I wrote this piece of fiction 5 years ago

Terra Maria Dunn

Novel Excerpt

Cracked: A Novel

I didn’t realize that her anxiety was irrational until she pleaded with me not to leave the

house. “I just want to go walk around outside for a little while,” I said. The temperate, sunny

weather wasn’t going to last for more than a few days before the weeks and months of endless

rain poured upon us and I wanted to enjoy it while it lasted. “No!” my mother yelled. “You can’t

go outside. I forbid you to.” She stood in front of the door, blocking my escape. She used to warn

me about the dangers of the outdoors; but now, she wasn’t going to allow me to venture beyond

the confines of our house. I felt like a prisoner. My captivity didn’t last long, however. Once my

father got home and I apprised him of the situation, he told her that we had had enough and that

she was going to go to therapy. “You can’t do this to me! You don’t understand!” she cried.

“What about us? What about our daughter? You won’t even let her leave the house to go across

the goddamn street. That’s crazy and I’m not going to take it anymore,” my father shouted back.

“You don’t care!” she sobbed.

My mother was always prone to anxiety, worrying over things she couldn’t control and

feeling helpless and overwhelmed with the things she could. The general unpredictability of life

kept her on edge and there was nothing my father or I could do to calm her down. Earthquakes.

Fires. Floods. In her mind, there was a good chance that, should disaster strike, she would die.

Trapped under debris, the fallout from a record-breaking earthquake, her weak cries for help

would go unanswered and she’d be left to perish suffocating to death under the weight of some

object keeping her pinned to the ground. My mother really believed that it was a possibility, that

she would be severely injured and most likely killed, should an earthquake rock our otherwise

solid turf. She knew that the odds were she’d be okay, but as long as there was even the remotest

possibility of some freak accident, she was in perpetual panic mode. My mother made sure that

everything in our house was nailed down or secured should an earthquake occur. My father put

up with it and didn’t complain when she earthquake-proofed our house. It was when she took the

books out of the bookcase that he put his foot down. To her, the unsecured books were a

potential hazard, should the shelf tip over and spill forth volumes of heavy tomes on our heads.

He once retrieved the boxes of books from downstairs and placed them, in alphabetical order, on

the shelves. “Cynthia, this is ridiculous. You’ve gone too far with this project of yours. For god

sakes, you super glued the television remote to the coffee table! And the books! I’d like to be

able to pick a book off of the shelf and read it,” my father said. My mother broke down and cried.

“Stanley, I’m just trying to protect us all from some terrible disaster! I mean, this house is a

deathtrap! There’s danger everywhere and I just want to lessen the chances that we’ll be victims

of--” she was too upset to continue speaking. I had never seen my mother so distraught. She had

always been a very cautious person, warning me about the hazards and dangers of the world, but

lately she had taken it to extremes: she hadn’t left the house for over a week. She stopped letting

me go outside. The only times she’d venture out was to retrieve the paper off of the porch or sign

for a package. For the most part, we put up with her extreme anxiety, though I found it bizarre

and my father was trying his hardest to conceal the anger and frustration he felt toward her crazy

antics. There is only so far one can be pushed. And my father and I, well, we’d been pushed

nearly out of our own house by her, though she tried her hardest to keep us in. Enough was

enough.

I understood why my mother felt so worried; after all, it was possible that we could be the

victims of some crazed sniper if we ventured from our safe little compound she had fortified

against every potential disaster her anxiety addled brain could conjure. Though it was unlikely,

an asteroid or a loose bolt on a plane could fall on our heads and kill us; strange things have

happened to people. Lightening could strike, the resultant electrical imbalance triggering a fatal

cardiac arrest. A fall, a slip on some unseen oil slick or black ice on the pavement could very

well break part of the spinal cord and result in total and complete paralysis. That minute, one in a

million possibility made her feel that her cautiousness and actions were not extreme. But to

everyone else, it was. My father could no longer turn a blind eye to it, and when he found his

shoes were glued to the floor, he said to her, “I’ve had enough--you’re going to therapy, whether

you like it or not!”

