Read Online Breakdown Lane, The by Jacquelyn Mitchard - Free Book Online

was far less weird than what was to come.) Anyway, we sat in the living room and watched Leo sleeping under the effects of sleeping pills in this little white motel-type room, and it about put us under. He was twitching his arms and legs about every other second. No wonder he never got REMS. He hadn’t slept, in the usual sense of the word, for years, though he as sure as hell looked the part to us. We spent, like, months of our childhood with board games and badminton sets in our hands, waiting for Leo to wake up, and watching him sleep.
    I don’t know if the whole sleep business was a head fake to prove to us he needed his “sabbaticals” from his very stressful life, or real. I was just a kid, and I didn’t realize then that it was sort of an American tradition to up and leave your wife for a bimbo before you hit fifty. It would be pretty difficult to fake twitching seventy times a minute.
    My mother was giving him stress advice: take long walks at night, Lee, go swim at the Y, go scuba diving. Instead, he would stay up late on the computer. I would pass their room, and see the tiny blue fire of his laptop glowing, the way other kids would see the TV screen in their parents’ rooms, though we didn’t have one. I said that, didn’t I?
    We saw how she was.
    Leo had to have seen it, too.
    He didn’t let it get in the way.
    Anyhow, my kid sister, Aurora Borealis, was a cute little kid with black hair and blue eyes and freckles, who, like the Dairy Queen in my class, got lousy comments from other kids through no fault of her own. Just like my mother, through no fault of her own, got a wiring whack in her head. And we, through no-fault birth, got Leo.
    I thought I was protecting my little sisters by keeping one off the street and one off my mother’s hands. My mother thought she was protecting us by saying she was fine, even when she was trying to make both her eyes work together. My mom’s best friend, Cathy, thought she was protecting my mother by muttering threats about her wish to maim Leo. My Steiner grandparents thought they were protecting my mother by making noodle casseroles and keeping the lawn mowed and selling their Florida condo. My father thought he was protecting us, as if he gave a crap, by pretending it was work driving him bonkers, not just his wanting to get away from his life—which included us. Everybody was running around trying to get everything to behave like normal, so Caro and I could pretty much do what we wanted. And that was how we hacked into the computer and set off on a trip with a fake excuse that would never have got past anyone who had been paying attention.
    In the end, of course, nobody protected us at all.

FIVE
Exodus
    EXCESS BAGGAGE
    By J. A. Gillis
    The Sheboygan News-Clarion
    Dear J.,
    I am a Catholic. Fifteen years ago, when I was an altar boy, my friend and I desecrated the host before mass by peeing on it and then drying it out over the radiator, as a joke. I never thought about this except as a boyish prank, until I realized things in my adult life so far have gone very badly—relationships, jobs, failure in school, and so on. I have confessed this and received absolution many times. Do you think I am under a curse from God?
    Worried in Warrenton
    Dear Worried,
    No, I don’t think you are under any curse. You may be carrying a certain amount of guilt. I think that if you spoke with a counselor, you might be able to uncover other causes for your perception of failure in pursuits that have nothing to do with your religion, and you may be seeing this prank as the cause. After all, if you were given absolution, you have removed any stain from your conscience. Often, people suffer for years over a particular event no one else knows about that has far less significance to anyone but them than they ever believed, once they look at the big picture through therapy. Good luck.
    J.
     
    “It’s a girl!” the obstetrician cried, and though we already knew