Henry's Sisters (19 page)

My shrink told me to willingly check myself into the hospital for a few days followed by a stint in a restful and expensive mental health place out in the country or he would commit me. He said this pleasantly, but I knew he was one step short of shoving a straitjacket over my head.

And somewhere in the thick murkiness of my depression I knew it was go, head to the hospital, or head to a mortuary, and buy my own coffin.

So I went. I had lots of counselling sessions with groups of people in the same snake pit as me. We made crafts and painted pictures of flowers and strolled along garden paths.

I made friends with an obsessive-compulsive who made Janie seem like she had slight idiosyncrasies, a paranoid schizophrenic who used to be a NASA engineer and gave detailed lectures on the development of the space shuttle, and a bipolar artist named Cassandra, who gave me the mermaid table and later jumped, as I mentioned.

A blonde doctor named Brenda Bernard saved my life, and I came out feeling like I was no longer going to follow Cassandra’s lead.

I wasn’t excited about being hospitalised for depression. The mental illness stigma sticks like tar and feathers to people, which is patently ridiculous. You get help for diabetes, no problem, poor thing. You get help for cancer, what can I do to help you, dear?

You get help for a mental illness? People start to steer clear. They are blockheaded, insensitive, narrow-minded morons who will never get past their own flaming ignorance, but they peg you in a hole, treat you with annoying kid gloves, condescension, and/or like they think you’re a weak, perhaps dangerous, eternally sick whack job, unsafe or unhealthy to be around. It’s beyond their minuscule minds to accept that people with mental illnesses get better all the time.
All the time
.

My hospitalisation had to be done to save my own sorry life.

So I did it.

And I’m still here because of it.

Somebody doesn’t like that?

Fuck ’em.

On my way to the bakery the next week, I stopped by a styling salon. I told the gal inside to cut all my braids off. She argued with me because she was young and hip and had a pink Mohawk and a ring in her nose like a bull. ‘They’re awesome…so cool…like, are you sure?’

I told her to chop ’em off.

She wasn’t happy, but she did it.

When I emerged from the salon, my brown hair was short and fluffy and light and curly. I felt like I’d lost ten pounds.

My new haircut didn’t do anything for my swollen jaw or my greenish-purplish appearance, but I felt like a new person.

I loved it.

Loved it
.

Janie didn’t recognise me at first as I stood at the counter, chin down. ‘I’ll be right with you,’ she said cheerily as she iced a wedding cake that she’d shaped into Mt Hood because the couple had met on Mt Hood, in a snow cave, on a group hike, when a blizzard hit. All made it out alive, two fell in love.

‘Alrighty, what can I get you?’ She smiled as she picked up an order pad. Such a change for Janie, who used to like talking to people about as much as she’d like to take off a toenail with a shoehorn.

I smiled back.

Her mouth dropped and her eyes bugged out like a ladybug.

‘Oh my gosh!’ she screamed. ‘
I love it!
’

Henry loved my haircut, too. He hugged me tight and long. ‘No braids! You still pretty, Isabelle!’ He pushed my nose with his finger, lightly. He fluffed my hair.

I have perhaps mentioned that Henry loves. He loves the world. (Except the ‘bad man’ who squished my face.)

He loves butterflies and dandelions. He loves watching geese fly overhead and spiders making their webs. He loves eating cookies and spaghetti and he loves Saturday morning cartoons. He loves the sun and he loves rainy days when he gets to wear his yellow galoshes.

He loves handing out dessert samples and saying, ‘Jesus loves you.’

He loves.

I made an appointment to see Momma and rode my motorcycle to Portland. Part of me was scared to be that exposed after getting attacked, but that’s why I did it. To fight the fear so the fear wouldn’t twist me into someone else. Someone I could not live with.

Momma was in bed when I saw her, wearing the pink robe and the shawl.

I had previously told her I was sick so I couldn’t visit her. She told me my illness was because I was a ‘poor eater…skinny like a scarecrow…lazy in my personal health habits,’ and so on.

‘Get over here, Isabelle,’ she snapped, pulling my face down close. I sat on the edge of her bed. I pretended not to see the ruffled blouse under the robe.

‘For God’s sakes, what did you do this time?’

I was too tired to lie. She was too smart to believe a lie, even if I wrapped it up in cotton candy. ‘Bad date, Momma.’

