By Brian Yeary

The man and the woman looked out of the window together. They watched the rain dance on the glass then slide down in jagged little serpentines until it collected in shallow pools along the brick ledge outside. He was twelve years older than she. In her eyes, he was the most handsome man in the whole world. The rain was steady now and the wet pavement below the window was glistening. 

She watched him carefully as he ate a soft-boiled egg and sipped black coffee. He sipped and chewed slowly, giving each swallow and every bite its due diligence. She appreciated that about him. She sat beside him in a chair and wiped the corners of his mouth with a damp cloth. He stopped working on the egg long enough to imagine her as she had been when the two first met. He always pictured her like that in his mind. He smiled at her now, she smiled back at him. They both turned to watch as a black bird flew in close to the window, then darted away in the autumn of the early morning. 

“I wish I had learned to speak French when I was a young girl,” she said to him. 

“It’s a beautiful language, I suppose. I could listen to you read a page from the phonebook and be just as inspired.” He took careful aim at her eyes with his gaze. She could not resist, not here and now, not there and then. She leaned in to rub the end of her nose on the tip of his, then pushed her lips to his cheek. Now she tried to hold back a tear with all her strength, but the tear refused to be held hostage by her demands. It rolled down her cheek, down and down until it had slid all the way down and fell onto his cheek like the droplets of sad rain sliding down the pane. He watched the blackbird catch a wind drift, thrust towards heaven, then cut back in the direction of the cold, wet glass. For a split second, he thought it might attempt to land there on the ledge between two shallow puddles.   

“Why don’t you crawl up here next to me.” He wiped away a tear from his own cheek with the back of a slow hand and then did the same for her. He threw back the sheets and the blanket and cleared a space for her next to him, playfully touching the top of the mattress with the flat of his hand. She stood from her chair and looked down her nose at him for a moment then laughed, tilting her head back so she could get it all out. 

“You stop that,” she scolded him, “I don’t have time for such nonsense.” Now she was coy, and he played along. He made a sad face, exaggerated and theatrical. She fell for it. She kicked off her shoes, one at a time, and sat herself on the side of his bed. Next, she pulled one knee over the mattress, then the other, until both legs and feet were comfortably resting in the space next to him. Now they smiled together and listened to the rain once more.

 “I wish I had a cigarette,” he told her. 

“You haven’t smoked in years,” she reminded him. He grinned a sheepish grin and pulled her in close with a strong right arm while holding an imaginary cigarette between the forefinger and middle finger of his left hand. He raised the cigarette to his waiting lips then took an imaginary drag. He exhaled a long puff of invisible smoke. The imaginary blue-gray rings and wisps floated above them, up and up, hovering just below the tiles of the ceiling where he watched them vaporize slowly, crawling along for a time. 

“Yes, but aren’t you supposed to have a smoke after a good roll in the hay?” He looked down into her eyes, then laughed again. She forced herself to laugh along with him until another tear escaped and rolled down and down. He watched the shaky hand of a nor-east wind push and pull the raindrops across the glass, scribbling a message there, communicating in some unknown, invisible hieroglyphic. He spent a precious moment de-coding the message before looking over the top of her head, out of the window, in the direction of all that was out there. He searched desperately for the blackbird in the watercolor sky, saddened to discover it had flown from there, out of sight. 

“A roll in the hay!” She exclaimed. “You old fool, I’ll roll your hay.” She loved his sense of humor, and his hair. He had the softest, most luxurious hair she had ever seen. She reached up and combed his bangs back, away from his eyes. They looked at one another, the man and the woman, each wondering what the other was thinking, but neither saying a word. 

****

The door to the room opened one inch at a time, allowing a graduation of light to intrude on their quiet, tender space. A well-preserved woman in a long white coat stepped in cautiously. She came to the bed where the man and woman were as close as they could have possibly been to one another. She looked beyond the two of them, through the window where she saw a flock of blackbirds swirling like a tornado of feathers. The man reached down and found the woman’s hand there beside him. He squeezed it gently then locked his fingers around hers. She rubbed the back of his hand, still moist from tears, his and hers. She gingerly caressed him, holding the entirety of his love carefully, like a baby bird. The tornado of feathers exploded across the pale sky, evading solidarity, becoming a million fluttering daydreams, each one uniquely interpreted by the man, the woman, and the other woman.  

---

Brian Yeary is a resident in the Pastoral Counseling Program at UAMS.  

