I never had to explain my relationship with Sara, because Misty never brought it up. We never spoke of that Saturday when she had false labor pains, when she found me in Santa Barbara after thinking I was in Los Angeles. She didn’t speak of it, not even after I took her up to the beach house to see the new window I put in Dylan’s room. I called in a favor and had a friend install the big bay with a toy box under the hinged seat. I opened a new credit card account to charge a telescope for our unborn son and then pointed it at the Channel Islands.
Misty accepted the “surprise” with the appropriate smiles, oohs, and aahs. But her total silence about the Braxton Hicks Saturday told me how much she understood.
For the next month I made sure Misty knew my every move. I invested in cell phones that further taxed our budget so she could text me as well as call. I checked in with her every hour. I found a way to make it to every one of her countdown appointments. I said I was sorry by being as devoted as I knew how to be. And still Misty’s mood declined.
I counted the days until her due date, stocking the kitchen cabinets of both houses with baby formula and bottles. I called in a refill for her prescription and put it up on the center shelf of the medicine cabinet, right at eye-level, label out. She’d be able to start taking it the day she came home with Dylan if she wanted to. I changed my mind about the medicine cabinet and put the bottle in the bag she had packed for the hospital.
But when Dylan finally arrived with that mass of dark hair, one of the nurses laid him on his mother’s chest and she pulled him in close. He latched on like this was as familiar as breathing.
“I thought we were going to put him on the bottle,” I said.
“I changed my mind.”
“Why?”
She smiled at me, one of the last uninhibited smiles I ever saw from her, and said, “Everything’s okay.”
The medicine bottle went back to our Marina del Rey home unopened and stayed in the cabinet that way for the rest of Misty’s life.
On his third day home both Dylan and Misty fell asleep in the nursery during a feeding. I scooped him up, so careful not to wake either of them, and cradled my son in my left elbow. With my free hand I pulled an afghan up over Misty’s shoulders, then I went to put Dylan in the crib. His lips were still smacking though there was no more food. As I leaned over, he startled in that way babies do, both hands shooting straight out as if I’d dropped him off a cliff. I laid him down, patted his tummy gently, and waited for his muscles to relax.
He looked just like his sister. They looked just like their gorgeous mom. They still do.
“What are you doing?” Misty was standing directly behind me, frowning. I was so wrapped up in my son’s face that I hadn’t noticed her get up.
“Hey,” I whispered. “You two fell asleep and—”
My wife stepped in front of me and picked him up. I saw his body stiffen again. I’m sure I flinched too, then stared as she spun away and carried our son into our bedroom. She locked the door before I could follow.
That night I slept on a round ladybug rug on the floor of Marina’s room. I could’ve slept on the couch, but then both Marina and I would have been alone, and sticking together seemed important to our family’s survival somehow. I thought about calling Sara to tell her what was going on. The thought never turned into action.
In the weeks that followed, Misty’s emotional state blackened. My begging her to notice was like putting a lit match to the fuel. She refused her pills. She refused to put Dylan on a bottle. She spoke to him quietly when they were together. Long-winded, conspiratorial whispers that fell silent whenever I walked into the room. Marina peppered her baby brother with wet kisses, and Misty would stroke our little girl’s hair, smiling. Then she’d lift her eyes to me and that smile would fall.
At the time I didn’t understand what had gripped my wife. Her OB quickly called it postpartum depression. Misty rejected the diagnosis. Even I thought the diagnosis didn’t quite fit, but what does a guy know about such things? I filled her script and she refused to take those pills too.
Today parents and docs know more than we used to. In Misty’s case, PPD wasn’t a hefty enough diagnosis for a woman with her mental health history. Today the bleak void that swallowed my wife would probably be called postpartum psychosis, a rare disorder that even more rarely causes a mother to take the lives of her children. More typically an afflicted mother becomes her baby’s fiercest protector and does battle with herself as both champion and enemy. And here’s the cruel dagger of this particular psychosis: if a psychotic mother possesses enough self-awareness to think she might endanger her newborn, or fail him in any way, she won’t think twice about taking her own life.
Had I known . . . but I didn’t.
December 14, 1997, was a Sunday. I remember this because I was watching the Raiders game with the volume turned almost all the way down, because both of our children fell asleep for their afternoon naps at the same time. Marina on the floor of her bedroom, fanny up and draped over a big stuffed bear, her face squashed into the ladybug rug. Dylan in the bassinet Misty put up in our room the day after she locked me out. Misty slept in the bed next to him. Out in the living room I cheered silently and only once forgot to object to officials’ calls in the same way. At the half it looked like Oakland was going to trounce Seattle. It also looked like I was going to run out of jalapeño poppers, so right after the Raiders’ third TD I ducked out to get another box from the freezer section of the nearest Vons. I was gone thirty, maybe forty minutes, which included a quick detour to the marina, where the damp ocean breeze did more for my puffy, new-dad eyes than a halftime show would.
