She Would Leave Her Heart
She left two button-down shirts, pressed and folded, size large, and a promise from the landlord to deliver the package if her son returned.
She left a birthday card: slid into a cubby at the nurse’s station, pushed into the hands of a skin-and-bones roommate, mailed with extra postage to his last-known address.
She left twenty dollars on his prison commissary account for soap and Top Ramen and shower shoes. A paper bag of groceries on the doorstep of the halfway house: one loaf of bread, three cans of tuna, a gallon of milk. A rent check and a note to call home.
She would leave her heart if she could, her soft insides woven into a rope, an umbilical cord to pull him back, fold him into her womb—an anchor, a stone.
The Boarding House Jeffrey’s mother drove five hours that day. From the parched inlands to the glitter of Puget Sound, her only passenger a flimsy department store gift box, wrapped in silver paper and topped with a tidy bow. Five hours in the car, but she didn’t call ahead. The last time her son picked up the phone he mumbled something about secret police, banged the receiver three times on the edge of his nightstand, and hung up. So today, she just took off driving: bone-dry landscape giving way to steep mountain pass, a jagged slash through emerald pines and soon enough Seattle, with its mirrored towers rising skyward and its floating bridges stretched across smooth-like-glass water.
Alone in the car, mile after mile, maybe she told that gift box beside her everything she couldn’t tell her son. Maybe she spoke of his teens, how in those years—before his schizophrenia, before an endless loop of psychiatric wards and Trazodone—she had known, with a mother’s steady clarity that he would make something of himself: a doctor or a lawyer or a football star, with a wife and children and everything a young man in the 1970s dreamed of becoming. Driving alone in her sturdy sedan, her words filled empty hours in an empty car.
Arriving in Seattle in the late afternoon, she climbed the stairs of the rickety boarding house, package in hand. The low-lying sun cut a sharp line across her bent body. Her cane tapped a steady beat on the wooden floorboards, slick and worn beneath her feet.
* * *
From my office at the top of the boarding house stairs, I saw Jeffrey’s mother on the security cameras just as she reached the first landing, clutching gift box in one hand and cane in the other, pausing to pin a stray lock of silver hair back into its tidy bun. Her eyes widened as she took it all in: sticky walls, dim hallways, threadbare carpet and chipped baseboards, bare light bulbs flickering overhead, sour kitchen grease hanging low and dense and the drone of bass rising from the karaoke bar below. She sighed, long and low, bottled breath escaping carefully rouged lips and just like that, before she even reached my doorstep, I knew exactly who she’d come to see.
In his late forties, her son was a tall hulk of a man: square shoulders and an equally square chin, his arms hanging always too heavy and his feet moving always too slowly, unable to keep a steady tempo as he lumbered down sidewalks and hallways. His pale eyes revealed nothing but a dull stare. Jeffrey was one of forty-nine chronically homeless men who lived in that boarding house, arriving from the streets and the shelters, the psychiatric wards and the jails, to make a fresh start if not quite a home. My charge as a caseworker was to help them take this fresh start and keep it, hold on tightly to their new lives even as they passed through drug relapses and jail summons and psych ward visits, even on the days when it seemed impossible, far easier to just disappear back in the direction from which they came.
Just two weeks before his mother’s unexpected visit, Jeffrey smashed a window—jagged glass, a bloody hand—along with just about everything else in his boarding house room, and left handcuffed to a stretcher, set to return to the state hospital from which he came. He had moved into the building only three months earlier, stable and medicated and hopeful for a new life. Now, refusing to take his antipsychotics, or see his doctors, or on most days even open his door, his plummet was swift. When he was finally carried away to the hospital, for one of the countless times in his life, none of us at the boarding house thought to call his mother because we didn’t know she existed. When he moved in, he listed no emergency contacts and even if he’d wanted, I doubt he had the wherewithal to remember his mother that year.