My father was going to have her involuntarily committed to a psych ward. He told this to

me and I promised I wouldn’t tell mother and I never did. “How long is she going to be away

for?” I asked him. I had no idea what a mental hospital was, being only eleven years old at the

time. “Well that’s hard to say, Livy. A few weeks, maybe a month or--” he said. “A month? I

want to see her, I can’t go a month without seeing her!” I cried. At my age, a month seemed like

forever. So much could happen in four weeks. “I’ll arrange some visits, okay? Don’t cry, Livy.

Everything is going to be okay. Your grandmother is going to take good care of you,” he said. I

heard the word grandmother and instantly forgot about my own mother. “Honey, I have a

business trip. Someone needs to take care of you and your grandma has graciously agreed to take

you in,” my father said. “You’ll have a lot of fun at her house. Maybe she’ll take you to the

beach, Liv. You love the beach and grandma’s house is only a few blocks away. Seashells,

swimming--doesn’t that sound like fun?”

No. It didn’t. For the sake of my father, I didn’t protest but resigned myself to the fact that

I’d be living with her and her hateful little pooch for a month. I don’t know what was worse:

grandmother’s biting remarks or literally receiving bites from her obnoxious miniature mutt. All I

could do was hope that my mother’s severe panic disorder would respond to treatment and she’d

be sent home before the week was up. I made one desperate attempt to advocate for my mother,

to get my father to see that maybe her concerns weren’t crazy. She may have carried her fears too

far, but she did have a point: danger lurked everywhere. You could get halfway across the street

and get run over by a car going eighty miles an hour, reduced to a splat on the pavement, a

Rorschach-esque design of blood and mashed internal organs identifiable only through dental

records. “A tiny object--even something the size and weight of a penny pitched from that high up

could really hurt you if it lands on your head. I’m not trying to scare you, kiddo--just don’t walk

under bridges, okay?” I promised her I’d stay away from bridges. I also assured her that I’d watch

out for bugs crawling around outside because all it took was one bite from a deadly spider to

have you seizing with convulsions. Everyday it seemed she had some new restriction: I couldn’t

do this, couldn’t do that. I began to live a very sheltered life. I began to fear everything myself.

Even the house couldn’t keep us safe from disaster; we could be lulled to sleep by the odorless

fumes of carbon monoxide filling our lungs as we dreamed sweet dreams that we’d never wake

from. The roof, protecting us like a skull protects the brain, could very well fall on us and we’d

be trapped under the heavy weight of the very structure that was meant to shelter our vulnerable

selves.

“Please, dad. Don’t send her away. What if she catches some fatal disease in the hospital

and dies?” I was truly concerned: parasites and pathogens were a fact of life. And it was also a

fact that certain strains and microbes could potentially kill you. “You know, that is why I’m

sending her away--you’re starting to fear everything and worry about things that won’t happen,

and it’s not healthy for either of you to live life like that.” But, I asked, didn’t he remember that

story on the news about that boy who went swimming in the lake and a deadly microbe traveled

through his nose and up to his brain and killed him? “Things like that do happen, Liv. But it’s a

one in a, I don’t know, ten million chance. We have better odds of winning the lottery than we do

of picking up some fatal germs in a pool or the hospital or wherever,” he said.

My father told my mother that they were going to drop me off at grandmother’s house for

the weekend; he said he was taking her on a surprise getaway to a resort. There, they could relax,

calm down, and de-stress, is what he told her. A salubrious sabbatical. A much deserved jaunt to

a semi-remote resort: not far enough away to be a true vacation, but sufficiently removed from

the domestic domain to be considered a recreational respite.

