Cal hated the tinfoil periods. His father hadn’t suffered continuous bouts of paranoia but when upsetting things happened in his world, he started covering things in foil to keep the radio waves from penetrating.
But Cal loved the old barn. He and his brother and sisters had spent many happy hours playing here—all sorts of games—hide-and-seek, pretend, you name it. They’d swung on a rope from the loft, a pastime his grandmother said took years off her life and his grandfather said generations of farm kids had survived.
“Dad? It’s me, Cal. Can you come out, please?”
No answer.
“Come on, Dad. I don’t want to have to search the barn for you.”
“You don’t sound like Cal,” his father said from a distance away.
“Well, it’s me. I came to see you. Looks like the house needs a little work—painting and stuff. I thought I might do some of that while I’m here. Mom is making you something to eat. Come on out.”
There was some rustling around in the hayloft. This didn’t surprise Cal. His father was as far away from the door as he could get. Jed peeked over the edge of the loft, a tinfoil cap on his head. Someday Cal was going to find out why so many schizophrenics during periods of paranoia adopted the same self-protective traits. Tinfoil? Hadn’t their fears evolved beyond the point they believed the superpowers couldn’t read their minds through household foil? It was almost as though there was collective thinking among this entire subculture.
“Come on down, Dad. I’ll stay with you. Let’s go see what Mom has to eat.”
“I shouldn’t go outside,” he said. “They’re probably still around.”
“The people from the county? Nah, they’ve been gone for a couple of weeks now. Mom told me they were here and asked me to come to be sure you’re safe.”
“She did?”
“Didn’t she tell you? I bet she told you and you just forgot.”
“They took Sierra, you know. Took her away.”
“I’m going to look into that,” Cal said, but his mother had told him the truth—Sierra had checked herself into a hospital. “But first, let’s get you something to eat and while you’re eating, we can talk about fixing up the house. It needs some paint, that’s for sure.”
Jed Jones sighed heavily. “This could be a mistake.”
“Nah, I checked around. We’re good. You’re safe in the house.”
He slowly descended the ladder from the loft. He was as skinny as Frank Masterson. His dad had always been so thin, losing interest in food sometimes. When he stepped down, Cal hugged him. “Feeling a little stressed, are you?”
“What do you expect, with all the pressure?” Jed replied.
“I guess it’s reasonable. What’ve you been working on here?”
“Another lecture and a design. I have a deadline and I’m behind.”
“The class could be postponed while you catch up,” Cal said, though of course there was no class.
“It’s not a class!” Jed snapped. “It’s a briefing, for God’s sake. It’s important!”
Cal thought if he unrolled those large papers he might see some amazing drawings—machines or solar systems or even spaceships, and they would look fabulously complex and perfect. And completely useless. He grew up being told Jed held several PhD’s in law, engineering, psychology, chemistry, etc. In point of fact, he wasn’t entirely sure of Jed’s level of education. He eventually came to find out that when Jed’s schizophrenia began to take hold, when he was a young man studying prelaw in college, his family rejected him, left him to his young wife to deal with. For that reason, Marissa had never taken him back to his relatives in Pittsburgh and none of the kids had ever met that side of the family.
Marissa’s parents did what they could to help, however.
“I stand corrected,” Cal said. “But you know when you’re under pressure you don’t think as clearly. You probably need sleep. I know you need a shower and food.”
“I need to be left alone! Why doesn’t anyone leave us alone? We never broke the rules!”
Cal wondered, as he often had, what things must be like in Jed’s world. He kept his arm around his father, leading him to the house. He was a little embarrassed that Jed had his foil cap on and wished he could bring Maggie a father more like Sully, a healthy, wiseass, happy, cognitive person. Although he wanted to yank the foil cap off his head, he stubbornly didn’t. Maggie should know how it is around here.
They walked in the door and there was a sandwich and glass of lemonade on the table. Jed jumped when he saw Maggie.
“It’s okay, Dad. This is Maggie. My girlfriend. She’s visiting with me.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Jones,” she said.
“It’s Dr. Jones,” he said, correcting her. “You shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe.”
“It’s all right now, Dad. I told you, I checked around. No one’s here but Mom. And now us.”
“I’ll be careful, Dr. Jones,” Maggie said.
Mollified, Jed sat down at the table and applied himself to the sandwich.
Maggie washed her hands at the sink. “Marissa,” she said. “You’re a little low on supplies. Would you like me to take you to the grocery store now that Cal is here with his dad?”
“Oh, thank you, but no. I’ll go when the check comes. We get by eating out of the garden till the check comes, then Jed’s fine at the farm while I go. It’s just a few more days.”
“Tell you what, let’s go now. Cal will cover the cost—it’ll make him feel useful. That would be all right, wouldn’t it, Cal?” Maggie asked. “I could take your mom to the grocery store now while you spend a little time with your dad?”
“You sure you want to do that?”
“There’s a grocery in Pratt, isn’t there?” she asked Marissa.
“You don’t want to go to that one,” she said. “The prices are terrible there.”
