The Crooked Branch (3 page)

“Are you coming?” I said.

“What time is it?” he asked.

He sounded confused. I looked at the industrial school/hospital/jail clock on the wall.

“Seven thirty.”

It was really only seven twenty-three. I could hear rumpling sheets. He stretched.

“Yeah, I’m coming, for sure, of course,” he said. “I can’t wait to see my girls!”

I couldn’t answer him because I was crying again.

“Are you okay?”

I shook my head. A giant, voluminous sniffle. “Not really,” I said. “I’m all alone here.” Roommate flicked on her television, as if to contradict me. “I haven’t seen the baby. They haven’t brought her to see me, yet. I don’t even know if she’s okay.” Leo was running water.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” he said. “You only gave birth to her four hours ago. They’re probably just expecting you to get a little rest. Visiting hours don’t start until nine.”

“I can’t sleep,” I said. “Everything hurts. I can barely move.” God, I was whiny. I knew three-year-olds who weren’t this whiny. I couldn’t help it. “I just want to see her. I want you to be here.”

“Well, I’m coming, okay?” he said. “I’m getting showered, and I’ll stop and get you some breakfast on my way so you don’t have to eat hospital food. I’ll be there waiting when they open that door at nine o’clock, I promise. Will you be okay until I get there?”

“Sure.” I nodded.

“Okay.”

“It’s just not what I expected,” I tried to explain. “To wake up alone here, in this room. It doesn’t seem right that we’re finally a family, our first morning as a family. And none of us are together. And everything hurts. My body . . .”

I sniffed again, and there were more tears. Ugh—more tears!

“I know,” Leo said. “But it’s going to be okay, right? I’ll be there before you know it. And they’ll bring that baby in any minute, you’ll see.”

“Okay,” I whispered.

I guess that’s when I started to hate myself a little bit—that was the beginning of it, when I hung up that phone and sat there all trembling and helpless in that hospital bed. And I don’t mean
hate
hate, like the way I feel about control-top panty hose or anything. But more like a Condoleezza Rice kind of hate, like where you know she’s culpable and a little bit shady, but damn, she’s just so smart and full of promise. And anyway, she has plenty of time to redeem herself, doesn’t she? That’s how it was with me. Because I knew I was stronger than this. I was a black belt in jujutsu, for God’s sake.

•   •   •

“Do you have any history of mental illness?” Dr. Zimmer asks.

“Not personally, but my family grows crazy like they can sell it for profit,” I say.

“That’s funny,” she says without laughing. “You’re very witty.” She says it like it’s a diagnosis: witty. “What kind of mental illness have you encountered in your family?”

“Oh, mostly your garden-variety types,” I say. “Depression, manic depression, alcoholism. Nothing too unusual. Just ordinary crazy.”

“It’s interesting that someone with your substantial vocabulary would choose to use the word
crazy
,” she says. “Rather than
mental illness
.”

I wonder what I’ve said in the twelve minutes she’s known me to make her think I have such a substantial vocabulary.

“Maybe that word just makes it feel more like fun,” I say. “Less terrifying.”

She watches my face while I talk, looking for symptoms, probably. A tic or a tremor.

“Like a carnival,” I offer. “Crazy!” With jazz-hands.

“Hmm.” She nods.

I try watching her face, too, but I’m distracted by her puffy, frizzy halo of gray brown hair.

“So what does that word mean to you?” she asks. “Crazy?”

She scribbles something down on her notepad without ever taking her eyes off my face. It’s unnerving, like being dissected without anesthesia.

“What, like a definition?” I say.

“Well, just your impressions.”

I wipe my hand across my mouth, and then take it down again, in case that gesture has some kind of latent crazy in it.

“I guess, my strongest impressions of crazy are my memories of my grandmother,” I say. It feels like a powerful admission and/or betrayal, but Dr. Zimmer only nods.

“What was her diagnosis?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m not sure she was ever diagnosed—it was the 1950s. But she was in and out of institutions most of her adult life. She had all kinds of electroshock therapy and stuff. But mostly, I think she was just mean. She didn’t know how to love her kids.”

“How many children?”

“Four. My dad was the oldest.”

Dr. Zimmer writes the number 4 in her notebook.

“Do you have any children, Majella?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Just one.”

“How old?”

“Three weeks.”

