She persists and finds aid.
Some mornings, I chanted om—the sound of the ome mornings, I chanted om—the sound of the planet’s vibration—and pretended that the trucks roaring by, the streetcar swishes and honking horns were all humming along to the same rhythm. And nights I sang a mantra or spoke a simple prayer: please help me. Most mornings I woke with good intentions, and then slowly the day fell apart. Ideas, plans, schedules.
At night when I couldn’t turn off the worried thoughts, when they rushed around like a truck rumbling down the highway, driven recklessly, no brake pedal, I listened to video astrologers on YouTube to override the anxiety. I played them to quash the panic spirals and cross-referenced their readings. Stormy weather in the week ahead because Mars in Scorpio, part of my chart, was conjunct with my Jupiter sign, Libra. The influence of Mercury retrograde—unresolved issues resurfacing and no signing any contracts. I should be wary about negotiating anything when Venus is at a hard angle to my Sun sign, Aquarius. Saturn could indicate smooth sailing and attention from VIPS but also attention from the police.
These horoscopes boiled down to: This could be a rough week with some lovely moments.
I ordered a chart from the astrologer with the most soothing voice. I read through the vague descriptors and thought: I paid money for this. The sentence that confirmed I’d wasted money: As a small child you may have felt warm and protected in your family environment.
At our daily check in, after I listed off everything that I suspected was wrong with me, my dad advised, “It’s not good you feel like this. You should go see somebody.”
At a walk-in clinic, I cried so hard Dr. Kim could barely make out what I was saying. She waited patiently for me to catch my breath between sobs.
“You’re not seeing me at my best.”
She nodded and offered me another tissue from the box she held. “I will. Do you have someone you can talk to?” She looked at my medical file, at the notes she had made during our session. Dr. Kim had drawn a simple graph, a barebones family tree. Mother: severely mentally ill. Father: clinical depression. Me: episodes of melancholy.
“Friends. Do you mean a professional? No.”
“There’s a lot here. And a lot going on right now. You may find it helpful to talk to someone.”
I don’t tell her about the distorted thinking. I have to work very hard to stay present. I can put up a good front. It looks like I’m here, talking in the now, listening, answering questions, but there’s this constant pull from the past. An unexpected undercurrent. Like the time I got hit by a wave and somersaulted through the water, frantic because I couldn’t swim, so close to shore that when the wave pulled back, it dragged me along the sand, my arm and thigh scraped as I tried to grab onto the ground. Then I stood in three feet of water and sputtered the ocean I’d inhaled out of my lungs. My friend on the beach laughed until she saw my face: “You’re okay. You’re safe now.” If life-as-a-metaphor meant feeling comfortable in moving water and cresting high seas, my limited dog-paddling ability and ill-equipped dinghy posed a problem.
“Do I need a referral to see someone who specializes in trauma?”
“Yes. I’ll send one in so we can get that started. I could also prescribe something for you—”
This again.
“Do you remember what you were on before?”
“An SSRI that didn’t work very well. And then one meant to help me sleep. I took it every night for two months, and the pill left a metallic taste in my mouth every morning.”
“Let’s start small then. We’ll try this, and you make an appointment up front to come back and tell me how it’s going in a month. That should give the medication time to adjust to your system. But if you have any uncomfortable side effects, come back sooner and we’ll make an adjustment. And we’ll get you in to see someone too.”
Later, I went through my journals and couldn’t find a record of the second medication. I found new moon charts, and vision boards. Notebooks full of ideas and no follow through. I clambered into bed. At two in the afternoon, I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
On a mild autumn day, I set out for an appointment with Dr. Andreev, the psychiatrist at the mental health centre. On the subway ride to the building on College Street, a feeling of déjà despair wafted through me. Apprehension about the meeting. The last time I met with a psychiatrist, it was my father’s—a fifteen-minute session for the doctor to check my dad’s meds and ask how life was treating him. I asked questions and persisted through the condescending tone. That guy had no interest in what I’d learned about mental illness in my role as amateur detective and armchair psychologist over a lifetime of trying to pin down the family plague.
Dr. Andreev welcomed me into a spacious office. His windows looked out into downtown on a sunny and mild Toronto day. I wished I were riding a bike on Centre Island.
“The report from your doctor says there’s been trauma but not many details.”
I nodded and focused on my hands in my lap. When I opened my mouth, no words came out. I shook my head and shrugged one shoulder. “My mom was ill. And violent. It took a toll. It’s still taking a toll.”
