The Breakdown Lane

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “You’re separated?”

  Separated, separated, separated. The heavy word rolled the length of the room, all its syllables growling and echoing. It had a thunderous quality, a distant fearsome sound, like adultery. I felt as though I ought to try to pick up my feet before this description rolled near and crushed them. “No,” I said, “we’re not separated. But…ah, my husband is on an extended trip….”

  “A business trip?”

  “No, a sort of sabbatical…”

  “A retreat? For how long?”

  “Not in any organized sense…and, well, he’ll be gone for several more months.”

  “And what does he think?” Jennet asked. “What does he think about your being aggressive about treatment?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it’s common, particularly for men, not to want to deal with something like this head-on. They can’t fix it or cure it, and they feel helpless.”

  “He doesn’t know because I haven’t told him,” I said, putting down the egg and picking up the carven head, which looked to me like the baby of one of the Easter Island monoliths.

  “Julie,” Jennet said. “You need to tell him.”

  I sat the stone face down harder than I meant to on the marble table-top. “I haven’t told him because I can’t reach him to tell him.” I held up my hand. “No, it’s not what it sounds like. He’s not hurt….” Then I thought, Maybe he is hurt. I thought, Maybe he’s…stuck in a crevasse or something, right now, dying of thirst. I thought that might be kind of nice. Then, I thought, My God, I haven’t even considered that Leo might be needing me.…We didn’t have the same last name, and my in-laws were in Florida. Had they arranged for call forwarding?

  “Julie?” Jennet prompted me.

  “He told me that there would be times when the plan would be for him to be totally incommunicado, and I guess that this is one of them. It’s unfortunate that this happened now.” I had been mesmerized by the serenity of the Easter Island face, its expressionless gaze, looking at all, caring for nothing. I glanced at the unmarked perfection of the egg and thought, All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…

  “But what was your system for emergencies?”

  “We don’t have emergencies like this,” I told her helplessly.

  “What was your system for any emergency, with one of the children, his parents?” Jennet persisted. “I know what you’d say in your column. I admire it, by the way.” I felt as though Jennet had torn off my shirt. I had expected we would do our “work,” behind respective masks, and agree to pretend not to recognize each other in the produce section. But this was a small city.

  “It seems like we would have done something so, basic, so sensible,” I admitted. “I was to contact him at one of the list of emergency numbers he left. Leo said he had left me a list of emergency contacts.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Why do you think that was?”

  “I guess, because, well, that wasn’t on Leo’s agenda. He figured I could handle anything. I always had.”

  “What was on Leo’s agenda?”

  I bit my lip. “Let me think that over.” But she wasn’t going to let me slip off the hook.

  “So the marriage was cracking before he left,” Jennet summed up. “And this sabbatical is an attempt for him to gather himself enough to make it work, instead of coming in here or somewhere else with you to tackle whatever’s stuck up his butt.” Her words were bullets fired into a stuffed dummy. I felt the impact but not the pain. The mortgage was still being withdrawn monthly, but I’d just had a check bounce. When the banker reminded me that “we” had closed that account and sold some stock in the recycled-wood-products company, I laughed and said I must be getting senile. Mike the banker made a few lame jokes about a dream vacation. I transferred money from savings to our checking account, alarmed at the undeniable dearth of what was left in savings, if I thought of it in terms of years. There was stock…Leo couldn’t call me, or his kids, but he could call the bank to cheat me out of what belonged to both of us. There was no escaping it.

  With honest empathy in her eyes, Jennet said softly, “Leo’s agenda was getting out of Dodge, wasn’t it?”

  I looked back into her eyes and said, “That about covers it.”

  “Damn. You’re everywhere, Gillis,” Steve said, when I showed up in his office, crisp in my high-necked gray silk dress, two-inch heels, and stockings with seams, my knees aching as if I’d run a half-marathon instead of taking the elevator up three flights. Standing at a podium to give an hour-long talk hadn’t helped. Cathcart leaned back in his chair. I stood. I was actually worried that once I sat down facing him, I’d be frozen to the chair for the afternoon.

