From Seven to Eight

When I was seven my brother, Brant, was born and I was very excited. Everybody else I knew had brothers and sisters and even though there was a larger age difference between us than the typical one or two years, I couldn't be more happy.

When he was four weeks old and being washed in the bathroom sink by our mother, my brother mysteriously quit breathing. I remember Mother rushing out of the bathroom holding Brant's lifeless blue body and screaming hysterically. As the fire department was summoned, I was commanded to get down on my knees and pray nonstop to Jesus that He might spare my brother's life. I prayed and prayed, and I had never been more scared.

After the fire department arrived, the medics were able to get my brother breathing again, and they took him away to the hospital for overnight observation.

The next fall, when Brant was about eight months old, Mother suffered an adverse reaction to a prescription medicine. Shortly after the incident with Brant in the bathroom sink, she found herself possessed by what she called the “blue devils,” a mild yet chronic case of nerves that would today be diagnosed as postpartum depression. Back then the medical community was prone to patching feminine disturbances with psychoactive drugs commonly dubbed “Mother’s Little Helpers,” and so two months after Brant was born Mother was casually prescribed Miltown, a meprobamate compound used in the treatment of anxiety and sometimes schizophrenia. From spring until fall of that same year she ingested 2,000 milligrams a day and when her take on reality deteriorated and she heard voices or imagined demons scampering in the shadows and saw angels hovering Indian-style above the front lawn, she never once, not once, neglected to take her medication, ever the dutiful mother, daughter, wife, saint of the church.

For six months I became Mother's pet project. She'd taken it upon herself to groom me for a 'sacred mission' she was convinced I was destined to fulfill. For some reason known only to her, she was convinced I was one of the 'Two Witnesses' foretold in the New Testament book of Revelation, Chapter 11. During all this time Father tried his best to pretend there wasn't a problem, that his wife's behavior was anything but normal, so made no attempt to intervene or step in whenever Mother lectured me for hours in the bathroom or locked me in the closet to ponder my transgressions. He hid behind his newspaper in abject cowardice and denial.

One morning in November, I awoke feeling under-the-weather and went into Mother's bedroom to ask if I might stay home from school. Without warning she leaped from her bed, forced me into a headlock, then looked around for the nearest thing she could find. She grabbed a large ceramic coffee mug from her nightstand and began hitting me in the head with it with focused deliberation. Over and again the mug came down on me with a sickening thump. She was convinced I had a demon living inside me (a proposition I could not counter, since even though I was sickly and prone to weakness I still managed to get into my share of trouble) so decided she must beat the devil out of me if I was to become pure. My protestations and screams of terror went unheeded, indeed only seemed to intensify the blows raining down from the mug. Blood sprayed from my head and quickly painted the both of us red, the bed, the carpet, even found its way on the walls and ceiling. At last, when her arm had tired, and there was still no sign of a demon leaping like a monkey around the room, Mother decided the surest way to force the creature out of me was to open my heart for Jesus. She meant to do this literally—with a butcher knife.

Still squeezing me in a chokehold, Mother pulled me from the bedroom and toward the kitchen. As we passed through the living room I saw Brant had somehow managed to crawl from his crib—motivated I'm sure by my screams and shouts—and was pulling lamps and other objects down atop him from the end-tables. There was broken glass scattered everywhere, but somehow Brant had negotiated the shards and had not cut himself. In the kitchen Mother removed a large chef's knife from the utensil drawer, then tore off my pajama top already soaked with blood. She announced the time had come to open my heart for Jesus. I knew that if I couldn't somehow reason with her I was probably going to die. I asked her how she planned to stop the bleeding once my heart was opened. She thought about it for a moment, then remarked she was going to wad up newspaper and shove it into the open cavity. I asked her if this was sanitary. She mulled this over while pressing the blade of the knife against my naked chest. As soon as she had drawn blood, this somehow snapped her into lucidity. She looked around and at me as if waking from a trance. She immediately called my father at work and he called our family physician, Doctor Woodward. Within fifteen minutes, Doctor Woodward and a nurse showed up at our house. Both were aghast. He wrapped my head with a compress, then hurried all of us into his car, a large station wagon that stank of cigarettes and alcoholic sweat. During the ride, I remembered Mother explaining that everything was going to be alright, that we'd all be home tonight, one big happy family, drinking Pepsi Colas, eating buttered popcorn, watching old Laurel and Hardy movies on TV. I don't remember anything else. I passed out.

When I woke it was nighttime and I was in a strange room. I'd been in and out of the hospital enough times throughout my seven years to know that's where I was. The room was dark and quiet, although the door was opened a crack and soft light shone in from the hallway. After a few minutes, a young nurse poked her head in the door and saw that I was awake. She came into the room, offered me some water through a straw, then asked if I'd been a car accident. When I told her, no, my mommy did this to me, she immediately broke into tears and excused herself. A moment later an older nurse came into the room who took my temperature then gave me a shot of something that made me sleepy.

