He put his face in his hands, then looked directly at me.
“The doctors said she’d swallowed around twenty-five tranquilizers before turning on the engine. She’s still unconscious, still on life support . . .”
He stared back down at the floor.
“They don’t know if there’s brain damage, or whether she’ll even be able to breathe without a respirator. The next seventy-two hours are critical.”
He went silent. I held him tighter, wanting to say something that would make things better; that would assuage our shared guilt. But I was in shock—and knew that nothing I said would change anything.
“Can I go see her?” I asked.
Dan came with me into Intensive Care, a steadying arm on mine. The nurse leading us through the unit said nothing until we reached her bedside. I blanched with shock. She didn’t look like my mother—more like some strange medical sculpture, enveloped in tubes and wires, surrounded by lumpy machinery, with a grim plastic mouthpiece fastened between her lips. I could hear the steady whoosh of the nearby ventilator, forcing air in and out of her lungs. Dan turned to the nurse, pointed to the chart hanging on the end of the bed, and asked, “May I . . . ?” She nodded assent, pulled it off, then handed it to him. He scanned it briefly, his face impassive . . . though he did chew on his lower lip as he read (a sure sign that he was tense). I kept looking down at Mom. Part of me wanted to feel anger at her for doing this, for being so selfish and vengeful. But all I could feel was shame and liability. And one thought kept haunting my brain: why didn’t I apologize?
As we left the ICU, Dan had a few quiet words with the nurse, then turned to me and said, “All the vital signs are stable, and though they won’t know anything definitive until she’s conscious, there are no clinical indications that she’s suffered brain damage.”
“But they can’t be sure, can they?” I asked.
“No, they can’t.”
Dan stayed with us for the next twenty-four hours—and, once again, he displayed an amazing restraint and sensitivity when it came to not asking all the obvious, difficult questions. Only once when we were out of Dad’s earshot did he inquire, “Did your father say if she’d been threatening this for a while?”
“No, but, as you know, she’s been unstable for months . . .”
I was about to blurt out the truth, but a little voice whispered in my ear: Careful here.
“I gather there’s been some bad stuff going on between them for a long time.”
“Someone else?”
“I think so, yeah.”
I tensed, waiting for him to ask, “How long have you known about this?” but he said nothing. Once again, I was astonished by his thoughtfulness, how he always put my feelings in front of his own; how he maybe accepted that I didn’t have to tell him everything . . . even though I felt lingering guilt about the things that I did keep from him.
We’d sublet our apartment to some friends for the summer, so we spent the first night at my parents’ house. It was strange to be back there after all these months, strange to be sharing the narrow single bed in my old room with Dan. Not that I slept. Even though I had been up the entire night before, I couldn’t surrender to unconsciousness, and instead found myself wide awake an hour after getting into bed. I wandered downstairs and found Dad sitting up, smoking. I bummed a cigarette off him and we sat there saying nothing for a very long time. Finally he broke the silence.
“If she lives, I won’t leave her . . . even though I’ll regret that decision for the rest of my life.”
Dan had to go back to Boston that morning—the hospital was insistent he return to work.
“I can be back here in three hours if . . .”
He stopped himself. If . . .
I called the school. The acting summer headmistress was both understanding and annoyed. I said nothing about my mother’s suicide attempt, only that her condition was touch and go.
“Well, you obviously must be with her . . . and we obviously must work around this problem.”
It’s not a problem, I felt like screaming. It’s life or death.
For the next three days there was no change in her condition; no sense of what the outcome would be. Dad was constantly at the hospital. I could only handle two short visits a day and instead busied myself by playing housekeeper. In the days since Mom was rushed to the hospital, the house had turned into a garbage dump—so I set myself the task of imposing order on chaos. Not only did I thorough-clean the house, I also threw out tons of old magazines and newspapers that Dad had been keeping, and even (with his permission) realphabetized the several thousand books that were scattered around the house. Anything to keep busy, to be distracted.
We said very little to each other—our conversations continued to be light, superficial, avoiding the big question that hung over us. But every time the phone rang, we jumped.
A week went by and I received a call from the school, saying that, under the circumstances, they would have to replace me for the rest of the summer. The very next morning, the phone rang at five-thirty. Dad answered it. I was already out of bed, heading downstairs, when he yelled up to me, “She’s opened her eyes.”
We were at the hospital half an hour later. The attending doctor informed us that though Mom had regained consciousness, she was still on the respirator. More tellingly, in the few hours since her eyes had opened, she hadn’t attempted to speak, nor had she shown much muscle activity.
“This could be significant . . . or it simply could be that the cocktail of tranquilizers and carbon monoxide which she ingested has yet to completely leave her system, which means that it is still holding her in a narcotic thrall. Only time will tell, I’m afraid.”
We were brought into the ward. Mom was still swathed in wires, tubes, and machinery, but she was awake and stared at us blankly, her eyelids occasionally blinking. I took her hand and squeezed it. She didn’t return the squeeze—so her hand lay limply in mine.
