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  I guess Molly forgot about me. I shouldn’t be surprised because she didn’t think of me on my birthday either. Unless I hear from her belatedly I’ll have to regard Molly like I do your half-sister … self-centered and not concerned about Dad.

  Love,

  Dad

  36

  I tried, but often forgot to send him birthday cards during that period. Now I am much better about it, although it’s a strange thing to shop for a birthday card for a dad in jail. The general sentiments of the dad birthday cards just don’t apply but I sort through them anyway—you were always there for me, dad (no), you taught me so much, dad (no), enjoy your cake and beer today, dad (no), another year of happy memories, dad (no). I usually give up on the dad cards and settle on one that just says Happy Birthday inside.

  August 2015 and Dad turned seventy in prison. I realized a week or so before his birthday. It would be a stretch to say we are close now, but we correspond. I remembered to buy a card with a gentle but distanced greeting. Then, I forgot.

  The unsent card caught my eye on the kitchen table where I’d left it as I rushed out the door and it was too late: today was his birthday, I’d forgotten and now it was too late.

  At my office I logged into CorrLinks, the federal prison bureau’s email system, and wrote him a friendly message, hoping he would have a nice day, gently teasing him about being the big seven zero.

  That night I checked CorrLinks again just to make sure the email went through this clunky prehistoric email service, and he’d already written back:

  Dear Molly,

  God bless you for remembering me. Yes, I turned 70 and nothing special happened here. Honestly, I feel like this is the wrong age for me—I certainly do not feel this old. The real problem is that I also feel that not much has been accomplished by me during the many years and I do not have enough time remaining to make up for wasted years (doing prison time). Thank you for the timely, lighthearted birthday greetings. It made my day.

  Take care.

  Love,

  Dad

  I don’t know what to do with Dad’s sentiments now. I don’t know if they are real. And if they are real, I’m afraid of the new universe this would put me in: one in which I have a good dad, and this dad has a good daughter, and that’s all there is—goodness.

  37

  I went through a phase where I would punch my mom in the stomach. Below the stomach, just under her belly button. Not hard. Mostly it would just surprise her. Even done very lightly she’d always buckle a little and make an “oof” noise. Sometime she’d laugh, but mostly she’d be annoyed, sometimes very angry. Whenever I saw her I’d do this, which wasn’t very often.

  Through high school I lived alone. Mom lived alone too, but in the same place. She was a therapist with a private practice now, specializing in addiction counseling, and she had clients all day, then group sessions at night. She existed in the contradictory space between doctor and patient, surviving with her own mental disorders to bear, holding me above water while she just barely kept afloat. I woke up before her to walk myself to school, then almost always went to bed before she came home. I ate cereal and canned soup or frozen vegetables with microwaved hot dogs. I brought in the mail, cleaned the condo, did laundry, played Nintendo, kept things going. I’d finish my homework diligently and go to sleep looking forward to school the next day. I loved school—the structure, the calm. I liked the bells and the facts and the tiny locker and the libraries, where I’d spend any time I had free. At home, food appeared in the fridge on weekends while I was out with my friends or hiking on the Paint Creek Trail.

  Sometimes I wouldn’t see her for a week or more. When I did see her it was in passing; she was always busy, in the middle of going somewhere, or dealing with some emotional story inside of her I didn’t have access to. She had boyfriends who came and went, medication to start or stop. At the time I think I meant the stomach punching in a joking way. I feel sick thinking about this now. I don’t think I knew I was angry about anything until recently.

  “Manic bipolar,” she told me one day when I asked her why the pansies had all been torn out of the pots in back. She explained the illness to me with clinical detachment. I thought about the unplanned camping trips she used to whisk me out of bed for on school days, the half-painted wall in one of my childhood bedrooms, never finished, the inexplicable shaking and crying, the days she spent locked in her bedroom. My life with her as a teenager was precarious—I never knew when she’d tilt and send our quiet, orderly life off the rails.

