Bebe Moore Campbell (25 page)

“There is nothing wrong with my attitude,” I said.

“You’re like a lot of parents. You think your daughter’s bipolar disorder is your personal tragedy, but it’s not. It’s Trina’s. She is the one with the brain disease, not you. You want the bright child back, who attends Brown and gets straight A’s. Well, don’t we all. You have to accept Trina the way she is. She’s not something you ordered from a catalog. She’s a gift from God. You need to treat her that way.”

“I love my child.”

He put his hand on my wrist. “I’m not talking about love. I’m talking about reverence for her life.”

Brad squeezed my wrist and then let me go.

When I looked at Brad and Jean, I realized they wanted me to surrender my dreams of Trina’s complete recovery. Maybe that was another reason to leave.

“I think we should all get some rest,” Jean said.

“Is there anything to drink around here?” I asked, looking at Jean. The question didn’t appear to throw her.

Brad stayed behind with the girls. Jean, Bethany, and I went to the kitchen and sat at a large round claw-foot table. Jean went right to the cabinet above the refrigerator. It was high, so she used a small ladder. She pushed aside bottles of apple juice.

“Rum or vodka?” she asked.

We opted for rum and mixed it with some fruit juice we found in the refrigerator. Sipped it for a while before anyone spoke. The fuzziness began permeating my mind, filling it with sad music. What’s the use, what’s the use, what’s the use? was the refrain.

“They all try something, honey. Tomorrow will be better,” Jean said.

“It just goes on and on,” I said. “One minute she seems perfectly normal and the next—”

“—she’s running through the world naked with bloody legs.” Bethany looked at me. “Yeah. Be grateful for your own sack of woes. I’d trade places with you in a New York minute.”

I let that sink in, but the words didn’t make me feel better.

LATER, WHEN THE CELL PHONE RANG, IT WAS FRANCES, HER voice not cheerful. “Keri, I hate to call you when you’re taking your break, but I just . . . I don’t know what’s going on with Adriana. She’s, she’s—listen, those so-called friends of hers, they won’t leave her alone. Every time I look up, they’re right there. And I’ve seen her with that guy more than once. It’s like they’re stalking her. Like they know her protection is gone and they’re moving in for the kill. She’s acting so strange. Coming in late to work, acting spacy. Girl, Adriana’s in trouble.”

“I can’t help her,” I said, maybe too fast. Maybe too hard. On the other end of the phone, Frances was quiet.

“I know that. The only reason I’m calling you is that I don’t want you to be shocked when you get back,” she said finally. “It’s just—damn, it’s hard to see someone falling through the cracks right before your eyes.”

When I hung up I said one of Mattie’s quick prayers. There should be a patron saint for wayward girls, a celestial guardian for strippers, porn queens, hookers, junkies, and those whose brains spew out dangerous impulses. What’s a mother to do against those tragic impulses? What kind of protection can I offer?

I sat down on the side of Trina’s bed. My body felt stiff and heavy. She was lying there, still not sleeping. I didn’t know what she’d heard. My fingers made a trail down her arm. She flinched but didn’t pull away. I took her hand in mine and began massaging her fingertips and then the joints of each finger.

“Why can’t we just go home?” she asked me. “These people are devils.” She began to cry, silently at first, and gradually the sound became a little louder. “I never thought my life would be like this.” She wiped her eyes and became silent again.

“Everything is going to get better, Trina. You’ll see. I know you think you hate me now, but I had to do this. You’re going to have a good life again. You have to believe that.”

Trina stared at me; then she took my hands and placed them on her head. I thought of Rona then, her small fuzzy head. Poor thin tired Rona, battling a wildfire in her body, hoping desperately to make it to her reunion in October. Wouldn’t that be a small thing for God to grant? “Could you manage that one tiny thing?” I said aloud. Trina looked at me. I began massaging again. My energy passed from me to her. My peace, my power, eased across my skin to hers. Was she feeling me?

