A Brief Lunacy Read online

  “Well now,” I say. “How is Marte?”

  “She was going to come walking but she fell yesterday and her knee is swollen.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad.”

  “She goes to Boston tomorrow. Visit with the kids.”

  Carl says nothing at all. One of the gulls lands on a nearby rock and stares through the window.

  “She says to come for cocktails at six.”

  “Not today,” I say. “We have some family business going on.”

  “More problems with the daughter?”

  “Not the daughter.” Carl speaks as if he is lecturing to a class of idiots. “Our daughter, and now isn’t a good time to chat. And her name is Sylvie.”

  “I know that,” he says.

  “Would you like a biscuit?” I ask.

  “Thank you, yes,” Hans says.

  “I’m not sure you have time for a biscuit,” Carl says.

  “Oh, Carl. Don’t be rude.”

  “Sorry about invading,” Hans says. “I’ll tell Marte you were asking for her. Another time.”

  I see him to the door. I wish Carl hadn’t told him about Sylvie. I would have left it at Just family business. It’s really no one else’s concern. Hans paid no attention to Sylvie when she was young, but he stopped in a few summers ago when Sylvie was visiting and they took a liking to each other.

  I stand in the open doorway waving as Hans walks along the path that leads past the old pine tree and continues toward his house, which is several miles down the shore. He has nothing else to do but walk. And what if Sylvie is there, by the tree? Perhaps it was Hans that I heard in the woods.

  “Why did you tell him? About Sylvie?”

  “I didn’t say a word about her.”

  “It’s not his business.”

  “All I said was her name. I said not to call her ‘the daughter.’”

  “Next time, please—”

  The telephone rings. Carl answers it. I can tell it’s Rita again and that she knows nothing. Now I sit at the table, drum my fingers on the surface, listen to Carl on the telephone. He asks questions and listens politely. Outside, the shadows of the trees lengthen as dusk settles all around. Where is she? When the children were young I sometimes thought about our old age, when they would have their own families and careers, and imagined Carl and I sitting by our fire, sipping our wine, thinking about what a wonderful family we raised together. Now we are old and we sit and worry about our firstborn, who has no family of her own and not even the promise of a career.

  Dinner. We still have to eat. From the freezer at the top of the fridge I pull out a bag of jumbo shrimp. I’ll fry them in butter and garlic, serve them over rice with parsley from the herb garden out front. Cool water runs over my fingers into a bowl, slowly, so the sound of the stream doesn’t obliterate Carl’s voice. I cut open the bag of shrimp. The whole chunk barely fits in the bowl.

  “We’ll wait to hear from you, then,” he says before he hangs up.

  “You were rude to him.”

  “Who?”

  “Hans.”

  “Let’s not talk about it,” he says. “Do you want to know what Rita said?”

  “They don’t know anything, do they?”

  “Yes. They do.”

  Why does he do this? Why doesn’t he just say what it is?

  “Don’t cry, my pet. She’s fine. Sylvie called the place. She’s in Ohio. She hitched a ride with a trucker and is waiting at a motel until someone from Douglas House can fly out there.”

  “How could she get all the way to Ohio? We should fly out ourselves. Carl?”

  “What, my Jess?”

  “I don’t think I’m strong enough to go and get her.”

  “Of course you are. You are the strongest woman I know.”

  “No, Carl, you’re strong. Should we go there? To Ohio? I’ve never been there.”

  “They’ll take care of it. By the way, Rita said the boyfriend left, too.”

  “The boyfriend?”

  “Apparently she really does have a boyfriend.”

  “Do you think he’s a real boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know, my love.”

  “He’s with her?”

  “No. She’s alone. They don’t know where he is. Name is Ralph something or other.”

  “Carl? Why do you think we were chosen to have someone like Sylvie? I can’t cope. Why can’t she just get better? Pills. Or something. Why doesn’t anything work?”

  “I don’t know the answers to these things. Do you think I always know what to do?”

  “Yes, Carl, you do.”

  He did the first day Sylvie went crazy. It was just before her high school graduation. I suppose we should have seen it coming, but what do you look for? A sign popping out on her forehead that says SCHIZOPHRENIC? She’d always been a bit strange, with her little village on that braided rug and spending so much time in the tree and other things. Sometimes I’d hug her tight and she’d hug back but I could feel she wasn’t all there, wasn’t really hugging me, was embracing something else far away and bigger than me. Not a God or anything like that. Just something powerful in a distant place where I couldn’t go.

  My father was there and my brother, Harry, and his wife. Carl’s family was all dead, of course, but he had invited a couple of the doctors he worked with to come because we were having a big barbecue afterward in celebration.

  She was fine at breakfast. A little odd, but then she was always a little odd. She picked at her omelet and when my father told her she’d need her energy for the graduation, she threw the fork against the wall, eggs flying everywhere. Dad told her to pick up the fork and asked what the hell was wrong with her, but of course Sylvie was beyond hearing any of that. “Sylvie,” I said, “please pick up the fork.” What a fool I was. As a cartoon moves on the screen, Sylvie meandered toward the thrown fork, muttering terrible words to herself. I was sorry I’d asked her to pick it up. Who gives a rat’s ass about a fork on the floor? But Sylvie did.