I didn’t agree with him lying to her, but if he told her the truth, that he was going to have

her committed, she’d runoff and probably file divorce papers that day. Getting her out of the

house was a big ordeal itself; she took a few tranquilizers when she had to leave her safe haven,

which made it somewhat more bearable--at least for us. “Hon, I’m going to miss you too. But I’m

only going to be gone for the weekend. You’re acting like you’re never going to see me again!” I

was tempted to tell her the truth, that she wasn’t going to some fancy resort to unwind, but rather

was going to one of the most undesirable places besides a mortuary or prison. “I’ll bring you

home a souvenir, okay?” but her attempts to placate me, with promises of baubles and trinkets

emblazoned with the name of some exotic remote destination, did not work. “Stan, why don’t we

just bring her with us?” she asked. “Why not stay home, then? The whole purpose of this

vacation is to help you--” he said “I mean, to be alone. For once. Without, you know, a kid.” My

father was able to convince her that they’d have a great time and that I would, too. We were each

getting our own mini vacations, he said. Though only my father and I knew that none of us would

have fond memories of our so-called “vacations.”

My grandfather had died over a year ago. He keeled over from a massive brain

hemorrhage, most likely the result of stumbling and hitting his head on the banister the day

before he unexpectedly collapsed on the kitchen floor mid-conversation, a cup of coffee in one

hand. My grandmother blamed him for dying; as I overheard my grandmother say to my mother,

if he wasn’t so stubborn and paranoid of the medical profession, he might have lived (albeit with

some degree of cognitive impairment) if he would have sought emergency care right away. He

thought that the severe headache and memory loss post-fall would go away, though obviously it

didn’t. My grandmother was on the verge of calling an ambulance to take him when he slurred

his words and seemed totally disoriented. He died instantly; the paramedics could not revive him.

If by some miracle they did get the ticker tocking again, it was more than likely he’d be hooked

up to respirators and feeding tubes and machines, brain-dead but kept alive on life support.

Though it wasn’t explicitly stated, implicitly it was known that it was best for all involved that

the grim reaper snatched his soul that fateful day, sparing us from the awkwardness of visiting an

uncommunicative, unresponsive comatose person for months or years.

Terra Maria Dunn

Novel Excerpt / Rough-draft

July 09

My grandmother kept a large garden full of a variety of flowers that I was not allowed to

pluck or smell or even look at. If she caught me leaning over to admire a pale pink rose she’d swat

me with the back of her bony, spider-veined arthritic hand. My grandmother did not cultivate the

roses and carnations and the dozens of other varieties of flowers for aesthetic purposes; rather, it

was her livelihood. She had a floral business and supplied bunches of arrangements for weddings

and parties. It was how she made money after her husband had the audacity to keel over from a

massive brain hemorrhage after he bumped his head on the stair banister after a drunken stumble.

If he wasn’t an alcoholic and clumsy to boot, he wouldn’t have taken that fateful fall that caused

his brain to bleed and swell within his skull. And if he wasn’t so stubborn and paranoid of the

medical profession, he might have lived (albeit with some degree of cognitive impairment) if he

sought emergency attention. At least, that’s what I heard when my mother and grandmother were

talking amongst themselves, and I seemingly oblivious in the corner, pretending to mind my own

business when in reality I had my ears attuned to every word they were speaking.

Often, my mother would drop me off at my grandmother’s house for a day or two every

week; the ostensible reason being that she had errands to run and having to tote around a whiny,

bored as fuck ten or eleven year old made the tasks she had to accomplish difficult, if not

impossible. But the real reason she dumped me off at grandma’s floral funhouse was so she could

attend the couples counseling with my father. It was her idea. She was trying to keep a marriage

that was doomed to fail from actually falling apart. Their marital union was hanging by a thin

thread that was bound to snap under the forces pulling it this way and that; my mother, trying to

turn him into the perfect husband and father, and my father meanwhile fighting to break free of her

suffocating hold on him.

“Are you and dad going to get divorced?” I asked one day while we were in the car.

“Divorce! What are you talking about? Who put that silly idea into your little head?” she asked.

She nearly drove past the Stop sign, she was so flustered. “Well, you go to counseling and--” I said,

not able to finish what I was saying because she interrupted. “For the record, your father and I are

not seeing a shrink. And even if we were, you’re a child and it’s none of your business,” she said.