“It’s good to have you back, Dorothy,” Dad said, his voice calm, reasonable.
No response.
“You had us worried,” I said lamely.
No response.
“Can you hear us, Dorothy?” Dad asked.
There was the slightest nod of the head, then she closed her eyes.
I sat with her for the next few hours. I went home, took a nap, and was back by six to sit with her again. Dad came in around eight. He insisted on taking me home, saying there was no point in me staying by her side all night. I didn’t want to leave, but two nights without sleep convinced me he was right. Back home I collapsed into bed, but was up at seven the next morning and at the hospital an hour later. This time, she seemed a little clearer. When I asked her a few questions—“Do you know where you are? Could you try to squeeze my hand?”—she responded with a nod. When I felt her fingers wrap around mine, I started to sob. I put my head against her shoulder and let go, the shock of the last two days (and all the anguish of the past months) suddenly pouring out.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
She squeezed my hand harder and nodded in acknowledgment.
The next day, Mom came off the respirator. During the afternoon, she sat up and began to talk. That night, Dad went in to see her by himself. They spoke for over an hour. When he came out of the room, he said, “She’d like to see you now.”
I went inside. She was sitting up in bed, still looking weak, small. But much of the medical paraphernalia had been taken away—and her eyes, though tired, had regained some of their sharpness. With a little nod of the head she motioned me over to the chair by the bed. I sat down. I took her hand. She didn’t take mine. Instead, she leaned over to me and whispered: “I knew you’d apologize eventually.”
FOUR
THE DOCTORS WERE amazed by Mom’s rapid recovery.
“Considering the number of pills she took and the fact that she was on the verge of asphyxiation,” one of them told me, “it is remarkable that she pulled
through—and with no permanent damage. She must have a ferocious will to live . . . despite doing what she did.”
I wasn’t surprised at Mom’s fierce need to pull through. In my darker moments, I couldn’t help but wonder if she had set up the whole attempted suicide as a grand attempt to reestablish her dominion over her wayward husband and her insolent daughter.
“Makes sense to me,” Margy said when I called her in Manhattan a few days after Mom came back to life. “And I think you’re right about her wanting to punish you both. If your father hadn’t found her, she would have, at the very least, made you both feel guilty for the rest of your lives—so that would have been a victory of sorts. My advice to you is: get the hell out of there before she really gets her claws into you.”
I was sorry about lots of things in the wake of Mom’s recovery. Sorry that I had been so fiendishly manipulated. Sorry that I had lost my summer teaching job (and the $80-a-week salary that came with it). Sorry I would be stuck in Vermont next semester. Sorry that my father had suffered emotional blackmail. But, most of all, I was sorry that I’d said “I’m sorry.”
She’d really done a number on me—denying me her love in order to extract the apology that her pride demanded. And I’d caved under the most extreme duress imaginable. Never again, I told myself. I’d never apologize for some “wrongdoing” that I felt wasn’t wrong. I would never be blackmailed into the sort of crippling guilt that I had suffered for the past few months. Margy was right. I needed to get the hell out of town.
For Dad’s sake, I waited a few days until Mom was formally discharged from the hospital before hightailing it back to Boston. I made certain the house was immaculate for her arrival, something she did comment upon—“My God, Hannah, you really are a housewife.” I ensured that the icebox was full, and that there were a couple of casseroles ready for defrosting in the freezer.
“We’re going to put this entire episode behind us,” Mom said to me on the day she got back home. “We’re going to forget that all this has happened, and carry on as normal.”
I went pale with shock. The nerve—the chutzpah—of the woman. But rather than tangle with her, I just nodded quietly—and, later that day, walked over to the bus station in town and bought myself a one-way ticket to Boston the next afternoon.
Dad had gone into withdrawn mode ever since she’d come out of her coma. He never did tell me what was said between them during their first post-suicide-attempt chat. Nor did he seem willing or eager to discuss how he was feeling right now and how things between them would progress from here. Instead, he seemed to realize that he was now trapped.
The morning I left, I brought Mom her breakfast. I’d overslept slightly, so when I got to her room, it was almost nine-thirty. She was already sitting up in bed, reading that week’s edition of The New Yorker. Near the phone by the bed was a notepad. I glanced at it, and noticed that Mom had scribbled down a phone number with a Boston area code. I was suddenly nervous.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said, putting the tray down on the bed. “Tea and toast as usual. Is that enough for you?”
“So you’re starting to teach school again tomorrow?” she asked, completely ignoring my question.
“That’s right,” I said.
“The Douglas School in Brookline, isn’t it?”
“I don’t remember mentioning it to you.”
“Your father told me when I asked him last night. And I just called the Douglas School this morning—and do you know what they said?”
I met her cold gaze. And said, “They told you that they had to let me go last week because my mother was at death’s door.”
“You told them I tried to kill myself?” she asked, her voice perfectly reasonable.
“No, I didn’t think that was any of their business.”
“But you just lied to me about having to return to Boston to start work. You’re out of work, aren’t you?”
“Yes, thanks to you, I’m out of work.”