By Aich Kay

His young wife rolled him in to the clinic room on a motorized wheelchair. Review of records indicated that he was here for a follow up after a prolonged hospitalization for cardiac arrest. I may have missed looking at his age in the pages and pages worth of documentation because it came as a complete shock to me that he wasn’t a geriatric patient. He was young, his skin clear, his dark hair full, his body lean and muscular. But that’s where the illusion of health ended. His strong limbs were contracted in odd positions, his eyes vacant, his face expressionless. Foam pads kept his nails from digging into his palms, padded braces and Velcro restraints kept his feet positioned on the footrests. I had seen the MRI brain prior to his visit: “diffuse axonal injury,” the report had said. In other words, the parts of the brain that make a person who they are, were all damaged irreparably. My heart bled for him and his family. I reached out to touch his wife’s hand, and her eyes welled up with tears. What happened, I wanted to ask, but afraid that it might be misconstrued as curiosity, not as an effort at sympathy, I left the words unsaid. But she read those unspoken words in my eyes anyway and told me. And as she spoke my mind filled in all the details in her story. 

It was an otherwise normal day. She was parked behind 20 other cars waiting to pick up the kids from school. Early next morning they were going to be on a flight to Barbados to visit family. It was a special trip: Grandma was turning 100 and family members were gathering to celebrate. Kayla who hadn’t seen her family in two years couldn’t wait and the butterflies in her stomach were fluttering wildly in anticipation. She checked off things on her mental checklist. Laundry: done. Tickets and IDs: packed in her purse, electronic boarding passes saved on her phone. This evening’s meal stood on the stove, still warm, its aroma wafting through their small house. Their suitcases stood in a line next to the entrance, packed and ready for departure. And the cat: Sheila from next door had agreed to keep her for the week they were to be gone. She was glad she had taken a day off from work today to get things ready. There was no way all this could have been done in the evening. 

Her phone rang briefly then got cut off. She glanced at the screen quickly. It was John. He could wait. She wasn’t about to pick up the phone while merging on the highway. Home was five mins away anyway. He might have been looking for something and then likely hung up because he had found it. She smiled, her heart swelling with love for John. What would he do without her, she wondered, if he couldn’t locate things in his own house? Anyway, she was glad he had canceled his night shift tonight. She was glad he was home. The kids chattered non-stop and she heaved a sigh of relief as she took the turn into her street. It had been a long day. 

“We’re home, John,” she announced as she ushered the kids inside. 

School bags and shoes were dumped in the mud room, the squeals of delight and the patter of little bare feet echoing in the small space. 

“Use the bathroom and wash your hands first!” she told six-year-old Elijah who was reaching to grab a snack from the pantry. 

“Aww Mommy!” He complained but headed to the bathroom. 

Four-year-old Kevin simply followed his big brother like he always did. Kayla looked at them for a moment, her hand on her chest, her heart full. 

She could see the top of John’s head as he sat on the sofa, the TV blaring loudly in the background. She started getting the dishes out, then turned the stove on to warm the food again. 

“John!” she said, “come on, help me. Don’t just sit there watching TV!” 

But John didn’t come. She looked over her shoulder through the little wall cut out between the kitchen and the living room. He was still sitting there. Surely he had heard her. 

Perhaps her heart got to the truth before her brain had had time to process. She felt a tremendous jolt and panic rose rapidly like bile hitting the back of her throat. Something was wrong. She ran towards the living room, but it was as though everything unfolded in slow motion even though she knew her hands and her feet were working as fast as they could. She shook him, trying to get him to respond, but he slid sideways on to the sofa, still unresponsive. His hands were cold, like death. She couldn’t find his pulse. She ran to pick up her phone, her hands shaking as she tried to call 911, wondering who was screaming, not realizing that the animal sound came from her own throat. 

They told her he wouldn’t make it. They wanted to let him go. Big medical words that didn’t make sense floated towards her in the family meeting. They told her neurosurgery wouldn’t operate. Why wouldn’t they? Why couldn’t they save John. No, she wanted everything done. He was there, her John, still with her. They just needed to do everything to keep him here. No, she didn’t want comfort care, she didn’t want to let him go just like that! No! She begged them to leave her alone. Her boys clung to her legs, confused, scared. She drew them to her, her body shaking with sobs that wouldn’t stop.  

It was she who had failed him, not them. She should have called him back when she was on the highway. She should have kissed him on his forehead when she came in, like she always did. They told her he had been down for too long. She had seen them working on him, pumping his heart with their hands, pushing air into his lungs through the mask, the defibrillator sending shocks through his body, lifting it up briefly and then letting it crash again. As she watched him, she remembered thinking absent mindedly that the floor was hard, almost as though she was disconnected from the scene before her. They will hurt him, maybe they already had. Why wasn’t he waking up? Nine minutes till they got his pulse back, they said. But still he lay there, a tube down his throat, unresponsive. 

