Things Unsaid: A Novel (23 page)

Joanne’s first night’s sleep in her own bed was mostly uneventful. Bathed in sweat, reliving the ramming of that tube down her throat, she woke up every two hours. At midnight, her throat seemed swollen. At about two o’clock, after the same nightmare, she lightly stroked her neck, feeling for swelling, as if there were abrasions deep down her throat all over again. At four she touched and played with the soft depression at the front of her neck. No more sleeping after that. With all the OxyContin in her system, she couldn’t feel her head wound. She tapped at the divot. What harm could there be, with the gauze padding the wound? She lay there, staring at the ceiling, counting the beams. She could just make out their outlines in the soft glow of her nightlight. She also counted her breaths. Reassuring. Confirmation of life.

By six the sun was up.

She must have dozed back to sleep at some point, because when she next opened her eyes, she was startled to see her parents and her sister eating breakfast around her bed. She glanced at the clock: seven. Both her throat and her head felt achy, so she just pointed to her neck. Her
parents rose in unison from her bed and Jules from the chair nearby to look for her meds. Jules was the first out the door and the only one to come back into the room—with the OxyContin, and also a cup of ice chips and a Popsicle to chase it down. Megan and Sarah must have already left for school.

“I feel like I might break, Jules. I feel anxious. Didn’t get much sleep with all of my nightmares and all.” She didn’t have to look in a mirror to know that she looked awful. Her eyes felt swollen. All of her seemed puffed up. She looked around. Where had her parents gone?

Jules handed her the cup, listening.

“You know, right after the surgery I felt like a clogged toilet—something wrong with my plumbing, shit backing up. That’s how my saliva felt to me. Viscous and lumpy.” She sipped and made as if to continue.

“Save your voice,” Jules said. “Look, here’s a pad of notepaper.”

Joanne had already spotted the notebook tied to the post of her bed. She picked it up.

“I didn’t realized just how complicated your surgery was until I started learning more about it,” Jules said. “Two surgeons were required. You see, the meninges are a one-way valve system between the water system of the brain and the veins that drain from the brain to the heart. It will take weeks, maybe months, before you feel like your old self.”

Joanne smiled as she listened to her sister, knowing she must have read for hours about meningiomas online. Jules rarely disappointed her.

“So not so much talking, Jo. Did you know meningiomas begin to grow in the embryo? In other words, when Mother was pregnant she already had this brain tumor inside her. Your meningioma. Here, look on top of your dresser. It’s so cool.” Joanne watched as her sister reached for something on top. The dresser was tall, so she couldn’t see the contents right away. Jules carried it closer. In the bell jar was what looked like a pickle of some kind, floating in formaldehyde. Jules laid it on the nightstand, next to Joanne’s new hand mirror.

“Just like Andrew’s formaldehyde cats in the attic. Do you remember?” Jules asked. “Your brain tumor affected the communication system, which protects the integrity of brain-to-heart flow. In other
words, your brain and your heart don’t seem to have much to do with each other.”

Joanne attempted a laugh, but stopped.
Not a malignant event, though
, she wrote.

“Good. Here, suck on this,” Jules said, passing Joanne the cherry Popsicle. Joanne had always loved cherry Popsicles when she was little. They turned her lips red, like her mother’s—“Popsicle lipstick,” she had called it. She swallowed and smiled, loving the coolness on her throat.

“I had to change my health insurance plan after leaving Al,” Joanne began, but her voice was whiskey sounding, like her mother’s. So she wrote instead:
My medical costs are too high. There is a large deductible and a cap. I’m maxed out
.

She didn’t write anything else; she didn’t feel anything else was necessary. Jules would help her. She’d been bailing out their parents for years. She wouldn’t fail Joanne either.

Joanne tried to read her sister’s face to calibrate her reaction. Jules gazed back steadily.

“We’ll talk about your doctor bills when you’re stronger, Jo. Not now.” Her sister’s voice sounded warm and caring, but weary, too. “We’ll get through this together. This sort of thing must happen all the time. Hospitals understand, I’m sure. They must.”

Joanne wrote on the pad: “I want to visit you. To recover.” She had thought about going out there all week. How they could hang out together the way they had as kids. Sometimes her sister drove her crazy, but she could use the change in routine.

I’m so lucky to have a sister like you
, she thought. She wanted to say that aloud, but all her meds were confusing her. So she wrote it down, but she wasn’t sure how Jules received what she’d written. She’d expected at least a smile, but Jules’s face looked grim.

“Now’s not a good time for a visit,” Jules mumbled.

“Thanksgiving is around the corner, and now is a better time for cheap tickets,” their mother said, appearing at the foot of the bed. “Right before the Thanksgiving holiday frenzy. Jules, how can you be so selfish?”

How could their mother call Jules selfish?

“Why don’t we talk about all of this later?” Jules said, and Joanne could tell she was relenting.

I really
am
looking forward to visiting you
, Joanne wrote in the notepad. To getting away from everyone and everything, she thought to herself. To unloading the details of her ordeal onto her sister. No one else bothered to listen, and she couldn’t tell her friends—they would worry too much. But their mother was wrong about Jules—she wasn’t selfish. Their mother was.

J
ules slept fitfully. Her sister’s operation had drained her. Dreaming of her toddler self. Bump, bump, bump on her tummy, going backwards, feeling free and fast.

“Can you be Mommy’s helper right now? Take this milk bottle downstairs, hon, and put it in the box. You know, near the front door. Outside.” Her mother’s words sounded furry, like her lovey—her Velveteen Rabbit. The bottle was so heavy and slippery to hold, even with both hands. Lying on her tummy, cradling the bottle in her arms like her rabbit, she started down. That was all—she only made it down the first two steps. Then, looking up, there was Andrew falling, sliding, his feet in her face. Then she didn’t see anything at all.

