Chapter 16

 

I WANDERED AROUND Anna’s garden with Betsy at my heels. I was glad for her company. Mr. Grubs hung out of her mouth as she shadowed me through the paths. Anna’s garden was amazing. It was late spring and yet it was already alive with brilliant reds, oranges, and purples. The flowers smelled rich and warm, like color. I practiced taking deep breaths as I walked the circular path, stopping now and then to pinch a sage or mint leaf and inhale their scent.

The eruption of flowers in Anna’s garden made me think of our spot at the freeway.

I sat down on a bench near the tiny rose garden. Betsy jumped up on the bench next to me and rested her head, and the slobbery Mr. Grubs, in my lap. I stroked her back as I let the memory surround me like the scent of the roses.

The words that Gray spoke that night were still crystal clear in my mind. The details of Gray were fading, and I could barely remember their voice now, but the words they spoke to me that night were lodged like a bullet in my brain.

 

“BANJ, DO YOU know that after Mom died nobody even hugged me? We didn’t have any family and Dad wouldn’t let her have friends, so there was just . . . nobody. My teachers were afraid of me and I never had any friends at school. I was alone. My mom and I had only had each other, so when she was gone I had no one.

“The day she died I came home from school to find Dad on the couch surrounded by empty beer cans and cigarette butts. He was never home when I got off from school. Normally he didn’t get home until at least six, and half the time he went out to the bars straight from work, so when I saw him I knew it was bad. I just knew.

“I remember panicking and thinking that maybe he killed her. I ran to the kitchen, praying to see her there, but she wasn’t there. I turned from the kitchen and was running to her room when my dad started to laugh. Yer Mom’s dead. Goddamn offed herself this morning. Your precious mother loved you so much she offed herself. Whadya think of that, ay little faggot? Huh, whatdya think of that?he slurred.

“I ran past him to my room, expecting him to come after me with fists flying, but he didn’t. I crawled under my bed and waited up all night for her to come home, but she never did.

“I stopped talking that day. I just stopped. Looking back, it seems impossible that nobody really did anything.”

Gray sat up a little, reached into the chip bag, and pulled out a greasy handful. With their mouth full of chips they continued. “My dad pretty much stopped coming home. I would see him now and then in the mornings or hear him stumble in at night, usually with some girl he met at the bar, but mostly I was on my own. I barely knew how to boil water, so I lived on peanut butter sandwiches. To this day the smell of peanut butter makes me want to puke.”

Gray turned to look up at me, chip crumbles sprinkled down their shirt. “You know, Banj, I would lie in bed and wish as hard as I could that she would come back. I thought that maybe if I just wished hard enough she would walk in. There was no funeral or anything, or at least any that I knew of, so there was a part of me that thought maybe she was still alive somewhere.

“I used to make up this story in my head. It was a total eleven-year-old sort of story. Mom got knocked out, like in some ridiculous sitcom, and totally forgot who she was. In my head she was wandering around trying to remember herself and her life and me and one day she would and then she would come back. Some nights I would stay up all night thinking about where my mom might be right at that moment and trying hard to wish her home.

“I didn’t start talking again until I was fifteen and my Mom came back.”

“What do you mean your mom came back?” I asked. “You mean like her ghost?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. All I know is that she was there,” Gray said. “I had always known she would come back one day, and she did. One night I was cutting my arms, going deeper and deeper, and I glanced up and there was Mom just sitting on my bed.

“It didn’t scare me or freak me out, it felt like exactly what was supposed to be happening.

“At some point my dad’s current girlfriend, Pam, overheard me talking to my mom. She didn’t give two shits about me, but hearing me in my room talking to my dead mom totally freaked her out. I think that part of her was afraid that Mom was haunting the house. But mostly I think she thought she had found her way to get rid of me. She insisted that Dad take me to a therapist.”

Gray pulled out another handful of chips and stuffed it in their mouth and then washed it down with more warm Coke.

“I had to go see this woman once a week,” they went on. “The therapist was this chubby lady with a giant head of ’80s frosted hair and bright red fingernails with matching lipstick. It was wild, but she ended up being like the first person who seemed to actually care about me. I guess I forgot that therapists are paid to care about you.

“One day I decided to tell her about my mom coming to see me. I stupidly thought she would take my side against my dad. I had this ridiculous vision of the big hearted therapist swooping in to save the poor little motherless child.  

“It was a like a slightly more grown-up fantasy of the one I had when I was eleven. In this fantasy, it was going to be just like one of those feel-good TV movies. In my head I would tell this chick about my mom and she would smile and pull me into a hug and tell me that it was all going to be alright and then she would swoop me away to her big house and we would live happily ever after. I would never have to see my dad again. It was a childish fantasy, but I truly believed it would come true. I had to believe it would come true.”

