A Blue So Dark

by Holly Schindler

  While some mad geniuses " enjoy great success, many do not. ,Inspired often, creative nut jobs don't have the focus of mind needed to complete projects. As prolific as van Gogh was, just imagine what he could have accomplished if he hadn 't been such a damned fruitcake.

  he music is blaring again as I race up the driveway, which means Mom's probably interfering with the Pilkingtons' hangovers. Mrs. Pilkington will be on our porch any minute, banging on the door and slurring her threats. I throw the front door open, stomp down the hall. But as soon as I hit Mom's bedroom doorway, everything I was going to scream at her disappears, like water down a drain.

  Mom's painting-I hate, hate, hate this expressionlike mad. She sounds like she's been jogging, her breath raspy against her throat as she pushes her brush against the paint blobbed on her palette. Mumbling to herself, she spits the occasional "Fix. It'llfix."

  Canvases that've been painted on and abandonedsome of them halfway gessoed-over-are strewn everywhere, like a stack of paper that's been tossed into the air and allowed to flutter back down to the ground. They lie face-up, face-down, crooked. They've stained the bedspread, and their corners poke into the walls or dresser. Some look like they've been attacked by a tiger, with long thin slices running lengthwise.

  The curtains are splotched with paint, too-even handprints, like someone's been held captive here. Like someone's desperately been trying to claw their way out.

  Books-textbooks, art books, coffee table editions-lie open and decimated, their torn-out, wadded-up pages dotting the carpet. And at my feet, right there at the toe of my sneaker, is Mom's old portfolio, dusty and frayed. With the music squirming inside my chest, I squat, open the portfolio, and look inside, flipping through the pages of Mom's work-the drawings Mom sent to art schools back when she was applying to colleges. But that was before she ran away from Nell and moved in with Dad, the summer after she graduated from high school. Before she wound up settling for the college here in town.

  Pieces, artwork is called. Pieces of artwork. But I can't think of the pictures in Mom's portfolio as pieces at all. Actually, I think the portfolio ought to be titled What It Was Like When Mom Was Whole. I mean, the person who did this, I think as I flip through the pages, the wild colors, the vibrant swirls, nothing shy, nothing tame, nothing backward about any of it-the woman who painted this isn't some dandelion seed. She's a lion. And lions don't get tossed about willy-nilly by the wind. She'll be back, I tell myself. You just wait. She'll open her eyes and yawn and growl. And then we'll drown ourselves in champagne to celebrate her return.

  An electric guitar beats its way past my eardrums and works its way deeper into my brain. I realize Mom's got Pink Floyd on the turntable. "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" is turned up too loud for the speakers; notes buzz like killer bees.

  I try to go back to the portfolio, which has always amazed me. To think, my own mother was responsible for these strange, fearless images that refuse to be caged by any -ism. These works aren't just abstract, or expressionist, or impressionist. They are somehow a blend of all, with odd angles, incongruous details-broad, fanciful strokes of color breaking up blurry, out-of-focus faces that peer out from windows or cafes or cars or moon craters, each setting so ornately detailed that it seems far more like a photograph than something created entirely by hand.

  The more I leaf through it, the more her portfolio taunts me. These pictures are telling me Look, Aura, right now, you're okay, just like she was. But soon, you won't be. Soon, you will start to fall to pieces, see? Because even these piecesthis artwork-it doesn't make any sense. That's the schizo mind at work, Aura. Tiny little pieces, shards, fragments-that's all you'll be. Enjoy being whole while you can. It won't last forever.

  "Goddamn it," Mom snaps, yanking the portfolio from my hands. Her eyes, wild, accuse me of horrible things. "Are you going to get your hammers and bolts?" she screams. "Are you trying to fix me? Are you? Who asked you?" She races to the dresser, grabs something off her vanity mirror, and shoves it in my face. The crystal I'd tried to drop in her housedress the other night. "I'm not broker, broking, broke, broke," she says, her mouth twisting as she fights for words.

  "Mom-crystals, right?" I blubber. "Just like when I had mono."

  Her face ages, like a film on fast-forward. Lines etch themselves beneath her eyes, around her mouth. Her cheeks sink, creating pools of shadow. "You think I'm sick?" she whispers. "I'm less?"

