by Kelly Rimmer
Mother called every few weeks, and we’d share a stiff, slightly awkward catch-up. Maryanne called sometimes too, and sometimes she wrote. But
despite her efforts, something had changed between us, and that became more obvious with every stilted conversation. Our chats were no longer smooth, and the connection between us no longer reliable. When the gap between her calls and letters began to grow, I was both disappointed and resigned. Perhaps it was inevitable that at this adult stage of my life, my sister would play a less vital role.
But despite the challenges, those early months of marriage were bliss anyway. Patrick and I were in love and building a life together. I looked after the house, and Patrick worked, and we spent our evenings and our weekends enjoying one another. Life was good. And it seemed even better when I realized that my time of the month hadn’t arrived for some weeks.
We were pregnant with our first baby, and everything was going pretty
much according to plan.
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5
Beth
1996
By the time we reach the top of the stairwell, Ruth has over-
taken me. I’m uncomfortable after the confrontation, so I let
her take the lead, mainly so I can compose myself before she
realizes how on edge our chat has left me. I’m so caught up in
my head, I’ve almost forgotten where we’re headed and why…
until Ruth reaches the top and lets out a horrified squeak. The
door is resting against the wall at the top of the stairwell, and
behind it, chaos waits.
I stand at her side as we take in the attic space. What was once
a pristine studio is now a tableau of utter madness. Overflow-
ing cardboard boxes are stacked almost to the roof in places,
surrounded by heaping baskets and piles of papers and candy
wrappers and discarded items of clothing, dirty bowls and soda
cans, and half-built shelves upon half-built shelves. It’s a massive
space—big enough that when we were kids, we could rough-
house and run around with our friends and it never felt cramped
or crowded. Now this room is full to bursting. There’s so much
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junk up here that Ruth and I can’t even step into the room.
Random junk is stacked or dumped or dropped at least waist
height on every single square inch of space. I know there are
floorboards and rugs under there somewhere, but I can’t see
even a sliver of either.
There’s a bewilderingly confused scent hanging heavily in the
air. It’s stale food and mold and paint and dust, and as it registers,
I cover my nose and mouth as if that will help. When I glance
at Ruth, she’s white as a ghost, also holding her nose. The sight
of the messed up attic is upsetting, but watching Ruth react is
almost worse. I can’t remember the last time I saw her cry, but
right now there’s a definite shine in her eyes.
I look back to the piles of trash, skimming my gaze over it all,
trying to understand. At first glance, the only objects in the attic
that don’t appear to be trash are the paintings. Some are color-
ful, and some are dark. Some feature color palettes which seem
completely random—jarring clashes of color without rhyme or
reason. Some are done in acrylics, others are watercolors; one
is a mosaic of tiny cubes that I suspect are tile. Some are simply
lying flat on the other junk, some mounted on the walls; one is
on an easel. They are differing sizes and shapes—most are rect-
angular, but two are square.
My sister fumbles for my hand and squeezes it, hard. “Jesus
Christ, Beth. What is this?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper back. It’s like we’re both afraid to
raise our voices, in case we stir up more trouble in this once-in-
nocent space. Maybe there’s even some logic in that. “There’s got
to be mice up here. Maybe even rats. Or snakes. Or all three.”
“There might be some mice,” Ruth concedes, tentatively
tipping a box over with the tip of her shoe. “But probably not
snakes. I mean, they’d be hibernating at this time of year any-
way. Right?”
“Yeah. Hibernating in this vast sea of undisturbed trash,” I
shudder.
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“We’ll soon know. If there are droppings…” We pause, stare
at each other, and then faux-gag. My sister and I will merrily
deal with even the most menacing spider, but we both hate snakes
with a passion. “I can’t let you pack this up on your own. I’d
never forgive myself.”
“I’m not really giving you a choice,” I mutter, wrapping my
arms around my waist. “I have time, you don’t. It’s simple.”
“Are you really going to bring Noah here while you clean
this up?”
“Chiara offered to watch him.”
“This will take days.” She puffs out a breath of air. “Hell,
Beth. It might even take weeks.”
I shrug again, and Ruth sighs.
“At least let me get a dumpster. No, we’ll need at least two,
and we’ll put them on the lawn out in front. And I’ll get some
laborers to help ferry the trash downstairs.”
“Let me sort through it first,” I sigh, gingerly kicking a box
right side up with the very tip of my shoe. Beneath it I find an
unopened packet of paintbrushes and a moldy coffee cup. “Who
knows what family mementos are lost among this chaos?”
