Patrick raised his hands over his head, as if showing me he had no other weapons. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—I promise you I would never hurt you.”
I backed away from him, but there was nowhere for me to go; he was blocking my exit. Even in his penitent state, he looked wild and capable of a violent, smothering kind of love. He crumpled to the worn carpet, dragging me down with him, and stroked my hair. He bathed my belly with his tears and whispered promises I knew he wouldn’t be able to keep.
Small ceramic chips dusted the shoulder of my maternity shirt, and I tried to brush them off. There was a dent in the plaster mere inches from where I had been standing, a tangible mark of the intangible thing that had broken between us.
That night when he was sleeping, I called Duffy and broke down weeping on the phone. I told her I didn’t know what to do and that I had no one to turn to. She said I was always welcome in her home, but I tearfully reminded her that I had no way of getting there. I think it was the first time in over ten years that Duffy left Salsburg. She drove the two hours to Milwaukee in the middle of the night to pick me up. I was so consumed by my own drama that we were almost to her house by the time I noticed her hands were trembling on the steering wheel.
She agreed with me that Patrick had a mental health problem and needed to seek help, and that it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to live with him until he had done so. She encouraged me to call his parents, whom I’d met only once when we’d broken the news about my pregnancy, and clue them in to what was going on to see if they could persuade him to get treatment. I stayed with Duffy and Winston for two months, almost up until the time of my delivery. During that time, Abigail Gill, Patrick’s mom, called me routinely, filling me in that Patrick had been diagnosed with type I bipolar disorder. They’d withdrawn him from his classes, and he’d moved back home with them. His doctor had put him on a regimen of mood-stabilizing drugs that Abigail claimed were helping. She suggested I come live with them; they were quite wealthy and had a “guest suite” above their garage.
I wanted to stay safe—wrapped up in my cocoon somewhere between conception and birth, between childhood and motherhood, in the care of my grandparents, but I missed Patrick. I was hopeful that the medication had restored him to the man I’d fallen in love with. I was hopeful that I could still prove my mom wrong and claim the life I’d always known I’d deserved. So I went back to Milwaukee.
Patrick wasn’t the bad-boy-artist I’d fallen in love with. Neither was he the insecure, temperamental man that I’d left. He was somewhere in between—a colorless, hollowed-out version of himself. But when I gave birth to David Patrick Jennings Gill on September 14, our son seemed to reach inside his shell with his little fists and bring him back to life for a few precious months. He started painting again and even got a job working at a hardware store. We were able to save up enough to rent the upper-half of a house on 57th Street, where I met Stacy, a married mother of two in her thirties, who would become a great friend to me and a convenient babysitter for David.
When David was five months old, I found out that Patrick had stopped taking his medication. I came home from the grocery store to find David sitting in his whale-shaped bathtub in chilly water with Patrick nowhere to be seen. I picked up the wailing baby, wrapped him in a towel, and clutched him to my chest, murmuring in his ear over and over again, “It’s okay, it’s okay. Everything’s all right now. You’re okay,” while in my brain, I screamed, “He could’ve drowned! He could’ve drowned! Just one little slip and he could’ve drowned.”
Patrick was in a corner of the basement that we shared with Stacy, rifling through some plastic bins and boxes. He later explained that he was looking for a green frog towel that we had wrapped David in when he was a newborn, but then gotten sidetracked by all his art supplies and old paintings.
“Oh, you’re home,” he said cheerily, as if he hadn’t just almost killed our infant.
We fought into the middle of the night. We fought until I went through an entire tissue box and my throat was raw and hoarse from screaming. Patrick said he had stopped taking his mood stabilizers because it made his head feel all cloudy and he’d gained some weight as a side effect. I replied that I was sorry, but I’d rather have him feel a little cloudy than accidentally drown our son with his negligence. Why hadn’t he talked to his doctor and tried a different dosage or new medication instead of just stopping without telling anyone? I told him that I no longer trusted him with David, and that if he didn’t start getting treatment again, we were through.
