Authors: Leigh Byrne
This is what happened: Our house was laid out such that one end of it was a mirror image of the other. The living room, kitchen, and my room, which was originally intended to be a small den, were at one end, and two bedrooms and the bathroom were at the other. When you walked out of my parents’ bedroom and took an immediate right, you were in the boys’ room, which used to be Audrey’s. When you walked out of the living room and took a right, you were at the top of the stairway leading to the den. Half asleep, and thinking she was in her bedroom, Mama, in her frantic effort to get to what she thought was Audrey calling out to her, walked out of the living room and took a right, running full force into what she thought was Audrey’s bedroom, but was actually the stairs to the den.
From her fall down the stairs, Mama suffered what Daddy called a frontal lobe brain concussion. She also bruised one shoulder and hip. The puddle of blood I had seen around her head was from a laceration down the side of her face that required several stitches. Daddy said she had most likely cut it on the sharp wooden corner of the bottom step.
Daddy spent every night at the hospital with her. He got his mother, Grandma Storm, to come from Nashville to stay at our house and take care of my brothers and me. Mama was in the hospital for just under a week, but it seemed like an eternity.
Finally the day she was to be released arrived. My brothers and I woke up early, got cleaned up, and helped Grandma Storm straighten the house. Then we all sat in the living room and waited for Mama to come home.
When we saw the station wagon pull into the driveway, we all ran out of the house, but Daddy stopped us in the yard and told us to go back inside and wait for them. We went back in and sat on the sofa, and watched from the picture window as he pulled Audrey’s old wheelchair out of the back of the station wagon, unfolded it, lifted Mama from out of the car, and lowered her into the chair.
It took them forever to make it up to the house, and when at last they were at the door, I was disappointed, because the person Daddy wheeled inside was not my mama. The strange woman had a bandage on her left cheek where Mama had cut her face on the stairs, and she resembled Mama, but her head appeared larger, and her eyes that glared into the empty space in front of her were much darker.
She didn’t even look at my brothers and me when Daddy pushed her by us in the living room. That’s when I knew it was definitely not Mama; she would never have ignored her kids, no matter how bad she felt. Daddy had obviously brought the wrong person home from the hospital by mistake, and I told him so. But he kept insisting it was Mama, and he even went so far as to wheel the stranger into their bedroom and put her on Mama’s side of the bed.
For the rest of that day, and the days immediately after Mama came home from the hospital, she spent most of her time sleeping. She only got up when she had to go to the bathroom. If she needed something from the kitchen, she had Daddy, or me, or one of the boys get it for her. This made me worried, but Daddy assured me it was a good thing because the doctor had said rest was the best way to heal a brain concussion.
During her second week home, she got out of her room more. Once in a while, she even stepped into the backyard to get some fresh air, or to watch my brothers and me as we played outside. But when she was out she was careful to keep her distance from the neighbors. If by chance she saw one of them, she threw her hand up and waved, but she made sure to avert her eyes from theirs, as she tucked her cheek to her shoulder and hurried back into the house. Daddy told us she did this because she was ashamed of the scar on her face.
After Mama had been home from the hospital for a few weeks, she started insisting I be by her side at all times. “Stay in here with me, Tuesday,” she said. “Sit down here on the floor beside my bed so I can see you.”
I did as she asked, but it was hard for me to sit still for so long. After she fell asleep, I slipped out of the room to play with my brothers, only to have her call for me to return when she woke up. Out of frustration I asked Daddy why she only wanted me with her, and not my brothers.
“I’m not sure, honey, but if I had to guess, I’d say maybe she’s afraid something will happen to you, like it did to Audrey. Maybe she’s more protective with you because you’re a girl.”
He then explained to me that the doctor had said head injuries like the one Mama had sometimes caused personality changes, and therefore she might not act like herself for a while. But he assured me it was a temporary condition.
His words satisfied me, and made me feel proud that I was so important to her.
It was late in the afternoon. Mama was sleeping, and I was sitting on the floor by her bed listening to the rest of the family as they moved about in other parts of the house.
Daddy stuck his head inside the doorway and said he was going grocery shopping, and he was taking the boys with him.
I wanted to go too, and I begged him to take me, but he told me it would be more helpful to him if I stayed home with Mama. He said he was going to stop and pick up some burgers on the way back, and as a special reward, he would get me a strawberry milkshake.