I don’t know the particulars of Jeffrey’s descent into schizophrenia, sometime in his early twenties, but I know all too well what became of him. How often I was tasked, in those years, with holding in my hands the fragile shards of lives like Jeffrey’s. How many hours I spent turning each fragment over, one by one, and wondering how I, only twenty-five years old, could possibly help put the pieces back in place. We call it a psychotic break, but this is too tempered. Schizophrenia doesn’t break; it shatters. A mind, a future, a family—sharp glass piercing flesh, blood running underfoot, slicing with little warning through an average life. The decline is steep and the wreckage thorough.
When she finally reached my door, I ushered Jeffrey’ mother into my cramped, airless office. Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to look her in the eye as I told her that her son wasn’t home, that he wouldn’t be home anytime soon, that he might not be allowed to return at all to this boarding house, his first stable living situation in years. In his paranoia, Jeffrey had refused to sign a release-of-information when he moved in, which meant I didn’t have his permission to tell anyone, even his mother, his whereabouts. If I followed the letter of the law, I could tell her he was gone, but I could say nothing else.
“I’m sorry,” I said, planting my fingertips on the top of my desk to steady myself. “I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t. He’s safe, though, and I’ll get a message to him, let him know you stopped by. I hope you understand.”
Bound by Jeffrey’s legal right to privacy and some naive sense of professionalism, I didn’t even tell her where her son had gone.
Back then I had no children of my own, no son to worry over, no daughter to watch as she grew, no idea the physical pain of motherhood, deep and searing, bright blinding. Back then, I didn’t understand that no matter how old they get or how large their bodies grow, our fears for our children never leave us. I couldn’t comprehend how, for a parent, a child’s madness must seem like a slow, incomplete death.
With shaking hands, I wrote her phone number on a pad of paper, slipped it into her son’s thick file, shut the cabinet and locked the door. We stood there face-to-face across my cluttered desk, her eyes shifting back and forth between me and the file cabinet until she remembered the package in her hand.
“It’s his birthday,” she said as she set the box on the desk between us, rose slowly, walked out the door. She left the present with me in case he returned, even though we both knew he never would. When I moved offices two years later, I found the package on a high shelf. Wiping away the dust with my sleeve, I teased open the box and set the lid on the chair beside me. Inside, nestled neatly in a bed of tissue paper, I found two button-down shirts, size large, pressed and folded, their collars neatly starched.
The Juvenile Detention Center
Before Jeffrey and his mother and the boarding house, with its forty-nine grown sons, before my own son and daughter and the rhythms of my own motherhood, there were other children; children not my own and yet for one year—many hours over many days—I was their keeper, protector of their broken, stitched-together, tough-as-nails-impossibly-fragile bodies. Cinder block walls and safety glass, concrete beds and vinyl mattresses. All day, the clatter of steel keys unlocking steel doors, the click of handcuffs slipped onto ankles and wrists.
As guards, we shared meals with our teenage charges: hamburgers or chili or spaghetti on segmented cafeteria trays. We watched movies with popcorn on Friday nights, walked across the grounds to the gymnasium-turned-chapel for Sunday prayers, stopping to pick out shapes in billowy clouds overhead or kick loose piles of pine needles gathered in drifts on the buckled concrete walkways.
At times like this, we could almost imagine it was a summer camp, and us campers and counselors at some different time, in some different place. But popcorn and cloud gazing aside, this was still prison. Our daily rituals reminded us: headcount and lockdown, the endless static of walkie talkies, shapeless polyester scrubs color-coded orange for suicide watch and yellow for flight risk. Thick files describing arson and assault, theft and yes, even murder. Each night and for long, silent, daylight stretches we caged these children in cells with no one for company but their ghosts and their teenage angst.
Of Holly: a sparrow of a girl with dirty-blond hair in a limp bob and bangs cropped too short above almond eyes, always watching. She slept with an old teddy bear cradled between her bird-thin arms and skipped down the pathways whenever she got a chance, but at twelve, this was already her second time in lockup. Unable to shake an obsession with flames, Holly started fires in garbage cans and parked cars and family homes. Not five feet tall, not ninety pounds, but her rage transformed her—eyes lit, bird-body turned to armored steel. It took four security officers to pin her down—burly, muscled linebackers whose entire job was to move from cell block to cell block, exerting powerful but careful force to back up the regular guards, those of us hired for our ability to pacify and negotiate, not for our strength.