“Aha.” She stops writing, and closes her notebook, as if she’s just cracked the case, and there’s no need for any further investigation. She leans back in her chair and folds her hands in her lap. “You have a tiny baby at home?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re suddenly worried about your crazy grandmother who didn’t love her kids?”

I nod. Why does this make me feel guilty, like I’ve duped her? “But it’s really not that simple,” I insist.

Dr. Zimmer has twisted in her red leather chair to open a low drawer in her built-in filing cabinets. She flips through the files and pulls out a single sheet. It’s a checklist, and she hands it to me. I don’t want to take it from her, but it would be rude not to. I take it, but don’t look at it.

“Are you experiencing any of these symptoms?” she asks, gesturing to the page in my hand.

I’m suddenly completely, unreasonably enraged, like an angry teenager. I don’t want to look at a goddamned checklist. I take a deep breath, and close my eyes for a moment. I have to read it like a grown-up. I open my eyes and look at the paper:

Do you feel sad or low? Are you more tired than usual? Do little things upset or annoy you? Do you have trouble concentrating or making decisions? Do you feel like you have no one to talk to? Do you feel numb or disconnected from your baby? Do you feel scared that something bad might happen?

I don’t mean to, but I roll my eyes.

“Why are you rolling your eyes?” she asks.

I want to punch Dr. Zimmer in the face, but I refrain, which feels like a noteworthy triumph, even though I’ve never punched anyone in the face in my entire life. I haven’t even considered it. I’m not a face-puncher. If you gave me a thousand dollars to punch someone in the face, I’m not sure I could do it. Unless that person was Dr. Zimmer.

“Because this isn’t what I’m here for!” I say instead, struggling to keep my voice at an acceptable volume. “Of course I’m more tired than usual. Of course every little thing upsets me. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since my second trimester.”

Dr. Zimmer has finally stopped staring at me, and is scribbling furiously on her notepad. I look back at the inane checklist.

“Do you feel scared that something bad might happen?”
I read aloud. “Are you kidding me? Show me a new mother who doesn’t stand over her baby’s crib for hours a day, just willing that kid to keep breathing. Of course I’m scared that something bad will happen. I imagine a thousand different deaths a day for my daughter. I’m obsessed with mortality, that she is growing older, even now.” My voice is rising in pitch. I can hear the hysteria creeping in. “She will grow up and die, my baby will die. We will all die. I’m a hormone freak show, I’m obsessed with death. But this is not why I’m here!”

I’m clutching the checklist in my hand and shaking it at her. I tear it in two, crumple the halves together into a ball. I love the crashing loudness of the paper destruction, but my tirade has exhausted me, and I’m spent. Now that it’s totally quiet in the breathless room and I’m grasping the ruined paper ball in my fist, I begin to feel embarrassed. I lean back against the couch and shake my head.

“I’m sorry,” I say. I feel unhinged, completely deranged. I didn’t even know that about myself until I heard it coming out of mouth—about being obsessed with mortality. But it’s true. It’s all I think about since Emma was born—how my life is whizzing by, and soon I’ll be gone. But Dr. Zimmer just waves her hand like it’s a wand, and it will banish whatever badness has come into the room. My teenage self will retreat, and I will be restored to adulthood because she bids it so. She folds her notebook closed and tucks it into her lap, leans toward me.

“You’re obviously deeply frustrated,” she says.

Man, she is
astute
. I bite my lip.

“Maybe this was a mistake,” I say.

“Maybe it was,” she concedes. I wonder if she’ll ask me to leave now. “But you’ll never know unless you stay and give it a chance. I won’t condescend to you, or make any assumptions. We can just talk.”

I stuff the ball of paper down in between the couch cushions. “Okay,” I say.

She nods. “So let’s just forget about the checklist.”

“Yes, let’s.”

The ferns on the window ledge behind her are waving slightly in the draft from the air-conditioning vent overhead, and so is Dr. Zimmer’s hair-halo.

“It’s just. It’s not postpartum depression,” I say. “There’s more to it than that.”

“Okay,” she says. “Like what?”

I take a deep breath. “I just feel totally lost. Like I don’t know who I am anymore. I’ve never felt this way. I’ve always been totally grounded and ambitious. I’ve always had a very strong sense of myself.”

Dr. Zimmer looks completely unintrigued.

“And—” I hesitate. There’s so much I don’t want to tell her. I guess those are probably the things it’s most important to confess. “I’ve started to hear things.”

