Family Storms (2 page)

“That makes sense when it comes to your parents,” she told him. He never talked about his parents or his sister,
and none of his family ever called or showed interest in him—or any of us, for that matter.

Mama and Daddy's fights usually ended with Daddy pounding a table or a wall and sometimes breaking something and then running out of the house with curses trailing behind him like ugly car exhaust.

I'll never forget the day we were evicted from our apartment. I was twelve, nearly thirteen, and home from school because I had a bad cough. We had no medical insurance, so Mama would always try to cure me with some over-the-counter medicines. More often than not, she would just tell me to take a nap or sit in the sun. She was in and out so much in those days that she hardly noticed when I was sick, and she was not taking very good care of herself, either. I knew she was with different men frequently and drinking too much. I hated it when she came home late at night and began babbling and crying. She would stumble and bang into things. I would bury my face in my pillow and refuse to help her.

Eventually, her good looks began to fade like a week-old rose. Her hair lost its rich, soft look until it no longer flowed. The ends were always splitting, and she wasn't keeping it clean. She finally decided to cut it herself. When she was done, it looked as if someone had hacked it with a bread knife, but even if she hadn't done it while she was high on some cheap gin, she wouldn't have done a good job.

It wasn't only her hair and her complexion that grew worse. Her figure seemed to stretch and bulge like the walls of a water-filled balloon. She couldn't get into her jeans and had to wear baggy skirts. Because we didn't have a car and
she couldn't afford taxis, she walked so much in old shoes that her feet were always aching or blotched with ugly blisters. She took to wearing oversized sneakers.

I remember once looking out the window and seeing a woman walking up the street, her eyes glassy, her gait uneven, and thinking,
How sad. Look at that bag lady.
When she drew close enough for me to realize it was my mother, I was stunned.

But I was frightened more than anything. The little there was of my own world was falling apart. I had long since stopped having friends over to visit, and no one was inviting me. My attention span in school was bad. I dozed off too much and took little or no pride in my work. My grades were tanking. My teachers said I had attention deficit disorder, which only made me feel more different from the others. Teachers were constantly asking me to bring my mother to school. We had no phone by then, so they didn't call, and letters were useless. She considered everything a bill and read nothing.

Now that I think back, I realize my mother was really the one who was stunned. She must have woken one morning and realized just how badly off we were and how helpless she was. Instead of the realization driving her to be more vigorous in search of solutions, it caused her to retreat to the gin and whiskey. It almost didn't matter what it was as long as it was alcoholic and could jumble up her thoughts and fears to the point where nothing seemed to bother her.

However, to this day, I don't think of her as having been an alcoholic. I believe she really could have stopped
if she had wanted to stop. She didn't have the courage to stop. It was ironically easier to look into the mirror and see someone she didn't recognize. Otherwise, she would have committed suicide.

I suppose if we could have afforded psychoanalysis back then, she would have been diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic. Something that had begun too subtly for me to realize right away had been happening in her head. At times, I thought she was talking to someone else. At first, I thought that occurred only when she was drunk, but I quickly realized it was happening even when she was stone sober. I think the person she was talking to was herself before I was born, and even before she had met Daddy. From what I heard and could understand, she was warning her younger self not to leave home, that if she did, this could be how she would be.

Of course, it made no sense to me, and if I asked her what she was doing or whom she was talking to, she would look at me angrily, as if I were intruding on a very private conversation.

“None of your business,” she might say, or “It's not for your ears.”

Whose ears is it for?
I wanted to ask.
There's no one there
. But I kept quiet. I was actually too frightened to push much further, anyway. Who knew what that might cause to happen, and enough had already happened.

She wasn't home when the police came to the apartment the day we were evicted. The landlord had followed all of the necessary legal steps, but Mama had ignored it all. I was home sick. I opened the door and looked up at two
burly sheriff's deputies. One took off his hat and combed through his hair with his fingers as if he were searching for a lost thought. He looked sorrier than the other for what he was about to do.

“Your mother here?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Where is she?” the other deputy asked.

“I don't know,” I said, and coughed so hard and long that they both stepped back, fearing infection.

“Jesus,” the first deputy muttered.

“Do you know when she'll be back, at least?” the second deputy asked me.

I shook my head.

“We'll wait in the car.”

They turned and went to their vehicle parked right outside our first-floor apartment. At the time, I didn't know why they were there. I thought maybe they had found my father and needed to tell my mother.

After I closed the door, I went to the front window and waited, watching the street. Finally, I could see her coming. She didn't look drunk. She was walking fast, swinging her arms, with her purse wrapped around the front of her body like some shield. She had told me she did that to avoid having it grabbed. “Not that I ever have much in it,” she'd added.

The deputies saw her heading our way and got out of their vehicle to approach her. She stood listening to them and then just nodded without comment and continued to the front door. When she entered, she saw me standing there and shook her head.

“You can thank your father someday for this,” she said. “Pack only what you really need. We can't carry too much. I'm not spending money on a taxi.”

