A Song for Julia

quietly, he said, “She’s your mother.”
    “No,” Crank replied, his face set. “She’s the woman who left us.”
    “Don’t you ever speak about your mother that way, Dougal!” Jack’s voice had a hard edge to it.
    “Why the hell not?” Crank responded with a raised voice. “She left you, Dad. She left us all!”
    Jack closed his eyes. His face had turned red, and he was visibly making an effort not to blow up. Finally, he said in a tortured, grim tone, “Would you rather she be dead? Because that was the choice we had.”
    “What are you talking about, Dad? Why would she be dead?” Crank was leaning forward, every line in his body rigid. I’d never seen him like this. But this was part of his core—the anger that drove his music and drove the life he’d lived.
    “She left because it was that or commit suicide! She didn’t leave, I made her go!” Jack shouted.
    Sean looked up suddenly, his face shocked, and I raised my hand to my mouth. Crank was still leaning over the table, his eyes wide with shock and rage. He gripped the edge of the table with both hands, his entire body shaking.
    Jack’s face shifted. Instead of rage, his face was twisted in grief. His eyes went red, bloodshot, watering, and he went on, and I wanted to tell him to stop, to please stop, don’t say another word. Not about suicide. Please, no. But he kept going.
    “The stress was killing her, all right? I came home one night, and she was in the bathtub bleeding out! So I let her go. Because I love her, and because she’s your mother, and if you ever say another word against her, I swear I’ll beat the living shit out of you!”
    Crank was stunned into silence. He let out a loud breath and whispered, “Are you shitting me?”
    Jack shook his head. A tear ran down his face, and he angrily wiped it away.
    “Why?” Sean asked. His voice was the same as always: loud, monotone. But he spoke quickly and louder than usual. “Was I that bad?”
    “Oh, God no, kid,” Jack said, no longer able to hold back his tears. “She just loved you too much. Both of you. Look … your mom always had … depression … sadness. Even when I met her. Before you were born. But she was good at everything. Everything she’d ever done was like gold. And she thought she could cure Asperger’s. She thought she could be the perfect mom. So … you know what it was like. Doctors, more doctors. Treatment. It’s not that she didn’t love you—it’s that she loved you too much. She wanted to give you—everything in life. And when that didn’t work … it just got to be too much. Way too much.” His voice dropped. “She stopped taking care of herself. Your mother … she wrapped up everything she had into curing you. And you can’t cure autism. But she was going to do it if it killed her. And … it was. Autism was killing her.”
    His face twisted in sadness. “That sweet, lovable, wonderful woman. She was my life, she was everything to me, and I was watching her die before my eyes. I couldn’t let it go on.”
    Crank whispered, “She really tried to kill herself?”
    Jack looked away, his face looking … old. Sad. Grief-stricken. “Yeah,” he said. “She did. So … I had to put her in the hospital. That day … she sent Sean to Mrs. Doyle’s. And she went upstairs and sliced her wrists open.”
    As he spoke the words, I stared down at the heavy bundle of bracelets I wore to cover the scars on my own wrist. I don’t even know what I was feeling. I’d never even thought about what it would have been like for my family. If Carrie or Alexandra or one of the twins had been the first to walk into that bathroom and find me, floating in the water, bleeding to death … I never even thought about them. Even my mother—as much as we fought, as much as I wanted her out of my life—I would never wish that kind of pain on her.
    “Something—something about her manner that morning scared me. For weeks, she’d been crying. All the time. She told me she wanted to die. She told me more than once. And I heard her … but I didn’t. I didn’t think she really meant it. I didn’t do anything about it. And then that morning, she was bright and cheerful. She said she was going to take you to the park, Sean.”
    Crank’s voice was rough, and I could see tears in his eyes. “That was right after we got in that big fight. And I ran away.”
    Jack looked at his older son, his eyes sad. “Yeah. That’s when it was. So I was worried. And I