Dr. Andreev signaled to the box of tissues near me.
“When do you remember the abuse starting?”
“It was always part of our everyday life.”
“Were Child Services called in?”
I gathered he was taking measurements. “Yes. Once when I was almost twelve. But my dad promised the social worker the problem would be solved in Italy.”
He waited for me to stop blowing my nose.
“Do you have any issues with drugs or alcohol?”
“Coffee. And sugar. And too much salt.”
“Do you experience any euphoria translated into dangerous behaviour? Harmful behaviours?” He offered a list and nothing twigged.
“Maybe reckless spending? But that’s if I stay up too late and get on Amazon. Then I buy a lot of books. I’ve got a lot of unread books.”
“Do you go into debt over these purchases?”
“Everything racks up debt when you don’t have a steady job. Bills are due that I can’t pay. I’ve worked since I was sixteen, and the last time I didn’t have a guaranteed gig, I didn’t function very well. I prefer to keep busy.”
Then I bring up the topic I’ve been wondering about. Possible misdiagnosis. How what looked like depression could have been something else that I’d never heard of until recently. “I’ve been reading about the research done by a professor of clinical psychology at Harvard on something called C-PTSD.”
“The C stands for?”
“Complex.” Never bring your own research to a psych fight.
“No. That’s not in the DSM.”
“I know. But it might be one day.” Tears streamed down my face. I was dabbing my cheeks as much as I could. But this wasn’t my first time at the evaluation rodeo, and I wouldn’t let someone from a profession that had repeatedly let my family down talk over me. “Until the DSM was updated in the late 1980s, LGTBQ people were being treated as ill, and some were even treated with aversion therapy. I read a memoir of a woman who was given electroshock treatments because she was a lesbian.”
“Do you have nightmares about the abuse?”
“No—”
“Then it’s not PTSD.”
I can’t explain about the evil presence I sometimes dream about, that I sometimes wake up with, certain it’s in my room. I don’t even know the dark mirages are symptomatic of night tremors, an issue that affects children and adults.
Dr. Andreev asked about my medication history. He suggested my dosage had never been high enough to cause any lasting positive change. “That’s an issue when family doctors prescribe antidepressants.” He noted that most people have to stay on them for the rest of their lives, and the worst side effects (numbness, exhaustion) don’t go away, so it would be a matter of finding drugs that didn’t cause those additional problems when possible.
“I don’t think you understand. You’re not seeing me at my best. I need to get my life—”
“Yes?”
I wasn’t in a reactive relationship any more, and I’d avoided ugly boundary entanglements as much as possible as an adult. The rare case flew under my radar, particularly when my detection system went offline, usually because I felt vulnerable. Like right then.
I didn’t know up from down, only anxiety, only a desperate need to feel like I could manage again, in a life mostly together instead of frayed at the seams and falling apart. I was hard-pressed to think of anything I did to look after myself. For years, at every medical checkup, when a doctor would press a stethoscope against my back and say “Take a deep breath,” they would have to say, “Again, and a little deeper please.” You could forget how to breathe naturally, normally when you have been ill. You might forget there was ever a time when you felt safe enough to take a deep breath. You might not know until years had passed that what every doctor noticed and you didn’t was that your shallow breathing meant you’d been afraid and holding your breath for a very long time.
I didn’t say: Pull out the tarot, try to predict the future.
He wrote the name of a medication on the back of his business card. Told me to get the book Mind over Mood out of the library and to start cognitive behavioural therapy.
I took his card and thanked him. Out on College Street, in the middle of the afternoon, the city filled with people on their way to or from coffee break, to or from heartbreaks, to or from work. I looked back at the building and knew I would never call to book a follow-up.
My muscles ached and joints stiffened with soreness. I felt arthritic in my neck and shoulders. My throat was itchy and tender, perhaps with the strep throat I used to get all the time. I retreated into spending time alone.
I had no desire to see anyone or to be seen. A heavy constriction in my lungs felt like all the air was being compressed, slowly, out of my chest: I breathed slowly to steady my thoughts. I felt like a diver being lowered into the depths of the sea in a shark-proof cage, realizing at the last moment that I was not properly equipped. The wetsuit, another layer of skin, wasn’t enough. I needed gills. I needed to breathe under water.
One morning, I woke up hissing.
