Fragmented (14 page)

I blinked. “So is that a yes or no on me coming back tomorrow?”

“Yes. Come back tomorrow,” the doctor urged. “I’m sure she’d love to see you.”

CHAPTER NINE

Instead of telling the taxi driver to bring me back to Damien’s house in the suburbs, I had him drive me into the city. My mother’s brother and his wife lived in downtown Memphis. It was the home I remembered better than the house I had lived in with my immediate family. When Damien had graduated from college a few years after my mother’s hospitalization, I could have gone to live with him, but by that time I was settled with Jerret and Olive. On bad days I’d think about running away and finding my brother, but my aunt and uncle had done their best to not make me feel like a burden.

The leaves had fallen from the trees in Chicago, but the evening was warm and dry in Memphis. I opened the screen door and knocked on the inner door before letting the screen come crashing closed again. The white paint on the wooden boards was chipping away to reveal the graying wood beneath. Jerret and Olive rented an old frame house whose architecture was foreign in Chicago. No one lived in a wooden house in the Windy City. They’d all been destroyed in the 1871 fire and had been replaced with brick.

“Coming!” I heard a female voice call out from inside the house. The inside door opened with the screen door remaining between us. My Aunt Olive stood in the doorway. “Harpoon?”

“Harpoon” was my Uncle Jerret and Aunt Olive’s nickname for me. They were the only ones I’d let get away with calling me such a ridiculous name.

“Hey, Olive Oil.” I gave her an awkward wave and a tight smile. “I should have called ahead.”

The screen door was thrown open and Olive was hugging me and tugging me inside and closing the door behind us.

She held me at arm’s length. “You’re so skinny,” she proclaimed.

“I’m a poor college student,” I dismissed. “Is Uncle Jerret home?”

“He’s at work until 9:00 p.m.”

“The record store’s still in business?” I marveled.

“It’s Memphis. People haven’t given up on vinyl yet.”

Olive was a striking woman. Her hair was platinum, now with a few white streaks that had come with age. Her skin was powder white, her eyes a dazzling sapphire blue, and her round mouth seemed stained a permanent cherry red, even when she was changed for bed. That day her hair was in a casual updo, and a blue bandana, a more muted color than her eyes, covered most of her hair.

“Hungry?”

“Starved.” I’d had cereal that morning at Damien’s, but nothing beyond that. My stomach gurgled at the suggestion of food.

I followed my aunt towards the back of the house to the old black and white kitchen that looked straight out of an earlier era. Both Jerret and Olive were into the rockabilly scene so the style fit their taste, but they were also too poor to make any major redesigns or updates if they’d wanted to.

Olive grabbed a hot pad and pulled a bubbling casserole pan out of the oven. Its scent wafted into the air as it sat on the stovetop to cool.

“Tuna casserole?”

“You know it.” Olive wiped her hands on the back of her high-wasted jeans. “Grab yourself a plate.”

I shooed a skinny black cat off of the kitchen counter, and it jumped to the floor with a solid thump and disgruntled noise. Olive had a soft spot for stray animals and my Uncle Jerret had a soft spot for Olive. Growing up in their house I had grown accustomed to multiple cats hanging around at any one time. Olive never gave them names though, just fed them so they’d stick around a little longer. Sometimes I’d felt like one of those feral cats that Olive took in.

I pulled a plate from the cabinet, and I fell back into the familiar routine of dinnertime in this house. I sat in my usual chair and Olive set a glass of milk in front of me before joining me at the table. She scooped out a generous serving of tuna casserole and heaped it onto my plate. Visible wisps of steam radiated off the oven-fresh food.

“So what’s the story?” she asked before I could even take my first bite. “I thought you weren’t ever coming back here.”

I frowned, feeling guilty because her words were true. “I know. But my mom had been bugging Damien hardcore about me coming to visit. She even called the Chicago police to report me as a missing person.”

“How
is
Bonnie? We don’t get out to that place to see her as much as I’d like.”

I stabbed my fork into the twisted noodles on my plate. “Today was a bad day. She didn’t know who I was.”

“I’m sorry, Harper. I can only imagine how tough that must be.”

“It’s okay,” I shook it off. “She hasn’t really been a part of my life for over a decade.”

“But still, sweetie, she’s your mom.”

I nodded and slowly chewed my first mouthful of casserole. Olive had never been the best cook, but neither had my mom. They’d both done their best to make something edible for the dinner table each night.

“How long are you in town for?”

“Just one more day. I’m on Fall Break right now, but I have to be back Wednesday morning for midterms.”

“How’s school? You still liking it up there?”

“Yeah,” I confirmed, taking another bite and swallowing. It was still too hot and it burned down my throat. “Chicago’s great. I’ve got a place off campus that’s all my own, and I graduate next semester.”

“That’s wonderful, Harper. I’m so proud of you, and I know Jerret is, too.”

I ducked my head at the praise. “Thanks, Aunt Olive.”

“Can you stay the night? Your old room is kind of storage for duplicate records right now, but I can clean out a space for you to sleep on.”

I wiped my mouth on my napkin and set it on the table. “That’s a nice offer, but I should probably be getting back to Damien’s.”

“How’s your brother?”

“Old.”

Olive guffawed and slapped her knee, doubling over in laughter. I couldn’t help but smile at the sound. Maybe Memphis wasn’t so bad after all.

When I got back to Damien’s house, Austin was already in bed and Sandra and my brother were watching TV in the living room. Sandra was on her tablet playing some mindless app and Damien was focused on a recap of the day’s sporting events.

