl! You are insane! This kid is sick, you hear me? She's sick!”
GOOD MORNING, DR. STRONG'S OFFICE.”“Hello, I'm a new patient looking for a cardiologist. Well, actually it's for my teen daughter. You see, she's got mitral valve prolapse, and I'm scared to death it's getting worse.”
ACOUNTRY SUMMER IN OHIO is just about one of the lushest, sexiest things you could ask for. It makes any girl want to traipse around in cutoff Daisy Duke shorts and a bikini top. Greenery gone berserk, vining all over everything, pregnant with shoots or seeds just bursting out of every split-open pod and juicy stalk; bullfrogs sit down at the pond and beat their hearts out at night in sexual frustration until the air sirens with a frenzy that gives and pulls, escalates in passion and dies down again to bare silence. It is delicious.
I sit on the back porch hot and restless for action, the action where a boy looks at you and you get dizzy with the excitement that he might like you, all the while trying not to look back. I sit on the back porch, restless and bored, and pick the ticks off of Stink Pup and Ebony. I do not kill bugs. The fat ones I collect on a paper plate with the hair and the scabs that tear off with them as the dog jerks its head back over its shoulder in an annoyed, watch-it sort of way. When I have four or five big ones on the plate, their legs waving wildly in the air, I pad across the soft grass to the pasture and dump them in a bush on the edge of the woods. They are just trying to live. Why should I step on them so they explode blood, or burn them with a match? I don't know why they are here but that doesn't mean they don't belong. The small ones I toss in the grass and they crawl away, sometimes trucking like hell back toward the dog, but that will just give me something to do another night. Tick ranching, this is what my hot teenage nights have come to. While other kids my age are necking in cars, pretending to talk for hours just in order to kiss minutes before curfew, or out at movies with their best friend and his older brother, shrieking breathless in the front seat of his Camaro as they roar around corners, I am sitting here on a dead-end dirt road, cultivating ticks from the burr-crusted coats of a couple of farm hounds.
NOW THAT I'M IN NINTH GRADE and Dr. Strong has me on medication for mitral valve prolapse, Mom wants to get something done about my mouth hanging open all the time.
“It makes you look like a nigger, Julie. Jesus, close your lips and breathe right!”
That winter, we see an ear, nose, and throat specialist in Columbus. Since my heart catheterization forced Mom to come into the University Hospital every day on her own, she's felt better about expanding our search into the center of the city. We got this close here, so there's a good chance we can get the rest of me solved.
Mom and the doctor talk about nasal passages and how the lack of air flowing through them can cause all sorts of medical problems, from heart irregularities to restricted oxygen traveling to the brain.
I sit on the doctor's exam table and his face moves in close. I can feel his warm breath drift across my bottom lip. Huhh. Huhh. Tilting my chin up, he sticks a pointy light in my nostril and spreads my nose all around with his finger. He says “Wellll” and “I seeee.”
They schedule me for a same-day procedure, where he'll go in and chisel the extra cartilage from my nasal passages in the hope that I can close my lips and breathe normally. He says I've got a deviated septum.
The office where he explains my operation has deep comfy chairs, their designer upholstery cut from chenille. Before-and-after profiles of other people
with deviated septums hang framed behind him, spanning the length of his office wall. I look closely while they talk, wondering if anyone else has noticed that each nose my doctor has fixed looks different after he operates. I thought I might ask him but he and Mom are holding direct eye contact. He leans across his mahogany table toward her, she leans from her chenille chair toward him, between them is an X ray of my nose, crowded with cartilage. Mom uses her finger like a magic wand. “Could you shave that little Roman bump off and give her a ski slope there at the bottom?”
The doctor leans back and smiles. “We can do whatever you like, Sandy.”
Mom tells me this procedure is going to count as one of my Christmas presents because it's not fully covered by insurance. But it's worth it, she says. Not only will my doctor make me breathe better, but he's also going to make me beautiful.
