Book Reborn

Jo Kasten’s middle child has always been difficult. Fiery, defiant, startlingly handsome and hyper intelligent, Eddy’s childhood years were full of turmoil and conflict. But when he reaches manhood, things change--for the worse. Eddy’s struggle with schizophrenia begins in a men’s bathroom at a local junior college and carries him to the deepest recesses of the human mind. In the midst of his descent, Jo is diagnosed with breast cancer. Cut Off is a story of love, madness, death, family loyalty and the primal bond between mothers and sons. Set in the frightening landscape of mental illness and physical disease, Cut Off is a story of survival.


After major revision and a new title, my second novel is back for more. I'll be posting a chapter a week for the next 32 weeks. I hope you'll join me as the story unfolds.

While preparing each chapter for publication here, I'll also be re-formatting the book so that, by the time we are finished, you will be able to buy a paperback copy or an ebook online. Because this site has been abandoned for some time, some links are still pointing to my first iteration of this book, called Count All This. Please don't buy that book! Wait until Cut Off is ready.

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the ride.

Any comments, observations, well wishes, or questions that you'd like to post here or send along are welcome. To contact the author, write pcferg@pacbell.net.

32 ~ Santa Cruz

Photo by
Brendon Stuart

After the radical mastectomy and after the first frightening chemo and after my hair started coming away from my head in handfuls but before my skin turned gray and before Lawrence buzzed me bald and before the hideous cold sore on my lip which flowered tenaciously for more than a week making me feel like a (perversely appealing) gargoyle, Rose suggested spending a day together.

“Let’s do something, Mom,” she said sweetly in October, her voice wafting over the ether and out of my cell phone to make its way into my cochlea. The sound was delightful. We set a date. We made a plan.

“You know what I’d really like to do?” I responded with some enthusiasm (the new, lower-quality enthusiasm I’d been generating since events began). “I’d like to drive to Santa Cruz and go to the Sock Shop. I’m thinking of buying lots of pairs of cool socks, one for each chemo treatment they have scheduled. Then I’ll wrap them up and after each treatment I’ll pick one out for a reward—just like when you were a kid and went to the doctor’s office. I could also buy a pair of cool tights for you and we could spend some time hanging out at the beach.”

Rose approved the plan, arriving by BART from Berkeley the day before our date and spending the night. As fate would have it, Eddy was home too, so we invited him to come with us. Lawrence and Henry were at work and school.

I can’t remember why Eddy was home. After being released from the hospital the second time and finishing the partial hospitalization program, he’d found a place to live in Berkeley and enrolled in school, two feats we considered evidence of improvement. But we weren’t sure how well he was doing there. He was secretive, distant, sometimes belligerent. He wasn’t usually interested in spending time with his family. But he was in Sunnybrae that day, wearing a mysterious black cowboy hat, and so he came along with me and Rose to Santa Cruz. First, though, some ground rules needed to be established.

“You’ll have to sit in the back seat Eddy,” I informed him preemptively. The Nissan had only two doors, and the back windows didn’t roll down. The seat was unpleasant, but he still wanted to come.

“And you’ll have to do whatever I decide. This is supposed to be my day, my treat from Rose, so it’s no fair trying to talk me out of or into something. You just have to go along with what I choose.”

“Okay,” he agreed dispassionately, adjusting the hat. I was protecting myself from an argumentative child that didn't seem to exist.

When we took off, Rose was in the driver’s seat. I sat in the passenger seat with a scarf over my head to keep my hair from falling out, and Eddy squeezed in back. We headed toward the Pacific Coast right away. As soon as we got to Highway 92—the two-lane route over the mountains that winds up to the summit and then down to the coast through fields of pumpkins and Christmas trees, past fruit and flower stands—we came into traffic, a long line of cars creeping behind a big truck which couldn’t accelerate uphill. We settled in for a lengthy ride.

“How are you doing, Mom?” Rose asked.

“I’m okay, I guess.”

“Is the chemo hard?”

“Yes, it is.”

“What’s it like?”

“I already told you, Rose.” I was annoyed. “The chemicals they’re putting into me stink, and they’re scary. One is bright red, like Kool-aid—I get two huge cylinders that must hold a quart full of that. The nurse couldn’t get the needle into my vein the first time. She jabbed and jabbed at the back of my hand. Your father cried.” I looked out of the window, tapping my knuckle on the glass.

That week at the infusion center we’d met an emaciated woman with lung cancer who had been given only a short time to live. She’d already exceeded expectations. “My doctor calls me the Energizer bunny, because I just keep ticking,” she said. I gave her an anemic smile.

We were in one of the three private rooms, preferring that to the big community room with six or seven infusion chairs, a television, a nurses’ station, and a constant flurry of activity. The private rooms had two beds each, and two chairs, for visitors. Sometimes, we were lucky and no one shared the room with us. But that day the woman with lung cancer had arrived in a wheelchair and received help getting up on her bed. Her toes, I noticed, were twisted. Her toenails were painted pink. After introductions—when we shared information about diagnoses and medications—she spent most of the four hours it took to infuse me napping. But after waking suddenly one time she turned her head on the pillow to fix me with a stare. “I can’t sleep at night,” she told me in a near whisper. “I leave the television on to keep me company. There doesn’t even have to be a show on. Just the sound of static is comforting.” Her husband, seated at the foot of her bed in the visitor’s chair, nodded his head with vigor. His head was covered with bright brown hair. Hers was covered with a gray turban.

“You lie awake and wonder,” she said.

When we reached Half Moon Bay, we stopped at Caffino, a little drive-through coffee stand. I had a chai latte. Rose had hot chocolate with whipped cream. Eddy said he wasn’t thirsty. He was quiet and subdued, lacking his usual animation. I felt worried about him, as I had been nearly constantly for the past five months, but also determined to enjoy the day out with my daughter. On the counter in the window was a tip jar with the label, “Instant Karma.”

“I’ll take some instant karma, too,” I told Rose, handing her an extra dollar to pay the server. “I think we could all use some of that.”

After we got our hot drinks we turned left on Highway 1 and headed out of town. We were quickly back in farm country, surrounded by fields of baled hay and bright pumpkins and tall shivering corn backlit by the mighty Pacific Ocean. The sky was enormous, gray and overcast—-the ocean roiling. The coastline between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz is the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen, and I’ve driven down it every summer for more than 20 years. The scenery is so magnificent it inspires artistic endeavor. Last summer, I took photographs of Rose in a white satin wedding dress that I’d bought at a thrift store standing in a field of cabbages beneath the Pigeon Point Lighthouse. I’d brought the wedding dress along with us today, and my excellent old single lens reflex Leica, in case inspiration hit again.

The experience of being a passenger on this stretch of road was new to me. Normally, I drove, and had to divide my attention between the scenery and the traffic. But that day, I luxuriated in the fact that I could devote all my attention to the water. “The ocean is my mother,” I told Rose playfully. She nodded and smiled.

It wasn’t until we were about five miles out of Half Moon Bay that Rose revealed her secret plan. “I’m taking a class on female sexuality, and I have a project due on body image,” she began.

“Umhumm.” I was distracted.

“I brought my movie camera.”

“Yes?” This brought my attention around.

“And I want you to film me walking naked down the side of Highway 1.”

“What?!”

She laughed mischievously. “You heard me.”

“Rose, you can’t do that,” I admonished her. “We’ll all get arrested.”

“Oh, come on, Mom. It’ll be fun! There aren’t any policemen out here.”

“No, Rose,” I used my authoritarian voice. “I really don’t like this idea, at all. Something bad is bound to happen. Someone might pull over and attack you. Or they’ll get into an accident. They’ll be so distracted by the sight of you walking naked that they’ll drive off the road.”

“Mom, be serious. That’s not going to happen. There aren’t even very many cars out here.”

“Rose, NO! It’s crazy.”

“Mom…” Her tone was disdainful.

“Hold on a minute. Let’s think about this. There’s got to be something else you can do for the assignment that will work. What was your whole idea?”

“Well, first I thought I’d take some videos of me walking naked along Highway 1,” she paused to give me a big, teasing smile. “Then I’d do a voice over about how I feel about my body. Then I want to interview you about what you said to me about sex when I was becoming a teenager, how my body was my own and you wouldn’t try to control my virginity, because that was so cool, Mom, and that had such a big influence on me-—on how I feel about myself and how I turned out as a woman.”

Was she buttering me up? I wasn’t sure if it was deliberate, but it was working. I felt a warm waft of pride suffusing my body.

“Rose, I’m very glad to hear that, really I am, and I’d love to help you with this project. I’d be honored to be interviewed on your film. But I just don’t want to do anything too crazy or illegal right now. I’m feeling too vulnerable. If something bad happened, I don’t think I could handle it.” I thought for a moment, considered sacrificing my wayward son. “Maybe Eddy could film you while I hid in the car.”

Rose nodded thoughtfully. “That would work.” I glanced mischievously at the back seat, but Eddy wasn’t playing along. He sat staring passively out the window.

“No. Wait a minute. I changed my mind. That wouldn’t work, because the policeman would bring you back to your vehicle. Then he’d find me and hold me responsible.”

“Do you really think he would, Mom, even though we’re adults? It wouldn’t have anything to do with you.”

“That doesn’t matter. If I’m here, I’m responsible.”

Just then a sign advertising a corn maze appeared on the side of the road. It was the third sign I’d noticed for the attraction, but the first time I’d paid any attention. “Corn maze…” I muttered, trying to rein in an elusive idea. “Rose, that’s it! We could do it in the corn maze. That would look great on film, and it would be private. No one would see you.”

“You think so?” The entrance was rapidly approaching.

“Of course! It’ll be perfect. Turn left at this driveway. Turn left! Turn left!”

The corn maze turned out to be enormous—-two square miles—-and cost $5 a person to get in. I didn’t mind paying in the least, felt I’d escaped disaster by pulling Rose’s project off the road. Rose was excited by the prospect of filming. Eddy followed along mutely, in a dreamy state. I felt another flush of worry about him. He was so quiet, so distant, so unlike himself. At the same time, I was relieved that he wasn’t running amok and causing trouble.

First, we gathered our stuff out of the car: two cameras, a water bottle, a warm scarf for me, the white satin dress in case a good photo opportunity presented, my wallet and keys. The proprietor was a small, grizzled man wearing a greasy cowboy hat and smoking an unfiltered cigarette. I located the entrance sign and, a ways off to the right, the exit sign. “Can we just go in a little ways and then come back out the entrance?” I asked him a bit nervously. “We just want to take some pictures. We don’t want to go all the way through.”

