his presence because he brought humor to the demented world I was visiting.
After my mother’s repeated good-byes to her friends, we’d get into her car. She was always quiet, and I knew she was thinking of my father, who still stood at the end of the bar entertaining his own phantoms. Her eyes squinted in the darkness as she concentrated on getting us home. The empty highway was a perfect accompaniment to the silence we listened to, but I could hear her thoughts, and her rage altered her perfume, adding a mystery to her determined smile and denial.
What happens to a home when the people living in it leave? What happens to the family left behind? Do they live with the old memories, unable to move forward? The house’s reassurances slowly vanished and the memories once shared became dust on the furniture. My older sister Trish moved out, my brother stayed at the house of the girl du jour he was sleeping with, and my sister Jenn was often out with her new best friend, going to the movies or the mall. The isolation and quietness were my mother’s and mine to share, to live with, and to endure like a single burning candle that has the responsibility to heat a palace. My father was never coming home, and that was no longer a thought in our minds, just an unspoken truth never voiced.
How could I ask my mother where my father had gone? Wasn’t it written on her broken heart, on her clothing, on her pride? Her dark-brown eyes sparked with rage and resentment, burning the memories of his body and face, searing his flesh, and sweeping the ashes of his laughter from her mind.
My mother, whose profound intuition for nature transcended anyone’s I had ever known, was betrayed by love, a missed shot from a broken bow. She was a woman lying by an icy riverbed with her head on the frozen grass, listening for the universe to give her direction. From her secret garden of ingrown thoughts, she watched the TV screen and pretended that moment didn’t exist, along with all the others forever locked in the solid waters. Her eyes filled with heavy tears that fell like ice drops from snowy branches. I couldn’t look at her, because to see her weep would make me cry, and all children are powerless over their mother’s tears. It was too late to get into this conversation again because the day had already been a lost war, and I had school in the morning. I turned to her, because I had to, and began to cry as we lost ourselves in our sadness. Together we cried—she cried for him and I cried for her, and the thunderclouds of her emotions sent lightning down my spine.
This cycle at night became a normal event in our lives. The raw emotions thickened like a dense fog blotting out the light. Her endless tears could have filled up oceans, and the delicate golden ribbon that strung her wounded heart together unraveled. Even though I knew the answer, I always asked her what was wrong, but she never spoke about it. I would hear her crying in the living room as I went to bed, and it killed me. I became a hostage to the music played by the broken instrument that had replaced her heart. I wanted to fix it, but I couldn’t. All that was once beautiful had gone. Together we perfected misery.
I would see my father at the bar each evening and wanted to ask him, “Where have you been? When are you coming home?” But I never did; I couldn’t utter those words, and instead observed all of the alcoholics as I reassured myself of how much I hated the substance that seemed to be the lifeblood of my family.
Countless long, uncomfortable nights led us to finally move on from the thought that my father would ever return home. We didn’t talk about it. To speak the words would mean it was true, and it would have shattered the illusions and pretense in which we lived. My mom sank deeper into herself, and I began to believe her lies. I believed her fake smile in the same way I convinced myself plastic flowers were real. They looked like flowers, so they must be flowers. I believed she would be okay, but she would never be the same again, and neither would we.
COMMONLY KNOWN AS THE ADAM’S APPLE, IT IS THE PROTRUSION FORMED BY THE ANGLE OF THE THYROID CARTILAGE SURROUNDING THE LARYNX. DURING MEDIEVAL TIMES A MYTH AROSE ABOUT THE ADAM’S APPLE, ACCORDING TO WHICH THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT BECAME LODGED IN ADAM’S THROAT AFTER HE TOOK A BITE OF IT. THE ADAM’S APPLE IS USUALLY MORE VISIBLE IN MEN THAN IN WOMEN.
My asthma came seeping back into my lungs with the changing of the seasons, autumn to winter being the most challenging. Every day I lost my breath. I was always trying to catch it, and that feeling of mortality and death crept in alongside the perfect, vibrant fall colors. Those are the colors prior to death’s arrival, before the hands of winter reap all that is living. The deepest colors always come with death.
In the months of September, October, and November I would end up in the emergency room for a treatment with a nebulizer. The nebulizer allowed me to breathe better, but I was ashamed of using it because of its pipe-like structure that resembled a hookah. In my mind I was an athlete, and drugs were the substances created for the weak and desperate. In addition to the nebulizer treatment, I was given injections of prednisone, a steroid that decreased the inflammation in my lungs. That medication is not the same as the much-abused testosterone and muscle-building anabolic steroids, but I was scared my teammates wouldn’t know the difference.
I became fascinated by the hospital and quickly began to pick up the medical terminology for my ailments. I had visited the emergency room so many times for my asthma that I began to feel like an intern. There was something romantic about a person who could prescribe medication. Those doctors were powerful to me, and I was attracted to the patient-doctor pattern—illness, diagnosis, medication. In a peculiar way, I felt I belonged there.
The doctors had changed my medications many times, and it was difficult to know which prescription made me feel better; all of them left me feeling hyper and edgy. During the numerous X-rays taken of my lungs, the doctors discovered an abnormality in my rib cage. This was more evidence that I was born different. I was born with an extra rib, a deformity that could not be seen by the human eye and was basically purposeless. My mom, who always tried to turn my awkward discomfort into ease, was a witness to the doctor’s discovery. Excitedly, she recalled the story she had been told as a child in church, about how God had taken one of Adam’s ribs with which to create Eve. She had read that Adam had been given an extra rib, like me.
As a boy, I didn’t attend church because it conflicted with gymnastics competitions that were held on Sundays. I found the sport to be a much grander religion, with a more promising outcome than any story supposedly written by God and told by men. My mom’s story made me feel better, and even though this extra rib didn’t hurt me in any way, I would have given it back to be “normal.”
A new asthma medication started giving me horrible anxiety, and I constantly believed something bad was going to happen. Panic and despair replaced my inability to breathe, and I would lie in bed wide awake. It wasn’t just a few hours of thinking of the many horrors and wonders the world held; no, this insomnia kept me awake until morning. The daylight announced a horribly arduous day ahead without any peace at all. A sleepless night left me feeling like my entire body was filled with rusty nails, heavy and dull, and my daily tasks at school followed by gymnastics practice seemed impossible to complete.
In the quiet of night I would sit in my room, staring at the walls, terrified for no obvious reason. I could never pinpoint what was behind those feelings, but it brought up an overwhelming desire to create something beautiful. At first, the feeling urged me to produce something original, to make some form of art or create something from nothing. I knew if I did not begin to create, I would live forever in frustration.
The form of creativity that eventually drew me in was writing. During my fits of sleeplessness I would write to keep the panic at bay, and the more I wrote, the more I had the desire to do so. I called my stories and my desire to write “ghosts,” and they moaned and lingered, stabbing me until their tales were written exactly as they tormented me to. Ghost-writing was the only way to freedom. Strangely, when I finished with one story, another one appeared, and sometimes two or three entered at the same time. I would sit on my bed, pen in hand, scribbling