“I can see he knows it’s me, I can see he understands,” she tells me at the clinic appointment. I see the unstated plea in her eyes and stop myself just in time from responding to the statement with logic and cold, hard facts.

“He knows his boys, too,” she says, and turning to him, runs her hand through his hair, “don’t you, John?”  

John doesn’t say anything. His eyes are open but barely just. They hold no expression, no answer. But I don’t know him like she does. Maybe his eyes tell her something different. Maybe he does respond in some way even though I can’t see it on the surface, a flicker of the finger, a turning of the head, a shift of his gaze. His wife’s life had changed overnight. Perhaps this was her way to deal with her new reality. It’s a busy clinic but I settle down in my seat and prepare myself to answer some tough questions. 

---

Aich Kay is the non de plume of a physician at UAMS who wishes to remain anonymous.

By Stephen Aguilar

It was December and snow was falling on the parking lot. Big lights, to ward off carjackers and muggers, made the white ground twinkle. A line of snow-covered cars slumbered. The hospital rose from the ground and kept watch over the night. I crossed the lot, scanned my badge at the side door, and was let into bright warmth. 

For my urology rotation, I was assigned to follow an older surgeon. The first surgery of the day was a partial nephrectomy. The patient had a mass in the right kidney. An incidental discovery during a workup for colitis. “Likely Cancerous” was bolded in the radiology report. 

The patient was married to a teacher. We waited for the school day to end so she could be there when we read the report. The surgeon was old fashioned like that.

“Well, ain’t that quaint?” The Patient said. “Incidental…” He looked at me and I nodded in agreement.

“We have uncovered one of the great mysteries of your life.” The Surgeon said. He put his hand on the patient’s shoulder. “Why God gave you two kidneys.”

The wife did not find that funny.

He was in his late sixties, the surgeon. Coke bottle glasses clung to the end of his nose. He knew his eyes would be what kickstarted his retirement, but he made do for now.  He had a highly educated finger. It endured a rigorous curriculum of rectal exams and surgical sweeps. “A noble pursuit of any digit,” he told me.

In the OR, everything was blue and white. There was an illusion of purity. A scalpel was put in my hand. The patient was draped and on their side. The bed had been bent to elevate their flank. Skin parted with the slightest pressure on the blade. It was like God’s will. What a will. Beads of red ignited at the edge of the incision. The surgeon followed with the Bovie. Blood burned up and was tamed. 

Once the first layer was opened, he nudged my hands from the field. He wiggled his finger. “It’s the little guy’s time to shine.” He cut along the fascial plane.  His finger did a sweep around the newly exposed site before moving forward. Cut. Sweep. Cut. Sweep. The hole in the abdomen was dark. It looked cold. The surgeon adjusted an overhead light. The darkness turned pink. 

“I call this next part The High Priest.” 

The educated finger descended in search of the kidney. Light from the overhead was blocked. The finger communed with the organs in the chamber. It happily moved side to side. 

Then it stopped. 

The surgeon did not take the finger out of the body. Slower this time, his hand began to move. His eyes closed. Lines of time splayed from the corners of his lids. He took his hand out and the incision became pink again. He grabbed my hand and put my finger in the incision. Into the darkness.

“Peek,” he said. I felt the kidney. The cancer sort of jutted out like a piece of gravel. He moved my finger up to feel the liver. It was uniform in texture. Smooth, slick, and rubbery. With my finger in his hand, he swept it back and forth.

Then…

“Shriek,” he whispered. My finger, still on the liver, touched something hard. It was a nodule disrupting the uniformity of the organ. What a will.

The Surgeon let me suture the wound with one of the residents. He and his failing eyes left the room, the cancerous kidney still inside our patient. The nodule too. 

What is to be done? Death slumbers in the shadows. 

Three surgeries were added to the end of the day, so I didn’t leave till it was dark.  I walked to my car over the slush. “Leviathan,” came to mind when passing the line of tightly packed cars. The one at the farthest end started up. The headlights glared at me. In my car, I shivered while waiting for the heat to start.

…

On the last day of the rotation the old surgeon pulled me aside. It was the end of the day. Christmas break was within reach.

“Come look at this,” he said. “The holidays can wait a few more minutes.”

I followed him to a computer. We huddled around it. He opened a patient’s chart.