“What are the pictures for?” he asked suspiciously.

“Nothing special. Just family. Just mementos.”

“As far as I’m concerned you can do whatever you want to, as long as you pay me. Just mind you don’t get lost in there.” He gave a malicious stare.

“We won't.”

Outside the maze some bales of hay were piled up to make a play area for small children. An oversized scarecrow surveyed the scene. There was a family on the bales—-a mother and father with a toddler and a baby in a stroller—-and a few random children darting in and out of the exit. Two other families were picking through the adjacent pumpkin patch, looking for the perfect spheres to make their jack o’ lanterns for Halloween. The maze didn’t seem to have any customers at the moment. That suited us perfectly. We went inside eagerly. After turning one corner, I took up the camera. Rose ran ahead to the end of the path, took off her jacket, tossed it capriciously on the ground, and disappeared around the corner like a wood nymph. “Perfect. That was perfect, Rose, but could you do it again? I’m not sure I got it framed right.”

As we moved through the maze, we developed a rhythm. Rose was the actress, I the filmmaker, and Eddy a kind of prop boy, carrying all the dropped clothing and acting as a lookout in case any strangers approached. At the end of the next row, Rose kicked off each of her shoes seductively. Next came her socks, pants, shirt, tank top…We followed her deeper and deeper into the corn maze, lured as if by magic, fascinated as she discarded another item at every turn. After her lacy bra, she finally took off her last stitch of clothing—her underpants—and gave a little leap of joy before disappearing around another corner of the maze. I saw myself restored in her leap, in her healthy young body. She had two breasts, of course, small ones like mine had been, and smooth wide hips, bright red hair, luscious blue eyes. Her nude female form was a panoply of possibility.

Eddy and I hurried after Rose with urgency, as if we were trying to capture her. Just then we heard a group of noisy teenagers approaching quickly from behind. Rose scurried to pull on her clothes again, barely getting her shirt over her head before they rounded the bend in a tangle of laughter and stumbled upon us.

After the filming, which energized both me and Rose but seemed to have no impact on Eddy, we continued south on Highway 1, arriving in Santa Cruz around lunch time. We found the Sock Shop on the Pacific Garden Mall and spent half an hour picking out 16 pairs with crazy colors and patterns. We decided to have lunch at the Bagelry and were sitting outside in their little fern-covered patio eating garlic bagels with hummus and alfalfa sprouts when I suddenly realized that I’d been wanting to come to Santa Cruz during the month of October for years—-but had always been too busy working—-in order to visit the site where thousands of monarch butterflies stop on their migration to Mexico. So we drove to Natural Bridges State Park next, at the end of West Cliff Drive, which hugs the cliffs along the beachfront north of the Boardwalk. The park attendant who took our money said not many butterflies had yet arrived, and even suggested it might not be worth the price of admission to enter, but I was glad to pay. Hopefully, by the time next October rolled around, I would be healthy again, back at work, and too busy to come.

After we parked the car, we walked along a wood-plank path marked with butterfly symbols, and when I noticed one or two flutter past, I thought we had seen all the park had to offer. But then a breeze picked up, and the trees bloomed orange. That’s when we realized that hundreds of butterflies were hanging in vertical strands all around us. We had mistaken them for leaves, since they were clustered so closely together, and the undersides of their wings were a dull, mottled brown. Rose cried out in excitement at the first recognition, and ran off down one of the paths, gazing upwards. Eddy and I stumbled mutely after. Seeing his broad back hulking before me on the path, and feeling my own stiff legs beneath me, I was reminded of the Frankenstein monster, or Grendel, dread night monarch astir in his cave. But each of those misfits suffered most from isolation. “At least we have company in our monstrosity,” I thought. “There are two of us.”

After the butterflies, we drove back along West Cliff Drive to the statue of a surfer with a long, old-fashioned board, and pulled over to watch his living counterparts riding the waves. Rose and I stood near a rail which overlooked an iceplant-covered cliff to the ocean. Behind us was a grassy meadow where a wedding was being staged.

Eddy was laying on the grass with his arms behind his head when a gust of wind took his black cowboy hat, lifting it off his head and depositing it on the iceplant on the other side of the railing. Eddy quickly stood up and attempted a youthful leap over the rail, holding the top with both hands and swinging his legs over the side. It was the kind of jump I had seen him make a hundred times—the kind of jump he could have easily completed just a few months before. But today his foot caught, and he went sprawling on the slippery iceplant, coming dangerously close to the edge of the cliff which dropped off to sharp rocks jutting out of the surf 30 feet below.

“No, God. Please!” I cried out without thinking, instinctively clutching the necklace that Greta had made me with both hands.

“Come back Eddy,” Rose coaxed gently, while her hands tightly gripped the rail. “Just forget it.”

The two of us waited anxiously, not wanting to say more, afraid of provoking an unexpected reaction. The hat remained on the edge of the cliff for a moment, as if taunting him, and he was turning slowly toward it when it lifted up abruptly and then dashed down to the sea.

Eddy came back to us then. I tried to grab his hand as he climbed over the railing, but he wouldn’t let me (“Mom! It’s okay. I’m coming”). I felt relieved when we were all buckled back in the car. This time I took the wheel.

The sun was setting magnificently as we retraced our route, splashing the sky with yellow and orange and purple hues. We drove north on Highway 1, with the ocean stretching out endlessly on our left, deep blue and fathomless for mile after mile, the wide expanse bordered with a frothy white fringe. The air outside was crisp and cold, with a tang of salt. Inside the car it was warm and quiet. Rose had chosen to sit in the back seat with Eddy, and the two of them leaned together and napped, reminding me of their childhood, while I crooned the prayer song I had written on this route years earlier, changing the words to give thanks that we were safe and alive. When we got to Half Moon Bay, we found Highway 92 so clogged with traffic that the cars were standing still.

“Let’s not go that way,” Rose suggested sleepily. “Let’s go up through Pacifica and around.” So I drove much farther north than I was used to, past Mavericks, past Miramar, past Devil’s Slide, traveling far afield in the dark and feeling lost and flustered, taking strange and arduous pathways till we found our way home.

THE END

Chapter 31 ~ Search & Don't Rescue

Photo by
Brendon Stuart

The last time I saw Jason was when Eddy was still in the partial hospitalization program which the hospital had prescribed as part of his “exit plan.” He arrived with his girlfriend Susie on a Saturday, poking his head tentatively through the front door. I came out from the back of the house at his call and ushered them onto the couch. It wasn’t like old times. Jason didn’t fling his music book onto the dining room table and pull out a chair, or reach into the refrigerator for a beer, or even saunter beyond the living room. “I’ll go get Eddy,” I said, establishing my power as gatekeeper and defining the nature of their visit at the same time. Eddy was in the back room, and when I told him through his closed door that Jason and Susie had come to visit he said okay. He’d be right out.

I returned to the living room and sat on the love seat by myself, at right angles to them. I was aware of my breasts, visible beneath the pale green sleeveless top I had worn on many outings with Jason in the past—of my long, ginger hair. “Eddy said he’s coming,” I announced. Then I heard the shower starting in the back of the house. “After he takes a shower,” I added after a pause.

Jason leaned back on the couch uncomfortably, delicately balanced between us. Susie didn’t speak or even move much but still pulled him toward her as a glacier pulls a drifting ship. I flitted about unpredictably like a nervous cowboy, dangling a rope to slip over his neck.

“How’s he doing?” Jason asked, avoiding the mistake which had incurred my wrath on the last visit.

“He’s doing pretty well, I guess. He spends eight hours a day at an out-patient program near the hospital. I’m not sure what he does there. He doesn’t want to tell me much. I know there’s some kind of group therapy—a few different groups, I think, and some individual therapy too. Maybe crafts.” My description was listless.

“How does he seem?” Jason looked critically at me from behind his glasses. He sounded officious, like a social worker who was evaluating my home to see if it was a suitable environment for our delicate offspring.

“He seems okay,” I said without much commitment. “He spends a lot of time in his room. He mostly wants to be alone...I’m not doing too well though.” I looked at Jason then, trying to pierce through the pose. The angle of my stare eliminated Susie, cut her off like the tip of a triangle, creating instead two parallel lines: from me to Jason, from Jason to me. Tears threatened as I made this last effort to recall him to my side, to remind him of the friendship we’d so recently enjoyed.

Jason looked pained, but not at my misfortune, at my indiscretion to mention it to him. He looked uncomfortable in his position on the couch, shifting his hips. He didn’t ask for more information.

“I guess you heard I have breast cancer?” I plowed ahead heedlessly.

“Yes. I heard something like that.” He looked at his shoes.

“Well, they’re going to cut my tit off next week.” I tried to push him off balance. When no outpouring of empathy was forthcoming, I hazarded a glance at Susie. Perhaps our common femininity would create a bond. But she sat immobile, with her signature blank expression. I wasn’t a human being to her, but a rather uninteresting artifact of a long-dead stage of her lover’s life.

“That’s too bad,” Jason mumbled, embarrassed.

“Yes.” I didn’t help him out.

Then there was more talk—perfunctory, scientific, scripted—as we waited for Eddy to emerge from the back room and rescue us from the social quicksand I’d rudely stepped into, touching it first with my toe, then my leg, my genitalia, simultaneously sinking and watching myself sink.

After 20 distinct and painful minutes, Jason decided to go. I had entreated Eddy two or three times to come out of the shower, my trips to the back bathroom providing a diversion from our vigil on the couch. “I guess Eddy’s not coming out after all,” Jason finally said.

“No. I guess not.” I surrendered. “Why don’t you holler goodbye to him through the bathroom door, anyway?”

Jason was glad for the excuse to leave the front room. He quickly walked to the back, and Susie followed him. I stayed speared to the small couch. They returned in a few minutes and said Eddy would soon be following them. “He wants to go to Half Moon Bay with us.”

“He does?” I was surprised, but glad. “That’s great. I’m glad he wants to get out of his room.”

“That’s what he says. Do you think it’s okay?”

“Yes. I think so. He goes out every day, after all, to the program. He walks there by himself. I think it will be good for him to go out and have some fun with friends. That’s nice of you to take him.” I offered a small gesture of reconciliation.

A few minutes later, Eddy looked happy as he tripped out the front door after them. “Bye, Mom,” he said.

But four hours later, Jason called to say he had a problem.

