“I see,” I said. “Well, what do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Elena said.
A year ago—six weeks ago—my heart would have leapt at this. I would have seen it as a fork in the road, a chance for a fresh start. I would have launched into a passionate appeal. I would have pinned all my hopes on it.
But now, I found a parking space and turned off the ignition. “I’ll be about twenty minutes,” I said. “You can wait in the car if you want.”
“No, I’ll go in,” Elena said.
She trailed me around the store as I checked items off my list and moved them into the cart. Once, I had studied her every look and gesture in the grocery store, and I had put in the cart anything she had glanced at. But today, I didn’t. I had my list, and I worked my way through it.
I was standing next to the frozen meat when she spoke again. “I’ve made my decision,” she said. “I’m going back into treatment.”
Six weeks ago, I would have burst into tears of relief. I would have hugged her and told her I knew she could do it. But now, I looked around the freezer cases. It was always so cold over here. I’d wanted chicken thighs, but all they had were bags of drumsticks.
“Did you hear me?” Elena said.
Did I? Yes. Then why was I not answering? Treatment meant weight gain even if it meant nothing else. Weight gain meant a reprieve of a few months from finding her dead.
My heart should leap with joy and relief.
But it didn’t.
“You can’t go back to Clove House,” I said as I opened the freezer door and pulled out a bag of drumsticks.
“I know that,” she said. “I’m going to go to Sandalwood, across town. And this time,” she added, “this time, I’ll make it work.”
Wasn’t that wonderful? What was wrong with me? Why wasn’t I brimming with excitement? Why wasn’t I walking on air?
“I won’t do the calls for you,” I said as I dropped the icy bag into the cart.
“No, I’ll call, as soon as we get home.”
And that’s exactly what Elena did. She drove herself to the intake interview and arranged to be admitted the following week. And she drove herself to school to withdraw from all her classes.
When the reality of this finally dawned on me—when I finally realized that this was, in fact, going to happen, that my child was going to seek help again and work to find a way back from the brink—I did a thing that nobody understood. Least of all, me.
I lay in bed all day long and cried.
“Are you okay?” Valerie wondered, coming in to check on me.
“I guess,” I sniffled. I honestly had no idea.
Elena came to the door. “Look, if you don’t want me to do treatment, I won’t,” she said. “I thought you’d be happy.”
“I am happy,” I sobbed. “Just shut the door on your way out.”
Joe came home and sat beside me. “I think you’re just feeling relief,” he said.
“Maybe so,” I gulped, wiping my eyes.
But it didn’t feel like relief. It felt as if a room-size lead-gray block of misery had pinned me down to my bed.
“You’ll feel better in the morning,” Joe said. “Elena’s going to be away at therapy all day, and you and Valerie can just spend time playing with Gemma.”
“You think so?” I asked.
I didn’t think so. I couldn’t see that happy day, myself. I saw myself staying there, hiding there, while Valerie worried and Joe got more and more exhausted and depressed and I never wrote another book. And if I didn’t write that Holt book, sooner or later they were going to want their advance money back, and what were we going to do then?
The next morning, Joe and Elena left to go to their respective workplaces—Joe to the office and Elena to Sandalwood. After they were gone, I finally ventured out.
Valerie and Gemma were in the living room. Valerie was sitting on the carpet by the hearth. Gemma was standing on wobbly legs and, handhold by handhold, making her way around the coffee table.
“Hey, Momma,” Valerie said. And Gemma gave a happy cry and waved at me.
“Look out!” I cried, grabbing Gemma’s free hand.
“Okay . . . ,” Valerie said. “What was that about?”
I felt too shaken to answer.
I had seen it all: Gemma was waving at me, and then her free hand slipped, and she toppled sideways and clonked her head on the corner of the hearth. The corner brick hit her right in the temple, and when we lifted her up, there was blood. And then there was wailing, the waiting room, the MRI . . .
“We need to get padding on these corners!” I said. “We need to do that today. The electrical outlets. We haven’t done the outlets!”
“Seriously?” Valerie said. “Momma, she’s never out of our reach. How is she going to get something into an outlet?”
But I was seeing new images: Gemma, finding a pin in the carpet and sticking it into that outlet over there. I could hear her shrill screams and see the burn. Only, in the next instant, I saw her eat the pin instead, and it was so vivid that I started scanning the carpet for pins, even though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen one in this house.
“Your uncle stuck a bobby pin in an outlet when he was two,” I said.
“Yeah, and he became an electrician.”
How can she be so cavalier about this? I thought indignantly. I was shadowing Gemma around the coffee table now, like a spotter in a gymnastics competition.
“Let’s go get childproofing stuff,” I told Valerie. “I’m buying.”
“It’s your money,” she said with a shrug, and she stood up and found her keys.
But being in the car was even worse. I didn’t just see the traffic. I saw exactly how every other car on the road would end up hitting our car. The busy street was like a coach’s whiteboard, with big blue arrows all over it: that van pulls out here, and that gray Mazda turns left now, and that banged-up pickup truck slams on its brakes now . . .
“Watch out!” I said as Valerie made a swift right turn.