He promised he would see his doctor and start taking his medication again. “I just wanted you to love me like you used to,” he admitted. “But you don’t love this doped-up me. You love the manic me. You fell in love with my creativity and energy, and there’s no way I can get that back if I’m in the cloud all the time.” His calm, hopeless assessment nearly broke my heart.
“I don’t want you to be in the cloud either,” I said. “But these manic episodes aren’t good for you. They’re killing us. We need to get you on more solid ground.”
He disappeared again a month later. He was gone for nine days before the cops picked him up for breaking into a mansion in Fox Point. He’d insisted he lived there and even brandished a crowbar at the real homeowner. While in police custody, he tried to hang himself and was put on emergency detention. His parents persuaded the homeowner not to press charges and had Patrick admitted to the best psychiatric hospital in the state. Meanwhile, I moved all of his stuff back to their guest suite, had my landlord change the locks on our apartment, and started the arduous process of petitioning for sole legal and physical custody of David. After Patrick was released from the hospital, his parents pushed for him to have supervised visitation with David. This lasted for only a few months before Patrick’s behavior became so frightening—screaming and cursing at me as though I were a stranger, squeezing David until he was red-faced and howling, and finally threatening to kill us and himself so that “we could all be together as a family”—that I filed for an injunction against him, and the court granted it, stating that he couldn’t make contact with me or David for the maximum sentence of four years, except through his parents to determine any necessary financial matters.
You didn’t know, Duffy had said. Not even his own parents knew. That was true, and yet sometimes, I felt like I was drawn to mania. That Patrick was right, and I had loved him only during his manic episodes. That mania was true love. And it could consume you like it had consumed Patrick, or it could leave you feeling tired and used up, like it had left me. Nothing seemed to exist in between.
CHAPTER FOUR
David wiggled his arm between one of the big gaps in the fence. “I want to pet the cows!”
The cows were all thankfully out of his reach, grazing several feet away from us in the pasture. “The cows are eating their breakfast, so they don’t want to be petted right now. We’ll just have to look at them from a distance, okay?”
“Moo,” he called to them and wiggled his other arm through the fence. “Moo moo mooooo.”
I tugged him back before he could land face first on the other side in a pile of manure. “What are you saying to them?”
He grinned. “Hurry up and eat breakfast and come play with me.”
We walked around the fenced-in pasture, David unsuccessfully trying to call the cows over every so often. I couldn’t blame him for being disappointed. That morning when Winston had asked us if we wanted to tag along with him to the Englebrooks’ farm while he repaired a manure spreader, David had been so keen on going that I’d managed to get him to eat an entire wedge of cantaloupe. I supposed he’d envisioned Old McDonald’s farm or the petting zoo his preschool had visited. My motive had simply been getting out of the house. I’d been in Salsburg for an entire week and hadn’t left my grandparents’ neighborhood once. Even a stinky old farm seemed like it would be a breath of fresh air.
But it wasn’t, of course. We’d been there for nearly an hou
r already, and no sign of Winston yet. I wondered how much longer it could possibly take to fix a manure spreader.
“Which cow has the most black on it? Which cow has the most white?” I asked David, and he studied the herd thoughtfully before pointing them out. “If you could name one of these cows, what would you name it?”
“King Rex,” he said, and I didn’t bother to correct him and tell him that cows were females.
Droopy from the heat and our long walk around the fence, we collapsed in the shade of a tree near the cornfield. I hadn’t thought to pack any water bottles or juice boxes because I hadn’t known the trip would last so long. David seemed content examining the leafy stalks of corn, which were only about a foot high. Still I prayed that he wouldn’t start whining he was thirsty.
“That will grow into corn in another month,” I said. “Yummy corn on the cob like we sometimes eat in the summer. But right now it’s really young and needs a lot of sunlight and water to grow big and tall—even taller than you or me!”