“You do? What is it?” I rushed my words. My heart raced as I recalled the phone call from Eddy up at CSM just four months before that had started the downward spiral of events.

“Well, Eddy’s disappeared. We were sitting on the beach and he just got up and walked off and never came back. We’ve been waiting for him for a long time, but now it’s getting late and we’ve got to go home. I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I just leave him here?”

“Oh, shit. He just walked away?” I repeated. “How long ago?”

“About an hour and a half.”

“Well, I guess you should leave him then,” I said reluctantly. “I don’t know what else you can do, if he’s disappeared. What beach are you on? Are you in Half Moon Bay?”

“No. We decided to go a little further south. I’m not sure of the name of the beach. It’s near San Gregorio.”

“Did he say anything when he left? Was he angry?”

“No. He just stood up and walked off without an explanation. So what should we do now?”

“Well, can you wait a little longer? Maybe half an hour? Would that be okay? Or is that pointless?”

“I don’t see the point. If he hasn’t come back by now…”

“Okay. Okay. Then why don’t you stop by the police station and just give them his description and my phone number, in case they come across him and he’s disoriented.”

“There isn’t a police department here.”

“Just go to the next town. Or if you can’t find one there, just go to the one in Half Moon Bay. Just as a precaution. That’s what we did in Santa Cruz, and they found him right away.”

“Okay. I’ll do that then.” He sounded annoyed.

“Is that too much? Do you mind doing that?” An edge of insult creeped into my voice.

“No, no. I’m just not sure what good it will do.”

“I’m not either. But at least then, we’ve done something, so if he’s lost, we might be able to find him.”

“Okay.”

I hung up the phone desultorily and went to report the news to Lawrence. We considered driving out to the coast, but decided against it. The task of finding Eddy would be impossible. We weren’t even sure which part of the coastline Jason was on. Then an hour later, we got a phone call from the San Gregorio Police Department. The voice on the other end of the line was young and assertive. He had several questions. What did Eddy look like? How old was he? What was he wearing? Was he mentally competent? Was he on drugs? Then he told me he was bringing officers in from all the local jurisdictions to mount an all-out search and rescue operation for my son.

“Oh, dear. We didn’t want you to do that,” I said fretfully. “I’m sure he’s fine. For all I know, he could be hitchhiking to Santa Cruz by now. We just wanted you to have our name and number so you’d know who to call if you happened to pick him up.”

“You don’t understand, ma’am,” he said determinedly. “It’s dangerous out there on the rocks. The surf could come up and take him away. It’s life threatening for him to be on this desolated bit of coastline, alone, at night.” He infected me with fear.

The search for Eddy went on all night, with officers calling every two hours to give me an update. One officer even showed up at my door, having driven up 92 from the coast, to get a photograph of Eddy. They were planning to post flyers in all the small coastside towns, he told me. "I don't think you need to do that," I told him helplessly. But it was no use. It was out of my hands. In the morning, they called out a helicopter.

Then, around 10 a.m., I got another phone call from the leader of the search and rescue effort. I wasn’t sure if he was the same man who had called the day before because his voice was different. His tone had changed.

“We found your son, ma’am,” he told me wearily. “The helicopter spotted him this morning, not far from where he disappeared. But he won’t get into the squad car. He refuses to cooperate.”

“I’m sorry, officer,” I offered weakly, ashamed. “But I’m glad you found him, anyway.” A small sop.

“Yes. Physically, he’s okay. He’s sitting here on the beach in San Gregorio. But since he doesn’t want to get in the squad car, there’s really not much else we can do for him. We don’t want to arrest him, because he hasn’t broken any laws. We could wait with him here until you arrive to pick him up, but he says he doesn’t want that either. So what do you want us to do, ma’am?” At last, someone had asked me.

“It doesn’t sound like there’s much you can do,” I answered, repeating what I’d said to Jason the day before, what everyone who loved Eddy was feeling. “I’d drive out there to pick him up, but I don’t think he’d get into the car with me when I got there.”

“I don’t either. He says he won’t.”

“So I guess you should just leave him where you found him,” I said dejectedly. Several hours later, he called his father to ask for a ride. I thought perhaps I was relieved.


Come back next Sunday to read the next chapter, or buy a paperback copy of the whole novel HERE.

Chapter 30 ~ Round Two

Photo by
Brendon Stuart

Eddy stayed longer the second time around, still without much effect. It would be another year, and a third trip to the hospital, before he was willing to try medication and psychiatry—to make a serious effort to come back.

When we passed the three-day threshold of the 5150 “hold for observation” without comment from the doctors, we knew we would be in for a long haul.

On the fourth day, Eddy told me the staff wanted him to escape, drawing me over to the big window in his room. “See that bike down there?” he asked. Four stories down, by the fire escape, leaning against the back of the building, was a bicycle.

“Yes.”

“They left it for me. They keep doing things like that—leaving openings for me to escape. They are hoping that I’ll take the hint.”

“Who do you mean by ‘they’ Eddy?”

“You know. The people who work here. The ones who are connected to the larger organization.”

“What organization is that?”

“Come on, Mom. You know I can’t tell you.” He sat on the wide ledge which framed the non-opening window. He wore a hospital gown—white with small blue flecks—and green slipper socks with white tread on the bottom. He was careless about how he held his legs; I hoped he was wearing underwear.

On the fifth day he was in a surly mood. They had transferred him to a teen ward that worked on a point system. “Why don’t you participate in group therapy so you can get privileges?” I asked him. “Then you could listen to the meditation tape I brought you.” He cleared his throat and spit on the wall. A big wad of green phlegm stuck there, not moving.

“I think we better go now,” Lawrence responded, putting his hand on my elbow and steering me toward the door.

“No, no,” Eddy protested. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. I won’t do it again. Stay awhile longer.”

The glob of green phlegm stuck tight to the wall and became a fourth party, a silent witness.

“Are you going to clean that up?” I asked Eddy.

“No. I mean yes.”

“When are you going to do it?”

“Later. After you leave.”

When Eddy called home that afternoon, I had to ask him, “Did you clean up the wad of spit, yet?”

“Not yet, Mom.”

I pictured it on the greenish wallpaper, and worried that the housekeeping staff wouldn’t notice it. But the next time we visited, Eddy was in a different room, and I forgot to check on the phlegm.

On the sixth day I brought Gem, a friend of Eddy’s from camp. I called Dora. I called Charles. I called Mike Goodman. I called Sonia. I asked everyone I could think of to visit Eddy in the hospital. They did.

On the seventh day, I didn’t go inside. I sent in my sisters Jean and Claire instead. Jean was on her way to Santa Cruz for the annual summer reunion at the beach house. Claire had come to Sunnybrae to see both Jean and Ed. On the way home from the hospital, Dr. Brand called my cell phone to tell me I had ductile carcinoma in situ, “the best kind of breast cancer to have.”

On the eighth day, Eddy was the only one left on the teen unit. The black girl who mostly cried in her room but sometimes stared blankly at Teletubbies on the TV in the common area, the white boy in a baseball cap who wouldn’t stop talking, the blonde girl with bandages encasing both forearms, had all been released. “I guess those other people were saner than I am,” Eddy opined.

Also on the eighth day, Dr. Hu asked to see me and Lawrence. We met at his office off hospital grounds. The entrance was around the back of a small building—a house divided up haphazardly into offices. The waiting room was miniscule. The door to his office was almost too small for him to fit through. His room was cluttered with books. Books on his desk. Books on bookshelves. Books on the floor. We sat down in two chairs opposite his big desk. He asked us questions about Eddy’s childhood, then repeated what he heard, putting it in his own words and skewing the meaning.

“So, your son has difficulty making friends.”

“No. He didn’t make friends at his elementary school. But he made friends at church. He made them at camp.”

“So your son has difficulty maintaining his friendships.”

“No. He has had long-standing friendships with people from camp. He made friends in high school that he still sees.”

“So your son has been in a lot of trouble with the authorities.”

“Not a lot of trouble, no. But some.”

Dr. Hu nodded sagely. After a 45 minute interview, he knew all there was to know about our son. “So what do you think is the problem?” we asked him eagerly.

“It could be anything. It’s hard to say.”

On the ninth day, Eddy decided to stop taking medication. He had read his patient rights and knew they couldn’t force him. He sat quietly, with his legs crossed, in his habitual guru pose, as a nurse talked to him about it.

“I understand your wanting to do this,” she said. “Just pay attention to how you react. If you think you’re getting worse, stop the experiment.”

“Eddy, don’t you think you should do what the doctors tell you?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

On the tenth day, the insurance company decided that if Eddy wasn’t taking medication, he didn’t need to be in the hospital. Dr. Hu called to say he couldn’t prevent our son from being released. We met hurriedly at the hospital—Eddy and Lawrence and I and Dr. Hu and a social worker—to talk over the exit plan. Eddy agreed to attend a day program for the next two weeks. They called it partial hospitalization. Lawrence and I were given phone numbers to call about residential programs for people who are mentally ill.

On the eleventh day the hospital called Lawrence at work at 10 a.m. to say Eddy would be released in half an hour. Lawrence rode his bike over and the two of them walked the three miles home together. Eddy wore the clothes he had checked in with. He still didn’t have any shoes.


Come back next Sunday to read the next chapter, or buy a paperback copy of the whole novel HERE.

Chapter 29 ~ The Dream

Photo by
Brendon Stuart


That night I had the dream. Eddy and I were down in his room, the one that belongs to Henry now, beneath the rest of the house. It was dark. We were huddled beneath a blanket. The blanket was gray, or iron blue, rough in texture, like the old blankets my father brought home from the army after World War II. Itchy and tightly woven. Warm but uncomfortable. The opposite of soft...

The dream was set against the back wall of the room, under the stairs, except there weren’t any stairs then. When Eddy had the room, he preferred there not to be any stairs. That way, we could never enter his room without going outside and around the back, through the little door that led to a storage room, and the bigger door that led from the storage room to Eddy’s. He entered it himself through the hole in the floor in a closet-like space off of the kitchen, using his upper body strength to lower himself down until his feet reached a ledge along one wall. Young people could do this, climbing in and out of his room like monkeys. His parents could not.

The condition of stairlessness was the result of an accident. The water heater had broken under the house, flooding the basement room. I had to remove all the furniture, and all the carpet—first ripping it into pieces with a box cutter—and the makeshift spiral staircase which was holding down a section of wet, moldy carpet, all by myself, because Lawrence was consumed at that time with opening a restaurant in Sunnybrae, a restaurant that might mean our financial ruin, or our success, and because our children were young and uncooperative, as suburban children often are, raised without chores or household responsibilities or much respect for their elders.