“Have I ever had an accident?” Valerie pointed out.
“You could, though,” I said. And then, “Okay, I’m sorry. I guess I’m just a little edgy.”
But over the following days, and then weeks, I realized that I wasn’t just a little edgy. Edgy didn’t begin to describe it.
“Oh!” I gasped as Joe was driving down the freeway.
“What?” Joe demanded, on edge because I was on edge.
“Nothing . . . I just thought that car next to us was coming over into our lane.”
Not true. What I’d really seen was that the car came over, Joe swerved, there was a massive smack and a shock, and the world went spinning as the SUV behind us caught the corner of our bumper. Then came the view through the spiderweb cracks in our windshield of an eighteen-wheeler barreling down on us. I could hear its brakes screaming, see its massive grille, as we sat, stopped dead in the center of the freeway, facing the wrong direction . . .
All that, in milliseconds. It had happened so fast, it was the sight of the eighteen-wheeler that made me gasp.
For months, I had been haunted by that Edward Gorey mother, with her feelings of fluttery panic and feeble cries. Now, she had swallowed me whole. I wasn’t just living with fear anymore. I was living completely inside fear. And the feeble cries were my own.
“Oh, my God!”
“Clare, would you just stop it with the Oh my Gods ? It’s a broken glass! It’s no big deal!”
But that broken glass was a big deal because I had seen Joe’s lacerated hand that didn’t happen, and the severed thumb tendon that didn’t happen, and the emergency room visit that didn’t happen—all in the time it took the glass to fall.
I barely seemed to register that things were getting better. Elena was back in treatment, having her ups and downs, but she was working hard. She was doing a new kind of therapy called DBT, and it seemed to have clicked with her. Little by little, she was filling out and sta
rting to look normal again. She was even sitting down to meals with us.
Clint was doing well in tech school, too. Soon, Valerie and he would be ready to move to their first assignment. Valerie was a joy. Gemma was a dream. And Joe’s job might be grueling, but he was in charge, and he relished the challenge.
My family was doing well again. But if my family was doing so well, then why was I doing so badly?
My nerves were shot, I told myself. My nerves were completely shot. I had heard that expression before and thought I had known what it meant. Only now did I understand.
And it wasn’t just danger that got to me, either. It was . . . well, everything, really.
At the grocery store: “I knew they wouldn’t have the right kind of tuna! I knew I should have picked a different recipe!”
Or, when Joe called from Japan: “I knew you were going to forget something if you put off packing! Now what are we going to do?”
Oh, no! Oh, no! What are we going to do?
So stressful were these wails of terror for me and everyone around me that I tried to stop things before they got that far. I spent my days checking, analyzing, examining, and planning for everything before it had a chance to go wrong. And since my disaster footage warned me ahead of time about everything that possibly could go wrong, my advice was absolutely flawless.
All my family needed to do was listen to that flawless advice. Then nothing bad would ever happen.
“It’s forty-five along here. They have traffic cameras here, you know.”
“Don’t stop to talk now—get that dog to the backyard! She’s been in all night, you know.”
“If you park over here, it’s easier to get past that traffic, and it’s a simple right turn out of the parking lot.”
“Did you remember your wallet? Your phone? Your ID? Your lunch? Your passport? Your meds? Extra diapers?”
As the weeks unrolled, my entire family started sending me subtle clues that I had morphed into a madwoman.
“Whoa, there, Mamacita!” Valerie said. “Deep breath! It’s just a misplaced debit card. I’ve already ordered a new one.”
“You know what?” Joe said. “I don’t think I’ll park way out here. I think I’ll do something crazy.”
“You’re being kind of a B, Mom,” Elena said. “It’s menopause, isn’t it?”
Maybe it was.
But all I knew was that I had lived with so much pain that I seemed to have hit some kind of limit. Like our insurance payments, I’d hit my catastrophic max. Before, I had been cautious and overprotective, but now, I was this terrified, shattered person who saw pain coming from every direction. And I couldn’t take it. I just couldn’t take it. I couldn’t bear one more little tiny bit of stress. I stopped reading books, and I stopped watching movies because I couldn’t bear to witness any more suffering.
“So, do you have a chapter for me to read yet?”
“No!”
It was a Saturday in December, and Elena was home because Sandalwood’s program didn’t run on the weekend. Joe was gone—Guam this time, I think—and I was shut up in the bedroom, trying to write. Joe was right, I needed to try again. I had to try again. Besides, there was no reason not to try.
Elena wasn’t dying anymore. Gemma was happy and healthy. Clint was earning praise from all his instructors. Valerie was her usual sunny self. Joe was back to sending me photos of interesting exotic places.
Everything was fine. My family didn’t need me right now.
Everything was fine.
I didn’t have to work on the memoir. I could write whatever I wanted. I could write something fun, something that wouldn’t take me back into the past. I could go somewhere completely new and different, somewhere I’d never been before.
So I sat down on my bed, picked up my laptop, and pulled up a blank Word page. And I asked—just as I’ve always asked:
Where am I now? What am I seeing?
Slowly, a scene came into focus.
