by Lisa Tucker
There was a record? Courtney knew she shouldn’t have been surprised: HR departments were notorious for viewing everything as a potential legal problem. One of the coworkers she had lunch with hinted that she could sue for something or other, but she didn’t want to sue. She wanted her job to go back to the way it had been before: peaceful and calm and the best distraction she had from the question of whether cancer was destroying her stomach lining even now, while she was eating an innocent salad.
Though Betty Jean had started all this, she didn’t try to hide the fact that she was very unhappy with Courtney. Day after awkward day, the older woman childishly exited the lunchroom when Courtney came in and pretended not to see her if they passed each other in the hall. On some level Courtney was aware that her very presence was now a challenge to one of Betty Jean’s personal myths: that she was boisterous and funny and good-hearted, the kind of person the younger employees liked. It was mostly true, that was the strange part. Betty Jean was almost sixty years old, but she still wore black Converse shoes, jeans, and hoodie jackets. She was the only one in the department who had given Courtney a present for her birthday. It was a bottle of wine, and Courtney didn’t drink, but still.
At the beginning of January, though the investigation was still in the early stages, Olivia decided that Betty Jean needed to at least do the professional thing and say she was sorry for losing her temper. Courtney was called to the HR conference room on Monday morning. Olivia was already there, and Betty Jean came in a few minutes later, ostensibly to deliver the apology.
She did seem sad. She cried through most of the half hour—though she denied all of the things she’d yelled that night. She hadn’t done anything but wad up the sample letter, but even that wasn’t something she was sorry about. Yet Olivia kept nodding encouragingly, as if Betty Jean’s nonresponse was exactly what she’d been hoping for.
The meeting was drawing to a close, and Courtney’s feet were tapping an anxious rhythm on the carpet. She was eager to go back to her desk—and get back to being calm. She’d never seen the point of this apology anyway. What did it matter if Betty Jean denied everything? That was what she always did, and it wasn’t that big a deal.
Courtney wasn’t really listening at the end. She heard the word afraid coming from Betty Jean’s mouth, but afraid of what? The older woman was wearing a nice blue sweater. Her hair was half gray, half brown, but clean and long. And she looked happy all of a sudden. It was the strangest thing. Courtney would never forget how Betty Jean had smiled, seemingly out of nowhere. “She was so upset,” Betty Jean said, pointing at Courtney. “It was late and we were the only people in the office.” She took a deep breath. “I became afraid of her. I thought, ‘This woman is going to hit me.’”
Courtney felt the blood drain from her face. Had her mouth dropped open? She was trying to pull air into her lungs, but she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. It felt like her heart was lodged in her windpipe.
She sputtered, “Have to—” and stood up and ran into the hall. About halfway to her office, she realized what was happening to her. She was having a full-fledged panic attack, the first one she’d had in over ten years. Her chest hurt, and she was gasping so loudly that she shut her office door so her coworkers wouldn’t get worried and call an ambulance. She put her head between her knees and stared at the green rug until she could breathe again. Then she unlocked her desk, took out her purse, and went home.
She called in sick the next morning and for the rest of the week. She had no choice: her heart started to race every time she thought about going to work. At night when she woke up, covered in sweat, her heart was pounding so loudly she thought the sound was responsible for waking her. When she couldn’t fall back asleep by reading a dull writing manual, she got up and baked bread or rolls or anything that required kneading. Sandra had taught her that kneading was better than yoga to calm the nerves. This was a long time ago, when she first got out of the psychiatric hospital and Sandra had had to drag her out of bed and stand her in the kitchen and place her hands on the warm, silky dough.
Though Olivia called and tried to explain away what Betty Jean had said by claiming Betty Jean had felt “judged” and “humiliated,” “cornered” and “trapped,” she also admitted that the question of whether Courtney was “physically threatening” to other employees could not be left out of the investigation now. But she acted like Courtney was silly for worrying about the outcome—and about what other outrageous things Betty Jean might make up if she continued to feel cornered. “She’s worked here a long time,” Olivia said. “Everyone on the management team knows her.” When Courtney hung up, she wondered why Olivia had shared that last part. How was that supposed to help?
Silly or not, Courtney was so worried that she woke herself up on Sunday night, crying that she was innocent. She went to work on Monday, but she had another panic attack when she looked in her schedule and discovered that she was expected to work with Betty Jean that very afternoon. So she went home again and stayed there, calling in sick day after day, until HR told her if she didn’t come back, she’d be fired. When she impulsively quit instead, they all seemed relieved: HR, because they could stop wondering if they’d violated some rule and given Courtney cause to sue, the department manager, because HR would stop investigating his department, and Betty Jean, because she could go back to strolling confidently down the hall, barking out orders, as usual.
No one seemed to feel particularly bad for Courtney (except for the receptionist, who’d taken all her sick calls and thought she really must be desperately ill). Most of the people in Courtney’s department had no idea what had happened and some had heard rumors that she had money and didn’t really need the job. She did have a small trust fund from her grandmother, but it wouldn’t be enough to live on now that she had to pay COBRA to keep her insurance. She didn’t have a husband or children; she didn’t have many friends in the area. Working had always been the biggest part of her adult life. Indeed, she had never not worked since Sandra had helped her get her first job all those years ago.