After I removed everything from the room, and got a new carpet put in, Eddy asked that we not rebuild the stairs. This was an easy request to honor. Lawrence didn’t want to rebuild the stairs anyway. They had been ridiculously hard to build in the first place, requiring multiple attempts to get the angle and rise and curve just right, so that they led from the ceiling to the floor in reasonable increments. Sections had to be built outside and humped through the short doorway before being reassembled in the room. It was a hard job. It was an unpleasant job. It was an expensive job. And when I had to destroy the stairs to get them out of the room, it was an easy decision not to build them again. Besides, I got some strange sort of satisfaction from seeing Eddy pull himself up out of his room each day—from seeing him struggle. He had made our lives difficult in so many ways, on so many days, that this seemed one small recompense, one tiny tip in the balance of the world’s burden off of our backs, onto Ed’s.

So there we were—against the back wall of the room, in my dream, under the not-stairs, behind the hole in the ceiling that Eddy could pull himself through but I could not. I would have to go out the locked door (but did I have the key?), through the musty storage room, into the overgrown backyard and around to the dilapidated back stairs if I wanted to leave.

There was movement beneath the blanket. I couldn’t see our faces. I couldn’t see our limbs. I couldn’t see our bodies or even a tiny patch of skin or any part of either one of us, but I knew what was happening. My point of view in the dream was that of an observer. I wasn’t experiencing the dream from inside my own body. I watched from the middle of the room, transfixed. I saw the movement beneath the blanket—hidden in the dark, against the back wall of the basement room, beneath the no-stairs. And then I saw the movement stop.

One edge of the blanket fell back and I saw my own head emerge, my long, reddish-gold hair. I pulled something from beneath the blanket. It was a dagger, slender like a letter opener, long and silver with a t-shaped hilt, like a tiny sword. The silver was pure, spotless, sparkling in the no-light. The dagger was the most brilliant thing in the room. The blade was close to twelve inches long. I plunged it into Eddy’s stomach.

I had to kill him.

I didn’t feel guilt, or remorse. It was natural. It was necessary. I climbed down off of the shelf (was it some kind of altar?), leaving Eddy’s body beneath the blanket. I held the slender dagger in my hand. There was no blood on it. It was clean and shining, made of precious metal. I walked toward the door. I would look for Henry, next. To be fair, to be merciful, I would kill my younger son immediately, as soon as I saw him, before I had a chance to meet him beneath the blanket. That way he would die as innocent as he had been born; he would enter the gates of heaven unstained...

After I had this dream I awoke in high confusion. “Omigod, Lawrence, I just had the most horrible dream,” I whispered fearfully to my husband.

“Really? What was it?”

“I dreamt I was down in Eddy's room, in bed with him, and then I killed him. Then I went looking for Henry, planning to kill him, too.”

“That’s really twisted,” Lawrence said in a low, seductive voice. “What a pervert.” He turned toward me and put his hand between my thighs.



Come back next Sunday to read the next chapter, or buy a paperback copy of the whole novel HERE.

28~Return

Photo by
Brendon Stuart

I awoke in the cold cabin to thin morning light and the familiar sound of Jean putting on her shoes. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep as she walked by my bed and out the door, which swung shut with a loud bang. Next I heard her trudging up the hill to the toilet, and knew it wouldn’t be long before she came back.

“Are you awake, Jane?” I asked quietly, looking up at the ceiling, not turning around to see her bed at the back of the cabin.

“Yes.”

It was good to hear the voice of my milder sister. Hearing her sympathetic tone was all I wanted, really. I wasn’t eager for conversation. But since it seemed that I should say something more, I asked the obvious question. “What am I going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

I was comforted by Jane’s lack of certainty and the warm weight of my sleeping bag. Like me, she was buffeted by circumstance, not sure how to respond in the face of disaster, preferring to stay still, cocooned in the cabin, waiting for some kind of sign. In these circumstances the memories of our father’s episodes worked against me. Dad had lost his mind several times, but always returned to reality unescorted. He had an unholy hatred for hospitals, and classified as a traitor any person who suggested he should check into one. And as it played out, he didn’t seem to require them. Was it possible that Eddy’s madness would follow the same rules? I felt unsure. And it seemed that Jane did, too. But Jean was untroubled by any hint of ambiguity. She knew exactly what to do.

“You have to take him to the hospital,” she told me when she returned, bursting through the door and sitting down solidly on the empty bed opposite mine, which had become the repository for all our bags and belongings.

“But how am I going to do that, Jean? What if he doesn’t want to go?”

“You’ll talk him into it. I’ll help you.”

“Okay,” I said uncertainly. “But I think you should talk him into it. I don’t think he’ll listen to me. In fact, if I suggest it, I’m sure he’ll resist.”

“All right. I’ll talk him into it. But you have to get up and help me find him first.”

Jane and I put on our clothes slowly and the three of us walked down to the lodge area where, surprisingly, we found Eddy sitting at a picnic table out front.

“There he is,” I pointed him out to Jean. “Well, that was easy. You go ahead and talk to him. I’ll wait inside.” Jean didn’t blame me for my cowardice, or laugh at the absurdity of me running away, or resist her assignment in any way, but walked purposefully toward my son, a force of nature in her yellow shirt, turquoise shorts and white sneakers with ankle-length white socks. Inside the lodge, I scooped out a bowl of granola and sat at a table near the window, where I could spy. Before long, I felt ridiculous. “I’m going to go talk to them,” I told Jane before bringing my bowl outside and approaching the table.

“Eddy. It’s the best thing for you. You need help,” Jean was saying in a calm, loving voice.

“No. Not yet. I’m fine…I think,” Eddy answered. “Hi, Mom.” He turned his face toward me, glad of the distraction.

“Hi, Eddy. How are you feeling this morning?”

“Okay, I guess. I think I want to read my poem at the Talent Show tonight.”

“You do? Well, it’s a good poem.” Eddy had read it to me earlier in the week, on the day we had hiked out to Ledges, a remote and beautiful swimming hole. Jane and Jean and I had driven to the trailhead with Karen, another woman our age, and enjoyed the 50-minute hike up the little north fork of the Big River as much as the swim when we arrived. The trail went through many transformations during the hike, starting out as a big, rutted road with two yellow, locked gates to block car traffic, passing through a fairy circle of enormous redwoods that created a still, silent sanctuary beneath heavy boughs, and then trickling down to a tiny footpath just big enough for a medium-sized human to avoid the poison oak that crowded in on either side, along with loganberries and stinging nettles and tall, tickling grasses. Once we arrived at the sandy bank deep in the woods, we found another small group from camp, and a family of locals: mother, father, and toddler. After lying in the sun long enough to raise our temperature, Karen and I peeled off our clothes and got into the water. It had taken me five years of coming to camp before I loosened up enough to go skinny dipping with the regulars, so I wasn’t surprised that Jean and Jane preferred keeping their suits on. They were the only ones clothed. An hour or so after we arrived, a group of teens from camp showed up. “Where’s Eddy?” I asked Brenda, whose thick, black hair made a striking contrast to her pale white skin.

“Oh, he was with us. But he wanted to stop along the way.”

“Stop? But where?”

“I don’t know. He just stopped. He didn’t want to keep walking.”

Eddy never showed up at the swimming hole, and I worried over him for the next few hours of our stay, wondering if he might have gotten lost in the wild, or would miss his ride back to camp, or decide on a whim to leave the forest with a group of townies and never look back. But on our hike back to the car, he suddenly appeared in the middle of the path, surrounded by verdant vegetation, like some kind of magical wood sprite. He stood without speaking in a beam of light that filtered through the trees, clearly aware of the visual effect he was making. He had his shirt off, was barefoot, and held a piece of crumpled paper in his hand. The background framing him was 100 shades of green.

“Hi, Mom. Can I talk to you?” he asked when we approached, as if there was nothing unusual about meeting up in the middle of a redwood forest.

“Hi, Eddy. Of course!”

Eddy and I dropped back while Jane and Jean and Karen walked ahead. He had written a poem, he said, and he wanted to read it to me. His voice was strong, his mind clear, and his poem provocative. He kept apace with me for 15 minutes or so talking about it before peeling off and fading back into the trees. That was a day I felt good about coming. Camp seemed to be having a salutary effect on Eddy. He was recovering, I told my sisters. He was coherent. He had written a poem! But the next time I saw him, he looked completely lost.

Now, a few days later, with the camp week almost over, I finally agreed with my sister Jean that maybe Eddy needed to return to the hospital after all. I stood considering this prospect as all around me people were practicing for the traditional week-end talent show. A group of four adults was sitting on chairs before music stands, playing a Baroque piece on recorders of various sizes. Five little girls were working on an acrobatic skit. A smattering of drummers were coordinating their rhythms under the trees.

“I’m going to go work on my poem,” Eddy told us, rising from the table. “I’ll see you later.”

“Wait a minute, Eddy,” I stopped him. “Are you sure you don’t want to go home right now? After last night, I thought we would be leaving this morning.”

“No. I’m not sure. But I don’t want to leave this second.”

“Okay. Well, how about this? Why don’t you get your things into the car? Let’s get the car all packed and ready to go so we can leave at a moment’s notice, if we decide to.”

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe, Eddy,” I girded to assert my authority, unsure what response it would bring. “I’m feeling anxious now. Remember our promise to each other? That we would leave if we needed to? Well, I need to. I want you to go get your things and put them in the car. I’m not saying you can’t read your poem at the talent show. But I still want all our things in the car, just in case.”

“Okay,” he said easily. Then he left.

“What do you think?” I asked Jean as he walked away from us.

“I think you should be leaving now. But it’s a good thing you got him to pack up, anyway. We can talk to him some more, later.”

I went and packed up my own things, and hauled them out to the car. When I ran into Melanie, Henry’s abandoned girlfriend, I told her to do the same. “Eddy was feeling pretty crazy last night, and we might need to leave at a moment’s notice, so after you pack your things in the car I want you to stay around the lodge where I can find you,” I warned. She agreed.

Once my things were in the car I felt some relief. A decision had been made; we were moving in a direction. The rest of the day was spent waiting.

After lunch was over, Gem, a lovely and responsible teenager with white-blonde hair and opalescent skin who had run the popular soap-making workshop earlier in the week, sought me out in the clearing in front of the lodge, where I was making myself accessible. “I think Eddy’s in trouble,” she told me.

