AS I WALKED into my living room, my cell buzzed in my pocket. Jimmy’s number. My chest filled with icy dread as I fumbled to answer.
“Mom? Iris is in the hospital. But don’t worry, I mean, there’s no … She’s okay. But come. She needs you.” He cleared his throat. “Charlie is on his way over to get you.”
I grabbed my purse and hurried to the lobby. I was scarcely there two minutes when I saw Charlie’s silver Camry pull into the parking lot, bumping awkwardly as he took the speed bump too fast. I rushed outside to meet the car and was waiting for him as he pulled up to the curb.
Charlie ran around to the passenger’s side to help me in. He was in exercise gear. His hair, which he usually kept carefully combed since his hairline started receding a few years back, was sticking out around his ears, with a few locks flopping down his forehead. His eyes were stormy and afraid. “Hey, Ma.” He kissed me and held my elbow as I lowered myself into the car.
“What happened?” I asked as soon as he got in.
He put the car in gear and inhaled. I saw his hands tighten on the steering wheel. “She tried it again.”
I was pretty sure I knew what he meant. But I had to make sure. “Did what?” My voice quivered.
“You know. She … tried to hurt herself.” His voice wobbled too. Poor Charlie. I looked at his handsome profile, so like his dad’s, and in sudden clarity I wondered what was it like for him. For so long now I’d been focused on Iris, her crises and her pain, that I had taken Charlie—his strength, the way he quietly held everything together without drama or demands—for granted. Did his kids feel like they were not as important as Bethany, their lost cousin? Tears welled in my eyes, and I resolved to pay more attention to them, and to him and Pam. I reached out and smoothed the hair jutting over his collar. “I love you, son.”
He braked at a stop sign and turned to me. He squeezed my hand. “I love you too, Mom.” His Adam’s apple bobbed, and I saw the emotion. “I’m scared,” he said quietly. The car behind us gave a little beep. He exhaled and accelerated.
When we arrived at the hospital, Jimmy was waiting for us. I said, “How is she? What happened?”
Jimmy shrugged and opened his arms in a gesture of helplessness. “I thought she had the flu. She’d been sweaty and nauseous, even had a little diarrhea.” He stopped himself. “I came home and found her curled up in the bathroom, with some sleeping pills and a bottle of gin on the vanity. Just like before. But this time she didn’t go through with it. She didn’t swallow them all or drink so much.” He paused. “I guess she stopped her antidepressants cold turkey. That’s why she was sick.”
Iris had been on a mild dose of Prozac for years—even before we lost Bethany. After Bethany’s death and Iris’s suicide attempt, the doctors shifted dosages and added something additional to address her anxiety. She’d been leery of the increases, but they helped. Perhaps too much, if she thought she could just stop them. I’d seen it before. People decide they feel so well they didn’t need their meds anymore.
Jimmy said, “But she’s been doing so great. We even began having fun again.” His voice cracked and his eyes glittered like shattered glass on the highway.
Iris was in a bed in the ER, looking much as she had in the first months after the accident. Lank unwashed hair, gray skin. I reached out to stroke her cheek. “Oh, honey.”
She allowed me to put my arms around her shoulders, and even leaned her head against me, but she didn’t make a sound. She was far away.
Jimmy sat at the end of the bed, rubbing her ankle. I lifted her chin. “Sweetie, what happened?”
She turned her face away. I repeated, tenderly, “Honey?”
She swallowed. “I was forgetting, Mom,” she whispered. “I was forgetting.”
Jimmy cleared his throat. “We went out last weekend and dropped by some friends. Their daughter came home from play practice …” He inhaled and swallowed. “Afterward we went to dinner.” He looked at me, pleading in his eyes. “We had fun.”
Iris lifted her head and choked out the words. “Fun! We had fun. What an obscene thing to do. We should have been going out with our own daughter after a recital. Instead, we were laughing in a restaurant.”
She cried, sweeping her eyes around the bed at us. “It’s the drugs. It’s all fake. I should feel bad. It’s wrong not to. The accident was my fault.” She stared at me, eyes wide. “I’m afraid I can’t keep …” Her voice trembled, and she pressed her fingers over her mouth.
“Oh, Iris.” I had to tread carefully. I stroked her hair off her forehead. She began weeping into my sweater. Finally I said, “Talk to your doctor. Maybe he can taper you off. But stopping cold turkey … It makes everything seem worse. It’s dangerous to stop taking your medicine so suddenly. That’s why everything seems horrible.”