I never brought it up again. After she found out I was listening in on her conversations, she was

more careful to whisper so I couldn’t hear, occasionally glancing my way to acknowledge my

presence and subsequently making a point to keep the volume down. That was the end of my

amateur espionage career. No more family gossip for the inevitable memoirs I was bound to write

when I became an adult and escaped the domestic dysfunction that characterized my formative

years and left an indelible impression that I’d later try to efface with psychotherapy and courses of

antidepressants. Now I’d have to rely solely on facial expressions without words to augment my

astute observations. I’d become an expert physiognomist, reading lines of peoples faces,

compartmentalizing every expression, every slight eyelid movement and barely perceptible twitch

of the nose, the subtle details that most people miss. While it might appear that being adept at

reading a multitude of facial expressions would be conducive for socializing, it actually proved to

be a hindrance. Every smile was a threat. The hand extended to lift me when I fell was more intent

on keeping me on the ground; I could see the disconnect, between action and intent, in the eyes of

the so-called good Samaritan. Nobody could fool me. I became well-versed in the seldom

practiced art of interpreting gesticulations, for it was actions themselves, and not necessarily

words, that spoke most intelligibly to me. I began to fear the bipedal beings, the short and tall

variety, an idiosyncratic personality trait that later on in adulthood evolved into a full-blown

phobia that would continue to mutate and render me a recluse, immured in my own home, too

afraid to venture from my insular domain.

“What are you doing just sitting there? Isn’t there some television program you want to

watch?” my grandmother asked. I was sitting on a rustic-looking metal chair that looked out of

place and would have been better suited for some Appalachian, backwater trailer park. Half of the

white paint was missing, a victim of inclement weather and a bored girl with sharp fingernails.

“Stop picking the paint off of my chair! That belonged to my mother, you know. It has sentimental

value to me,” she said, her macular degenerated eyes fixed on me, caught red-handed with flakes

of lead-paint, like a handful of confetti, in the upturned palm of my hand. She may have been

losing her sense of vision but what she had left sufficed to catch me doing things I wasn’t supposed

to.

Needless to say, trips to my grandmother’s house weren’t very pleasant. I told my mother

about the deplorable way she treated me, but she’d guilt trip me into those visits by implying that

grandma’s time on earth was running out so I should be a good girl and foster some good memories

of her before she succumbed to some disease and died. It was only a matter of time before her new

residence would be six-feet below, a marble plaque demarcating her permanent resting place

among a rolling green field of other victims of mortality. I tried to form happy memories, trailing

behind her when she pruned the shrubs and extirpated the moribund marigolds and planted new

bulbs and seeds to replace those that had withered away and would never bloom again. I asked

questions in the hopes that she would be flattered to show off her expertise of all things flowers.

“What’s this called?” I asked, pointing up toward the large, sun-like flower that towered

above me. “That is a sunflower,” she answered. Curious for more facts to add to an already

overcrowded repository of knowledge within my cerebral hemispheres, I pressed for details: I

needed to attach an exact name to the object that would be catalogued somewhere in my brain.

“It’s a sunflower!” she snapped, annoyed with my incessant questions. I wanted to know the

classification, all the way from the specific species to the general kingdom. I wasn’t satisfied with

the big picture; I needed the accompanying details. “What about these? What are these called?”

The flowers that had caught my eye were pink and heart shaped hanging pendant from its

branches. Closed, the tiny flowers resembled hearts with a white and pink teardrop-shaped petal

that extended below the heart, hence the namesake. When they bloomed, the heart seared up the

middle to form two symmetrical halves to reveal the pure white petal that had been shielded by the

delicate exterior. “Bleeding hearts,” she said. “I planted those after Martha died.” Martha was my

grandmother’s sister. They were Irish twins, born fewer than twelve months apart. They shared a

special kind of bond that two siblings, so close in age, inevitably developed. Martha was the oldest

and shortly after she let out her eardrum-bursting cry, announcing her debut in the world, another

one-celled organism took up residence in a still warm womb. Nine months later, Ursula (for that

was my grandmother’s name) was expelled from the warn-in uterus that had housed six other

siblings before her. Mother Nature, well aware that there were not enough resources to support

such proliferation, put an end to my great-grandmother’s child-bearing after Ursula was born;

hence, there were no more siblings to split the one loaf of bread with, no more unhappy tots

inheriting their elder siblings clothes that, by the time they reached the youngest, were no more

than glorified rags.