“It looks like Dad used this as a trash room,” Ruth says. “I
have a feeling you won’t find anything of value up here. You
know what Dad was like. He was so precise with the things he
loved.”
“Maybe. I’ll start sorting through it, and if it is all just trash,
I’ll call you for help.”
“What do you make of the artwork?” she asks.
“Maybe he was trying to perfect an idea he could see in his
mind.”
“Is it a letter? Half of the letter B?”
I tilt my head to stare at the nearest canvas, then shake my
head. “Oh, I see what you mean. I don’t think so—why would
he paint the curves of a letter like that?”
“Well, what do you see?”
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“I didn’t see anything at first—just abstract paintings. Now
that you’ve pointed it out, though, I do see that they all have
something in common.” I skim my gaze around the paintings,
squinting at them. “They’re all so different, but every one does
feature a similar shape. It’s like a little curve, then a big curve
right beneath it, right?”
“I see why you’re not an art critic,” Ruth laughs softly. “I
meant how do you interpret it?”
I stare around the room and think about it in the context of
the house, then I wrap my arms around myself, feeling sud-
denly chilled.
“I honestly h
ave no idea what—if anything—the paintings
represent. But I suspect that Dad was deeply ashamed of what
he’s left up here—that’s the only explanation for the lock. And
if you think about what he left on display—how pristine the rest
of the house always was, it kind of makes sense that he’d lock
away this mess.” I hesitate, then suggest, “It’s like we’re seeing inside his head, if you know what I mean. He managed to hide
the problems he was having for so long, until he just couldn’t
hide them anymore. This attic is kind of the same.”
“Maybe this is where his savings went,” Ruth says suddenly.
“I don’t know how expensive art supplies are, but surely this
junk represents a lot of wasted money.”
“Maybe that’s part of the puzzle,” I sigh. “But Tim said there’s
hundreds of thousands of dollars missing—pretty much all of
Dad’s retirement savings. There’s not that much paint up here.”
Ruth shakes her head slowly.
“Sometimes I feel like I can’t bear to watch Dad fade away.
It’s almost too much to bear, but at the same time there’s just
no way to escape it, because the signs of his illness are every-
where now.” She suddenly, furiously kicks an empty soda bottle.
It flies across the room and hits an exposed beam, then drops
and disappears into the mess below. “Even in the damned attic.”
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I disentangle my arms so that I can link my elbow through
hers, and rest my head on her shoulder.
“I know, Ruthie. I know exactly what you mean.”
In this pain, I can connect with her. This is our family’s trag-
edy, and we each play a part in the suffering. By sharing it, we
can survive it, because we subconsciously remind one another
that one day soon, this will end, and we’ll still be standing side
by side. Dad will be at peace, and Ruth and I—and Jeremy and
Tim—will all still have each other. We are his legacy, and de-
spite the tragedy of his current circumstances, that’s actually a
pretty spectacular thing to have in common.
But just like Dad’s locked attic, there’s a whole other world
inside my mind that I have to keep separate from Ruth at the
moment. I can’t bear to talk about what’s going on in the quiet
moments when I’m alone, or worse, when I’m alone with my
son. I don’t have the language because I haven’t made sense of
it myself.
If Ruth wants to support me through that world of pain, she’ll
have to be patient with me…just as I’m trying to be.
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Grace
December 5, 1957
I used to think every woman was born to be a mother. I thought the first time I held my child would be a moment of perfect clarity and purpose.
This wasn’t a one-off moment of romanticism from a girl too young
to know better—no, I was expecting that swell of meaning and beauty
right up until they lifted my bloody, screaming son from between my legs and rested him on my breast. After twenty-eight hours of back labor, a roughshod episiotomy and a less-than-sympathetic obstetrician who was
irritated to miss a golf date, I was ready to stare down at my baby’s little face to be reassured that it had all been worth it.
So you can imagine my surprise when I looked down at Timothy’s
perfect features and felt nothing but relief that it was all over.
Labor seems like an ending, the full stop on the sentence of nine long months of anticipation. In reality, labor is the beginning of an endless journey. Even when I am gone, my children will still walk the earth, and the journey will continue.
