Chapter 18 Reed
REED
As my driver takes us down the long, tree-lined driveway of my mother’s facility, I look out the car window and let my mind drift.
Not surprisingly, it lands on Georgina. Again.
The same way it’s been doing this entire past week.
Once again, I find myself thinking about Georgina’s flushed cheeks as she told me off in front of my house.
And then her flashing hazel eyes, and raised middle fingers, as she drove away in that Uber.
I can’t believe that crazy woman ditched my ass, even though she knew it was in her stepsister’s best interest for her to stay and kiss it.
Not to mention, for her to come inside and suck my dick.
And yet, hotheaded, sassy, glorious Georgina Ricci got into the backseat of that car and left me in her dust, her two middle fingers riding sky-high, and her integrity firmly intact.
And I haven’t stopped thinking about her since.
“Mr. Rivers?”
I blink and realize we’ve arrived at the front of the mental facility—a posh place in Scarsdale, an affluent town about forty-five minutes outside the City, that boasts a “bed and breakfast”-type vibe for its patients.
I check my watch while unlatching my seatbelt.
“This is going to be a quick visit this time, Tony. So don’t drive off to buy a pack of cigs or anything.
I want you here when I come out, ready to haul ass to La Guardia. ”
“I’ll be here.”
Inside the lobby, I show my identification to the attendant, per protocol, even though everyone knows me.
After signing the log, I leaf through the past few weeks of signatures, making sure my mother’s best friend since childhood, Roseanne, has visited as frequently as our contract requires.
With relief, I discern Roseanne has, indeed, held up her end of our bargain.
And also that my saint of a little sister visited yesterday with my little nephew in tow, exactly as she told me she was planning to do as the three of us strolled through the Central Park Zoo earlier this week.
“You don’t have to visit my mother,” I said to my sister in front of the elephant enclosure. “She’s never even acknowledged your existence. Fuck her.”
“Reed,” Violet chastised. “Don’t say that about your mother.”
“I’m just saying you owe her nothing.”
“It’s not about me owing something to her.
It’s about me doing something nice for a lonely lady in a mental hospital.
I often do what I can to brighten the day of a perfect stranger, so why not your mother?
You’ve mentioned several times she doesn’t get a lot of visitors, only you and that ‘friend’ of hers you have to pay.
And you’ve also mentioned she never stopped loving our prick-ass father, despite their nasty divorce and everything else. ”
“She was always his doormat. I don’t know if you can rightly call that ‘love.’”
“Well, either way, I think it might be nice for a lonely lady to get to see a cute little baby who has her ex-husband’s DNA inside him. The same DNA as her own beloved son. Maybe seeing my baby will remind her of happier times in her own life.”
I felt a mix of emotions right then, during that conversation with my sister in front of the elephants.
First off, I felt shame at my secret knowledge that the words “beloved son” probably didn’t apply to me, at least if you were to ask my mother.
But, mostly, I felt awed by my sister’s selflessness.
Not that I should have been surprised, really, since compassion is her defining characteristic.
But, still, as I stood there with Violet and my sweet little nephew, watching an elephant dunk its thick trunk into a trough of water, I had this distinct thought: How the hell does this girl have Terrence Rivers’ DNA inside her, the same as me, and yet, unlike me, she doesn’t have a single asshole bone in her body?
I close the facility’s logbook, having finished my inspection of it, and return it to the attendant at the front desk.
And then, I make my way down the familiar hallway toward Mom’s room—the biggest one at the facility, with the best view of the garden.
But when I poke my head inside Mom’s room, she isn’t there.
I turn to leave, figuring Mom must be at yoga, or perhaps painting in a hidden corner of the garden, when a canvas by the window catches my eye.
I walk toward the easel, bracing myself for my inevitable exasperation when I survey it, and audibly groan when I make out the details of the scene depicted.
Fuck. It’s yet another happy family portrait.
And I want to smash it against the fucking wall.
To an outside observer, this painting, like all the others, would likely seem like nothing but a pleasant idyll.
A lovely tribute to family. And if it were a one-off, or a two-off, or even a hundred-off, I’d probably agree.
In reality, though, as I know too well, this painting is actually anything but a pleasant idyll.
No, it’s a physical manifestation of my mother’s unwell, hyper-fixated mind.
Evidence of what doctors call my mother’s “perseveration.”
In short, my mother’s got an obsessive compulsion that prompts her to pick up a paintbrush, every week of her life, and paint yet another iteration of this exact scene, with only a few small variations and variables, over and over and over again.
Indeed, no matter how many times her doctors, therapists, “best friend,” or I encourage my mother to, please, please, paint something else—anything else, for the love of fuck—Eleanor Rivers always paints the same thing.
An idyllic depiction of her family at rest or play, enjoying some pleasant sunshine without a care in the world.
This time, Mom’s portrait depicts a late-afternoon family picnic in a park surrounded by gorgeous cherry blossoms. As usual, Mom’s painted herself as a young mother.
This time, Mom’s avatar is seated on a red blanket with her two small sons: my older brother, Oliver, who’s holding an ice cream cone and looks to be about seven or eight, and me, holding a lollipop, looking to be around five or six.
Mom always paints Oliver the same way—looking like he’s around eight years old—even though, in reality, he drowned in our backyard swimming pool at age four, when I was two.
Mom also gives Oliver some sort of treat in every painting.
An ice cream cone, as with this one. A piece of candy.
A shiny new toy. A puppy. A kite. A kitten.
A butterfly net. Apparently, one of Mom’s greatest pleasures is showering her ill-fated older son, in paintings, with all the little gifts she never got to give him in real life.
