The Ex Chronicles

Hope arrives home from work Friday evening at nine o’clock completely exhausted. It has been a particularly tough day in an exceptionally long week. She just wants to forget about it. Before even leaving the entry hall she riffles through her bag and pulls out a bottle of sleeping pills and swallows one. Leaving her bag on the table, she walks into the living room, kicks off her Louboutins, and throws her alligator briefcase on the couch. She then pads into the bedroom, slips out of her fitted khaki pantsuit, closes all the blinds, and crawls between the sheets in her bra and panties.

Hope wakes up Saturday around noon with heavy eyes and a groggy head, squinting into the hazy sunlight streaming across her bed. She yawns, stretches, then goes into the bathroom to wash her face. Preferring to stay home she orders in breakfast then gets back between the sheets to wait for the doorbell. By the end of Saturday she’s taken two of the Valium she got illegally in Acapulco and stared at the TV for five hours, then she passes out at eight p.m. after having pasta delivered from the Italian place. She’d left the sanctuary of her bed a total of six times.

Sunday is a lot like Saturday except she skips breakfast and goes straight to Chinese for lunch and dinner. Although her cell phone rings several times over the course of the weekend, she answers it only when she hears the Italian aria of her mother’s ring tone. This is when she snaps out of her fog and picks up the phone.

When she hears the Caribbean lilt of her mother’s full-time home aide, Cherry, she feels the familiar sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, which she always gets when her mother calls.

Hope knows that this isn’t good news and wonders what’s coming. Has her mother had a fit and tried to hit Cherry? Not that she’s worried; Cherry has at least forty pounds on her petite mother. Has she wandered off and been tracked by her GPS bracelet, or did the cops bring her back? Is she crying inconsolably to anyone who will listen about how her children are no good and left her with strangers to take care of her? The list is endless.

Because her children want nothing to do with her. But unfortunately when Daddy died so suddenly, the responsibility to take care of her and her progressing dementia fell to me, who, being unmarried, was thought to not have a life. Although Faith, her sister, is the oldest, and lives just fifteen minutes away, being married, she felt exempted from taking care of her mother. But Hope doesn’t say any of this; instead she leans over to the nightstand and pops a Klonopin into her mouth, swallowing it dry.

Her mother comes on the line. “Which one is this?” Hope hears her fumbling with the phone, and sighs, wondering what other child she’s expecting. Hope is the only one who’s called her in a year.

Even though her mother has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Hope never quite knows when she is confused about what’s going on or when she’s being manipulative. But Hope doesn’t think this is the case now. Along with Alzheimer’s, her mother also has dementia, a disorienting illness that affects her cognitive memory, attention, and problem solving. At times her illness escalates her negative behaviors.

Pearl has always been extremely intrusive. As kids, Hope and Faith had absolutely no privacy. Pearl would go through their rooms and their belongings, and would even listen in on their phone calls. She would say she was protecting them. But this intrusion affected her girls in very different ways. Faith became extremely open and carefree, while Hope grew up to be very private, intensely protective of her privacy and her belongings.

“Oh, Hope, I don’t know. I wanted to talk to you about something. Something very important, but now I can’t remember.” By now Pearl is sobbing.

This isn’t new to Hope. She’s been in this situation many times before. Her mother will be distraught about something, but then can’t remember once she gets Hope on the phone. Hope tries not to sound impatient. “Mommy, please tell me why you’re crying.”

“Oh, Hope, I get so scared. You don’t know how it is to forget things. I can’t remember so many things. I get scared. And your father, he’s never here. I can’t do anything without him. He takes care of everything. Where is he?”

Hope’s heart sinks. The worst part of her father’s death a year ago is that she has to tell her mother that her father died at least once a week. And every time, it’s as if she’s telling her for the first time. By the time Hope gets off the phone, she’s almost as dazed and confused as her mother.

Monday morning, Hope lies in bed, watching the digital alarm clock tick off the time. When it goes off at seven a.m., she takes a Klonopin then gets up. An hour later, she is showered and dressed in a cream pantsuit. Her bob is immaculate, the back sharply tapered and the bangs framing her perfectly made-up face and intense dark eyes that seem to look through you as much as at you. Checking the time, she turns off the lights. Grabbing her briefcase from the couch, she slips on her sandals, tosses her cell into her bag, squares her shoulders, and steps out the door.

