Mad Max: Unintended Consequences

by Ashton, Betsy

  “I'll come back but do not, under any circumstances, think this is permanent.”

  “I understand.”

  “No, you don't. When Merry comes home, I'll reassess my role. As soon as she can take over, I'll transition everything to her. If she can't, you'll have to hire live-in help. I love all of you very much, but I will not be the one responsible for your household.” I waved for a refill for my coffee. “Is that clear?”

  “Got it. Max, I'm so scared. I visit Merry every day I'm here. She's getting around better, but she's so different. I can't touch her or hold her, or anything. She's not my wife.”

  This jibed with what Emilie said she felt; her mother had changed to the point she was almost a stranger. I felt my mushy side taking over. Before I could stop myself, I blurted, “We'll get through this together.”

  When would I learn to control my tongue and avoid getting myself into such predicaments?

  “Dad said the rehab center wants to send Mom home, but she's not ready.” Emilie started crying.

  We sat on my bed long after she should be asleep. After all, the next day was a school day. Here it was after midnight. She was too tense to tunnel into the pile of pillows I bought to match my bedroom at home.

  “Neither are you, dear child.”

  “I can't do it without you.”

  In May, after months in the hospital and then a physical therapy center, Whip brought Merry home. I helped Emilie and Alex plan a surprise party with all the neighbors bringing covered dishes. Alex was too excited to sit; Emilie retreated to the quiet of her bedroom.

  I tapped on her door and waited until she invited me in. She lay on her bed, book propped on her stomach. She hadn't been reading it, though; it was upside down.

  I took the book and set it on the table. Emilie had the saddest expression on her face.

  “What's the matter?”

  “Mom doesn't want to come home. She's scared. She's angry too. The party's a big mistake.” Emilie sat up. I put my arm around her shoulders and hugged her. “You feel this?”

  I still didn't understand how she felt what she said she felt. It was real to her, and I was learning to give it proper respect.

  “Yes.”

  Whip had called when they left the therapy center. They were due any minute. We rose together when the doorbell rang. Neighbors slipped in, put food in the kitchen, and gathered in the family room.

  We lost Merry at “Surprise!” She didn't speak. She didn't smile. Whip helped her into the family room where her friends came to welcome her, one by one. Merry barely responded. She even ignored Darla and her daughter, Molly.

  Whip made a big deal about presenting Merry with keys to a new Infiniti. “A belated anniversary gift.” He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

  She flinched and pulled away, the keys lying unacknowledged in her lap.

  I fed everyone and let people escape as soon as they wanted. Within an hour, the house was empty, save for immediate family.

  “I want to go to bed.”

  Whip brought her cane and helped her to her feet. He followed her into the kitchen.

  “I knew you'd change everything.” Merry had discovered my counter-decluttering meddling.

  “When you're ready to cook, I'll put it back just like it was.”

  “Yeah, right.” Merry left the kitchen and tapped her way upstairs.

  “How will you do that?” Alex asked.

  I held up my cell. “Easy. I took pictures.”

  Emilie went up to her room after the master bedroom door clicked shut. Alex wandered around like a lost puppy. I shut myself on the patio and called Raney.

  “How was the party? Was Merry surprised?” Raney knew what the kids had planned.

  “Try horrified.” I filled Raney in with minute details.

  “Oh dear.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Merry's return should have been the first step toward Emilie and Alex getting back to normal. No flipping way. Merry might have been back in the house, but she was far from normal. She needed physical therapy three times a week, wasn't allowed to drive, and suffered memory loss, not to mention mood swings and an occasional bout of aphasia.

  Three weeks after the disastrous party, I told Whip I needed to go to New York for a weekend.

  I caught the last flight on Thursday to be ready for my monthly board meeting the next morning. Given how much help Merry needed, flitting between New York and Richmond would be my norm for the foreseeable future. I couldn't sit around the house all day waiting to activate Max's Taxi Service to pick up the kids or take Merry to therapy. I couldn't replicate my New York cultural activities, but I could bring some of my exercise gear back with me. First thing would be my rollerblades. I loved skating in Central Park. I'd already found several bike paths in Richmond that would be decent substitutes. Between pickups and drop offs, I could at least stay fit.

  After a full day at the office, I unlocked the door to my apartment, flipped on the lights, and dropped my briefcase on the tiled floor of the foyer. I crossed the living room to the kitchen and poured a glass of Pinot Noir.

  Raney called to remind me of our dinner reservations at Gustavo's at seven.

  “I'll be there.”

  With an hour to shower and change, I carried my wine into the bedroom, stripped, and took the hottest shower I could stand, washing away the fatigue of the day. Wish I could wash away the worry too.

  The oil painting of the two sisters in my bedroom represented the last moments of my carefree lifestyle “before the accident.” While I dressed, I lost myself in its quiet beauty. Then Emilie called.

  Alex was at Ben's house down the street, and Whip wasn't home from work yet. Emilie was supposed to go to dinner with her mom and dad, but her mom made some lame excuse and canceled.

  “She yelled at me. She swore too.” Hurt and tears clogged her voice.

  “She yelled at you?”