I sat straight up in bed, disoriented, not fully aware of my surroundings. My eyes adjusted to the dark as dim light streamed in the window from streetlamps. The digital clock read 3:33 AM on this fourth night in a row I had woken at 3:30, restless, anxious. I focused on my bed, my room. My nightmare had morphed into night terrors. Moments before, in the dream, I had been in another apartment, a high-rise that I believed to be home. Faint light filtered in from the floor-to-ceiling sliding glass door of the balcony. I was uneasy, unable to imagine how I had ended up in this unfamiliar place, furnished like a bland hotel room. Every dream friend was a stranger, an unrecognizable face. They would come in, talk for a bit, and then their faces would twist and contort into severe expressions of grief. People kept coming to visit me, and in the brief time of the visit, they ended up sickly, so overtaken by irrational thoughts that each one jumped off the balcony.
Each time, I yelled, “Wait! Stop!”
A voice whispered, “There’s a malevolent presence here.” I spun around and couldn’t find the source.
Not possible, I thought, I would know. Full of false bravado.
I heard a bizarre mix of speech and sound, not one voice but many, murmuring conversations, unkind laughter. A swirling sensation came over me as I spun around, looking for the source of the shadow presence I finally sensed. I looked around the room. This couldn’t be how I lived, where I lived. Where was my furniture? My bookshelves? The buzzing sound of talk grew louder.
The cautionary voice spoke again. “Protect yourself. Dangerous. Unsafe.”
More mumbling drowned out the guardian voice.
“What do I do? Who is it?” I felt something, someone walk past me. I heard laughter. A cackle. My mother’s laugh.
I hissed like a feral cat. I turned 360 degrees, standing on the same spot, sibilating to every corner of the room, furious with myself for not being aware, sooner, that trouble was brewing. No retreat, stand firm, I thought, it’s dangerous to be this oblivious. First I felt fear, then fury.
Spittle lined my lips as I kept hissing in my sleep, defending my space. I wanted to ferret out the evil, to retaliate and destroy the demon that deprived me of a mom. “You can’t catch me. You can’t hurt me.”
I woke up cold, hissing and shivering. I kicked the sheets off myself as my eyes adjusted. What if a menace had followed me back from the world of dreams? My breathing quieted. As in the nightmare, I sensed nothing. The hissing woke me, I realized; I wiped my mouth.
Was I the gatekeeper between two realms I couldn’t identify? “You will not get past me,” I said aloud, in case. And then I hissed.
For the rest of the day, I felt the chill of tiredness and terror.
When I told my father about the dream, he had no doubt about its significance. My mother, born to the malevolent stregas, was trying to get at me again.
The following summer in Toronto is a season of amplified sound. Wires buzz, car horns blare, people yell obscenities at slow drivers. The air conditioned to a hum. Every voice is louder in hot weather, not muffled by snow or slush.
A cool August meant sleep was possible. Rest from unrelenting heat. Even with this weather bonus, I called my dad and broke down over the phone. Pounding the employment pavement meant mounting humiliation.
“Think how hard it was for the people who came here and didn’t understand anything, No English. Maybe they couldn’t read or write even in their first language. That’s not you.”
He assumed agreement in my silence.
“Look at the news. See the people in Syria—they have hardship and real suffering. People lose their life because a crazy stupid man is in charge. People try to cross the sea in the boat and wish they live in a place like Canada. Is not your situation.”
“I’ve made a mess of this life, and I don’t know how to fix it. I can’t get out of bed. I’m struggling to get dressed, get up, get to another job agency.”
“Please, you know how upsets me to see you like this. What I can do?”
“Nothing.”
“You should go look in the mirror,” he says, repeating his familiar advice. “You no cheats nobody. You no steal from the people. You no kill nobody.”
I agree to go over the next day for lunch.
At Islington station, waiting for the south-travelling bus, my brain feels stuffed with cotton. It may not be good to visit the geography of my nightmares. Whenever I dream I am stuck, not moving forward, that I never left, it is in this suburb of concrete and cars.
I sat at dad’s small table while he cooked bucatini noodles with tomato sauce. He’d initially suggested going out, but I wasn’t in the mood. After the mishap at No Frills, I didn’t want to expose myself to any more run-ins with my mother, who still roamed the neighbourhood, searching for my dad, pestering my aunt enough to warrant a restraining order.
I asked after my aunts.
“Your mother showed up at your Aunt Sofia’s house again last night. Middle of the night, banging on the door. Asking you to come home and stop working as a prostitute. Then she asked Sofia to make friendship. Can you believe? She has no shame. No feeling.”
“What do you mean, she was in the neighbourhood? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want to upset you.”
