Lessons in Heartbreak

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘Mum!’ Stopping only to gesture to Marcus to stay back, Beth rushed to her mother and hugged her. ‘I was so worried, Mum. I couldn’t believe –’

  ‘– I know: that I’d done something so stupid. I’m sorry, so sorry,’ Anneliese sobbed.

  ‘Mum, how could you think of doing that? How could you?’

  Anneliese hugged her daughter and the promise of her first grandchild and felt the raw heat of the shame again. Look what she’d done.

  Anneliese knew there was only one way to fix it and she took a huge step back into her old life: ‘It was a mistake, my love, I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m so sorry, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I’d taken too many anti-anxiety tablets and I did something I’ll always regret. It was a stupid mistake, please believe me.’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’

  Anneliese could feel some of the tension leave Beth’s body and she knew she’d done the right thing.

  ‘I was so worried, you’ve no idea. Dad phoned and I couldn’t take it in at first. I mean – you would never –’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Anneliese softly, ‘so sorry.’ She wanted more than anything to tell Beth the truth about how she felt, but she couldn’t. Not now, with Beth pregnant. Probably not ever. A long time ago, she’d made the decision not to raise her daughter to stand in the front lines.

  She’d tell Beth what she needed to hear and pray that telling Beth it had all been a mistake would take away the red raw shame inside her for having hurt her daughter. So, she wasn’t being honest. But she might die of pain if she told the truth. And now, with Beth holding her, Anneliese realised that she didn’t want to die after all.

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ Anneliese soothed, and was astonished to realise that it was going to be all right. At that precise moment, when she should be feeling worse than she ever had, she felt a strange surge of relief because she’d been through the absolute worst and had come out the far side, still breathing, still there. Despite the fear, she’d got through it. She could get through anything. That thought brought her a ray of sheer peace.

  It was like jumping into the abyss and, instead of falling endlessly, she’d hit a trampoline – or bouncelina, as Beth called them when she was little – and she’d been bounced back.

  We don’t want you – so you’d better bloody well get on with it, the other world had said irritably.

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ she repeated, and this time, she meant it.

  ‘Why didn’t you phone me and tell me how you were feeling?’ Beth went on. ‘Mum, I’m here for you, you know that.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Anneliese repeated, hugging her.

  Eventually, Marcus had come over to sit on the bed, and they’d skirted round why his mother-in-law was in the psychiatric ward. Dear Marcus, he was a good man.

  She’d told him as much when he and Beth left.

  ‘Take care of her,’ she’d whispered to him. ‘I’m sorry for all of this, Marcus. It’s going to be OK, though. I’m not planning on trying it again.’

  Marcus nodded and she could see a telltale gleam of wet in his eyes.

  Beth had come back the following day, and Anneliese had summoned up the energy to look sprightly and tell her daughter to go home, that she’d be fine.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Beth asked.

  Anneliese, inhabiting the in-control-mother zone, nodded. “Course I am,’ she said firmly. ‘You go home and work on this baby. I’m going to be fine. I’ll be out in a few days and I’m looking forward to going home, and putting all this behind me.’

  She managed to say it with brio, as if what had happened was a little glitch instead of a suicide attempt.

  ‘Well…’ Beth faltered.

  ‘Darling,’ Anneliese used the voice she’d used when Beth was at primary school and didn’t want to get out of bed on cold winter mornings, ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘OK, Mum,’ said Beth, accepting it.

  Anneliese felt relief that she’d convinced Beth she was fine, even though she wasn’t. But mingled with the relief was a certain sadness that her daughter had believed her so readily.

  Anneliese had never known her mother’s secrets, any more than she’d known dear Lily’s secrets. But she’d somehow thought that she and Beth would share each other’s lives. But they didn’t. The fierce bond between mother and child didn’t include that. Perhaps the bond would be weakened if it did.

  Mothers were meant to mother, not spill their souls.

  Beth didn’t need to know that Anneliese now bore two scars that would never heal. The first was how much she’d hurt Beth by trying to kill herself. The second was that she’d reached that place where death seemed the best option. It was like a spot on a mythical road-trip, somewhere that altered a person so much that, once they’d visited, they were never quite the same again.

