CASEY B DOLAN

WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS

KWELA BOOKS

Kwela Books,an imprint of NB Publishers, a division of Media24 Boeke (Pty) Ltd

40 Heerengracht, Cape Town, South AfricaPO Box 6525, Roggebaai, 8012, South Africa

www.kwela.com

Copyright © 2014 Casey B Dolan

All rights reservedNo part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying and recording, or by any other information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from

the publisher

Cover design by Mr DesignTypography by Reneé Naudé

Set in Minion ProPrinted and bound by Interpak Book, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa

Product group from well-managed forests and other controlled sources.

First edition, first impression 2014

ISBN: 978-0-7957-0660-8ISBN: 978-0-7957-0661-5 (epub)ISBN: 978-0-7957-0662-2 (mobi)

For you, Mom. Believing can create miracles . . .

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AMBER

I AM TOO YOUNG to die, but I am going to. And soon. I never realised it would be a privilege to grow old. I used to

believe in something. In love. Romance . . . I am not sure when my attachment to those ideas disappeared, when the final crumb of hope was stolen . . . or given. All I know is that it is now gone. And I, though I am not, feel suddenly old. Far too old to believe in happy endings.

This confession is not just about mistakes. It is about a journey. My journey. That is about to end, prematurely.

I am forty-one years old and in less than six months I will be dead. And it will be painful. Though no more painful than the last two years I have laboured through.

My initial mistake was probably marrying my first love. He was my third lover and best friend. Wade. I loved his name when I first spoke it, the ease with which it tumbled from my lips. He was a fourth year dental student; I was second year journalism. He was preppy, all American; I was peculiar and foreign. But somehow we found ourselves spending our library study sessions side by side, comforted by the sympathetic consumption of knowledge. This soon became a sympathetic consumption of each other’s bodies and an inseparability known only to the very young or very selfish.

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Ironically, I was on a quest for truth. “An idealist’s heart with a pragmatist’s brain,” Wade would often muse in those early days. This would always leave me feeling angry and patronised, but my vehement denials only amused him further. Though only three years older, he shouldered my rantings and desires like a seasoned life player. Even when he tried to break loose and started a three-man med student band, Drills and Thrills, it was he who organised venues, dissolved arguments and discouraged excessive drinking among his peers. The band was a failure but it was no surprise when Wade Whittington-Jones graduated cum laude. It was also no surprise when he fumbled with his awkward black gown on the tumbling staircase of the university entrance to land heavily on one knee before me. Staircases have always reminded me of piano keys . . . each note ascending or descending depending on direction. Wade had met me on the way up and I was rolling down: so, la, mi . . . me. The box in his hand held his hope, and who was I to deny him.

Of course I said yes, though I was still a full year shy of completing my degree and hadn’t a clue whether I would be allowed to stay in the United States once my scholarship was up. I needed him and his steady pragmatism. Being heady and arrogant, I imagined I would juggle the demands of married life and still fervently spread truth through the world, but youth knows, time shows and I never crossed the finish line of that final year. If I had it would have been miraculous as I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant with Tyler.

At a slim five foot nine inches I’d always had my fair share of sideways glances from the opposite sex, something I had grown accustomed to, even begrudgingly expected. My flowing blonde hair helped encourage such looks, which I tried to deflect with dry

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wit and slightly oversized clothing. I would have given anything during those nine months to pull on a pair of skinny jeans and a halter top. Being dowdy and large at twenty-two wasn’t ideal.

Wade was ecstatic. His intense brown eyes crackled with anticipation, assuring me that we would find a way for me to complete my degree so that I could soon enough set off on an exciting career. “Lots of women do it, Blossoms. You will be so happy you had a family early. You can enjoy your freedom when everyone else is leaving careers behind.” He was so encouraging, so believable; my heart clung to the comfort provided by his words.

To be clear, my name is Amber. Amber Celeste Whittington-Jones. Even though he said my name was apt, given my fieriness, “Blossoms” was Wade’s name for me. He saw me as full of opinion and idealism, desperate to open and bear fruit. He said I was the ultimate possibility . . . Blossoms . . . I feigned annoyance at the nickname, but secretly cherished his view of me.

So I bore him Tyler. Something I took totally for granted. Something I assumed was ordinary: women gave birth. Mine was intense, difficult in that I required twenty-two stitches after the fact, but entirely “normal”. Tyler came with a tuft of dark curly hair and murky small eyes. I would never have believed him mine had I not witnessed his arrival. A slice of his hair was missing, courtesy of the scalpel that had been used to give him a grander entrance. I knew I would fail at mothering as my first words as a fully fledged mom fell from my lips: “Where the hell is the rest of the hair . . .? It must still be inside me . . .! Hair doesn’t dissolve!”

The doctor stared at me, perplexed, with bloody hands. “That will all be expelled . . . You have a perfect baby boy, Mrs Jones. Ten fingers, ten toes . . .”

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But all I could think about was dark curly hair stuck in my core.

So began motherhood.

MY OWN MOTHER HAD been bereft of colour. Bereft of voice. A shell. My father saw to it that any sound she could muster was extinguished. Despite this, in all his alcohol-drenched rages he never touched me. Never even looked at me. Referred to me as “her” or “that one”.

