Hope and Other Luxuries

by Clare B. Dunkle

  “I do, too. They’re great guys. They came out to visit me. We went to the movies together.”

  I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. It had to be a nightmare—one of the many nightmares I’d had this last year, where I was trying to reach her, trying to call out to her . . .

  “Valerie, that’s not knowing somebody!” I cried.

  “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

  I took a breath and tried another tack.

  “Do you even know where these great guys live?” I asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Where?”

  Please give me a name. Please, please! Something to go on . . .

  “That’s my business. Bye, Momma.”

  No, this wasn’t happening, not in real life. This was like the script from some hideous crime forensics show or some bad horror movie. It wasn’t real, it couldn’t be real that my daughter was actually saying, “I need to go now. They’re busy loading up the car.”

  This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening!

  “Valerie!” I heard myself scream. “For God’s sake, no! At least give me a zip code! What will we tell the police?”

  Then the phone clicked. And she was gone.

  I don’t know how Joe or Elena took the news. I don’t know if they could eat that week or couldn’t. I don’t know what demons Joe wrestled. I don’t know if Elena lay awake and thought, I told them! I warned them! She certainly could have.

  All I know is what happened to me.

  After everything I had done for Valerie—after everything I had tried to do—I couldn’t believe that it had actually ended like this. I could believe that Valerie would do this to her father and sister. Both Joe and Elena had built up their distance and stayed behind their walls of disapproval. But me? I had no walls. I had no protection.

  I had only hope and love.

  It was to me that Valerie had come over the course of her long, strange illness, and it was to me that she had confided her confused hopes and dreams. “Listen to this song,” she had told me countless times. “Listen, Momma. It describes exactly how I feel.”

  And I had listened. I had listened, and I hadn’t judged. I had tried to be with her wherever she was. I had followed my lost sheep so far away—so far away! As far as she would let me. And I hadn’t asked for perfection. I hadn’t asked for health. All I had ever asked—the most I had ever asked—was that she take one step toward health, toward goodness. One step back to me.

  One step back toward the light.

  My daughter is an amazing person. It was my mantra. It was my faith. My daughter will be a better person than I am.

  And now my daughter was gone.

  I crumpled. I did. After a solid year of worry, of anguish, of panicky insomniac plans for how to drag my family whole and entire through the next day—the next week—the next year—I curled up under a mound of blankets and shut down.

  I had no more thoughts. No more hopes. No dreams.

  I lay motionless and watched gray blobs float across the salmon-colored dusk inside my eyelids. Or I opened my eyes and watched the flimsy shadows of tree branches slide across the cool blue wallpaper of the bedroom. Occasionally, stripy cat Tor might jump up and make a warm nest at my feet. Occasionally, a bird might sing outside. In the evening, Joe or Elena would come in and stand by the bed. But when I heard the door open, I would pretend to be asleep.

  I hid my injured soul away inside my safest, most comforting daydreams. I lay in bed, and my imagination brought me other worlds where characters lay in bed. They lay between crisp sheets in a tuberculosis hospital, surrounded by snow and fir trees and the clean, clear, ice-cold mountain air. Or they lay paralyzed in rose-scented hot baths while encouraging attendants massaged their shattered limbs.

  The best doctors and nurses tiptoed in and out of my daydreams and brought my characters relief and care. But they couldn’t get better because I couldn’t get better. We would never get well again.

  A part of me was missing now, torn out of my soul. Call it trust. Call it hope for the future. Whatever it was, that piece of my soul had kept me going through all those anxious months.

  But it wasn’t there anymore. My daughter had taken it with her.

  And my daughter . . .

  My daughter was gone.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Joe and Elena teamed up and applied themselves to sleuthing on the Internet. Elena cracked Valerie’s passwords and found out where she was. She was living with a fundamentalist family in Georgia. They had taken her in because they thought we had kicked her out. They thought she had nowhere else to go.