22

DESPITE JEAN’S COAXING, TRINA REFUSED TO GET UP LATER that morning. I didn’t really feel like moving either. As I lay on my narrow bed, Bethany and Angelica were dressing under Jean’s watchful eye. They were off to the salt mines. I’m sure that somewhere on the premises there was a room for shelling, a space for yoga and games and crafts.

You’ve seen one underground railroad stop, you’ve seen them all.

I could hear Bethany and Angelica talking. Mostly, it was Angelica, carrying on at least two conversations, one with one of her invisible friends and the other with Bethany, who was trying to distract her. I stole a look at Angelica. Damn. How did Bethany stand it? The voices, the catatonic stares, the meth habit. Sunken cheeks and burned-out eyes, stringy hair she probably refused to wash. Her teeth were stained, a yellow that made me want her not to smile.

At least Trina was still beautiful. At least she looked normal and clean. She could carry on a decent conversation. If she walked into a store, no one would alert security. It wasn’t right to compare them, but I couldn’t help myself. I needed to feel superior.

Closing my eyes, I recalled going to the movies, a drink after work; I recalled seduction and quick, easy fucking. Good times seemed so far away.

“Are you okay?” Bethany leaned over me. I could smell her perfume. She was still putting it on, even on this unscented journey of ours.

“I’m just tired. Everything caught up with me all at once.”

She gave me a look that told me she understood. Behind her, I could hear Angelica muttering at the unseen.

“You’re not going to go home, are you?” Bethany asked.

Now that someone besides Brad was calling my bluff, I had to consider my words and ultimately confess that I’d been premature in my thoughts and certainly in speaking them. If I went back home, Trina would be worse off than before. She had just enough medication in her system to keep her out of the hospital and not enough to maintain her at home unless she continued to take her pills. Given her recent track record, I couldn’t count on her to do that. So here I was: stuck.

“No,” I told Bethany. “We’re staying.”

She patted my shoulder.

“Actually,” I said, “I was thinking about calling my boyfriend for phone sex.”

Bethany gave me a look of pure amazement. “God bless you. I haven’t thought about sex in so long.”

“Are you married, Bethany? I’ve never asked.”

“My husband died five years ago, but we were living completely separate lives at the time. We hadn’t slept together in years. He had someone, but I didn’t. Too caught up in Angelica’s illness. And then I have another daughter. She’s older.”

“Mom.”

We both looked up at the same time. I gasped; Bethany didn’t. A naked Angelica was standing in the doorway of the bathroom. Her legs were dripping blood in four or five places.

I got out of bed. “I thought you got rid of everything sharp. What did she use?”

“I don’t know.”

I called Brad and Jean; they came running. The cuts weren’t deep. Jean applied peroxide and Band-Aids. Brad found a sharp rock in the wastepaper basket.

“Come on, honey,” Bethany said to Angelica when she had dressed and the excitement was over. “Let’s get some breakfast.”

Trina never woke up. I went back to bed.

Trina and I dozed for maybe two hours before Brad and Jean came in to wake us. When we were ready, they escorted us to a very large eat-in kitchen where fruit, juice, coffee, herbal tea, muffins, cheese, and oatmeal were waiting for us. Trina dug right in, but I wasn’t hungry.

“It’s good, Mom,” she said, as though we were sitting in a restaurant. Moments like that threw me off, normal moments that appeared so suddenly.

Normal didn’t hang around long. Trina refused to go to yoga. She screamed that she wanted to go back to bed. After a while, I saw Jean walking her toward the barracks.

I sat between Angelica and Bethany at a long table in a room in the back of the house. The new shell game was almonds, cracked the old-fashioned way. Even though the nutcracker they handed me was deluxe, the job was tedious. I mean, it wasn’t picking cotton from sunup to sun-down; it wasn’t fingers split open from the sharp bolls. It was just a pain-in-the-ass job.

“Full bucket means done,” Brad told us.

I ended up cracking nuts for almost four hours and working up a pretty good sweat. Brad never mentioned our late-night conversation; in fact, he didn’t address me directly at all. Halfway through my tour of duty, he left the room, and the tall man I’d caught a glimpse of the previous night took his place.