Soon I heard the door shut behind them, and the house got quiet. Hours passed. The room grew darker and darker, until I had nothing to look at but the glowing numbers on Mama’s alarm clock. I fixed my eyes on them and watched the minutes slowly flip away.
At seven thirty, she stirred. Suddenly she sat up and turned on the lamp beside her bed. When the light hit her face, I saw that it was red and bloated, and her eyes had bags under them. Her hair was flat on one side, and it stood up at the crown, like a windblown flame.
With dazed eyes she searched out the room, confused and disoriented, as if she had forgotten where she was. When she spotted me sitting on the floor, she squinted to focus on my face and cocked her head, first to one side, then to the other, like she was trying to figure out the species of a creature she’d never seen before.
Then her deep woe registered, and she sank back into her pillow and cried. “I want to sleep forever,” she said. “Please God, let me sleep forever!”
She slung one of her arms over to the nightstand, knocking off a glass half-full of watered-down tea, and groped around until she found a bottle of pills the doctor had prescribed to help her sleep. She propped herself on one elbow, twisted off the cap, and poured the shiny, red capsules out into her palm. Blinking hard, she stretched open her swollen eyes to get a better look at the pills. She poked each one with her forefinger, then stuffed them back into the bottle and returned them to the nightstand.
She picked up the phone and dialed. Someone on the other end answered, and she said into the receiver, “I just called to say good-bye. I can’t take it anymore without Audrey, so I called to say good-bye, and to tell you that none of you will have to worry about me ever again.” Then she slammed the receiver down, and reached for the sleeping pills.
The phone rang almost immediately. “Tuesday, answer that,” Mama said. “It’s your Aunt Barbara. Tell her I don’t want to talk to her. Tell her I’m going to swallow this bottle of sleeping pills. Answer the phone now, and tell her what I said.”
I picked up the phone. “Hello.”
Mama was right. It was Aunt Barbara, Mama’s sister.
“Tuesday, is that you?” she asked, sounding surprised to hear my voice. “Let me speak to your mother, honey.”
I offered the receiver to Mama. She shook her head no. “She doesn’t want to talk,” I said to Aunt Barbara. “She’s going to swallow her sleeping pills!”
“Where’s your daddy?” Barbara asked.
“He’s gone to the grocery store.”
“Tuesday, what is your mother doing right now?”
“She’s crying and holding the pills.”
“Hand her the phone, tell her I want to speak to her. If she won’t talk to me, you’re going to have to run next door and get a neighbor for help while I call an ambulance. Now tell her everything I just said.”
I did as Aunt Barbara instructed. When I’d finished talking, Mama jerked the phone from my hand. As soon as she got the receiver to her ear, she said, “You don’t know how it is to lose a child. You don’t know, and you don’t care. Why do you act like you do?”
Right about then, I heard the front door open. Daddy was home. He walked into the bedroom carrying a white fast-food sack in one hand, and my milkshake in the other. “What’s going on in here?” he asked as he handed the milkshake and food to me.
“Mama is going to swallow all her sleeping pills!” I said.
He walked over and took the pills from her. “Tuesday, go to the kitchen and eat your supper with your brothers.”
It was Sunday morning, and Mama was still in bed. Daddy had gotten up early and driven to Nashville to go to church with Grandma Storm. I was at the kitchen table, in a morning daze, shoveling Rice Krispies into my mouth.
Nick was sitting across from me, slicing a banana over his cereal. “You look like you have popcorn balls in your cheeks,” he said.
“Who, me?” I asked, glaring at the sunlight reflecting off the silver flecks in the linoleum tabletop.
He pointed the butter knife he had in his hand at Jimmy D., who was beside me. “No, him.”
I looked at Jimmy D., his cheeks bulging with cereal. Milk was oozing out of his lips and running down his chin. “You
do
look like you have popcorn balls in your cheeks!”
Jimmy D. got tickled, and blew milk and bits of Rice Krispies through his mouth and nose onto Nick’s face.
I cracked up.
That’s when I heard Mama calling out from her bedroom. “Tuesday!” she yelled in her gravelly morning voice. “Tuesday!” she called out again, this time more insistent. “Come here now!”
I put my spoon down beside my bowl of cereal, wiped the milk from my mouth on the front of my pajamas, and ran down the hall to her bedroom.
