A Brief Lunacy Read online

  “Do you allow her to behave in that manner?”

  “She’s an adult,” I said. “I can’t allow or disallow.”

  “Well, I think it’s deplorable conduct. Madeline, were you aware of Sylvie’s behavior? Has this happened before?”

  “Mother, let it be. Give her some space.”

  “Does this kind of thing run in families? Sylvie. Can’t you calm yourself, young lady?”

  “Well, fuck you, Miss Pig,” Sylvie said. “Mommy? Tell her. Tell her to leave me alone.”

  “Sylvie, darling,” Harry said, “let’s you and your old uncle Harry go for a walk.”

  “Please, Mrs. Lachaby, have some patience. She is ill.”

  “Oh, ill, is it?” Sylvie said. “Is that what you call it? I’ll show you ill.” I’m glad she chose the cheesecake, because it was soft and easy to clean up. And I’m glad she threw it at me and not at the mother of our daughter-in-law. After that, Sylvie said she’d take a bath and calm down. She’d be fine after her bath.

  Sylvie made a little bonfire in the bathroom with dry pine needles from her pocket and a bunch of drawing pencils from the art drawer. She wanted to keep the people who lived in the bathtub warm. She exploded when we said there were no people living in the bathtub. Carl and Harry brought her to the hospital and made it back in time for dinner. But it was all very distressing. The holidays were never very good times with Sylvie. Something about the time of year.

  We paint for the whole morning, and for the entire time, I hear things in the woods. Not squirrels or birds, either. Once, I think of calling out, Who’s there? Is anyone out there? but Carl’s right beside me painting the pine tree over and over again. It’s funny. He’s the one who paints the tree but I’m the one who loves it. By noontime we each have a stack of watercolors. His are all of the pine tree. Mine are of bones and mosses and cracks in the pine bark. Carl says we could have a two-person show at the library next summer. Yes. We could.

  On the way back to the house for lunch, I walk behind him because he’s bigger and breaks the way through the bushes. And besides, I love to watch his back as he tromps through the woods. I wouldn’t ever tell anyone that I find my husband sexy at our age. But that’s the truth of it.

  I try to picture him as a young boy, running away fast as he can on sickly legs, his mother yelling, “Vite, vite!” for him to run faster, faster, and his father blocking the bullets behind him. Did he keep running when he heard the shots? When he heard the rest of his family drop to the ground? When he noticed that his mother’s voice no longer urged him on? He never told me the details. I only know that little bit because I pried too hard once when we’d had too much champagne. And I’ve seen the fish on his arm and the scars on his back. There’s no mistaking those things. Sometimes I’m satisfied not knowing very much because it’s clear it’s a life he’s set aside, but sometimes I want to prod and snoop. But where do I do that? I don’t think he has anything from that time except for the violin.

  It was during the war. When I think of it all, I cry. I can’t help it. And right now I want to yell at him in English to run fast, but I know I can’t do that. There’s no reason to worry except for the feeling I have that there’s something in our woods that doesn’t belong here.

  As we approach the house, I half expect Reba to dash off the porch to greet us. It’s like when I quit smoking. Every time the phone rang, I’d reach for a cigarette, although there weren’t any and I wouldn’t have smoked one anyway. Sometimes even today that happens to me, after twenty-two years of not smoking. Reba’s only been gone for a month. Do you suppose I’ll be watching for her twenty-two years from now?

  “What’s that, Jessie?”

  “I’m just laughing at myself,” I say.

  “Shall I slow down?”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Carl? Do you hear something?”

  “Crows. Gulls. Your footsteps. That’s the best sound. Your footsteps.” He turns around. “My Jess. What do you hear?”

  “I thought I heard someone. A person. A dog. It’s nothing.”

  He kisses my forehead before he turns back on the trail toward the house, which seems oddly alone on the small hill overlooking the bay. I can see from here that the gulls have gone off for the day, probably to Schoodic Rock or down to the sardine factory to scrounge more fish.

  We clatter and bang our way into the house, dragging easels and finished canvases and paints up the back stairs and into the kitchen.

  The answering machine blinks by the kitchen phone. Three messages. The first is the library reminding me about the overdue mystery. I delete it. The second is Sylvie.