“Why are we leaving?”

“We can't live here anymore. The landlord got the police on us.”

“Where are we going?”

“To a hotel nearby,” she said.

It sounded good, but when we arrived, I saw how small it was. The lobby was barely bigger than our living room had been, and we had one room with two double beds and a bathroom.

“What about a kitchen?” I asked.

“We'll eat out when we want hot food. This will have to do for now,” she told me.

Her best hope was that “for now” was forever, only I didn't know that. I didn't know how serious the dying going on in her head was. Because we slept in the same room, I woke up often to hear her nighttime chats with her invisible second self. Most of the time, it was done in whispers, but I often caught a word or two. None of it ever made much sense to me.
Maybe she's just dreaming aloud,
I thought, and went back to sleep.

She was doing it now as we trekked up the beach. The raindrops had become more like pellets. I kept my head down and lifted my eyes just enough to see her soaked old sneakers pasted with sand and mud plodding forward awkwardly.

“Where are we going?” I cried. I was tired and would have gladly just slept in the rain.

She didn't answer, but from the way she was moving her arms and hands, I knew she was talking to her imaginary self. I could see the top of a bottle of gin in her shabby coat pocket. There was no one else on the beach but us, so there was no one to appeal to for any help. I was feeling worse than ever. The only way I realized I was crying was by the shudder in my shoulders. My tears were mixed in with the rain.

Mama suddenly turned and started toward the sidewalk. I hurried to catch up. She carried her suitcase limply. It looked as if it was dragging. Even though I was exhausted myself, I wanted to help her, to take it from her, but she wouldn't let go of the handle.

“I'll carry it!” I cried.

“No, no. This is all I have. Let go,” she said.

The way she looked at me sent a sharp pain through my heart.
She doesn't recognize me,
I thought.
My own mother doesn't know who I am. She thinks I'm some stranger trying to steal her things.

“Mama, it's me, Sasha. Let go, and I'll help you.”

“No!” she screamed, and tore it out of my grip.

We stared at each other for a moment in the rain. Maybe she realized her momentary amnesia and it frightened her as much as it had frightened me. Whatever, she turned and surged forward.

I sped to keep up with her. We were at a traffic light on Pacific Coast Highway, and it turned green for us. She stepped into the road, and I caught up with her to walk side-by-side. We were nearly to the other side when I heard car tires squealing and looked to my right.

The vehicle struck Mama first and literally lifted her over my head before it struck me hard in the right thigh. I saw Mama slap down on the pavement just before I fell and slid in her direction.

That was how my life began.

1
The Accident

T
he pain was hot.

Although I was lying faceup in the road and the rain was sweeping over me in a downpour, I no longer felt the slightest chill. It was as if electric heaters had been placed all around me. I heard myself groan, but it seemed to come from someone else. My first thought was that I was dead and this was the way a soul left its body. Any moment, I expected to be looking down at myself lying there on the road, shocked, my eyes two balls of blue glass, my mouth opened in a silent scream. Souls don't cry, souls don't laugh, but they can be surprised when they realize they are no longer part of their bodies.

Cars began stopping, some nearly rear-ending the ones that had stopped already. Looking through what was to me a curtain of gauze, I could see some men directing traffic, shouting at drivers, waving off the curious. I started to move, but the pain shot so fast and sharply up the back of my leg, up my back, and into my neck that I immediately
stopped and closed my eyes. I was vaguely aware of someone beside me, holding my hand. There was a man's voice and then a woman's. I realized the woman was trying to get me to talk. I heard more shouting. I tried to open my eyes, but they wouldn't open. The noise began to drift off, and then it came surfing back on the wave of sirens.

“Mama,” I thought I finally managed to say. I wasn't sure I had spoken. I drifted away again and then opened my eyes when I felt my body being lifted. When they began to slide me into the ambulance, I had a funny thought. I envisioned a freshly made pizza being slid into the oven. Slices of pizza were our lunch more often than not and sometimes all we had for dinner.

I looked back and saw another ambulance.
They're getting Mama,
I thought, and that gave me some comfort. The paramedic beside me was saying soothing things and putting a blood-pressure cuff on me. There was so much conflicting noise, mumbling voices, cars, people still shouting, that I could make little sense of anything else the paramedic was saying. Finally, the doors were closed, and I heard the siren again as we began moving.

“Hot,” I said, and lost consciousness.

I awoke in the hallway of the hospital emergency room. My clothing had been removed, and I was in a hospital gown. I saw what I knew to be an IV bottle and stand beside me. The tube was attached to my right arm. There was a blanket on me, but there was no doctor, nor was there a nurse tending to me. People were rushing around. No one spoke to me. Another pair of paramedics wheeled in another gurney, and I thought,
Maybe that's Mama,
but it
turned out to be an elderly man with oxygen leads in his nostrils. His eyes were wide, as wide as those of someone who saw his own impending death. They pushed him past me without even looking at me, but it frightened me.