Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [27]
“Let's put her where we can't see her, so we don't have to confront this every single day,” I mocked. “Let's put her where no one else can see her, where no one else will know she has problems.”
To be honest, I didn't really have any idea what was wrong with Lori. Because I am six and a half years younger than her, I was still just a kid when she began having difficulties in college. My parents didn't seem to understand much of Lori's problems. What they did understand, they weren't passing on to me. I was only vaguely aware of talk of Lori having troubles in school.
And when Lori graduated and moved back to New York, all I heard was more talk, again vague, about her seeing a doctor. Even her suicide attempt a few months before didn't really register. I was lying in bed at night when I heard the phone ring. There was the scuffle of someone dressing, and then my father poked his head in my bedroom door.
“We have to go get your sister in the hospital,” he said. “She's tried to kill herself.”
It was out of the blue. I didn't understand it, and no one took me aside to explain what had happened. Now Lori was suddenly a major problem—bigger than anyone knew how to deal with. Since there were no answers, nobody talked about the questions. I felt isolated in the silence and confusion.
When my parents put Lori in the hospital, it reopened an old wound for me. It was loneliness. I was still resentful that my mom had gone back to work many years earlier. I was still feeling abandoned.
So when Lori went in the hospital at the end of my junior year in high school, I just felt it was more of the same. Mom started coming home later and later. Both Mom and Dad were more and more preoccupied. They both had even less time for me than they had before.
That summer, they left me more on my own to do things than they ever had with the other kids. My summer job that year was working at Cherry Lawn Farm, helping bag produce and wait on customers. In the evenings I sometimes started dinner. My mom had always done all the cooking, and somehow the fact that she wasn't doing it all the time anymore seemed to signal the end of a happy era to me. We used to start dinner together. Now I was doing it alone. I would start the burgers, or chicken or steak, and cut up vegetables for a salad.
Then once they got home in the evening there we were, just the three of us around the dinner table. Mark was away at college. Lori was put away someplace. My parents were silent and tense. We were hardly even a family anymore.
So when Mom started coming home crying, I wasn't exactly sympathetic. She never talked about Lori. I thought she was upset about work. She always talked about work. She was upset, she said, because someone had said something mean to her. Or because someone had taken credit for something she had done. Or because of some bit of office politics. It never really registered that she was coming home late and always crying because she had gone to visit Lori.
Had I been older, I might have thought that all the stress in my mother's life was making it hard for her to deal with things that otherwise she might have taken in stride. But I didn't think that at all. I thought she wasn't cut out for business. I thought she was finally finding out that she had no business leaving home—and me. Lori had nothing to do with it.
And when my mother started smoking again after seven years without a cigarette, I wouldn't buy her explanation. Is smoking the solution? You and Dad are just using Lori as an excuse for everything bad that is going on in our family. I was harsh. I knew I was being harsh, but I didn't care. I didn't know what was going on, and I was very confused.
Underneath my complaints and my criticisms, though, there lurked something