“Hey,” he called out to me, not budging from the couch. “There’s leftover Chinese in the fridge if you’re hungry.”

“I’m good, thanks. I stopped by Uncle Jerret’s and had dinner with Aunt Olive.”

Damien grunted, but said nothing else.

I lingered in the archway between the foyer and the living room. Sandra had yet to acknowledge me or even bother to look up from the screen of her tablet. Damien didn’t ask me how my day had gone, and without the prompt I wasn’t going to tell him what had happened at Riverside Estates.

“I’m gonna head upstairs,” I announced. “I’ve got some studying to do and then I think I’ll get to bed early.”

Damien waved at me, but his eyes never left the flat screen television perched on the mantle. “Ok. Night.”

As I lay in bed that night, listening to the sounds of my brother’s suburban home, I stared at the darkened screen of my silent cell phone. I wished I had an excuse to call Raleigh or even to just text her. My visit with Olive had been the pick-me-up I needed, but it would have been nice to hear another friendly voice to help me shake off this nightmare of a day. I could call her with the excuse of having a question about one of our upcoming midterms, but my dream from the previous night still weighed heavily on my mind.

I put my phone on the end table and rolled onto my side, hopeful for a dreamless sleep and that tomorrow would be a better day.

+ + +

The house was empty when I woke up the next morning. Damien and Sandra had left for work and Austin was at school. I found a note from Damien on the front of the refrigerator with instructions about where to find the hidden, extra key in the front yard if I got home before them.

I considered not taking a second trip out to Riverside Estates. I would have had more fun visiting my old hangout spots downtown or maybe even surprising my Uncle Jerret at the record store, but I knew the responsible thing to do was to visit my mother again. The previous day had been a disaster. Today couldn’t be any worse, I reasoned to myself.

I took another taxi out to the residential hospital with less anxiety this time about what the driver thought about me. The same orderly who had greeted me the previous day was at the front door to welcome me again.

“Welcome back,” he said, holding the entrance door open for me. “Is this going to be a regular thing?”

“Hopefully not,” I muttered lowly.

I signed in at the front desk and waited for an attendant nurse to escort me to my mom’s room. While I waited, another patient approached me. She was an elderly Indian woman with thick grey hair pulled back in a tangled bun. Her skin was the color of a paper bag, and she wandered around the lobby area with the help of a walker with tennis balls jabbed onto the bottom legs.

She started to babble about how she had wanted to be a nun and had been close to joining a convent when the devil had broken her leg. She told me her family had kept her in the hospital now for three years. Her light brown eyes started to tear up which made me really uncomfortable. I’d never been any good at consoling people or anything like that.

I started to kind of zone out because her accent was so thick. I could only understand every other word until she started talking about how she was praying for everyone to get better, and then she pointed down the hallway. When my eyes followed where she was pointing, I saw a glimpse of my mother’s red-haired nurse escorting my mom into a room. The Indian woman said she was especially praying for “that one.” She said she was praying for God to open her eyes. And then she said a peculiar thing: “But God can only help those that want to be helped.”

I didn’t know why it struck me, especially because I wasn’t a religious person. But I extricated myself from the conversation as politely as I could.

My mom was sitting in front of a full-length mirror, brushing her hair. The nurse who’d picked me up at the front desk knocked lightly on the doorjamb to announce our presence. “Bonnie, there’s someone here to see you.”

Our eyes locked in the mirror’s reflection. My mother set down her hairbrush on the vanity desk beside her and I stiffened, anticipating the worst.

“Harper? Is that really you, baby?” She turned on the small bench and I finally saw it—the recognition in her light blue eyes.

“Yeah, Mama,” I choked out, suddenly overwhelmed with a wash of emotions. “It’s me.”

My mom was like a kid with a new toy. She showed off the facilities with pride and introduced me to every doctor and fellow patient we came across. It surprised me how much she knew about my life in Chicago; I wondered if it had been Damien or Jerret and Olive who’d kept her up-to-date on my life. We didn’t talk about anything of substance. I was too afraid to upset her and ruin what was turning out to be a really lovely day. But there was one question blazing hot in my mind.

We were sitting outside by a little man-made pond, watching ducks float on its surface when I finally had the courage to ask. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her directly, so I posed the question to the empty space in front of me. “Mama, all those years ago, how did you know you were getting sick?”

She ran her palms down her legs and grasped her skinny kneecaps. “I didn’t. I never did. Not until the doctors told me, at least.”

“But wasn’t there some inkling that something was wrong or a little off before then?”

She was quiet, thinking. “That was a long time ago, baby.”

I let out a long breath and took in our serene surroundings. For being a residential program for people with mental instabilities, it was really nice. We sat beneath a mature ornamental cherry tree situated on a gently rolling hill that overlooked the duck pond. I would spend all my time down here, I decided. It was the perfect place for a picnic or to simply sit and read a book.

Thinking about books made me think of Raleigh. I was attracted to her; that much was obvious. She was beautiful, smart, and brave in ways I could only envy. I wished I had someone to talk to about her. I’d never had someone in my life with whom I was close enough to talk about relationship stuff. Olive had done her best when I was younger, but at the time I’d been so angry and resentful about how my life had turned out that I had taken her kindness for granted.

I wondered when or if my mom had told my father about her family’s history with schizophrenia. I could always ask, but the sun was out and I didn’t want to bring up more unhappy memories that day. I was curious, but it wasn’t worth upsetting her over.