The Opposite of Music (7 page)

Mom says the medical establishment has let her down again. She's entirely disillusioned with Fritz. He's fallen off his pedestal. Mom says that Fritz never really cared about helping Dad. He only took the case to help pay for his sailboat.

Mom and Dad stay home at the time of the next scheduled appointment with Fritz.

The phone rings and rings.

“The Happy Pills”

(Sung by a chorus of doctors)

“Oh, that's funny, Billy,” Mom says.

“Your father and I have just finished discussing his options,” Mom says. “We feel fortunate to have skirted what was obviously a medical disaster in the making.”

Uncle Marty talked Dad into watching a college basketball game with him in the den. From the other end of the house we can hear Marty shouting. He has a bundle of money on the game.

“At this point we're going to change our strategy. We're going to do what I initially thought we should have done, and that is to care for him on our own. From this point your father is going medication free, and his symptoms, including the bizarre sleep disturbance, will have a chance to subside.

“Our home routines will be different for a while. I spoke to Dad's office and they're extending his medical leave. We expect it won't be a long one once he recovers from the medications. I'm going to change my work schedule”—Mom's voice breaks, and she stares at Triumph until she's calm again—“to half-time, from two thirty in the afternoon until six. That will allow us to provide Dad with continuous care throughout the day. Billy, you will come home directly after school so that you can take over from me at two fifteen. It would be best if you and I can overlap for a few minutes before I leave, in case there's anything we need to go over.

“I know how scary it's been for both of you to see him this way. He told me he hates to have you see him like this. He never wanted to be someone you felt sorry for. He wanted to be someone you looked up to. He wouldn't even want me to have this conversation with you. He wouldn't even want me to tell you what I just said. But I did, so there it is.

“Your father and I are going to need all your help to get through this time. Once it's over…we'll turn the page on this chapter and never look back again. What do you think about that?”

Linda is flopped on my bed. “Of course, Mom,” she says. “We'll do whatever it takes to get Dad well again.”

Mom raises her eyebrows at me.

I raise my eyebrows back.

“You can go, Linda.”

“Okay, Mom.” She kisses Mom on the way out.

Mom stays in my desk chair. I'm down low this time in the beanbag.

“What?” she asks, looking down at me.

“I know you need me and everything.”

“Yes.”

“But—I'm coming home right after school?”

“Yes.”

“And staying here until six o'clock? Monday through Friday?”

“That's right.”

“What about Linda?”

“What about her?”

“Shouldn't she come right home too?”

Mom has a few ways of looking at people that make them shut up. One is to remove her reading glasses and place them on top of her head. She kind of combs the arm of the glasses slowly through her hair first in a way that can be scary. But this time it doesn't work.

“Shouldn't she?”

Mom shrugs.

“You're not going to answer me?”

“You know she wants to help. But she can't, really. She's just too young. This is not the time to complain.”

“Shouldn't she get a chance to try? Maybe she'd turn out to be good at it. Better than me, even.”

“Billy.”

“Maybe she has a knack, or a special gift.”

“Will you keep your voice down, please?”

“Hey, I know.”

“What?”

“You could get her a little nurse's uniform. Wouldn't she look adorable in it?”

“What is the matter with you? This isn't the time.”

What is the precisely calibrated bored look that says Mom's judgment is so obviously wrong that everyone realizes it except her?

“What if I want to do something after school?”

“You have important plans?”

“That's neither here nor there. What if I did have them?”

“This isn't forever. It's just for a few weeks. Until he's over it.”

“What if I say no?”

“I'm not giving you a choice.”

“All right, then, I guess I won't say no.”

“It's only for a few weeks.”

“A few weeks. All right.”

After Mom leaves, I take her spot at the desk. Inside the desk is a Hohner Special 20 harmonica Grandma Pearl got me. I had asked for it, in fact, but it's still sealed in the package with the instruction book. Had I ever learned to play it, I would create an ugly sound at a special decibel level only Mom could hear, letting her know I will never be her orderly.