A last resort, these pinnings, but with Holly we had little choice; once her rage took over, she hardly registered the soothing words we spoke. In a ten-by-ten cell at the end of the hall, her back arched and her heels dug into the concrete floor as the security officers knelt, one on each of her limbs. Finally, unable to subdue her, they carried her horizontally, her spine as stiff as a makeshift gurney, through now-empty corridors and into isolation, a padded room designed to keep her safe from herself.
Of Eleanor: my most frequent suicide watch. Eleanor who taught me that a streak of blood against the eggshell-white paint of a prison wall becomes its own kind of freedom, the thrumming wing of a robin in flight.
The opposite of Holly in looks and disposition, Eleanor turned inward on her worst days. Broad shoulders sagging, sharp eyes gone soft, quick wit falling limp. How many hours she and I spent on suicide watch, with the glass of an observation cell between us and her safety my only concern. On those days, we stripped her of everything: books, pictures, human contact. Familiar prison scrubs were replaced by a rubber gown, stiff and heavy, fastened with Velcro at the shoulders and virtually indestructible so it could not be broken down into string and rope by desperate hands.
Every five minutes during suicide watch, I was required by law to record in a log book the trivial events happening on the other side of that glass: inmate sleeps; inmate paces; inmate urinates into a cold steel toilet with no curtain for privacy; curls into a ball on the bed with no covers to shield her; rocks back and forth; wails long and low, a caged animal. So fragile, this child and her body. I watched, I waited. I protected as best I could.
Three decades earlier, Jeffrey and at least half a dozen of my other charges at the boarding house walked the halls of this very same juvenile detention center, wore these handcuffs, slept in these same bare cells. Many more spent time in other centers just like it. Mental illness takes many forms, and their diseases were as varied as their crimes. But surely none of them knew, at such a young age, that their time spent in juvenile detention was only the beginning. Surely none of them saw themselves at forty, fifty, sixty years old, moving into a bare-bones room in a dilapidated boarding-house after years spent sleeping on the streets. By the time I met the men at the boarding house, my work at the detention center had long ended. But like phantoms in reverse, Jeffrey and the others in that ragged building showed me how little I knew about mental illness and addiction, recidivism and generational poverty. They showed me how little I knew about mothering. Back at the detention center, what became of Eleanor and her robin’s wings? What became of Holly and her unmasked rage? What became of all the children who wished, more than anything, to take flight from that place?
The Visiting Room
Every broken adult was once someone’s child. Every child begins, at the moment of birth, to cleave inch by inch from her mother’s womb. The children at juvenile detention are gone from my life now, just as I’ve closed the door on a decade of work with adults like Jeffrey. But they return to me in whispers and echoes—those concrete cells and safety glass, those fragile children. A walk across frosted grass on a crisp fall morning and I am transported to sprawling prison grounds, to watch towers and regimented lines and walkie talkies, and everywhere the pulsing beat of adolescence. And to visiting hours, to the mothers. These days, more often than not, it is the mothers to whom I return. Details that escaped me back then rise to the surface now from some forgotten, primordial place.
Each Saturday they arrived, their weary bodies settling into plastic chairs in the hard-packed, visitation room. No couches on which to snuggle and comfort their children, no kitchen counters to share quiet confidences over pancakes and orange juice. Just tired eyes staring across the expanse of tables at their daughters, once their babies, clothed in prison scrubs and living behind concrete walls. Like Jeffrey’s mother and her department store gift box, these mothers did their own leaving. When Eleanor’s parents visited, her mother tried hard to fill the silence, chattering in an endless loop about holiday plans and football games while she emptied the contents of a paper bag onto the table between them: lavender soap, warm socks, liquid eyeliner. Eleanor slouched in her chair and picked at her fingernails. Her father stared at his shoes.