  Her limbs jerked in slow motion. She moved robotlike across the room and when she passed me she growled like an animal, deep in her throat. She bent and curled her fingers around the fork handle and stabbed the floor over and over and over until the tines bent into her palm. Even the blood didn’t stop her stabbing. She laughed out loud. Dad was yelling. I stood helpless, terrified. Carl rushed to her, scooped her up, and held her very tight until she stopped. But after that she didn’t speak when we asked how she was, and she didn’t go to her graduation.

  We tried everything for the next few days, but finally a week later, the doctor said we had no choice and had to admit her. She was slipping away from us. We went to the hospital to see her the next day, of course. She huddled in a corner, silent, face like stone. I saw the pain in her eyes. I stood there for what seemed like hours and she didn’t move. I couldn’t just leave her like that. I began to sway and move my arms in a dance, slowly, as close to her as I dared get. There was no response that day but I danced the next and the next. The fourth day, I brought a tape player and a cassette of music by Saint-Saëns and played “The Swan,” and she rose with her arms spread and danced her swan until the swan died, picked herself up from the floor, and hugged me. “Mom, let me show you my room,” she said. And a week later she was home.

  “I’m a doctor,” Carl says, “but that doesn’t mean I’m God, now, does it?”

  “Who is this boy? Did they say?”

  “Ralph? No. I didn’t ask. What does it matter?”

  “Should one of us go out? To the store? We could use some milk. I don’t think we should leave the phone, but you could go.”

  “No,” he says. “I’ll stay here. You go if you want.”

  “Did you hear that?”

  “What? There’s nothing, my pet,” he says. “Just the wind and the gulls and maybe bears ready to get you and coyotes and—”

  “Stop. You’re teasing me.”

  He laughs. I love it when he laughs, which isn’t often.
People who’ve lived through a war have a hard time laughing.

  “I’m going to the tree again. She might go there, you know. She might be lying about being in Ohio. And I’ll get the yarn while I’m out.”

  “Why would she lie about that?”

  When Carl stoops to pick up the paints and papers from the floor, he looks old to me. I pat his shoulder as I pass by. The air has chilled and I’m glad for the flashlight in my pocket because there is no moon and I might need it. In the distance, a pack of coyotes howls. I flick the light on and follow the beam toward the pine tree, and all the way there the howling goes on and on.

  “Sylvie. Are you there?”

  And what if she is?

  Sometimes I dream about having a daughter who marries a nice man and has two children, a boy and a girl, who call me Nanny Jess and climb up on my lap while I read about dragons and fairies and ogres. I’m not sure that the boys want any children. Charlie’s wife is a fancy lawyer and Sam isn’t even married. Sylvie was pregnant once. It was years ago when we lived in Connecticut. She’d just moved into a group home when they called and asked if we knew who the father might be. I drove the two hours alone because Carl was operating on someone that day. I brought a picnic lunch so that Sylvie and I could talk in private. The conversation was simple. I asked who the father was. She said first that it was King Kong. Then it was Paul Newman. I don’t think she had any idea who it was. I wanted a grandchild. Carl and I had talked about it and part of me wanted to take the child and raise it. I thought that it might bring Sylvie around if she had a baby to take care of. But I knew that was all a lie. I made her get the abortion.

  Well, who would take care of a child born in a group home to a woman not capable? And I was truly too old even then to raise a child. After our picnic at the edge of a meadow of wildflowers, she lay her head on my lap while I brushed her hair with my palm and sang little songs, “Hush, Little Baby, Don’t Say a Word” and “The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night,” as she moaned softly to herself. “Sylvie, raising a baby is hard. Let me help you. Daddy knows a good doctor.”

  The doctor was the wife of one of Carl’s colleagues. Sylvie held my hand in the waiting room, dug at my thumb until she broke the skin. I murmured soothing words about its being the best thing and that she’d forget all about it in a while.

  The whole procedure was short. Sylvie handled everything like a normal woman when they had her undress and climb onto the table. She didn’t cry out or get angry, just did exactly as she was told.

  “But Mommy, would you kill your child? Would you kill me? If you’d known?”

  I didn’t answer her. “After it’s over, you and I will go to a hotel. Boston, perhaps. We’ll watch movies and eat room service. We’ll order shrimp and cheesecake. Won’t that be fun?”

  “No. It won’t be fun.” And she cried. I was never sure whether she cried for the baby or for herself. And there went my grandchild, flushed down the institutional toilet.

  They wanted to sterilize her at the same time, but I wouldn’t sign. I think she’s on the pill now, just in case. That’s a good thing, considering she has a boyfriend named Ralph.

  At the tree I freeze and listen hard. There’s no sound that is human. When I call out, no one answers. I shine the light up into the branches to see if the branch is still there. In the dark, with just a small shaft of light, the branch hangs at an odd angle. When it falls, I’ll be sad. Isn’t that a silly thing? To be attached to a broken branch? But it’s Sylvie’s solace, there in the crotch of that tree. When she was a small child, Carl climbed up with her and they pretended to be hiding from something bad. Now when Sylvie comes home, she still shinnies up to her spot, using stumps and holes in the bark for steps. What if she tries to climb onto the branch and it snaps?