“What’s happened!?” I jumped up out of my chair.

“Nothing’s happened,” she calmed me. “He’s just been talking to me, and it sounds like he’s having a pretty hard time.”

“Oh, thank God he’s all right. Well, what should I do? Should we go find him?” I walked with Gem back towards the Far Meadow, where we thought we might run into him. “What’s he been saying?” I asked.

“He says that he’s having trouble thinking. His mind is racing out of control. He hears and sees things that he isn’t sure are real. He doesn’t know what’s happening to him, and he’s scared.”

I felt the proper worry and sympathy when she told me these details, but for some perverse reason, when we found Eddy sitting on some beleaguered camper’s front step, my chest exploded with anger.

“Eddy, how’re you doing?” I asked aggressively.

“Not so well.”

“That’s what Gem’s been telling me,” I tried to modulate my voice. “Come on, why don’t you get up and walk with us? I doubt the person who is staying in that cabin wants you sitting on her step, blocking the doorway.”

Eddy scowled at me. “Nobody’s here!” he said. “There’s no problem. Why do you care about that person? You don’t even know who she is.”

“Are you sure nobody’s there? Did you look inside?”

Eddy shook his head in frustration at my inanity.

“Listen Eddy, I want to go home now,” my voice took on an excessive tone. “I know you’re having a hard time, and I am too. You don’t have to go to the hospital, if you don’t want to. But let’s get out of the forest. I want to go home. The car’s all packed now. I want us to get in it now and drive away.”

Eddy stood up and started walking towards the lodge. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Someone’s trying to tell me what to do. Someone’s trying to talk to me, but I can’t understand what he’s saying.”

“Eddy. Nobody is trying to talk to you but me. There’s nobody here but me and you and Gem. Can you understand what I’m saying?”

“This isn’t working. This isn’t working. I don’t want to get in the car with you. I’m not supposed to.”

His resistance to leaving triggered more animosity in me, reminding me of countless times when he’d refused to end outings as a child. I remembered the time I had to chase him around Marine World for 45 minutes in a sputtering rage before finally capturing him in a foolish maze, and though I wanted to beat him senseless at the time, I remembered restraining myself admirably, managing merely to carry him, kicking and fighting, all the way to the car. He bruised my thigh with his heel that day, and broke the flesh on my arm. I told him during the ride home that I would never bring him to Marine World again, and I never did. But that didn’t change his behavior. At King’s Castle, a video parlor closer to home, I’d become so apoplectic at his refusal to leave that I’d actually gotten in the car without him and driven away. I didn’t carry him out that time because I couldn’t bear the physical confrontation—the flailing and screaming, the kicking and scratching, and especially not the people standing and staring after me like some kind of child abuser. Yet the vision of him in my rear view mirror, finally coming outside and running after the car on his skinny little boy’s legs as I pulled out of the parking lot, still filled me with both guilt and anger. Then there was the Unitarian Universalist snow trip, when the problem was not refusing to leave, but leaving too soon. Tired of waiting for me to gather up the other children off the slopes, Eddy had hitchhiked back to our lodgings with another church member without telling me, leaving me to look for him frantically in the freezing snow for two hours, imagining all the while that he was in some kind of danger, or dead. All the frustration of raising this preternaturally willful child welled up in me.

“Edward, why are you doing this to me now?!” I yelled at him. “Why did you wait until Dad left before you went crazy? I can’t deal with this alone, I’m telling you! Just get in the goddam car so we can go home!”

“No, Mom. No. I’m not going yet,” he used a calm voice that threw my own into sharp relief, making me realize that I was the one who sounded hysterical. “I’ve got to read my poem at the talent show. I’m sure of that.”

We were back at the lodge area now, and Jean moved in for tag team persuasion. I saw her envelop him in her big mama’s arms, pulling him close to her chest in a completely open and candid way that I envied—a way I hadn’t been able to hold him since he hit puberty.

While Jean showered Eddy with unconditional love, I sat at a distance and wondered what was wrong with me, asking myself for the thousandth time if there was something lacking in my mothering that had brought Eddy to this pass.

I remembered what he had said in the hospital three months previous—that at the core of his difficulties was a birth trauma, a desire to stay in the womb, not to separate from me. I remembered the dream...

After dinner, the lodge was made ready for the talent show, with the big tables pushed to the back and the benches lined up in front of a clearing which would be used as a stage. Mike Goodman was the MC this year, and I was comforted by the sight of Eddy’s friend all grown up, big and bear like and friendly, with a full head of long brown hair, running the show. I found a place on the edge of a crowded bench and waited for Eddy’s turn anxiously. The room was crowded with parents and children and teens. Jane sat beside me, and Jean stayed in the staging area outside, with Eddy. First came several silly performances of small children doing sommersaults and tricks with hula hoops. One group of young boys recreated two scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: the Black Knight getting all his limbs amputated in battle, and the gatekeeper asking riddles of the knights who wished to cross a bridge. A pair of small sisters did a magic trick. An adult sang a love song. Brenda danced to a Stevie Nicks CD. At one point I saw Eddy poke his head through the back door which was acting as a stage entrance for the various acts in waiting, and then worm his way into a group of spectators sitting on the floor along the side of the stage. I went out to talk to Jean when I saw he was settled inside. Jane came with me.

“He’s ready to go to the hospital,” Jean told me. “He wants to leave as soon as he reads his poem.”

Melanie was outside too, hobnobbing with the excited and costumed performers, and fully informed of the plan. I gave Jean a grateful hug goodbye, in case we left in a hurry, and a promise to see her with her family in Santa Cruz in August. I hugged Jane goodbye, too, thanking her for coming and supporting both me and Jean. Then I hurried back inside to see Eddy’s performance.

He was scheduled to read just before intermission. Mike announced him and he stood up alone before the audience. He held up his paper, and I imagined him stunning the crowd with his brilliant locution. It was a testament to his charisma that I saw several adults leaning forward in anticipation. But in the pressure of the moment he just hurried through, mumbling, so that most couldn’t hear what he had to say. But I did.

Death and dying; Anticipation.
I’m too ready to be ready.
My flow is stunted, my thrusts blunted
Try too hard and martyr my failures
but now I hang up on success
I’m down on progress past the present
But my life isn’t in line, my life?
My life? I mean right fuckin’ now
‘cause I don’t have another I’m not
immortal. Here I am munching nuts and
Writing but they both go half ignored apparently
my parents and me we had a moment once us
three. I loved my mother and she me I
came out of her breathlessly I
did discover another universe I was reborn without
consent and now I hurry then slow I’m spent
little maybe change is against my nature cause I
didn’t want to leave that warm secure shelter
Now, I’m stuck in a wombless room or hallway as
the case may be and I know that worlds flip
upside down but I hold these two that make
me frown.
Die to the womb I died I die now, crazy
but too lazy to make it all the way, rationality
stays. Internalize those closed up eyes and
refusal. No approval. Came out blue and
hated to.
I’ll die like all the rest.

The crowd couldn’t hear all the words, but they saw the emotion, and were clapping enthusiastically when Eddy slipped out the stage door and I went out front to meet him.

“That was good Eddy,” I encouraged him.

He hung his head and shook it once.

“You ready?” I asked.

He nodded this time.

The people who happened to be outside hugged us goodbye until Melanie climbed into the back, and then Eddy snapped the seat back into place and sat down on the passenger’s side. I slid into the driver’s seat, and we started down the dusty road.
Even though it was dark, and we had a long way to go, it was a tremendous relief to be on the road at last, leaving camp and the crowd of people behind us, traveling toward home, and Lawrence. We did little talking. Eddy sat much of the time with his eyes closed, although I didn’t think he was sleeping. Melanie sang along to music coming out of a set of headphones attached to her ipod.

Hours later, around midnight, we pulled into the parking lot of the emergency room at Sisters of Mercy Hospital. This was the same entrance we’d gone to three months before, in daylight hours, when Eddy had been admitted to a psych ward for the first time after cutting his hand. It was dark now, of course, but there was still activity. We saw a security guard standing outside the sliding entrance doors. A man and woman drove up in a truck and clambered out together. A head leaned against the etched glass in the waiting room.

“Okay, Eddy. Here we are. Let’s go in,” I prompted.

“Wait a minute. I’m not ready to go.”

I was exasperated, after the long drive, to come up against his ambivalence, but too tired and confused to make much of a fuss. We sat in the car as Melanie and he engaged in an interminable conversation about the pros and cons of submitting oneself to the hospital authorities. She patiently listened and debated with him. I sat mostly silent, but eventually insisted a decision be made.

“Listen, Eddy. I’m tired of sitting here. I’ve been driving for five hours. My legs are numb. If you don’t want to go into the hospital this minute, that’s fine with me. Let’s go home, and we can talk about it again in the morning. Otherwise, let’s go check you in.”

“Okay. But you stay here,” he instructed me firmly. “I don’t want you to come with me. I want to go in alone.”

“Why, Eddy?” I was inexplicably insulted. “What’s the difference? You need me to go with you. What will you tell them? Do you even have your insurance card?”

Eddy didn’t have his card, and I told him pettishly that I didn’t want to give him mine, because he’d lose it. But he retorted that he didn’t need my card to be admitted.

“Don’t worry, Mom. They’ll take me,” he reassured me before climbing out of the car. Melanie and I watched him walk barefoot across the parking lot and through the sliding glass doors, but when they closed behind him, I didn’t immediately drive away. We waited and watched from across the desolate parking lot for another 10 minutes, afraid he might change his mind and come running back out to us.

We waited and watched in the cold car beneath merciless stars for a long and lonely 10 minutes. When the wind picked up and a paper wrapping tumbled by, I felt a tsunami of grief rising up in my chest, but it wasn’t until I had driven home and crawled into my own bed next to Lawrence that I finally let myself cry.


Come back next Sunday to read the next chapter, or buy a paperback copy of the whole novel HERE.

Chapter 27 ~ Camp

Photo by
Brendon Stuart

After the Cronus fiasco, Eddy somehow managed to pull himself together before I left for camp. At first Lawrence said he would stay home with Eddy, that I should drive up to the Mendocino Woodlands—to the Tall Trees Family Camp we’d been visiting at the end of July for the past 10 years, a vacation which we’d already paid for in advance—with just Henry and Rose. It would be good for Eddy and Lawrence to spend time alone together, Lawrence told me. It would be good for Eddy to spend time in a quiet, empty home. That plan suited me. I worried that Eddy would grieve about being left behind, since family camp had been his favorite place on the planet since he was about nine years old, but I didn’t see any way around it. Then Lawrence said Eddy was behaving so well, so coolly, so like a sane person, that maybe we should consider letting him come along. That plan didn’t suit me at all.

