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.
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