  It turned out that the effect on Steve was psychological; he thought I was assuming a power stance.

  “Well, you probably know what I’m going to say,” Cathcart began, ruffling his well-tended beard. His big, even teeth glistened, ringed by an uncommonly ruddy mouth. I had never contemplated how much Steve resembled the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood.

  “I guess,” I said. “But Steve, you have to understand—”

  “I do, Gillis. Don’t feel guilty. As much as I hate to admit it, you need to be syndicated. That’s what I told my guy, Marty, from Panorama Media. He agreed. But hey, I know it’s not a sign that you’re some kind of diva,” he said. I grabbed the back of the chair and tried to nod sympathetically, my left leg twanging under my skirt like Elvis singing “Jail-house Rock.” Steve went on, “I have to hope you’ll still do the occasional special number, a big feature or a Q and A, just for us and for extra compensation, of course. And we’ll keep our special arrangement. You’ll be paid for your weekly column separately from whatever Panorama gives you, and we’ll run it full-length, even if your other markets cut it. You’re our girl, first, Julie. Marty says he can probably get you in a hundred small dailies to start and maybe in a few bigs, now that the Lederer girls are gone. There’s the Post girl. She’s hot, but she’s strictly dating. And you do it all, families, sisters, the whole rag. I hate to share you, but you should move on it. Syndication will never make you rich, but then you’ve got Mister Bizlaw for the important stuff. But it’ll help you grow, and, don’t get a big head, but you’re too good for a small paper.”

  Cathcart handed me a slip of paper with Marty Brent’s number and address at Panorama, and did this goofy thing that involved sitting on the top of his shiny desk and spinning himself around on his rear end until he was facing me without having to get up. He took my hand, a parody something between a stern shake and a gentleman dropping a kiss on a lady’s hand. “You’re looking sharp, Gillis,” he said. “Hitting the gym?”

  “Hard,” I said. “Thanks for noticing. The hard drive goes first.” He laughed and waved me good-bye.

  Outside, from the car, I called Cathy. “You’ll never guess!” I told her.

  “You’ve been named editor of the paper!”

  “No.”

  “You got fired?”

  “I got syndicated! My column! In probably a hundred newspapers! Or more!”

  “You’ll be rich!” she screamed. “You won’t need Leo!”

  “I…won’t be anything like rich, Cath,” I said, and the melting snow on the road shimmered before my eyes. “And why…what do you…what does that mean, about Leo? I need Leo.”

  “Julie, you have to know—”

  “I, Cath, I have to call somebody. For an interview. I’m sorry, girlfriend. I’ll get back to you.” But once I was off the phone, I didn’t start the car.

  I simply sat.

  A couple of guys…maybe in their late twenties, drove past in a convertible. It was a nice day, though probably not warmer than forty. Too cold for adults to have the top down, but nothing could drive a Wisconsinite to excess faster than a false spring.

  “Hey,” one kid yelled, “hey, pretty lady!” My eyes stung. I snatched my handicapped tag from the v
isor. If I got out of the car now, and wavered across the street like a drunk, how pretty would they think I was?

  How pretty would Leo think I was now? How proud would he be?

  What if I finally needed a wheelchair?

  What if I did?

  I would have to find a way to get one. On my own.

  I was on my own. Now.

  And so I needed to do something real to stay well as long as I could as often as I could. I’d been avoiding the big, expensive, scary drugs, both for what they would cost and for what they signified. But vitamins and green tea and antidepressants weren’t going to cut it. The going was going to get tough. Maybe. And so I had to get tough, too. I needed my own insurance policy; it would be pricey, especially with a preexisting condition I couldn’t deny, but it would be a tax write-off. Leo’s coverage of the kids would last, but there was a chance he might not be covering me in any sense for long. I had—I gulped at this—to find a support group, so people could answer my questions. There were things I could sell—my mother’s real jewelry, my relatively new car. I’d start comparison shopping later that day. But one matter couldn’t wait. I picked up my phone and made an appointment with the neurologist.