  When Beth had gone, Anneliese let the in-control feeling flood away. She could summon up the mother persona if required, but to get out of this place, she needed to let go of the old Anneliese.

  ‘Anneliese.’

  She looked up from the window seat in the television room. It was her favourite nurse, the tall dark-haired one.

  ‘Hello, Michelle,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve a visitor, Anneliese,’ said Michelle.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Me, the man who pulled you out.’

  She’d thought the big figure behind Michelle was another patient, but it wasn’t. It was the marine ecology guy. Mac, the man she’d tried to avoid on the beach, the man who had pulled her out of the sea.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Michelle, walking off.

  Anneliese stared at Mac and embarrassment flooded through her. He’d been there that day: it was like him seeing her naked.

  ‘How did you get in?’ she demanded. She was all out of politeness.

  ‘I was visiting someone and I thought I’d come over and say hi. I wanted to see how you were. I was the one who pulled you out, after all.’

  ‘I didn’t ask to be pulled out,’ said Anneliese irritably. It wasn’t entirely true, because she had wanted to be pulled out. He’d saved her life.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said abruptly. ‘You did pull me out, thank you. It’s just that I don’t have much social grace in me at the moment,’ she added. ‘This isn’t the sort of place for pretending and smiling politely. I seem to have lost the ability to hide the truth.’

  Also not entirely true. She’d pretended everything was fine for Beth. But she wasn’t going to do it for anyone else. No more pretending she didn’t mind that Edward had left her. No more pretending politeness and happiness. How liberating.

  ‘You want to go and get a coffee?’ he asked.

  Anneliese looked at him in surprise. ‘It’s a locked ward,’ she said.

  ‘Time off for good behaviour,’ he said. ‘I’ve been here before and I know the rules. I can bring you out, if you’d like to go and have a coffee with me? Of course, if I don’t bring you back at the prescribed time, they’ll set the dogs on me. But we’ll get a head start on them.’

  Anneliese laughed. It felt great to really laugh again.

  They sat at a table and drank coffee. It felt good to be out of the ward where she’d spent the last five days and Anneliese enjoyed watching the world move around them.

  ‘Thanks for the coffee,’ she said, ‘although I should be buying. I owe you, after all.’

  ‘You don’t owe me anything,’ he said. ‘I just happened to be there at the right time.’

  ‘You’re very laid back about this whole saving-woman-from-killing-herself thing,’ she said curiously. She couldn’t imagine many other people sitting there so calmly with someone they’d pulled from the sea, yet Mac wasn’t watching her warily, as if expecting her to wail and throw herself on to the table with grief.

  ‘I’ve been on the edge myself a few times, I sort of understand it,’ he said. ‘That’s what life is about: teetering on the edge.’

  ‘How do you know all th
is?’

  ‘Just do,’ he said.

  ‘Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, huh?’

  He smiled slowly. ‘I bought the factory that makes the T-shirts.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t want my life story.’

  She grinned. ‘Actually, I do. Before the Sea – should I have a word for it, BS (Before Sea)?–I’d never have been so blunt, but now, After Sea, I am. The new and improved Anneliese tells it like it is. Confess all.’

  It took another coffee to tell his story of alcoholism, a failed marriage and two little girls whom he hoped more or less forgave him for it all after ten years of recovery. He couldn’t give them back their childhood, though, any more than his alcoholic parents could give him back his.

  ‘Do you ever wonder why it happened to you?’ Anneliese asked. It was the one thing she had trouble sorting out in her head: why had it all gone wrong? A man who’d been born into addiction must surely understand that?

  ‘This wise guy once told me that when someone falls in a hole, they think “How do I get out of the hole?” But when an alcoholic falls in a hole, they think “Why did I fall in the hole.’”

  Anneliese laughed.

  ‘Makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Mac said.

  She nodded. ‘Works for me. Actually, it does work for me. Every time I fell in a hole my entire life, I wondered why instead of just getting out of it.’