  “Yes. She does it a lot. Especially when I try to talk to her about me. She pushes me away like she doesn't care. She never did that before the accident.”

  “What about the swearing?”

  I'd never heard Merry swear at the kids. Come to think about it, I hadn't seen much of any interaction between them. Merry spent most of her time hiding in her bedroom.

  “She calls both me and Alex—”

  “Alex and me.”

  “She calls Alex and me bad names, words she never lets Dad use. She's not Mom.”

  Emilie rattled on for several minutes. A picture emerged of Merry becoming more disconnected from her children, more irritable if not downright nasty and pushing them away. Merry's neurologist warned us about personality changes. This must be what he meant. Merry was ill-tempered around me, but I assumed our old friction was reemerging in spades. I hadn't seen her take her bad moods out on the children, though.

  “Have you told your dad?”

  “No. I wanted to talk to you first.”

  “Tell him when he gets home. Or maybe over dinner. Make him take you out. Promise?”

  “Okay.”

  Emilie had added another worry to my pile. If Merry, who'd been the quintessential soccer mom before the accident, now avoided her children, I had to break through her self-absorbed fog.

  “When are you coming home?”

  “Sunday, but I'm coming back here again next month. Would you like to come with me?”

  “You bet.”

  “We'll plan a weekend for goofing off. Sound okay?”

  “Yes. See you. Love you.”

  “I love you, too, Em.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Raney was in Gustavo's when I arrived. We hugged, and she waved at the bartender. “Our table will be ready soon.”

  I perched on a stool.

  “Martini, Mrs. Davies?” the bartender asked.

  “Please.”

  Raney and I became regulars at Gustavo's as soon as it opened. Though new, the restaurant was old-school. Most of the newer places were brass-and-fern
bars rather than lush with dark mahogany. Gustavo's felt more like a private club than the trendy place it was.

  “Good board meeting?”

  The bartender placed a dirty martini with three olives in front of me.

  “We've had a terrific breakthrough.” I was the chairman of Davies Enterprises, my late husband's company. “We've been testing a new type of engine. It doesn't use gasoline.”

  “Really? This could be in a car I'd buy?”

  I sipped my martini before eating the first green olive. “It could. If we manufacture it, I'll have every oil company in the world putting a hit out on me. No need for gasoline. Period.”

  “Your table's ready, ladies. If you'll follow me…”

  Gustavo's maître d' led us to a quiet table at the side of the main dining room. We stopped talking while we listened to the daily specials, looked over the menus, and ordered our meals and a bottle of Cabernet.

  We were well into our first course when the conversation turned serious again. “What's the latest on Merry?”

  “She's home.” I put my fork down. “She's walking and talking almost normally.”

  “It isn't enough, is it?”

  “No. She's so different. The kids don't understand. To be honest, I don't either.”

  “Different? How?” Raney looked at the seafood risotto the waiter set before her.

  “Her personality's changed. Part of the time she's out of it, disconnected from the world around her. A lot of what she says doesn't make sense. She treats the kids like crap.”

  I told Raney about the phone call from Emilie. “She acts one hundred eighty degrees different from the way she was before the accident. The brain injury is much worse than I thought.”

  “Shouldn't she be glad to get back into her routine?”

  “You'd think. Before the accident, the kids and Whip were enough. Now, they're not. Her doctor put her on antidepressants and about a dozen other pills.”

  “Like that helps. Is she seeing a shrink?”

  Raney had gone through enough therapy to appreciate the power of psychiatry. Her husband, her childhood sweetheart, was kidnapped years earlier in Syria. Released after seventeen months, he was never the same. She knew firsthand Merry wouldn't get better until she asked for help.

  “No. I want her to go. So does Whip. She insists she's fine.” I finished the last drop of wine. “Fine, my ass.”

  “So you've tried to talk to her?”

  I picked up a stray peppercorn on the white tablecloth. “Oh, yes. Many times. If I ask her what's wrong, she shuts down. She won't talk to me or anyone else.”

  “She's leaning on you now, because she can.”

  “Of course.”

  “What if you weren't there?”

  “I've been chewing over this a lot. Half of me says I should leave. Merry would snap out of it. Half of me says she won't snap out of it. In that case, she'll need more than a shrink to help. Half of me says she could spiral out of control in either case. If she gets too bad, it'll mean institutionalization. Any option screws the kids up.”

  “You do know that's three halves.” Raney twirled the dregs of her wine.

  “Never was good with numbers. I want to come home, but I can't. I may have to hogtie and drag Merry to a therapist. She's got to come around. If not, I'll have three children on my hands, instead of two.”

  “Have you thought about bringing Merry to New York? Lord knows, we have more shrinks than any other city.”

  “Bring Merry here?”

  Raney nodded.

  I'd never thought about that. Would getting Merry completely away from her family do the trick? I had to consider it.

  “If that won't work, you have a fourth half. You could stay in Riverbend.”

  “I know. I don't want to stay. Every time I think about leaving, I go on a major league guilt trip. I can't abandon Em and Alex. Whip won't let me bring them to New York for any extended period, so if I'm going to take care of them, I have to be in Richmond.”

  “Didn't you say Merry was moody as a child?” Raney reached for her latte.

