The End of Normal

by Stephanie Madoff Mack

  “Yes,” I told him. I wanted to tell my story, “and I want to give your brother a voice.”

  “Well, I am sure it must be nice for you to finally get noticed and get some attention,” he sneered. “I am sure that must feel good to you.”

  “Not really,” I answered truthfully. This was something I needed to do for my children, and for Mark. I didn’t understand why Andy wouldn’t want vindication for his tormented brother, too.

  We had no further contact until just before Mark’s birthday, when Andy sent an e-mail out of the blue saying he wanted to come by. I was just leaving St. Barths. I sent an e-mail back explaining that I was about to get on a plane and wouldn’t be home until late that night.

  I don’t want you to think I am blowing you off or making excuses to not get together, I replied. I am just traveling a lot these couple of weeks. Also, just out of curiosity . . . why all of the sudden interest to see me and the kids? He had never paid any attention to his niece and nephew before, and hadn’t asked about them since their father died.

  I want to have a relationship with Audrey and Nick, and as Mark’s birthday approaches I’ve been thinking about it a lot, he answered, adding that his schedule was flexible. I responded that I planned to get away for Mark’s birthday. I didn’t volunteer where I was going.

  I decided to just escape and spend a few days in Nantucket with Nick and Audrey. I planned to take my remaining share of Mark’s ashes with me to scatter. “I don’t think you should do this alone,” my brother, Rob, said when I told him my plan. “I’ll go with you.”

  We drove to the ferry at Hyannis on March 10 and rode across the gray water to Nantucket, where our closest island friends, Chris and Marybeth, had opened the house for me and were waiting in the living room to greet me.

  “I can’t believe how happy I am,” I told them. “It sounds so strange.” Already this magical place was lifting my heart. I had promised the kids a birthday party for Daddy, and we set about planning his perfect celebration.

  I woke up to a gray, rainy day on the eleventh. I could smell the sea air, even inside the house. Mark would have been thrilled; the smell of low tide intoxicated him. Audrey was crying that her daddy wouldn’t be there to blow out the candles on his birthday cake that evening. But she was easily distracted by the colored paper and stickers I had brought with me so the kids could make birthday cards for Mark, and she set to work with her brother. Rob and I waited all morning for the rain to let up so I could set out with my ashes, but it just kept pouring.

  “Let’s just go,” I finally said.

  My first stop was the White Elephant, the beautiful seaside hotel where Mark and I had gotten married. By now, the rain was coming down sideways, freezing cold and relentless. I got out of the car and made my way to the dock where we had posed for our wedding pictures. I climbed down the slippery ladder, crying hysterically, and emptied another packet of Mark’s ashes into the water.

  “Where to next?” Rob asked back in the car.

  “Let’s go to New Lane,” I answered. That was where we bought our first small place in Nantucket and had enjoyed happy getaways as newlyweds. I assumed the house would be closed for the winter, and Marybeth, who is a realtor, had assured me no one was in residence. I was surprised to see a car in the driveway. “Uh-oh,” I muttered. What was the protocol here? Knocking on the door seemed ill-advised. I doubted that even the most hospitable local would exactly welcome a weepy, soaking wet stranger standing on their doorstep off-season to ask for permission to scatter her husband’s remains in their backyard. I snuck quietly onto the patio and quickly shook a pinch of Mark’s ashes beneath a slender tree under what had been our bedroom window. I didn’t want to think about what trespassing statutes I was breaking with that one. I had gone from tragic to ludicrous again.

  My next stop was Madaket Marine, where Mark had kept his beloved fishing boat docked. It had been sold the summer before, and his old slip was empty. I watched as more ashes disappeared beneath the water’s glassy surface. Finally, I ended up at Dionis Beach, where Mark and I had rented a cottage the summer we were engaged. I walked into the freezing water and let go of him once more.