When I returned, the front door of the house was open. Immediately I checked the bedrooms. Misty, gone. The sheets of our bed were rumpled and still warm, but Marina and Dylan slept alone in the empty house that had been left open to the world. I dropped my grocery bag on the chair that usually held Misty’s purse, and my thoughts split apart like a broken rock. It took me a minute to formulate a plan. I couldn’t leave the kids and I couldn’t let Misty wander. Where had she gone? Why had she left the kids? Or had someone taken her? Was she in her right mind?
I woke Marina thinking she could help me. First mistake. My three-year-old cried and cried while I transferred Dylan to his infant carrier. He slept through his sister’s wails and my fumbling efforts to get the stupid restraints buckled right. I carried him out to Misty’s car and clicked the carrier into the base, then I went back for Marina, who had to be carried out in her socks. I didn’t dare insist on shoes. When I tried to secure her in her seat, she fought me and cried some more. But I got her belted in without losing my cool.
I thought to get her something to put into her mouth. In the kitchen I filled a sippy cup with juice and grabbed a sleeve of graham crackers. Her screams filled the garage. She called for her mother through a wet throat. The jalapeño poppers stayed in their plastic bag in the bedroom, where they thawed into a soggy ruin long before I remembered them again.
Marina’s face and hands were a snotty mess when I handed her the cup and the crackers. She hurled both to the floor as I climbed into the driver’s seat and adjusted it to my long legs, thinking I should have left a note in case Misty got home first. No time. I pulled out of the driveway, closed the garage door, and bumped down into the street before I saw Misty. She was running toward us down the sidewalk in the yoga pants and socks she’d fallen asleep in. Her purse on its long strap slapped against her hip. I sighed heavily, so relieved. Marina’s sobs had morphed into hiccups.
I pulled forward to close the gap between us and leaned across the passenger side to open the door for her while the car was still rolling. Misty plunged across a neighbor’s grassy verge and jumped into the road right in front of the car. I hit the brakes. The sudden jolt silenced Marina. Misty came around to my door and yanked it open.
“Get out,” she said. “Get out get out. Out of my car.”
“Misty, what happened?”
She grabbed at my shirt though the seat belt still crossed my chest. “I know what you’re doing. Get out. Leave my babies alone.”
“You left them at the house! Where did you go?”
“Where are you going?” A nonsensical echo. “Where are you meeting her?”
“Who?”
“Sara. I’m not stupid. I hear you talking. I know that’s where you went.”
“No.” I pried her hand off of my sleeve. “Misty, stop.”
“Sneak! Look at you!” She started to cry. Marina picked it up again too. “You whisper but I hear it. I know what you say. You sneak out. You take my kids. You and Sara want my babies.”
Marina and Dylan were our babies, and no one was going to take them. I scraped off her grip. “Get in the car,” I said. Our house was only two lots away. “Get in or walk, I don’t care.” But I couldn’t move the car without my door smacking her.
When I refused to leave the seat, she opened the back door and started unbuckling Marina, muttering. I caught only pieces. “. . . do to my baby girl? Shhh, shhh, Mommy’s here . . . let the bad lady take you . . .” She lifted Marina out. The crackers tumbled to the asphalt in their brown wax wrapper. Marina clung like a sniffling monkey to her mother’s neck.
Misty walked round to the other side of the car.
“Misty, what are you doing?”
“Shut up,” she ordered. “They’re mine. She can’t have them.”
She couldn’t lift Dylan’s carrier out of the base with only one hand, though she tried. Her yanking on the handle jostled him, and I finally got out of the car. “Hey, hey.” I tried to be gentle. “Let’s all get in the car. We’ll go back to the house together.”
Misty tugged until the carrier was listing in the belt strap. Dylan woke and joined his sister in crying.
“You’re upsetting them.” I leaned in between her and Dylan and put my hand over hers on the handle of his carrier.
Her strike surprised me. Though she held Marina, my wife drew her elbow back and caught me in the chin swift as a reflex. I took a bracing step back and raised my hand in front of my face.
“Don’t touch my son,” she hissed. She took a swipe at my arm, still connected to the carrier. Her hit was awkward and flimsy, more like a shove than a punch, and I had the better footing. With Marina still in the crook of her arm, she lost her balance and fell into the door.
I caught them both as Misty went down, one hand on her elbow, one on Marina’s back. She sank more than fell, letting me and the door support her. Trembling, she folded into a cross-legged sit, asphalt pebbles sticking to the bottoms of her white socks. I knelt and held on to her. She crossed her free arm in front of her bowed head.
“Don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.”
“What? Misty, no. I love you. I would never. How can you think that?”
“You want me to die. You wish I were dead.”
“I want you alive and well.”
“You want her.”
I was guilty of betraying her; I would have admitted to that straight up. But I’d stopped it. I’d proven my loyalty. Her melodrama pushed my patience to its end. She didn’t have to go so far.
“Stop it,” I said sternly. “I won’t leave you. And no one is trying to take the kids away.”
We sat in the street, Dylan keening and Marina snuffling, wiping her sloppy nose all over her mother’s shirt. A light of clarity flickered somewhere deep in Misty’s glassy gaze.
“You’re a liar. I’m taking Marina and Dylan to my parents.”