She snapped her head up, her eyes burning. “Everything is horrible. That medicine is what is dangerous. It lets you lie to yourself so you can feel okay.” She covered her face and choked out in a strangled whisper, “How can I laugh and have fun? What kind of person am I that I could do that?”
Jimmy wrapped her in his arms.
I had lived through this after Cal died, and then four years ago, after we lost Bethany. Actively mourning someone is a way to keep them in our lives; it keeps their presence vivid and real. But eventually, life tricks us. The days pile up, separating us from the dead, and somehow, yes—that hoary phrase again—we move on. But letting go of active grieving is another loss, in a way. An important moment in the long process of saying goodbye. Iris had gone right up to the edge. But standing where she could glimpse a post-Bethany life and any happiness other than what she would have shared with her daughter—she retreated. Re-embraced the familiar pain rather than step into a future lacking the daily, familiar habit of her grief.
Later, I told Jimmy that next time I thought she would walk through the gate. Embrace the future. That this setback was really a symptom of the fact that she was getting better. I prayed it was true.
After Charlie took me back to Ridgewood, I lay in my bed in cold terror that Iris might have succeeded. She was in good hands now, I told myself. She hadn’t hurt herself, or really even seriously tried. I squeezed my pillow and took comfort that she would be seeing the clinical psychologist first thing in the morning. They would be making arrangements with a therapist and reestablishing her meds, and Jimmy was taking some time off work.
But knowing these things didn’t make me less afraid. Iris had her grief, but I had been cursed with fear. I’d lost Cal and Bethany, and almost lost Iris. Now, whenever Danny or Adam went swimming, or Charlie or Pam or Jimmy or Iris got on an airplane or went skiing, I had to stuff down a disproportionate, soul-chilling dread. I wasn’t sure if I could survive another loss. But it wasn’t just fear. It was also anger. After Bethany’s death I lived with deep, corrosive fury at what had happened, at the judge, at the “system.” I tried to contain it because I knew it could poison my whole life. But there were days, like today, when it boiled up.
I felt so lonely. I wished desperately I could talk with Cal. In times like these his absence was like a phantom limb, a piece of me missing. Being the surviving half of a long-term couple is anguish. The left-behind partner has to face mortality twice … and in between, to learn to live with an essential part of one’s self gone. It feels like a punishment, unfair, unjust. I used to wonder what I had done to deserve such sadness.
A shudder wrapped my spine.
Who deserves anything? What is justice, anyway?
Who gets to decide?
Judges, a sardonic voice came back.
Right.
Stinson, destroyed by alcoholism and addiction, had crashed into Iris’s car. He was the one who couldn’t stop drinking. Who, in the grip of dangerous sickness, wasn’t forced to stop, or at least removed from situations where his sickness could hurt others.
So where did the responsibility lie, really? I closed my eyes as tears slipped down.
With Nathaniel, that’s where. The circumstances he set in motion caused our suffering as much as if he’d done it himself. As surely as someone who put a loaded needle in an addict’s hand would be responsible for what came after. If Nathaniel had enforced the law the first time Stinson hurt someone, Bethany wouldn’t have died. Iris wouldn’t be blaming herself, guilt and grief eating away at her soul. Stinson would have been in jail or in treatment. Instead, Nathaniel had allowed an obviously out-of-control drinker to go free and do it again, this time to my family. And Nathaniel did it for money. He wasn’t starving, wasn’t impoverished, wasn’t buying bread for his hungry child. He had plenty; he just wanted more.
I couldn’t understand the greed. Was there ever enough? Did he tell himself: just one more time, just the next payoff, just the next bank deposit?
Or was it the emotional charge, the adrenalin?
Then, in a stab of insight, I understood. What had Lisa said about wanting to control things? It was the power. The fact that he could affect the outcome of a trial in whatever way he wanted. Whatever else—the money, the rush of transgression—he was persuaded to do it as an expression of his power. I could even imagine that in his vanity he convinced himself he was actually correcting an unreasonable or inflexible system.
The realization was as hard and cold and true as any I’ve ever had. “Bastard,” I hissed. Then I turned over in my bed and punched my pillow. “Please, God,” I whispered. Praying once again to a God I didn’t quite believe in, but couldn’t ignore. “Please let Iris be okay.”
Jimmy and Charlie and Pam, along with some of Iris’s oldest friends, arranged to be sure she was never alone. Iris agreed to go to a therapist—someone wise and smart and experienced—replacing that so-called support group and the internet grief blogs she haunted. Thank goodness. And she would get her medications reestablished.
