The Freak Observer (4 page)

I know way too much about dreams. I am an expert both in theory and practice.

The worst kind of dream is when you are just trying to shut your eyes and it's like a slide show. Eyes open: the real world. Eyes shut: you see what you don't want to see. The detail is amazing, but you can't look around and you can't look away. You shut your eyes, and there it is. It's like there is a camera that shows you the same bloody broken mess over and over again, frame by frame.

I'm standing at the kitchen table folding clothes. I know that. I can reach out and touch the wool socks. But what I know and what I see—not quite the same thing.

Eyes open: a little striped shirt in the laundry basket. Eyes closed: a lump of muscle that looks like a broken heart. Nothing new or weird about that. Been here. Seen that. The important thing to remember is that this is normal—for crazy people.

I even know its name: intrusive imagery. Esther's bloody heart isn't now, nor has it ever been, in the laundry basket. It's just a glitch in my brain. My programming is missing a breakpoint, and I'm stuck in an infinite loop. It's a processing problem, a stray spark lost in the dirty Jell-O inside my head.

. . .

There is nothing special about me. PTSD is common. They used to call it shell shock a hundred years ago almost. It happens to lots of people—guys who come back from the war, rape victims, little kids who lived through hurricanes—they all have to deal.
If
they can deal—otherwise, they lose it and end up like that crazy gray-haired Vietnam vet who lived in a culvert until he froze to death. Thinking about the images they see, the nightmares they have, it makes me feel like a coward.

I just need to focus on what is real—laundry to fold— and I need to remember those words
intrusive imagery
.

I may also need to be very aware of my breathing.

It's not a Zen thing. I have to breathe very carefully because intrusive imagery is only one of the sneaky traps I need to avoid. Memories can also hide in the smell of spilled diesel or hospital disinfectant. There is a proper name for that too. It's olfactory trigger: a smell that sets off a memory in your brain. Most people like them, I guess. Christmas tree needles or jasmine tea—somewhere people are probably seeking out those smells just so they can feel a wonderful memory light up in their imagination like twinkly lights. Me, not so much. I know that one unconscious breath can let a smell in and zap-zap-zap my brain will start sparking like a fork in a microwave.

Once that happens, I can blast my nose with garlic or Mountain Breeze air freshener or poisonous oven cleaner until tears run out of my eyes and I get a headache. It won't help. It takes more than another stink to fix that short circuit and avoid remembering.

And there is one other trap: dreams, plain-old-vanilla, recurrent-nightmare dreams. Living through everything once was bad, but not bad enough apparently, because it keeps happening again and again. My brain needs to understand what happened, so it gives itself another opportunity.

“Here,” says my brain, “Let's just change this one thing. Changing one thing changes everything. You know that. Maybe if you have to ride to school in an ambulance. . . . Maybe if your little sister and your little brother are the same person. . . . Maybe if I make death into a recurrent character—call him The Bony Guy. See isn't that better now that you can see him? Just fiddle with the focus and make the picture sharper, sharp, sharp, sharper. Now he has a face—well, sort of a face. . . . Don't you feel better?”

My brain is not my friend.

. . .

When things are really bad, the best thing to do is to stay awake, and the best way to stay awake is to keep busy. So I stay awake until my eyes itch, I scrub the grout around the toilet with an old toothbrush, I make a pot of coffee, and I don't sit down. I go outside where the air is cold and I can hear the creek and see the stars. I chop wood. It's almost morning. I can tell by the position of the moon. Time to get Little Harold out of bed and give him some breakfast. I can hold on. I can get a handle on it.

The minister who preached at my little sister's funeral screwed up her name.

The mistake is completely understandable.

We don't go to church. We just hired some guy to talk that day, I guess. Why would he have known?

It still gravels my dad, though. Sometimes I hear him saying under his breath, “Her name is Asta, Asta Sollilja. Not Ashley.”

I thought of that at Esther's funeral.

Mostly, I try not to think about Asta. It'll never heal if you pick at it. That's what I think. But it was unavoidable today. There were too many memory triggers.

. . .

Esther's funeral was held in the same place as Asta's. I think the same dust was on the woodwork. The same air was in the room. Last winter we sat in a little, secret space near the front. We were very near the shiny, white box where Asta was hidden. It was just the four of us in that little space. Now Esther's family was sitting there, behind a sheer, dark curtain that kept them separate. The curtain hides them from prying eyes. It's a trick of light—or something about the angle of vision. I didn't know we were hidden when I was sitting there myself. It never occurred to me.

But now I'm outside. I understand that it has a purpose. The rest of the funeral audience can't see through that curtain. In that little room, you can have your grief in private, as long as you are quiet.

. . .

It surprises me to hear the minister at Esther's funeral say he didn't know her, since that family is religious. I wonder if they just picked his name out of the phone book. That's how we did it. Found a minister, I mean. I guess they are like gyppo loggers, just waiting for the chance to work.

However it happened, the guy talking today admits he didn't know Esther.

Then he launches into his stuff about how unprepared we are for someone so young to die. I give him some points for honesty, though not many. I felt like he was suggesting that it would have been easier if death was a scheduled event. Speaking from experience, sometimes we do expect someone young to die. Sometimes we have years of preparation. And it still hurts.

I give him some points for style. He tosses in a couple of nice metaphors, I notice. But he probably isn't sticking to the Bible as much as Esther's dad would like.