“That’s okay this one time, Marissa. So, should we go while Cal visits with his dad?”
“Are you sure?” Marissa asked a little nervously.
“We’re sure, Mom,” Cal said. “Go get some groceries.”
* * *
So their visit began. Maggie and Marissa went to the small grocery where Marissa was greeted familiarly and kindly by a few people. They asked after Dr. Jones and she replied that he was fine and staying busy. When they got home with a few bags of groceries they found Jed had washed and was sitting in his chair, writing in one of his notebooks, rocking sometimes, muttering as he wrote.
Maggie assured Cal that the trip to the store had gone well and asked him how things were at home. “As normal as they ever get. We can leave now.”
Cal helped put the groceries away, hugged his mother and promised to be back the next day.
The next morning, after breakfast, they stopped at a store to buy paint and supplies, and returned to the farm. Cal talked Jed into helping him sand and paint the porch and the front of the house, while Maggie spent most of her day with Marissa, getting to know her and seeing the garden, which was only a small patch but impressive. In the second bedroom of their house Marissa had a loom and showed Maggie some of her decorative weaving, something she’d been doing for decades. The other thing she kept in that weaving room was a bookshelf stuffed with books, all of which had been read to death. It reminded Maggie of Cal’s treasured books that he read and read and read again.
“Your family does love books,” Maggie said.
“It always gets us through,” Marissa said.
They all had lunch together but Cal and Maggie left them at dinnertime. On the third day Maggie went to a bookstore and bought Marissa and Jed some new books. She had noticed the books they kept were mostly science, law or literary classics so she bought a nice big stack, including a few large art books, hoping she wasn??
?t duplicating what they had. Marissa was breathless with excitement and gratitude.
“I notice you don’t have a computer in the house,” Maggie said to Marissa.
Marissa looked at her in shock. “We can’t have a computer,” she said. “Jed wouldn’t be able to get along with it. There are enough voices in his head without the internet. We had a computer for a short time and he didn’t sleep for days.”
“I thought it might keep him busy and help him communicate,” Maggie said.
“He would soon be communicating with aliens from outer space. I’m very careful with what we have on TV.”
“Marissa, has your whole life been like this?” Maggie asked. “Taking care of Jed?”
“My whole life has been loving my husband,” she said. “Jed’s a brilliant, wonderful man.”
Of course every night they talked it to death. Maggie lay in Cal’s arms and they went over the details of the day. Jed would be better on medication except that he refused it. “My mother claims they tried psychiatric help but I honestly don’t remember anything like that ever happening. Maybe it was one of those times we kids stayed here on the farm with Grandpa and Grandma. When my dad was much younger he could conceal his hallucinations and work. And he was a gifted lecturer—when he started talking, people gathered around him. But even then my mother stayed very close to him, coaching him, managing him, making sure he wasn’t acting crazy. Mom and Dad were just day laborers, farm workers, warehouse workers, that sort of thing. He got arrested a couple of times, I can’t even remember what that was about because he’s not one to draw attention to himself by breaking laws. Maybe that’s when someone tried giving him medication. His hallucinations really intensified when I was a teenager. The bottom line appears to be that he’s not aggressive, not dangerous to anyone but himself, and he’s not going to see a doctor. Ever. But he’s been on the farm for twenty years and as long as he stays on the farm, he seems to be safe.”
“There’s a nice little patch of cannabis behind the tomatoes in your mother’s garden,” Maggie told him.
“Oh, I know,” Cal said with a laugh. “Good old Dad has been keeping his voices under control with weed for a long time now.”
“It could be adding to his psychosis,” she said.
“Everything could be adding to his psychosis,” Cal said. “Under any other circumstances, without my mother and the farm, he’d be homeless and wandering the streets.”
“Your poor mother!”
“It’s her choice, Maggie. Not the choice I would have made.”
“What choice would you have made?” Maggie asked.
“As a parent? I’d have drawn a line in the sand—get help for the mental illness or you’re on your own. I know my mother is a loving woman but I’m not sure this devotion is helping him and I know it’s not good for her. She had children to be responsible for. She could’ve been a better role model. Instead, we grew up knowing a woman who devoted her life to her crazy husband. He was her priority, not the whole family.”
“And yet, look at the family. Look at how you turned out. You, your sister, your brother...”
“My mother was a teacher—she taught us. She read to us constantly, until she was hoarse, and the minute we could read even a little bit, she took turns with us reading. And she read from adult literature when we were small, the same books over and over and over.”
“Something about that worked—you’re all so brilliant.”
“But, Sierra...”
“Are you going to find out what’s happening with her?”
“I have the name of the hospital she admitted herself to. I’ll get in touch. But she’s an adult. If she doesn’t want to talk to me or have me know about her condition, that’s her prerogative.”
“So, you don’t approve of the way your parents are handling their lives and your dad’s illness. How does that impact you?”