“It’s the guy we cut on a couple weeks ago. Your first Peek and Shriek, right?” he asked.

“Yes sir.”

“We got a PET scan.”

He opened the image. A tunnel appeared in the wall, and I thought we were meant to crawl through. But it was just the first picture of the scan. Anechoic chaos, air. The surgeon scrolled. From the choas, the outline of a man materialized. Radiology shines light where Death hides. Shadows of organs appeared. In the liver, something twinkled. The nodule. He scrolled more. The piece of gravel in the right kidney lit up as well. The two lights glared at me, as if to challenge their authority. Again, more scrolling.

“There,” the urologist said. “A Christmas tree. From me to you.”

The shadow man was alight. The margins of his lungs burned orange. A great jewel sat in the brain.  Even his bones seemed to be wrapped with those finnicky tree lights.

“Sometimes,” he continued. “You can only bow your head.”

Outside, snow fell silently. The sun set and the hospital’s shadow stretched out to become the night.  Flood lights turned on to help the weary people cross the parking lot. 

---

Stephen Aguilar is a medical student at UAMS. He will complete medical school this year and will start his residency training in Internal Medicine at UAMS. 

By Annette Leavy

“There you are,” he says each morning. He seems amazed she is still there.

“Here I am,” she smiles back. Where else did he think she would be? When they moved him to in-patient hospice five days earlier, she had moved in with him, brought her toothpaste, a few changes of clothes, and the novel she was reading. She woke before he did, washed her face, and dressed to be ready for him.

This morning she had doubled over the sink. Her sobs made it impossible to stand upright, but then, sensing she was late for him, she stuffed her tears back inside.

“What’s the matter?” he asks as she sits down beside him.

“I’m okay.” She sips her coffee and then corrects herself, “I’m sad about you.”

Later, after the breakfast he would not touch had come and gone, he asks, “What’s that black cloud over my eyes?” His curious eyes no longer glint brown and green. They have turned a flat, frightening, heavenly blue, and his right eye often doesn’t bother to open.

She gulps, “I think it means that you’re dying.” The hospice pamphlet had informed her that sight goes first among the senses.

He turns away from her and clutches the other side of the bed, wailing.

Has her honesty been cruel? Who should tell him if not her?

The nurse, Mandy, whose cheek bones are puffed with years of care, whisks into the room.

His arms reach and beseech as Mandy tries to massage them back down by his side. “My Reiki won’t work,” Mandy says. “Do you want to get in bed beside him?”

“Yes,” she exclaims, realizing that’s what she wants. If Mandy hadn’t offered, she might have felt afraid to hold her husband.

The nurse moves his body to one side of the bed to give her room.

It’s awkward, uncomfortable in the narrow hospital bed. Her left arm stretches across the pillow to hold his head, while she curls herself around him. She drapes her right arm across his body as lightly as she can. Everyone says bone pain is the worst.

He twists and turns, cries out, twists and turns some more, even after Mandy has filled his IV with morphine.

She holds him and strokes him and feels calmer than she has in weeks. If she holds him long enough, maybe he will settle into her body and they can take a nap. She tries to breathe her love inside him.

He never truly settles. Instead, his body jerks and twists until he has pushed her bottom and legs off the bed. She clings onto him as best she can.

“What is it?” she asks.

“I can’t make you come,” he says.

She almost laughs. Almost flushes with happiness. Even now, she thinks, after I told him he was dying. 

“Oh honey, don’t worry about that. You did plenty,” she says.

The small of her back is now hanging in mid-air off the mattress. She feels the sciatic pinch where her hip meets her pelvis. Finally, she eases herself off the bed and plops into the chair.

The room is an airless tomb. The one corner window lets in no light. She needs a walk and a cup of coffee. She tells him, I’ll be back soon, but when she returns, he is asleep or somewhere that is no longer with her. At four, her son arrives to give her a break. 

“Go home for the night,” Mandy says. “You’re no good for him if you’re exhausted.”

She does just that, takes a shower, empties her inbox, eats supper, drinks some wine, and sleeps in her own bed with the dog at her side until the night nurse calls at six the next morning, “Come now.”

By the time she arrives they have combed his unruly curls off his forehead and arranged his body, so newly dead that she can stroke it and feel something like life underneath the sheets.

---

Annette Leavy is a writer and psychotherapist living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her stories have appeared in The Blue Lake Review and The Capra Review. “The Free Temple” was a finalist for the 2022 Rash Award in Fiction and will appear in the next issue of the Broad River Review.