“I’m Pete,” he said, as he sat down across from me. “You didn’t come to breakfast, so I haven’t welcomed you.” He smiled and extended his hand. The hand I shook had soft skin and a powerful grip.

“Thank you.” My words sounded too spare. I should add something. Underground Railroad Etiquette 101. “Thank you for opening up your home to my daughter and me.”

“You’re more than welcome,” he said.

When he smiled, I realized he was handsome. His smile lit up his face, so that his dark eyes, aquiline nose, and wide mouth were highlighted, almost airbrushed. His skin was olive, a color that made me wonder what family tree he claimed.

When I handed Brad my full bucket, Angelica was still staring at the ceiling, the pile of almonds in front of her untouched.

I was surprised to find Wilbur inside the barracks with Trina. We’d driven for at least five hours to get to Pete’s house, and I had assumed the girls would see a new psychiatrist.

“Hello, Keri,” he said. “Trina, I’m going to step outside and talk with your mother, all right?”

We went outside to the corridor and moved away from the barracks door.

“Brad told me about last night, and I talked with Trina about it. What do you think happened?”

“I’m not sure what you mean. She jumped out of the car and took off. That’s what happened.”

“Right,” he said, nodding. “Has she ever done anything like that before?”

“Run away? Sure. Whenever she gets manic, she takes off. She’s a flight risk until she’s stable.”

“Right. I’ve decided to increase her mood stabilizer. We’re still not going to see the real effects for six to eight more weeks, but the boost should cut down on the impulsive behavior. I’ll be staying here until you leave, and I’ll be keeping an eye on her.”

“Should I try to get her out of bed?” I asked.

“No. Just let her be for a while.”

I decided to walk. The terrain wasn’t as mountainous as it had been at Jean and Eddie’s. There were mountains way off in the distance, but the house and the surrounding property sat on flat land. Behind it were rows and rows of almond trees. The program’s philosophy seemed to be: Shell what you grow and put it all in the Health Bar.

A huge magnolia tree, with branches and leaves that looked able to cover half a basketball court, was growing between the house and the almond orchard. A woman sat on a chair in the shade its leaves provided. I could hear her calling, trying to say something I didn’t understand. When I got closer, I realized she couldn’t articulate the words she wanted to say. It turned out that the chair was a wheelchair. The left side of her body seemed to be lower than the right, as though someone had put rocks in the pockets on that side. I assumed she was recovering from a stroke.

I smiled, and her face twitched slightly. Her eyes responded; they were large, dark, and luminous. And even though her face was slightly lopsided, and it was an older face, there were traces of beauty left in it still. She had turned some heads back in the day. There was a sturdy plastic lawn chair next to the woman, and I moved toward it, my back still facing the house.

“I see you’ve met my wife. Cecilia, this is our guest, Keri.” Pete had come up so quietly I hadn’t heard him.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, smiling as his wife made a guttural sound.

Pete carried a tray, which he placed on his wife’s lap. On it were a bowl of chili, toast, and a salad, as well as a glass of orange juice and a cup of black coffee. He pressed the edges of a napkin into the opening of Cecilia’s dress and began feeding her, blowing on the food each time before putting it in her mouth. She seemed able to chew only a small amount at a time, and it took forever for her to swallow. When Pete held the cup of orange juice to her lips, some of the liquid spurted out of her mouth and dribbled down her chin.

“Had a little accident, huh?” Pete asked, wiping the drops from her face, dabbing softly at her skin. Cecilia’s lips twitched.

It took a long time for Pete to feed his wife. I watched, because . . . why did I watch? Their tenderness took me by the hand, drew me in. At first I thought the giving was in one direction, but then I witnessed her energy flowing to him, the pleasure he received from watching her eat, from looking at her, remembering her beauty or still seeing it. Behind us the leaves of the almond trees rustled, and the breeze carried the faint sweet odor of their fruit.

“It was nice meeting you,” I said, rising to leave. I took her hand in mine. Hers was cold, so I rubbed it to warm it up, an involuntary gesture. Cecilia closed her eyes, and I took her other hand and rubbed it too. Cecilia’s hands told me a lot about her pain, her state of mind. I kept rubbing, pressing down on certain spots on her palms. My fingers worked their way up and down her wrists. No one said a word until I let go.