  In town I bought a birthday cake, decorated to look like an ocean, with Happy Birthday Daddy written out in blue icing. Carrying the cake to the car, I was struck by the pungent smell in the air. Low tide again. It was odd to catch a whiff of it in town, and odder still that it was lingering so late in the day. Stopping at the wine shop to pick up a bottle of champagne for a bittersweet toast, I could still smell low tide, and I realized it had been there all day, wherever I went. Mark. I knew then that I had found what I had searched for so desperately that first night I returned to Mercer Street. His lost scent.

  For his birthday dinner, we ate Mark’s favorite lobster bake from Sayle’s Seafood—I was relieved to find them open when most of the island was still shuttered for winter. We feasted on lobster, red potatoes, corn, steamed clams, mussels, clam chowder, and the two sides of fried clams that Mark always insisted on ordering. It was stormy all night, but the next morning broke crystal clear, sunny and beautiful, and I woke up with a sense of relief. I had gotten through the birthday. I called for Grouper and got ready to go on my favorite trail run, straight out to the ocean and back through the woods. I made the mistake of turning on my phone first, and saw that my stepfather had forwarded me an e-mail from Andy.

  On Mark’s birthday, Andy had tried to reach me via e-mail, then reached out to my stepdad to intercede when he got no response. He apparently had been asking Mark’s friends where I was, too, and had solved what he perceived to be some sinister mystery.

  I’ve been thinking about you today and what an unbelievable source of strength and comfort you were to Mark, he wrote Marty. I will always be grateful to you for that and for the support you gave me in our darkest moments. Today has been very difficult for me and I hope you’re getting through it without too much sadness . . . It’s hard not to think about him all the time.

  I exchanged a few e-mails with Stephanie this week, and it’s obvious that she’s extremely angry with me. She mentioned that she was going away for the weekend, and when I asked where she was gong [sic] she wouldn’t tell me. I found out last night that she was in Nantucket and it dawned on me this morning that perhaps she’s up there scattering Mark’s ashes. I hope that isn’t the case, as I told her that I wanted to be part of that when it happened. I know that Daniel and Kate do too, and they would be devastated i [sic] they missed out on such an important event. Please do what you can to see that she includes us.

  I immediately punched in Andy’s number, but the call went straight to voice mail. I went for my run. It was windy and cold, but I could sense Mark running alongside me and felt his happiness. I missed him so much. Back at the house, I worried that Kate and Daniel might have been falsely told that I had disposed of their father’s remains. There had been no “event.” I called their mother to reassure them that this wasn’t the case. Susan was guarded but gracious. Yes, Andy had called, she confirmed, but she refused to rush to judgment. “Stephanie, it’s your decision,” she said kindly. I told her what my intention had been all along: I was dividing the ashes into four equal shares. One for Andy, one each for Kate and Daniel, and the rest for Nick, Audrey, and myself. Susan interrupted before I could go on.

  “You’re not doing that,” she said harshly. “My children won’t want that.”

  Her response surprised me. Surely Ruth would have welcomed the chance to do something with Kate and Daniel to say good-bye and honor Mark’s memory in a way that felt right to them. I obviously didn’t want to be part of that tableau, but I honestly felt that whatever they chose to do was something that belonged to them. I let Susan say her piece, and silently promised Kate and Daniel that I would safeguard their father’s ashes for the day when they were ready to decide for themselves what they wanted to do. Maybe somed
ay Daniel would want to scatter them on a favorite mountainside where his father had taken him snowboarding, or Kate would want to honor him in some private way of her own. My child psychologist had stressed to me how important it was to leave such options open for Nick and Audrey to someday have closure, given how hard that is to find in cases of suicide. If any or all of the children wanted to include me in whatever they chose to do someday, I would be there for them, but just as important, I wanted to respect their privacy.

  Later that afternoon, Andy returned my phone message, clearly irate.

  “I sent you an e-mail yesterday and you didn’t respond,” he complained.

  “I didn’t get one,” I said, double-checking. There was a long silence on the other end of the line while Andy scrolled through his e-mails, too.

