The voice laughs from the entryway.
I pivot in that direction. Jenna stands there, and from the distress washing across her face, I know she’s been there long enough to watch me frantically race around the room, shouting at no one. Her mouth hangs slightly open. Her arms are glued to her sides.
As for me, my feet feel anchored to the floor like lead. I can’t speak. I’m embarrassed and humiliated. I’m shaken, because in one fell swoop, all the comfort Jenna was able to restore after the MRI yesterday, all the hope she helped me rebuild, feels lost. Not just for me, but from what I’m seeing, for her as well.
“Mommy!” Devon calls out from his bedroom. “Where are all my baseball hats?”
“Probably wherever you left them, sweetheart,” Jenna yells back, but her eyes never waver from me.
“They were all on my dresser,” he says, “I just saw them there this morning!”
Jenna shifts her fretful attention to the staircase. “Ten baseball hats?”
“Yeah, and they’re all gone!”
“I’ll help you in a minute,” she says, then turns back to me.
Reprieve over.
“I should be getting my results from the MRI tomorrow,” I offer quickly and nervously. “We just have to ride this out a bit longer, and then we’ll have answers.”
Before Jenna can respond, movement over her shoulder distracts me. Jake crosses the entryway.
Carrying one of Devon’s baseball hats in his mouth.
I look back at Jenna and see my fright reflected on her face. She doesn’t understand what I’m thinking, but it doesn’t matter—I know she feels it. My wife takes a step away from me, and I see a shadow drift along the planes of her face. Something that looks like uncertainty. Like doubtfulness. No, it’s more than that. It’s— “Chris,” she says, voice shaky and holding unsettled eyes on me. “I don’t know what just happened, but it’s making me very nervous.”
She’s not alone on that.
54
NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T
My father began seeing and hearing things that weren’t there—sometimes people, sometimes small animals, and sometimes beings that defied the laws of biological reason.
He also began screaming at them.
After that day in the car, I already knew the score, knew exactly where we were headed. To a place with no promise of a new day and no escape, just new ways to experience old and troubling emotions. A life of being tossed between extremes, none of them good.
My father was very sick, and that was a secret Mom could no longer hide from others, even as she continued the fight to hide it from herself. One day, Dad wandered out of the house in his pajamas and strolled to the next-door neighbor’s. After welcoming himself inside, he plopped down on their sofa and launched into a loud and frightening diatribe about six-legged, subhuman creatures, cohabiting and reproducing inside sock drawers. Frightened and unnerved, they called my mother, who rushed over to explain that he’d become disoriented after getting a flu shot: they didn’t buy it, and news of my father’s lunacy quickly traveled through the neighborhood. Everyone watched us now with guarded suspicion.
We were all struggling against the same truth, each in our own way: my mother fighting mightily to ignore it, me feeling threatened by it, and my father hopelessly lost in it. The more difficult my dad became, the more my mom would bounce between two rocky states, either digging into her toolbox for another mental contrivance or isolating herself within the dark clouds of depression. When things became most intolerable, she would exercise the option of committing my father for “evaluation.” Then off he’d go, shipped away for the county to deal with.
“They’re going to make him better!” she insisted every time, her smile so tragic, tears so desperate. “You’ll see. They’ll fix him—they will—and then we can finally have him back!”
But it was like sticking a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. We always did get him back, but he was never anywhere near fixed, and in some ways the hospital visits only made him worse. He’d arrive home medicated, stupefied, and for a short time more manageable, but eventually his disturbing behavior would resurface and escalate further. Even while he was gone, I didn’t find much relief, just a permeating sense of oncoming doom that germinated within me like a fast-growing seed. So many nights I cried myself to sleep, feeling lost in my helplessness. Lost on this mental merry-go-round with him, cycling through tragic hopelessness and going nowhere fast.
Our family threads were quickly unraveling, a river of denial swirling and pulling them looser as my father continued to come undone.
And in the process, he was taking us all down the same path.
55
As my car drifts toward work, restless worry hangs ahead of me like a bad vapor.
I told Jenna the MRI results would bring answers and give us hope, but if I’m going to be honest, my statement was more an act of desperation than assurance. An MRI can’t detect schizophrenia, so I’m praying it will reveal a brain injury, because at least that might be treatable. Against schizophrenia, I don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell.
It’s sad—if not completely ironic—to hope that a damaged brain could save me from going crazy, but fighting for sanity feels a lot like struggling to maintain balance on the tip of a double-edged blade. Each day I slip a little closer to the end, trying to keep my mind from destroying my family before it destroys me. I don’t know how much longer I can hold on. Judging from Jenna’s reaction last night, it would seem she’s beginning to wonder as well. I could almost see cracks spreading through the courage she’s worked so hard to maintain.
My breaking mind is also breaking my wife.
I try to ignore the thought, but it won’t let me. Then, as I pull into Loveland’s entrance, ten feet of tarmac brings a distraction I didn’t at all want.
My foot briefly slips off the brake pedal.