I stopped eating. “I can’t believe you. I can’t believe how many times we have the same conversation over and over and nothing changes. I need the warning. I ask you to give me the information I need to keep myself safe, and you can’t even do that. You don’t—
“I don’t want you to get upset. You see how you’re getting upset. That woman ruined everything for us. I don’t want—”
“I’m upset with you, not Mom. I’m upset with me. I keep trusting you, and there’s no reason to trust you. You’ve never given me a reason to have faith that anything would be taken care of.”
“Me, you don’t trust me? I put you before me my whole life whatever you needed, whatever you wanted. You needed books, I buy, you needed clothes, I buy—”
I got up and scraped my dish into the garbage. I filled the sink with soapy water and refused to speak.
“Eufemia, please. I can’t stand to see you like this.”
“So look away. Did I ask you to look? Who’s asking you to look? You avoided looking, avoided dealing with the problem the whole time the awful situation was right in front of you. Why pay attention now? Why do the one thing I ask of you?”
“Here we go. I do everything for everybody, and I’m the bad guy. Better I should die now. No one appreciates sacrifice. It’s a waste.”
“Why can’t you understand why it’s important for me to know so I can keep myself safe? Since you couldn’t do it twenty years ago, try now and I’ll make a decision like ‘today’s a day I stay home’ instead of coming here not knowing and then running into her.” I cursed myself for forgetting my sunglasses and my hooded jacket. Not that the clothes made for a perfect disguise, but I felt less exposed, less anxious when I covered up, even though I probably drew more attention to myself. Like a pathetic spy-school dropout.
I washed the dishes while my dad continued to mutter about how no one understood the efforts he’d gone to and everyone was selfish and self-absorbed.
Shouting at a senior who loves me. I knew it was ridiculous, but I couldn’t unhook the rage. Like burs stuck all over me.
I shouted, “I’m going home,” and refused the offer of a lift to the subway. The anger had a grip that wouldn’t let go, and I didn’t want to say thank-you for anything. I wanted to vent resentment.
At my apartment, I got back into bed and turned off my phone. I tried to will my body into calm, but I couldn’t shake off the tremors. My hands shook. I yanked the duvet over my head and slept for four hours. When I woke, I lit a candle and placed it in front of my parents’ wedding photo. Then I called my dad to apologize.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“I thought you were finished. Thought I broke you. Too much stress is not good for living.”
“Can I go see Victor?”
Victor, my father’s parapsychologist-tarot-reading-feng-shui-master, was gregarious and easy to talk with for a guy dabbling in the woo-woo world.
After my dad’s psychotic break, when he spoke of my mother’s witchcraft, Victor had sat patiently with him and prescribed a homeopathic treatment—a Bach flower remedy. He’d told me I needed to form a mudra with my hand when I felt stressed, to stop the energy from dissipating and running out of me. The second time I’d tagged along on a checkup of my dad’s, Victor interrupted himself to give me a warning. “You should protect the space where you sleep better. Throw white light around it as you’re falling asleep.”
“How?”
“How? With your mind, what else?” He looked at my father—a look that said they don’t teach this stuff in school and they really should.
Books on feng shui flourished in his waiting room as well as annual prospects for each sign of the Chinese zodiac. I looked up my sign to see how the Rooster would fare. Then I perused my father’s (Tiger) and my mother’s (Rat). Animals that would never hang out together. In the mythology of the birth of this astrology, Buddha hosted a race and invited all the animals in the kingdom. Twelve showed up, and the rotation of their honorary years is based on the order of making it through the finish line. The Rat cheated by hitching a ride on the Ox, and that’s how it arrived before every other critter. Under the Rat, in the weaknesses category: unstable.
Victor called my name and led me into his office space. He listened as I poured out the confusing parts of my panic spiral. I couldn’t figure out what to do or how I would do it. Look after my dad. Manage the unknowable future. I’d kept myself so busy before; now, without work, my days had no structure and no meaning.
“When he called, your dad told me he was worried about you. Your energy is like his was when he first came to see me. Maybe not as bad but very low.” He pulled a folder from his desk drawer and labelled it with my name, birthdate and time of birth. Then, on a blank unlined sheet he drew the outline of a body. He traced the outer lines with three circles.
“This is your aura in the world. Right now it’s dark grey and full of holes, an energy leak from all the psychic attacks. The second layer is dull as stone too. When the outer layer gets hit repeatedly, the second is weakened. If the first layer, the one that’s like another skin, is also depleted, then that’s crisis time. That’s health issues. Insomnia, no focus, no strength.”
