The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner

Author:Ruth Wariner [Wariner, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-250-07771-4
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Published: 2016-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

22

Later that week, Mom was washing dishes with her back to the TV when the evening news reported that the man known as the Mormon Manson—my uncle Ervil—had died of a heart attack in a Utah prison. Mom spun around, wiped her hands on a kitchen towel, and hurried into the living room. There, she watched with a pale, stunned look on her face as the reporter recounted Ervil’s infamous crime spree. Mom counted on her fingers the number of years that had elapsed since my dad died; it had been almost nine years since he’d been executed.

“I can’t believe it,” Mom mumbled, her face taking on an eerie glow as she searched the screen for further explanation. “After all the heartache that man caused … He should have suffered in prison for a lot longer than he did.” She took off her glasses, leaned forward over her swollen belly, put her head in her hands, and began to sob. Her shoulders jerked up and down as if the news had shaken loose an old and long-buried sadness.

Given her attitude toward the US government, Mom didn’t find the same peace that I did in being forced to stay in El Paso, but she tried to make the best of the situation. She took us on road trips on the weekends and during the holidays. That Christmas, we visited Grandpa and Grandma in Strathmore and took a side excursion to see Audrey at the state hospital. Eventually, doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia, a disease that had afflicted several members of the LeBaron family, including two of my father’s siblings.

That Christmas was the first time I’d seen her since the day Mom had taken her away, and although it had only been a few months, she was a changed person, and not for the better. She was fourteen and heavily medicated, her upper eyelids red and droopy, her cheeks sunken, her personality almost completely unresponsive. She had teeth marks on her pale, bruised arms, and the nurses explained that she had been in a fight with another patient. We weren’t surprised when the nurse said that Audrey had started the brawl. The doctors told us that at times they still had to feed Audrey intravenously, and that the drug cocktail they gave her was the only thing that kept her from being violent toward herself and other patients. I thought my sister looked barely alive, although she seemed to remember all of us.

The hospital allowed Audrey to come to our grandparents’ house and spend one night with us, although her presence in the outside world only highlighted how she no longer had a place in it. At my grandparents’ with Audrey, Mom’s face became etched again with its familiar helplessness. She wore that look all day long; right up until the moment she took Audrey back to the hospital.

We returned to El Paso just after New Year’s, when it was time once again for Mom to give birth. She had already decided to have the baby at the hospital in Casas.

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