A Blue So Dark

by Holly Schindler

  "We're still at the soccer field," I told Dad when he answered the cell he kept clipped to the pocket of his coveralls. "And we can't leave, because of the-the shiny water."

  But Dad didn't say, all worried, like I still expected him to, "I'll be right there." He just sighed, long and exasperated, right in my ear. Sighed so hard I could practically feel his breath, hot, coming through the phone. "Aura, I cant.

  "You-you-" I stuttered.

  "I'm not even working in town today, Aura. I'm all the way over in Billings. And I can't just keep running off at a moment's ... Look, you're going to have to handle it, okay?"

  My whole body was thudding and I was so scared, so scared, suddenly I was the one who was drowning. I can't, I can't. You're not really going to do this, are you? Why are you going to let everything fall on my shoulders, heavy as every brick building in the whole world?

  "You're going to have to talk her down, okay?"

  "She won't-"

  "She will, Aura. She just needs you to show her what's real. Tell her that I said to trust you. Tell her that this is an episode. She knows what that means, okay?"

  "No," I begged. "Don't leave us out here. Please."

  And my dad-the selfish, unfeeling jerk-hung up on me.

  The whole world was wrong in that moment. Everything was off-the smell of grass was so strong in my nose, it was like fumes from nail polish remover.

  "Is he coming?" Mom asked. "Is he bringing the boat?"

  And I started to cry, because everyone else in the world was gone by then, and there was no one I could even call out to-not a coach and not another mother. Nobody, just me and Mom, but she was seeing a whole other world, one that I wasn't a part of, which made me feel like she wasn't inches but a whole universe away. At that moment, I felt so abandoned-like Pluto must have when all the scientists decided it wasn't a planet anymore. Nothing but a bunch of cosmic trash.

  We sat for what felt like months, until darkness fellbut not because the sun was setting. No, like some cosmic joke, the sky that had been so perfectly blue for our game was filled with black, churning clouds. And the strong, overwhelming smell of grass was overpowered by the smell of wet clouds, approaching rain.

  We were both bawling when the rain started to fall. Crying like a couple of babies, the downpour soaking us to our very bones. And I prayed, like an idiot or a poor pitiful soul with no choices left. I prayed that at any minute, Dad would come streaking down the street, driving the company truck so erratically that the ladder would fall from the top, clatter straight to the pavement as he veered toward the soccer field. There he'd be, big work boots clomping up the bleachers, and even in the dark, I'd be able to see the worry-wrinkles all over his face.

  But he didn't. There was no point in wishing anymore. Time to find some sort of exit strategy.

  What was that word he'd used?

  "An ... an ep ... an episode," I mumbled.

  Mom turned to me, her eyes wide, like she'd just torn up the winning lottery ticket-two hundred million dollars in tiny little pieces at the bottom of the waste can.

  I've got her.

  "That's not water," I said, my words attacking her like boxing punches that she could never dodge. If this was a battle of the wills, I was going to win.

  "You can walk on it, really," I told her, standing up and squirming away when she tried to grab me. "Look at me. I'm fine. I'm not drowning. It looks like water, but it's really just the bleachers. Remember our soccer game? You came up here to watch our game. And we won, Mom," I said, trying to smile, even though the rain felt like nails against my skin and I was still crying a little. "We won. Let's go home, okay? Let's go home."

  Remembering how I'd wrapped my arms around her that day-me-just like all the mothers had wrapped their arms around their daughters and led them away from the soccer field, I put the phone back on the cradle. What was I thinking? Why would I even consider the possibility of getting help from Dad? I'd just as easily get help from a pair of salad tongs.

  In Mom's room, I grab the phono needle and pull the arm to the side to cut the music, but not far enough to click the turntable off. The label of Pearl just keeps spinning.

  The record player's a real antique-Mom clutches onto it like a kid with a security blanket. And she's truly got an amazing assortment of vinyl, for anyone into collectingHendrix and Pink Floyd and The Velvet Underground. Rare gems like a promotional issue of the Stones' Sticky Fingers album with the zipper on the front, and a signed copy of Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home. She's even got an old Beatles butcher cover. I could probably go to college out of state on what's in that stack. But Mom would never part with it. And who am I to ask Mom to part with anything else? I mean, how many of us have to wave goodbye to our hold on reality?