She studied me for long seconds, turning my face this way and that, her green eyes missing nothing. ‘You’ve cut off your braids. Good. You’re not black, you know. This haircut is better. Choppy, a mess of a job, but it’s better.’

I nodded, exhausted, worn-through, running from my flashbacks of my attack.

A remarkable thing happened then: something crumpled in Momma’s eyes, her face softened, her lips trembled, her chin wobbled, tears sprung out, and she hugged me close. She did not let go for long, long minutes, rocking me back and forth.

I cried into her shawl and she patted my back. ‘You’re going to be OK, Isabelle Marie Bommarito, you’re strong, baby, and you’re going to make it. By God, you are.’

Momma hugged me so rarely and now, with my rainbow face, it made me cry harder, my lungs gasping for air.

One of the times she hugged me tight was after the abortion. She had hugged me because she was falling, in free fall, her pinky fingers slipping from the edge.

She cupped my face with her hands, not bothering to hide a hundred tears. ‘I’m going to kill the bastard that did this to you.’

Bob, The Man in Charge, called Janie and left a sweet message about scones, tea, English gardens. He sounded so nervous. She did not return the call. Too scary.

Each time Father Mike saw me on Wednesday nights, he gave me a hug.

‘I knew God would open the door and you’d burst right through it and bring peace to my soul!’ he’d declare. Or, ‘Lord, I thank you for this girl.’

Something must have flashed across my face one Wednesday night because Father Mike said, ‘Isabelle, child, what is it? Still having the nightmares? The flashbacks?’

Where to start?

Those kind eyes stared into mine.

Waiting.

Not judging.

Kindness swimming around in them.

He saw my hesitation and led me to a pew. The kids were already in their classes, so we had the sanctuary to ourselves. We made small talk, but Father Mike is impatient with that, he likes to get to people’s ‘spiritual essences,’ so he said, ‘Share with me, dear girl. Let’s talk as the Lord wishes us to talk, with honesty and trust.’

And it all came out.

‘I hate what I’ve done in my past, Father Mike. I’m so…’ I took a deep breath. ‘I’m so… I’m so ashamed. I feel so dirty, like I’ll never be clean, never be normal. I wished I’d never done what I’ve done and now I can’t get it out of my head. I hate myself for doing it. I do, I hate myself.’

‘You hate what you’ve done in the past? You hate yourself? Lovely girl, lovely girl!’ He clasped my hands in both of his. ‘Lay your shame and the past you hate on the feet of Christ and know this, dear child: God loves you. He understands you. He forgives you.’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

Father Mike spread his arms like the wings of an eagle. Or an angel. ‘Ask and you will receive forgiveness. And then, Isabelle, forgive yourself. Do not hate yourself, do not spend time regretting what you cannot change. No sins are too great for Christ’s light.’

‘Hell, yeah. They are, Father Mike. Mine are.’

‘Christ is bigger than the sins. God’s love is eternal and everlasting. They are the light. Embrace the light, Isabelle. Embrace it.’

I bent my head again as so many shameful, demoralising memories flooded it.

‘If Christ had wanted us to wallow in regret, He would have said so. If Christ had wanted us to let guilt rule our past and future, He would have told us. He did not.’ Father Mike clasped my hands again. ‘If Christ felt we were unforgivable, He would not have offered forgiveness. God would not have sacrificed His son for us.’

He smiled at me, pure, sure.

‘Isabelle Bommarito, I see Christ’s light in you shining bright. I see it in the way you bring God’s music to the hearts of teenagers. I see it in the way you left your own life to care for your mother, for Henry, for Stella. I see it in the love you have for your sisters. I see Christ’s light emanating from you, dear child.
Emanating
.’

I bent my head to our hands and let my hot tears slip through our fingers.

‘Isabelle, God is proud of you. Your walk took you away from him, and now, by your own choosing, you are back. The angels of heaven are singing, glorifying in your return. Christ is rejoicing.’

I did not resist when Father Mike hugged me, his hand patting my back.

‘Welcome back, dearest Isabelle. Welcome back to God’s house. We are delighted you are here.’

Tears gushed out of my eyes, but in the wash of water, I think, I hope, I believe… I saw a tiny glimmer of light.

Momma’s abortion – dangerous, dirty, cheap – was done by a doctor who’d had his license shredded for molesting women patients when they were under sedation and for a number of botched operations on Long Island millionaires. It not only almost killed Momma physically, it about killed her emotionally.