So Charlie became my grocery-shopping, errand-running companion. And when he came a few days later, I told him I needed to go to the condo, to gather some things.
“What do you need? I can get whatever it is.”
I answered, “No—you’d never be able to find it. I need to go.”
“But Mom, the place is a mess.”
In order to get it ready for sale, the condo was being repainted in neutral colors, outfitted with new curtains, bathrooms updated. He was worried that seeing my former home all torn apart would make me feel bad, but I didn’t care about the condo. Not really. Our old clapboard Victorian, where he and Pam and their kids were living—that’s the place I thought about when I thought about home.
“Charlie, please. It isn’t asking much. If you can’t drive me, I’ll get the desk to call a cab.”
He sighed. “Okay. You win. But just remember it’s a work in progress.” Once we were in the car on the way over, he pressed, “What is so important you need to fetch?”
“Just my box of stationery, that’s all. I need some nice note paper, and I have a special card I want to send Ruthie for her birthday.”
“Ah, Cousin Ruthie.” Charlie exclaimed. “Are you aiming for a blessing or an absolution?”
Ruthie had once studied to be a nun, and when my kids were young, I had apparently developed a habit of quoting her on matters of right and wrong—until they became old enough to tease me and roll their eyes. I laughed. “Don’t be such a heathen. Besides, she’s one of the rare people who actually writes letters these days. It’s nice to get something in the mail. The day is coming when no one will do that anymore.”
He smiled indulgently, and his teasing voice reminded me of Cal. “I’m happy that you and Ruthie keep the post office in operation.”
We pulled up to the door of the condo. Charlie seemed nervous, but also a little excited. He said, “Wait until you see how it looks,” and opened the door, with a sweeping gesture. “I hope you like it. And just so you know, Iris chose the colors.”
I hesitated, then stepped inside. Though I generally hate beige—as does Iris, who I am sure chafed at the real estate wisdom of insisting on generic blandness—the living room did look great, with new off-white curtains and freshly brightened walls the color of toasted bread. Charlie smiled in relief when he saw I approved. “Let’s go see if the painters have finished the kitchen,” he said, and headed down the hall. But instead of following, I veered into my old bedroom, pulled by memories and curiosity.
“Oh! For cripe’s sake,” I heard Charlie yell. “They used the wrong color.” Then, loudly, “Mom, I’ve gotta call the contractor.” I heard him plop down on a stool. He would be busy for a while.
Though most of my furniture had come with me when I moved, the bedroom set I’d inherited from my folks, too big for Ridgewood, was still there. Iris had yet to take it. I ran my hand over the nightstand, tracing a few faint rings made by baby bottles and coffee cups on the old wood, the gouge left when my dad dropped his hammer while hanging up a family photo. I opened the top drawer to look for the initials Charlie had drawn with sharpie on the inside corner when he was six. I remembered how upset I had been, scolding him as I scrubbed at the indelible ink, until his trembling lower lip melted my anger. I ran my hands over the little boxes of safety pins, earrings missing their partners, notepads with mini-pencils attached. I stopped when my gaze fell on an empty plastic bottle.
Cal’s digoxin. He’d started on it shortly after Bethany was born, eager to do whatever his doctor ordered so he could have as much time as possible with his grandkids.
A dim image flared. The medication cart at Ridgewood.
Digoxin was a very common medication. Both Katherine and Nathaniel were on it.
I swallowed. Ah yes, arrogant Nathaniel. Darkness bubbled up, clouding the reflection, like oil spilling in a stream. “Adequate.” The anger swelled, conjuring Iris clutching the empty bottle on her bathroom floor, sitting on a cold park bench every morning at dawn, watching other people’s children go to school. Trying and failing to have fun with her nephews. My eyes cleared.
I looked down at the empty container in my hand. Cal had been on a very high dose. I remembered thinking at the time how fortunate it was that I was a nurse, because digoxin is such a tricky drug. The line between efficacy and toxicity is thin, particularly for older folks. Our kidneys don’t clear it from our system so efficiently, so the drug can build to lethal levels pretty fast. Back when I worked ER, a digoxin level was often one of the first tests we ran on seniors.
My chest tightened. Where was the rest of his medication?
Maybe I’d put it with the other things I brought home from the hospital. I swallowed, pushing the memories of Cal’s last days out of my mind. I blinked away the tears that were gathering, and swallowed again, the lump so big it ached.