THE NOSE IS NOT A PART of the body designed to wear a cast. But they have plastered my nose, what's left of it, and anchored it firmly to my face with thin white strips of medical tape. The pain is excruciating. My cartilage has been shaved, the tip of my nose nipped and tucked. The first couple days my eyes are black and blue and swollen shut and I must hold my head very, very still. Blood and mucus cake around my nostrils, a snot bubble blows when I breathe out. I am not allowed anywhere for two weeks, so I stay home from school and can take my time wheelbarrowing bales of hay to the horses, hauling in buckets of coal, and chopping wood for the stove. I'm moving slow, because my sinus plates feel like they've been shattered with a mallet. The pressure never ceases, just a constant broken feeling in my face, like chips of fine china or slivers of a bird's delicate bone, broken in its wing.
They say I can't wear sunglasses for six weeks: My nose is so fragile that even the slightest weight could collapse its new shape. The pain in my face is all I can feel. I cannot remember a time without it, I can't imagine a time free of it. It's all I can see before me, a sea of pain, with me adrift in the middle, clutching a log, trying not to go under. They can do anything they want now. Because I know, deep down, I'll never get better.
HAS HE TOUCHED YOU, you know, privately?” Mom had me trapped on the bed for one of her talks.
“No.”
And it was true. I loved Dad; he never did anything bad to me. I didn't like to be in a swimsuit around him, but he never did anything that I could say for sure was wrong.
“Well, Penny told someone that Dan was, you know, and they believed it. That goddamned mother-fucking son of a bitch—I know he did it, so help me God I'd like to see someone take a gun and blow his brains out—but the caseworker's gonna come down, maybe take Penny and probably ask some questions, and you just answer no, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Tell them your dad would never do anything like that.”
But when I came in from outside the next day, Mom had Penny, one of the original foster kids, in the living room, her beautiful blond hair wrapped round and round Mom's hand.
“You little slut. How dare you make up that shit when I'm your mother and you never had it so good? I gave you a horse and let you be in 4-H and bought you clothes and took you to the fair and …”
I slipped into my room but I could hear Penny trying to tell Mom, through tears, that she wasn't making it up. Dad did pull out his magazines in the garage. She was sorry, Mom, she didn't mean to tell. Her voice went in and out, like her head was being rammed into the couch, the wall, the hutch.
I had an ear down at the bottom crack of my door, my heart racing.
“You slut, you make me sick. I hope they rape you where they take you, then you'll know what it's really like.”
The next day she was gone.
WHEN THE FOSTER KIDS FIRST CAME, I used to have to beat them. In the beginning, I felt like I was in some special elite group. They were the outsiders. I was the real kid who counted. They were pseudochildren, ghost kids. They were just there to give us money to keep building on.
They came into our house and we were just supposed to automatically be brothers and sisters. Most of them were kicking and crying, screaming that their real mom was coming to get them as soon as she could find them.
They were foreigners under our roof and stranger than the old men. At least the vets had their own separate wing of the trailer that Mom locked up. She put them away because it was against the law to have both foster kids and war veterans. So when the caseworker came to check on things, Dad would load up the old men in the wagon and go out for a while. Then, when the VA caseworker came in, he'd take the kids out on a drive.
We lived not even remembering that the old men were under our own roof, they were so removed. But the foster kids shared our rooms, our closets, our toys, our clothes, our bunk beds, and our mom and dad.
Mom puts the flyswatter in my hand and shows me how to do it. Grab their wrist and whack the hard plastic handle over their pink baby palms. She stands in the doorway of their room until I can crack hard enough to make them scream. Some of them are only a year or so younger than me.
It was just us then, me and Mom, bosom buddies. When we went shopping after doctors' appointments, we left the foster kids in the car. I was her best friend, and when she made fun of how stupid Lloyd was, the way he stuttered and had bowlegs from having rickets as a baby, I laughed right along with her jokes. When she pointed at fat Penny and told long-waisted Ricky how he was shaped funny, I did too, and we giggled like schoolgirls.
Mom shared all this with only me, and being let in on her private funnies was as warm a feeling as peeing in the pool when no one was watching. I beat the kids for Mom because I was still her little helper. God love me.