“I think I’ve always been tired.”
“You don’t have to believe what I’m saying to you. It doesn’t matter. I’m telling you what’s happened to you—who knows how many lifetimes. This could be old pain.”
“I don’t remember a time when I didn’t feel exhausted.”
Victor held up a hand to stop me while he made notes on my chart. “First the cord between you and your mother has to be cut. She’s not well. It’s not her fault. Not completely. You have a choice to make.”
“You mean not being in contact.”
“It’s up to you. If you can do it and stay strong, but the umbilical energy cord between you two has to be cut. She’s not a problem you can fix. You come into the world unprotected. And the people around you have to protect you.”
I told him I had malocchio removal when I was a baby, when I was six months old.
“You and everybody else who was born to Southern Italian parents. That’s why they don’t pay compliments to the baby.”
“I guess that’s how people coped with high infant mortality rates, and with living in horrendous poverty when no one had access to education.”
“Listen, not everything everyone thought was backwards then. They understood essentials no one thinks about now. You spend time around someone like your mother, and you will get sick too. Look at your father. Look at the difference in him now to ten years ago. He was almost dead.”
“That’s because he wouldn’t make a decision to get out sooner.”
Victor believes what my dad believes—which is based on what Victor said—so this weird spooky-spirit-sickened-séance stuff comes full circle. All roads lead to hexes.
I left his office with a candle and instructions to let it burn for three days straight. At night, or if I needed to leave my apartment, I had to place the candle in my bathtub with nothing flammable nearby. The candle sat on a white plate that Victor had cleansed and given back to me.
“Whichever way the wax goes, put everything after the three days in a plastic bag and bring the bag to me. Leave it with Isabelle at the front desk.”
Two weeks later I returned for the analysis.
“At least you didn’t wait as long as your father to come for help.” He gives me another white candle. One to light every morning at the same time and speak directly to God. “Or Spirit, or universe, whatever you prefer. Every morning, after you light this, you tell the universe everything you are grateful for. Say thank-you and really mean it; say it with your heart full of love. You need to start when the next new moon finishes.” He checked his calendar. “And go for twenty days, up to the full moon. Please make sure the space around your bed is clean and clear. We need for that space to be protected. You like to write, so write down what happens in your dreams. Pay attention to what happens. Make an appointment to come see me again in a month.”
At the next visit, Victor looked me over and wrote more notes. He prepared a package for me—the contents of which contained the melted candle and other materials.
“Leave this behind your bed for three nights. Put it in one spot and don’t touch it. On the fourth day, you need to throw it into water. Running water is better than the lake, but you can go to the beach. You have to turn your back to the water, and throw it behind you. Make sure you set yourself up. You have to throw it hard so it lands in the water. You can be near the edge. Then you walk away. Don’t turn back to look at the package. You can’t, you understand? Walk away. Go home. If this is a place you go to all the time, don’t go for a while. A week.”
“What if it’s a body of water I pass every day on transit?”
He thought about it. “That should be okay.”
Days later, I waited for a lone moment on a pedestrian bridge over the Don River. I didn’t want to have to explain to anyone walking past, “I’m using the river to perform a curse removal. I know it sounds like a metaphor, but listen, can you scoot away? I have to sidestep an Orpheus manoeuvre now, and if you distract me, I might turn the wrong way and be faced with demons forever.” I calculated the angle to make sure I didn’t throw the package on the banks. Then I hurled it. I walked away, not looking back.
Overhead the sun shone. A breeze blew down to the lake. I heard the traffic of the parkways and walked home, stopping at my favourite café to grab a coffee.
Later that night, I told my dad everything had gone smoothly, nothing felt different.
“That’s the mistake I made.” My dad had done this treatment in the early days of seeing Victor. “I threw this little bottle into Lake Ontario, and then I turned around to look at it. In that moment, everything came back to me. All my bad luck, my bad life with your mother. Every humiliation she put me through. But you didn’t look, and that’s good.”
I knew this story. Back when I first heard it, months after that visit in my early twenties where I’d refereed my parents’ wrestling match for hours, I’d thought my father was gone. Or that the person I thought was my father had never really existed except as a figment I’d created. That the real man was so flawed and superstitious, he’d believe a bottle could contain evil spirits and unleash sickness.
“I guess I learned from your mistake.”
“That’s life. Make a mistake, learn, make a mistake, learn. You try not to be make the same mistakes.”