She perks up. “What kinds of things?”

“Crunching.”

“Crunching?”

“Yeah, crunching,” I say. “Crrrrrk, crrrrrrk, crrrrrrk. At night, when I’m in bed, I hear it. At first I thought it was coming from the attic, but then it just seems to come from all around. Like it’s coming from inside my head.”

“Couldn’t there be some logical explanation?” she asks.

“Like a tumor?”

Dr. Zimmer frowns. “I was thinking more along the lines of a squirrel in the attic.”

“We’ve checked and checked,” I say. “There’s nothing up there. And my husband doesn’t hear it, even when I wake him up. And it’s so
real
. It’s loud.”

“Okay.” Dr. Zimmer nods. “Any voices?”

“No.” I shudder. I’d never even thought of that. “No, thank God.”

“Okay, what else?” she asks.

Isn’t that enough?

“I don’t know, I just find myself doing things and saying things that are insane. I can’t seem to control myself. Like what just happened here, that outburst? That checklist made me so damned angry. I’m not usually like that. Or I didn’t used to be.”

She waits for me to continue. She knows there’s something more coming—it feels like I’m in a confessional and I’m about to go for it. It’s that awful swelling moment of terrified shame before you admit your lusty buffoonery to the shocked and kindly priest.

“Last week I told someone that the baby died,” I whisper.

It’s the same whisper I use when Emma’s sleeping and I don’t want to wake her, a hope of not being heard. I can’t meet her eye now. I’m too ashamed to look up, but I imagine I hear something like empathy in her one-syllable response.

“Oh.”

•   •   •

At home, the baby monitor is propped against the window frame, and I’m padding around the attic in my fluffiest (quietest) socks, careful not to wake Emma, who’s napping in the nursery below. The window is thick with grime, but that’s no match for the hard, gushing light of a September afternoon. I’m sending up rockets of dust through the sunbeams, and trying hard to avoid sneezing. Three weeks after I gave birth, my incision is still prone to frequent spasms of icy pain. Right after we bought this house, I started cleaning out the attic, but then I got too pregnant to move, and I abandoned it half-finished. I still have dreams of making it lovely, maybe a playroom for Emma, or a quiet reading nook. But in the meantime, it’s a mess, filled with semiorganized piles of junk. In one pile, clothes. In another, old newspapers, journals, and scrapbooks. In a third, rusty things: a birdcage, an old-fashioned bellows, a manual typewriter with a missing
L
. I feel like this is the pile for me.

If there is a squirrel living here in this attic, tormenting me with his elusive crunching noises, making me think I’m going crazy, I will find him. I will make him pay. I look around at the stacks of stuff. It’s like a squirrel’s paradise. He could be anywhere. There is a heap of old handbags nearby, and I nudge it uncertainly with my toe. Nothing scurries out from beneath it. There is no sound of crunching. The steamer trunk stands alone near the window and the diagonal light cuts across it, slicing it into shadows. Could there be a nest inside? Of course not. There’s no squirrel door. But I cover my nose from the pending dust cloud, and open the sticky lid anyway. Inside, the stale scent of mothballs, some long brocade skirts, and two woolen coats. I lift the items out one at a time to throw them on the clothing pile. A small clothbound book must have been stitched into the lining of one of the coats, because there’s a gap there, just at the hem, where the threads are worn brittle and loose, and the diary just slides out from between the folds of fabric. It comes to a rest on the floorboards, in a small puff of dust beside my filthy, fluffy socks.

In this moment, I am pierced with foreboding: goose bumps, a cold breath across my neck. There is a damp, quiet
presence
in the hushed and sun-clogged room. I can feel a distant suffering, before I even bend down slowly to retrieve the battered book, before I open it to its first fragile, yellowed page, before I see or understand the significance of the name emblazoned in mad, familiar handwriting fourteen times across the inside cover: Ginny Doyle. Ginny Doyle. Ginny Doyle.

•   •   •

There are all different kinds of crazy, but mostly I think it’s ancestral. Sometimes you can even trace it back along the dead branches of your family tree; you can find
evidence
in family anecdotes or documents. A sepia-stained photograph. A diary. You might think you’ve escaped its reach—you might think you’re okay. Because it can lie dormant like a tumor, until some gentle, private trauma pushes it loose inside you.