  "Too loud," Mom says, and tosses her angry face at me with such force, it feels like I've just been smacked with a wayward soccer ball.

  "No, it's not," I insist. "I turned it off-see, Mom? No more music."

  She cringes like feedback from mile-high Marshall amps is screeching right into her brain. I wish I could help her, turn the volume down on the thoughts that come to her like a radio cranked up far too loud.

  But then she shakes her head, like a dog trying to knock water out of her ears, grabs a box of art supplies, and starts furiously dumping tubes of oils and acrylics on the floor and opening paint cans. She dunks a brush into a small container of a dark metal-gray. When she pulls it back out, she lets it drip all over some bunched-up mounds of drop cloth like she's making her own Jackson Pollock.

  "I know how to fix it. Everything. Fine," she says. And her eyes-if I ever came across a wild animal with eyes like hers, I'd back away slowly, heart pounding in every one of my fingers and toes.

  "Mom," I tell her, "you're having an episode, okay? Like in the car this morning? What you saw when we ran off the road? Why you pulled me out of class? This whole thing is an episode."

  "Leave me alone," she snaps, and drops the needle on the vinyl. She grabs the volume knob and cranks it up so loud, she'll never be able to hear me, no matter how loud I screech.

  One of the main risk factors for developing schizophrenia is having a close relative completely messed up by the disease.

  he front door explodes with a furious knock. When I swing it open, I find our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Pilkington, standing on our porch in her purple velour jogging suit, her poofy gray bangs hanging floppy and crooked over her forehead. "Whash going on in there?" she slurs, pointing to the lab puppy at her feet. "You're hurting Scooter's earsh."

  Is she serious?

  "I ... I'm gonna call a copsh," she swears through her whiskey-drenched stupor. Her face looks like a sculpture made out of Crisco that's been set outside during the hottest part of a hundred-degree summer day.

  "Don't do that," I say. "I'll turn it down-I'm sorry."

  Sure, she's a lousy drunk. And maybe, if she were to complain, the cops would only roll their eyes at her. But then again, maybe the cops really would come inside my house, and they'd see what state Mom's in-before I could figure out how to fix it-and they'd wind up hauling her off. Slapping a straitjacket on her. Trying to fry her brain back into working order with some good old-fashioned electroshock.

  And if Mom were locked up, what would happen to me? Not to sound like the mayor of Snootsville, but I really don't know what would be worse-foster care, or life with Dad (the vanilla ice cream cone) and Brandi (a bubble blown from an obnoxious pink wad of chewing gum).

  I burst into Mom's room and yank the power cord on the record player.

  "Gimme that," I say, reaching for the brush. "Come on, you've got the Pilkingtons all worked up. You've got to quit."

  "No," she snaps. "Don't you dare take this from me." But the words run much deeper than a brush. She's not talking about a wooden handle and some bristles. These words have come straight up from the darkest part of her, the core of her very being, and they bubble up to the surface wearing soul moss. She's talking about her art. "I
need this," she whispers.

  I let go, watch her grab a tube of paint and squirt a thick stream of yellow straight onto the bristles. But it seems like she's forgotten about Janis, at least, so I leave her.

  The morning weighs so heavily on me that I feel like Atlas, holding the entire freaking sky up on my shoulders. My canvas bag is on the table with my bio textbook poking out the top. I reach inside, pull out my sketchbook, and collapse into it, the way I've seen Ethan sometimes collapse into Janny's chest. Art, the great soother, comforter. Art, the thing that makes me whole-just like Mom.

  Lately, when I pick up a pencil, artwork and poetry have shown up like vines, twisting in between each other so tightly that if I were going to try to uproot one, yank it off the page, the other would go, too. I start sketching-a rocking horse-back and forth, sane and insane, here and gone. And underneath, a poem explodes across the page, frantic and angry:

  As always, breathing is a little easier as my pencil flies. The ache of my life quits pulsing. As I draw, and as words come with my images, it's as though I've been given a cortisone shot-the pain is gone. I can move. I don't feel completely crippled anymore.