  “I’ve had it with her!” Elena told me, sitting on the edge of my bed. “I never want to speak to her again.”

  She’s safe, I thought. My wayward child is safe. And all those pictures my imagination had been showing me—dirty bones poking out through a pile of mildewed leaves, white fingers rising like mushrooms from muddy ground—grayed out in a tear-soaked haze of relief.

  When Elena left, I got out of bed and padded into the bathroom. The late-afternoon sun was shining in. A real-life hot shower felt so much better than any number of imaginary rose-scented baths.

  “Tor!” I heard Elena cry. “Not again!”

  “I’ll take care of it,” I called.

  My poor stripy kitty had started throwing up again. His delicate stomach couldn’t handle the stress of my worrisome absence. Antacids, I thought as I pulled on clothes. Six small meals. Just a teaspoon of food at first. I stopped to put in my contact lenses, and suddenly the world had clarity again. It had hard edges and purpose.

  I walked back into the bedroom and saw dirty clothes to pick up.

  I walked into the kitchen and washed dirty dishes.

  Time passed. Our house was quiet. There was no reason to fight anymore. Elena spent her time at school or at the hospital, and Joe worked his long days at the office. Once again, I wandered through silent rooms, as I had after the girls had left for boarding school. Once again, I had no job. I had no projects.

  But I was different now. The piece of my soul that Valerie had taken with her when she left—that part of me stayed lost.

  My isolation was absolute. Why would I want that to change? What could I say to the people I knew?

  “My daughter is gone. She dropped out of college and disappeared.”

  “What? Valerie? Isn’t that your brilliant, funny girl, the one who seemed so wise when she was a child? Didn’t you say she graduated from high school with honors? Didn’t you say she was making As in college?”

  “Yes, but she’s ill. She’s been ill for a long time.”

  “Ill how? You never really explained that.”

  “Just ill. Unhappy . . .”

  “Unhappy how? You never really told us what was wrong.”

  “She never told us what was wrong, either. Depression, maybe. The doctors weren’t sure. But why are we even talking about this? She’s gone.”

  “Gone? But why? Why is she gone?”

  Why was she gone?

  Why?

  That was the question I lived with every second. It pulsed through my arteries with every beat of my heart. I breathed and ate and slept that question. I couldn’t possibly bear to hear it spoken out loud.

  So I let the walls of my house define me. I had no intention of reaching out for a life beyond their limits. I was content to remain alone. But when it comes to the imagination I have, I am never alone.

  As I sat and drank my tea at the dining room table, I found an old friend sitting beside me. She had an oval face like Valerie’s, and dark hazel eyes, and like me, she, too, had felt no desire to leave home. She had long brown hair put up in a bun and terrible handwriting like mine, and more than anyone else, she understood what I was going through.

  This hazel-eyed woman was the Victorian writer Emily Brontë, the creator of my childhood playmate, Heathcliff. She died of tuberculosis in 1848. But when we are truly great, we never really die.


  Delicate kitty Tor was welcome in her shadowy company. Emily’s own animals had filled her house and occupied the first place in her heart. She had once told a classroom full of her pupils that she preferred the school dog to any of them.

  Nor were my spiritual bruises over the loss of my daughter any obstacle between me and Emily’s presence. “Well, some may hate, and some may scorn,” Emily told me with casual grace, and it was obvious that she couldn’t care less if they did. Her own beloved, talented brother had drunk himself to death right in the same house with her, but she was strong and independent, a remarkable woman who had achieved remarkable things, and my imagination brought her to me now as a kind of sister.

  I had looked up to Emily Brontë since I was a little girl, when my mother had first told me stories about her. I remember hearing, breathless with wonder, how she saved a child from a rabid dog—and then walked home and cauterized the bite she’d received with a red-hot poker. The world as Emily knew it was a harsh, brutal place, but she had faced that world without flinching. And her antihero, Heathcliff, true child of his powerful author mother, had helped me face my freakish childhood without flinching.

