Still Life with Tornado(42)

He said he was just stressed out. He hadn’t done it again since.

But he still asked me questions about the doctors.

That only stopped once Sarah was born. Six months after we buried Gram Sarah. I hated him by then. What he’d done to me and Bruce was unforgivable. I’d kicked him out twenty times. He never left.

And now, we’re here.

It’s like putting a movie on pause for twenty-six years.

I’m stuck, eating staples, on pause, glue.

But meeting ten-year-old Sarah changed everything. I can see my Sarah in her. I can see what she used to be like. Though, at ten, Sarah had already seen what Chet could do. She saw in Mexico. She saw before Mexico, I bet.

My Sarah? My Sarah doesn’t see shit. She’s all conflicted. She stopped going to school. Something happened but she can’t talk to us. Why would she ever trust us? Chet and I have been lying to her since she was born.

Kids are smart. I’ve said that my whole life. In the ER when we have to give bad news to the parents before we give it to the kid, I say to my nurses, “You can’t bullshit a kid. You have to tell the parents first, but the kid knows.” And there I was bullshitting a kid when I know you can’t bullshit a kid.





Honest Things



I don’t go to the movie. I open my umbrella and balance it on my headboard. It’s dangerous if I sit up fast, but I don’t plan on sitting up fast. I plan on napping. Except I don’t nap. It’s impossible to nap if one’s mother is out with oneself and one is not there with them. It’s very confusing.

I think about calling Bruce again tomorrow. I think about him staying at the B&B on Pine. I want to be honest with him, but more than that, I want him to be honest with me.

? ? ?

I get up and manage not to poke my eye out with the umbrella. I put on a thick sweatshirt and I leave. Dad still isn’t home and no one has said anything about it. Maybe his weekend insurance emergency will last all night. Maybe he got mugged on the way home and is lying in a puddle of his own blood. Maybe he’s seeing someone on the side.

I leave the house and decide to stand in random places. On 16th and Pine, a guy says to his friend, “It’d be really cool if you had a bed that makes you shrink because then when you sleep you’d take up less space.”

On 16th and Locust, a woman tells her partner that his shampoo smells like Lysol.

On Broad and Locust, I hear the beginning of a conversation between two middle-aged women and I follow it.

“It was a great book.”

“I didn’t like it.”

“Come on. Didn’t you think Gregory was hot? I mean, I just read it for the scenes where he’d take his shirt off and chop wood.”

“I thought the Gregory character was a douche.”

“He was confident.”

“He was a douche.”

“He was hot.”

“I thought the most interesting part of the book was the wife who took shots of J?germeister as mouthwash.”

“She was weird.”

“Not as weird as Gregory chopping wood shirtless. Creepy.”

“Hot.”

“You’re forty going on sixteen.”

That’s where I stop following them. Halfway between Locust and Walnut. I’m sixteen and I think I’d have liked the J?germeister-mouthwash wife better than Gregory.

I stop listening to people and walk down Walnut. It’s a nice night. Ten-year-old Sarah and my mother are at a movie. Dad is AWOL. Bruce is in Oregon and he might be coming to see me. He can’t be my therapist. I will be my own therapist.

Twenty-three-year-old Sarah says, “What’s the first thing you would talk to your therapist about?”

I say, “Oh, hi. This isn’t weird at all.” I notice she’s carrying my favorite umbrella again. I left mine at home. I wonder can the two exist in the same place at the same time. “It doesn’t look like rain,” I say.

“I always carry it just in case.”

“Always?”

“Always.”

I look at her well-done hair and her stylish boots. I can’t tell if she’s an artist or someone who works in the mall, at the Gap or something. “You don’t realize that carrying an umbrella on days when no rain will happen is a bit weird?”

“We’re weird. We can handle it.”

“Don’t say we.”

“So? What would you talk to your therapist about?”

“None of your business. Unless you’re a therapist.”

She shrugs.

“You know what I’d say. You’re me. In seven years. You know what I’d say.”

“I don’t remember what I thought when I was sixteen. I don’t remember if I knew yet,” she says.

“Well, it’s none of your business.”

“You don’t have to be so immature,” she says.

“I really don’t need your judgments right now.”

“Get over yourself.”

She walks down 17th Street with her umbrella.

I’d talk to my imaginary therapist about a bunch of things, really.

But I’d never tell the therapist about the Sarahs.

I’m pretty sure I’m going crazy. And if I’m going crazy, then Mom is too because right this very minute, she is in a movie theater with ten-year-old Sarah but I’m pretty sure Mom doesn’t think she’s going crazy because she seemed perfectly fine with it. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that she sees real mental illness all the time and she knows it’s no different than a broken arm.