I've been playing Battleship with Dad. Somehow, he always ends up looking for my Destroyer last.

The Destroyer is the very smallest of five boats—it occupies only two spaces on the game board—and so it can be hidden anywhere. Dad seems to have guessed a hundred times, systematically, all over the board. In fact, he seems to be creating a scientific net of guesses to throw over the grid and ensnare my Destroyer. I can see his web of guesses spreading over the grid, from A1 way up in the lefthand corner, seeping downward and outward over the transparent green plastic of my ocean and covering the four boats of mine that he has already sunk.

Yet somehow he's missed D9.

In the meantime I'm just as systematically trying to avoid sinking his last boat, the massive, five-space Aircraft Carrier. I'm doing a kind of hot-coals dance around the perimeter of the only five spaces where his Aircraft Carrier can possibly be. I waste guesses. I guess some spaces twice, although Dad doesn't seem to notice. But what I'm most occupied with is telepathic bulletins. As his guesses get quieter, more discouraged, and further apart, I stare down at the dinky little Destroyer stationed on D9 and 10 and I chant to myself,
D9, D9.

And Dad looks up and says, “C7?”

Earlier we played Thousand Rummy. And just as on the previous days, Dad was the one to draw the ace of spades. If it was Gin, Thousand Rummy, or even Concentration, Dad would sit there in his pajamas (he sometimes wears his pajamas all day now), press his lips together decisively, and flip over a card…and there it would be.

The ace of spades, the Death Card.

How can this keep happening? It's getting so that we wait for the ace of spades. It seems to look for Dad. Since we stopped seeing Fritz and ended the medicines, a sense of doom sits over Dad like a mist.

So there it is,
Dad seems to say. He looks at the card like he's been expecting it. He drops his head into his hands like a condemned man. The writing on the card, which seemed innocent before he got sick, seems to have turned into an ominous message.

D
EBONNAIRE,
O
LEET
P
LAYING
C
ARD
C
O.,

M
OUNT
V
ERNON,
N.Y. “S
UPERKOTED” ™

What does this mean to Dad?

The ace of spades stands on its unipod and stares my father down. It's a heart upside down. It's the opposite of a heart.

Mom and I return to the house after a Saturday afternoon in the library.

“Whatcha got there?” Marty asks. Dad trails him into the dining room.

Each of us dumps a double armload of reading material on the table. I have nine books, including
Affirmations in the Key of Health
by Lillian Drakava;
Make Up Your Mind: Self-Empowerment Through Mood Selection
by R. Candelbaum, MD;
Go for the Joy
by Sybil Lucien-Simple, MSW; and a thinner one called
Darkness Manifest
by an award-winning novelist, as well as a stack of journal and magazine articles, some photocopied and some printed off the computer.

On the way there, Mom said she was lucky, in this difficult time, to have a teenage son with my capacity for understanding human nature. I have to admit that it was strangely fun finding books that described what Dad was going through. There were almost too many matches to choose. When I asked the librarian how I could tell if a book was any good, he told me to look for letters after the person's name. A shelf full of credentials—PhD, EdD, LICSW, and DDiv—cleared its throat at me, but I chose some authors with no letters, like the novelist (ultrasad eyes, extra neck skin), just because I liked their pictures.

“You can tell a lot from their pictures,” Linda agrees, picking up books and flipping them over.

The books in Mom's stack include
Feed Your Brain
by Wilbert and Orralie Curtis,
The Feel Good Vitamin Bible
from the publishers of
Feel Good
magazine, and
Peace Without Pills: How Eating Right Can Replace Costly and Potentially Harmful Psychotropic Medications
by Evgenia Sutter, CNC. Behind the crinkly, scuffed plastic library covers, the smiling Curtises wear matching red-and-white checked shirts and hold out palmfuls of unprocessed grain. Evgenia Sutter has long brown hair and wears a white lab jacket with eyeglasses in the pocket.

Some faces are like a hard pill. Others are more of a loose powder. One of them will be the cure for what ails Dad.