  Now, vulnerable and lonely, as I tried to pull myself together again, I reread her classic novel, Wuthering Heights, and I found its barren, windswept world a safe place to be. No one there looked down on my crippled spirit. No one there was whole.

  New characters began to walk with me on the edges of Wuthering Heights’ stormy world. Half of those characters were already ghosts. I built a new world for them, and as I began to write, I poured all the pain of the last two years into my story:

  Deep in the nighttime, when not a spark gleamed indoors, nor a star without, the dead maid stood by my bedside again and summoned me from sleep. She shook me as if to rouse me and take me with her, those chilly fingers sliding down my arm.

  And that bleak, savage story healed me.

  It sounds strange to say that something so grim and brutal could help heal the damage I felt, but it happened because my characters themselves refused to give up hope. Even in that grim world, they found compassion in unexpected places, and those moments of compassion shone out in the darkness there like lighthouse beams. Step by step, they guided me back to serenity and forgiveness.

  As the darkness and confusion drained out of me and into my dark, tumultuous story, I began to rouse myself to look after my family again. Joe’s work was still exhausting, but he seemed to be finding his way back to his old self. The commander who had made his workdays such a burden was finally retired and gone. And Valerie, out of touch though she still was, seemed from the hints we could glean online to have found some sort of balance. At least it was clear that she was safe.

  It was Elena who worried me now. Outwardly calm and successful, as well as popular with her friends, she was carrying a seething cauldron of anger within. And since Elena was keeping the secret of her torn-up family to herself, she had no one else besides me to talk to about it.

  I began to worry that Elena’s successful school days weren’t just a reflection of her love of learning anymore. Elena still seemed to be trying to differentiate herself from Valerie. She was wearing herself out in a fierce competition with her “deadbeat” sister, even though Valerie had left the playing field.

  Maybe this pointless competition was the only way Elena had found to keep her absent sister in her life.

  But it didn’t seem healthy. It wasn’t bringing her any relief. Unlike my story, which had taken me through the darkness to the light, Elena’s strategy seemed to be keeping her from moving forward.

  “Why don’t you talk to somebody about all this?” I suggested. “Maybe work out some of that anger.”

  “Are you kidding?” she said. “I don’t want anybody to know that Valerie even exists!”

  I had heard this so often that it didn’t even hurt anymore.

  “No, I mean a counselor. They have to protect your privacy, right? A counselor would keep anything you say confidential.”

  So Elena talked to the school psychologist, Mr. Temple, and he suggested that she go to grief counseling at the military hospital. Once again, I mentally rolled up my sleeves and tackled the phone system in the military psychiatric department. But here was some good news: since Elena was a minor, she wouldn’t need to deal with their busy staff. She would see Dr. Petras, the child psychiatrist who had been called in to consult about Valerie.

  Elena and I went in for the first appointment with him in mid-May.

  “I don’t really think I need it, though,” Elena said as we waited outside his office. “Mr. Temple gave me some good advice, and anyway, the school year’s almost over. I’ll get a nice break and rest up and forget about this sucky year. Barbara and I have plans to work on our tans and do the summer reading list together.”

  “Well, why don’t you go anyway?” I said. “After all, it can’t hurt.”

  So Elena went off and talked to the social worker there. Then, after about half an hour, Dr. Petras saw us in his office for a few minutes. I was glad he had helped us through Valerie’s hospitalization. It meant that he would understand why Elena was so upset.

  “I’d like to put you on Zoloft,” he told Elena. “It takes a few weeks to start working, so how about I see you again in a month?”

  “Sure,” Elena said as she handed the prescription to me. It was par for the course at this hospital: more pills. But then again, sometimes those pills helped. They hadn’t done much for Valerie, but they still meant a lot for Joe’s peace of mind.