She hadn’t wanted to be pregnant, but then she hadn’t wanted to have sex with that rattlesnake at his shack, either. She did it for a trailer so her kids wouldn’t freeze.

Not the street many people would have taken, but it’s easy to judge someone else when you’re not battling a raging depression, single motherhood with a disabled and often unhealthy son, three daughters, no roof over your head, no job, an empty wallet, and you think you may well freeze in winter.

Six months after we came back to live with Momma after the blood-soaking mattress incident, the woman who owned the clothes store Momma worked at divorced her husband because she decided she’d been stuck in a rut for ‘one decade too many.’ She skipped off to Italy, deciding to stay ‘’til I run out of money.’

Momma was out of a job again. Henry had a major allergy attack, followed by pneumonia, which landed him in the hospital. His stomach aches worsened with stress. The medical bills piled on. We had government-sponsored housing and food stamps, but we weren’t making it. Momma waitressed during the day, and nights she did second shifts, but Henry’s health problems lost her the jobs.

Momma headed to bed again for two weeks and we baked and baked and baked, selling chocolate silk pies, pumpkin pies, and pink frilly cakes on the corner. We started adding our own notes in the margins of the cookbooks next to Dad’s. Oddly, it brought me a little comfort. If a recipe could be further perfected, it should be. I had got that from him.

On the last day of the second week, Momma got up, brushed her hair, and put on a tight dress. She tried to cover it up under her fraying coat, but I saw it.

I knew what Momma was going to do.

I begged her not to.

She hugged me tight, that hug I remembered.

She wrote us a pink note of what to have for dinner and housekeeping chores we were to do.

I told her I didn’t want a stripper for a momma.

She slapped me, that slap I remembered.

It was love and fury that defined my relationship with Momma.

The slap about knocked my teeth out.

The money started coming in again. The more it came in, the more Momma slipped emotionally. Henry continued to have medical problems: bronchitis, asthma attacks, weird skin rashes, stomach upsets. Cecilia’s rash came back; Janie had her migraines.

Momma danced at night and took care of Henry during the day when he wasn’t at his own school, unless she couldn’t get out of bed, which meant that Cecilia or Janie or I stayed home and missed school.

One night Momma passed out at work, right onstage, and she was carted into an ambulance. She was hospitalised for six days with exhaustion and pneumonia. By the time she got out, a fellow dancer suggested that Henry go into a group foster home.

Momma resisted at first.

But she passed out a few nights later, to the frustration of her boss, a mole-slug of a man, and was transported to the hospital. She finally gave in.

At that point, I believe Momma was an inch from taking her own life. Earlier in the month I’d seen her staring at Drano with a fixed expression. Another time she was leaning a little too far out from our third-floor apartment window.

I caught her as she tilted and hugged her to me. She moaned in my arms for an hour, deep and guttural, done with life.

On several miserable, mind-crushing occasions, wild with depression and remorse, she rasped, ‘I killed my own baby. I killed him. Do you think it was a boy, Isabelle? Or do you think it was a girl? I told them I didn’t want to know, but I do!’ She gasped and gasped, like there was no air left in the room. ‘I couldn’t have another child,
I couldn’t
. But now I can’t bear it that I killed my own baby. Killed it. Killed it. I killed my baby.’

I held her and rocked her, then Cecilia would take over, then Janie, who rocked Momma while repetitively counting the objects in any given room we were in.

‘A little baby…a sweet baby…’ Momma muttered before we carried her into bed. ‘There is no more baby…no more baby…’

I could not imagine Momma having one more child. We, as a family, could not have handled it. But that abortion made mishmash of Momma.

Momma decided shortly after that that Henry was going to a group foster home. We argued with her, but she was resolute in a ‘I’m about to completely lose it’ sort of way.

We gave up fighting with her.

So Henry, at age eleven, went into a group foster home for kids. We were told that he would love it.

It did not go well.

Momma never forgave herself.

The home was officially run by the state and Momma qualified financially for help. Then it was considered a modern, new way of handling the disabled and/or ‘disenfranchised’ boys and girls.

We thought that the woman, Thelma, and her husband, Trent, ran it out of their personal home. We thought they lived there full time. We thought they slept there. That was incorrect.