His native tongue was Afrikaans and when he spoke in English it was guttural. “Her didn’t tidy the kitchen.” The sound of flesh colliding with flesh cannot be erased from a child’s memory. “Her needs to be taught a lesson.” And so my mother created a fleshy barrier between my father’s volatile temper and my untouched skin. She didn’t even cry out; she would just wave me to my room.

We lived in a two-bedroomed face-brick house in a rough area in a place called Boksburg, east of Johannesburg, that had once belonged to my paternal grandparents. My mother had been orphaned at an early age. She had been educated to become an English teacher by her upper class foster parents but my father saw to it that she stayed home and performed her wifely duties instead. He, on the other hand, came and went when he felt like it. Sometimes he was gone for days, sometimes weeks. His job selling metal scrap didn’t bring in much, but my mother always found a way to put bread on the table. It made no difference if he was there or not, because the tension remained permanently. It was almost a relief when he swerved through the doorway shouting expletives. At least we knew where he was.

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And then one day, during my ninth year, he was gone. It took my mother months to file the missing persons report. The South African police, back then, didn’t take cases of missing husbands seriously. As the months became a year, and then more, we sighed with the relief of released prisoners – he was gone, for good. But so was my mother. In every way that counted she was a ghost. She hardly left the house. Her anxieties spread like a vine in the shadows and each day her world shrank. At the same time, with each new phobia that spun a web inside my mother’s faded psyche, I was emptied of fear. With every responsibility that became mine – shopping, arranging appointments, going to the post office, cleaning – I grew determination.

My mother had begun tutoring failing English students in the afternoons after my father’s disappearance, but as time went by and her fears worsened the burden fell on me to acquire work, which I sought out at a local supermarket where I packed grocery bags and counted inventory. I was accustomed to my mother mumbling nonsense as she swept through magazines and newspapers for coupons, specials and competitions. She had always won prizes in crosswords and wordplay competitions and with my father gone she began to enter these religiously, winning everything from hygiene products to washing machines. These jewels were sold and often kept our refrigerator stocked for weeks, even months at times. But soon her frenzy escalated. She had begun talking to herself more and more, and, instead of just specials and coupons, started collecting odd bits of paper during her tour through the columns, random words and pictures that she cut out and glued to the dining room wall, despite my protestations. I tried to fathom their meaning, to make some sense of the words and fish and buildings cut out and plastered where my grandmother’s

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photo had once hung. Eventually the clippings became a bizarre wallpaper across almost every wall in the house, my room being the only exception. I knew I needed a whole new life, in a place as far as possible away from the quicksand my life had become. And so I wrote entrance exams for UCLA under the foreign student scheme and I got the scholarship. I only had to afford the air ticket and a portion of the residency costs, which I knew I could cover with a part time job. Thousands of miles from my home town lay hope. I called social services to find appropriate care for my mother’s mental condition and with a rucksack full of guilt and a heart full of hope I walked on to a plane and started a new life. I knew I would make more of my life in the US, away from my shattered remaining parent. I would do more, be more, live more. I would never be “her”. I would make a difference and the lives of women like my mother would be altered by it. My first blossom.

TO WADE I TOLD a half-truth about my mother, explaining that she had suffered a breakdown when my father had left and that she was in a place of care. He never probed where it got too painful and acquiesced when I insisted they would never meet, even when we were deeply involved. I wanted the slate clean. South Africa was my past. Wade, the land of opportunity and freedom were my future. I never tired of the sureness in his step. He never tired of my passion. We were a fit.

Wade’s temperament was a direct result of his middle-class lift-scheme youth. I wanted to fit that space and, more, I wanted to show my Wade that I could belong in his world.

Motherhood eroded any hope that I could maintain my veneer.

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I was hopeless, clueless, helpless and sleepless. The combination left me reeling under the gaze of my infinitely patient but extremely busy, specialist-in-the-making husband. Not only did he manage to bring in an income for our young two-bedroomed-apartment family, working as a dentist in the healthcare system, but he also completed his medical degree and specialisation in maxillofacial surgery by using his scholarship and sabbaticals to train. He was as determined as I was exhausted.

Tyler exposed me as the “her”, “that one” who was always shifting under my skin. He hardly slept, he cried incessantly and I was sure that any day someone would burst in, grab him and declare me unfit in every respect. But no one did. Instead I received back rubs and encouragement from my indomitable husband. He cajoled and soothed and, in turn, I did the same for Tyler, who eventually slept and, after nine excruciating months, miraculously stopped crying.

One afternoon, when his yells no longer tore at my tympanum and he rolled around on our brown chunky rug in the middle of the room where the sun hit the corner just so and the shadow of the spruce tree near the window fluttered, a true awakening slammed into my core. In the whisper of perfection I reached a dichotomous epiphany: no one is coming. A thundercloud of despair slowly suffocating under the weight of mercurial relief. Torn and sewn in a moment.

I am a mother. This is it. I am doing it. No one is coming to take my Tyler away. No one is doing this but me.

There.And so in a strange, magical instant, I bonded with my child.My perfect, curly haired, violet-eyed, ten-fingered, ten-toed

baby boy.

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I crawled up next to Tyler on the rug that day and wept as we made shadow shapes in the light.