  "No-that's not-I don't mean-"

  Mom tilts her head toward the light, erasing the shadows in her cheeks. Youth pops across her face as quickly as a kernel of popcorn, replacing the hard shell she'd been the moment before. The vacant hollows of her eyes fill. The stranger steps aside to show me the real her, who still lives, so deep down. "You'll understand someday," she informs me, her voice as clear and unclouded as tap water. "When you're grown, you'll understand these things."

  Her words zip through me like electricity. She knows exactly what she's saying. The room spins, my stomach churns, my skin burns. Oh, my God-it is true. We're just alike.

  I shouldn't leave her. I'm not stupid. My brain knows I shouldn't. But my feet are moving, running, like the house is on fire. It's self-preservation that sends me racing. I grab the keys to the Tempo, got to escape, got to escape for a little while.

  I tell myself that if I have the car, she'll be safer. It guarantees she won't be behind the wheel. Before I leave, I even turn the deadbolt on the front door and lock the sliding glass door in the kitchen. Maybe, I think, maybe, like a caged hamster behind the safety of wire walls, she won't be able to figure out how to get out.

  And then I'm steering the Tempo, chewing on the inside of my bottom lip, praying I won't get pulled over for the headlight Mom knocked out in the whole mailbox fiasco. Yeah, okay, I shouldn't drive without a license, all right, but it's not like it's brain surgery. It's driving. I mean, take a look at the dopes who leave the DMV with licenses sometime. Besides, it's midmorning, and traffic is down to a murmur. Hands at ten and two, seat belt locked, I remind myself it's no different, really, than steering the riding mower. I avoid the main thoroughfares, taking the side streets to Zellers Photography.

  "What the hell?" Nell shouts when she sees me. My heart practically shatters, because this is how I wish it could be at home-I want a mother who gets after me for showing up in the middle of a school day, obviously cutting class. I want a mother who puts her hands on her hips and frowns just like Nell, as she shouts, "You'd better get your butt back to school, kid. I'm not tolerating crap like this."

  But I shake my head, tears coating my eyes the way rain hangs onto a car windshield in a downpour. A serving of normalcy isn't really what I've come for-not today. Details, that's what I want. My sneakers squeak as I hurry across the floor. "That picture," I say, pointing at the beach scene-Nell and her daughter in a crumpled heap on the sand. "Where was it taken?"

  "Florida," Nell says, eyeing me like I've flipped my freaking lid. The red of shock and embarrassment starts to creep around the base of my throat.

  "No, it wasn't," I argue. "I've been to Florida."

  Nell chuckles as she falls into the chair behind her desk. "You ditched school to come debate me on Florida. At least you're not boring, I guess. Worst thing you can be in life, boring. Worse even than being selfish."

  "What was he like?" I want to know. "Your husband."

  Nell sighs. I get tense, because I figure I'm being completely transparent-and because Nell's the kind of person to call me on it. But she just says, "He was brilliant," as straightforward and matter-of-fact as if I'd asked her where she'd gone to college or what her dad had done for a living. "Was going to write the Great American Anti-Novel, or so he called it. Was going to invent a brand-new art form, one that would make guys like Burroughs and Vonnegut scratch their heads and stroke their chins in amazement." Her eyes go distant.

  "But he didn't."

  "No," Nell whispers, her eyes going all windshield-inthe-rain, too. "He never did. He tried, though."
<
br />   "So what happened to him?" I ask, even though I know. I know it, without anyone ever having told me straight out. Dead was all anyone had ever said, as if that word answered questions instead of filling a mind up with a hundred new question marks.

  `A lot of mentally ill people take their own lives," she says, then bites down on her bottom lip so that it won't wobble, so that her mouth becomes a sort of dam against the sobs that want to break out. My mom's got the same habit.

  But I don't-my tears, once started, can never be held back. Streams are already rolling down both cheeks when I tell Nell, "Look, I probably won't be back to work again, all right? So don't think anything about it if I don't show up." My voice is thick and low, and full of more history, suddenly, than the wooden floor in Nell's studio. My voice carries every disappointment I've ever felt, and Mom's, too, and even those of a grandfather I've never met, because it's all becoming so clear to me. Generation after generation of madness hits my shoulders like rain made of concrete blocks. It's verifiable, like one of those damned geometry proofs-this disease comes to artists as surely as lung cancer comes to a person who's been smoking three packs a day for thirty years straight.

