CHAPTER NINE
The first time Mom was sick, I was eight years old. It was soon after Phoebe died. I don’t remember much, except that Aunt Sissy came to stay with us. Aunt Sissy’s real name is Cecilia; she’s a lawyer and she hates being called Sissy, which makes sense to me—who wants to be called Sissy?—but Mom said, “I can’t help it. You were Sissy all my life. You’d feel like a stranger if I started calling you Cecilia.” Which also made sense.
I remember when Dad and I visited Mom in the hospital. All she’d done was lie there in bed, sometimes with her eyes open, sometimes closed. I couldn’t see anything wrong with her. She didn’t have a cast on her leg; nothing was bleeding or cut. She didn’t have a bandage on her head like you saw in the movies. Dad made a couple of attempts to talk to her.
“I watered the garden this morning. Your yellow rose is still in bloom.”
Then there’d been silence for a while and Dad squirmed in the chair, got up, and looked out the window. “They’re building a new apartment across the road. Looks nice,” he said.
I felt sorry for him. Later, he tried to draw me into it. “Tell Mom about the birdhouse you made at school.”
“I made a birdhouse,” I said. She didn’t answer. Dad gave me a look and I knew he wanted me to say more, but I couldn’t think of anything else.
The second time Mom was sick, I was nine. Aunt Sissy came to stay again. The first night she sat on the stool in the kitchen in her navy-blue suit and matching pantyhose and high heels and she said, “I don’t cook and I won’t clean, but I can microwave like nobody’s business and I can hire a maid service to do the floors and laundry.”
“We don’t need that,” Dad had said. “Thank you, but we’re a twentieth-century family.”
“Great, you’re only a century behind then,” Aunt Sissy said.
“I know how to cook and the laundry has always been my job. If you want anything ironed, though, you’re on your own,” Dad said.
“I didn’t come here to have you do my laundry.”
“Why did you come then?” Dad said. I knew by his voice that he was mad, but I didn’t know why.
“Moral support. Company for Francie.”
I was glad she was there, even if I only saw her in the evenings when Dad was at the hospital. We microwaved popcorn and watched movies and she told me about some of her funny court cases, like the couple who’d split up and fought over who would get their cat and when the husband got the cat, it scratched him in the face and he sued his ex-wife for turning the cat against him.
“I like having Aunt Sissy here,” I told him one night.
“I know you do,” he said.
“But do you like having her here?”
“Sure I do. Sure.” He looked at me sideways and I wasn’t sure he’d say any more. But then he added, “You know sisters. They can be a bit bossy. Mom doesn’t always appreciate it. Let’s just leave it at that.”
That time, I was old enough to understand that the sickness Mom had was not in her body but her mind. It wasn’t just little worries anymore. She saw things all wrong. Sometimes she heard voices no one else heard. Back then, Mom was new to her job as a counselor at my school, and adults who saw me in the hallway would give me these kind of sad-puppy-face looks or they’d say, “How are you?” But they didn’t ask how she was, like they would have if she’d broken her leg or had the flu. It was all kind of hush-hush, like the time Ricky Maloney peed his pants on the field trip bus and the teachers frowned at us because we were all supposed to pretend like we didn’t notice. I don’t think I actually noticed this with the adults when I was nine, but when I think of it now it explains why I felt like punching my PE teacher or breaking Principal Vannar’s thick glasses in half.
I did get in trouble once during that time, when I broke every single piece of chalk in a brand new box of it during lunch hour. And it wasn’t too smart since I was the only one in the classroom at the time so they knew it was me. But it felt satisfying to hear each one of them snap, so I kept it up until I’d snapped them all.
Dad got called into Ms. Vannar’s office and Ms. Gretchen, our teacher, was there too, wearing the sad-puppy-face and occasionally smiling at me with a frown and a smile at the same time. I thought they were making a big deal about nothing. I didn’t think Ms. Gretchen was the type to mind using shorter chalk. But the tired and disappointed look on Dad’s face was too much for me, so I made sure never to do anything else that would get me into trouble.