The air was cooler this morning. Fall was clearly here. Hope breathed in the crisp air, hoping for a good week. Idling at the curb of her brownstone is her car and driver. Hope slides in the town car’s tan leather interior and peruses the morning papers on the seat. As the car slides smoothly into traffic and heads downtown on Central Park West, Hope sips the still-warm Starbucks coffee waiting in the backseat cup holder and reads the papers. It isn’t until the car is almost at the midtown offices of Shades Magazine that she looks at her driver. Instead of the round face and kind eyes of Paul, her driver for the past year, she is staring at the chiseled cheekbones, dark chocolate skin, bald head, and intense eyes of a stranger.

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I got a call Saturday saying they needed a replacement. Call the agency,” he finished, returning his eyes to the road.

“Why wasn’t I informed about the change?” Hope liked to have a routine, it gave her a sense of control that the past year had taught her she didn’t actually have.

He shrugs again. “Maybe you missed the call.” Then he smirks. “I’m guessing you need other people to take care of you—why don’t you have your assistant call?” Then he pulls into the reserved idling spaces in front of the office building, and steps outside to open her door before she can form the words to tell him off. Hope grabs her briefcase, almost spilling her coffee, and struggles out of the car.

When she stands up, the top of her head is barely in line with his chin. Hope looks up past the plumpness of his lips, and the sharp line of his nose, into his deep, dark eyes. This is not happening—I pay this joker’s salary, she thinks.

“Don’t bother picking me up; you’re fired.” She almost stamps her foot. Derrick looks down at her and slowly shakes his head. “Look, lady—” Hope sputters, “My name is Ms. Harris. That’s how you’ll address—”

Derrick cuts her off. “Look, lady, the agency pays me, not you. You got a problem, call ’em. Unless I hear different, I’ll see you later.”

Hope feels her whole body heating up. “You don’t seem to know who is the boss here, Derrick—that’s me,” she finishes, pointing to herself with her cup and spilling coffee on her cream jacket. Oh no. This is too much. Her jacket is ruined and—wait a minute, is he . . . ? He is—Derrick is laughing at her! Hope is stunned into silence. She’s in front of her office, people are starting to stare at a grown woman having a tantrum, she has a meeting in half an hour, and she’s spilled coffee on herself.

Hope starts to shake. She’s speechless. She feels the heat rushing up to her face and her head is spinning, and then she chokes up and starts to cry. Derrick stops smiling; without a word, he ushers her back into the car and slides in next to her. He puts the offending coffee cup back into the cup holder, then takes a tissue out of the box next to it and dabs at her eyes. Hope, who almost never cries, now can’t stop. It’s like everything she’s kept bottled up inside the last year has decided this is a good time to come up.

“C’mon now, baby, don’t cry. You’ll ruin all that beautiful eye makeup.” He opens a compartment next to the tissue box, pulls out a small bottle, and sprays it on the stain on her jacket, then dabs at it with the tissue. Derrick is so close she can smell the coffee on his breath; he has flecks of gold in his eyes. If she leaned forward slightly she could rub her cheek against the light stubble on his chin.

He strokes her face as he holds her in his arms, rocking her slowly, his lips close to her forehead. Hope can’t move or speak. It feels so good to be held, to be wrapped in someone’s arms. Before she can stop herself she’s crying harder, getting mascara all over his snowy white shirt.

She has no idea how long they sit like that, him rocking her and whispering softly, “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay; you go ahead and cry. I’m here.” And she does. She cries over the past year since her beloved daddy died so suddenly; she cries for her once-vibrant mother slowly fading away; she cries for the loss of her sister, Faith, whom she hadn’t spoken to since their father’s funeral; but mostly Hope cries for herself.

Hope was engaged when her father died, but the strain and exhaustion of constantly being on call for her mother, and her own sadness and depression were too much for Terence to handle. Less than nine months after they broke off their engagement, Terence was married. Hope is now at the end of her rope. She wants her life back, her freedom. Most of all she wants her family back. She wants to be the happy-go-lucky person she was before her world fell apart.