Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

“What?”

“All my promises.” His voice softened. “I did keep one, though. The time your mother made me spank you. Promised I’d never do it again.”

“Yes,” I whispered. For a moment I’d almost asked him for his handkerchief.

“I never did, either.”

There was a telephone in the hospital room, but Father wasn’t allowed to use it. He wasn’t even supposed to know it was there. Accordingly, it never rang. Out of respect for him, we made all our calls in the phone booth down the hall. To use a telephone in his presence, when he himself didn’t have that privilege, seemed heartless. He was the master; it was one of his glories. Our most crucial communications had taken place on the telephone, and our most comfortable. For me, his disembodied voice—whether spanning thousands of miles or just a few blocks—had more immediacy and meaning than his voice in person.

One day I stared at the telephone in Father’s room, contemplating ways to kill it, indulging myself in fantasies of hurling it against the wall, extinguishing it with a pillow.

I even picked up the receiver to see if it could save me the trouble by going dead on its own.

“Let’s yank it out, Bill. I’m serious. What the hell’s it for?”

Bill shrugged. “Emergency.”

After that, I couldn’t glance at it without wincing. It had become more than an ugly black little reminder of everything that lay outside the hospital, of Father’s past.

It had become a symbol of his impotence and ours.

And finally I knew that he would never call me on the telephone again, that that part of our lives was already over.

• • •

“I miss Emily,” I said out loud, without opening my eyes.

“Emily Buck? Our old nurse?”

“Yes.” I’d dozed off in my chair. It was a bad way to wake up. “Remember how she used to sit on our beds when we were sick? I miss the way she smelled—Clorox, tobacco, coffee, toast. If she were here now, I’d sit on her lap and she’d rock me …”

I peered at Bill through my lashes, not wanting to let in too much light. But the room was already dark. “What time is it? How’s Father?”

“Still asleep. I wish I could sleep that soundly.”

“Me, too. I’m afraid.”

“Of what?” Bill’s chair scraped close to mine.

“Right this minute? Everything. You name it.” I closed my eyes again, longing for Emily. But Emily had died painfully of stomach cancer a few years earlier. “Of letting go. Of dying. Of living. Of going nuts. That’s the most prevalent one. And you?”

“I suppress most of that stuff.” Bill whistled a tune silently through his teeth. “Programmed myself a long time ago not to think about the shit that the future might be handing down to me.”

“Don’t you ever feel rage now?”

“You mean specifically at Mother or Father?” Bill swiveled his gaze to the hospital bed where Father lay. “I couldn’t live long enough to discharge it. We were trained not to express anger. I got so good at that it landed me in Menninger’s.”

The room was steeped in twilight. I felt as if we were detached from the rest of the hospital, adrift.

“Extraordinary,” murmured Bill, wandering back and forth in semicircles around Father’s bed. “Insane what you go through—sixteen years old, being locked up—not because you’ve committed a crime, but because your parents think you should be. Absolutely one of the most impotent, frustrating, disastrous kinds of feelings, because there’s no voluntary trip about it at all. Even though you know it might be doing you some good, and in the long run you might benefit from it. Never got over it.”

Listen, I wanted to answer, what makes you think I got off scot-free? The marvelous act I put on to give that impression? The truth was I felt like a veteran of the wars. It was still inexplicable to me that Bridget and Bill had wound up in Menninger’s and Austen Riggs and I hadn’t. My guilt for not having gone through their ordeal was as great as my relief at having been spared it. Whatever had happened to my brother and sister had happened, in some way, to all of us.

Bill came to a halt in front of me.

“But, on the whole, I’m glad I went.”

“Why?” He really was crazy.

“Well, it’s weird. It’s like—if you think you’re neurotic or possibly insane, the idea is always lurking in the back of your head that the punishment for going crazy is being locked up in the loony bin. And it must be very frightening. But if you’ve already gone through it, it’s not so bad. Besides”—he held out his hands to pull me up—“you can always bullshit your way out.… Here comes the sun.” He flicked on the light.

“Ugh.”

“Reveille,” he went on cheerfully. “What do you want for breakfast tonight? My flight plan features Szechwan Tang Tang noodles smothered with those heavy-duty little black peppers that blow your head off.”

When we leaned over Father to kiss him good night, he awakened instantly as if he were afraid to miss anything.

“What’s up?” he croaked.

“Thought we’d nail down a little dinner, Pop,” said Bill.

“Good idea.” Father nodded weakly. “Let’s go to the Colony.”

“Of course—where else?”

I looked away from the tube of glucose fastened to his arm.

“No.” Father struggled to lift his head. “Let’s go home instead. Where’s Bridget?”

“She—” I hadn’t heard him mention her name in many years. “She’ll be here in a minute.”

“Please tell her to hurry up.” He sighed and turned away from our voices. “I’m tired of waiting.” Then he spoke very softly and as if he were miles away. “There’s a clock in my head. It never stops ticking, but the hands don’t move. Why does it take so long to die?”

A few days later, he went home.

The night of March 18th, I drove out to Haywire House. After Pamela’s phone call, it took me about an hour to rent a car and get there; by the time