“You’re such an innocent, Martha Mary.”
The following year things worsened, and I’d wake at night to Del talking in her sleep. She always sat upright. Sometimes, she stood in the closet. I was half-asleep, and the talking rarely made any sense. I would awaken with only pieces of things—her tone, imploring or urgent, a word or two—camellia or mirror? Broken branch? I stopped trying to understand and I accepted the spiral of words that charted her forgetting everything—who she was, what she meant to me. It was a sad sort of relief to think that the only thing allowing me to slacken my watch over her was the understanding that she had moved into a place I could not follow.
Even my mother could no longer excuse Del’s behavior as brilliance, and when I was a senior in high school and she was sixteen, she was sent away, to a place that had been founded in 1824 as the Connecticut Retreat for the Insane, then renamed the Hartford Retreat, and finally, more hopefully, the Institute of Living. Still the place couldn’t shake the pall that came from the many lobotomies performed there from the 1940s to the 1960s. Gene Tierney, the actress who appeared in Laura and Tobacco Road, was admitted in the 1950s and suffered twenty-six shock treatments that robbed her of her memory. She tried to flee but was caught and returned. None of these things could convince my mother or my father that they had made a mistake sending Del there. They were resigned, convinced that this type of thing ran in the family—citing Great-aunt Rose, who had lived out her days in that Fairfield asylum in Newtown, long since closed down and abandoned to ruin.
Without Del, I worried I’d come home to an ambulance in my driveway, men from the hospital poised to chase me down and drag me in, too. Gone was the sister who posed beside me in photographs of our childhood, the two of us wearing Easter dresses or Christmas robes, identical except for color, Del with her blond hair and winning smile, me pouting and angry over some slight no one ever took the time to understand. I knew I was being selfish, that in some way Del had been taken in my place. If I had described my visions, I would have been the one drugged and shuffling through therapy groups and arts and crafts. But I wasn’t brave enough to confess anything.
After almost six months of unsuccessful family therapy sessions, I drove alone to the Institute of Living to visit Del. I was preparing to graduate. It was clear that Del’s participation in teenage milestones—the part-time job, the acquiring of a driver’s license, the various mortifications of high school from her sophomore year onward—would be cut short. By then she’d been transferred to a residential house on the grounds. It was a spring day, the dogwood was blooming, and I waited in the lobby for over an hour, only to be told Del didn’t want to see me. I was hurt, and furious.
I never tried to visit again. We wrote old-fashioned letters back and forth—a method of communication that let me couch my rancor in the false recounting of my life: details of shopping trips with our mother that I never took, a day with my father at museums in the city that never occurred, the date with a man I met at a play I never attended. I knew she’d see through my lies—lying was what we did best together, and so it was my best revenge to hide my life beneath a story of one. In truth, I rarely left the house. I’d gotten leery of the dead. They filled me with regret. And the living troubled me more. At least with the dead, there were no questions—just their longing, and my renouncing of it. I was an intermediary who refused to function in her role. Somewhere, grieving parents and siblings and lovers suffered, and I denied them any solace.
As I sat in the car, reassessing my earliest letters to Del at the Institute, my mother drove through Liberty, home of the old Grossinger’s Resort, where, I imagined, throngs of astral inhabitants reclined on dilapidated loungers. As we passed through the seemingly empty stretches of Binghamton and Lisle into Ithaca, my mother hummed along with a song on the radio, and I sensed she had hopes that I would make a new start, and the pressure of her hopefulness was yet another burden. Perhaps she knew I was fleeing, had sensed, as I did, that the detective’s questions seemed to have become more probing, more pointed, that his gaze had hardened, become almost wily, like a man who had a taste of something he liked.
He’d sat in a chair brought in from the dining room—he needed it for his back, he had said, and whenever he visited, my mother brought the chair into the living room, and he thanked her—“Ah, you remember”—as if her courtesy, too, were being cataloged in a file.
“I have a girl here, a Jane Roberts, who says you had a crush on David,” he’d said.
I’d leaned forward and smiled. “My old friend Jane said that?”