David’s eyes widened. He stepped into the row of corn and stroked one of the glossy leaves with his thumb.
“Don’t go too far. Stay where I can see you.”
A light breeze ruffled the corn plants, and I followed David’s sky-blue shirt with my eyes as he skipped through the neat rows. From my shady seat, the farm looked more picturesque. I tried not to let the red barn and tall silo remind me of the nursery mural that Patrick had finally painted in our apartment on 57th Street, the same walls that I had forced myself to paint over when David had turned three.
I returned my gaze to my son, and something caught my eye. I immediately scrambled to my feet. Darting through the corn behind him was a coppery-colored animal. It was taller than David, almost as tall as me. And it seemed to be running on two legs.
“David!” I shouted. I searched for a stick, for anything, to ward off the threatening-looking animal, but there was nothing, so I simply launched myself into the cornfield. I would put my body between them.
I was thirty feet away. Twenty. David was leisurely jogging toward me, with flushed cheeks and a goofy smile, apparently unaware of the creature in hot pursuit. It looked like something out of a horror movie. Leathery skin covered its lean body, and its lizard-like tail stood out behind it like the rudder of a boat. Its face…its face was terrible. Yellow eyes with black slits and a mouth full of knife-like teeth. It seemed to be emitting a black mist that drifted over the corn stalks like a low-lying, poisonous fog.
I shivered. I was only ten feet away now, and I’d opened up my stride so I could swoop in, collect him in my arms, and keep running. “It’s okay, David. Everything’s going to be okay. It’s not going to hurt you! Just come here.”
He reacted to the panic in my voice, tears immediately wetting his eyes. Instead of tumbling into my arms, he stopped in his tracks. The black mist crept up his bare ankle. “Mommy?”
The fearsome creature stopped too, just inches behind him, and seemed to taunt me from over David’s shoulder. Its coppery scales flashed in the sun; its yellow eyes penetrated mine.
I charged forward and scooped David into my arms, carrying him to the edge of the field. When I looked back, there was nothing there except for our shadows; even the dark smoke had dissipated like a bad dream. I turned in a slow, searching circle, but there was nowhere for a creature as tall as me to hide in the glaring late-morning sunlight.
My grandfather, however, was just then ambling down a hill to reach us. His plaid shirt was darkened by sweat, and grease smudged his forearms, but he wore the expression of a man in charge. I had never been happier to see another human being before in my life. I wanted him to lift both David and me in his sturdy arms and hold us tightly against his barrel chest.
“Sorry that took so long,” he called. “The bed chain was giving me—”
“Did you see it?” My words came out in all one breathy gasp. “Did you see that…that thing?” I set David down and pointed one shaky arm at the cornfield.
Winston squinted at the now empty rows of cornstalks. He pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket, squinted at me, and then squinted at David. Genuine concern was etched on his face. He arched one shaggy eyebrow upward. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see anything.”
“It was chasing David.”
Winston’s eyebrow climbed higher. “Was it a wild turkey? They can be aggressive if you startle them. Or a raccoon? It’s unusual for raccoons to be out at this time of day, but if it was sick…” He dabbed at his forehead with the handkerchief. “There haven’t been coyotes around in these parts for years, and they’re mostly nocturnal, too. What did it look like, Anna?”
A predatory, oversized reptile running on two legs. But this description sounded insane, even in the privacy of my head; I could only imagine how nuts it would sound if I spoke it aloud. I looked down at David, whose tears had evaporated. He looked calm and no longer frightened, and I tried to channel his easy resilience.
“I didn’t get a good look,” I lied, wishing it were the truth. “But whatever it was, it gave us quite a scare.”
I had just settled David in for his afternoon nap and decided that a nap of my own might not be a bad idea. I flopped backwards onto the bed and squeezed my eyes shut. When that didn’t work, I got up and yanked the curtains closed and returned to bed. I pressed my palm over my eyes and massaged my eyeballs through their lids. But that didn’t work either, because it wasn’t the sunlight that was keeping me awake: it was the images flickering behind my eyelids.