  And maybe the Zoloft did help. Little by little, Elena seemed to relax. Even though she started the summer with a million frenetic plans, as the weeks passed, she began to let perfection slide and started having more fun. She slept in a little later in the morning and badgered me to order pizzas in the evening. She and Barbara worked on their tans, and she got Barbara interested in volunteering at the hospital.

  Slowly, the mood in the house tilted back toward happy, even without Valerie’s soft singing and sunny smile. Joe began to look glad to be home again as he walked through the door at night. He and Elena watched angst-ridden reality TV shows together and wagered cheerfully over who would be the rudest contestant. I finished the rough draft of my tribute to Emily Brontë and decided that she would have liked it.

  Then, on the evening of my birthday in June, a one-line email popped up in my inbox:

  hey momma happy birthday! i’m in georgia now, don’t know if you knew. sorry about everything, miss you and love you so much, val

  I read it over and over. I realized that I was sitting perfectly still, as if a butterfly had landed on my hand.

  Elena’s second monthly grief-counseling session came up that same week. Now, she felt even more ambivalent about it. “He upped the Zoloft,” she said afterward, “but he barely talked to me. Most of the time, it was that social worker again. Anyway, how can somebody with a mustache that stupid possibly help me overcome my problems?”

  I laughed. “It does look pretty silly. But it’s a rare privilege to be able to keep facial hair in the military, so I’m sure he wants to show it off.”

  “He looks like a sad, noble dog,” Elena said. “He looks unhappy in his own skin. He looks like he thinks people are whispering behind his back, but he’s too well-mannered to listen.”

  “And look,” I said. “We are!”

  Now it was Elena’s turn to laugh.

  “I’m not whispering,” she said with mock aggression. “I’d say it to his face!”

  By the time the third grief-counseling appointment came around in early July, we were all back to living life again. Valerie and I were corresponding regularly. Joe was down to eight or nine work hours in a day. Elena was out almost constantly with her friends, not just going through the motions but having real fun. And I was on the final read-through of my Brontë manuscript—the one with all my darkness buried in it.

  Tor and our black cat, Simon, and I were in the garden room, a tiny scrap o
f a room just off our kitchen. It was so small that two overstuffed brown chairs filled it to capacity. Tor lay in the shadow of my armchair, protected from the afternoon sun, but Simon lay in the full force of golden rays so intense that his dusty black coat was the color of bittersweet chocolate. It was a wonder he didn’t burst into flames.

  I glanced up from my laptop as Elena walked by.

  “Pizza tonight?” I offered.

  “Meh,” she said, opening the fridge and pouring out some juice. “I’ve got that stupid psychiatric appointment tomorrow. It’s a waste of time. We ought to just call and cancel it.”

  “Well, you wanted to go to the hospital anyway to do some volunteering,” I said. “And it seems polite to go see him one last time, even if all you do is tell him you don’t think you need to see him anymore.”

  Elena frowned at her juice glass. “I guess so,” she said. Then she put the empty glass in the sink and walked away.

  We’ve done it, I thought as I went back to my work. My family and I have survived the darkest days of our lives. With a little luck—except, there’s no such thing as luck—this manuscript will be the only evidence that those dark days even existed.

  It was July again, just over a year since Valerie’s overdose. And it finally seemed like a long time ago.

  Pizza tonight, I thought.That’s easy. I’ll have this manuscript on my agent’s desk by Friday. And we should take a vacation before school starts next month. Maybe England. Maybe the south of France. And as the warm summer sunshine came streaming through the windows, I meditated on pleasant futures, near and far.

  It’s when you let down your guard that the ax falls.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The next afternoon, I was sitting in the very same spot, curled up in one of the big, overstuffed brown chairs with my laptop open on my lap. But, although sunshine flooded the garden room with light, I was seeing another place entirely. It started between my ears, at the top of my head, and slowly grew outward, increasing in size and color until the world in front of me blurred out. Then, although I was still dimly aware of Tor twitching his paws in his sleep, that other place was all I saw.