  ‘The why is the killer for some people,’ he shrugged. ‘How about you just accept it? Stop asking why, move on and try to find peace.’

  ‘I have peace,’ she said, with a certain pride. ‘Before, I tried everything for a sign that it would all work out. I read books, tried to meditate, listened to CDs, and finally I sat in St Canice’s and prayed for a sign, and there was none. But I was looking in the wrong place. The sign is me. I’m still here, so I guess I must be meant to be here. That’s my sign.

  ‘Mind you, this feeling-at-peace thing is very strange,’ she added now to Mac. ‘I dare say it’s a gift. I asked for help and it came. Sort of last minute,’ she added wryly. ‘You can’t get more last minute than that, but the help came. You came. Angels, God, I don’t know who did it. But whoever it was, I’m grateful’.

  ‘Glad I was there.’

  A woman Anneliese knew saw her and waved, then stopped still and her hand dropped and her face fell.

  Anneliese kept smiling and waved back.

  ‘Poor old thing,’ she said kindly, ‘probably forgot for a millisecond that I’m here for trying to kill myself, and now doesn’t know what to do. I might not have managed to kill myself, but I’ve probably committed social suicide.’ Then she laughed. ‘We should go out together, Mac. Wouldn’t that be apt – you’re an alcoholic and I’m a failed suicide.’ She beamed at him. ‘We’d make a lovely couple. People would be terrified to invite us to their houses: they’d be worried in case you saw a bottle of wine and freaked out, and they’d be worried in case I tried to impale myself on the kitchen knives.’

  ‘And every time they’d mention the beach or the sea, they’d all go silent and gasp in case you started to cry.’

  It was so ridiculous, they both started to laugh. Anneliese knew people were probably looking at them but she didn’t care. She’d come out the other side of the abyss. Wasn’t that something?

  ‘How did you get involved with marine rescue?’ she asked.

  ‘It was the only liquid I hadn’t tried to drink,’ he deadpanned.

  Anneliese shrieked with laughter.

  ‘OK, why didn’t you consider stand-up comedy?’

  ‘I’m not depressed enough.’

  ‘Have you ever been depressed?’ she enquired slowly.

  ‘No. I was never anything. Whatever I felt, I flattened with alcohol. I didn’t have any feelings left to be depressed about. You?’

  ‘Yeah, for most of my life. It’s not quite the mountain on top of you that some people talk of. For me, depression is so subtle, it creeps up like a colony of termites eating away at your house, nibbling through all the – what are those important bits called?’

  ‘Joists?’

  ‘That’s it. Joists. The termites ate away at the joists. They messed me up, turned me into a bit of a control freak – or at least that’s what my daughter says.’ She winced, remembering Beth accusing her of trying to control everything. ‘And…’ She stopped.

  ‘And?’

  Anneliese sighed. ‘Can I say anything to you? I feel as if I can, but can I?’

  ‘Say anything,’ he replied. ‘I’m unshockable.’

  ‘I think I probably ruined my marriage.’ There, she’d said it out loud, the horrible thought that had been haunting her for the past few days. That she was more responsible for making Edward leave than silly Nell had been. That her retreat into her sadness had pushed him away.

  ‘I don’t know if you know, but my husband left me earlier this year for my best friend. That’s partly what pushed me over the edge. But I’m realising that I wasn’t easy to live with. Not in the slamming-doors and dropping-crockery sort of way, but in my own quiet way. I wanted to cope with it all on my own, so I shut Edward out and didn’t talk to him about how I felt. In the last five days I’ve told the doctors here more about what’s been going on in my head than I’ve told Edward in our whole marriage.’

  Mac said nothing. He just listened. He was a good listener, she decided: he didn’t let his attention flicker even for a second.

  ‘I hate admitting that it was my fault. It’s like I’ve failed and I can’t bear failure, but I have to take the blame, or most of it, anyway. I shut him out and if it was the other way round – if I was married to someone who shut me out of that part of their life – I’d want to leave too. When our daughter was grown up, I shut down even more.’