  The thing about the shots was that they basically made the time between shots “good time.” Or at least, they might have been doing that; I had no idea how I’d be without them.

  But there was a trade-off. The time right after I took them was a mud slide.

  And the mud slide, at first, as my body grew accustomed to the onslaught of what was de facto a poison, could last up to a week.

  I began taking shots once a month, and after the first month, I knew I could count on being down for one week of four the next.

  And when I was down, the kids went out. You’d be surprised how fast a house can go to hell in a couple of days if the master and commander can do no more than get out of bed long enough to go to the bathroom, or, occasionally, fry a couple of burgers before falling asleep while trying to eat one.

  Gabe didn’t do anything bad. He only let his natural inertia take over. He never missed getting Aury to school, although sometimes she showed up an hour late. But Caroline, my erstwhile new best friend, began working on what I suspected might be the forfeiture of her five-hundred-dollar virginity. Moreover, Caroline’s last report card seemed to have gone as permanently astray as Leo’s letters. I grew accustomed to the soft click that coincided with the clock striking four A.M. It meant Caro was back from I-was-glad-I-had-no-idea-where. I was glad I didn’t formally know that my fourteen-year-old was staying out all night.

  Then, Cathy had the nerve to chastise me about it. Well, at least to raise the subject.

  “She’s not accountable to anyone,” Cathy said helplessly, after Caroline met Cathy in the driveway at seven A.M. one Sunday morning. Cath was bringing popovers; Caroline was just getting home. “She’s telling you she wants you to make her behave.”

  “Well, what would you suggest, Cath?” I shot back, fuzzy but determined, sitting up in bed to nibble at one of Connie’s popovers. I knew that, objectively, it was a flaky confection, utterly delicious. But to me, it tasted like soaked pizza cardboard. Every nerve ending I had was on vacation. “She minds when I can make her, but when I can’t, she takes advantage of it. I forbid her. But she does it behind my back. I can’t afford to hire a keeper.” Ground her, Cath suggested. Set limits while she was still young enough for limits to matter. But Cath didn’t know how tough a nut my daughter had become. I would watch Caroline, her headphones ever attached, her head ever moving in a silent seizure, complete in her oblivion, her self-absorption. I suppose it was as good a defense mechanism as any. But then, Caroline had always had a poker face, perhaps a poker heart. Even as a tot, she’d been able to keep things to herself for far longer than most children—than most people can, period, even as adults. I could monitor her groundings no more successfully than I could monitor her weight.

  “At least Patty Gilmore tells me she’s in school every day,” I said. “That’s something.”

  If Caro was out with an older boy on the weekends I was sick, or was using drugs, the only therapy I could avail myself of was Cath, and Cath was so familiar to Caro she was almost like another parent—destined for disrespect. The only rehab I could afford would be the kind that came with a court order. In fact, in the long run, it would be better for me to remain ignorant of any serious problems Caro had. What if she ended up in a foster home?

  And there was Gabe. Gabe was a brick, and he was vigilant about Aury, but he was only a young boy, with a young boy’s standards for the acceptable condition of a home. Clothes might need to be clean, but neither folded nor in drawers. When all the dishes, including the holiday china, got dirty, it was time to wash three plates. The rest were stored in the logical place, the dishwasher. When I was well enough, we’d go on a forced march through the house, dusting, sweeping, scrubbing. We’d just get it sorted out, and then it’d be time for another shot.

  After my shot, as I weakened, Gabe would take up my slack, through a routine we’d developed without ever talking it over. He’d set the alarm for six, drag himself out of bed, rouse Caroline—even to the point of putting ice cubes on the soles of her feet—put Aury on the toilet and back into bed if she didn’t have preschool. He’d leave bowls and raisin bran for us on the table. If Aury did have preschool, he’d call Cathy before he caught the bus, and Cath would drive Aury. Then one day, he presented me with the (perfectly forged) application I’d filled out for a hardship driver’s license and a work permit. With a plummeting heart, I wondered how many other absences and detentions for late schoolwork I’d acknowledged. I’d begun throwing away notes addressed “To the Parents of A. Gabriel Steiner.” What was the point? I couldn’t afford a really good LD tutor. I couldn’t call his “case manager,” though her e-mails piled up like angry little sentinels in my in-box.