Where would I have stashed them? I scanned the room. Then it came back to me. I put everything that came home from the hospital in the hall bathroom, in the cabinet where he kept his cologne and his shaving cream. Somehow it seemed that was where the last things he’d used belonged.
I went into the hall. Charlie was still on the phone, pacing in agitation, his back to me. “But we specifically said we wanted Pale Ocean Gray for the kitchen.” His voice was exasperated.
I slowly walked the eight feet or so to the bathroom door. This area was being updated as well.
I pushed. There was resistance. I leaned against the door and shoved. It moved a bit, then swung free as it cleared the shard of broken tile that had gotten wedged under it. Thank goodness I had a good grip on the doorknob, otherwise I would have pitched face-forward.
The vanity had been pulled out from the wall and bits of tile scattered the floor. I managed to angle myself inside.
Behind the door was a narrow cupboard, useful for linens and toiletries. I braced myself. This little cubbyhole, almost more than any other place in the condo, reminded me of Cal. It was a shrine to his love of cologne, the storehouse for his fancy shaving creams, repository for countless Father’s Day gifts of soaps on ropes and body powder.
I opened the cabinet. The scent of my husband, my partner of a lifetime, poured out in a wave. Here were his combs, his handkerchiefs—he still used cloth hankies—his favorite powder. His medicines. The sorrow that had been kept in abeyance hit me, and I put my hand over my mouth.
In some ways, my life ended the day Cal died. I know that sounds maudlin. I am not saying I haven’t lived since then, haven’t felt pleasure since then, or that my life was only meaningful in conjunction with a man. But that was the moment when the life I had planned and built came to an end. When the choices I made, about career, about where to live, and with whom, about what to do and where to shop and what to eat, were mostly in my control. It seemed like ever since that day, the circumstances of my life have been determined by a lot of other things in addition to my wishes.
Of course, I know control is an illusion. If nothing else, Bethany’s death made that very clear.
The thought brought me up short. I wiped my nose with my sleeve and inhaled.
There, in the back. The large envelope with Cal’s “effects.” My eyes flooded, and I knew it had been pointless to think I could look through this cupboard without a meltdown. I was pulling the huge weight of my past behind me, and once in a while I just had to allow myself to feel it. In tears I opened the envelope. There it was: the refill that had come in the mail after he’d been admitted for the last time. A cry broke free. I turned the bottle over and over, feeling the heft.
“Mom? What is it?” Charlie was peeking in the door.
Our eyes locked. His grew luminous with understanding. He squeezed into the bathroom and put his arm around me. “I miss him too,” he said softly. “Let’s go home. I was afraid this would be too much for you.”
I became rigid. “Please don’t treat me like a child.”
Charlie stopped. He knew me well enough to hear the warning in my tone.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t meant to sound like that. But—it’s got to be hard.” His eyes flashed to Cal’s cabinet. “Especially this.”
“I … I really appreciate that you didn’t clear it out.”
He exhaled. “It seemed the sort of thing you would want to spend some time with.”
I nodded and swallowed, trying to get control of myself.
He searched my face and seemed to be formulating a question when his phone buzzed. He patted my arm, and hurried to answer it. “Did you find the invoice for the correct paint?” he said as he turned, easing out of the bathroom.
I shoved the pill bottle in my pocket.
Charlie was pacing in the living room as he talked with the contractor. I headed to the desk in what had been our spare bedroom, because I still hadn’t found the box where I kept my fancy stationery and the supply of nice greeting cards I’d accumulated, picking a few up whenever I found them on sale.
This room was Cal’s retreat, his “office” after he retired, where he would watch his baseball games and play solitaire on our old computer. It was lined with photos of him with his grandkids. On the desk was the last picture taken of him and Bethany, displayed in a white ceramic frame patterned with hearts and “World’s Best Grandpa” written in gold. She’d had it in her bedroom, and Iris gave it to me after she died. As I picked it up, the pills rattled in my pocket. I opened the drawer, and sure enough, there was the box of stationery.
Charlie appeared in the doorway. “They found the invoice, and I was right. They’re going to redo it with the right color.” He lifted his eyebrows. “Now—you ready to go home?”
I lifted the stationery and nodded.
We headed out to the hall. As Charlie pulled the door shut behind us, he said, “Be sure to tell Ruthie hello for me.” He winked. “Maybe go to some more book groups so you have something to write about.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’ll send your love,” I assured him, patting the box. The movement jostled Cal’s medicine, heavy in my pocket.