Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [82]
We took turns watching her. Hope and the doctor had already spent hours with her and they were asleep in one of the three rooms the doctor had rented. Neil and I were on guard.
Because of the medication the doctor had given her, my mother slept soundly. I was grateful for this because her hysterics terrified me. I’d been awake for three days straight. I just wanted to go to sleep, but I knew that she could hurt herself if we didn’t watch her. So we watched her. And Bookman passed me the note.
I stuck my tongue out at him after I read it.
He smiled. Then he scribbled another note on the rest of the wrapper. You have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.
I had my mother’s eyes. Everybody always told me this. And it scared me that I had her eyes because I worried that it meant I had whatever else she had back there that made her believe she could not only speak to the dead, but smoke cigarettes in the bathroom with them.
As I sat there, I thought about what would have happened if I hadn’t decided to go to the mental hospital; if I had decided to just go to school instead. I’d be expected in school the next day. How would that have happened? Even if I had wanted to be in school, there just wasn’t room for it in my world. I wondered what the Cosby bitch would do in my situation, if it were her father on this bed in a poodle sweater. “No, Daddy, Fat Albert isn’t hiding in the corner with an axe. You’re Fat Albert, don’t you understand?”
I’d tried calling my father collect to tell him what had happened to my mother. I was hoping that maybe he would feel bad and come get me, take me somewhere. On a trip, maybe. But, as usual, he refused to accept the charges. I decided that when we returned, I would send him a dildo in the mail, C.O.D. “What’s this?” he would say in front of the mailman. And then he’d open the box. I would make it a nineinch black dildo.
I sat on the stiff vinyl chair, Bookman sat on the other and I wondered how anything would ever be normal again. What if my mother didn’t get better? What if she couldn’t be pulled back from wherever she was? And more importantly, what would the cheap motel soap do to my hair?
The first time my mother was hospitalized, I was eight. She was gone so long, I forgot what her face looked like. I worried she would never return from the hospital and when she did, it was like not all of her came back. She returned flat, sad. As though an important part of her personality had been surgically removed.
Since she started seeing Finch, she’d gone crazy every fall. It was like her brain went on a Winter Clearance Sale. Sometimes the doctor would take her to a motel room where they would stay for four or five days. They would “work through” the psychotic episode together. Other times, she would be hospitalized. That would usually last for two weeks. It made me sad to visit her in the hospital. Not because she didn’t fit in there with the crazy people, but because she did.
Each time my mother went psychotic, I hoped it would be the last time. Afterward, she would tell me, “I think that was the final episode. I think I had a breakthrough.” And I would believe—for a few months—that it was true. That she was back to stay. Maybe it was like having a rock star mother who was always on the road. Were there Benatar children? Did they sit around and wonder if their mom’s Hell Is for Children tour was going to be her last tour?
Eventually, I dozed off. And Bookman must have carried me, because when I woke up, I was in bed, under the sheets. I was wearing my shirt, but my pants had been stripped off.
“You feeling better?” he asked, sitting on the other bed smoking a cigarette.
I felt heavy, like I had slept for months. “I don’t know. How long was I asleep?”
“An hour maybe,” he said.
“Oh. How’s my mother?”
“Still asleep.”
I wanted to go back to sleep. But I couldn’t stop replaying the conversation I had with her before she went to bed.
“Are you alright?” she asked me.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?