By Corinne Patrice de Palma

It was a blustery day in November. The wind whipped across the front steps of Avon Road as I made my way toward the front door of my house. I walked in chilled to the bone. The frost had set in. I just wore a light windbreaker that day. I underdressed like I always did since I was a child. I never liked feeling confined by clothes – I think this harkens back to the time when I was a baby and my mother, who had always gotten cold easily herself, had dressed me in two sleeping blankets instead of one in my crib – at least from what she told me. 

Yelps sounded in the background from the family room, from what I could discern. I took a few steps towards the voices. It was my mother, pinned by my brother Matt against the wood- paneled wall. This had taken place right next to our piano. Mom was a virtuoso on the piano. She even learned how to play the flute when she was young. My grandmother Nana, my mother’s strict Italian immigrant mother, who literally come here on the boat when she was a baby, had made her become proficient in two instruments growing up. My associations of Mom at that piano – measured and skilled, juxtaposed against the mayhem in the room – brought more attention to the chaos it seemed, amid her loss of control: She stood there like a puppet, suspended, defenseless, as my brother kept his elbow on her neck, to keep her from moving. 

“Stop,” she squealed. 

“Screw you,” my brother replied as his hand pressed down harder on her neck keeping her captive on the wall. This was new behavior. Or was it? I never saw him fight with my mother. He shouted, “You’re a whore.”  

I just transferred to public school – Moores Junior High. I was in seventh grade. Two years older than me, my brother Matt was in ninth grade there. Being in the same school had been a first for us. Had he always been this way? Maybe he had, but I hadn’t noticed since, in different schools the year before, and on different schedules, we weren’t around each other as much. 

Either way, prior to that day, I had only thought always of Matt as my fierce protector, my big brother who had always defended me and my sister Janine – the sister who was one year older than me – against the bullies on our block, and my mother of course, against our wicked stepmother, Rita, who had regularly harassed her since I was seven years old after my father left home. 

Once, Rita had come calling at our front door, pretending she was the Avon lady before she was married to my father, really just to get a good look at my mother to see what her competition was, and to threaten her, I discovered. Before that, I didn’t even know who she was. I answered the door after hearing the doorbell ring. It was right near our upstairs staircase, and I was right near it as I was headed to my bedroom on our second floor. “Is your mother home?” she asked, with Skin So Soft in her hands. After calling my mother and she came to the door, Rita yawped, “I’m Rita. He’s never going to go back to you. He’s with me now, forever.”  My mother stood there stunned as Rita besieged her. My father at the time had refused to marry Rita after he had moved in with her at her house in the South Bronx. Our lives were something out of a movie even then. Nothing had ever been ordinary. That’s when Matt who was upstairs in his room, in hearing the noise, came downstairs, and after figuring out what was going on, stomped into the bathroom, filled up a glass of water, and threw it in her face. Then he shouted, “Get out of here you whore.” My brother had always done the fighting for us. Not with us.

As for now, as he held my mother up against the wall, I walked towards him. “Get the hell off of her,” I screeched, doing what I only felt was instinctual to protect my mom.  He came back at me hard. He just learned karate, put me in a headlock, and threw me onto the floor. 

It wasn’t long before Matt struck again. Years later, my therapist, Dr. Klein, would attribute Matt’s treatment of women as whores to Rita and his bad experiences with her. “Matt’s encounters with Rita led to the generalized perception that all women are now whores,” she told me. In some ways, Matt’s rage towards Rita wasn’t a stretch. She’d been atrocious, the classic evil stepmother for sure. Years later, Grandma de Palma would tell me that she heard from one of the doctor’s wives in my father’s medical practice that Rita had showed up at his office pretending she was sick to lure him away. My father was a cardiologist. Grandma told me she heard that Rita had been married three times before and that she was heard announcing to a friend who was a secretary at my father’s office that she was going to get a doctor now. That was her next goal.  

But soon, Matt’s outbursts became a pattern. 

Once, he had become so rebellious towards my mother that she threatened to run away. 

I was lying on a couch in our family room in my sweatpants in front of our TV. It was December. Along with the indoor grill in our kitchen, the couches there had been a popular destination. When I was young, my older sister, Janine, Matt, and I, and my younger sister Regina (when she was old enough since she was six years younger than me), would fight for one of them.  “I call that couch,” one of us would say, pointing. Then, whoever got to one first, laid claim.  

On this one day, sprawled out on the couch, relaxing, I watched Lost in Space, my favorite show. Janine and Matt must have been upstairs. It was eight in the evening. Regina wasn’t at home. She took dance class almost every night of the week and was probably going to be home shortly. 