A thin smile appeared on my mother’s lips.
“You didn’t have to rush back here to join the deathwatch, but you did. However, now that I am back in the land of the living, you are rushing back to Boston, even though there’s no job to go back to. So would you mind explaining why you’re running off so fast?”
“Because I don’t want to be around you.”
The thin smile grew tighter.
“Yes, I did think that was your reason. And to be blunt about it, Hannah dear, I don’t care. I really don’t. I received the apology I deserved from you. So now, if you want to see me again, fine. If you don’t, that’s fine too. The choice is entirely yours.”
That night, as I sat seething in our kitchen, telling Dan what she had said to me, I vowed to keep her as far outside my life as possible. Dan certainly concurred with this.
“Do yourself a favor,” he said. “Cut her off.”
As hard as that was to accept, I followed his advice—not by completely ending any contact between us, but by simply maintaining the most minimal of communications with her. During the few weeks I had left in Boston, I made a point of phoning her every Sunday morning for a polite, controlled, unemotional conversation about her well-being. If she asked me any questions about myself, I’d respond. But only if she asked.
When we got back to Vermont at the end of August, filling the time productively became an obsession. I threw myself into classes, but dropped French in favor of a History of Education course, because speaking French in Vermont only served to remind me that I’d stopped myself from living in Paris the next year.
I kept such thoughts at bay, except when Margy sent the occasional postcard from Paris—regaling me, in one hundred words or less, with some tart observation about French stand-up toilets, or why Gitanes tasted like an exhaust pipe, or how she would never again sleep with a Romanian émigré saxophonist with dentures.
Did I feel envy for Margy’s adventures in France? Absolutely (though I could have definitely lived without sex with the toothless Romanian émigré). But I kept busy and I plowed ahead through junior year.
Two weeks after we started the winter term, Dan came back from med school holding a letter and looking pleased. He’d just got news that he’d been accepted for an internship in Providence.
“I know it’s not the most glamorous of places,” he said, “but this is a great break for us—and Rhode Island Hospital is such a great facility. Hell, half the people in my class are having to make do with internships in Nebraska or Iowa City. At least we’re still staying in the Northeast. Anyway, the good news is that they don’t want me to start until mid-July, which means we could definitely go to Paris for our honeymoon.”
That made me pause for thought.
“Is that a proposal?” I asked.
“Yes, it is.”
I moved over to the window and looked out at the snow.
“You know,” I said, “when I was seventeen, I vowed I would never get married. But I hadn’t counted on meeting you . . .”
“Well, I am very glad you did.”
“I’m glad too,” I said, turning back to him.
“So does that mean you accept?”
I nodded.
So there it was: I was going to marry Dan. My future was tethered to his and, as such, it was secure.
Around three days after this conversation, Dan received some annoying news. Two interns at Rhode Island Hospital had just left, and as they were now short-staffed, they needed him to start work right after graduation.
“Can’t you negotiate?” I asked.
“They’re really adamant I begin on June 8. If I say no, the next guy on the list will get the internship. And the fact that it’s Rhode Island Hospital, where most of the interns came out of Ivy League medical schools . . .”
“So we’re not going to be able to have that month in Paris after all?”
“Things change. I’m sorry.”
I swallowed my disappointment. Ten days later—on one of those rare perfect la
te-summer New England days, where the sky was a great big dome of blue and the August mugginess was mitigated by a tangy wind—I married Dan in the First Unitarian Church in Burlington. The service—short, unsanctimonious, and to the point—went off without a hitch. So too did the lunch in the Old Town Hall. Dan made a very nice speech about how I was the best thing that ever happened to him. Dad, of course, was in erudite form—saying how, in a world of constant political uncertainty and ongoing generational conflict, it was a “rare and wonderful thing” to have a daughter who was also such a great friend and such a great support against “life’s usual vicissitudes,” and that, in his modest parental opinion, Dan was a most lucky fellow. In my little speech, I gave effusive thanks to my dad for teaching me that curiosity is one of the most essential components of life, and for always treating me as an equal (a near-truth); to Dan for showing me that good guys aren’t an endangered species; and to Mom for “endlessly challenging me” (a comment which, as intended, was wide open to interpretation), and for throwing such a good bash.
Two days later, we moved to Providence. We found another run-down apartment in another clapboard house, which I knew I would spend much of the summer fixing up. And I did manage to find a full-time teaching job in a private day school in town, teaching English and American history to sixth-graders. And Dan’s father gave us a great wedding gift. It was a four-year-old Volvo station wagon—Electric Orange with cracked brown leather seats—which we both thought was the height of cool.
Margy, meanwhile, had put her Paris plans on hold. Her mother had fallen down a flight of stairs while smashed, and had been confined to a wheelchair with a broken hip.
“It looks like I have to play dutiful daughter and stay with her for the summer,” she said during a phone call. “As you can imagine, I am not pleased being forced into this Florence Nightingale role—and often wonder, in my darker moments, if she deliberately tumbled down those stairs to keep me from returning to Paris.”
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