Adrianne hoped for the best. Charlie’s termination had seemed so damning that she’d at first considered it a validation of her personal concerns about her husband’s character. But then, when he’d found new work so quickly, she doubted herself again. Charlie was a union member, had been educated and tested, received degrees that required regular recertification, and was governed by state nursing boards, hospital ethics boards, supervisors, and staffing departments. If there had been no repercussions from such serious accusations, if he had been fired and quickly rehired, then this must simply be the process. It was inconceivable that at an institution entrusted with human lives, the staff weren’t at least as carefully regulated as the stocks of morphine. Adrianne didn’t know the business of medicine, but she did know the business of business; all signs indicated that Charlie’s termination and rehiring had no more moral undertone than any other corporate restructuring.
The change of jobs seemed to rejuvenate her husband. His career had a new direction and a higher rate of pay. He seemed excited by the new routine, the new technical systems to learn and new patients to master them on, and that excitement carried over into an attitude in his home life which was, if not positive, at least more animated. Charlie even agreed to start working days, so that their schedules weren’t at such absolute odds. That put added pressure on their day-care needs, but seemed like a hopeful sign for the relationship. It was only a week before their troubles began again.
She didn’t think Charlie had been a good husband for a long time, and soon after their second daughter, Saskia, was born in the middle of December 1991, she decided she didn’t like him as a father, either. Charlie’s secret drinking had finally become impossible for even Adrianne to ignore. There was no avoiding the topic. First he denied it. Then Adrianne broke into his footlocker while he was at work, and confronted him with the bottles. Charlie made her violation of his privacy the issue, or tried to—Adrianne didn’t go for that one. Finally, he acknowledged his drinking but insisted it wasn’t a problem. He was depressed, he said, but no, he didn’t want to go on antidepressants. It was obvious to Adrianne that her depressed husband only became more depressed from his drinking, that he was caught in a spiral with her family in the center. Confronting Charlie while he was drunk was pointless. They’d fight and say things, and Adrianne would suffer a night that Charlie either didn’t acknowledge or didn’t remember the next day. Each time she tried confronting him when he was sober, Charlie would flee to the basement. Adrianne finally decided she needed outside help. The family health benefits from her employer would pay for five days in an alcohol treatment center. But Charlie didn’t actually want to stop drinking. Adrianne tried leaving his old AA books out for him on the counter, hoping maybe he’d remember his former resolutions. But the books backfired. Charlie would get angry, or ignore them, or put them away as if straightening up. Then he’d sit and drink Coke and eat potato chips until it was time for him to retreat to the basement.
Charlie saw no benefit to be gained from talking. He liked drinking. It lifted his spirits, at least initially. It drowned out the noise. It transformed slippery minutes into a constant Now. He felt at once more distant and more focused. That focus was dedicated primarily to himself. He felt wronged, and deeply misunderstood, and considered it criminal and tragic that his own wife didn’t appreciate his frailty, the verity and intensity of his internal suffering. Because Charlie was suffering, deeply and daily. Adrianne never appreciated that—not that he didn’t try to show her. He staged demonstrations of his pain carefully, making sure that, for example, Adrianne would walk into the living room while he was on the phone with the local funeral parlor, inquiring about their burial rates.
Charlie’s demonstrations did little more than further annoy his wife and confirm his own sense of futility. And so, he tried again. He waited until he heard Adrianne walking from the kitchen, then flopped dramatically off the couch onto the living room floor—tongue out, prescription pills spilled like blood spray from the amber bottle, suicide in flagrante. Surely, Charlie thought, this bit of stagecraft would demonstrate the sincerity of his pain. But Adrianne only heaved a great annoyed sigh, stepped over him, and grabbed a magazine from the coffee table, leaving Charlie lying there, unsure how long to hold the pose. Crouching on the rug, picking up the pills one by one and placing each carefully back in the bottle, he allotted himself an extra dose of sympathy, knowing how very wrong it was for his own wife to ignore the obvious agony that he had demonstrated. He’d hang on to that hurt for a few days, then devise some other way to elicit the proper sympathetic attention. But the more he tried to show Adrianne how he needed to be taken care of, the more Adrianne hated him for it.
Finally, in November 1992, Adrianne decided she’d had enough. She didn’t tell Charlie, but she did tell a lawyer; she was worried that what happened to Queenie could happen to her kids. Afterward, driving home in the early dark, Adrianne felt fortified by her secret decision. The only problem was that Adrianne needed to go in for gallbladder surgery that coming January, and that surgery had been scheduled to take place at Warren, where Charlie worked. The lawyer said the paperwork wouldn’t be ready, but Adrianne insisted. There was no way she was going into that hospital—Charlie’s hospital—without a piece of paper declaring her intent to divorce and the reasons behind it. If Charlie was working, she said, something might happen to her, as it had with Queenie. She didn’t articulate exactly why she felt this way and she didn’t dare to. All she told the lawyer was that she needed it done. Adrianne’s father escorted her to the surgery and waited for her to emerge from the recovery room. She told him not to allow any other visitors, especially not her soon-to-be ex-husband.
Charlie was working in the Warren ICU that afternoon when the legal paperwork for the divorce was delivered. The man had tricked him, it seemed, into identifying himself, then put the envelope directly into Charlie’s hand, and in public. He was humiliated at having such a personal thing served to him there, in his hospital, but when he tried to find Adrianne in the post-op recovery ward, he found his father-in-law and a closed curtain. And when Adrianne was sent home from the hospital, her father went with her, and he stayed on the foldout couch like an implied threat. Charlie became indignant, then pathetic. And gradually, Adrianne began to feel some of the old sympathies for her husband. The man was suffering. He was the father of her children, after all. He was no longer fighting the fact that their lives would be separated—did she need to punish him as well? It was agreed: Charlie would move out as soon as he could afford it, but they would continue to live in the house together until they could figure out the details. Adrianne regretted the decision almost immediately.