A commercial break had come on TV for Fruit Loops with the bird, Toucan Sam. As he smelled the Fruit Loops from far away and flew towards it hastily because it smelled so good, suddenly, I heard the loud roar of Matt that I had become familiar with by now as he defied my mother. I found out later that he attempted to go to the house of Peter Fischer, a bad drug user, but Matt left anyway despite my mother’s desire to keep him at home.  

I heard my mother’s car keys jingling. I looked up. There she was rushing to our front door, acting like a crazy woman. She’s 78 now, and she still has crazy bouts like this if my daughter, niece, or nephew are visiting with her and one of them wipes their noses on a piece of furniture, or spills something on the rug. She still lives in the house where I grew up. “Damn it,” she’ll explode, shaking. “How dare they come and mess up my house,” she’ll say, knowing she loves her grandchildren dearly, but she can’t cope with disorganization. This is residual I think now, from the mayhem in our home then.   

Acting like a crazy woman as she rushed to our front door, she yelped, “What’s my name” in a baby’s voice. “I’m Jean de Palma,” she answered back. “That’s who I am. Where do I live?” Then she broke into fits of laughter. “I’m leaving and I’m never coming back.” Again, instinctively, I got up from the couch and ran out the door toward her as she rushed down the front steps to our house and to her car. Janine was upstairs in her bedroom. She must have heard the commotion. She followed me outside. As my mother got into her car and turned on the engine, I sat in the passenger’s seat. Janine scurried into the back. My mother began swerving down Avon Road as she drove in starts and stops, accelerating on the gas pedal each time she swerved. 

“Mom. Stop. Now,” I yelled. I must have known how to drive from the bumper cars at Playland Amusement Park where I visited as a child in the summers. I surprised even myself when I was able to drive the car and get my mother to calm down. 

Even Janine, the sister who kept secrets, marveled at me. “Wow, Corinne, you’re amazing,” she said – a testament to her good heart. 

My mother had many implosions around that time. I hate to think what might have happened if I hadn’t restrained her or tried to defend her against Matt – what might have happened had I not kept her from driving recklessly down Avon Road. But either way, we never talked about that day again. She didn’t remember what happened. That wasn’t the story I came to realize she had heard: “Matt doesn’t mean any harm. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Just ignore him,” she responded and after each of his outbursts from then on. This would become a common refrain, even after I had been forced to call the cops multiple times, after he started turning his attention toward me in struggling to defend my mother. “You’re too sensitive,” she would tell me. “Just ignore him. He doesn’t mean any harm.” I had always been the sensitive one in the family, but in my eyes, Matt was wrong. 

Matt began belittling me in front of my friends if he passed me in the hall. “You idiot,” he would say in a low voice. I played it down to avoid the humiliation I felt. “Oh, he’s nuts,” I remarked to my friends, then I suddenly pretended to get some books from my locker as an attempt to get away. What was I to think? My big brother calling me an idiot? How was I to know on some level if Matt’s savage outbursts weren’t going to sway my friends’ opinions of me. 

Sometimes, it was worse if Matt didn’t say anything and just walked by with a cynical look, leaving me to guess whether he was going to explode right then and there. Thankfully, he never got the chance to do this in front of my boyfriend, Joey, my first love. Matt never saw us together at school, and it was at this point when he started to turn on me rather than my mother that I had stopped inviting Joey to my house to hang out with me. For the most part, I didn’t tell Joey about Matt. I didn’t know if he too was going to believe what Matt had said about me.    

At the time Matt had put me in a headlock, I felt certain I was going to die. It was March of that same year when Matt had pushed my mother up against the wood-paneled wall in our family room. I came home directly after school to study for a science test. My mother was sitting on a couch in our family room as she graded homework assignments for her students.  I was in the kitchen eating a can of green beans I pulled out from one of the cabinets and had mixed them with ketchup for a snack. 

“What time did you get home?” he asked, as he abruptly walked into the room. 

“I don’t know.” 

“Was it five?” 

“I don’t know.” 

Was it my pitch, my glance, the look of fear under my breath that had given him license to attack? 

“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” he demanded. “It’s rude not to look at someone directly in their eyes when they’re speaking. Haven’t you learned this by now?”

I kept eating. Carefully. As I lifted the beans onto my fork to put them in my mouth, the juices from the can when I poured the beans into a bowl had left a splat of water on my chin. I didn’t bother to wipe it as Matt stood there glaring – I was so frightened to move. Suddenly, he lunged towards me and put his arm against my throat while he held me in a headlock to keep me from getting away. He tightened his grip. I began to choke. 

