Tragedy Plus Time

by Adam Cayton-Holland

  And when those types of shows really swing for the fences, when the voice-over hammers home the lesson of the episode, and the family breaks bread as every character seizes their medium close-up of them laughing, of them as happy as they can allow themselves to be, you find yourself overcome. You choke on the emotion; your eyes wet with tears. Because you want that so bad for your family. You want that exact scene, that solid core, stronger than ever before, happy, unburdened, together. The children get married, the clan grows bigger, but it always comes back to the group gathered around that table. It always comes back to the family.

  And we had that. For a brief moment, once Lydia returned to us, we had that. My mom, my dad, Anna, Lydia, me. We were all right where we were supposed to be, living our best lives, thriving. It may have been the happiest we ever were.

  But looking back now it’s impossible not to see that the cracks were beginning to form. Or maybe they were there all along, right beneath the surface, and we just didn’t know to look for them—like little gnomes hidden in the paintings on the walls.

  LITOST

  “Lydia had a bit of a breakdown,” my mother began. Her voice sounded thin, with sputtering stops and starts. You could tell she was trying not to cry, that she had been crying.

  “Breakdown?” I said. “What kind of breakdown?”

  I was in Mexico. I had met up with my buddy Gabe, who ran a student-travel company. He’d recently finished leading twenty high schoolers around the rural Mexican countryside. I’d recently had a Denver Post feature anoint me the next big thing to come out of Denver. We both had cause to celebrate. So why was my mom calling me? I didn’t buy any temporary international plan. We had agreed to communicate via e-mail. Something was wrong. I knew it the second I saw the caller name pop up on my cell phone: Home.

  That panicked feeling. It still happens to me all the time, whenever something seems off or irregular about the timing of a call. It happens more than you would think. My heart starts beating out of my chest; my breath becomes short.

  This is it. The worst is here. Again. You knew the dark cloud would be coming back for you and the people you love. You knew you couldn’t avoid it forever. Those times when it was gone, you were fooling yourself. You weren’t safe. It always wins.

  My mom filled me in. It was weird, she said. Lydia had come into my dad’s office that morning and couldn’t keep it together. She broke down in tears and started confessing all these things, like she couldn’t keep them inside of her anymore, and was ashamed of them. She was like a pot boiling over, onto the stove, the floor. Everywhere. Lydia hadn’t been able to sleep for months. She said she couldn’t turn her brain off. That it howled at her. My mom said she kept talking like that. About her brain. As if it was someone else, someone controlling her, not a partner working in unison. My brain won’t let me. Unable to sleep, Lydia would try to pass the time by reading but her brain wouldn’t allow her to. She would read the individual letters in one word and then immediately scan back across them in reverse, reciting them in her mind, over and over, forwards, backwards, forwards, backwards, barely able to move on to the next word, let alone finish a sentence. An hour would pass and she wouldn’t have read a paragraph. She felt like a prisoner in her own head.

  My mom explained how my father had assured Lydia that it was okay. That she didn’t need to feel any shame about telling us and that he wished she shared this sooner. He consoled her and told her that everything was going to be all right. We would get her some help, find a good therapist, do everything we possibly could to get to the bottom of it. My mom said Lydia seemed relieved to no longer be carrying the burden of her secret. I asked if I could call Lydia. My mom said she was asleep, sleeping like the dead.

  I texted Lydia that I loved her and to call me when she woke up. I cracked a beer and headed out to the patio, overlooking the Pacific. I couldn’t believe that I didn’t know any of this. Why hadn’t Lydia told me? Why hadn’t I noticed? If she was so miserable and sleep-deprived, you would think that some of it would have spilled out into her everyday life. But she kept it so hidden.

  Magical realism was her favorite genre of literature. Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez. She loved Milan Kundera. Anna turned her on to him. In The Book of Laughter and Forgiving Kundera writes, “Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.” Lydia had recently changed her screen name to it. Litost. Was that a cry for help? If so we missed it. I just thought it was a great screen name. Lydia’s nickname was Lee. On certain platforms she went as “LeeToast.” Nickname combined with obscure literary reference? Bravo, Little Sis! The internet awaits you.