  The flashlight beam fades. The damn batteries are old. When I stop walking I listen hard for other footsteps or a rustling in the bushes. The coyotes have stopped their eerie racket and the only sounds are small noises in dry leaves, squirrels perhaps, or birds. Carl’s right. Sylvie isn’t here. How could she get here? But then, how could she get to Ohio?

  5

  JESSIE

  WHEN I APPROACH the house, all the lights are lit like some brazen Christmas display. I hate Christmas, especially the colored lights all over the lawns around here and the loud music in the stores.

  My childhood Christmases were days of wishing our mother wasn’t dead. Our father sat in his wingback chair, smoking and drinking sherry until tears slipped down his face and he gathered Harry and me onto his lap to tell us that it wasn’t our fault, that we were just babies, and that our mother died because she was too small and we were too big. Too big to come out. My aunts and my grandmother always came for dinner or we went there in the evening for roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. But through the day we both felt much too big.

  I flick off the almost-dead flashlight and step carefully over exposed roots and stones around the back of the house toward the garage.

  We really need a new car. The side panels are beginning to rust from all the winter salt. The back door sticks and creaks when I open it. The blasted interior light is broken and the flashlight is dim when I push the on button, but it throws enough light for me to see the paper bag full of yarn on the floor of the backseat. It’s all there. The Donegal tweed and the primaries for socks.

  I glance up the driveway but the dusk impairs my vision. And the damn broken glasses. There’s no one there. No one that I can see, anyway. We don’t really need milk. How foolish. I grab the bag of yarn and go back into the house. I think Carl is secretly afraid of the dark and that’s why he turns on all the lights.

  I smell smoke coming out of the chimney. He must have started a fire in the woodstove. When I go back into the house, Carl isn’t talking on the telephone.

  He watches me as I hang up my parka, pull off my scarf, turn off the ceiling light, and pour myself a glass of red wine.

  “Do you want one?”

  He doesn’t answer me, but I pour a second glass and bring it to the table after I light a candle. Carl flicks off most of the lights. I’m afraid to ask if anyone’s called. I sip my wine. Carl sips his.

  “Was she in the tree?”

  I don’t answer the question.

  “She called again.”

  “What?”

  “She called. She isn’t in Ohio.”

  “Why didn’t you say someone called? And how could she be in Ohio? It’s too far. Where is she? Why did you ask if she was in the tree?”

  “She wouldn’t say where she was, but I’ve called Douglas House. Someone’s already flown to Columbus.”

  “Shit,” I say. Between us on the table are my glasses, fixed. I put them on without speaking of them. Carl fixes things. Everything. So why the hell can’t he fix his daughter?

  We sit in silence and near darkness sipping our wine while the cold shrimp drain in the sink. How could we have kept her at home? I can’t cope with her when she freaks out. And it’s not safe.

  “I’m hungry,” he says. “Shall I cook up the shrimp?”

  “How can you think of food right now? What is Sylvie eating? Garbage from the back of a Dumpster?”

  Not all our times with Sylvie have been difficult. When she was fifteen we built this house to replace the old cottage that she burned down. It was a mistake, of course, an accident. She was just trying to make smoke to hide in. That’s what she said. I have to believe her. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it made sense to her.

  We ordered all the materials from the building supply place to be delivered to the site and invited everyone we knew for a weekend of hammering and sawing and eating lobsters. Our old friend Jacob, from down the road, was the contractor and head carpenter. He died last year. He had the plans and knew how to execute them. We all had a job. Mine was cooking and putting up sheathing. Carl did framing with the boys. Even my father came and worked on running wires and plumbing with the people we hired. But the best was Harry. He pulled up his
lawn chair close to the activity and directed everything. He had lists of things to be done and gave Sylvie little bits of paper to hand out to the workers with their instructions. They sat close together and murmured about little changes that would make the house cozier or brighter or warmer. In a way, they were both damaged people, maimed in some way. Sylvie in her mind and Harry in his hip. Why do we expect that all human beings should be perfect? That day, Sylvie and Harry together, their foreheads touching while he wrote out the instructions for building our house, were perfect.

  And together, they hypnotized thirty-seven lobsters before they went into the pots, just to give them a quick and painless death. That weekend we essentially built a house. Of course, there was lots of work to do after that, especially on the inside, but at the end of the weekend, a house stood where there had been none.

  I don’t realize I’m standing until Carl’s hand on my forearm tugs me back down into my chair. All I want to do is paint in the woods and read my books and watch the birds on their rocks. But I can’t because Sylvie is missing.

  “You sit here and listen,” he says. He scans the radio dial until he finds chamber music on public radio. He thinks it will relax me. As if there is something wrong with me. As if I’m the one needing repair. “I’ll fix the shrimp,” he says. “Garlic? Rice? Parsley?”

  While he chops garlic, gathers parsley, steams rice, I knit, hoping that I don’t reach the heel before supper is ready. The socks were going to be for me but now I think I’ll give them to Sylvie for Christmas. She loves stripes. I’ll knit the toe red.