“Mom,” I gasped. “Matt is going to kill me.”  

She looked up. “He’s not going to kill you,” she replied. “He’s not capable of that.” 

I learned that it’s not the actual pain of physical harm that’s so bad in of itself – it’s not knowing how far someone is going to go.  After all, when Matt was in the red zone, like a pit bull in a full-blown attack, he had no control. I guess what I was saying to my mother is that I was in trouble, and I needed help. And of course, accidents happen. I heard about a woman once who, at a stop sign, hit her temple on the stick shift of her car and died instantly. She was one of Joey’s friend’s mothers. Why was it outlandish to consider that he could accidentally kill me even if he didn’t intend for me to die?

Thankfully, I managed to escape from his grasp and run out the front door to get away. This helped until the next time he approached me, at which time I hid in a closet of our house if he were home until my mother’s boyfriend Joel would come over. When Joel was there, Matt was less likely to attack me. Relying on Joel, of course, was only a stopgap solution to keeping safe.  

My mother, a professional seamstress, was born in the Bronx. As one of her colorful stories, my mother had always told us when were kids that as part of her upbringing, my grandfather was a train engineer for the New York Central. As I got older, every time she had mentioned this, I would ask, “What type of engineer? You mean civil?” 

She would nod. “An engineer. That’s what they called them in those days. Grandpa wasn’t educated. He fixed trains. A train engineer. That’s all I know.”

Years later, after starting my career, I would ask, “And by New York Central, do you mean Metro North?” By then, this was the only train I knew of that I took from Westchester County, which borders the Bronx, to work in New York City. Recently, I looked it up. The New York Central was the railroad company since 1832 that owned the commuter lines in the New York Metropolitan area up until Grandpa retired from work. After that, the company was acquired by Penn Central, then Conrail when Penn Central went bankrupt. When MTA (New York Transit Authority) took over Conrail’s commuter operations in the northern portion of the New York metropolitan area, the line I took was dubbed Metro North. 

I think clarifying these small details had come to matter to get to truth in my life. 

Nana had a hard life. As an immigrant, she came to America with her father and four sisters after her mother died following birth to her. (I wonder what kind of guilt Nana had felt from this – her mother dying after she gave birth?) She was the youngest child of five girls. Her father came to this country to start a new life. Yet they were so poor, Nana had often talked about how she had to wait in line around Christmas in Mount Vernon in Westchester County, where they’d settled, to get presents from the town. 

Because of this, Nana, as the breadwinner in the family, vowed to provide her children with the life that she didn’t have growing up. As a professional seamstress, she made a new outfit for my mother every weekend. She gave her dance lessons for fifteen years. Making it mandatory for my mother to become proficient in two instruments had fit into Nana’s dream to give my mother the culture her father couldn’t afford to give to her. Yet, as adoring as Nana was of my mother, my mother had always told me that Nana was so strict, she had never been allowed to speak. She was instructed to address Nana as Mother Dear, and if she didn’t, Nana would pout for days as if my mother didn’t love her by not addressing her in that way. 

I often wondered if not being allowed to speak up is what led to my mother’s tendency to not call Matt out on his wrongdoings, as his violent outbursts besieged our home. Ignoring was all she knew in terms of how to cope with adversity in her life. “I know. I’m pathetic,” she always said. “I never learned how to fight back,” but why didn’t she try?  

“Mom, Matt has got to see a therapist,” I’d insist each time he went into a rage.   

She said nothing in response.  

Matt had taken on many faces to Mom (as well as King – not uncommon in Italian families). He was also a genius. This became evident in his twenties when he trekked out to Long Island to work on a missile at Grumman Aerospace.  

He was recruited by the company following his graduation from college. The job was so important he had to go through clearance with the FBI. I soon learned about my selection as one of the people interviewed. I discovered this when one morning a man who called himself Thor introduced himself to me while I was boarding the Metro North on my way into work. By then I landed my first career job in book publishing at Charles Scribner’s Sons on Fifth Avenue. Thor invited me out to lunch and asked me about my siblings. When it came to Matt, he stayed on him for a while. “Are you close? What was he like?” Thor asked. Later that afternoon I walked into Human Resources to pick up a form in which I accidentally omitted information when I was hired and had been asked to complete. Thor was walking out the office of the woman who’d hired me. I’m still not sure what he wanted to know about me – maybe verify that I was indeed Matt’s brother, and he had the right person by cross referencing my home address. I don’t know how he knew who I was when he met me at the train station, and that I was even going to the train. Maybe he followed me from my house. None of this had made sense. 

