Pandemonium

She gazed at the floor. “You were in the hospital for almost three weeks. All they knew how to do was sedate you and keep you tied up. We took you out of there, but even at home you had to be watched all the time, even at night, because you’d get up and tear around the house. You started a fire in the living room one night, to roast marshmallows. You were wild. And so strong.

“But you weren’t mean—you didn’t try to hurt anyone, not on purpose. You were just careless. You didn’t know your own strength. Lew was seven, and much bigger than you, but even then, well, eventually your father . . . your father and I decided that you had to be kept in your room. Your father boarded up the windows to keep you from escaping, and we put a bolt on the outside of the door. A lot of that time, because of the tantrums, you had to be strapped down. We fed you in bed, though all you wanted to eat was peanut butter sandwiches and ice cream.”

“I scream, you scream,” I said, half singing it. Mom looked up at me sharply, and then away. “You’d chant that at the top of your voice.”

“Lovely.”

She sighed. “You weren’t easy to live with.”

“So what changed? When did I get better?”

“It didn’t happen in one day—it didn’t happen in one month. The thing you liked, the thing we finally figured out, was stories—you’d lie still for stories. I read from picture books and the jokes from the paper, Lew would read you comic books. I told you stories from my childhood, talked about all the things you’d do when you grew up . . . oh, anything I could think of. We went through every book in the house, then went to the library every other day for a bag more. This was after my surgery, and it was a lot of strain, but some days I think I did nothing but read to you and take Tylenol.”

“Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel,” I said.

“Oh Lord yes. We must have read Mike Mulligan five hundred times.”

I loved that book. “Okay, so then . . .”

“Then you calmed down. Gradually, we let you play more in the room, and you behaved yourself when you came out. You just got better and better.”

I shook my head. “But how did you—when did you know I was me? What happened to let you know that the demon was gone?”

She smiled, shrugged. “I just knew. There was one thing, though. For the longest time you hadn’t called us by our names. Lew was ‘that big boy.’ Your dad was ‘mister,’ and I was ‘that tall lady.’ And then one day I was feeding you lunch and you called me ‘Mom.’ ” She shrugged. “That was enough for me. I knew then I had my little boy back.”

Inside the shower I let the hot water beat on my skull and tried to drown myself in noise: the thrum and hiss of the shower; the indistinct male rumbling of the voice on the clock radio on the bathroom counter; the intermittent faint trill that could have been a telephone in the next room. It didn’t help. Through all this, wired directly to my nervous system, was the rattling pressure of the thing in my head. I twisted off the shower and slid open the glass door. The phone was ringing. It stopped a moment later.

Had to be Bertram. He’d left two more messages on Mom’s machine while we were out last night, and I hadn’t called him back. Why did he think it was okay to call me? We’d gotten to know each other in the hospital, as much as you could get to know someone nutty as a fruitcake. We’d had hours to fill with talk as we made circuits of the wing. But that was the extent of the relationship. We were hospital friends.

I opened the cabinet door under the sink and took a large, fluffy towel from the stack of large, fluffy towels, none of them older than a year. Mom had joined a towel club—a bunch of ladies who agreed to buy each other towels on their birthdays. For some reason Mom found this easier than just going out and buying herself ten new ones. I dried off and started opening drawers, looking for a comb.

“Del, it’s Dr. Aaron.”

“Really?” I unlocked the door, opened it a crack. A lick of cool air