Contagion

I'm holding my breath because I KNOW if I breathe in the dust and mold in this little cubby: I'll sneeze. It's possible that won't matter, but it's all I can do to stay safe.

That and hide in the only room in this apartment that doesn't have a window.

I hear him. Everyone in the neighborhood can hear him; I'm sure. (My GOD! How mortifying! I would die of embarrassment if I wasn't so frightened that he's going to kill me first.)

He's slowing down, though, I think. I hope. It's taking him longer to make his way around the house, isn't it? His banging on the doors and windows seem less frantic. His voice seems a little hoarse. Maybe he's...

"Let me in, Judey! Let me in so that I can kill you! Let me in NOW!"

I push myself back into the small hidey-hole under the stairs to the second-floor apartment, silently slipping my feet under myself, scrunching down against the bricks that I am counting on to protect me if he fires the gun. (He's showed me something through the door. He said it was a gun. How did he get a gun? How does he get anything?)

"Let me in! Let me in! Let me IN!"

He's howling the words now. I bet his face is all red and scrunched, his eyebrows making that "M" on his forehead like they've always done when he gets frustrated. Why me? Why did he come for me this time?

"I'm going to KILL YOUUUUU! Where are they? Where did they go? Why are you hiding them?"

Them. It's about them. Of course. They didn't tell him they were moving. (How could they? Who knows where he is at any one time- except now. Now is all too apparent. And why am I making excuses for my parents?)

There's no way that I'm going to tell him where they are. There's no way I'm going to get near him, or a window, or a door.

And now he's ... he's crying. I think he's crying. I can hear him choking and snorting. I know those sounds, the way he cries when his heart is breaking. I've heard my brother cry like that for, well, for my whole life, I guess. As long as I can remember, anyways.

That doesn't mean that I'm going to comfort him now. Not this time. No.

I truly believe that he will kill me if he gets to me. I'm staying right here until it's quiet. Quiet for at least, at least, at least two hours.

I can wait him out.

~

I don't know when my brother started breaking. That's what I thought it was; parts of him must be broken, misfiring, disconnected.

Maybe it was the elderly mother-in-law-of-a-family-friend that abused me and him when she was brought in to be the live-in babysitter after our mother died. I don't know how much he remembered of that time she moved in (he was 2 and I was 3), but as I write this, looking at the keys as always, I see the thumb of my left hand cocked at the angle it froze into after she beat me and broke it. And she liked me better than she liked him. I don't really know what she did to him, not really; what I do know is enough.

Maybe it was due to my father, enraged that his oldest son wasn't the male he wanted. Maybe my father's sickness couldn't cope with the breaking he recognized in Pete? I don't know, and I am learning that I'll never know and to accept that fact.

I do know this: somewhere along the way I understood that Pete and I were the problem. We two were the children of our father and that mother, his first wife, and we were, what? We were just somehow wrong. Broken.

crazy. crazy? shhh. we don't talk like that. what happens in our house isn't talked about outside. to others. shhhh.

What we don't talk about, though, tends to grow. Gets bigger and more invasive, like tough pigweed that grows and covers all of the good plants.

Pete went to counseling. Pete's teachers tested him. Pastors and priests weighed in. Threats of military school, of 'shape up or ship out mister!', of police knocking on the door and looking for my brother, of break-ins and shoplifting, lies and tears. Of fights and punches, tossed down the stairs, running away, angry silences that sat next to us in the house like a giant saddened Great Dane daring us to object.

The boy's not right. He's just not all there. It's the father's fault. It's the mother's fault. He needs more discipline. Fewer rules. More guidance. Drugs to slow down his mind. Drugs to even out his temperament. He needs to join the army. He's insane. It's insanity, I tell you.

It's manic-depression (it was the 70's, now it might be bipolar). No; it's schizophrenia. It's depression. It's too little iron. (The boy just needs discipline and vitamins, Lois...) He's a bad seed. It's the drugs.

Then, when he was seventeen, on my nineteenth birthday, he ran away for the last time. My parents let him go.

And me? I was relieved. Guilty for that, sure, but relieved. And then I started waiting.

~

I began the waiting that has followed me for over forty years; I wait for the bad seed to sprout in me. For the crazy to seep out. To leave a stench behind as I walk through the world, dirtying all that I touch, poisoning all that I do.

When my first marriage crumbled I was devastated but not surprised, exactly. After all; who would want to stay with me? Eating disorder, trying to push the evil outside of my horrible self with the searching finger down my throat? Well, sure.

When I miscarried a so-much-wanted child my disloyal body was further proof that I couldn't be trusted with a miracle of that magnitude a second time. How dare I have wanted a second child? I'm flawed. Broken. crazy

And now? And now as an adult that has decided to face the fact that they did, in fact, go through familial trauma and abuse; now I am learning to look at it more closely. But not in the same way I used to, not waiting for the crazy to manifest.

Instead I'm crawling into the hiding place I found as a 20 year-old newlywed, and wrapping my arms around her. You did the best you could, you did what you could to survive. You can see it and grow, now.

Now I can look into the mirror, at the eyes the same blue as my brother's, and stop waiting for the madness to strike.

************

Here's a story about my brother and the time I believe helped shape him.

My thanks to RM Stockton for his prompt to write about insanity.

Comments welcome.