When I got there, she was sitting up in the bed. She had just woken from a hard sleep. I could tell from the deep creases in the side of her face.
I bounced up to her and sat down. “What do you want, Mama?”
“I don’t know what you’re so happy about, young lady, because you’re in big trouble!”
Springing up, I started backpedaling and searching my memory for something I might have done to upset her.
I couldn’t remember doing any of the usual things that got me into trouble, like running in the house, or fighting with my brothers, and my school grades were good. But it was obvious she was mad about something. I could see the rage in her face, hear it in her voice.
I stood before her, nervous, and suddenly cold from the wet spot where I’d wiped milk on my pajamas. “Why, Mama, what did I do wrong?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, girl! You know exactly what you did!” she said in a growly tone she had never used with me before. “As punishment I want you to stand in the hallway with your face to the wall.” From her bed she pointed to an area between two doorways right outside her room. “Stay there until I say you can move.”
While I stood with my face to the wall, I continued to try to figure out what mysterious bad thing I had done. And all I could come up with was the time I’d let Audrey chew my bubblegum. I knew if Mama found out there was a possibility I’d given Audrey the flu that killed her, she would certainly be mad. But there was no way she could have found out, unless Audrey had told her before she died.
Suddenly Mama leaped from her bed and ran into the hallway where I was. She grabbed me by both of my shoulders and spun me around, facing her. “Why did it have to be my angel?” she screamed. “Why Audrey?”
“I don’t know, Mama,” I screamed back at her. “I don’t
know!
”
She shook me back and forth. “Tell me! Tell me why, why, Tuesday, why?”
It was the last time she ever said my name.
I thought my face to the wall punishment would last only a few minutes, and then I would go back into the kitchen and finish my breakfast. But a few minutes turned to hours, and I ended up staying there for the rest of the day, until it was time for me to go to bed.
The next day the radical change in Mama’s attitude toward me continued. She went from asking me to stay by her side, in a seemingly protective way, to demanding I be within her sight at all times, as if she didn’t trust me. And she no longer wanted me close to her, by her bed, but rather in the hallway outside her room, positioned so she could watch me.
She wouldn’t tell me why she was angry. She would say only that I had done something so horrible, she couldn’t even bear to talk about it, and that I needed to be punished for what I’d done. She said the punishment she had chosen was to stand with my face turned to the wall in the hall outside her bedroom door, and not to speak unless she asked me a question.
As soon as I got up every morning, she ordered me to stand in the same place, in the same position, and that’s where I remained until it was time to go to bed. I ate my meals in the hall. If I had to go to the bathroom, I asked for permission, and she went with me. When she felt well enough to venture out of her bed and do a few things around the house, she took me with her. She said she had to make sure I didn’t do anything else.
Once Nick passed by me on his way to the bathroom, and asked me what I was doing standing there. “I don’t know,” I told him. “Mama said I did something bad, but I can’t remember what it was, and she won’t tell me.”
“Leave her alone,” Mama shouted from her bedroom when she saw us talking. “She’s being punished.”
Nick didn’t try to challenge her. Since her accident, he and Jimmy D. had trod softly around her and indulged her every whim, no matter how outrageous. I was afraid to say anything too, afraid she would lash out at me again, and ask more questions about Audrey, questions I couldn’t, or didn’t, want to answer.
With each passing day Mama isolated me from my brothers more and more. It got to where whenever one of them passed by me in the hallway, they promptly turned away like they were afraid if they looked too long, or got too close, they might catch whatever it was I had that made me different, made me bad.
Somehow they were able to separate the way she treated me from the world they lived in with her. Every now and then I caught Jimmy D. staring at me with something resembling pity in his eyes. It was a far-removed emotion, though, the way one might look at a poster of a starving third-world child. Like he felt sad and guilty to see my suffering, but there was nothing he could do about it. I sensed he wanted to help me, but his sympathy and good intentions were always overshadowed, both by his fear of Mama and his great love for her.
Staring at the blank wall, I listened to my brothers’ distant voices as they played, straining to hear fragments of their con versations, to in some way remain part of their lives. I wanted desperately to be near them, but it was impossible because now I wasn’t allowed speak to them, or to even look their way. Mama had become adamant about this rule. She warned us—no communication at all, and we knew she meant it. We could see it in her eyes; if we disobeyed her, there would be fiery hell to pay.