The smell of the flowers in the garden and Betsy’s warm head heavy on my leg helped to keep me firmly in real life. I continued to stroke Betsy’s head as I let the memory come into me.

“Of course that’s not how it worked out. It was terrible. It was so, so terrible . . .” Gray shut their eyes and swallowed hard. “Joyce got this condescending look on her face and I knew I had screwed up big time. She explained to me that from what my dad had told her she thought it was pretty likely that my mom was schizophrenic and that it was possible that I was too.

“Joyce spoke to me in a sugary voice like I was five-years-old and she was my kindergarten teacher. Your mom had a mental illness, sweetie, and it tends to run in families. It’s possible that you are developing it, but don’t you worry, they have medicine that will make you as good as new. And then I found out that she had thought I was nuts all along. She had just been waiting for me to admit seeing my mom.  

“The not talking, the way I seemed too girlish for a boy, and the dead mom all pointed toward crazy. Once I mentioned my dead mom visiting me, she had all the evidence she needed to confirm the fact that I was a lunatic. My teachers, my school counselors, obviously my jerk of a dad, they were all in on it. They thought I was some sort of gay psycho or something.

“The shame swallowed me up until I couldn’t even see light or feel warmth or even remember that such things existed. I was thrown into a bottomless pit of pure self-loathing and not a single person tried to pull me out.”

I thought about what Gray had said about their mom and about how Joyce betrayed them. I felt my eyes burn, but I didn’t snap the rubber band that was on my wrist and I didn’t dig my nails in, instead I just kept rubbing Betsy’s silky ears and let myself stay back there in that night with Gray.

“I lost it,” Gray said. “I freaking lost it. You know, I have no idea if that was really my mom or if it was some sort of delusion, but I can tell you this much, I needed to believe it was Mom. I needed her and she came to me and I don’t care if it was her ghost or my messed up brain or what it was. I was fifteen-years-old and alone and I needed my mom and that woman took her from me.

“I started to scream and I didn’t stop. I don’t really remember anything other than picking up a chair and throwing it at the wall. The leg went right through the goddamned flowered wallpaper and just hung there. And suddenly it was all just so funny.

“When the cops arrived I was doubled up on the floor laughing so hard I could barely breathe. I ended up spending three months in the mental hospital. And you know what? Nobody hugged me there either. Not one single person. The last hug I had was from my mom on the day she died . . . up until I met you. You were the first person to hug me since I was eleven-years-old.”

I pushed Gray’s wispy hair out of their face and traced my fingers over their eyebrows. “I’m glad I was the first person to hug you.”

 “Me too.” They smiled, touching my face.

“They let me out of the hospital with a court order saying that I had to take my meds. I didn’t go back to school and nobody cared. Going mad unleashed this new freedom in my life. As long as I didn’t act like a freak and swallowed the handful of pills each day nobody cared what I did. Dad and Pam avoided me like never before. I didn’t even have to go back to counseling. In some ways it was the first time in my life that I was actually free.”

Gray sat up. They pulled their pipe out again, fished a small bud from their pocket, and loaded it into the bowl. They put the lighter to the pipe took another hit, and coughed out a cloud of smoke.

“Want another one?” They choked.

I put my hand up and waved it away. I already regretted taking the first two. I knew that I needed to stay clear headed for this conversation.

Gray opened the candy bar and broke off a piece. They picked up a stick and tossed it a few feet behind us for Rags. We had to be careful not to draw attention to ourselves from the cars below. The bank of trees that lined the upper hill kept us fairly concealed. Rags retrieved the stick and then settled down next to Gray to shred it.

“After I quit school I spent most days that spring and summer down at the Bargain Basket just sitting in the parking lot, listening to the trains. The tracks ran along the backside of the store and after Mom died they put up a chain link fence to keep other people from following in her footsteps, so to speak.” Gray tried to smile.

“The Basket was one of those grocery stores for poor people. You know, one of those places where the produce was always half rotten; mushy apples, spotty brown bananas, tomatoes that practically fell apart in your hands. Forget anything green. Nobody had a choice though. It was the only store in town and it’s where we shopped, which totally sucked after Mom died because every week my dad would drag me there to go shopping for peanut butter and beer and every week I would look out at the tracks and think about my mom.”

Gray’s monologue continued without hesitation.