  But then I lift my head, and through the sliding glass back door I can see Mrs. Pilkington in her own backyard with Scooter, staggering, pointing at the tree, like that's all the instruction the guy needs to be housebroken. Joey comes outside, back screen flopping, voice like an angry father's, and he's shouting at her, something about meeting, meeting, sponsor. They seesaw this way, taking turns-first Joey's off the wagon, then his mom, the sober one screaming in the driveway when the drunk one finally rolls in at five a.m. with vomit trailing down the front of their shirt.

  They're just alike. I'm shivering, all hot chills as I hurry away from my sketch and walk back down the hall to my own bedroom. But mine's a bizarre room, really-not any real sanctuary at all-with kelly green carpet and a pale blue ceiling and flowers Mom pulled me out of bed to paint when I was in the third grade, after that lightning bolt of inspiration had struck her. Flowers with wild polkadotted petals, stamens making giant curlicues. Lady bugs as big as monkeys. Clouds swirling like wisps of blue cotton candy.

  We'd painted all night, while Dad was visiting an old friend in Albuquerque. Or Mom did, really. I watched and carried paint trays and added white or red or orange when she told me to, mixing the new hues for her with the end of a ruler. Proud, back then, to just be part, you know?

  "Can't take it," Mom's muttering angrily from her room just across the hall. "Can't. From me. Mine. Don't. I'll fix it. Everything. Fine." I remember the way Joey screamed his sloshy, drunken words at his mother the summer before last, dawn spilling like orange Kool-Aid across the sky. "You can't make me quit," he'd said, just like some little boy. "You can't make me." Even though the booze and the whoknows-what-else he was on was obviously going to kill him. Even though addiction has always been the damn cause of every one of the Pilkingtons' problems.

  I wander back across the hall to reassure her-or maybe it's to reassure me-that we're okay. I come up from behind her, and start to wrap my hands around her long black hair, putting it into a kind of temporary ponytail, just like she used to do to me when I was little.

  She pushes me away, her eyes so crazed, crazed, that my first instinct is to snatch that brush away from her again. But I remember the sketchbook on the kitchen table, and I know all too well how she would feel if I were to take it, to trash her art supplies. It'd be like gouging her eyes out.

  So I turn, and leave her with her painting. Which I'm slowly beginning to realize is like shutting the door while she sticks a hypo needle filled with poison into her arm.

  Famous schizos: van Gogh, painter. Jack IKcrouac, author. Syd Barrett, musician of Pink Floyd fame. 'haclav Nijinsky, dancer. Every single freaking one of them an artist of some sort.

  ura," Janny sighs. "It's not like I can just take offto-what? Hang out?" In the background, Ethan is screaming like somebody's put a knife through his skull.

  "Your mom'll babysit," I say, selfishly. "I just-I need somebody else to look at her, you know? Just come over for dinner-real quick-and you can take off."

  "Now, Aura? You're handing me this now."

  I get tight inside, defensive. It's not like I planned this. It's not like I want to have a mother who's in her room, starting canvases and leaving them half-finished, paint flying everywhere. It's not like I want a mom who wakes me up like she did last night, rustling me out of bed, hissing, "AuraAura-I need some green. Are you listening? You need to get in the car, okay?"

  What I wanted to say was, Yeah, Mom, this town is full of all-night art supply stores. Because everybody knows that at two a. m., you just might find yourself needing a bottle of cough syrup, some ibuprofen, a jug of milk, or a tube of acrylic kelly green #304. Right. But I just peeled myself from my sheets and tried to placate her by mixing up some green myself. Yellow and blue, Mom. Don't you remember?

  "Ten minutes," I tell Janny. "Five," I try to bargain. "You can just pretend to eat." I feel like some wayward stray at her back door, scratching and pawing and begging. And that makes me angry, too. Hadn't I let Janny cry into my shoulder for a week solid when the stick had turned pink?

  "Fine," Janny sighs, exasperated, just the same way she sighs at her mother. I figure, judging by her tone, I even get an eye roll.

