Haunted House by Mary Buchanan

     Ian Sane CC




Haunted House

   You are arrogant today, and you take a pack of beer with you on your drive to the mental institution. It’s a bright October afternoon and the surrounding farmland rolls too greenly past you. You’ve got the notion to record your reaction like a journalist, like you’re reporting on something rather than forcibly confronting a place that’s haunted your mind’s real estate for over twenty years. Your mother once lived at the place you’re driving to. Your mother once sat beneath its rafters and watercolored torn, gray coloring book pages of cartoon squids and squirrels. Your mother once took injections of horse sedatives and laid on twin mattresses while folks rummaged through her mind, redirecting her electricity, pumped and plump under a doctor’s weary supervision. You speed a little, all the while craning your neck for views of the dormitories coming into view. They’re Georgian Red Ironspots, spaced generously apart, and you imagine what your mother’s shared room must’ve looked like on the inside. Once in highschool, when she was back home for a visit, your mother told you about waking up at midnight to the heavy breathing of a figure leaning over her. “It was my roommate,” she’d said, with drowsy terror, like a muffled bell gong in her throat. The terror couldn't fully rise. A handicapped kind of afraid that stuck with you all these years later. The kind of drugs she was on made her impartial to things, gave her a mental limp that enraged you as a teenager because what you wanted most from her was an acute sort of caring that was largely absent. In mirrors, she looked bloated and strange, all shininess, scrubbed free of the carefully made-up woman she’d been. No hi-lights in her hair, no deep berry lipstick. Dilated, cornered-animal eyes she could hardly hide beneath her pale lashes. 
   Whitfield comprises more than 100 buildings and is located outside the small city of Brandon, MS, where you hail from originally. Your family has lived in these parts since the 1800s, when it was known as the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum and later, in 1900, as The Mississippi State Insane Asylum. Lunatic is a word you’ve circled for years, most obviously because of your fascination with moons. Your mother, according to the state and the paper trail she’s left in her manic-depressive wake, is a lunatic. According to your own doctors, you could qualify as one too. At the stop sign across from the train track, you slap your right blinker and take a too-wide turn. There’s traffic today and you’re surprised at the steady stream of cars and trucks frothing around the place. In your mind, you’d seen yourself as the lone car pulling up, something dramatic, something painstakingly truistic. You’re one of many, and this changes things. 
   Grabbing your iphone from the passenger seat, you steady it on your steering wheel and snap a few shots before swiping to video. There’s guilt laced in these movements, in this urge to create a spectacle of your past, but you do it anyway. Approaching your mother’s past through faux journalism makes things palatable and posting them to social media satisfies the adolescent itch to be seen. Guilt, again, more photos and 30 second video shots of the gorgeous swath of magnolia tree lined entryway. The main building is past security, palatial, colonial, gleaming bone white against its six columns. There’s a tastefully graveled round-a-bout adjacent to a private parking lot you’re too afraid to park in so you circle twice before pulling back out onto the entryway and glimpsing the pond. You’re disappointed in yourself for this essential abandonment. To soothe yourself, you contemplate posting a video of yourself talking about it but you decide not to. This would be going too far. This would make your cowardice public, afterall. 
   That afternoon, you fall sick, and the sickness becomes something you can only describe as a waking nightmare and later, to your therapist, a fever dream. Eventually, you haul yourself to the bathtub and spend the next five hours sobbing in lukewarm water up to your chin. You drain it at some point and lay yourself out, spread eagle and shaking, spend another hour in corridors of your mind you’ve never visited before: your mother, your mother, your mother, you. You black out for long intervals of time in the bathtub and you’re able to do this because your roommate’s at work. You say things like “Mama,” no, not say, scream. The red brick dormitories. The grassy hills. The chain wire fences. The buildings you had no right or access to enter. Your mother, your mother, your mother, the summer night before eighth grade, being hauled into the minivan by your father and grandfather. A madwoman, your grandfather had called her then. Her face was wild and you’d simply stood there and watched, a little statue of yourself, so detached your limbs went numb. They’d opened the backdoor to a steady stream of cicada noise, the lights had all been blazing, the house was alive with her turbulence. She was taken away from you but had been leaving on her own for some time already. By the time she was hauled away, she’d been good and gone for weeks.    She’d left one night after staring at the moon, after she’d said, “There’s someone up there I’m talking to, go away now, I’m busy.” Or no, it wasn’t that night, but one night later when she’d said something your father could hear or done something none of the grownups could excuse away. You’d been keeping her words private like she’d asked you to. “Don’t tell Daddy,” was a common refrain that summer. You see this now in the midst of your trauma response in the bathtub. You see how wrong youth can get it, how wrong you’d been for nineteen years in blaming her.
   A crack up is what you’re entertaining in the bathtub, just like your mother, those many Julys ago. Crack up: to burst into laughter; an act of breaking up or splitting apart; a collapse under strain; to suffer an emotional breakdown under pressure; a car crash. Cracked like something crystalline. Cracked like the head of Humpty Dumpty. Cracked like a tortoise shell. Cracked like porcelain wedding china. Cracked like gold-filled kintsugi.   
     The first time your mother’s committed, she stays for six crystallized months. You never once go to visit her. You allow this to happen. You’re angry, you’re a girl in eighth grade, you insist to yourself and everyone else that you don’t need your mother. When your father says he doesn’t think it’s a good idea for you to go see her, you allow this decision, in place of your own agency. It lies dormant. It is deadly asleep. 
     Eventually, once she’s allowed visitors on a regular weekly basis, your mother begins asking her father for quarters when he comes for weekly visits. He is your grandfather and he tells you this on a ride home from school one day. Beat up truck, boiled peanuts in Tupperware, your grandfather’s profile and the silvery hairs sprouting from the dear deep pocket of his right ear. At this point, you haven’t asked about her in months. It’s during these quiet, motherless months when you develop your particular brand of silent, stubborn rage. You carry this quality into your adult years. So, maybe this worries him—your grandfather—a brilliant, reclusive, curmudgeonly person who recites word-perfect Chaucer even in his 80’s. You ask him what she does with the quarters and he tells you how she gives these rolls of quarters to some of the ladies in her ward. Most of them are Black women, most very poor, most diagnosed with the catchall term ‘addict’ or schizophrenic’. It’s 2003, it’s Mississippi, when a brain goes bad, you’re lumped into the masses. It’s the polite, southern way of saying someone’s a Fuck Up. 
     Many of the women in your mother’s ward lack the kinds of families she belongs to. Fourteen years later, you’ll ask her about it one day when she’s chilly, remote, but lucid-seeming. She’ll say: I gave those quarters so they could call people on the telephone and buy cigarettes. They promised it made things better for them. 

   During summertimes, mom leaves us behind. It’s hard to determine whether she has some choice in the matter. When she goes out walking with her disease, she enters into a state of liminality that’s air stinks of emotional erosion, with difficulties the size and caliber of a bad fairy tale. Exuberance, but of a noxious quality. This leaving, this time, just like all the others, feels intentional, although any doctor would stress otherwise. Last week in court I saw my childhood in her face. Felt it like a globe in my throat. It pursues me into the tender pink cusp of middle age, feels like something intentioned, evilly cyclical, a psychic set-up, even. If I had a map of my life, all roads would lead toward Mother, a fate I’m beginning to buck, to bray against. Thirty-three going on wayward child is an uncomfortable fit, all wrong at its seams. 

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Mary Buchanan is a writer living in Mississippi. Her work is heavily influenced by mental health and magical realism. You can find her words in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Hobart, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Razor, Psychopomp, and Maudlin House. Twitter and IG: @mrybsell

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