“I feel a natural obligation to them, but I won’t take it to the lengths my mother has. Sedona and I visit once a year at different times, more often if there’s some kind of crisis. Dakota comes less often—that whole situation is hard for him to take. I come to be sure they’re fed, warm, safe. There’s a family practitioner in town I’ve become friendly with and he’s my mother’s only physician. She’ll go to his office if she has to, but Jed won’t. The doctor is willing to go to the house if Jed’s sick, like with a flu or something of that nature. But Jed, who smokes pot every day, won’t get a shot or take pills of any kind. Really, he should be dead by now. But while they’re alive on that farm, I’ll call regularly and check on them sometimes. That’s all.”
“Was your childhood horrific?” she asked.
“I hated the way I grew up,” he said. “I hated the instability of it, the constant worry, the embarrassment. Some of the best times were when we went back to the farm or lived in a hippy-dippy commune type community where everyone was a little wacky and we didn’t stand out so much. I worked so damn hard to leave that lifestyle behind. You can’t even imagine how hard I worked to appear normal, how driven I was to have stability and security. I worked and studied like a damn dog, achieved considerable success in the practice of law early in my career. I had the house, the car, the money in the bank, the reputation. It was like I was on a treadmill set at high speed and to get off was to die. Then, when it hit a snag, when I lost Lynne and couldn’t stop the pain, what did I do?” He laughed. “I went back to the gypsy roots of my childhood, living loose and lean, trying to find myself all over again.”
“Because you learned that true happiness isn’t material,” she said.
“Everyone knows that, right? But I was pretty damn happy in my material world, being one of the most sought-after young defense attorneys in the state. I didn’t need the lesson, Maggie—I knew money can’t buy love. Love buys love. And hard work is admirable. But loss is inescapable. It’s part of life, and one thing a bank account won’t help you do is get over it faster.” He took a breath. “I shut off the treadmill.”
“Are you happier now than you were a year ago?”
“You know I am. But there’s one thing that remains from my dissatisfaction of my childhood—I feel best when I’m useful and when I’m helping people. Although they don’t talk about it, the same seems to be true for Sedona and Dakota. We knew from early ages that our father is mentally ill and our mother is a flaming codependent and enabler. I think we might’ve overcompensated.”
“Ya think?” Maggie asked with a laugh. “A lawyer, a psychologist, a decorated war hero?”
“I really think you had to see that,” Cal said. “Now if you want to talk about the future, you can do that knowing I come from a family with some very obvious cracks in the porcelain.”
“Cal, it will never be like that with me,” she said. “I’ve seen a hundred men like Jed, delusional and afraid. Most of the time they have nowhere to go, won’t take their meds when they have them, don’t have the means to get help even if it’s available. If he didn’t have your mother, he’d probably be homeless or dead. In fact, I’m sorry to say I think your mother stands in the way of Jed getting help by protecting him and taking care of him as she is. I’m sure she’s doing the best she can with what she has to work with.”
“Well, you should know up front, I’ll always look after them, but there will always be definite boundaries. My mother has no boundaries where my father is concerned—he has her full attention. Sedona has very smart boundaries—if there’s some kind of crisis, she comes alone and never stays at the farmhouse. If they don’t appear to be in crisis, she has brought her kids to visit them a few times, but the kids are well educated on the problems their grandparents live with. Sedona brought them as a kindness to our mother.”
“Makes sense, I guess.”
“I don’t think my parents have ever been on a plane so there’s no danger of them visiting. I
think.”
“You think?” she asked.
“I always brace myself for the day he goes off on a wild hare and decides it’s time to pile in that old minivan and get on the road again...”
“God help us all,” she said. “What do you do in a case like that? Call the highway patrol?”
“Hell if I know,” he said. “You know, you were amazing with them both.”
“Cal, he’s ill. It’s not his fault. He shouldn’t be punished for it. But you have to remember—it’s his illness. I’m sure there have been multiple times there were options other than a reefer a day. Between your mom and dad they’ve decided to deal with it this way. If there are consequences, they belong to them, as well. He wouldn’t be the first patient I’ve ever had to refuse medical treatment.” She shrugged. “Happens every day.”
“The day will probably come when the thing he fears the most will become his reality. When my mother can no longer care for him, he’ll be committed. It’s all Sedona and I can do. We decided that a long time ago.”
“Understandable,” she said.
“Does it give you the cold willies?” he asked her.
“No,” she said with a smile. “I don’t know that your dad would be all that much better off in a group home, except that he’d be on regulated meds and get some therapy. Might have a better quality of life. Your mother definitely would have better quality of life. But as far as I could tell, you’re right—they’re safe and warm and have food to eat. Even their neighbors seem very understanding—they greeted Marissa in the grocery store and asked after Jed.”
“I think they’re as happy as two people with those circumstances can be,” he said. “Or want to be.”
“Well, I intend to be happier,” Maggie said. “Do you have a mission statement yet?”
“Almost,” he said. “Before we get to that, I’ll find out what’s up with Sierra, but if we keep moving in this direction, I think we should consider genetic counseling. Maybe donor insemination.”
She just smiled at him. “First, your statement of intent. Your mission statement.”