Then next morning I awoke famished. I realized I never ate the day before. A young nurse in a crisp red-and-white striped uniform brought me a big breakfast of pancakes, eggs, and bacon but avoided looking directly at me. I wondered what was wrong. After finishing my breakfast, I eased out of bed to go look at myself in a mirror on the far wall. I had to move a chair and climb up in order to see myself in the mirror, but even the I thought the mirror was playing tricks on me. I didn't recognized myself at all. The top half of my head was so swollen I looked like a big-headed alien creature from The Outer Limits. I was amazed. I was still standing there looking at myself when a nurse came in to take away my breakfast tray. She quickly escorted me back to bed and told me to stay away from the mirror for a few days, at least until the swelling went down. After all these years I can still recall the pain, but once removed, quietly lingering but no longer immediate, just a dull numb thing squatting in the dark atop the nightstand. I had been heavily sedated then, of course, my introduction to the staggering grace inherent in most Class A drugs.

I would remain in the hosital for ten more days, and out of school for four weeks. They moved me from my private room to another room upstairs. Even after I learned how close I was to dying, years later when he found the police report among my father’s papers, I could not recall the fullness of the pain, or the horror, or the fright, or the encroaching darkness. All he could remember was the girl in the next bed over.

She had something terribly wrong with her, she was quite ill, but from what I never learned. Nothing contagious, I assumed, or they would not have allowed me to share the ward with her, unless the hospital thought we were each so far gone it just didn’t matter. Her illness was invasive, and caused her to glow with fever. She irradiated heat like a small furnace. I remember touching her arm that first time and pulling my hand away quickly as if brushing against a warm oven. She was a tropical plantation, moist and hot, a thick stand of rubber trees, sylvan and ripe, exuding resinous scents and superstition. 

She had three tubes hooked up to her, two that pushed fluids in, one that drew fluid out, terminating in a shiny steel cylinder churning obtrusively on the floor. The whole setup reminded me of my grandmother’s old Electrolux vacuum cleaner, real retro but at a time before the word retro was used, with all its hoses and attachments and squabbling sounds. Late at night I would lay awake and listen to her machine working between us, her bed and my own, and try to decipher its mechanical meaning, always whispering the same message, different for each of us, but always the same. We heard warnings, advice, seductions, complaints, but never once did we hear a curse. Only God could curse, consumed by wrath and ire and rage, and yet we embraced something bigger than the Christian God, better, greater, infinitely compassionate, unconditionally loving, eternally patient, an emptiness that lay behind the pain of abuse and childhood disease.

The girl in the next bed over was easily twice my age, sixteen or seventeen, and she was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. It was her eyes, her mouth, the things she would say and the manner of her speech. Gaunt with sickness, emaciated, a collection of hard angles jutting beneath the limp hospital sheets, her weaker flesh was an external dimension toward which I paid little concern. Even today the memory of her tremendous green eyes causes me to daub tears away with the heels of my hands.

And her words. Those words! The small kindnesses from her mouth almost negated the months of verbal attacks I suffered behind closed doors, in darkened rooms, locked on my knees in narrow closets.

It was on my fourth morning in the hospital that I awoke to find himself in a different room and the girl in the next bed over propped up on one elbow looking at me.

“You okay?” she asked in a genuine way.

I looked around the room. There were three other patients that I could see and more hidden behind long curtains that slid on tracks mounted on the ceiling. From behind these privacy screens I heard coughs and sighs and grunts and groans. “They must’ve moved me,” I said, vaguely waving my hand. “It’s better here. Brighter” I tried to keep my voice from breaking or showing any real concern.

“They brought you up from Intensive Care,” the girl in the next bed over said. “No windows.” She shifted her weight off her elbow and eased back into her pillow and stared up at the ceiling. “You’re in the Monkey Ward now.”

“Monkey Ward? How come you call it that?”

“Dunno, really. That’s what they were calling it when I got here and I’ve been here a long time.”

“How long?”

She wrinkled her nose and worked figures in her head. “Three and a half, four months. Something like that. Could be more though. It’s sort of hard remembering the first part.”

“Isn’t there a store called Monkey Ward?”

“That’s Montgomery Ward, silly!” she laughed, and then coughed. The canister on the floor between their two beds began to churn and whine.

“What’s that noise?” II asked.

