After the ambulance leaves, Mom takes us back to Grandma and Grandpa’s house in San Jose. Grandpa lets us in, whispering because it’s late. “I made the bed up for you and the boys. You can stay as long as you want.”
Mom puts us down and grabs onto him, burying her head in his shoulder, “I didn’t know, Dad. I didn’t know.”
“Shhh, shhh,” he pats her on the back lightly. “You’re okay now. That’s okay. That’s my girl.” She puts us to bed but I can’t sleep because I keep picturing the men in the masks. Every noise I hear outside, every creak of the house, every time my brother turns over in his sleep—I wonder if it’s the men with the clubs, if they followed us here and we’re next. I picture Phil on the ground, the way he fell over all at once.
Why were they so mad? What did we do wrong? Is Tony right about Mom? Is she angry at Dad for divorcing her so she stole us so he can’t see us? Are they mad at us for leaving?
When I wake up in the morning, the sheets are cold and wet and I know I’ve done a bad thing. I know Mom is sad and Grandpa always tells me she’s been through so much. I don’t want to get in trouble so I wait until Tony and Mom go to the living room and take the pee-soaked sheet to the garbage in the back outside the glass door. I know there’s a fresh sheet in the closet so I put it on the fold-out bed as quietly as I can before going to the kitchen for Dutch cheese and rolls.
We know the stories of the other people who left Synanon and the bad things that happened to them. We hear Mom talking about them all the time. One man was bitten by a rattlesnake that someone left in his mailbox. He nearly died from the bite. One man came home to find his dog hanging from a tree. Tony says he heard a story that the teenagers, the Punk Squad who were given to Synanon by the courts so they could get clean off drugs, were beaten by the Synanon people. They kept trying to escape but they couldn’t get away fast enough because they were so far from any cities or towns up in the Tomales Bay compound. Chuck bought a thousand rifles. He’s training the men he calls the Imperial Marines to defend Synanon at all costs. They look like soldiers with their shaved heads and big boots and matching denim overalls. There’s a trial from Mom’s Vestigation and that’s when the tapes come out, the tapes of the Old Man saying crazy things. He wants legs broken and ears cut off and put into jars. He wants a revolution.
Phil is in a coma for a month. He has a cracked skull and broken bones and something called men-in-ji-tis in his head. We don’t visit because Mom is afraid the men from Synanon are watching.
I tell her, “I’m scared of the men, Mom.”
She says, “No you’re not. You’re happy because you’re with your mother now.” I keep trying to tell her I’m afraid and I’m having nightmares but she won’t listen. It’s like the words don’t exist once I say them.
She says, “You’re fine.” Then she says, “This has been really hard on me. You know it’s not easy to lose your husband and then also have to worry about losing your kids.”
I don’t know what to do because I feel something close up inside me, like a gasp that echoes up from a well. Like if she can’t hear my words then maybe they don’t exist and I can just hide up in the room in the clouds by myself. I tell myself again and again, You’re not scared. You’re happy now. You’re not scared. You’re happy now. So I try to pretend and I smile at her and I give her a hug because she’s been through so much and I know it’s my job.
And when we do talk about it, Mom says how difficult it was for her and I say yeah, that must have been hard because they looked so mean with those masks on.
She says, “But you weren’t even there.”
I have to remind her that I watched it from the porch, that Phil and I locked eyes, that the men asked for me and Tony, that Tony was with the kids across the street, that he was scared too.
I wonder if she’s right. If what’s real is the World of Synanon or the World According to Mom, which are different things. And they exist outside the castle in the clouds, the place where I’m safe behind the thick stone walls.
I don’t know if the fear is real or if I can just pretend to not feel it, to lock it up like in a bottle and put it on a shelf and, just like Mom, pretend it isn’t there.
She says, “Oh,” and I watch as her face fills with worry, like she’s left the stove on somewhere, like there’s something she can’t quite remember. She stares at the wall with her fist over her mouth, the way she does when she gets the look from the deep-russian.
“Right. Right. Well. This has all been very hard on me.”
I don’t have the words for the thing inside me, the blank white like ice at the bottom of my throat. I want her to tell it to me, to see it and help me name it. Do feelings exist if no one sees them? Did I imagine it? The feeling of not knowing, of wondering what is real, bounces around inside my chest. I don’t know what I’m supposed to call it. I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell people about Phil, about Synanon, about Dad, about Mom, about the fear and the sadness and the fact that I don’t know if it’s real because Mom won’t see it.
“Mom? Mom?”
“Yes, Goo.”
“Are we safe here?”
“I think so.”
“Because I’m scared.”
“No you’re not. You’re happy to be with your mother and away from that place that kept us apart.”
“But Phil almost died.”
She shakes her head. “This has been such a hard time on me. This too? On top of everything else?” She looks away and I am alone in the room again. After a minute she stares at me, “What, sweetie? What was it? But how would you know what happened? You weren’t even there.”
For months my dreams are of men in masks and broken bones, blood on the driveway and running away as fast as I can. I wake up to wet sheets and when Mom finds them, she tells me I need to stop wetting the bed like a little boy even though I never wet the bed before the bad men came. I try to replay the moment, what I could’ve done differently, how I should’ve fought them or made Mom move us or screamed to make them stop. Mom is small, fluttering around the big shoulders of the men, dodging the skinny clubs as they swing at my brother and me. There is no place that is safe from their reach, nowhere to go to get far enough away. They’re under the couch. They’re in the closet. And Dad, he is somewhere else, somewhere vague and fuzzy on his moto-cycle, riding down a highway, a blur, a glimpse of something I can’t quite see as I sit alone in that room in that house in the city where my mother went to change the world.
OREGON
“Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s lonely in the desert.”
“It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.
—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPE’RY, THE LITTLE PRINCE
CHAPTER 5
HE’S GOT THE WHOLE WORLD IN HIS HANDS
The mountains between Oregon and California are the largest things I’ve ever seen. They jut out in rocky peaks all around us as we drive north in the dirty white Chevy Vega with the wooden doors. Something about it seems like the work of giants. The valley is a giant footprint, the lake is a giant handprint, the river was made by dragging something heavy and sharp across the land. I wonder how a boulder perched on a cliff over the freeway got there. I wonder if the boulder will fall as the Vega wheezes up the steep hill, if after thousands of years of watching and waiting, a simple gust of wind might be enough to send it tumbling down the hill to crush us or block the road so no one can ever follow.