Thor had told me he’d like to call me again. We exchanged telephone numbers. He told me he lived in the new condos that had just been built in town where the old Hotel Gramatan was torn down. Two weeks went by and I didn’t hear from him. When I called the number Thor gave me, there was no answer. I never saw Thor again. Not long after this, Matt found out that our neighbors had been approached by the FBI. That’s when we figured out that Thor must have been with the FBI.  

Matt was cleared and got the job. This whole experience of Matt getting a job working on a covert project on a missile was exciting. FBI? Secret. There was a real mystique attached to it, like we had just been drawn into full-blown espionage. This experience had diverted attention away from Matt’s bad behavior in my mother’s eyes as she touted the fact that he was a genius, she claimed – how else could he have gotten the job?

In his early thirties, Matt moved into the basement apartment in our house to work on a product he invented. By then, I had my own apartment and was gone. Matt invented a sun patch, technically a sun dosimeter, which monitors the sun’s rays to determine a person’s exposure. This one was designed to wear on the arm while in the sun. He was quite successful initially. Sometimes when I visited his house, I would see him in a HAZMAT suit, goggles and all, as it protected him from exposure to toxic chemicals with which he was experimenting for his invention in the backyard. This was amusing as I spotted him in his white gear conducting experiments, sometimes in puddles of water if it had rained, and tinkering around — whatever reason that was for. He traversed back and forth into the basement at the same time where he chanted and stomped on the ground when he was working, to what he claimed help clear his head. That was fine. It was even somewhat entertaining when he did this. To my mother, now Matt was an Eccentric when she saw him outside in his protective gear. “This goes along with being a genius. All geniuses act a little bizarre,” she said.  

In my late thirties, Matt moved out of the house at age 40 and had an apartment funded by one of his investors for his sun product. The apartment was set in a drug-filled, crime-ridden area of the Bronx. He got held up with a knife three times. When that happened, he took to the streets and became homeless for long periods of time. 

He rode the subways in the day during his homeless bouts, and then he’d find a small piece of land in Central Park and camp out. When he did this, he would lock up his cell phone in a safe to keep it from getting stolen if he were asleep, and my mother wouldn’t hear from him for days. While visiting my mother during these times, I often found her crying.  “Is he okay?” she pleaded. I felt badly for her. I sympathized with him. But I always knew Matt’s differences between right and wrong.   

Recently, I stopped by the house. Mom was watching one of her favorite shows on TV, Little People, Big World. Matt called just after I arrived. While they talked,  I grabbed some lunch from the refrigerator. She turned to me when she got off the phone and looked puzzled. “Do you think Matt is bipolar?” she asked. She grimaced painfully as if she held onto this theory to deal with his outbursts as a youth – that Matt had suffered from a clear-cut mental disorder – and now out of the house, had gone through homeless bouts. It was clear he couldn’t function on his own – at long last, she was going to get to the bottom of this, for once and for all.   

Baffled, I sighed, yet was slightly amused. “Bipolar? Manic Depressive? OCD? What difference does it make?” I replied. By now, we’d been through a lifetime of pain. 

I admit, Matt had a hard life. He did the fighting for us. By standing up to Rita on behalf of my mother that day at our house, Rita had proceeded to take any chance she could get to antagonize him. I can’t imagine any boy not growing up unscathed. But still, did my mother think that attaching a label to his violent outbursts made them okay? 

There was always that fine line with Matt – erratic versus a person with a mental illness; narcissist or amateur. Matt had been like a pied piper. Despite his abuse, he had a charismatic personality. He seemed to attract women easily – always women who were smart, the intellectual type, and beautiful too. He always knew how to laugh at himself and had a doting nature – the way he praised people, sometimes even putting them on a pedestal at the expense of himself – that drew women to him. He grew up in the liberal ‘60s and ‘70s when rebelling was the norm and anything goes. I wondered myself where he had fit in exactly. But I always knew that his behavior was wrong. 

That’s the thing with labels. In today’s society, labels for everything, even a medical diagnosis for a child rebelling against a parent – ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) – makes it easy to avoid dealing with what you might already know. 

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Corinne Patrice de Palma teaches writing at SUNY Purchase College and holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College in New York state. She is published in Entropy, Mom Egg Review, the Washington Post and numerous USA Today media outlets. Ms. de Palma recently completed her memoir titled In Full Bloom.