For one thing, Rose had decided to arrive later. She was busy that summer. She didn’t want to spend a whole week at camp. Then Henry and Lawrence decided to come for three days only, so that left just me and Ed.

For another thing, my sister Jean had decided to join me. For the first time ever, she was interested in driving down from Walla Walla, Washington to spend time with me in the redwoods. She thought camp sounded like a place she could escape the drama and trauma surrounding the divorce her husband Jack had recently requested. And because Jean was coming, my sister Jane was considering coming, too. That made three people that I would need be worrying over at camp: Eddy, Jean and Jane. I began to think it would be better if I stayed home.

But I didn’t stay home, of course. I couldn’t. For one thing, I had signed up to be on staff at camp. I would be working in the kitchen. For another thing, we thought that a visit to camp might help Eddy heal. Despite the fact that he’d been out of the hospital for almost three months, and we’d been frantically trying to respond to his unstable condition all that time, he still didn’t have a coherent treatment plan. All he had at home was a weekly counseling session with a therapist we’d finally found whom he didn’t like much and near-constant family tension. At camp, he would be surrounded by people who loved him, people who had known him since he was a little boy. He would be soothed by the beauty of nature. He would be safe, protected by the community. He would be in a place that he’d associated with heaven on earth for the past 10 years. Plus, he’d been saying since before his camping trip with Charles that all he needed to recover was some time alone in nature, and we halfway believed him. We wanted very much to believe him. Perhaps our brilliant son’s intuition was right. But we were unwilling to cut him completely loose in the wilderness. This would be a good compromise. He could go off on his own to seek solitude in nature, but still be close at hand. So it transpired that a mere week after Eddy had walked away from Cronus of Santa Cruz, the two of us were together in the little black Nissan, driving up to Mendocino, a trip of about five hours. During the first part of the drive, I did all the talking. Eddy was quiet and compliant. I began to think it might work out. But after a couple of hours on the road, he began talking, and I couldn’t help noticing thatis conversation was circular. He wasn’t making any sense. In an effort to avoid exascerbating the situation, I went for long periods without saying anything, but as we got closer to camp, his mood seemed to get worse. To help both of us calm down, I asked him to read me passages from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Peace is Every Step. He was glad to do it the first time, but petulant the next. And then, when I asked him to hand me a sweater from the back seat, he reached back angrily to grab it and threw it out the window.

I immediately pulled over the car. “What did you do that for?!” I scolded him angrily before getting out to retrieve my belonging, being careful first to remove the car keys. We were in the redwood forest by then, close to camp, and I was feeling very uneasy about our decision. I still clung to the idea that my son could recover if he wanted to badly enough. It seemed to me that he was purposely losing touch with reality in order to punish me. Why was it that he had been so cooperative and reasonable at home, but now was spinning out of control? The walk along the rural roadside helped to steady my mind. We should continue to camp, I reasoned, and if Eddy didn’t stop acting crazy, we would just turn around and drive back home. But at least I would have a chance to check in with my sisters, and explain to the camp managers why I wasn’t showing up for my job. When I got back into the car with my sweater, I made an effort to smooth things out.

“Listen, Eddy,” I started gently. “I know you’re nervous about seeing people—about seeing your old friends. And I’m feeling nervous, too. I’m thinking this whole trip might be a very bad idea. So I want to make a deal with you. I want to promise you that if, at any time, you feel it’s too much for you, you feel you can’t deal with it, I will leave camp and drive you home. Okay?” Eddy looked down at his hands in his lap and nodded. He gave a big, windy sigh, and seemed visibly relieved.

“And at the same time, I want you to promise me that if at any time I want to leave, because I can’t take it, that you’ll get in the car and come home with me. Can you promise that?”

“Yes. I can promise that,” he looked up at me with weighty sincerity. “That helps a lot, Mom. Thank you.”

I started the car back up and we continued on our way to camp, pulling off of the asphalt and onto the dusty dirt road that marked the last four or five miles of the journey. I pulled an Ativan out of my pocket and quickly swallowed it. I didn’t ask Eddy to do anything else for me. As we approached the outer edges of camp, recognizable by the sweat lodge erected next to the creek, beneath the trees, Eddy asked me to pull over the car.

“Why don’t you let me out here, Mom?”

“Why, honey? Do you want to walk into camp?”

“Yeah. I don’t want to come in just yet. I’m not ready for all the hubbub at the lodge.”

“Okay. I can understand that.” I pulled over, and popped open the trunk. He took out his backpack and hammock. I felt a flash of worry.

“Why do you need all that stuff?” I asked him warily.

“I’m going to find a place to string up my hammock out here. I think it will be better if I keep a little distance.”

“Okay, I guess,” I said reluctantly. “But come in to dinner, all right? I don’t want to have to worry about you. I want to know that you are okay.”

“I won’t know when dinner is.”

“They’ll ring the bell.”

“Oh yeah,” he laughed at his own forgetfulness. “Okay. I’ll see you then.”

When I pulled up in front of the lodge, the wide clearing in front was alive with activity. People were walking in and out of the double doors of the big, rough-wood building; moving their cars under the watchful eyes of the parking czar; unpacking their trunks and commandeering wheelbarrows to cart their belongings to their cabins. A few young people, including Eddy’s Settlers-playing friend Hans, tossed a Frisbee back and forth. Several grownups sat on lawn chairs under the trees. I saw my sister Jean lounging like a regular with a book propped on her lap.

“Hi, Jean,” I approached her first to give the customary hug. “You got here before me!”

“Yes, I did,” she beamed at me. “Where’s Eddy?”

“I let him out outside of camp. He wasn’t ready to come in yet.”

“You let him out? Jo! That’s crazy! How could you do that?!” she said with the automatic authority of an older sister. “He’s schizophrenic. You can’t leave him alone in the woods. He’ll get lost!”

“No. I don’t think he’ll get lost, Jean,” I said with a firmness I didn’t feel but knew would be necessary to rebuff her. I was irritated by her use of the word schizophrenic. I felt pretty certain I had not described him to her in that way. “He knows the area really well. We’ve been coming here for 10 years. I didn’t leave him very far. He’s just out by the sweat lodge,” I said peevishly.

“I don’t know,” Jean shook her head disapprovingly, “I don’t think it’s a good idea.” And despite my efforts to resist, I couldn’t help absorbing her concern. “Well, look, why don’t I check in with the registrar, then you can help me take my stuff to our cabin, and we’ll talk about it some more there in private, okay?”

“Okay.”

I walked over to Patty, a short woman with an astonishing areola of coppery hair, who was manning a long table set up in front of the doors to welcome people, accept the last of their payments (if they hadn’t made them yet), and tell them to which cabin they had been assigned. “Hello. You’re here!” Patty said. “It’s about time. Your sister got here before you.”

“I know. I saw her,” I said with false enthusiasm. “What cabin did you give us?”

“Well, you have a cabin in Creekside, like you asked for—number 12,” she pointed out the cabin on an amateur map drawn with felt pens on a long strip of butcher paper. “And you owe me another $200. Where’s the rest of your family?”

“Most of ‘em aren’t coming until Tuesday,” I told her as I pulled out my checkbook. “Lawrence and Henry are coming then, along with Henry’s girlfriend. I’m not sure about Rose. Maybe Wednesday? I’m the only one here—except Eddy. He’s around here somewhere.”

“How’s he doing?” I remembered then that Patty knew something of our troubles, if not the whole story, because of an email I’d sent the camp managers a week before saying Eddy wasn’t coming this year because he had checked into a drug treatment program. Later, I’d sent a retraction.

“Okay, I guess,” I reported uncertainly. “I’m hoping camp will be a good place for him right now. We’ll see.”

Patty accepted my explanation without protest. She took my check, and directed me to a chart where I could discover which kitchen shifts Eddy and I had been assigned before releasing me to unpack my car. Jean helped me carry my things to the cabin, where I claimed my space on one of the four single beds—two in front, on either side of the creaky swinging door, and two in back, behind rough wood closets. Jean had already laid her sleeping bag down on one of the beds in back, and her suitcase on the other, so I took the bed to the right of the door.

“How’s it going?” I asked. “What’s going on with Jack?” The room was dark, illuminated only by the dim natural light that filtered through the massive redwoods surrounding us. There was no electricity—just a line of window-like openings along the walls beneath the roof, covered with screen. The community toilets for this cluster of cabins were up a hill behind us. The shower house was farther away, behind the lodge. Despite the gloom, we were happy to stay inside to achieve some level of privacy, although I knew from experience that sound traveled far in the forest, and if anyone was in the surrounding cabins they would be able to hear what we said. I sat down on the thin plastic mattress of one of the two beds that flanked the door, made more welcoming now with the covering of my sleeping bag and belongings. Jack had moved out, Jean told me, and was still asking for a divorce, but she retained hope for a reconciliation. She’d started counseling, and was taking Prozac, and had embarked on a diet and exercise program to lose the close to 100 pounds that she had put on in the last 10 years. Astonishingly, she’d lost 20 pounds already, even though the crisis had just begun one month before.

“What I realized is that I’ve been depressed for 10 years,” she told me. “I never did anything but sit on the couch and watch TV, or play Settlers online. Jack took the kids camping, and skiing, and went on trips with them, but I never wanted to leave the house. I was so inactive that it felt like my bones were ossifying. It even became difficult for me to move.”

I was surprised by her analysis, since I’d seen Jean in Santa Cruz every August, and hadn’t noticed that she was particularly depressed. But she explained that it was easy to hide it in Santa Cruz.

“The house is always so full of people, that it didn’t seem odd that I never wanted to leave it. I never wanted to go to the beach, but people just assumed it was because I was fat and didn’t want to get into a bathing suit. And since there was always a Settlers game going, I could sit around all day playing board games, and it didn’t seem a bit strange.”

Although she was terrified about it, and hopeful that it wouldn’t happen, Jean was glad Jack had asked for a divorce, she told me, because it had woken her up from a kind of somnambulism. Her newly-discovered energy was practically palpable in the cabin. “What do you want to do now?” she asked enthusiastically, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I answered lethargically. In contrast to Jean, I felt overcome with a powerful reluctance, weighed down by my fears for Eddy, which I was unwilling to verbalize or even outline clearly in my thoughts, and my resistance to assuming hostess duties for my sister. “Let’s go back to the lodge, and see if Eddy has shown up yet. If he hasn’t, maybe I will go look for him after all, just to put my mind at ease.”