  Anneliese felt her throat tighten thinking about Beth. It wasn’t her darling daughter’s fault, but when Beth had been young there was someone there for her to fight for. Beth needed protecting and Anneliese would do that; if it meant laughing, smiling and singing at the top of her voice in the morning, she would do whatever it took to make their world happy and normal.

  With Beth gone, there was nobody left to protect. The fire in the husband-love corner had long since gone out while Anneliese had tended the daughter-love one.

  ‘Nell said I wasn’t interested in him any more,’ she said slowly, ‘and she was right. I loved him, cared about him, yes. But not in the way I used to.’

  There was something immensely freeing in saying what she’d thought out loud. In her head, the words had such dark power, but when she spoke them to another human being, and he didn’t cringe away in horror, she felt enormous relief.

  Anneliese wasn’t sure that talking about problems endlessly helped – it had never helped her. But speaking the absolute, unabashed truth and not flinching, that helped.

  ‘Would you have him back?’

  Anneliese didn’t know why, but the question lacked the breezy informality of all the others.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I doubt if either of us could go back. I’ve changed. It’s different now. I don’t want to be the old Anneliese again. I can’t go back. When he left me, I wanted it all the same as before, I longed for that, actually. What was hard to grasp was that I’d believed in one reality all along and I was wrong. Edward was deceiving me and so was Nell. I’d thought the world was flat and it was round.’

  ‘And now?’ he prompted.

  ‘Now I know I was deceiving me too because I was living as if we had a wonderful marriage, and we didn’t. In the end, neither of us was sharing our innermost thoughts with the other. I kept mine to myself and he shared his with Nell. Not a textbook happy marriage, I think.’

  ‘My wife and I split up in my second year of recovery,’ volunteered Mac. ‘She’d lived with me through the drinking, through the nightmare of the first year of recovery, and then, I left. She’ll never forgive me for that, but I’d changed too much. It was time to let go of th
e old stuff and move on.’

  Anneliese understood. Going back would be lovely, but it wasn’t an option.

  ‘Not that Edward is asking me to have him back, but even if he did, I wouldn’t be able to. I like the freedom of now.’

  Mac grinned at her.

  ‘Freedom to be me,’ she went on. ‘It’s so liberating. I can say what I like.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I want to tell dear Corinne who works in the Lifeboat Shop with me that if she waves another smelly little potion under my nose and tells me it will change my life, that I will strangle her with her moonstone necklace.’

  ‘Moonstone?’

  ‘Good for life energy.’

  ‘Is she energetic?’

  ‘No, poor dear, she’s the least energetic person I know,’ laughed Anneliese. ‘Her idea of exercise is sitting back in her chair and telling the rest of the world where they’re going wrong.’

  ‘So the moonstone’s not working, is it?’

  ‘No, but I couldn’t tell her that,’ Anneliese groaned. ‘Don’t want to hurt her.’

  ‘I thought you were saying what you wanted to? You are nice, after all.’

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed, ‘I am nice. I don’t want to hurt people.’

  ‘Who else, then?’ he asked. ‘Who else can you tell what you think without hurting?’

  ‘I’d quite like to tell Nell that fixing her hair, wearing lipstick and moving in on your supposed best friend’s husband isn’t the recipe for long life and happiness. She’s not right for Edward, actually.’

  ‘Is this advice coming from your intellect or your heart?’ he asked. ‘Bitter part of you speaking or rational part?’

  ‘What I like about you is that you don’t sugar-coat it,’ she said.

  ‘Sugar-coating is for wimps. You don’t get in the door of AA if you sugar-coat.’

  ‘Not even saccharine-coating?’

  ‘Especially not. In fact, coats are out, full stop. We meet in the nude. It’s hard to hide things when you’re naked.’

  ‘What a horrible picture that conjures up,’ she laughed. ‘The advice is from the head and not from the heart,’ she added after a few moments’ consideration. ‘Edward is complex, for all that he appears like a straightforward individual, and he needs someone who understands that. Nell is pretty straight down the middle: what you see is what you get. Apart from the running off with my husband bit,’ she amended. ‘But generally, Nell is Nell. No sidebars, no hidden extras. Edward likes the hidden extras, although I think he got fed up with mine.’