  I saw my mom in hospital beds so many times, pulled back from a death she thought she wanted over and over—I can’t say how many times she attempted suicide while I was in high school. She used to joke about it, say at night she hoped maybe this time she’d “wake up dead,” and I would laugh with her, a little.

  I remember the feeling in the hospital room when we’d visit her after another overdose attempt, her in the bed, zoned out and slow. I sat with her once, alone somehow, while she dozed, an old woman in a wheelchair in the next room saying, “Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me.”

  She felt awful about it, and about me and my sister seeing her, but she’d smile. Charcoal pumped into her stomach after an overdose attempt would catch in her teeth; I’d see it when she smiled and talked. Many times I saw this. Or the amnesia and total weakness after multiple sessions of electroshock. It was supposed to jolt old patterns out of her brain, but it jolted everything out. Over the weeks all of it came creeping back.

  In a way her bipolar disorder made me distrustful of her emotions. I learned that her bursts of positive energy were short-lived, like sugar highs followed by a crash, however much she’d insist it was a new phase or better path. Like when she decided she was going to sell candles to make extra money and spent hundreds of dollars on boxes full of them that sat in boxes in a closet. She just didn’t have the social life or network of friends required for that kind of endeavor, and hadn’t thought that through. I grew suspicious of her good moods, and sad at my own suspicions. I wanted her to be happy and I wanted her happiness to stick. But it didn’t.

  Feelings moved across her dramatically like sharp weather. Happiness was keyed always a little too high, the colors too bright, almost painful or frightening, her cheery energy. Despair was so severe it transformed her physically—she’d wander through our small place, tired, in a rumpled nightgown, as if moving through mud. I left the house a lot, hung out with friends in a park nearby, or stayed with them when I could. I kept quiet about it.

  Weeks of relative calm were interrupted by strange visitors—clients of hers who were temporarily homeless. She’d invited them to stay in our basement, violating all guidelines of professional practice.

  Once after school I heard crying in the basement. A note on the counter explained that Janet would be staying with us for a few days, just until she gets back on her feet. Janet was a bony alcoholic woman whose sole possession seemed to be an enormous carton of tampons she’d hug as she traipsed up and down the stairs. I had no interactions with Janet except for when she’d set off the fire alarm by smoking menthols in the basement and I’d have to come down to tell her to stop. She would respond by smearing the cigarette out on the bottom of her tennis shoe and gently crying.

  Just a week or so after Janet disappeared I came home to find a faded yellow seventies-era Impala parked in Mom’s spot. I stopped. Beethoven was blasting from our condo, rattling the windows. I entered and saw a note on the counter; “Jonas” was all it said. I moved to the living room to see a loopy Norwegian with a lazy eye lying on his back, howling along with the tune, a vodka bottle raised in each hand above him.

  “Hi,” I said in a loud and disappointed way.

  He saw me and raised up to turn the volume knob down on the tuner, still holding a bottle in each hand. “Hi, leettle geirl! I’m Yonas, your mom freend.” I smiled at him, terrified.

  “I have to stay here a leetle while. My house, burned down, my house. I burned
it down accident.” Jonas swayed back and forth on the floor, not quite looking at me while he talked. He had stringy blond hair and smelled filthy. I politely excused myself and turned to leave, off to the park or to a friend’s house, anywhere. Jonas lasted a month or so at our place until he took Mom’s stereo to a pawnshop so he could buy booze. Then, visitors rarely stayed overnight.

  Even in the worst lows, when she would mess up her meds or mix liquor with them and be out of it or end up in the hospital, I wasn’t ashamed of my mom. She was brave and strong and wild, and lived beyond me, which I accepted. And no matter what, she always went to work. She was good at her job. She helped people.