Scattered around Mom and her two happy sons are Mom’s three younger sisters and mother, all of them clad in merry, pastel dresses, and all of them gaily spinning cartwheels and jumping rope.
.. even though, in real life, tragically, all four of them died in a horrific house fire when Mom was barely sixteen.
Mom had been babysitting a neighbor’s three children at the time of the fire, mere blocks away.
When word of the blaze got to Mom, she frantically sprinted home, hell-bent on hurtling herself inside the burning structure and saving everyone she loved so much from catastrophe.
But, alas, by the time she got to the house, it was already abundantly clear it was too late.
Four of the only five people my mother loved in this world were already gone.
As for the fifth person in this world my mother loved, her father, he was a traveling salesman on a trip at the time, marooned that fateful night with a flat tire about two hours away.
Or, at least, that’s what Charles Charpentier swore to investigators, when no witnesses could confirm his whereabouts, one way or another.
To this day, I think my mother mostly believes her father’s version of events, which is why she always includes him in her happy family paintings.
Including her father in her paintings is my mother’s way of declaring to the world: Charles Charpentier’s sole surviving child rejects the wicked rumors about him—the whispers that swirled around Scarsdale immediately after the fire, and then continued swirling endlessly, long after the man killed himself on the one-year anniversary of the tragedy.
According to my grandfather’s doubters, Charles Charpentier was a compulsive gambler who’d arranged to burn down what he’d thought would be his empty house that fateful night, in order to collect insurance money and pay off his mountain of debts.
To my mother, on the other hand, her father was a tragic figure who lost almost everything that horrible night, all at once.
.. and, tragically for her, the only thing that remained, the man’s eldest daughter, simply wasn’t enough to keep him from putting that gun to his head and pulling the trigger.
Interestingly, Mom always places her father off to the side in every painting—as if he’s watching his family’s revelry from a distance, but not participating in it.
I think Mom keeps her father at arm’s length in this way, each and every time, because, in the deepest recesses of her unwell mind, she’s not sure what to think about him.
Consciously, she’s decided to believe in his innocence.
But, subconsciously, I’m guessing she’s got her doubts.
Perhaps she includes her father’s figure in her paintings, in the first place, as a declaration of love and support for him.
.. but she then feels compelled to set him apart, away from her beloved mother and sisters, as a show of loyalty to them.
.. just in case, on the off-chance, the incessant whispers and gossip about her father were actually true.
“She’s in the yoga room,” a voice says. And when I turn around, it’s one of the nurses. Tina. A middle-aged woman in blue scrubs who’s worked here forever.
“Thanks,” I say. “I’ll look for her there.”
Tina comes to a stop next to me, her eyes trained on Mom’s canvas. “No grandma this time? Poor Grandma hardly ever makes the cut.”
“Mom’s grandmother should be grateful to make it into any of Mom’s paintings. By all accounts, Grandma was a raving bitch.”
Tina chuckles.
“My guess?” I say. “Grandma won’t make it into a painting until Christmas.”
“Christmas?” Tina says. “Dang it, I hope not. We’ve got a pool about when Grandma’s going to make her next appearance, and I put my ten bucks on Thanksgiving. If Grandma shows up to eat turkey, I’ll win a hundred bucks.”
“Sorry, I wouldn’t count on it, Tina. Apparently, Grandma hated my mother’s cooking and told her so, repeatedly. So, I’m thinking the last thing Mom would want to do is give Grandma a seat at the Thanksgiving table, only to let her bitch about Mom’s turkey being too dry.”
“Shoot.”
“But, hey, I guess it’s possible Mom could paint Grandma at the Thanksgiving table, to let her rave about how perfect everything is. Mom’s been known to paint revisionist history a time or two. Or forty-two billion.”
Tina points. “Who’s the baby? I don’t think I’ve seen him or her in one of your Mom’s paintings before.”
“I believe that’s my nephew.”
Tina grimaces, apparently assuming the baby must be deceased, if he’s making an appearance in an Eleanor Rivers original.
“He’s alive and well,” I clarify quickly. “My sister brought him to visit yesterday for the first time.”
“Oh, I was off yesterday.” She peers at the tiny blonde figure as he plays with a red ball in the hinterlands of the grassy park.
“Wow, one meeting with him and your mother’s already put him into one of her paintings?
He must have made quite an impression. It took me working here eight years before your mother finally made me an ice cream vendor in one of her paintings. ”
I shrug. “She’s always loved babies. It’s when they get to age seven or eight that she has no fucking clue what to do with them.”
Tina flashes me a look of sympathy, before returning to the canvas. “Why do you think your nephew is way off in a corner like that, so far away from everyone else? I would have thought she’d at least let one of her sisters throw that ball to him.”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I say. But I’m a liar.
I know exactly why my mother has banished my nephew to a far corner: it’s a sign of his paper-thin connection to “her” family.
But why would I admit that to Tina? Especially when, like Tina said, the fact that Mom’s included him at all, after only one visit, is a sign of progress, however small.
“She adores you, you know,” Tina says. “She talks about you all the time.”
I smile politely and shove my hand into the pocket of my jeans.
But I know the truth. If my mother talks about me at all, it’s only to brag about my money.
The truth is, my mother isn’t capable of loving me in the way other mothers love their children.
But that’s okay. She doesn’t need to be capable of it.
I’ve long since stopped hoping for, or expecting, motherly love from her.
All that matters to me now is that she is, in fact, my mother, and that I love her.
All that matters is she’s on the short list of people I’d do anything for, protect until my dying breath, and love unconditionally, forevermore, whether she’s capable of returning my devotion, or, shit, even simply liking me. .. or not.