  Because art is a drug. One that destroys the mind, breaks it, leaves it black and withered and useless. And here I've been surrounded by art my whole life. I've got to quit; I've got to get away from it; I've got to run before it swallows me, the way addiction has swallowed two generations of the Pilkingtons.

  "Wait. Aura-what do you mean? Are you quitting? What for?" Nell tries. But I'm out the door, away from her photography, away from art, away, because I know that someday, if I'm not careful, I'll be standing in front of some white-coat, drugged into a stupor, my arms frozen like tree branches, a trail of slobber falling out between my lips.

  "Forget it," I shout back at her, terror racing through my chest. "Forget it, forget it, forget it," even though what I mean is, forget me. And I turn away, stomp toward the Tempo, which I rev to life.

  I hightail it away from Nell's studio. Slam the car into drive and gun it.

  Family members who care for a schizophrenic are at risk of burnout. Especially family members who are probably going to be just as sick, raving, and nuts as their wacked out relative.

  om finally, finally falls asleep around dawn, collapsing onto her bed for the first time in what feels like about three centuries. By a quarter to eight, her snores are so rattle-the-whole-house loud, I figure she's out hard enough to maybe sleep through the entire day. I dress and grab the keys, since I don't have time at this point to walk-and I really do need to put in an appearance at school. No, nothing wrong at home, Fritz, nothing, just going through my oh-so-cool rebellious phase. Sorry about running out on you yesterday and skipping all my afternoon classes.

  I start to reach for the handle of my canvas bag, stopping short when I realize it's not sitting on the floor beside the kitchen table, but on Jeremy's skateboard. I reach down to touch a rough patch along the edge of the board that maybe got scraped up during some trick. Touch it like I would if it were Jeremy's elbow, wounded in a fall. I close my eyes and let my fingers run along the thick swirls of paint he's smeared across the board, tracing them like the curves and indentions of taut muscles down a stomach. My mind explodes with images I'd paint-if, I remind myself, standing and kicking the board into the back corner of the kitchen, painting wasn't like lying down in the middle of the freaking highway, waiting for a semi to turn me into Aura hash.

  The defroster in the Tempo is shot, so I drive with the windows cracked-the extra-bitter Missouri October morning makes the whole car feel like a deep-freeze. My breath comes out in opaque puffs that probably make me look like I'm smoking. And I'm such a ball of nerves, trying to make it seem like I'm an expert driver and not someone who's just slipped behind the wheel for the third time in her entire freaking life, I really wish I were. Smoking, that is. I wish my lungs were full of smoke right now.

  Mr. Groce, King of Crestview Security, doesn't exactly smile upon fifteen-year-olds who are driving illegally, so I pass the entrance to the Crestview lot and head for the nearby Kmart. Cut the engine out behind the Tire & Lube.

  By the time I park, though, I realize it's taken me longer to drive to school than it usually does to walk. Criminy. I've really got to huff it, past the already empty Circle, all the way across the field and through the Crestview High back door.

  And smack into a chest as soft as an overstuffed living room chair.

  "Badge," the chest barks at me. It belongs to Mr. Groce, who's wearing his usual eighties-vintage brown plaid jacket, purchased when he was six sizes smaller.

  I reach into my hoodie and pull out my laminated ID badge on a bright yellow cord. The faculty acts like they're no big deal, like they're just time cards you'd punch any old day at the mind-numbing office. Nobody has the balls to say what they really are: dog tags. If there's ever a Crestview High massacre, Groce will know who to mail my mutilated body to.

  Less paperwork that way, you know. Less money spent on those pesky DNA tests.

  He glares at me as I try to make a last-second dip into the ladies' room. Before I can even touch the handle, though, he jingles his keys out of his pocket and slams them into the lock. My shoulders droop. I could tell him, I just have to pee, but who wants to discuss bodily functions with a fifty-yearold male security guard? Reminds me of having to watch the birds 'n bees video with the hairy-knuckled fifth grade gym teacher. Ultra-creepy. Besides, he's obviously made up his mind about me-I'm not a glistening golden, but the bad guy, guilty until proven innocent, a tramp who will light up as soon as I step into the back stall (and probably even start a fire when I toss a still-burning cigarette butt into the trash can). I am just the kind of gypsy scum who will destroy anything her sneaker tread touches-so I don't get to use the cleanest bathroom in the school.