  “Mommy? Are you there? I’ve left the fucking place. Everyone there’s a nutcase.”

  “What?” Carl says.

  “I’m on the way to the Midwest. Isn’t that a riot? Going to North Dakota,” she says. Her voice is sweet, lyrical, like when she was a child. “I have money and I know how to get more. I can dance.”

  “Yes, my darling,” I say to the machine. “You can dance.”

  “Don’t, Jess. She can’t help it. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “And guess what?” There’s a long pause, as if she expects us to pick up the phone. “There’s a guy here in the loony bin who loves me. How about that?”

  “Oh, Sylvie, I love you,” I say.

  “Loves me loves me loves me,” she sings. The tune is familiar but I can’t place it. “Yes, he loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah.” It’s a Beatles tune.

  “Sylvie, where are you?” Do I expect her to answer?

  “’Bye, Mommy. Dad. He’s leaving, too.”

  “Who, dear?”

  Carl presses the button for the next message. Is Sylvie finished? He hardly gives her time to say good-bye.

  “Mrs. Jensen? This is Rita at Douglas House. I’m sorry to worry you but please call as soon as possible. Hello? Are you there?”

  There are more “hello’s” before Rita from Douglas House finally hangs up.

  “What? Sorry to worry us? Worry that Sylvie left? Sorry she is insane? Sorry she’s not Sylvie, sylvan of the woods, tree climber?”

  “Jess. Compose yourself. We’ll find her. She never goes where she says she’s going. You know that. She won’t go to North Dakota.”

  “Carl. She’s in the woods.”

  “No. Jess, why would she be in the woods? How would she get here? She isn’t in the woods.”

  “Call the place. You call. You’re better at these things.”

  We both sit down, as if an outward appearance of calm will translate through the phone lines to the bureaucracy. I pull the sock out of my knitting bag, thankful that I’m not at the turning-the-heel place, thankful that I have several inches to go on the leg before I need to think. Carl leans back in his chair, pen and paper in his lap. Only my knitting needles move; their clicking is the only sound.

  “Rita, please,” he says when someone answers. “Carl Jensen here.”

  They know nothing at all. Isn’t that why they get paid? To know what happens to their patients? Carl waves me away when I try to ask the questions, Where is she? Why did she leave? Does she have her medication? When was she last seen? He listens intently, writes on the pad little notes in doctor writing that no one else can read. When I peer over to try, he shifts his weight so that I can see, but it’s just lines, dots, dashes. I recognize nothing about where or when or why.

  I drop a stitch. My fingertips feel numb on the yarn and I have to use a crochet hook to pick up the loop before I continue going around and around on the three needles. The noise of the clicking makes me a bit crazy myself but I’m afraid to sit with nothing. I’ve never been one to be idle, to clasp my hands in my lap.

  “Please let us know if you hear anything,” he says into the telephone.

  “Of course they’ll let us know,” I say after he hangs up. “What a stupid thing to say.”

  His face flushes as if I’d slapped him. “Th
ey’re looking in all the usual places,” he says.

  “I’m sorry, Carl. I didn’t mean to say that.”

  “I know, my pet. Of course you didn’t.”

  “Now what do we do?”

  “You could finish the sock,” he says.

  3

  JESSIE

  THE WAIT IS INTERMINABLE and the socks are finished. Useless balls of yarn, too small for anything but trim or accent, roll around at the bottom of the basket. Then I remember the paper bag in the car with the Donegal tweed yarn that I bought to make Sam a sweater, and some skeins of primary colors for socks. I’m afraid to leave the phone to get the yarn and I hesitate to ask Carl to do it for me because it sounds like such a frivolous errand.

  “Shall I heat the chowder?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “I’ll do it.” Thank God he asked about the chowder, because the inordinate hush is disconcerting. On the way to the kitchen I lift the receiver, just to make sure it wasn’t replaced off kilter. That happens sometimes.

  The kitchen is as we left it this morning, which seems strange to me because now life has changed. Wouldn’t you think the kitchen would appear darker or lighter or disturbed in some way? I know this has happened with Sylvie before but that doesn’t make it any easier. The table creaks when I lift one end and swing it toward me, away from the wall, just to shift the focus when we sit to have lunch. A change of scenery. Look at things from a new angle. You have to do that sometimes.