Thelma looked like a man dressed like a woman and the man was grizzled and ugly. Trent reminded me of a moulding tank. He smelt like dead sweat and rotten meat.

The day we dropped him off, Henry tried to get back in the car with us.

‘No, Henry,’ Momma said, her bright eyes filling with tears. She was skinnier than I’d ever seen her, she’d aged ten years in two weeks, and her body hadn’t stopped trembling for months. There was no life left in her eyes. ‘Baby, I love you, love you so much.’ She held his face close to hers. ‘Love you.’

I stifled down the pain that arose like a bubbling volcano at her words. Momma rarely told us girls she loved us, which is why a dozen alarm bells clanged in my brain. I finally grasped the truth: Momma was dropping Henry off at a foster home because she was searching for a place Henry could live in when she was gone, knowing we wouldn’t be allowed to care for him ourselves.

Momma hugged Henry long and tight, her tears making her whole face wet and splotchy. She was on the way out the door, speaking from a heavenly perspective.

‘You stay here, Henry,’ I told him, hugging him close. I knew, even as a troubled teenager, that it was going to take all we sisters had to get Momma back on track. ‘We’ll be back in a few days.’

‘No. No, Momma,’ Henry said, shaking his head, fluttering his hands. He was wearing his favourite shirt. It had a smiley face on it. It said, ‘Smile!’

‘I go with you. I stay with Momma and Henry’s sisters.’

‘Henry,’ I said, my voice breaking. ‘You can still go on your trips. They’re going to take you to the doctor’s for your appointments and the yellow bus is coming to take you to school. It’s only for nine days, Henry. You’ll come home weekend after next.’

Henry burst into tears.

Janie burst, too.

‘Henry,’ Cecilia said gently. Henry was the only person she was gentle with, the only person she’s always, always been gentle with. ‘It’ll be an adventure. You’ll like it.’

‘I no like it here!’ he shouted, his face red. ‘I no like it here. I go home. I go home with Momma! I go with sisters!’

I thought Momma was going to dissolve into the sidewalk, and I held her up on one side. When she sagged further, her eyes checking out even more, Janie grabbed the other side.

Thelma and Trent took charge. They grabbed Henry by the arms as he made a clumsy run for the car.

‘He’ll calm down,’ Thelma snapped, her fat underarms swaying like white wings. ‘He’ll get used to it. Don’t baby him like this.’

‘We’re not babying him,’ Cecilia retorted. ‘It’s his first
time—’

Henry wailed, then shouted. ‘I no stay here! I love you, Momma! I love you, sisters. I stay with you!’

Momma sagged further, like her legs were made of oatmeal.

‘He’s manipulating you,’ Thelma informed us, her face lined with disapproval.

‘Henry never manipulates anyone,’ I protested. ‘Never.’ I hated Thelma and Trent on sight. Stern. Forbidding. I heaved Momma up again.

That Momma didn’t fillet Thelma with her words convinced me further that she was almost beyond help. Momma could eviscerate anyone at any time. That her head only wobbled in defeat scared me well beyond one of her raging rants.

I saw two skinny boys hanging around the porch. They both had black hair and brown eyes. There was something eerie and gross about their grins, something weird about the way their fingers never stopped moving, the way their heads jerked back and forth. One of them made a slashing movement across his neck when he saw me staring at him.

‘He’s manipulating you by throwing a fit,’ Thelma snapped, wrestling Henry into the house with her husband as he hollered and kicked. ‘These people need rules and boundaries like normal humans and I can see he hasn’t had any.’

Momma moaned in my arms as Henry’s high-octave scream torpedoed us straight in the heart.

‘Oh, shut up!’ Cecilia yelled. ‘He’s had discipline. He’s scared, can’t you see that?’

‘Be nice to my brother or I’ll kill you!’ Janie shouted, her fists clenched.

My head swivelled to her. Janie was so gentle. Later she told me she went home and started thinking violent thoughts that exact day.

‘Goodbye, Miss Bommarito,’ Thelma said with nauseating authority. ‘I have spoken extensively with the state about your…
special situation…
and I can handle Henry. I’m taking over. You go home now.’

‘Momma!’ Henry wailed. ‘Cecilia! Janie! Help me! Help Henry! Help Henry! Is! Is! You help Henry!’

‘Pull yourself together, young man. Don’t be a big baby,’ Trent ordered, heaving Henry up the porch stairs. ‘Dammit,’ he said as Henry kicked him in his wobbly stomach.

