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Chapter 22

22

I spent the rest of the week convalescing, or as Ben said, being lazy. I slept a lot and watched videos. My brain didn’t feel up to reading yet, but toward the end of the week Ben brought a computer video game over, and that occupied a little of my time. It was one of those slow-paced strategy games, something I could actually play left-handed without getting carpal tunnel syndrome. Ben came over after school, and by mid-week we’d finished off Mrs. Waters’s brownies while picking apart the last of the daytime soaps. After that, I’d have my daily excursion to the mailbox. My feet still caused me a lot of pain when I walked, but it no longer felt like the pain was a harbinger of something horribly wrong. It was just pain.

Noel often arrived before we made it back to the house. She’d drop by after work, and we’d play rummy until Noel had completely slaughtered us. By the end of the week, I could use the fingers of my right hand to pluck individual cards from my left. Ben’s fingers never got any more dexterous in his clumsy attempts to cheat.

We also ate dinner together every night. Noel cooked, with some assistance from Ben. How she coaxed a teenager addicted to pizza and junk food into the kitchen I’ll never know, but they made a pretty good team. Their chatter and the steaming smells always lulled me into a doze.

Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? In a way it was, while they were there. If I picked at my food, I still ate enough to allay any concerns. If I slept a lot, seemed a little fuzzy or grumpy sometimes, needed sunglasses to get the mail, who could blame me? I was healing. And I was chafing at the inactivity. But most of all, I was taking a lot of pills. A lot for me, anyway. I don’t shun western medicine when I need it, but my need threshold is probably a little higher than most. I was never a recreational drug user, even in college. It wasn’t a matter of morality or legality. Again, I guess I just never felt the need. But I felt the need now.

Once Noel and Ben left in the evenings, my mind would wander where I wasn’t ready to go—back to the clearing in the woods, back to the moments before or the years after my brother’s death. So I’d go to bed. I’d have my nightly dose of narcotics and go to sleep. That worked for a day or two. Then I found that the silence of the day was too much for me to bear, and I started my morning dose.

For the first couple of hours, I’d watch the drugs take effect, like an intellectual exercise. There, there it is—the bit of vertigo in my brain, like I’m falling but only stepping a few feet off the edge of a deck before hitting the ground. It’s controlled falling, trying to find the next step on the stairs in the dark, a step you know is there but your brain thinks disappeared forever when you turned the light off. Amazing. Feel my blood accelerate briefly through my body, then slow down. And the pain isn’t as close. It’s still there, but doesn’t make me claustrophobic, doesn’t feel as if it’s sitting on that same next step down, waiting for my tentative foot to smother me again.

Then I’d sleep, or pretend to myself I was sleeping. It was such a fine line, after a while I didn’t know if I was asleep or not, but it didn’t matter. Not as long as I didn’t have dreams. I found as the days wore on I couldn’t play Ben’s computer game. It was too frustrating, perversely getting more difficult rather than easier. And the sun in the living room was too bright for my eyes, so I started going back to bed. Or not leaving the bed. Most days I remembered to clean up, or at least move to the living room, before Ben showed up after school. The presence of him and later Noel began to be less of a comfort and more something intrusive that kept me from my sleepy haze. Part of me knew that was a problem, but I didn’t care. The most I could do was try not to let my irritation show while Ben and Noel were there.

One evening I was jolted from what may have been a fake doze by a variation on the cocktail party syndrome. I’d call it the “I’m a Lying Bastard” syndrome. I wasn’t awakened by the sound of my name, but instead by the knowledge that a lie I’d told was being passed along to someone else.

Ben was saying, “Sydney doesn’t have any family.”

“None at all?” from Noel.

“I don’t think so,” Ben responded. “She said she’s an only child.”

I’d been trying not to think about my family since dreaming of Allan and reading Lisa’s letter, which of course mean on some level I’d been thinking of them the whole time. That’s probably why the conversation caught my ear, not because of my impressive polygraphic abilities. And because Lisa’s pale blue envelope, now lying on the floor beneath the end table, suddenly seemed fluorescent, pulsing like a paper telltale heart.

I didn’t even remember telling Ben the lie, but I must have done. For years I’d told anyone bold enough to ask that I was an only child. I always rationalized the lie by telling myself that in a way it’s true. The three of us may be related by blood, but we haven’t been a family for a long time. When my brother Allan died eighteen years ago, he pretty much took the idea of family with him. Now for the first time, my “partial truth” felt wrong. I was unable to call it anything but a lie.

My sister Lisa and I haven’t spoken since our mother’s funeral. In her letter, Lisa said it had been ten years, but it’s more like eleven. We hadn’t spoken for years before that either. Lisa and I never got along very well. I always thought she was a b***h, and she always knew I was right. I’m not in contact with our father either, so when I got Lisa’s letter I thought he might have died. You’d think she would have called for something like that, let me know about the funeral, but with Lisa you never knew. Of course, as she said, apparently I hadn’t given her my phone number. And I hadn’t opened the letter for days, knowing it could contain the news of father’s death. Guess the bitchiness gene is common to the entire female line.