  Just last night we sat here sipping too-hot fish chowder and eating fresh biscuits, chattering about Sylvie, saying we hadn’t heard from her in a while and how that seemed like a good sign. The chowder is thicker today as it falls from the bowl into the saucepan, chunks of potato and haddock plopping into the bottom, splashing milk onto my sweater. Some splatters the lenses of my glasses and I can’t see the chowder in the pot.

  Carl is right. We always find her. She gets picked up on the street or she calls us from a stranger’s house a few minutes away from Douglas House. They can’t really keep her locked up, because she isn’t a danger, they say. Just crazy. Just out of touch with reality.

  When I put the pot of chowder on the top of the gas stove and turn the heat on very low, I take off my glasses and sit at the table to wait. My fingers close around my glasses tight enough to break them but I don’t hear any cracks or snaps except in my own brain. Why don’t they break? I pound the glasses down on the table and a lens falls out in my hand. Now they’re broken. That’s reality, n’est-ce pas? as Carl would say.

  “You all right over there?”

  “Right as rain,” I say. “Waiting for the chowder.”

  When I was in labor with Sylvie, I wanted chowder and all the hospital had was cheese sandwiches. The doctor said not to eat anything because it would make me sick. Sylvie was big. I remember that. They knocked me out with ether and wouldn’t let Carl in the delivery room even though he was a doctor. While I lay there on the table, my arms tied to keep them out of the way, legs tied to keep them open, invaded with forceps and strangers’ fingers, Carl went out to the Norfolk Restaurant and bought a triple takeout of fish chowder.

  I think my own mother bled to death. Because we were too big. Why couldn’t they stop the bleeding? I think my father was with her. Were we there or did they take us away? As a child I imagined my mother cradling us, one in each arm, as my father wiped her cheeks with a damp towel and she whispered that she loved us with her last dying breath. I’ve gotten over that but I still picture her touching us, placing her fingers in our small fists. I’ve never asked my father if she saw us. I don’t want to know that she didn’t.

  Sylvie was pretty: dark like Carl, and elfin, her face framed with black hair, which the nurses had to trim because they were afraid it would hurt her eyes. Her fingers waved in the air like dancing ferns. And I couldn’t even eat the chowder Carl brought. He ate it all himself except for one spoonful that he fed to me. I couldn’t seem to eat anything but toast.

  Carl doesn’t ask why the table is askew or why my glasses have a lens missing. Sometimes I wonder if he notices things like that or whether he just doesn’t mention them because he’s grown accustomed to my odd habits. We chat about Sam and whether the girlfriend can pay for her own medical school and about Charlie’s new appointment as partner at McGinty, Trainor, and Hoyt. Carl gets up once to check the receiver. We don’t speak of the telephone until we finish eating.

  “I’m going to go outside,” I say. “Will you listen for the phone?”

  “Where are you going? She’s not out there. How would she get here?” He slurps his soup. Carl is a good man but he slurps his soup.

  “Just a walk. Breath of air, and I need to get my yarn from the car. Call me if you hear anything. I’ll be back soon.”

  I half-wittedly hold the door behind me for the dead dog and kick dry leaves from the landing, where they pirouette to the ground. The sun has dried the night dew from the forest. Small noises surround me as I make my way through shriveled ferns toward the pine tree. I stop here and there to listen to rustlings made by squirrels and birds and perhaps mice. Nothing sounds big like a human being walking. Carl is right. She couldn’t come all the way here by herself.

  My still life has collapsed. I gather dry leaves into a pile at the base of the tree and lower myself onto them. I’ll just sit quietly and listen to what comes. A woodpecker hammers in the next tree. I hiss at it to shut up. If there were someone in the woods, I wouldn’t hear them over that racket. I shift my weight, unfold my legs, which have fallen asleep, and stretch them out in front of me. My foot kicks the old broken wing bone.

  “Sylvie? Are you out here?”

  The woodpecker racket ceases. The small rustles disappear. There is nothing. I’m not sure what I expect.