  I liked to ask her about her clients, because they always seemed so much worse off than us. I remember the story of the kleptomaniac who’d steal paperback books from the Meijer store and dump them in a trash can as soon as he left the store. The anorexic who’d serve herself only the small gelled egg of chicken broth that came in the package of Mrs. Grass powdered soup, my sister’s favorite. She ate it whole, uncooked, like a gummy salt gem.

  One woman I still think about to this day. She was an only child of two parents who were also only children, and both were dead. The woman, then, had no family at all. No sisters, brothers, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, nephews, nothing. She was working as a secretary, no friends, having an affair with her boss, seeing my mom for depression. Not a single family member. Mom said she felt sorry for her, and as bad as things ever got with family life, she was glad to have one at least. I always liked that she said this, but I think I secretly felt differently. I imagined myself as this woman, completely untethered by blood to other humans, without obligation to bonds of family customs, or the roles of sister, cousin, aunt, niece, daughter. How different her holidays must have been, how tidy, and how single-minded her aspirations could be. No one would say they want that. Still, I’d catch myself daydreaming about her life, how peaceful it must have been.

  38

  Mom told me her first memory also happened on a stairwell. The cold, dusty back steps, alone, where she’d gotten lost and sat down in her lostness. She thinks she was only three years old. “Eventually I realized I would have to just get up and find my way out or I’d be sitting there crying forever.

  “No one can find you in the dark anyway. You just have to walk yourself out,” she added.

  39

  Mom left home at fifteen, for good, just walked away one February morning. Her dad dropped her off at a corner near her school and she just turned the other direction and kept going. She was wearing a skirt, knee socks, tennis shoes, sweater, coat, and had nothing on her but schoolbooks and some change. Walking slowly in the cold, aimless at first, she decided she’d walk all the way to the family cabin, three hundred miles north. Once she made it to Olivet, the next town north of Marshall, she knew for sure she wouldn’t turn back. She hitchhiked some, telling her rides she was supposed to be meeting her family at the cabin, but that she had gotten lost. She made it to the cabin in the middle of the night, with no one around the lake for miles, no lights anywhere, just silent snow. For three days she survived in the unheated cabin by building an igloo of blankets in the living room and rationing out the half-box of saltines left in the pantry.

  Her mind went foggy in weakness and hunger. She wrapped herself in blankets, tied them with fishing rope, and did nothing but look out onto the frozen lake. She made up a weird song to sing to herself, a song she has always remembered, and I have heard her sing, only to herself:

  In the waters of Babylon, no fish swim in the sea

  Above the waters of Babylon no birds fly in the sky

  By the waters of Babylon I sit alone and cry

  Beneath the waters of Babylon my soul goes to die.

  How thick and bright I loved my mom when she told me this story. I almost buckled to the floor. It made me feel exposed in the connection. My loneliness bubbled up to meet hers, as if looking for kin.

  The house where my mom grew up in Marshall, Michigan, was an old six-bedroom house, now run as a bed and breakfast, built on property owned by James Fenimore Cooper. She had three brothers, but kept to herself mostly, wandering the three-acre property, climbing pine trees until they bent, just swaying atop them, or talking to the cattle on the next property over. She read a lot and dreamed of being an artist. She loved being alone, like I did, and would shut herself into a dark cabinet for hours just to hum and think.

  And lifelong sadness sprung from the roots in this house. She finally told her best friend that her eldest brother had been molesting her at night, in her bed, for years. The friend told her boyfriend, only fourteen years old all of them, but he called her and talked to her about it. He said, “Here’s what you say to him. You say, ‘You have to stop doing this. I will tell my parents if you don’t.’” She said she’d needed someone to give her the words. And she told him to stop, and he did. I don’t like seeing this uncle at family occasions. Quiet and unfriendly, he is unlike anyone else in the clan. I perceive his silence as strained or simmering, but I’m sure that is just my perception.

  It’s unclear how much her parents knew about the abuse, or believed it if they did know. Mom could take only a year of silence and denial in that imposing house before she chose to flee.

