An Uncomplicated Life Read Online Free Page B

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    I don’t remember the rest of the day. My dad must have come home fairly soon after that, and they must have gone to the emergency room. Someone sewed my mother’s wrists. Later that night, my father woke me up.
    “You saw your mother lying there and didn’t do anything?”
    “I didn’t know what to do,” I said weakly.
    “So you went outside to play?”
    For a long time after that, my mother’s wrists were wrapped in bandages, and she would wear long sleeves to cover her arms. She looked sad, tired, disappointed, defeated.
    “I didn’t know what to do,” I repeated.
    That’s when my dad told me what to do if something like this ever happened again. He was giving a six-year-old instructions on what to do the next time his mother tried to kill herself.
    TWO YEARS LATER, WHEN I was in the fourth grade, my mother completed her task. We were living in a first-floor, garden-style apartment with a front door and a sliding glass door in the back. The day she died, both doors were locked. That day I got off the school bus, walked to the apartment and tried the front door. When I discovered it was locked, I went around to the glass door. I knocked on it, but I could tell my mother wasn’t home. I sat in a chair on the porch and did my homework.
    This was unusual, but not completely strange. Sometime before that, my mother had bought a handgun and shot a hole through the ceiling of our apartment. I didn’t know why she did that. I’ve never asked. Doctors said she was “schizophrenic.” She’d been put on medication.
    “Who would you rather live with? Me or Mommy?” my dad had once asked me during an especially unhappy night.
    “I love you both,” I said.
    Understanding something as complex as a flawed human brain is beyond most of us. It wasn’t on my radar as a kid in elementary school. It wasn’t even a concept. The times my mother checked into the “mental hospital” were explained to me as you might expect:
    “Mom is sick. These people are going to make her well.”
    Well, okay. Who’s going to make dinner?
    WHEN YOU ARE A child, all you really want is no surprises. There ought to be a comforting sameness. Cake on birthdays. Sleepovers, dinner at six and no TV until the homework is done. The calculus of a kid’s life should not be complex: Love, security and a place to go. And that place should be immovable so his world spins in a tight circle. Home is where you go that makes nowhere else matter. The monsters you see shouldn’t be the ones that scare you.
    My mother said she heard voices. She sometimes kept me home from school because she wanted the company. She was a loving mother, and we took long walks to the park, where she pushed me on the swings and laughed when I let her down quickly on the teeter-totter.
    She loved the mountains of North Carolina. We’d spend a week in Montreat, a Presbyterian retreat 20 miles east of Asheville. The Rev. Billy Graham still lives in Montreat. It’s a town of 250 people, tucked into a cove in the Black Mountains of the Blue Ridge. Calmness abides. Everyone says hello.
    My mother and dad and I hiked the local Lookout Mountain. I ran up the hill, and they would pray to the Rev. Billy that I wouldn’t take a header off the narrow trail. We hiked Grandfather Mountain, whose main attraction was a swinging bridge connecting twin peaks. When the wind blew—which it did all the time—the bridge swayed mightily, and I refused to cross it. To this day, my dad calls Grandfather Mountain “Chicken Peak” in my honor.
    We’d venture into Asheville to eat at the S&W Cafeteria, where my “vegetables” were French fries and mashed potatoes. My mother was never happier than when she was roaming the spines of those ancient hills. Their beauty was cathartic.
    After I’d been sitting on the porch for a while, my dad came home. The suicide note lay on the table in the dining nook. He read it as I sat on the porch, peering in. He put the note down. He opened the