There was a mansion. It was near a wide river—the Hudson River, maybe. It was early spring, and there was a hard frost. When the sun came up, the short grass would be white, but right now, it was still a ghostly light gray.
The sky was clear, a bright clear brown with just a single strip of salmon-orange cloud in the east. And there was a pool of water in the short grass near the mansion—a perfectly round, deep, glass-smooth pool, catching the dawn light in a color like pink pearl . . .
But wait! Wait! What am I doing here? What am I doing? That’s not right! That’s crap!
What did I know about mansions on the Hudson? Nothing! I’d have to research that first. I needed books of architecture . . . history . . . No, that wouldn’t be good enough, I needed to make a research trip! And did clear skies look like that? Did frost look like that? Did calm water reflect that light? I needed to see frost again! That trip needed to be in the spring! I needed to find a pool!
Oh, what am I even doing, thinking about stuff like this? I don’t know what I’m doing! It won’t work. This isn’t going to work!
Okay. Blank out the mansion and the frost. I could figure that out later.
There was a girl standing by the pool. She had long blond hair. The dawn just gave her pale oval face a touch of rose. I could see her bare feet on the light gray frost of the grass. She smiled. And, even though it was cast-iron cold outside, she dove gracefully into the water . . .
But wait! Wait! In what? What is she wearing?
Was that a shift? A nightdress? Did it have lace? Machine or hand lace? What was the difference? I needed a book on lace! Was she wearing a corset? What kind of a corset? I needed photographs . . . costume books . . . novels from the time period . . . old movies . . .
Oh, what’s the use? What’s the use? This isn’t going to work!
Slowly, I came back to the safe view of the walls of my bedroom. I was hyperventilating, stiff with terror, as stiff as a board. I sat there panting, then talked myself into unclenching my shaking hands. I put the laptop back into sleep and folded it up for the day.
Word count: two hundred and ninety words.
Misery overwhelmed me. I pulled up the covers and burrowed down into their warmth. All I wanted to do was sleep. As long as I slept, I couldn’t hurt, and I couldn’t fail. As long as I slept, nothing bad could happen.
Voices. Loud voices. I tried to stay asleep, but the voices were pulling me back.
Laughter. Loud laughter.
Right outside my door!
Why were they yelling and laughing like that? I wanted to sleep! I wanted to stay asleep!
In a frenzy, I jumped up and slammed open the bedroom door. “I’m trying to sleep in here! Do you mind ? How about showing a little consideration? Do you think you can do that? Well? Do you?”
My brain captured a single image: Valerie and Elena sitting on the floor together, staring wide-eyed at me, their laughter frozen into shock.
I turned around, slammed the door, and threw myself back on the bed.
And yes, I was fully aware of the irony.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Six weeks later, I was driving Elena through morning rush-hour traffic. It was January again, a year after Elena’s first admission into Clove House.
January. A new year. A fresh start.
Elena had been attending Sandalwood’s treatment program for three months now. She was on much less medication these days, and that had been a rocky process for her and her care team there. The opposite of sedation is excitement—fight or flight. Elena had gone through lots of fight-or-flight moments as her body had learned to give up those powerful drugs.
For the first month, Elena had driven herself back and forth to treatment, but that hadn’t been ideal. When those fight-or-flight moments had come up, Elena had grabbed her car keys and bolted. I got regular calls from Dr. Leben back then: “Elena’s on her way home. Try to talk her into coming back.”
So Elena had asked me to start driving her to treatment. “That way, I won’t have a get
away vehicle,” she said. I had been driving her in now for the last two months: thirty minutes there and thirty minutes back, twice a day.
Once upon a time, a commute like that would have played havoc with my busy schedule. It would have interrupted my writing and thrown everything off. It would have become the reason I let myself fail.
Now, it was the most pleasant part of my day.
Elena and I had stayed careful with one another for weeks. Each of us, for excellent reasons, saw the other person as the greatest threat to her happiness. As weak as we both were, if we had had the chance, we probably would have drifted apart, and that sense of threat between us might have hardened into animosity.
But the commutes had brought us together. They threw us together in one small space, and they let us both do something we enjoyed. I got to drive, and Elena got to tell stories.
This morning, as we inched past a big drugstore, Elena said, “Did I tell you what Jamie’s grandmother says about those places? She thinks they’re secret gambling dens. ‘The parking lots have so many cars in them,’” she quoted in the grandmother’s high, wavering voice, “‘but when you get inside, you hardly see anybody in the aisles.’”
“Hey, she’s right!” I said. “I never thought about that!”
“‘Where are all those people?’” Elena went on, mimicking the grandmother. “‘I think there’s a craps game in the back!’”
I laughed.
“I just love her,” Elena said. “You can never tell if she’s going senile or just messing with your head. When I was there last week, they had these really cool dessert plates out, the kind with a raised pattern, a big fruit. The grandmother was sawing away at the plate with her knife—an empty plate. And the mom said, ‘What are you doing, Mother? I haven’t cut your cake yet.’ And the grandmother said”—and here Elena went back into that wonderful, wavering voice—“‘Oh! I thought that pear was very hard!’”
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