Tension pinches the back of my neck, and from Jenna’s slightly narrowed eyes, I can tell she knows where this one is going. Where my worries always do.
“It’s okay,” she rushes to reassure me.
“It’s really not.” And as my words come out, the Donny Ray case—the children he abducted and murdered—again puts a stranglehold on my mind.
“Chris, he was fine . . . Everything is okay.”
“But it might not have been. He left school, and nobody knew where he was. Kids can’t just walk the streets alone in the middle of the afternoon these days.”
“Sweetie, I know what you’re saying, but the media exaggerates those risks. The chances that anything could have happened are so slim. You’re forgetting that I’ve worked in the school system for years. I know a lot about the dangers kids face.”
“But I work in a psychiatric hospital. I see the other side. Hell, I work with it every day. I know what kind of evil is out there. The predators and killers.”
“I get that—I really do—but look, school is just a few minutes away, and the important thing is that he made it home safe.”
“And the other thing? The part where he might not have?”
“I had a talk with him about that and explained the importance of safety. He’s promised to never leave school without permission again.”
I shift my weight, cross my arms.
“Chris, please stop worrying about him so much,” she says. “Overreacting causes more harm than any potential danger he might face.”
“I got a new patient today,” I say, trying to explain my reaction.
“And?”
“Ten kids are missing. They think this guy killed them. The last one was Devon’s age.”
Jenna’s lips part with unsettled understanding, and all at once I know she gets the full context of my edginess from earlier this evening. Admittedly, I do worry too much about Devon’s safety but now perhaps reasonably so.
This conversation has become way too dark, even for me. Leave work at work, I think. Pulling Jenna close, I place an arm around her, and she again rests her head on my shoulder.
“Well, there is one good thing,” she offers brightly.
“What’s that?”
“Kid’s got a good business sense. Could really pay off for us someday.”
I shift my shoulder, raise Jenna’s head so we’re face-to-face, and inspect her for evidence of sarcasm.
She manages to hold an impressively solemn expression in place. For a few seconds.
Then she cracks.
Now we’re both laughing, and I’m reminded again that life is indeed all about the contrasts and perspectives.
7
IT’S JUST A SHADOW, DARLING
My mother was the classic example of magical thinking in motion. A woman who believed she could manipulate reality simply by ignoring it. A woman who preferred to avoid the complexities of life rather than live in the messy parts.
Southern raised, born and bred beautiful, Virginia Lucille Chambers was a stunning redhead, the kind most men could only dream of. And while she was indeed a sight to behold, everything on the inside seemed to contradict what the outside was doing. There was something so broken about her, so incomplete. The short version: my mother was like window dressing draped over a cracked cinder block wall.
From the start—and at their best—my parents never had the high-functioning or strong-loving marriage that I think was my father’s dream. Mom was skilled at projecting a facade of buoyant optimism, which along with her beauty made her an easy sell to men. But beneath the surface, she was a jumble of complexity. Unfortunately, by the time my father figured that out, it was too late.
Whenever anything went wrong—she forgot to pay the gas bill three months running; she gave away my father’s heirloom casserole dish as a gift for a neighbor—Mom flashed a little charm, poured a nice glass of sweet tea, and pretended whatever it was had never happened. That would be my father’s cue to come swooping in and turn her fantasy into reality. He’d clean up the mess, make it go away, and then, presto change-o, that was that. This crazy, backward dance became our family blueprint, our baseline for normalcy, while our foundation progressively crumbled.
The evidence of my mother’s pathology was both illustrative and endless. One day, while driving me home from school, she decided that applying lipstick was more important than watching the road. Seconds later, we hopped a curb and hit a trash can, which flew into a speedy roll, dead-ending in a neighbor’s cellar window.
And she kept driving.
“Mom! What are you doing?” I said, watching as she made her mistake disappear in our tracks.
“It was only a trash can, dear,” she replied, then stepped on the gas. “It’s nothing.”
“But that trash can just broke a window!”
A mild shrug, an oblivious smile. “I didn’t see that happen.”
“But I did!”
“And you didn’t, either.”
“How can you just—”
“I said, you didn’t, either.”
Whether we saw it was academic, because the homeowner most certainly had, and about ten minutes later, he came stomping up our front walkway. When he banged on the door, my mother ignored it, continuing to unload groceries. Dad, by now an expert at sensing this kind of trouble, immediately headed for the front door while keeping a wary eye on my mother.
Several minutes later, it was all taken care of, my dad apologizing profusely for his wife’s derelict behavior and writing a check to cover the damages, his wife acting as if none of it had happened.
Problem solved.
Business as usual.
But living with such lunacy eventually took its toll, and my father wasn’t the only victim. Struggling to survive inside this thickly encapsulated, reality-skewed world was no way for a kid to grow up. It was shaky footing indeed, one that continued to chip away at my ability to trust the tangible.
Me at age ten. “Mom! There’s a giant spider on the ceiling!”
Painting her toenails, refusing to take her eyes off them, “Nonsense. There are no spiders in this house.”