  “Look at me, Mommy.” It’s a little girl’s voice I hear in my head, not my grown daughter who is crazy, hiding in the woods. “Look how high I am.” And I looked and said, “Oh, my. You certainly are a climber.” And afterward we walked through the woods, her small hand tucked in mine, while she gathered her “collection,” as she called it, a tote bag heavy with stones and chipmunk tails and clods of moss. In those days, we lived here only for a few weeks in the summer in a cabin we built ourselves. Sylvie set up a whole village of people and houses made from sticks and bones and feathers in the middle of the living room floor. Did we know something then? Harry said it was strange for a child to set up a disparate world like that. Sam and Charlie knew to stay away from her village, and each year it grew larger and more complicated until the year she was twelve. One day we came back from town and everything was gone. The only sign was a moldy spot in the center of the braided rug. She never spoke of it. When I asked where her village was, she said she was grown up and had no need for such things. Should I have talked to her about that? I guess we should have.

  The next year, Sylvie burned the place down.

  Then I hear it again. A footstep, perhaps. The snap of a stick. A breath that is not mine.

  “Hello? Sylvie? It’s Mommy.”

  I struggle to my feet because my legs are all pins and needles from sitting so long. No one answers. I look up but I can’t see anything. My glasses. “Come down, darling.” If I had my glasses I could see better. A pinecone drops from the tree and sticks to my sweater. Is that the noise? Pine-cones dropping?

  All the way back to the house I listen for her, but I know she isn’t there. She would appear if she saw me. She’d laugh and throw her head back, and for a moment I’d think she was little Sylvie of the woods with her tote full of doll parts. But after the laugh would come anger and swearing and then perhaps a lost look and a tilt of her head. “Mommy?” And she’d run to me and kiss my eyelids. Once, after the kiss she bit me. Not hard. But Carl noticed the marks.

  Carl sits at the end of the kitchen table, receiver to his ear, twirling my broken glasses around and around through the empty lens hole. He’s talking to Charlie at the office, asking if he’s heard anything. Now, why
would Sylvie contact Charlie?

  “Will we see you on Thanksgiving?” he says. “Well then, bye, Son. We’ll keep in touch.”

  “Why are you using the phone? What if she calls?” I sit down in my chair. “What if she’s trying to reach us?”

  “Here, Jess. Have some tea.” He pours steaming tea into my breakfast cup. “I just thought they might have heard something. Charlie’s her brother, after all.”

  “Should we go to Bangor? Should we go searching?”

  “Where? Where would we start?”

  “Anywhere. The police. Churches. Hospitals.”

  “They’re looking for her. Did you get your yarn? You could start another sock.”

  “Did Rita call again?”

  “No.”

  “But you’ve been on the phone.”

  “How about Scrabble? It’d pass the time.”

  “Would you drive up the lane to the highway? Just see if she’s trying to come to us. It’s a long walk down here. What if she fell?”

  “I do hear something now,” he says.

  “Who would be knocking? Who?” There has been no car sound. And we’re over a mile from the road.

  4

  JESSIE

  WHILE MY FINGERS are still wrapped around the doorknob, the knock happens again. Sometimes she knocks. Isn’t that odd that a child would knock at her own home? Which Sylvie will it be, elf of the woodlands or queen of the venomous mouth? Although I know there is no God, I pray for the sweet creature who kisses me too hard.

  Hans stands just outside the door on the stoop, his ridiculous walking stick held upright, his bare knees bowed out. Who would wear shorts this late in the season?

  “Come in, Hans,” I say. Carl can’t stand him. “Would you like coffee?”

  “I’m off caffeine,” he says. “I’ll take hot water. Everything all right here?”

  He strides into the house toward Carl, tapping the infernal stick on our shiny floor with every step. He makes an exaggerated swerve around the piled-up tubes and paintings left in a heap by the cabinet. Why did I invite him in? I don’t know. Why can’t I say, It isn’t a good time, dear friend? But he isn’t even a dear friend. He stands at the table, waiting to be invited to sit down with Carl. Carl gazes out toward the absent gulls, picks up yesterday’s newspaper, reads the back page again. When I catch his eye he nods my way, pushes out a chair for Hans, and resumes reading. Carl is very rude sometimes but I love him. Why? Because he loves me and he’s kind to most people.