Silver flecks on the ceiling. Stretched out on the red Formica dinette table in the kitchen.

“Now, little darling. Don’t cry, you hear me? You are a big girl now. Mommy’s big girl. This isn’t going to hurt,” her mother said as she stuffed a red-and-white-checkered kitchen towel—one that matched the color of the table—into her mouth. It tasted like old spaghetti sauce.

Her father stood over her with shiny steel rods and thread. Eight stitches. Jules peed herself. But she shed no tears.

“What in God’s name was she doing going down the stairs with a milk bottle?” her father asked, turning towards her mother so stiffly Jules wondered if his body had become steel, like the legs on the dinette table.

“Turned my back for a split second, that’s all. I don’t have eyes in the back of my head,” she answered back, quickly hiding her pretty
glass, the one Jules saw her with every day. Her mother then teetertottered—or was that her own head wobbling from being held down so she couldn’t move?—out of the room.

The next day she had to be x-rayed. All that pushing down on her in the kitchen, she supposed. Two protruding bones jutted out below her neck, below her throat. She got to wear a cross-your-heart bra—or so she called it—at bedtime until her collarbone healed. She felt really grown up wearing it. It was like a mommy bra.

Her mother was right about stairs: they could be dangerous.

Jules woke up. She had had that dream too many times to count. But this time she wasn’t covered in sweat. Her fear was concentrated somewhere else. On Zoë. On wondering where she was, and whether she was okay. It was clear now that Mike no longer knew where their daughter was. And the only contact Jules had had with her recently was a text Zoë had sent asking her to send her money to a Palo Alto post office box. Jules had texted back, pleading with Zoë to give her a real address where she could stop by to see her, but she had heard nothing else.

I’ll go to Palo Alto tomorrow and look for her
, Jules decided. What else could she do?

Jules’s eyes hurt from the glare of the monitor. Too bright in stark contrast to the darkness outside her study. Her cursor went right for her sister’s e-mail.

Hi Big Sis:

It’s 4:00 a.m. I can’t sleep. Worry, alcohol, and meds keep me up. I don’t know why—they’re supposed to make me sleep. My bank balance is minus $9.30. I asked Al for money. He says: “What am I supposed to do? I have to pay a mortgage.” But I had to pay for all the child care, food, and children’s clothing out of my meager paycheck. As if Megan and Sarah belong only to me! But that is the past. That can’t be undone. I’m your only sister, and you’ve always been there for me. You never
disappoint! My loan’s coming due now. And my store rent’s going up.

I know you don’t want to hear this, but tough. Neither you nor Mike know what severe depression is like, or bipolar disorder. Yesterday I slept most of the day since I had been cleaning all day Saturday. Went to bed again in the afternoon, got up four hours later. I couldn’t cook dinner. I eat saltines with cheese most of the time. I have lost the desire to cook or eat. And I used to love to do both. Now nothing makes me happy. I just cry and cry. Sometimes I go to sleep just to reset my mind, so the crying will stop.

Depressed means unable to move. It takes me all day to do the simplest task—like make the bed—and then I get more anxious and the crying starts all over again. After a couple of days, I stay up all night to get something done. And the cycle repeats itself. My happy pill doesn’t help anymore. The world is closing in on me. I feel I could fit into an urn—one that matches one of my favorite dresses in color and pattern. Try not to throw this in the garbage with “what does she expect from me.” I will not be hospitalized, period.

Love you
,

Your little sis

Jules’s heart raced as she read the e-mail over and over again. The computer glow was the bluish-green color of the Magritte painting she had viewed with Zoë a few months before. That same
Ghostbusters
color Uncle Wilson’s check had been. A bad-luck color to her, associated with death.

How she missed them. Her family.

She remembered that gallery visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Zoë still had that girl-boy quality: beautiful with her dark chocolate–brown eyes, girlish but athletic and frenetic. And such beautiful, curly, jet-black hair. Like most teenagers, she had concealed her feelings as best she could from her parents. But she’d exposed herself anyway. Wandering through the rooms, hesitating and weaving
through the crowds, not saying much, her daughter had eyes only for paintings done by Magritte, the artist who had created the man in the bowler hat, apple perched on top—the piece of art she’d seen and fallen in love with in the movie
The Thomas Crown Affair
.

Magritte’s most famous paintings were happy, whimsical fantasies—clouds floating across living rooms, fruits in the sky, floating doorways. A crowd gathered around
Homage to Mack Sennett
—a woman’s headless corpse, transparent nightgown draped over the hanger, in a closet. Her nightgown was
Ghostbusters
-colored. A radical departure from the joyful images that Magritte created thirty years later: bowler hats in the sky, birds cut out of clouds.

“Something very bad must have happened to Magritte when he was very young, before he painted this,” was all Zoë had said.

They read the accompanying placard. Magritte had been thirteen years old when his mother committed suicide, and in his early twenties when he painted
Homage to Mack Sennett
. It wasn’t until his fifties and sixties that he blossomed, literally painting blossoms and fruits floating in the sky.

“If you can’t forgive or forget, you’re a corpse in the closet. Magritte wanted to live again,” Zoë said in that offhand fashion a teenage girl sometimes has with her mother. Then her daughter came over to give her a powerful hug. “I love you so much,” she purred, knowing exactly what her mother needed. And the cells in Jules’s body softened in return.

Where is my daughter now?