The girl in the next bed over tilted her head and looked straight into my swollen eyes. For some reason I couldn’t look at her, I was even kind of afraid of her, so I unconsciously adjusted my gaze and looked instead to an imaginary spot just to the side of her face. I did not know it at the time, but I was beginning to show the effects of an unintentional yet long-lasting conditioning. With Mother’s help, I had been inadvertently trained to avoid looking people, especially women, directly in the eye. Years later another woman, full of herself and Jesus, would observe this awkward trait in me and pronounce me possessed by a devil because I was unable to look a Christian saint directly in the eye. The more everything changes, the more it stays the same.

“That noise?” the girl in the next bed over said, playing with the tubes connecting her to the mechanism on the floor. “That’s my support system, you know, like the Mercury astronauts will use.”

Like the Mercury astronauts? I thought this was neat and said so.

“It’s okay,” the girl in the next bed over said. Her voice sounded almost too cheery. “It keeps me alive and I suppose that is neat.”

“It looks kinda funny,” I said.

“You seen yourself lately?”

"I know," I said. "You shouldv'e seen me a couple days ago."

“You got the face only a mother could love,” the girl in the next bed over said. She didn't mean anything by it, just a bit of good-natured "monkey ward" ribbing.

"You’re right,” I said. And then, for the first time since arriving at the hospital, I started to cry.

When I was released from the hospital I had already missed two weeks of school and. On the drive home my father told me I would probably miss another two but could advance to the third grade with the rest of my class if I made up all my homework and passed the tests I missed. It was a week until Christmas break and I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. I was going to have to work hard to catch up.

The blood stain was still on the carpet of my parents’ bedroom. Someone had attempted to scrub it away but only ended up making it worse. Now it looked like a shadow that never disappeared, a hole in the green carpet that led down into the earth. For years I would avoid this stain, would not permit myself stand on it, afraid I might fall into it and never come up.

The blood stain was still there but Mother wasn’t. She was still in the hospital, my father explained, a different hospital than the one I had been in, a different kind of hospital. I didn’t remember her hurting herself bad enough she needed a hospital, but things had gotten a little crazy there near the end and I just assumed all the blood everywhere, on me, on her, on the bed, the carpet, the knife, the kitchen floor, had been my own. I touched my chest through my shirt and remembered where the knife had been and what it had almost done.

Two hours a week I had to visit a doctor, but Doctor Bill wasn’t like any doctor I ’d seen before. Instead of an examining table and bottles of rubbing alcohol or jars of Q-Tips and squeeze-bottles filled with brown soap, Doctor Bill’s office looked more like Perry Mason’s office on TV. There was a desk and six different types of lamps, some chairs and a black sofa. The floor was mostly covered with a beautiful red rug that had a paisley design and white fringe at both ends. The walls were lined with bookshelves and rows of important looking papers in glass frames. On a square column separating the two windows, whose Venetian blinds always seemed closed to the outside, there was an old-fashioned photograph of a bearded man smoking a cigar. The man looked a lot like Kris Kringle in the movie Miracle on 34th Street even though Kris Kringle never smoked a cigar as far as I could remember. And I could remember everything. All Doctor Bill ever wanted to do was talk about whatever it was I could remember. Mostly Doctor Bill would ask questions and I would answer those questions. Sometimes I didn’t feel like answering Doctor Bill’s questions, but Doctor Bill was tricky. He could always get me to answer eventually. Sometimes I would cry after answering the tough questions and other times I would feel sick to his stomach, but I always felt better afterwards, sometimes a lot better, so I decided Doctor Bill must know what he was doing asking questions I would never ask himself. At the end of ten weeks Doctor Bill told my father I didn’t have to come back anymore and my father seemed genuinely relieved. We celebrated that night, just the two of us—Brant was staying with the neighbor lady across the street—by going to the A&W in Edmonds and ordering Papa Burgers, french fries, and huge frosty mugs of root beer.

In May, Mother was finally released from the hospital. She had been there six months and although everyone called it “the hospital” I knew what had really been going on there because I overheard Elaine Leary, our neighbor who baby-sat Brant during the day, tell another neighbor lady it was where they took the crazy people and it was either go there or go to prison and if it was up to her she'd choose prison any day over a snake-pit like Firlands.

Later I learned that while Mother was in the hospital she was given both insulin shock and electroshock treatments. She lost large portions of her long-term memory and some short-term. After the first couple of months there she became even more paranoid and mistrustful, believing the hospital staff was trying to poison her. She took to hiding her pills under her tongue and spitting them out in secrecy. Not taking her medication she started getting better. The hallucinations went away, the voices, the angels from her peripheral vision. Feeling better she started swallowing her pills again and would quickly relapse. This cycle continued for months. Better, worse, better, worse, and it took her doctors a half-a-year to figure out what was really going on—that she was having an adverse reaction to the tranquilizers—but by then it was too late. When she was finally released she did not remember Brant at all and she thought I was only six years old. Everything in between was missing. Two years. Completely erased.