“You seem to know what you’re doing,” Pete said.

“Yes, I do.”

“How was that, honey?” he asked his wife.

Her eyes were closed; she made a contented sound.

“Do you want to go back to the house?” Pete asked. She made another noise and he said, “Well, I’ll check on you later.”

As we were walking, I got a really good look at Pete. He was tall and straight, with no fat around the middle. His hair was mostly silver; the face it framed was calm, unlined, and handsome. He could have been fifty; he could have been seventy. I could see African, Native American Indian, and European in his features.

“So where did you learn acupressure?” he asked me.

“I went to massage school in another life.”

“Did you work for a spa or do it on your own?”

“Both. When I started out, I worked out of my house; later, I was at a day spa. Very posh. I was in public relations for a while. Then I opened a designer resale shop and pretty much stopped doing bodywork until a couple of months ago, when an old customer of mine looked me up. She has cancer and is going through chemo. She talked me into working on her. I don’t think your wife is aching, but she’s stiff. Has she been ill long?”

“She’s been the way you see her now for four years. But she was getting ill long before. My daughter will be thirty-eight on her next birthday. Trudy was diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was seventeen. Cecilia and I did everything we could to help her get treatment. She was a beautiful girl, just about to go to college. She was, of course, noncompliant with her medication regimen. We put her in facilities where she could get care; she walked out. This went on for years. There were times when she went missing, when she was homeless. Horrible things happened to her, things no one could have prevented.

“When she was first diagnosed, my wife and I were living in San Francisco. I’m a physician, a nephrologist. I owned three dialysis centers in the city, and plans were under way to open several in Los Angeles. I was earning more than two million dollars a year. I served on boards, and I was a member of several elitist organizations. We belonged to a country club. Cecilia was a real estate agent, selling multimillion-dollar properties. We were a very successful couple.

“As our daughter’s illness progressed, both of us began to get ill more frequently. Colds, lots of colds. Flu. Numerous viral infections. And terrible headaches. I began to realize that if I didn’t pace myself, I would die. I let go of the boards, the organizations. I sold the three centers and cut back on my practice. I stopped taking every telephone call my daughter made. But my wife tried to hold on to everything. If the telephone rang at three a.m., my wife took the call, and she wouldn’t stop listening until five. She couldn’t accept the fact that Trudy wasn’t going to fulfill all our dreams. When you love someone who has a mental illness, there comes a point at which you must detach in order to preserve your own life. My wife couldn’t do that.”

He reached out, as if to hold on to something, and then returned his hand to his side.

“What happened to her?” I asked.

“Massive stroke. That’s when we came out here.”

“You think it was your daughter’s illness that caused her stroke?”

He shook his head. “It was her reaction to it that made her sick. We all have the potential for pathology in our bodies. Cells can react negatively at any given time. Stress can set those cells in motion on a journey to self-destruction. Each one of us is responsible for defending our own bodies from that kind of assault. My wife wouldn’t rest. She wouldn’t eat well. She wouldn’t guard her emotions.”

“Will she get better?”

“What you see is an improvement.” He smiled.

“How is your daughter?”

“Better. She lives in a group home just outside of Phoenix. I see her once a month. We talk on the phone every Sunday. She has a peaceful life. Sometimes, that’s all you can ask for.”

“Did the program help her?”

At first I thought he hadn’t heard me, he took so long to answer. “Yes, but time helped more.”

“Why do you work with them?”

“Why do I work with them since they didn’t deliver back to me the daughter of my dreams?” He laughed. At me. “I believe in what they are trying to do. Early on, my wife and I encountered the kind of mindless bureaucracy that can frustrate anyone with a sick child. Don’t get me wrong: There are good hospitals, good doctors, wonderful treatment facilities. Once we got the right information, I must say that the system worked very well for us, up to a point: patients’ rights. Patients’ rights often clash with what’s best for a mentally ill person. Once, after we succeeded in getting our daughter on a hold, she refused to see us, told the doctors not to speak to us, and so, of course, they couldn’t.”