  But now, in the darkness of this “breakdown,” it seemed sinister. It felt true.

  “Is there a history of mental illness in your family?” Gabe asked me after I told him what was going on.

  And suddenly I remembered, as if realizing for the first time, that there was. One I had felt so connected to when I was depressed in college, but had not thought about for years. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t still there.

  My grandma’s cousin Wallace threw himself off a bridge in Richmond, Virginia, in the forties. Had enough one day and leapt to his death off the Lee Bridge, right into the rushing James River down below. Lee. Just like Lydia. That was the story of Wallace; that was all anyone said about him. They didn’t talk about his wife and children that he left behind. They didn’t speculate about what drove him to it. Whenever anyone asked about it some relative would respond about not knowing anything about that whole mess. A suicide footnote. There was many an ancestor on my mom’s side that spent time inside the walls of Virginia’s Eastern State Mental Hospital, including one unfortunate relative named Emmett who was habitually in and out for “nerves.” Their mental illness was nothing out of the ordinary, but it was also nothing to be spoken about.

  Then there was my dad’s sister Barbara, my aunt, whom we barely ever saw. She’d visit every few years and it was always, like, oh yeah. Dad has a sister. A manic sister. He let on very little about her as a child but the glimmer that we got was not pretty: her carrying on inappropriately with their cousin, her chasing after him with a knife when they were kids, her trying to poison him. My dad didn’t talk about it much. Later I learned that Barbara ended up in a mental institute as a teenager and received shock therapy. Poor thing. But she was also brilliant. Several of her paintings hung in my parents’ house. She had been a gifted piano player. Just like Lydia.

  My dad left that family when he could; after his mother passed away, he was off to go start his own new life. Barbara died years later in her fifties due to prescription drug complications: not an overdose, but issues from a body ravaged by medication. She didn’t kill herself, my dad swears. At the time of her death, she had a boyfriend, her first in years. My dad remembers her as happy and in love. She hadn’t taken her own life, but you got the sense that because of her mental illness, she never really got to live it either.

  I remembered the last time I ever saw Barbara. She came for a visit and we walked a few blocks down Montview Boulevard to a nearby garage sale. She bought me a novelty mirror that I hung in the treehouse in the backyard. It would contort your face into all sorts of ghoulish fun-house masks when you looked in it. There were words painted on the glass in blue: Objects in Mirror May be Closer Than They Appear.

  These people were all there in our bloodlines, victims of something sinister looming in our genes. Was Lydia becoming one of them?

  “You okay man?” Gabe asked me.

  I was crying.

  “Come on,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. “We should head out to a bar.”

  Lydia didn’t reach out to me for the rest of that trip. I kept calling, e-mailing, doing everything I could to reach out to her. But I suppose she didn’t feel up to it. I e-mailed my mom asking how she was. If there were any updates. She wrote back.

  Things aren’t going well for Lydia. She had a big meltdown today, crying and begging for m
edical help. Her doctor put her on a major anxiety drug—big, knockout dose—while he finds a shrink. She is sleeping now. Apparently she has been averaging only an hour or two a night for some time now. She has been very, very manic. We’re all sad and scared. But we will keep a close eye on her and help her get what she needs. If she’ll let us. Maybe it’s good that she is finally getting to a place where she wants help. I love you. Be safe.

  I asked my mom if I needed to cut my trip short to come home and help. She said to stay and enjoy myself. There was nothing I could do that they weren’t already doing.

  Gabe left Mexico a day before me and I spent a strange day in Sayulita alone. I moved to a crummy hotel off of the main zocalo. After a hot, mostly sleepless night, I awoke to find a boxing ring had been set up in the center of town. The streets were buzzing. There would be fights that morning.