  I mix up a tuna noodle casserole, and while it melts into a bubbling, canned-fish blob, I head into the living room and sit down on the bench of the Ambrose Original, our family piano. I really don't play the old upright very well. I can read the treble clef okay and can form a few chords. But the real reason I love it-as pitiful as it is-is because I built it with Dad. Because he bought it for my tenth birthday. Because I came home from school, and there it was, all scraggly and chewed up, looking like it had been through every major battle of World War II. And for more than a year, we spent every Saturday going to Piano Pete's-an old music store just across the street from the skankiest used car dealership in town-to buy pedals, hammers, felts, damper pads, strings.

  When I sit on the bench, I remember how Dad and I used to laugh about the belt buckle Pete wore, the gold thing in the shape of a baby grand. I remember how Mom sanded the mahogany down to the nubs so that she could paint it up in her own amazing style. She did, too-angels and sinners and street performers and love and pain and fear and lust and everything everybody ever played a song about-she painted it all, an absolute masterpiece, right there on the piano. I think about how we got it done in time to play carols on it. All Christmas Eve long.

  I stare at the Ambrose Original lettering Mom freehanded over the Kimball that was branded to the front when Dad first brought it home. I touch the perfect, straight, strong, gold brushstrokes while my eyes wander over the rest of Mom's painting. The way the colors swirl across the top of the piano, it's always reminded me a little of the van Gogh that shows up in all the print stores-Starry Night.

  Yeah, van Gogh, schizo as they ever come. Some say that's why he cut off his ear, you know-because he was tired of the voices. And they-the ever-present THEYso-called experts who probably can't even tie their own shoes-they say that Starry Night shows how light's texture can change with the onset of a psychotic episode.

  Damn, I hate that picture.

  I wonder sometimes why some people are geniuses, and some are just nuts. What's so different about Mom and van Gogh? What's in the sunflower paintings that didn't make it to any one of the hundreds of canvases Mom's stacked everywhere-the garage and the living room and the attic? Why isn't my room considered a masterpiece? Why aren't vacationers from Pittsburgh and Little Rock lining up at our door in their Bermuda shorts, salivating over a chance to get a glimpse of the garden Mom painted all over my bedroom walls? Why am I not standing at the door every single weekend, taking money and telling everyone, Remember, no flash photography, thank you?

  The clunkerty-clunk of the engine in Janny's rattlebang p.o.s. makes me remember dinner. She throws open the front door ju
st as I rush back into the kitchen to pull the casserole from the oven.

  "Where is she?" Janny sighs, rubbing at her face. She looks like she's forty, the way that pretty face of hers has been stretched and bloated with the pain of a mistake that never gets undone.

  "She's been painting ever since we got home yesterday-her eyes," I start to babble, explaining about the car ride and how I had to drive.

  "That's really dumb," Janny says, pulling a pack of cigarettes from her floppy, bargain-bin purse-the kind of thing we would have made fun of a couple of years ago, made from scraps of mismatched leather sloppily patched together. She shoves aside the back screen so that she can smoke through the open door. "You don't know the first thing about driving," she grumbles, because she's already had her license for a year and a half. Pre-Ethan, the twenty months in our age difference (caused by Janny getting held back once and me skipping a grade) never seemed like it even existed, since, from the time we met, we were always in the same class. Now, though, she's holding those twenty crappy months over my head. Like somehow she's already seen it all, and I'm just this snot-nosed little kid.

  "What was I supposed to do?" I snap while Janny flicks her half-smoked cigarette onto the patio. "Out there in the middle of some ditch."

  Janny flashes me a principal face, like I should know better. I feel a little like slapping her for it, actually.

  While Janny sets the table, I head down the hall, saying, "Mom? Mom?" my voice as soft as the fur on a tottery young kitten.

  "Mom," I say again as I slip into her doorway.

  But she doesn't answer. I just stare at her awhile, covering my mouth, because after a full day of painting she seems as wasted as Joey Pilkington after a night out. My eyes travel across the paint she's smeared up her arms and under her fingernails and all over her face. She's tied her hair in a knot, too-an honest-to-God knot, and it's been so long since she's put any conditioner on her hair, I figure she'll probably have to whack it all off. I figure her hair, dry as yarn, won't ever come out of what she's done to it.