  I glare right back as I head for the stairs. I should have known better than to leave the house without using the bathroom. What am I, five?

  Ah, well, no time now. I hike the sleeve of my hoodie- 8:05. Damn! And I take the steps two at a time. My feet echo through the dead stairwell.

  By midmorning, I'm not sure why I even bothered coming to school at all. It takes the entirety of first period to straighten everything out with the stupid attendance secretaries, and a bomb threat means the entire student body spends second and third periods out in the parking lot, shivering in the October cold. Since it's Vote for Your Homecoming Queen Bullshit of the Century Day, the glistening goldens wander through the parking lot while we wait for the fire department to give the thumbs-up, smiling at all the rest of us as if to say, Why, I never thought you were a gypsy in the first place. Want to share my last stick of juicy Fruit?

  Gag.

  Across the lot, I see Janny, alone, arms across her chest. And I walk up to her, a smile plastered on my cheeks like a clown's grin. Because every other fight we've had has ended with me showing up at her house like nothing bad had ever been said between us. Ten minutes after ringing her doorbell, we'd be in front of her TV, passing a bowl of popcorn back and forth, and in the last year or so, every time one of my insurance-selling Dad's retarded commercials came on, Janny would put her head on my shoulder. We'd watch my very own dad put his arm around Brandi, who was holding their daughter, the words Auto, Home, Life, Health flashing on the screen with the American Family logo. Janny'd point to my little half-sister and say, "I think Carolyn's a dumb name, anyway."

  But now, when I walk up to her, her angry eyes start boring into my forehead. Like a drill bit, you know? Like trepanation. They used to do that to crazies-drill holes right into their skulls to let the demons out.

  "What do you want now, Aura?" she asks, annoyed.

  "Come on, Janny, you act like I'm Ethan. Like every time you turn around, you have to wipe my ass."

  "Frankly, I'm surprised you even remember his name," she spits.

  My brain spins. I don't know where this is coming from. "You know, I've got a few things on m
y mind, Janny. I've got this person at home-remember her? And I don't know what to do, okay? And maybe if somebody helped me out-"

  "So go find somebody, creep," she says. "I just came today to clean out my locker."

  "Clean out your locker," I repeat.

  "I moved out, okay? Of my parents' house, all right? And I got a job, because Ace is gone-"

  "Wait, wait," I say, reaching for Janny's arm, but she squirms away.

  "Yeah, big surprise, right? One thing's for sure-don't ever trust a guy named Ace to come through for you when you find yourself in a jam. Guys named Ace get in their 1966 El Camino street racers and head for the coast. Any coast. And dumb old Janny Jamison couldn't even figure that one out. And the thing is," Janny blurts, like she's been waiting eons for the chance to tell someone this very thing, "they say it's the woman's prerogative to change her mind. But that's wrong. Guys are the ones who get to say, `You know what? I don't want to be with you after all.' They get to say it after they've sucked all the sweetness out of you, just like those cheap, liquid-filled wax candy things we used to get for Halloween. They leave you a dried up, empty piece of wax, and head off to find somebody else who still has some sweetness inside."

  I clutch my chest. "Janny, I didn't know-"

  "No," she says, trying to suck the snot back into her nose. "You didn't. And you didn't bother to find out, either. You're not the only person with problems, Aura. Real, shitty, stupid problems. And I'm sorry, but I can't take on any more. Especially not from someone who just thinks I'm whining about a stuffy nose. Leave me alone, okay? Just leave me the hell alone."

  As I watch Janny turn to disappear in the crowd, I find out that when my heart shatters, it sounds just like a glass vase splintering into a million pieces on a tile floor.

  I hurry over to the side of the building, away from the parking lot. And I feel so rotten and so lost and so scared, I'm actually crying. Tears rolling, just like some weepy little baby-like that stupid douche bag Adam Riley, who cried in the first grade when a substitute teacher showed up, because he wasn't supposed to talk to strangers and there was one in his room and he just had to get out of there, go to his mommy.