Bandit by Molly Brodak

Author:Molly Brodak [Brodak, Molly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802189615
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2016-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

How thick and bright I loved my mom when she told me this story. I almost buckled to the floor. It made me feel exposed in the connection. My loneliness bubbled up to meet hers, as if looking for kin.

The house where my mom grew up in Marshall, Michigan, was an old six-bedroom house, now run as a bed and breakfast, built on property owned by James Fenimore Cooper. She had three brothers, but kept to herself mostly, wandering the three-acre property, climbing pine trees until they bent, just swaying atop them, or talking to the cattle on the next property over. She read a lot and dreamed of being an artist. She loved being alone, like I did, and would shut herself into a dark cabinet for hours just to hum and think.

And lifelong sadness sprung from the roots in this house. She finally told her best friend that her eldest brother had been molesting her at night, in her bed, for years. The friend told her boyfriend, only fourteen years old all of them, but he called her and talked to her about it. He said, “Here’s what you say to him. You say, ‘You have to stop doing this. I will tell my parents if you don’t.’” She said she’d needed someone to give her the words. And she told him to stop, and he did. I don’t like seeing this uncle at family occasions. Quiet and unfriendly, he is unlike anyone else in the clan. I perceive his silence as strained or simmering, but I’m sure that is just my perception.

It’s unclear how much her parents knew about the abuse, or believed it if they did know. Mom could take only a year of silence and denial in that imposing house before she chose to flee.

Probably she would’ve come back on her own, maybe called her parents soon to come get her. But they’d already sent a state trooper to check the cabin to see if she was there. When she opened the door to let him in, she said he grabbed her arm, and she didn’t like it, so she snapped and threatened him with the hunting knife she had pulled from behind her back.

And she never went back to Marshall. She was a delinquent now, a runaway, brandishing a knife at a cop. Her parents struck a deal with the courts and got her into a hospital instead of juvenile detention. A good hospital, in fact, the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of Michigan Hospital. First she shuffled the halls of the adult women’s ward in a Thorazine haze, waiting for a bed to open in the adolescent unit. “Thorazine kept you compliant,” she told me. “It felt like your brain had been hit with a giant sledgehammer. Brainless, but walking around, like a zombie.”

Diagnoses came and went with trends or with new doctors. First she was given the borderline personality disorder label that other troubled teens were getting in the mid sixties, then it changed to manic depressive/bipolar, which she kept for most of her life.

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