  “I sent it to the wrong address,” he said flatly.

  “Yes, I’m up in Nantucket,” I told him. “You have to respect my privacy. I don’t want to have to tell everyone where I am and what I’m doing all the time.”

  “Like I said at the memorial service, it’s up to you to decide what to do with Mark’s ashes,” Andy reminded me. “I just want to be included.”

  I explained my decision about dividing the ashes into four equal shares.

  “I don’t want that,” he snapped.

  “Well, then fine,” I shot back. “But nothing is going to happen for at least ten years, until Audrey and Nick are old enough.” If I was going to put together some formal ceremony or another memorial, it was going to be on their terms, to help them heal.

  “That’s fine.” Andy relented. “Even if it’s ten years from now, I’m just telling you I want to be included.”

  I felt exhausted. I couldn’t imagine what this tattered family was going to look like in another decade. Would unbearable loss eventually bring us closer, would it be our only bond? Or would we just go our separate ways, rebuild our separate lives, and try to forget how much we had all hurt one another?

  When I checked my inbox again, I found another e-mail. This one was from Ruth, dated on her dead son’s birthday. The first two sentences acknowledged my pain and said she thought about me constantly. The rest of the brief message was about herself, and how misunderstood she really was.

  I don’t know really why you are so angry at me, she wrote. To begin with I need you to know that I knew nothing of what Bernie was doing. When Mark asked me to stop any contact that I had with Bernie I must tell you about what was happening to me. I was totally alone. I was rejected from every apartment. I couldn’t go out . . . I was desperately lonely, crying myself to sleep every night and very confused and conflicted. Bernie was the only one I had.

  She recounted her e-mail exchanges with Mark and Andy as the second anniversary of the scandal had approached, and how she was hoping to see them when she visited Kate and Daniel that Christmas. She clearly hadn’t accepted Mark’s final decision nixing that plan in an e-mail where he told her that he simply wasn’t ready to see her again.

  I was planning to tell them I needed them too much and that I would stop having anything to do with Bernie, Ruth said. I truly believe if we had been able to speak to each other, we could have come upon an agreement.

  But so unfortunately, it was too late.

  I took a last walk, barefoot on the frozen ground, from our dream house out to the little observation deck where Mark and I used to sit and enjoy the view. It was too foggy to see anything now. Leaving on the noon ferry, we sailed past the White Elephant. Those three days brought back my happiest memories, but the pain of being on the island without him was unbearable. It will be a very long time before I can come back here, I told myself as Nantucket disappeared behind the fog.

  Back home on Mercer Street, it took two weeks before I could sit down and respond to Ruth’s last e-mail. I dissected her single, self-pitying paragraph as if it were a thesis, bitterly tearing apart her arguments point by point.

  You could have had me and my children and YOUR children, I reminded her. You also had Kate and Daniel and Susan. Bernie is all you had? He is in jail. What could Bernie possibly have given you at that point?

  I seized upon a line where she had declared that “my children were the center of my life always and you know that.”

  Actually, Ruth, no, I don’t know that. If they were truly the center of your life, then on the day Bernie confessed his crimes to them you should have left that apartment with them. Again, you chose Bernie.

  On and on I railed, filling the screen with my blind rage. Not for one minute did I believe that she had cut off all contact with Bernie, any more than I had bought his similar claim in the letter he had sent from his jail cell a few weeks before. But at this point, I realized, I no longer cared.

  I don’t have it in me to forgive you for standing by the man who killed my husband, I told her. Good luck to you Ruth.

  I hit Send and felt the same peacefulness settle over me that I had experienced when I had given up Mark’s ashes to the sea.

  What needed to be said had been said now, for both of us.

  I was done with good-bye.

  · ten ·

  WISH FLOWERS

  Nobody knows who I am, but I still hide at first, staking out my favorite bike in the back row. The lights are dim, the music is loud, and our instructor, Laurie, is full of energy and upbeat affirmations. “Get out of your head and into your body!” she urges, and I pedal harder up an invisible hill.