  A crew of young boys in gloves and headgear lounged on the ropes, waiting for their respective turns in the ring. But before they could fight, the organizer of the event got into the middle of the ring and whipped the crowd into a frenzy. He talked about how education was abhorrent in the area. There were no opportunities for the youth. Boxing, he continued, represented a viable way out. If these young boys trained hard and remained focused, the entire world was theirs for the taking. Who knew what they could achieve! And it all started right there, right then, in that boxing ring in Sayulita. For him it was that simple, that linear: boxing, hard work, escape, success. As if nothing else could get in the way. As if life didn’t have so much else in store for every little fighter that day.

  A spirited clanging of the bell, then the fights. First there were six-year-olds, then eight-year-olds, then ten, and so on by twos all the way into adulthood. Every twenty minutes another pairing of young boys took the ring and proceeded to beat the living shit out of each other, one boy in red trunks, one in blue. They fought like their lives depended on it, like there was only one carrot dangling there in front of them, like there wasn’t enough to go around.

  I didn’t have the stomach for it. I couldn’t even get off in some wannabe-Hemingway way, pat myself on the back for being in a foreign country alone and watching something violent, like real men are supposed to do. All I saw were two desperate little boys bludgeoning one another when they should be catching insects in jars and going to birthday parties. While the audience howled for more. I left the square and headed down to the beach, depressed, wondering why life has to be so goddamn hard for some people.

  STILL LIFE OF LYDIA

  The next few months played out like a ball of knots, impossible to unwind. None of it made sense.

  “Maybe you’d be happier somewhere else,” I said to Lydia. “Somewhere away from us. Back in Colorado Springs. Or you could go back to Ecuador if it would help you feel better.”

  I didn’t sugarcoat anything. This was Lydia. We could be straight-up with each other. No bullshit. I felt like my shadow was eclipsing her, Anna’s too. Did she need to get away from us? Did she need to be alone somewhere?

  “That’s fucking ridiculous,” Lydia said. “I’m not threatened by you guys. I love you guys. And I’m happy being home. This is where I want to be. I’m just going through some shit right now.”

  She was already seeing a new shrink—her second since her confession to my father—and she was taking prescriptions pills to help her sleep regularly. It was a strange turn of events, she insisted, but one that was isolated.

  “I already feel more in control of my brain,” she said.

  So we believed her. Why wouldn’t we? We had no reason not to.

  And sometimes she seemed like she was doing so well.

  Like one night, I got home from a weekend of shows out of town. It was late on a Sunday evening, and I was exhausted. I just wanted to hang out with my dog, eat some sugar cereal, catch up on my DVR. Lydia had other plans. She called me and reported that she was having an impromptu backyard party and that my attendance was required. It was all very matter of fact.

  “Not a chance, Lee,” I said. “I’m spent.”

  She was undeterred. Lydia never accepted a first offer. She let loose with her pitch: tons of comics were going to be there, all my friends. She was shy and didn’t want to host a party without me. Everyone was wanting her to do better, to not retreat inward, this was her way of doing just that.

  It was Lydia to a T: impassioned defense of an irrational position. In Lydia’s mind a dinner party at six on a Saturday was no different than a throw-down on a Sunday at midnight. Weren’t they both just gatherings of people? So she kept after me, relentlessly. I shot down every entreaty, she just reloaded and kept firing. This was our brother-sister ping-pong; a game we knew quite well. I knew that I would lose. Because Lydia always won. She was a mule-child, as stubborn as they come. After twenty minutes of back-and-forth I caved and told her I’d be right over.

  It was a late-summer night. I walked the seven or eight blocks to her house. I skipped the front door and hopped over the side gate which never opened right. It was like I landed in a painting: Still Life of Lydia. Tiki torches lined the thin portion of side-yard leading to the back. On the picnic table, dishes of fruit and cheese and crackers were artfully arranged. There was a cooler of beer on ice. There was music playing. Twenty of our friends were in attendance, all laughing and enjoying themselves. Lydia’s dogs Anya and Wren were out, yapping and jumping and loving the company and attention. It was beautiful. Absolutely perfect. A snapshot of the kind of life that you would hope your sibling leads. And there was Lydia in the center of it all. She didn’t notice me at first so I just watched her: the little hostess, so normal, so beautiful, so vibrant. When she saw me she lit up, relieved that I finally showed. Her eyes sparkled at me, as if to say, “See, Adam? Aren’t you glad you came?!” And I was. I really was.