Esther's dad is a minister. His whole congregation is made up of his family. I haven't heard him preach, but he is known to be a strictly By-The-Book kind of guy.

It was impossible to know if he is angry with the pinch hitter at the pulpit. The sheer curtain—it really works. When you sit back there, you can see out. Things look a little gray, but you can see everything. From out here, nothing.

. . .

I wear the same dress for Esther's funeral that I wore when we buried Asta. The black wool sleeves are so tight I can't bend my arms. I shook it out before I put it on, but it still smells like the dust in my closet. The thread in the seams is stiff and pokes me up both sides and makes my armpits red and rashy. It fit better when I wore it that winter, but it was never comfortable.

It is a perfect dress for the job. It puts me in the right frame of mind, almost. It makes me uncomfortable enough that I look like I am sad.

. . .

Reba is here for the funeral too. She waves, but I don't wave back. I hope she figures out that it isn't personal. It's not like we are at the mall or something—waving at a funeral is just a little wonky.

Reba isn't wearing the right kind of clothes. She's got on a black dress too, but it's an LBD with sheer black sleeves and glittering beads that would attract magpies if she stood by the side of the highway.

Two things attract magpies: sparkly stuff and road-kill. This particular funeral is a jackpot for magpies. I can't share that with Reba.

A funeral is not a social event. A funeral is not a place for jokes.

Besides, my parents aren't letting me mingle and talk to anyone, much less Reba. The three of us just sit in the back row of chairs. We aren't close friends or family of the deceased. We are just here to pay our respects.

After the funeral, we don't go to the cemetery for the actual part, the part where there is a hole in the ground.My parents and a bunch of other people who are paying their respects clump together in the parking lot of the funeral home.

“. . . the flowers—a little over the top. The florist probably gave them the hard sell. The kind of people who will take advantage of grief.”

“. . . and it's terrible, just terrible.”

“The driver is off the hook. It was a blind curve. He admitted he'd had a beer, but he wasn't going fast and the blood alcohol was way below the limit . . .”

“. . . just ran into the road in front of him.”

Somebody had heard from somebody who knew somebody at the hospital who overheard that she was about eleven weeks pregnant.

“That family . . .”

“If she was pregnant, that'd explain it.”

“Still, it's tragic, just tragic. And your heart goes out to that family . . .”

“That family . . .”

. . .

I don't like the thought that someone can go rummaging around in a body and tell all its secrets.

I know it happens.

I don't like to think about it.

I don't want to know if they did that to Asta.

All she had left was her little body.

Her little red hands with the scars where she chewed on them.

She didn't know they were her hands.

Or maybe she did.

Maybe it was just another sheer black curtain, and she could see out, but we couldn't see in so we didn't know she was there.

I want to believe she was gone way before the end.

I hope she was never really in the hospital. I hope she never felt the infection around the feeding port where we could squirt the food right into her stomach after she forgot how to swallow.

I hope when she mewed and mewed after we brought her home, it was just something her body was doing and it wasn't Asta.

I hope she wasn't scared or hurt when her heart stopped.

Please, please, please, it wasn't Asta anymore.

. . .

I saw Esther's family get into a big black car to go to the cemetery.

There were a lot of them. Her mother, her father. It was hard to tell which of them was the strong one and which one was blind with crying and ready to fall down. Then the kids like stairsteps: Faith, Abel, the missing step in the family where Esther used to be, Naomi, Ruth, Hope, and Gloria. There were even Faith's two kids: a toddler and a little blanket-wrapped bundle. There were enough to fill that big black car.

There weren't so many of us. The day of Asta's funeral, it was just Mom, Dad, Little Harold, and me in the shiny black car following the hearse. Little Harold was kind of big for it, but Mom pulled him onto her lap and cried in his hair. Little Harold was crying too. I think he was just upset that Mom was crying, but he might have been starting to understand what was happening. He was only seven then, but he's a smart kid, Little Harold.

. . .

Mom was pregnant with him when we started to lose Asta. We didn't know that then. She was disappearing from the inside out. We thought we were all good. When Little Harold was born, Asta was in the world. By the time he could talk, we knew she never would. His world has changed more than all of ours.

I think I might be the only one who can even think that Little Harold's world might have changed in a good way.

. . .

Asta was such a good baby. It wasn't just that she was pretty. Lots of little girls are pretty. She lived up to the name Dad found for her in a story he was reading—Asta Sollilja. It means “pretty sun lily.”

She was a sunny baby. Complete strangers would stop what they were doing to watch her smile. As for me, I was desperately proud of her. She was my Asta too.

She didn't like her toys so much. That was all.

She was still warm and round, and I loved it when she would hold onto my thumb or finger.

I got to take care of her quite a bit after Little Harold was born. She was my living doll. I loved to dress her and fuss around with her hair. She never tried to get away from me. Now we know that might have been a sign, but we didn't know then.

Then one day, Mom took her along on a well-baby appointment for Little Harold. Little Harold was doing great, getting bigger and stronger every day. He was hitting every one of those “Your baby should be able to . . .” checkpoints.

For Asta, though, things looked a little different.

It is odd she stopped crawling.

Nothing big. Nothing to worry about yet.

It is odd she won't look the doctor in the eye.

Nothing big. Nothing to worry about yet.

It is odd she won't reach for the little flashlight.

Nothing to worry about yet.

Wait until the tests come back.

It is probably nothing.

Every baby has her own schedule.