LLOYD WAS SUPPOSED TO GET IT one morning because he didn't pick up his room fast enough. Mom marched the flyswatter back to me and crammed it into my grip.
“I'll leave it to you, Sis. You give a holler if he gives you any trouble.”
I stood in the doorway like a soldier, glaring at the boy. He stood stiff with his bowlegs, staring back from the side of the big round toy box, shaped to look like the blue earth, trying to drop the toys in as silently as he could. I was going to make him pay. I rushed forward and grabbed his little hand, flipped it over, and hit and hit. For a second there was no response. And then the air cracked with his scream. It came from a low, guttural place, as if his soul itself had been punctured and had unleashed its own cry of defense. The sound turned me nauseous. It sounded like torture. And I was the torturer.
I let go of him and took a few steps back. His bottom lip sucked in fast as he tried to stay breathing. His hand was streaked red, pulsing with the heated throb of welts rising. He couldn't take his eyes off me. I couldn't take my eyes off him. We stood there, staring, panting, four feet between us. Mom yelled out from the kitchen and we jumped in our skin from the jolt her voice sent straight through us. We still stared, eyes locked on to one another, and I took the flyswatter and hit my own hand while Lloyd let out the cries. We did it for Mom, we did it for us.
And after that, without ever acknowledging it, the foster kids and I just naturally fell into an advanced system of nonverbal communication. An entire sentence or potential danger could be boiled down to an essence flashed in a single split-second darting glance, a tiny, un-detectable emphasis on a word, the brush of a finger along the kitchen counter.
These messages told us everything we needed to know about where Mom was, how she was feeling. We were psychic CBing. We were POW kids in a hideout tin trailer, and we began to look out for each other. The screams we heard were paralyzing at first, but they later mobilized us with a heroic panic to jump in and take it ourselves. It wasn't just that “other” kids were getting beaten, it was now our brothers and sisters. Stepping in became our own choice and was somehow easier to handle than standing passive.
And since I was the oldest and knew how to smooth her out the best, from all the times I hadn't shown the doctor how sick I really was, my skills were honed and polished. I alone could save the others from what I knew would kill them, in spi
rit at least.
I came to know every nuance of imbalance Mom careened to, every far corner she drifted into, every crevice she slipped through. I kept my antennas tuned for any outer stimulus that would throw her off. As the great shock absorber, I stood firm, invited the chaos on her screen into me, neutralized the waves, and adjusted the knobs in order to take the static out.
When I'd hear the cry from Lloyd's throat fill the trailer, I'd bound into the living room and say, “Mom. It was me. I lied. I'm the one who told Lloyd I'd clean the room and he could watch TV. I forgot. It's my fault. I'm sorry.” The most direct, complete information, delivered in one condensed, easy-to-comprehend package. Sometimes she'd turn on me, and scrawny little brown-haired, bowlegged, stuttering Lloyd would slip, almost unnoticed, past the curve of the couch and go hide.
And soon it was me and Maria as the new bosom buddies. We could share a private funny about Mom with just our eyes alone—like the time Mom lost her hairpiece on a branch when we all went on a trail ride with the 4-H Club.
And within a few months, when Mom was beating Maria in the living room, I ran in to offer my own skull to the sharp heel bone of her hand—and got hit harder for having such a hard head that hurt her hand in the first place. When she was done, I stumbled off to the back bedroom, a closed-off addition, piled high with all the stuff we bought but never used.
Maria tiptoed through the tiny laundry room that led to the bedroom door and glanced over her shoulder to make sure Mom hadn't followed. She crept back to me in her stocking feet, weaving her way through paths cut in the junk. She found me crouched in the back corner and sank down the wall, draping her little arms around me and squeezing tight. She was not gonna let me go.
“I love you, Mom,” she said.
“I love you, too, Maria.”
IT WAS IN TENTH GRADE that I first heard the term “emancipated minor.” Kids living on their own, working jobs to pay their bills, free from their parents! All you had to do was talk to the school counselor, sign some papers, and they'd help you get it set up. I was going to get out. And I was going to take Maria with me.
Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood Page 11