Storms 01 - Family Storms

helpless she was. Instead of the realization driving her to be more vigorous in search of solutions, it caused her to retreat to the gin and whiskey. It almost didn’t matter what it was as long as it was alcoholic and could jumble up her thoughts and fears to the point where nothing seemed to bother her.
    However, to this day, I don’t think of her as having been an alcoholic. I believe she really could have stoppedif she had wanted to stop. She didn’t have the courage to stop. It was ironically easier to look into the mirror and see someone she didn’t recognize. Otherwise, she would have committed suicide.
    I suppose if we could have afforded psychoanalysis back then, she would have been diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic. Something that had begun too subtly for me to realize right away had been happening in her head. At times, I thought she was talking to someone else. At first, I thought that occurred only when she was drunk, but I quickly realized it was happening even when she was stone sober. I think the person she was talking to was herself before I was born, and even before she had met Daddy. From what I heard and could understand, she was warning her younger self not to leave home, that if she did, this could be how she would be.
    Of course, it made no sense to me, and if I asked her what she was doing or whom she was talking to, she would look at me angrily, as if I were intruding on a very private conversation.
    “None of your business,” she might say, or “It’s not for your ears.”
    Whose ears is it for?
I wanted to ask.
There’s no one there
. But I kept quiet. I was actually too frightened to push much further, anyway. Who knew what that might cause to happen, and enough had already happened.
    She wasn’t home when the police came to the apartment the day we were evicted. The landlord had followed all of the necessary legal steps, but Mama had ignored it all. I was home sick. I opened the door and looked up at twoburly sheriff’s deputies. One took off his hat and combed through his hair with his fingers as if he were searching for a lost thought. He looked sorrier than the other for what he was about to do.
    “Your mother here?” he asked.
    “No,” I said.
    “Where is she?” the other deputy asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said, and coughed so hard and long that they both stepped back, fearing infection.
    “Jesus,” the first deputy muttered.
    “Do you know when she’ll be back, at least?” the second deputy asked me.
    I shook my head.
    “We’ll wait in the car.”
    They turned and went to their vehicle parked right outside our first-floor apartment. At the time, I didn’t know why they were there. I thought maybe they had found my father and needed to tell my mother.
    After I closed the door, I went to the front window and waited, watching the street. Finally, I could see her coming. She didn’t look drunk. She was walking fast, swinging her arms, with her purse wrapped around the front of her body like some shield. She had told me she did that to avoid having it grabbed. “Not that I ever have much in it,” she’d added.
    The deputies saw her heading our way and got out of their vehicle to approach her. She stood listening to them and then just nodded without comment and continued to the front door. When she entered, she saw me standing there and shook her head.
    “You can thank your father someday for this,” she said. “Pack only what you really need. We can’t carry too much. I’m not spending money on a taxi.”
    “Why are we leaving?”
    “We can’t live here anymore. The landlord got the police on us.”
    “Where are we going?”
    “To a hotel nearby,” she said.
    It sounded good, but when we arrived, I saw how small it was. The lobby was barely bigger than our living room had been, and we had one room with two double beds and a bathroom.
    “What about a kitchen?” I asked.
    “We’ll eat out when we want hot food. This will have to do for now,” she told me.
    Her best hope was that “for now” was forever, only I didn’t know that. I didn’t know how serious the dying going on in her head was. Because we slept in the same room, I woke up often to hear her nighttime chats with her invisible second self. Most of the time, it was done in whispers, but I often caught a word or two. None of it ever made much sense to me.
Maybe she’s just dreaming aloud,
I thought, and went back to sleep.
    She was doing it now as we trekked up the beach.