Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival

I skulked into the bathroom.

It always starts when you’re young, Nick said. You lie a little, cheat a little. And then all of a sudden that’s your mentality. That’s who you are.

Nick, said my mom. You used to lie your ass off when you were a kid. That’s why you got kicked out of grammar schools and high schools and military schools. So don’t act like Norman’s got the problem, Nick.

Nick slumped against the door jam like an animal backed into a corner. He was a hairline trigger away from exploding. Don’t do or say anything Mom, I thought to myself.

She swung her hip out to the opposite side.

You think you’re right because you’re drunk and stoned, she said. But you’re wrong.

The word wrong seemed to prod Nick from deep down, and whatever it unleashed crawled up his neck and his veins popped out and the thing continued into his face turning it purple-red and wound his eyes up like a cartoon character. It wasn’t funny though, and I stopped breathing.

His jaw set and his front teeth sawed together.

I’m the fucking truth, he said, grinding up the words. And you two are fucking lies.

He stared at me, red-faced, veined and perspiring.

I can’t let you grow up to be a liar. A failure. I have to stop it. There must be consequences.

He stepped past me and pulled out a jar of Ajax and a sponge from under the sink and handed them to me.

Scrub the toilet bowl, he said.

I looked at my mom standing in the kitchen with her hand still on her hip. She shook her head, but I was afraid to defy him. I dumped the Ajax into the toilet bowl.

You don’t have to, said my mom.

Your mother doesn’t care about you, Norman, he said. She wants you to be a liar and a failure. Do you understand that? She’s too lazy to stop you.

Shut up, Nick, she said. Norman’s not a liar. You are, Nick. You are!

His body tensed as if jolted by electricity.

You know I’m right, he said.

Nick looked down at me. You know I’m right, he repeated.

He may be drunk and stoned, I thought. He may be crazy. But he was right—I had lied.

I held the sponge and Ajax and my mom looked at me, half eclipsed by Nick’s stomach. She shook her head. It wasn’t clear whether she was signaling for me not to scrub the toilet or whether she was just disgusted with the whole situation, or both.

The hair on his stomach was inches from my face and he smelled like sour milk.

You’ll wake up one day and realize the world does not revolve around you and it will be too late, he said. You’ll be too old to change. You’ll end up bitter and frustrated for the rest of your life. Save yourself, Norman, he said. Because your mother can’t.

My mom scoffed. She either didn’t know or didn’t care that I had lied, and this ambiguity created a void inside me, a space for Nick’s demons to take root.

I began scrubbing.

You don’t have to do that, said my mom.

He knows I’m right, said Nick.

You’re a joke, said my mom.

I kept scrubbing and then I heard Nick’s rocking chair creak. I heard my mom march into the living room and they started yelling at each other. I wished I could yell too—better than just shrinking up like a bug.

He called her a cunt. She said he wouldn’t know what to do with one if it fell in his lap. Then I heard the sound of meat and bone colliding. A second later a dull thump against the floor. I dropped the sponge and ran into the living room.

My mom was on the floor. She held both hands over one eye. She whimpered like a child, curled and fetal. Nick stood over her. He moved his feet like a nervous horse. I got between Nick and my mom.

You’re a bully, I said.

He swallowed and his Adam’s apple rose and fell. He turned and went to the freezer. I kneeled down and asked my mom if she was okay.

I’m fine, Norman. You should go to bed now. Everything will be okay. Don’t worry, she said. I promise.

I didn’t see how things would be okay. I didn’t see how that was possible. She was either lying or didn’t understand what was really going on.

I’m going to run up to Dad’s, I said.

No! she said. Don’t do that, Norman.

Why? He’ll protect us.

If you try to run away I’ll track you down, said Nick. You’ll never make it.

He sounded like an actor in a movie. He came through the archway with ice wrapped in a towel. In that moment he looked melodramatic and ridiculous to me. Nick handed the wrapped-up ice to my mom. His blood-veined eyes slanted across his face at me. I turned away and saw the sliding glass door and imagined myself escaping out it. I was running up Topanga Canyon to my dad’s house—he would fix everything—but Nick was chasing me on the bridge over the creek and it was dark and his fingers snagged my hair. Feeling myself crash to the ground made my courage wither, exposing something else beneath it, and I stood frozen in the living room, eyeing my escape route, defeated.

In the middle of the night I woke to the cry of a dying animal. I opened my bedroom door and heard my mom moan as if in agony. I stepped toward her room and was about to call out, Are you okay? when she moaned again. It sounded different, as if a note of joy rang out from a frenzy of dark chords, and I realized they were fucking. It dawned on me that their fight had seemed like a show, like they were actors playing parts in a made-up story.

I went back to my bed and thought about how I had lied and about Nick being right and my mom being wrong and about Nick hitting her and how now they were fucking, as if they knew all along that that was how the night was going to end.

CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_36a194f0-0ab8-53d4-b026-8e9734e98b35)

SANDRA STOPPED CRYING. Her hand remained over her face. She is wrong, I thought. My dad is for sure still alive. I have to check on him.

I was facing the wrong way in the chute. I had to turn around. A blinding gust scrabbled over me and I closed my eyes, visualizing how I’d make my 180-degree turn. I remembered how Dad had taught me about ice—you always have to keep an edge—and I replayed the time I slipped on the face of Mount Waterman and he dive-bombed the ice face and scooped me up like a shortstop. Once you get going, Ollestad, it’s hard to stop.

When the flurry passed I reached my downhill arm uphill and tried to grab the snow next to my uphill shoulder. My fingers closed around a feeble top layer of crust, knuckles scuffing the hard pack below. So I stabbed my fingers into the hard pack. One knuckle deep. Enough.

I compressed like a ski racer making a high-speed turn, poised on the inside edges of my Vans. Then I unweighted and swiveled my hips 180 degrees, crouching right back into my race pose for stability.

I inched across the chute, slanting the edges of my rubber soles into the crust like I would skis. No steel rail to carve into the hard snow, so I compensated with precise balance. As I crossed into the funnel, a subtle dimple—the threshold between the crust and the intractable ice curtain—I was forced onto my stomach again. I clawed, fingernail to fingernail, across the funnel.

Must be getting close to Dad, I thought, and glanced up from the curtain. A pool of fog clung to him and his curly brown hair appeared. There was some silver in it. Blond surfer hairs, he’d say.