  Exercise has always helped me through rough times, but spinning has become more than an endorphin release to me. I go there once, sometimes twice a week. It’s forty-five minutes where I don’t have to think. Losing weight isn’t my goal; I’ve had no appetite since Mark’s death, and the stress has caused me to lose more than twenty pounds already. It’s strength I need. Strength and escape.

  Sometimes one of the Real Housewives of New York shows up for a class, too, and we exchange pleasantries. Everything else in my life has become surreal, and it seems oddly fitting that my favorite exercise class is now, too. Even the name is ironic: SoulCycle. I find myself listening eagerly to Laurie’s shouts of encouragement. “Let ’em see you sweat! Never let ’em see you struggle!” I seize on her proclamations like the freshest convert at a salvation show. “Leave whatever is not working for you in this room!” Laurie commands as class comes to an end in a final sprint. We climb off our bikes and head back into the blinding sunlight of the real world. I gradually work my way up to a bike in the second row.

  Fresh start, new beginning, clean slate: The clichés all make it sound like one big, promising adventure. But building a new life is hard labor. Back in the loft on Mercer Street, Nick and Audrey pick up where they left off, and I envy the innocent way they deal with their loss; they’re too young to anticipate pain, or to wallow in it after it broadsides them. People always ask me, brows furrowed in concern, voices dropped to a near whisper, “And how are the kids doing?” The question drives me crazy. “The kids are doing great!” I truthfully reply, thinking to myself, for now.

  I worry about the years, and questions, yet to come. Audrey doesn’t remember her grandfather, and Nick never knew him. I will tell them who he was, what he did to so many innocent people, and how he drove their father to his death when they are mature enough to understand and absorb such horrors. That will mean telling versions of this story over and over to them, filling in the details only as they can handle them. I refuse to let the events of these past two years define them or affect their entire lives.

  I’m already sensitive to well-intentioned assumptions. When a caregiver oversympathizes with Nick’s separation anxiety, telling me, “Of course, he’s had a hard time lately,” I bristle. Many of the other two-year-olds in class are clingy, too, and Nick has no idea what happened that morning as he slept in his crib. My children don’t know that there’s a template for all of this, that there are fiv
e stages of loss, academically acclaimed and widely cited. My soul predictably cycles through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance and then loops back around again, but children don’t follow this route; they don’t “process” feelings. They feel them. When sadness hits them, they literally stop in their tracks to react, and then move on.

  Audrey goes to the huge windows overlooking Mercer Street and shouts greetings to the sky, confident that her father can hear her. “I love you, I miss you, I kiss you, I squeeze you!” she sings. Nick follows, gleefully mimicking his big sister. “Hi, Daddy! Hi, Daddy!” They happily perform in the window while I cry, not just for Mark anymore, but for what he is missing. They’re getting so big now, and so smart, and there are a dozen things that Audrey and Nick say or do every single day that I know Mark would find hilarious, like their Fourth of July underwear march across my parents’ front lawn in Montauk.

  Montauk was supposed to become our new place together, a replacement for Nantucket. Mark and I had both spent happy summers playing on Montauk beaches when we were growing up, and as long as we avoided Bernie’s old haunts later on, Mark seemed to enjoy it. Our last family photo together was taken there on a chilly day just after Thanksgiving. We look like a perfectly normal, happy family.

  We had gone to Long Island that weekend to see the holiday lighting of the Montauk Point Lighthouse. As thousands of white lights outlined the lighthouse and keeper’s quarters, we listened to a band play Christmas carols and huddled together as the wind bit our faces. I went back six months later with my last little box of ashes. It was Memorial Day weekend, and surfers in their wetsuits were already paddling past the breakers to wait for a perfect wave when I left the house at seven in the morning. I headed for the village, remembering the comic scene the last time Mark and I had driven through. He had been at the wheel when I had suddenly let out a yelp.