I was fine for the first few days after the birth, even if bewildered by the disparity between my physical reality and my inner world. I was still in a great deal of physical pain, although I felt strangely numb on the inside, and was dreadfully confused about why the rush of love I was supposed to feel still hadn’t arrived. The “baby blues” landed with full force on day three, the same day that Mother came to the hospital to meet Tim for the first time. She handed me her carefully embroidered handkerchief and assured me that the blues were a normal part of having a child, and that the tears would pass within a day—just a sign that my milk was
coming in. She was right about that at least: by midnight that night, my breasts were painfully engorged. She was wrong about everything else.
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I wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital bed for ten days after the birth and other than a brief shower each day, I was expected to remain on bed rest. Between the agony of learning to breastfeed, the agony of my stitches and the indignity of trying to use the bedpan, I felt like my whole life had become suffering, and I was stunned by how blasé everyone was about my situation. I was in constant pain and my body seemed to have been
damaged beyond recognition, and no one at all seemed concerned about
any of that. I felt like shaking the doctor when he’d assure me in that condescending tone that “this is difficult for all young mothers.” Patrick came to visit during the allotted hour each day, but he spent a lot of time staring at the baby with a confused mix of pride and terror, and seemed to have little energy to inquire about my welfare. Most of the nurses were brisk and unsympathetic—run off their feet, and I suppose they become hardened after a while. That entire week was so draining, but I clung to the hope that I’d feel better after some sleep, and once I was home and back to my own bed.
When they finally discharged us, I remember walking down the steps
from the hospital ward with Timmy in my arms, looking back at the
doors cautiously. I was certain someone was about to tell us they’d made a terrible mistake and we needed to come back inside. Even as I slid into the car, I was confused. Were they really going to let us just walk out of there with a baby? I had no idea what I was doing. How was I ever
going to keep him alive? There seemed to be some great assumption that I had some experience with babies or even maternal instincts that would kick in to help him thrive, but that just wasn’t the case. I was the same clueless woman who’d walked through those doors in labor eleven days
earlier, just slightly thinner, significantly sorer, and now holding another life in my hands. I cried all the way home, and Patrick just kept shooting me bewildered stares. I’m sure he thought I was being overly emotional, and maybe I was. But it wasn’t his responsibility to care for that baby.
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He’d be going to work for ten hours a day, leaving me at home with his son, and overnight my work had become a job I’d never been trained to do.
No one at the hospital had mentioned anything to me about Timmy
waking up through the night, and I felt sure that they would have, be-
cause I was certain that behavior wasn’t normal. Still, now that we were home, Tim was crying every few hours, demanding milk. This worried
Patrick, too, and we were both convinced that something was wrong. We
scraped together the money to take the baby to the doctor, who told us that my milk was too thin. He said that formula was better for the baby, sci-entifically developed to help him grow and sleep. So we switched to the bottle, and it made no differe
nce. If anything, things got worse, because now I was up fumbling with bottles in the middle of the night and Timmy was constantly constipated.
It was several weeks before Patrick’s aunt Nina came to visit, and
when I mentioned how worried I was about Timmy’s inability to sleep
through the night, she laughed and laughed. Aunt Nina found it hysterically amusing that Patrick and I didn’t even know enough to recognize
typical newborn behavior, but how could we know? This was like the shock of labor all over again. I had been so caught off guard by the pain of those first few contractions I actually felt cheated—because someone should have warned me . Childbirth and the early days of childrear-ing are a shameful business, spoken about only in hushed whispers when the men aren’t around. The scant knowledge I did have came courtesy of Maryanne. Our cat had kittens when we were younger, and she’d whispered to me quite scandalously about what had happened.
So there I was, in our ramshackle apartment, miles away from my
parents, alone for sixty hours a week while Patrick built houses, with a baby who cried all day and night, and gradually, I began to lose my
mind. People can use those words so flippantly, but I mean them in their truest, darkest sense: I felt like I had lost the essence of myself, and the Truths I N_9781525804601_ITP_txt_275977.indd 83
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new creature I had become instead was worthless and useless. Mother-
hood changed me—it had sucked the very life from my bones, and now
I was an exhausted, empty shell. It was the strangest thing—the way
my thoughts about myself evolved, until I held nothing but disdain for the person I’d become. I cried from morning until night, and sometimes, Timmy did, too. Sadness drenched me to my core, and I was so lost in
my confused thoughts, I couldn’t stop to wonder if this was the way it was supposed to be.
Somewhere during the blur of this, I realized that Patrick was staying out longer after work. On hindsight, I can see that our domestic reality didn’t match the picture he’d had in his mind for our life together, and so instead of trying to fix it, he ran from it.
I can’t say I blame him. If I’d had the option, I’d have run, too.
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