He wasn’t at the lodge, and when I decided to hike out to the sweat lodge, I encouraged Jean to stay behind. Otherwise, I was certain, she’d tromp through the woods calling his name too loudly, frightening him off and annoying other campers. I showed her where the workshops and activities were listed on long strips of butcher paper taped to the wall, so she could consider which ones she wanted to do during her week, and introduced her to a few other campers before heading off on my own. She wasn’t a bit shy, perhaps buoyed by the Prozac, and I felt no concern for her as I left. I took the camp route, rather than the road, crossing the creek on the tall wooden bridge, and winding my way through the cabins. I kept my eyes open for Eddy or other teens. Whenever I saw one, I asked him or her, “Have you seen Eddy?” And though I soon passed three familiar teens, none had.

I walked through the first cabin group called Near Meadow and past the grassy circle where the kids sometimes played soccer. A labyrinth of stones appeared one year in the back corner of this site, and would likely be the location of a ritual later in the week. Across from it was the quiet nook where a regular camper had set up her table one year and given me the world’s most satisfying massage—enhanced by the quiet sanctity of the redwoods and the noisy rushing waters of the creek.

After the meadow came a pathway through a few tents erected by veteran campers who disdained cabins. Up a hill was the community bathroom where I had been “imprisoned” one year during a game of Capture the Flag. After the smattering of tents came another cabin cluster known as Far Meadow, where many of the staffers liked to stay. I’d had a huge panic attack in one of these cabins one year, and had asked to be placed elsewhere ever since. Beyond Far Meadow was another bridge over the creek, this one down at creek level and more makeshift—just a few boards thrown across the water. When I got to the other side I walked along the road for a bit before veering back in towards the creek near the sweat lodge area. I looked around carefully for Eddy’s colorful hammock, but saw nothing. There was the fire pit where rocks would be heated for use in the sweat lodge, a short half-dome structure made out of bent wood and covered with blue plastic. There were two or three tents scattered about the area, and one double air mattress covered over with a sumptuous comforter and an elegant white mosquito net draping down from a tree, which looked like a fairy princess’ forest bed. “Eddy,” I called out quietly, knowing how sound traveled under the trees. There was no answer. I walked over to the edge of the embankment above the creek. “Eddy,” I called again, a little more loudly. “Please come out. I want to talk to you.”

I was surprised when I saw his head pop up on the other side of the creek, amidst the ferns. I could just make out then, behind him, a bright flash of red which must have been his hammock. He looked at me across the water but didn’t say anything.

“There you are! I’m glad I found you. Would you come over here?” I asked him. “I don’t want to yell.”

He looked annoyed but nevertheless made his way down the embankment on the other side with some difficulty, then crossed over on a fallen tree that spanned the creek. He walked up the pebbly bank until he was 12 or 15 feet away from me. He stopped there, out of my reach, a bit far for friendly conversation, as if afraid that if he came closer, I might try to capture him.
Seeing that he wasn’t going to come nearer, I began. “Eddy, I’m glad I found you. I felt worried because I didn’t know where you were. Jean’s here. Are you going to come into the lodge area and say hi to her?”

“Not right now. Maybe later.” He seemed impatient.

“Have you found a good place to put your hammock?” I tried to set a friendly tone.

“Mom. What did you want me for?” he said with irritation.

“Not anything, really,” I said foolishly. “I’m sorry I made you climb across the creek. I just wanted to know you were all right, that you weren’t lost in the forest.”

He scoffed.

“Have you seen any of your friends? Are you feeling comfortable?”

“Mom. If there’s nothing else, I’m going to leave now,” he told me formally.

“Okay,” I felt reluctance to end the conversation and see him disappear again into the ferny forest. “But don’t forget you promised to come in to dinner. I’ll look for you then.”

“Okay,” he responded before turning away.

I saw Eddy that night, across the room, sitting with a table of young people, and I began to believe that bringing him to camp was a good plan, after all. He seemed comfortable, among friends. Jean made a point of approaching him and giving him a big hug. I waved at him from across the room, conjecturing, from our conversation that at the creek, that he would prefer me to keep my distance, and feeling gratified that he had shown up at the lodge, as he had promised, and was managing the crowd without apparent difficulty. But the next day, this illusion began to deteriorate.

Eddy had signed up to be a dishwasher and our friend Kay, who managed the kitchen with Steve, had somehow contrived to find him in the forest on our second day in camp and get him into an apron for his first shift. I was sitting in the lodge alone at a table covered with paper, felt pens, books depicting mandalas, bowls, cups, and a variety of other circular objects suitable for tracing spread out around me when he came up to talk. Jean had gone on a walk with the naturalist. Jane hadn’t yet arrived. Eddy looked dirty, and bleary eyed. His hair was greasy and falling into his face; his feet were filthy, and jammed into pink flip flops two sizes too small. His apron was tied haphazardly.

“Mom, I’m having a problem,” he sat down next to me on the bench.

“You are? What is it? Do you want to go home?”

“No. I don’t think I need to go home. But I don’t think I can do this job.”

“What do you mean, honey? Why not?”

“I just can’t do it, Mom. I don’t know how.”

“What do you mean you don’t know how, Eddy? You’ve been doing it for years. It’s simple. You just rinse off the dishes and put them through the machine. Why are you wearing those tiny flip flops?”

“I forgot to bring shoes,” he said, looking down at his feet confusedly. “And I can’t go into the kitchen without shoes. So I borrowed these.”

“You forgot your shoes? That’s a bummer,” I said in a tone of admonishment. “What are you wearing out in the forest?”

“Mom, what about the dishes?” He used a patronizing tone, as if I was an easily-distracted child who couldn’t keep her mind on the topic.

“I don’t know, Eddy,” I said with some sympathy, but not much understanding.. “I think you should try harder to do them. Do you want me to help you?”

“Maybe. That would be all right. Charles said he could just do it by himself, too.”

“He did? That was awfully nice of him. But before we let him do that, let’s go into the kitchen together and see what’s going on.”

In the kitchen, Eddy’s friend Charles was manning the stainless steel dishwasher station quite competently without him. The music was blaring from a CD player perched up on a shelf and the dishes were flying through his hands.

“See what he’s doing, Eddy?” I asked. “You just use that retractable hose to squirt water on the dishes and then put them in the rack for the dishwasher. It’s easy. Want to try it?”

Eddy shook his head forlornly. I could see how having him stand there confused would make washing dishes more difficult for his partner, so I pursued plan B. “Hey, Charles,” I had to tap him on the shoulder to get his attention. He released the lever on the hose and turned around. “Eddy tells me he’s having trouble doing the dishwashing job, and that you’re willing to do the work of two people. Is that right?”

“Oh yeah,” Charles smiled easily. “No problem. I’m happy to do it.” Although he’d only come to camp one time before, Charles had blended in easily with the key players and made himself an instant regular. His tall, well-groomed good looks and polite manner made him a favorite with the parents, while the teens liked his self confidence and sense of humor. I wondered if Eddy resented this.

“Thank you, Charles. That’s really nice of you,” I told him gratefully. “Now Eddy,” I turned to him, “you have to go find Kay and get her approval for the substitution.”

“Could you do it?”

“No. It’s your job. You need to do it.” Eddy nodded his head with exaggerated understanding and left the kitchen in search of our friend. After she gave her permission, he took off his apron and hung it on a peg in the pantry before disappearing back into the woods.

I wondered over the next few days if it wouldn’t have been better to hold Eddy to his commitment. At least then he’d have a reason to show up at the lodge. But at the same time, we couldn’t stress the camp staff that needed to keep the kitchen running smoothly to feed 130 campers three meals a day—not to mention afternoon snacks. Placing a loose cannon in their midst might derail the system and result in long-term negative consequences for both me and Ed.

I saw him only fleetingly over the next three days. Sometimes I felt encouraged by our encounters, and believed that camp was restoring him to good health, as on the day my sisters and I had hiked out to Ledges, a favorite swimming hole, and he’d appeared in the forest on our trek back to read me a poem he’d written. Other times, he seemed completely dysfunctional, and I felt stupid for believing in fairy tales. During that same period, Jane showed up and joined Jean and me in the cabin; Lawrence came with Henry and Henry’s girlfriend, Melanie, and, after manning the projector and showing his carefully-selected 16mm giant monster movie on movie night, left for home again, taking Henry with him but leaving Melanie behind with me, since the two of them weren’t getting along; and Rose arrived and moved into a cabin of young women for two nights before leaving herself. Despite the constant flurry of my family, I felt unsupported. No one stayed long enough for me to transfer some of my burden onto them. My two sisters were sympathetic, but not fully cognizant of all the details since they hadn’t lived through them. I tried to keep tabs on Eddy from afar, asking his friends about him whenever the occasion arose. But mostly, I proceeded in ignorance.

The atmosphere around camp felt tense. Even Eddy’s Settlers-playing friend Hans was in a difficult mood. “Hi Hans,” I said cheerfully one afternoon, approaching him at a picnic table where a raft of young people was braiding hemp bracelets. Hans wasn’t making a bracelet, but socializing. “Have you run into Eddy, yet?”

“Yeah. I’ve seen him,” he said ruefully.

“Have you cured him, yet?”

“No,” he scoffed. “I have definitely NOT cured him.”

Mike Goodman, Eddy’s longest-standing friend, reported that he seemed basically okay, but difficult to talk to. Dora said he was scattered and confused. Gem wondered if his mental problems were a ploy to get attention. Brenda said that something was definitely wrong. He stopped coming to meals. I wondered what he was eating. Each time I saw him he seemed skinnier, and dirtier, and more inaccessible to me.

On Wednesday, “out of camp day,” I went into Mendocino and bought him a pair of large flip flops (I found out later that Kay had done the same). Then I set out to find him in the forest, trudging over the same path I had followed earlier in the week. When I got to the area around the sweat lodge, I started tentatively calling out his name. On the other side of the creek, high up on the embankment, I saw a pair of longtime campers hiking together. Then I saw Eddy, running at breakneck speed, passing them by on the narrow trail like a man being chased by a mountain lion. He was barefoot, I knew, and had his pajama bottoms on. His shirt front was open and his shirttails were flying.

“Eddy!” I called out to him. “Eddy, stop! I need to talk to you!”

He flew by without heeding me at first, but reined himself in down the path, retracing his steps to stand staring at me across the creek.