  Probably she would’ve come back on her own, maybe called her parents soon to come get her. But they’d already sent a state trooper to check the cabin to see if she was there. When she opened the door to let him in, she said he grabbed her arm, and she didn’t like it, so she snapped and threatened him with the hunting knife she had pulled from behind her back.

  And she never went back to Marshall. She was a delinquent now, a runaway, brandishing a knife at a cop. Her parents struck a deal with the courts and got her into a hospital instead of juvenile detention. A good hospital, in fact, the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of Michigan Hospital. First she shuffled the halls of the adult women’s ward in a Thorazine haze, waiting for a bed to open in the adolescent unit. “Thorazine kept you compliant,” she told me. “It felt like your brain had been hit with a giant sledgehammer. Brainless, but walking around, like a zombie.”

  Diagnoses came and went with trends or with new doctors. First she was given the borderline personality disorder label that other troubled teens were getting in the mid sixties, then it changed to manic depressive/bipolar, which she kept for most of her life. But any breakdown that landed her in a psych ward would often come with an undifferentiated schizophrenic title too.

  Mental illness is a gray cloud inside of a gray cloud. It gets sharpened into focus with different names, but names change, and with that, identities change. She felt like a shape shifter with each new name, hoping, somehow, it could pin her to her right self, and help. The names didn’t help. The drugs, as I saw it, just numbed her. Certainly they helped keep her calm and functioning reasonably well throughout her life, but I wonder what went missing under that murk.

  But a state hospital would have just kept her drugged and chained to a bed indefinitely. If she had been born a few years earlier, into the previous generation, she would have been lobotomized.

  She thought that if she was good and worked hard at getting better they would let her out. They hadn’t told her she was going to stay for three years, regardless of her progress. It hurts me to hear her tell this part of the story, that they didn’t tell her, didn’t think it mattered, or that she wasn’t lucid enough or old enough to consult. It would have been better for her if they had told her. All summer and through the fall she worked, was obedient and serious in therapy, listened and gave up her secrets. She wanted to be able to leave for Christmas, a holiday that mattered to her, to be with her family.

  November came and her therapist told her she would not be home for Christmas, or any time soon. Enraged, she stormed down the long hall to the sunroom, the only place on the adolescent floor without locked grates on the windows. She kicked the window out, smashing her leg through the glass in it
s metal frame, and jumped out of the window, four stories to the ground, and broke her leg.

  It was pouring rain. She dragged herself along the sidewalk for a little while in a sorry attempt to escape until a doctor found her and carried her back in.

  After months of isolation, she started over. Now more jaded, I imagine, but still hopeful about entering the rest of the world again. She finished high school in the hospital and applied for college when she was almost eighteen. They had a classroom right there in the psych ward, with some of the best teachers from the University of Michigan teaching their classes—it was not the worst place to finish high school, really. Her graduating class was eight people, the largest one yet.

  How much of this early damage predisposed my mom to Dad’s cons? I suspect there is a relationship. But I assign no blame to Mom for being duped.

  I found out about this when I was a teenager and I asked her about her prom. I didn’t go to my own prom because I thought the whole thing was stupid and I wanted to know what hers was like. I sat numbly as she spilled this whole story out. “So. I didn’t go to prom either,” she ended.

  She left straight from the hospital for college, in 1968, to Grand Valley State, to study psychology. For a year she did wonderfully, was so happy to be in the world, content to have schoolwork. She left college, though, perhaps out of this very confidence. She moved to Israel to work on a kibbutz for a year, a hippie dream of hers, and it was like heaven. The square, yellowy photos I have seen of her from this time seem unreal—cool, free kids playing at utopia, working the earth and forging a tiny community. During the day she picked tomatoes or packed green grapes into crates. On breaks from daily work she killed scorpions and snakes or read sci-fi novels under the pistachio trees. At night she learned to cook and dance and to repair shoes and tires, trying to catch up to the things she missed growing up in a hospital. She had come so far.