  “I thought she was a normal teen. With perfect hindsight, I'm not so sure. Anyway, I took her to a therapist after her dad died. He didn't find anything wrong. She was grieving. He gave her Valium.”

  “Which was the magic panacea at the time. Take the pill, and everything will be all right.”

  Raney stirred sugar into her cup. “You know, some of that early hostility could be coming back. Maybe some mental block broke loose. Maybe she no longer has control over what she says.”

  “Em said the same thing. Now that I look back, Merry was self-destructive in junior high.” I half-closed my eyes against the memories. “She used to bite her hands and arms. Said the neighbor's dog did it.”

  “Really?”

  “It didn't last long, though. I forgot about it.” I sat in thoughtful silence looking back at Merry's childhood. “In high school she got hooked on diet pills.”

  “My girls did too. They wanted to be rail thin, so they went for the pills.”

  “Better than today's bulimia or anorexia. Maybe if I'd paid closer attention, I could have figured out her behavior and gotten her help.”

  “Maybe if her doctor asked better questions, he could have discovered her problem.” Raney's eyes clouded. “You're not a psychiatrist. Nothing in the common literature of the day would have told you what her behavior meant.”

  “I'm so damned scared. Merry drinks in secret. She's addicted to drugs too. She has piles of prescriptions. Always sucking down a pill or two.”

  “Sounds like she needs drug rehab more than physical therapy. Can't you get her into a clinic so the doctors can put her through detox and teach her coping skills? Therapy only helps if Merry's ready to admit she has problems, though.” Raney sighed. “Listen to me. The new queen of pop culture psychobabble.”

  “Watch out, Dr. Phil. Dr. Raney's ready for prime time.” Raney made me feel better. I still needed a Dr. Phil.

  “I hope it works out. I'm selfish. I want you to come home. I miss our weekly dinners and bridge games.”

  “I miss you too. I want my life back.” I didn't feel the least bit guilty admitting it. “I'm way more concerned about Em than Merry. She says such odd things. Like knowing her mother's not doing well. Knowing she's thinking crazy, mixed-up thoughts. Knowing she's not the same.”

  “Is she trying to get attention?”

  “I thought so at first. No, when she tells me something about her mother, she goes very pale. Breaks out in a cold sweat and trembles. She apparently knew the exact moment Merry was injured.” I blew on my latte.

  “That's not possible.” Raney frowned.

  “Bette confirmed Em went ashen just after ten the night of Merry's accident. She was distracted the rest of the evening. And she was winning at Clue.”

  “I wish I could help, but I'd be in over my head.” Raney reached out and took my hand.

  “Jeez, me too. I haven't a clue what to do next.”

  “Do you think Em's psychic?”

  “I don't know. Maybe. Whip doesn't remember anything like this happening before. Bette and the Colonel don't either. Alex has said Em acts weird sometimes. I thought he was making up stories. Now I don't think so.”

  Raney waved for the check. It was her turn to treat.

  “I don't know how to help both her and Merry. They need such different things.”

  “They both need shrinks?”

  “Merry does definitely. Haven't the foggiest idea of what kind of shrink Em might need.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I can't call the American Psychiatric Association and ask for a New Age shrink who specializes in psychic teens and just happens to live in or around Richmond.”

  “Why not? You never know who might surface.”

  “I'll sound like an idiot.”

  “Do you care?”

  “I don't give a rat's patoot. I'll try.”

  It didn
't much matter if I sounded like an idiot or not. If I could find someone to work with Emilie, that would take half the problem off my shoulders.

  “You have too much to handle. Just take baby steps. No ‘but firsts.’”

  “‘But firsts’?”

  “You know, I need to clean the kitchen, but first I have to reread War and Peace.”

  “Okay, no ‘but firsts.’”

  We gathered our handbags and pushed away from the table.

  We nodded to Gustavo's maître d', assured him dinner was excellent as always and walked out onto the sidewalk where the Friday crowds were queuing up at the hot restaurants.

  “I'm coming back next month with Em. Maybe a break and distance from her mother will help.”

  “Be here on the twenty-sixth. I'll get tickets to Yo-Yo Ma at the Lincoln Center.”

  “Isn't it sold out?”

  “Not if you know the right people.” Raney was on the board at the Lincoln Center.

  “That would be wonderful. Em'd love it. I'll bring Alex another time. Plan something a boy would enjoy.”

  The spring night air was soft and warm. We stopped in front of Raney's building to hug our goodbyes.

  “You know, Max, Merry may never come around. She may never be like she was.”

  I shuddered. I didn't want to think what the most negative outcome could be.

  “Remember what Eleanor told you when you left the day of Merry's accident?” Raney kept her hands on my shoulders.

  “You mean, about my doo-wop? Because I didn't get it right with Merry the first time around, I have a chance to get it right with Alex and Em?”

  “Merry thinks you didn't get it right. Make the most of every day with her and with the kids.”

  “I know. I know.”

  Raney shook me slightly. “Don't blow it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I had no sooner landed in Richmond than my phone buzzed. Caller ID showed Darla's number.

  “Hey, lady. I just got in.”

  “Welcome back, I think.”