“I have shoes for you,” I called out to him, holding up the flip flops. “Do you want to come get them?”

Eddy picked his way down the embankment, crossed the tree trunk bridge, came up the creek side and stood below me on a tangle of mossy, fallen logs.

“Where were you running to so fast?” I asked him.

“Nowhere.”

“But why were you running?” I laughed. “You looked like some kind of wild animal.”

He looked at me belligerently, as if I was trying to harm or insult him. “Just to run—to get exercise.”

I handed him the shoes, looking down at his feet as I did so, and noticing they were covered with dirt and scratches and dried blood. “Look at your feet, Eddy. They look injured. I hope these shoes will help.”

“Thanks, Mom,” he climbed a little closer so he could reach out for them. As he stretched his arm out I noticed again how terribly thin he was. It was skeletal, with just a bare covering of flesh.

“Are you sure you’re feeling okay here, Eddy? Or are you thinking we should maybe go home?”

“I don’t know. I’ll tell you later.” He turned away from me and started to walk back down the creek.

“Eddy, wait. I never see you at mealtime. What are you eating?” I called after him.

“Don’t worry. I go into the kitchen at night,” he called back over his shoulder before hopping briskly up onto the log.

The next day, Thursday, Jane, Jean and I went together to the morning ritual at the fire circle. Spending time with my sisters was making my camp stay bearable. Although I was worried about Eddy, I was often distracted. Jean’s troubles gave me an opportunity to forget my own. Unlike at home, where I would be in constant contact with Eddy, I could pass long periods relatively worry-free, imagining that he was safe and being cared for by his circle of friends. Jean, Jane and I went to workshops, ate, talked and hung out together. We hiked out to the swimming hole together. We shopped in Mendocino. We were easy in each other’s company, and comforted. That morning the ritual involved passing a copper bowl in which were folded pieces of paper containing inspirational quotes. There were about eight women in attendance, and two men. We sat on big logs that were planed flat to form seats and tiered up in a semicircle around the fire pit. We each accepted the bowl, took out a paper, and read it to ourselves. If we felt moved to do so, we read it aloud to the group. After each voice was a period of silence, when we considered the words. In the midst of this activity, Eddy walked across the bridge and joined us. He had on his pajama bottoms, no shirt and no shoes. A long, beaded earring dangled from one ear, the wire perched in the ear hole, since his lobe wasn’t pierced. He carried the walking stick I had worked on during a workshop the day before. I had decorated it by burning designs into the wood, gluing on beads, staining the length different colors and wrapping the hilt with leather thongs. A leather circle dangling from the handle displayed my name. I was surprised to see it in his hands. He must have found it leaning outside the lodge and picked it up.

Eddy sat behind me, on a log, and accepted the copper bowl when it was passed to him. Susan, the leader, welcomed him with a warm smile and a few words explaining the process. He nodded in her direction, saying nothing. Then he took out a piece of paper and read it out to us. “The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.” Although his behavior was perfectly correct, although he did all the right things—sitting quietly, accepting the bowl, reading the quote out loud—his body emanated an aura that disturbed me. He wasn’t right. His eyes, although sparkly, had no reciprocity of understanding. There was a shield behind the sparkle, a protection, a defense. If you asked him a question, he wouldn’t respond in a way that you’d expect. He’d say something cryptic that might pass for witty—and might not. It was clear he felt himself wise, like a guru or saint. And it was probable the things he said made sense to him. But if you tried to understand him, to follow his reasoning, it would be like dropping down into Alice’s rabbit hole. I shifted uncomfortably on the log and asked myself what I was doing at camp. Shouldn’t this boy be taken home? Clearly, the healing we had hoped for wasn’t happening. But I also knew it would be difficult to get him to leave . The way he flitted about the perimeter, just out of my reach, ducking and hiding, made that clear. And once I got him home, what was I going to do with him, anyway? Seeing a counselor once a week wasn’t a powerful enough treatment, but as far as I had discovered, it was the only one available to us. He didn’t want to go to the hospital, which wouldn’t take him anyway, unless we could prove he was a danger to himself or others. And after his first stay there, when almost nothing was accomplished, I wasn’t even sure that I wanted him to go. Eddy passed the bowl to the person beside him and then got up and left the circle, not waiting to hear what the others had to say.

That was the night I sat down with a coven of camp regulars at dinner, and heard Jen’s mild accounting of her conversation with Eddy in the lodge, and Steve’s dire assessment of his encounter with him in the shower house.

That was the night I felt my nipple gush fluid as my worry for my son sharpened, and looked forward to returning home and getting my mammogram to assuage my fears.

That was the night Karen said, “I’m so sorry this is happening to you.”

And I thought, ”But it’s not happening to me, it's happening to him."

I stayed up late in the lodge that night, hoping to get another glimpse of Eddy. I worked on my giant mandala, which had been becoming bigger and more elaborate as each day passed, obsessively coloring in a thousand little circles with bright felt pens while people beaded jewelry, or braided bracelets, or played cards or board games, or read books, or just talked together at the tables around me. Behind me, Hans sat with two teenagers playing Settlers. Kay was their fourth player, but kept disappearing into the kitchen to take care of some food preparation for the following day’s meals. It was almost midnight, and I was just standing to leave, when Hans called over to me. “Hey, Jo. Why don’t you take Kay’s place here so we can finish this game of Settlers?” I was flattered by the invitation, and though I was already tired, I readily agreed. But after coming within one roll of winning, the victory went—as usual—to Hans, so it was in a sour mood that I finally walked out of the lodge with my flashlight in hand, tired and frustrated and worried about my son. As I passed the line of cars before the path down to the creek, one of them honked.

I stopped, startled, and peered through the darkness. It took a moment to realize the car was my own. When I opened the passenger door and shined my light in the back seat, I saw Eddy there.

“Eddy, did you honk at me? What’s up?” I tried to sound casual.

“Come on in.”

I sat down in the passenger seat, and tried to conduct a conversation with Eddy in the back, but since I couldn’t see him in the darkness, and since the headrest of the seat obstructed my view, I ended up facing forward and talking to a disembodied voice that floated over my left shoulder.

“What’s going on, Eddy?”

“I’m just sitting here, being schizophrenic.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked solicitously. “Do you want to go home?”

“I say that because you asked me what’s going on,” he said angrily. “Do you want to know or don’t you?”

“Well, yes. I want to know. But what do you mean by that term? Why do you say you’re schizophrenic?”

“Because I AM!! I’m schizophrenic! I’m schizophrenic! I’m schizophrenic! I’m schizophrenic!” he shouted at me. “Why the FUCK are you sitting there talking to the windshield?!”

“Okay. OKAY!” I shouted back at him. “You don’t have to scream at me! I’m only looking out the window because I can’t see you there in the back seat.” I turned around to try to peer through the gap between the two front bucket seats. I couldn’t make him out, but I continued facing backwards to appease him.

“Everything is talking to me, Mom. Everything!” He leaned forward through the gap, brushing me aside, and turned on the radio. An old song came through the speakers. Turn around. Look at me. “Listen to that! LISTEN TO THAT!” he shouted again before bursting into exhuberant laughter, as if the coincidence of the lyrics was comical proof that the universe was communicating with him.

“Okay, Eddy. Calm down.” My voice exuded a reason I didn’t possess. “I’m sorry you’re having a hard time. Listen. I think we need to go home. I want to take you home, okay? But I don’t want to leave right now. It’s very late, and I can’t see very well, and neither of us is packed, and I just don’t want to drive down that curvy road in the dark right now. So what I want you to do is just try to calm down and get a good night’s sleep, and then we’ll see how you feel in the morning, okay?”

“Did you HEAR that, Mom?”

“I heard it, Eddy,” I said despairingly. “It’s just a song. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not talking to you. Look, Eddy. I have some tranquilizers I brought with me, in case I needed them. I want you to take a couple of them right now. Okay?”

“Tranquilizers? No, Mom. Tranquilizers is not how you treat schizophrenia. Didn’t Dr. Hu tell you?”

“Eddy, listen,” I was surprised to notice there was moisture on my cheek. “I don’t think I can handle this. I’m upset that Dad’s gone, and Rose’s gone, and Henry. I’m upset that we’re here by ourselves. Jane and Jean can’t help us. They can’t drive us home. They don’t live there. I need you to just make it through one more night, okay Eddy? Then we’ll leave in the morning.”

“Okay,” he seemed sobered by my tears.

“Are you sure it’s okay? Is it okay for me to leave you now? Won’t you take one of my tranquilizers?”

“No. I don’t want a tranquilizer.”

“What are you going to do now? Where are you going to sleep?”

“I don’t know. I think I’ll just stay in the car for awhile. Then, when things quiet down, I’ll go into the lodge and get something to eat.”

“Okay, Eddy. That sounds like a good plan. I think you should sleep in the car tonight. Don’t go back out to your hammock. I want to be able to find you in the morning. But I’m going to leave you now. I’m going to go to bednow, okay? Give me a kiss.”
He leaned forward and presented his cheek for me to kiss, and though I knew I probably shouldn’t, I left him alone in the car.

“’Bye, honey,” I said pathetically as I closed the passenger door. I turned and walked quickly away from the car, before he could call out after me, stumbling over tree roots in the darkness, sliding down the dirt path to the wobbly bridge over the frigid creek. It was a cold night, and so dark you couldn’t see one foot in front of you, but after I crossed the creek, I found my pace increasing. I shone my flashlight by my feet, and practically ran up the small hill without thinking—trying hard not to think—until I got to my cabin, where I swung open the squeaky door and dove onto my bed, pressing my face into the pillow and sobbing.

“What is it? What is it, Jo?” Jean and Jane awoke and sat up in unison.

“It’s Eddy.” I croaked. They both scurried to my cot and held me as I told them what had happened. But I didn’t cry very long, or very loudly, because I knew that everyone in Creekside could hear me in that deadly quiet hour. I felt confused, and ashamed, and achingly tired, and deeply afraid. I was afraid that if I fell apart no one would be able to put me together again, so I held it all in, as best as I could, and lay on my bed in the middle of night, looking out at nothing, at blackness, urging the morning to hurry, but also dreading its arrival, until I was finally overcome by sleep. I dreamt I was back in the basement room, climbing down off the shelf (was it some kind of altar?), leaving Eddy’s body behind beneath the blanket. Something silver was glinting in my hand…


Come back next Sunday to read the next chapter, or buy a paperback copy of the whole novel HERE.