“How did she die?” I asked out of curiosity, with a serious demeanor that I hoped she

interpreted as concern for her loss. But grandmother didn’t answer me; she was caught up in her

reveries, staring up at the sky as if she were searching for a celestial sign that her sister was

watching over her. “Grandma, how did she--” I prodded. “Huh?” she seemed confused, as if she

had gone on some out-of-body trip and was now jolted by the realization that she was standing

firmly on a pile of dirt, holding an old-fashioned watering can that was tipping over, rudely

showering a plot of fire-red chrysanthemums, neighbors of the bleeding hearts, that bowed their

heads under the weight of the downpour. Given her age, her reflexes weren’t up to par so it took

her a few seconds to react, to realize what she was doing. “Look what you made me do! I’m tired of

your questions. Get out of the way. Move!” I didn’t take one step but stood where I was and

watched her go about her business, tending to some orchids that would solemnly adorn a casket or

be used as décor for a wedding.

Bleeding hearts. Planted in remembrance of a deceased sister. No one told me why or how

my aunt Martha died, nor why those particular flowers were chosen to be a living shrine to her. The

poet in me searched for metaphors behind the bleeding heart, which must have meant something.

Perhaps she died of a heart-related ailment, thus the choice of flowers. Or perhaps it was less literal

and more metaphorical, the sundered parts symbolizing the heartache when someone you love

dies. I picked a few bleeding hearts and peeled away the halves, letting them fall onto my sandaled

feet. The remains I crushed, my fist clenched to conceal the handful of heart parts. “Olivia? What

are you doing?” my grandmother asked. My parents called me Livy or Livia. To the few friends I

had, I was Olive. My grandmother insisted on calling me by my christened name. To me, it just

further demonstrated how distant we were, with her refusal to call me by the name I was familiar

with. Olivia existed only on paper in legal documents and was said by those in authoritative

positions and even then, they usually respected my request to be referred to by my preferred

appellation. For some reason, my grandmother insisted on adhering to formality, perhaps it

reinforced her notion that she was superior to me because I was a child. But I wasn’t like my

puerile peers who behaved like little monkeys, crawling across the jungle gyms and swinging on

the bars that were built for their short-term, attention-deficit amusement. Occasional temper

tantrum aside, I was, for the most part, advanced not only in intellect but in other matters as well. I

had the world figured out before I mastered cursive, that obsolete style of writing used by people

my grandmother’s age. It’s no wonder then that I was depressed and cynical before I reached the

cusp of adolescence.

“Do you hear me?” my grandmother called from a distance, supplementing her verbal

admonishments with a semaphoric wave of her hands, motioning me to come over to her. I opened

my hand; it was covered in blood. Crimson rivulets of wine-colored blood coursed down my arm.

The sight of blood usually elicited a primal scream, an instinctual reaction that must have afforded

some evolutionary advantage for it was so universal, but I was too stunned to yell. I stood there

watching the blood trail a crisscross course down my arm, pool at my elbow crease and drip-drop

like raindrops, like tears, onto the mosaic patio tiles. “Olivia--” my grandmother said, squinting

her eyes from the blinding light of the sun, a true look of concern in her eyes. Or at least, that’s

what I thought I saw. “My flowers! My god, look at the mess you’ve made!” Her thin fingers

circled around my wrist like a manacle. I swear I saw hate in those diluted blue eyes of hers. “But

my hand is--” I glanced at my injured extremity and gasped not because the gruesomeness repulsed

me, but because the blood that had covered my hand and part of my arm only a few moments ago

had disappeared. My palm was stained pink and pieces of the flowers were all that remained. “My

hand. It’s pink.” It wasn’t the first time I hallucinated. And it wasn’t the last.