Pandemonium

“After the accident, I had some, well, complications, and I needed to go to a different kind of hospital.”

Amra frowned in concern. Lew said, “Holy shit, you mean like One-Flew-Over different?”

Amra shushed him. “Are you okay?” The tiny cabin and the high seat between us made the space simultaneously intimate and insulating.

“I’m fine. Everything worked out.”

“Fine, he says. Holy shit. Does Mom know? No, of course not, she would have told me. She would have told me, wouldn’t she? Holy shit.” He swept down on the rear end of a truck, and for the first time in the trip he slowed down rather than change lanes. “So what were you in for? Did you check yourself in, or did they commit you? Does Mom know?”

“I’ll tell her tonight. It’s not a big deal.”

“You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” Amra said.

“But you should feel free to talk about this. It’s not a stigma.”

“Come on, it’s sort of a stigma,” Lew said.

I nodded. “There are a lot of crazy people in there.”

Amra turned back around. “I’m trying to talk seriously. This is important.”

“It’s not a big deal,” I said.

Lew laughed. “Every time you say that it gets more convincing.”

He gunned the engine, swung around a station wagon, and swerved back right across two lanes, just in time to catch our exit. I braced myself against the door as we swooped into the hard curve of the off ramp.

“So what was it?” Lew asked. He glanced left and merged onto the street. “Thought you were Napoleon? Seeing pink elephants?”

“More like hearing things.”

“No shit.” I’d shocked him sober.

Amra looked at Lew, back at me. “Is this about the thing that happened when you were little?”

So Lew had told her. Which I should have expected—they were married. Family. “When I was possessed, you mean.”

Amra looked so sad I made myself laugh. “Come on, I barely remember it.”

“You ask me, he was faking,” Lew said. He steered the car onto our block. Familiar trees scrolled past the windows, bare limbs raking a close, steely sky. “Del would always do anything to get Mom’s attention.”

Dinner had been waiting since 1985. The meal was straight out of my childhood—glazed ham, mashed potatoes, the mix of regular and creamed corn I loved, hot rolls. My mother brought it out of the oven—she’d been keeping it warm—two minutes after we walked in. We ate off the same white-and-green Corelle plates we’d always used. We talked easily about trivia: changes to the neighborhood, the two winters I’d managed to miss. Lew and Amra didn’t bring up demons or psych wards. My mother didn’t ask why I hadn’t shown up for Christmas, or why I’d suddenly decided to fly here with barely a day’s notice.

Afterward, Mom tried to shoo us away while she cleaned up. Lew and Amra ran out to buy us ice cream, but I stayed to ferry dishes from the dining room to the kitchen. My mother loaded the dishwasher—it didn’t work if anyone else did it.

She was a high-waisted, big-boned woman, built like a municipal building—solid, tall. Lew got his size from her. Her hair was feathered with gray, but when she smiled or spoke she seemed the same as the day I left for college. But when she wasn’t concentrating—like during the long breath she took between sitting down and picking up her fork—her face sagged and she seemed to age twenty years.

“What did you do to your hand?” she asked.

I’d rolled up my sleeves to rinse the dishes. There was a long thin bruise like a bracelet around my left wrist. “Oh, that. That’s nothing.”

She looked at me. I laughed. “I’d looped a rope around my wrist, I was—

a friend of mine got stuck, we were trying to pull his car out. He hit the gas before I let go and—it’s fine, it doesn’t hurt, it just looks bad.”

She tried to pat down the hair at the crown of my head, my eternal cowlick. “You’re always getting in accidents. You look tired, too. Have you been sleeping?”