“Spring and summer in Florida are almost unbearable, but I would sit there on the curb for hours just listening to the trains and trying to figure out why she left the first time. And the second time. Why hadn’t she returned after I got sent to the hospital? Was it the meds? Or something else? I still don’t know the answer to that. So I would sit there and wonder and try to will her back. Delusion or no delusion I wanted my mom back.

“I didn’t have a single friend, Banjo. I was fifteen-years-old and completely alone in the world. I guess it’s sort of a miracle that I never climbed that fence and walked onto the tracks myself.”

Gray looked at me hard as they ran their foot back and forth over Rags’ back. I could tell they were lost in the memory and contemplation, but at the same time they were measuring their words, trying to find a way to go on with the story. It had been locked up in them all of these years, pushing against their skin and trying to crawl out of their lips and now they could no longer hold it back. They turned from me and looked out over the freeway. The cars sped by so fast that it made me dizzy.

“The only conclusion I can come to as to why my Mom did what she did is that she just felt so damn helpless against my dad. I think she felt like a failure in every way, and especially in not being able to protect me. I dunno though, maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe my dad had something to do with it. That thought wakes me up at night . . .

“The thing that’s really hard is that my love for my mom is sort of stuck in the past. I still love her like an eleven-year-old loves their mom. I don’t love her the way a seventeen-year-old does. Like I still see her as almost flawless in so many ways. I know logically that she had a ton of issues and that, in a lot of ways, she really let me down, but at the same time I don’t really know that because I never got to know her as a teenager, or as an adult. I never got to be really pissed at her or hate her or even have a fight with her, which is both good and bad I guess,” they said.

“I know logically that my mom wasn’t perfect, but I don’t know really know it. In my head she is my perfect mom and the only person that ever really loved me completely, so now I feel like I will never find that sort of love again. Does that even make sense?”

“Yeah.”

“You know, I think if they had let me keep her when she started to come visit me, I would be better off. If instead of sending me off to the loony bin, they had instead just let me work through my shit with my ghost mom—I don’t know, maybe I would be better off.” Gray leaned forward and kissed Rags on the top of her matted head.

 

I TRUDGED THROUGH the memory of that night with Gray as if it were a muddy trail through the forest. One foot in front of the other, slow and steady, being careful not to slip. Breathe in, breathe out. As I came to the end of the memory path, I imagined myself putting the memory into a campfire and watching the smoky embers float off into the clouds. I opened my eyes.

I was afraid I would find Anna staring at me. I had no idea how long I had been sitting on that garden bench. Being so lost in the memory, I had forgotten where I was, but when I opened my eyes it was still just me and Betsy in the garden. I took Mr. Grubs and tossed him down the path. Betsy took off after him and I followed. She grabbed the filthy stuffed toy, and together we went back into Anna’s house.

“Hey, sweetheart,” Anna said, “I made us some more tea.”

I sat down on the floor and leaned on the table. She pushed a mug of tea toward me.

“You’re doing great, Banjo. You’re doing just fine.” Anna smiled. “Do you want to talk about the memory, or how you’re feeling?”

“No. Is that okay?” I knew that I did want to talk about this with Anna though. I wanted to ask her if she thought that Gray’s mom had really come to them. I wanted to tell her about Gray’s terrible dad. I wanted her to know about all the awful and shameful things that I carried like rocks inside of me, but I knew I couldn’t. Not today.

“Of course it’s okay,” she said. “Maybe tonight you could journal a little bit about it. I would like for you to spend the next week focusing on your journal as well as allowing your memories and feelings to come and go as they need to. Don’t be afraid to feel the pain, but also try not to hold onto it. Practice letting the memories and emotions just come in and then float away. Don’t try to control them, don’t try to resist them, don’t let them settle in. And feel free to take some rubber bands with you.

“Speaking of rubber bands, how’s the cutting going? Or not cutting I guess I should say.” She smiled. I loved Anna because she didn’t play all the dumb games that Doctor Jack and Cindy played. She just said it like it was and didn’t freak out about how it was.

I took a few sips of my tea. “I’m doing a lot better. I mean, I still want to a lot, but mostly I don’t.”

“Good. Good,” she said. “Well, I think we had a good day today, how about you?”

“Yeah.”

We sat in silence and sipped our tea. It didn’t feel awkward or uncomfortable, it felt safe. After a while I realized that I wanted to go home. I wanted to see Henry. Maybe the two of us would take Rags for a walk. They would both like that.

“Well, I guess I should probably go home now,” I said.

She stood. “Alright, then I’ll see you next week. Feel free to call or text me if you need me, sweetie. And, Banjo, you should talk to your mom about the baby and what you plan to do, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Anna.”