There were no two ways about it: I was seeing things. Things that weren’t there, that other people couldn’t see. In particular, a scaly monster that was stalking my son, who was completely oblivious to its existence. The first time, I could write it off as the sun in my eyes combined with a lack of sleep. But the second time, I had stared into the creature’s eyes. I had been so close to it that I could almost smell its foul breath, could imagine what the texture of its skin would feel like beneath my fingertips. I could feel the temperature change. It was certainly no raccoon or golden retriever.
There were two possibilities I could think of to explain these bizarre events. Either a) there was a giant lizard on the loose in Salsburg, or b) I was going crazy. The former didn’t seem very likely.
I rolled onto my stomach and buried my face in the pillow. When Patrick had finally been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I’d tried to learn as much as possible about the disease. The more I’d learned, the more convinced I’d been that it was a cruel, cruel illness, lulling you into thinking you would live a normal, happy life, until it suddenly pulled the rug out from under you in your late teens or early twenties. But I wasn’t suffering from mood swings. I was suffering from hallucinations. What could that mean? Schizophrenia? What chance in life would my poor son have with a bipolar father and a schizophrenic mother?
I lifted my face from the damp pillow, sat up, and wiped my eyes. There had to be some other explanation. I didn’t feel schizophrenic, although I didn’t suppose anyone ever did. I wasn’t having several delusions—only one. And it had only happened here in Salsburg. Maybe we needed to go back to Milwaukee. Maybe I was getting too much fresh air and relaxation, and my brain was restless and had started inventing boogeymen. Or maybe my grandparents’ yard and the Englebrooks’ farm was haunted…by humongous reptiles. Right.
I commandeered the old desktop computer situated in the hallway nook outside my bedroom. Duffy and Winston rarely used it, as evidenced by the sheen of dust on the boxy monitor and the flurry of sticky note instructions attached to the desk. Make sure the green light is on and there is paper loaded in the tray before trying to print, one note instructed.
A cursory search of the internet turned up several stories of people who’d had hallucinations of large reptiles and lizards (whew!), but this was only after ingesting LSD or shrooms (damn!). Certain types of brain tumors could create disturbing visions, but that was a possibility too dreadful for me to ponder long, so I quickly
changed tacks. Apparently the state of Wisconsin was brimming with weird creatures—everything from werewolves and lake monsters to Bigfoot and even something called a Hodag. Rhinelander’s legend of the Hodag initially seemed promising, because the horned animal was described as part frog, part dinosaur, and part elephant, but with a little more digging, I found out it had been confirmed as a hoax a long time ago and was now just a cartoonish tourist attraction and festival mascot, not the very realistic creature I had witnessed.
In frustration, I pushed my chair away from the computer desk. So what was I seeing? And what did it have to do with David?
Outside, the familiar growl of a lawnmower roared to life. I strode through my bedroom, drew the curtains back, and peeked out the window, which overlooked the backyard. Sure enough, Jamie Presswood, dressed all in black, was mowing our lawn. I guessed it was a weekly thing. I glanced at the reflection of myself in the glass of the Revolutionary War picture, making sure my eyes weren’t still puffy from my earlier cry. Then I shut down the computer, grateful to close the images of the horned beast (imaginary or not, he was still ugly as sin), and ran downstairs.
He didn’t notice me at first, waving at him from the deck, so I walked barefoot toward him.
“Hey!” I called out. “Jamie Presswood! Fancy meeting you here!”
Jamie squinted at me and motioned to his huge headphones. “Sorry! I can’t hear you!” he shouted over the roar. “Hold on a sec.” He slipped the headphones around his neck and released the handle of the lawnmower, and the yard fell silent. Up close, I could see that this was Jamie Presswood, my childhood friend, not just some strange man with a beard and gothic wardrobe. He was staring at me expectantly, waiting for me to say something.
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