Burial of the Dead

PLOTS - 1

*****

Brian Wyman leans against the fridge, waits for the blast from the kettle on the stove. There’s the little rumble, a kind of rush, it builds, fades with a puff of steam, begins again and whistles. He twists the dial, the flame disappears, the boiling sound goes quiet. He picks up the kettle, pours water in two mugs. The old man only buys instant coffee, so Brian will drink tea.

He places one mug before his mother and takes one for himself.

She thanks him without a word, just a nod, dips her spoon, moves the bag in hot water, catches it, presses it, moves it again. It’s five a.m. Neither she nor Brian are fully awake.

There were snow-showers overnight and the windows are damp with it. Sometimes it’s snows in April. They expect it to rain on the weekend.

“I don’t see why we have to go,” she says.

Brian reminds her that they’ve put it off three times, and there’s a question about what insurance will cover if they refuse to meet with Matthew’s doctor.

Overhead Brian hears footsteps, his father walking down the long hall. His mother hears the footsteps too. She looks up, makes a face, looks down.

“I guess he’s not gonna’ come,” Brian says.

“Of course he’s not,” she says. “He leaves the dirty work for me.”

“It won’t be that bad, Ma. I’ve talked to the guy. He’s a nice guy, very calm like.”

“I just don’t know why we have to go,” she says, and Brian sips his tea, adding sugar, stirring it, adding more milk, stirring that, looking out the window as a blue light begins to settle like fog over the wet lawn.

They arrive early. The hospital’s psychiatric ward is a low, flat building standing in a field fronting a back road with a gas station, a fast food joint and an abandoned bowling alley.

“It’s always me,” the mother says, sitting in the passenger seat, bundled in a cloth coat, refusing to move, refusing to look directly at anyone or anything, as if her eyes had turned inward and grown opaque. Brian knows the look. He’s seen it forever. It’s the look she prepares for a world that’s fucked her, oppressed her, hurt her, disappointed her, made her crazy – the look that can give way to one of her episodes, or make her catatonic, rife with a kind of anxiety that can’t find release and freezes inside of her, paralyzing her, making her small, brittle, silent.

“It’ll be alright, Ma. The doc said he’d see us whenever we got here. He said it’ll take an hour at most.”

“Do we have to see Matthew too?”

“No. The doc said he’s still pretty doped up.”

“At least I don’t have to go through that, then, having to listen to him blame me for everything. As if I caused all of this. It’s such an embarrassment, and do you think your father might help with any of this?”

“He can’t handle stuff like this, Ma. It’s too much for him.”

“And it’s not for me? What do you think that whole town thinks of us now? My family had a name in that town, and I’ve got a son who’s been committed. Committed!” She spits the word. “We did not set out to raise a crazy person. I told him from before high school to be normal in this world. Nobody wants anybody to get too smart for themselves. It’s not much better than being too stupid. The world’s not made for left handed people. Too smart or too stupid – either way it’s trouble, and then doctors get involved and you end up in a place like this. Sometimes I think it would have been better if he’d been retarded. At least then people would say how sad or whatever, but they don’t say how sad when your son’s crazy. They don’t say anything. They try to ignore it. But they don’t ignore you. They look at you and they can’t hide it. They know and you know they know and it’s awful.