  How could she possibly be doing so poorly when here she was, thriving?

  Because Lydia had become a pendulum, capable of opposing extremes. For every yin, there was a yang.

  Like another night, we had a Grawlix live show and Lydia was flaking, again. She had started doing that a lot. I kept calling her but she wouldn’t answer her phone. The other comics were backstage, grumbling. We were waiting to do a tech rehearsal but it was impossible without the person running tech. And the show started in an hour. Finally, Lydia answered and let loose with a string of vague apologies and explanations for her behavior. She didn’t have gas in her car. Her computer was messed up. Also she was feeling socially awkward. I called bullshit on every excuse. She just reloaded and kept firing. Brother-sister ping-pong. Of course I was bound to lose.

  I told her to just get to the goddamn show already. She said she would send her boyfriend Zack instead. He’d be there in a half hour. He was there forty-five minutes later, carrying a laptop with a zip drive Lydia gave him full of all our tech cues, the video for the show, the music. He was apologetic and eager to help, like somehow this was his fault and not my little sister’s fuck-up. I met him on the street and ushered him past a line of people waiting angrily in the rain. Doors were supposed to be open fifteen minutes ago.

  That same girl I marveled at in her backyard, I was now furious with. I had no patience for any of it. I was totally uncharitable in those moments. I sent Lydia bitchy texts like Thanks a fucking lot, Lee. I tried to have empathy after her breakdown but the days grew into weeks and then months and Lydia’s behavior kept flip-flopping so often it was impossible to live in that headspace of understanding. Sometimes she was great and completely on top of things, other times she was a total flake. It infuriated me.

  I couldn’t contextualize. I’d had twenty-six years of Lydia as normal, capable, reliable, and that was all I’d had. I was not used to this new version. And I resented it. I helped her, consoled her, asked her how it was going with her third, fourth, and fifth new shrinks and where her head was at. But I also grew frustrated. Often. Like come on, Lee. Get your shit together.

  Anna understood. We commiserated. Bitched ab
out Lydia fucking up. She blew tech at a big trial for Anna and my dad. They needed her to compile hundreds of pieces of evidence and show the slides to the jury. Instead she came into the courtroom so exhausted she was barely functional. She moped at the prosecution table like a petulant teen. Anna had to take over and execute the grunt paralegal work in addition to trying the case. Seven months pregnant. With a three-year-old at home. Anna was so exhausted and hormonal she cried in the courthouse bathroom during recesses. She was just so over it all. Lydia had completely dropped the ball.

  The memories continued to stack up, one on top of the other. A sloppy pile.

  Lydia started dating a new guy, some DJ over a decade older than her. I ran into him at Whole Foods once. He approached me right there in the middle of the fruits and vegetables and told me he had nothing but good intentions with Lydia. We were casual acquaintances, had a few friends in common. Then he started hooking up with my little sister. I wanted to tell him to fuck off. That she was a child compared to him. But I just shook his hand.

  Lydia’s ex, Zach, moved across the alley. They remained close friends. He was intimately familiar with her mental state and checked on her often. Including the day after Thanksgiving, when he found her strung out on too much Ambien. He took her to the ER. She made him swear he wouldn’t tell any of us, but Zach felt like he couldn’t keep it a secret. So he cheated and called Sam, Anna’s husband. Not a blood-relation anyway. Sam immediately told Anna. They were in Lincoln, Nebraska, at the time for Thanksgiving with Sam’s family. So Anna called my parents. They hurried to the hospital. I had a Grawlix show that night. Last Friday of the month. Lydia was supposed to work it. By that point I was so accustomed to her not showing I always had a backup on hand. I didn’t even learn she was in the hospital until after the show. As far as I knew she just wasn’t returning my texts. Flaking again.