Holly’s mother came alone, carefully unpacking gifts of coloring books and hairbows, childish items for her only child, as if these offerings could somehow bring her back.
On Saturday mornings, when visitation ended and these mothers left their daughters behind to walk across the gravel parking lot, did their arms, no longer holding their offerings, feel feather-light, too-light, float-up-to-the-heavens-light? Empty with all they did not hold.
When my own daughter was born, my first, I never wanted to set her down. In those early days I held her constantly, singing softly into her ear, nursing and rocking her until my elbow cramped and my fingers went numb. On my first trip out of the house without her—to the grocery store for something mundane like bread or onions—my arms ached with lightness, longing for something to weigh them down, as though this was the first time in my life they had ever truly been empty. Was it like this for the mothers at the detention center, walking away from their daughters on visitation days? And, once they got to their cars, closed their doors and let the silence envelop them, did they sit and weep?
The Boarding House
Our children are water we cannot contain. The cup from which we once gathered them in their infancy and youth becomes over time too dented, too shattered, too rusted to hold them. Cutting valleys and canyons, they carve their own boundaries, build their own lives, take their own leave. I am no expert. At three and seven, my son and daughter still fit the space I molded for them. Why should these mothers in boarding houses and in visitation rooms be my road map? And yet they are. In all that they leave behind, I search the lines of my own motherhood. In the care I gave their children, I feel the absences this world contains. Motherhood is, after all, a matter of magnitude. We all fear. We all hold. We love as we can, we leave what we must. We believe, against all odds, in our capacity to save our own children; it is motherhood’s only salve.
No longer wards of the juvenile justice system, no longer teenagers full of hope, I sat with Jeffrey and his boarding house neighbors as they wept like children, dreamed like children. I sat with them in dark apartments, shades drawn tight against their piercing pain, the shadowy remnants of a self-medicated stupor. We perched together on sticky curbs while yellowed fingertips tapped tobacco onto bleached paper squares. I sat with them while they reckoned with the violence and disappointment of the adults they had become.
Although I didn’t recognize it then, I did my own leaving in those days. Not starched shirts and back-dated rent checks, but offerings nonetheless, set before an altar of unwavering optimism: a bus pass slid under a door, along with a note to take the number seven to the doctor in the morning; a paper bag full of food-bank commodities set on a bedside table; the number to medical detox taped next to a battered telephone. A handful of residents at that boarding house even called me mother, though I was in my early twenties and nearly a decade away from bearing children of my own. “Mama Allison,” they said. But I was no one’s mother back then.
I was no one’s mother back then, and I like to think that if I was, I would have driven Jeffrey’s mother to Western State Hospital myself instead of turning her away that day. Driving south down the freeway, gift box between us, we are giddy with anticipation. We watch out the window as skyscrapers turn into factories and factories turn into suburbs, emerald pines streak by, and the memory of the big city, of the boarding house and all its vices, becomes nothing more than a speck in our rearview mirror. Once inside the hospital’s stark, brick walls we know just where to go. We have no map; a mother’s intuition is our only guide. From a hook high on a wall, we steal the keys to the isolation room, flying past nurses and doctors, psychiatrists and gatekeepers until we reach the place to which we are drawn and finally, I place her mottled hands on the crown of her son’s sedated head so she can bend to kiss it. Breathing deeply of that sweet-child smell, she whispers in his ear, “Happy birthday, my baby. Wherever you go I will find you, always.”
Allison Vrbova holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA from Western Washington University. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Under the Gum Tree, Drunken Boat, Fourth River, Hunger Mountain Journal and Green Mountains Review, among others. She is a recipient of a 2023 Artist Trust GAP Grant in support of the manuscript-in-progress for her first full-length essay collection. "She Would Leave Her Heart" is the title essay in this collection. She lives in Bellingham with her husband and two children.