Thelma and Trent hauled Henry in, their grim faces flushed, the boys on the porch laughing and giggling, fingers twisting, while Momma died a slow, terrible emotional death.

We had to keep Momma from killing herself, so we drove her straight to the hospital. I drove. I hardly knew how to drive, but we didn’t have far to go. The doctors sized her up, sized up her chart, and admitted her. We told them we were going to our aunt Caroline’s. They were too busy to check on that.

On the seventh day we went to get her. I drove home slow. Momma was slightly better, more rested, and had new medicine in hand. She still had that hollow, blank expression plastered on her face, as if she had gone on to somewhere else. How she turned it on for her job, I don’t know. But the men weren’t there to see Momma’s eyes anyhow.

‘Hello, Momma,’ we said.

‘Take me home,’ she rasped out. ‘How is Henry?’

We tried to stifle the hurt we felt that she didn’t ask how we were.

It was one of many stifled hurts.

On Friday we went over to the foster home right at 5:00. Henry tumbled into Momma’s arms and they hugged. He hugged each one of us, crying in a way I’d never heard him cry, pathetic, weepy sounds gurgling from his mouth.

‘What happened, Thelma?’ Momma asked, clutching Henry. She was still trembling, but not as much.

‘Nothing happened,’ Thelma snapped. She crossed her fleshy, age-spotted arms over her cannonball stomach.

‘Now, Henry, tell your mother what you did.’

Henry’s eyes flew open wide. He flung back his head and howled, a howl from the bottom of that poor boy’s soul. ‘I no tell I no tell I no tell!’

Momma’s face registered her shock, as did Thelma’s and Trent’s.

To the side of the house, I saw that those two bony boys with the maniacal grins had their hands over their mouths so they wouldn’t laugh.

Henry whipped around to the boys. ‘I no tell I no tell I no tell!’ he shouted at them. ‘I noooo tell!’

I knew something was going on, but I didn’t know what. People didn’t talk back then about that type of secret, plus I never even knew that crime existed. It was beyond my imagination.

‘I wanted him to tell you, Ms Bommarito’ – Thelma’s upper lip arched in disgust – ‘that Henry went to the zoo with us.’

‘I no tell! I no tell!’ Henry sobbed, clinging to me, eyes squished shut.

‘I think we’re done here,’ Thelma said, her disapproval dripping and sticky. ‘I would like to inform you that we will be imposing discipline on Henry. He may not like it, but he needs it. We can’t have him out of control like this. Emotional. Needy. Even
these
people can learn new tricks. They can be trained.’ She made to shut the door. ‘Like pets.’

‘He needs a man’s hand, River,’ Trent said. ‘A man’s hand. Not a woman’s weakness, and I aim to give Henry the discipline he needs. Women alone can’t raise boys to be men.’

‘You big fuck—’ Cecilia started.

‘You watch your mouth, missy,’ Trent roared. ‘I can see you’re going to take after your mother in your behaviour. A husband’s gonna have to take a firm hand to
you—’

‘I’d like to take a firm hand to your face,’ I said. ‘Maybe I could slap it back into shape.’

‘Shut your
mouth—’

‘Shut yours or I’ll nail it shut,’ Janie whispered. (That line went in her first book years later.)

Trent’s eyes popped.

‘That’s enough,’ Thelma snapped. ‘See you on Sunday.’

‘I don’t know if you’ll see us on Sunday,’ Momma yelled over the din of Henry’s screams.

‘Well, dear, I don’t think you have a choice. You have a night job, right?’

Thelma’s husband smirked. I saw the way he stared at Momma and I wanted to smack him. ‘Yes, you’re busy nights, aren’t you?’

Momma turned red. ‘Come on, Henry. We’re going home.’

‘I no tell I no tell!’ Henry howled, his arms locked around my waist as I tried to reassure him, comfort him.

Impossible.

We went home.

As soon as we got there, Henry started throwing glasses. We had to duck. We had to hide behind the couch. We had to hide under the table.

Calm, sweet, loving Henry was enraged.

One glass cracked and somehow split Momma’s hand open. Blood gushed.

‘Blood! Blood! Blood!’ Henry screeched, cowering in a ball and covering his head. ‘Oh no! Blood!
Blood! I sorry Momma! I sorry!
’