As she handed over her ID badge, she broke down sobbing. They wouldn’t let her spend even a few minutes saying good-bye. HR procedures required that when someone quit, they had to be escorted out of the building by security. She was devastated, but she felt she had no choice: she had to leave for her health. They would never fire Betty Jean, and she wasn’t even sure she wanted them to. She just wanted to remain calm.
But unfortunately, without a job to organize her life, she couldn’t find her way back to being calm. Her lovely house, so carefully furnished with her grandmother’s antiques, had changed from her nightly after-work refuge to her twenty-four seven prison. She kept waiting for someone from work to email that they were sorry or call to invite her for lunch or something, but they never did. A few friends from her old job sent her sympathetic texts, but they were all busy with their families and their lives. If only she had a boyfriend to call, but she hadn’t had a date in almost a year, since she’d ended it with Stefan, and the fact that she even thought about calling him now was a very bad sign.
She’d chosen Stefan because he was smart and funny and he’d seemed safe because he was an artist. He was so dedicated to his painting that he lived in a dump for the high ceilings and good light. He had no money. Of course he would never want children. She was right about that, and she was right that he wouldn’t be shocked if she told him what had happened with her baby. It was one of the best nights of her life, the night he painted her after she told him about Joshua: a beautiful portrait full of so much love and understanding that he said he could never use it in one of his gallery exhibitions. It wasn’t edgy or dark; it didn’t fit with the rest of his work. But then he did find a way to use it. In fact, it became the centerpiece of his next exhibition when he entitled it Medea, after the Greek goddess who killed her children in the Euripides play.
As day after lonely day w
ent by, Courtney became more convinced that she really was seriously ill. Her skin was dry; she was always cold—except when she was suddenly burning up—and she had so little energy she stopped going to the gym. And the worst part was her poor heart, which was always pounding, pounding, pounding, though she couldn’t say why.
She could sleep all she wanted to now, and yet her body wouldn’t let her sleep for more than a few hours at a time. She was tired of throwing away moldy bread, so she’d given up baking. Instead, most nights she paced around her house like a nervous ghost, trying not to think about how unfair it was that she was the one who’d lost her job, trying not to be nostalgic for the office she used to have, the calming rows of pencils and pens, the coffee mug with the corny company logo, the modern art prints she’d chosen for her office walls that made her colleagues joke that she was too hip to work at a place like this.
When the idea of going to see Joshua’s half-brother Michael first floated into her mind, it seemed like a life raft. Sandra had given her a photograph of him as a baby, and the resemblance was striking. She only wanted to have an idea what Joshua would have looked like as a little boy—what would be the harm? It would be so easy to arrange. She knew where David lived; she’d looked up his house on Google Earth. But she wasn’t a stalker. And so she successfully resisted the urge until after the first week of March, when she found out that she did not, in fact, have cancer.
The nurse called to tell her the results, already a good sign, as all the other calls had come from Dr. Downer himself. But something had gone wrong; Courtney wanted to believe the good news, but she just couldn’t. She was clearly sick, even if she didn’t have stomach cancer. She wasn’t sure what was causing her illness—and neither was her regular doctor; he was doing a battery of tests—but she suspected her heart was giving out. She could always feel it now, banging in her stomach and her ears and her hands. Her grandmother had died of a heart attack. Of course her grandmother was much older, but Courtney’s life had been such a disaster, her heart had probably aged much faster than a normal person’s.
And so one day, she found herself driving to Mt. Airy. She still resisted the word stalking for what she was up to—though she did sit in her car for several afternoons, watching their front door, waiting for them to come out and walk to the neighborhood co-op. She assumed they belonged to the co-op. It was a cute place, filled with healthy, happy people: exactly the kind of place David’s family would belong, in Courtney’s imagination anyway.
His new wife was not beautiful, but she was tall with long hair and long legs, and she moved in such a cautious, gentle way that it wasn’t hard to see the appeal. The best word to describe her was probably careful: a word no one would ever use to describe Courtney, with her fidgety fingers and bitten-down nails and car full of empty candy wrappers and skittish, thumping heart.
But as she moved around the co-op that day, she tried to be careful. Even though she was wearing her disguise, she kept out of Kyra’s line of vision. Surely David’s wife had seen the photographs Sandra kept. She had to be at least somewhat curious about the woman—or more likely, the monster—he’d been married to.
Luckily, Kyra was busy filling up her cart. Too busy to notice that her son had turned around in the vegetable aisle to wave at a short woman in a green floppy cap. Courtney waved first, but still, her face lit up when the little boy lifted his hand and returned the greeting. The only problem was her heart, which was hammering like it was going to beat its way right out of her body. She was afraid she might die on the spot, but she couldn’t leave, because Michael was smiling so shyly and sweetly. She had to stay in this aisle as long as this little boy smiled at her, even if her heart wouldn’t cooperate, even if it decided to finally break.