I wanted to say something, to stop Noel and Ben and explain all this and more, but there was so much to tell, and I was so tired. It took too much effort to care. I couldn’t face it, couldn’t face them, and feigned sleep. Again, rationalization, excuses, for taking the coward’s way out and not telling them when I had the chance. If I had, I could have saved us all a lot of grief. Maybe. Maybe not.

That night I took the last of the Vicodin—only one, and my sleep was fitful. I got out of bed the next morning, feeling raw, and thought a little food might take the edge off. When I tried to heat a mug of water in the microwave for some instant oatmeal, I found myself staring at the microwave uncomprehendingly. I pushed every variation of the buttons I could think of, with no response. Then I realized the damn thing was unplugged. It must have gone unused all week. Had I eaten at all when Ben and Noel weren’t here?

The microwave stand was too heavy and awkward for me to move to get to the outlet, so I struggled with a kettle of water on the stove instead. The whistle of hot water pierced me between the eyes and probably contributed to my lack of control as I sloshed water into my bowl and made apple cinnamon soup. I forced myself to eat it anyway and felt I was on the road to recovery until I dropped the bowl while trying to rinse it and splashed myself with oatmeal water.

“f**k!” I screamed, recovering my grip on the bowl and bringing it down hard on the counter. Nothing but pain shooting up through my arm. I threw the bowl on the floor. The painful action of my arm was met with a satisfying breaking of ceramic, and I screamed again, a wordless shriek until my breath ran out and my throat felt bloody. I left the shards on the floor and went back to bed.

My sleep was deep and undisturbed, and when I woke up I was feeling more like my self. I seemed to have finally slept myself out of my lethargy and into restlessness. Monday was my follow-up appointment where I hoped for a reprieve from my local doctor, but I couldn’t drive before then. Mike and Richard had made doubly sure of that by taking my car keys. They had called a couple of times to check in, and when they said they were coming to Tallahassee Friday evening—this evening—it was one of the few things that had managed to penetrate my haze. Now I was looking forward to their visit, for the car keys and the company. I’d been hiding long enough, and to butcher my metaphors it was time to get back on the horse before I became equine-phobic. It was time to focus on Isaac again, and it was time to tell Noel what I’d learned about her family.

Mike and Richard were meeting me for coffee when they got in town Friday evening. The coffee house I’d chosen is sort of hippie/suburban bucolic, hippie because a lot of the alternative types hang out there, and suburban bucolic because it adjoins a park frequented by yuppie families feeding the ducks. I was looking forward to getting out of the house, to caffeine in familiar friendly surroundings. Noel was taking me there after she got off work. That gave me some time alone with her, time to get her up to speed before the guys arrived for a strategy session. In hindsight, my cabin fever and temporary drug-free euphoria made me look forward to the outing with unjustified naïve optimism.

This was my first sojourn into public since the accident (attack, Syd, it was an attack) and I was going bandageless and hatless. A scarf over my hair and big sunglasses hid some of the fading minor bruises, but most were still easily visible to the most casual observer. I didn’t care. The more furtive you are about anything, injuries or your relationships or your finances, the more interested people become. If you’re hiding something, it must be because you’ve something to hide. I put on lipstick but no other make-up, and my short-sleeved blouse and knee-length skirt exposed more healing bruises and scratches. Nosy parkers be damned.

Ready half an hour before Noel was supposed to arrive, I decided to unpack my motel bag before I tripped over it. It was on my bedroom floor, and only my tentative, aching baby steps had saved me tripping so far. I put the clothes away first, then moved on to toiletries and the manila envelope from Mrs. Waters. In it was a printed itemized bill, but I was surprised to also find a short handwritten note paper-clipped to a sealed envelope.

According to Mrs. Waters’s note, she’d found the envelope under a chair by the door when tidying my room. “S. Brennan” was scrawled on the outside of the envelope in an uncertain hand. It appeared those fingers had trembled as much in addressing the envelope as my own were in trying to open it. I took it to the kitchen, sidestepping the remains of my ceramic bowl, and slit the top open carefully with a knife. Then I got a pair of latex gloves from under the sink, nearly toppling over, before realizing I didn’t need a whole pair. My right hand still wasn’t that consistently functional (as my attempts at sliding a glove over my left hand demonstrated) and good luck getting a size “small” glove over the awkward splint.

I settled in a bum-numbing kitchen chair and took a deep breath, letting the residual spots and blotches fade from my eyes before sliding the single sheet of paper from the envelope. It was plain paper, the kind you’d find in any printer or copier, folded three times. The words were printed clumsily, as if the writer knew he or she should disguise her handwriting but wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. The message itself was unexpected.

Please go home—its not safe here and your not helping anyone.