  During those postinjection nights, I would wake, shivery with sweat. I’d yearn to make sure Aury was still alive and covered, so I’d creep down the hall, but often, because of the darkness and my unsteady gait, on my hands and knees. Gabe would hear me, and without a word, slip out, wearing his flannel pajama bottoms, which I finally recognized as Leo’s, lift me to my feet and, hands under my arms, escort me to my bed—exactly as I had when he was little and sleepwalked. He never spoke of it the following morning. What must that have been like for him? The shame of it. What should I have said? “Thanks for dragging me back to bed last night, hon!” It would only have compounded his humiliation. And as if that weren’t enough, Tian, through golden tears and kisses, finally came to the end of her time at Sheboygan LaFollette and left for home—sorry to part with Gabe but clearly eager to be with her own family, and clearly ready to fry bigger fish than Sheboygan offered. So, Gabe was hardly tooling around with a car full of Luke and Luke’s friends—though having the car, even a few days a month, even only to drive to school—would have earned him back some of the status he lost when Tian left.

  Gabe didn’t have the heart.

  I knew how he felt.

  I also didn’t have the heart to reply to the urgent stack of notes and reels of recorded messages from Hannah and Gabe Senior.

  “Julie,” the answering machine urged me frantically. “Julie. Julie! Please call us!”

  Finally—and wouldn’t it be just two days after my last shot?—my in-laws showed up unbidden, all the way from Florida, telling me they’d planned to come back early because they’d become bored with “all that sunshine and those old people.” Bored. With twenty inches of snow on the ground in Sheboygan, mostly on my front sidewalk, because Liesel and Klaus were on an extended trip and shoveling was even lower on Gabe’s radar than laundry.

  Gabe sounded like a kid on Christmas morning when he yelled down the hall, “Mom! Grandma and Grandpa are here!” It was as if the Marines had landed.

  “We’d rather be here, with real life around us,” I heard Leo’s dad say as they rolled their matching suit
cases into the hall.

  I tried to swing my legs over the side of the bed. My legs refused even to twitch. The last time I’d gone to the bathroom, I’d ended up pouring a full glass of cold water down my thigh, and it hadn’t been accidental. I saw plainly that my skin was neither on fire nor infected, but my brain was shouting at me that I’d fallen asleep for six hours under tropical sun. The bed looked as though I’d peed in it.

  I heard Hannah “tsking” her way down the hall, calling, as I imagined her skimming the soft mantle of dust on the bookshelves that lined the walls and crowned the doors on that side. “Julie, Julie, with your head in the books…Julie, sweetheart, when was the last time that little girl came and cleaned? What was her name? Sayonara?” Her name had been Leonora, and she had been a Filipino grad student who’d done “the heavy cleaning” weekly, and who I hadn’t been able to afford since I’d begun the shots, which, because they weren’t a proven therapy for MS, weren’t covered by my state-sponsored disability insurance or by my paltry private policy.

  I could imagine how it must have looked. And smelled.

  “Julie?” Hannah peered into the murk from my doorway. I’d kept the shades drawn for the past few days because the light hurt my eyes. They were, even now, during my downtime, still pretty good, especially my right eye. Out of my left eye, I saw things haloed, as if by a smudge of oil. I was still thinking about medicine bottles when Hannah cried again, “Julie?”

  I’d…forgotten she was standing there.

  “Julie, what in heaven!” she cried, throwing back the curtains and raising the blinds, revealing the army of used tumblers; the empty, side-over sunken paper cups of Ramen noodles; the tangle of T-shirts and pajamas in the corner next to the TV where I’d lobbed them; and me—in an old pair of Leo’s sweatpants under a long ballet T-shirt with a mustard blot on one boob. I saw the stack of newspapers that had, to Aury’s delight, reached nearly to the top of my chest of drawers before she’d accidentally knocked them over. “What happened in here?”

  It looked like a dorm room.