FOURTEEN
March 28
Dear Mother,
I’m writing to you though I know you probably won’t ever see these words. How pathetic, right? Someone call the wah-ambulance. I’m only doing this because my psych doc has been pressuring me for months about this letter-writing idea. He thinks it might break through my “denial” about what happened to me and help me deal with my feelings about you, which is an even bigger deal to him. I told him it wouldn’t change anything, but he wore me down until I finally agreed to give it a try.
Over the years, I’ve made up dozens of stories about you. In one story, you were a missionary helping native peoples deep within the rain forest. In another, you were in an accident in Florida and were still being rehabilitated. Or you’d married a scary man who kept you locked in a cabin deep in the Canadian wilderness.
My doc pointed out that all the stories had one thing in common: they didn’t just explain why you hadn’t contacted me, they provided a reason you couldn’t. They made you make sense to me. The doc says I have a deep need for everyone to make sense and this is what led to what he calls my “habit of inventing reality.” This habit or whatever it is goes way beyond making up stories about you. I’ve been doing it all my life. I didn’t even know there was anything wrong with it.
It probably sounds like I’m some kind of freak who lives in pretend world, but I don’t think I am. Until last fall, I was on the debate team, which is nothing like stories and all about being reasonable. I was pretty good at it, though sometimes when I was supposed to be working on a real debate, I would write down what I would say and what you would say, if I was going to try to convince you that you shouldn’t have abandoned your daughter. And I guess that was a story, too, since you were talking, though at least I was trying to just stick to the facts.
The doc told me once that I treat facts like they’re enemies. The truth is, I like facts fine, but they seem so narrow. The fact that you left, for example. What does that tell me that I can use?
In the fake debate, you always began with what I figured you must really believe: “That girl has nothing to do with me. Yes, I gave birth to her, but that doesn’t mean I owe her anything now.” I tried beginning with the classic: “Do you realize what would happen to society if everyone acted like you, Mother?” This is called “Kant’s Test of the Universalized Maxim,” according to my debate coach. Kant was a philosopher who thought that one way to judge if something is wrong to do is to think how you would feel if everybody did it. Unfortunately, it didn’t do much for my side of the debate, since you could say, “Well, everyone wouldn’t act like me,” and that would be hard to counter, since most mothers don’t want to desert their kids.
I also tried the nature argument, which goes something like “Even animals know they must take care of their young and humans should not defy the natural order.” This is called an “argument by analogy.” First I had to show that animals are good mothers and then make an analogy to human mothers. But it turned out that there are animals that desert their young. Some animals even eat their babies. So that argument went nowhere as well.
You: “Well, I didn’t eat you. Aren’t you grateful for that?”
Me: “Was eating me on the table? Pun intended.” (I’ve always loved stupid puns. I hope that’s not on some mental illness checklist.) “I mean, you’re not a cannibal, are you, Mother?”
You: “All right, Miss Smarty-pants. I didn’t have an abortion, then.”
Me: “Thank you for calling me Miss Smarty-pants. Let’s keep it formal, since we don’t actually know each other.”
You: “Seriously, young lady. Everyone told me to have an abortion. I was so young, but I didn’t do it. That should mean something to you.”
Me: “Yeah, it should. I wish I was more grateful about that.”
Which I honestly do. I have no idea if you considered abortion, Mother, but you did give birth to me and that really is something. I wish I was glad about it, but I’m not really glad about anything anymore. I’ve let my friends go. I’ve dropped out of everything. I basically never leave the house now that I’ve finished all the credits I need to graduate.
The doc thinks I might have agoraphobia. He’s wrong. I don’t have a fear of places, I have a fear of people. I can go pretty much anywhere as long as I’m alone. I know every inch of this town: from the creek behind the strip mall to the hill at the edge of my neighborhood that I used to think was a mountain when I was a kid. As cheesy as this sounds, I called it “God’s Mountain,” because I thought I could talk to God there. I didn’t like church because it was too warm and I have low blood pressure (inherited from you?) and so I was always close to fainting by the time the service was over. And at God’s Mountain, I was alone. I thought God could hear me better if He wasn’t being bombarded with the prayers of everybody in the building.
Hello, God, it’s me. Will you bring my real mommy home?
You: “I didn’t realize I was being invited to a pity party.”
Me: “So you’re still talking in my imagination, even though I’m no longer remembering our imaginary debate? That’s probably a bad sign, but OK. You’re right, I don’t want this to be a pity party, though I think that’s what my doc intends these letters for. I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself though. I was thinking about my eight-year-old self and feeling sorry for her. She was so much cuter and sweeter. Even my stepmother thought I was such a sweet, well-behaved girl that she trusted me to be fine if she just left me alone most of the time.”
You: “Are you hinting that your stepmother didn’t take care of you? Don’t you think that’s a bit cliché?”
Me: “Cliché, Mother? Ouch. But OK, I’m not saying my stepmother is some kind of witch. She’s just nothing like me. And I think she sort of dislikes me because I’m related to you and you were Dad’s first love.”
