All the Things We Never Knew (13 page)

“I'm worried about you, David. You look so stressed out.” I put the glass in the sink and leaned against the counter. “Is everything okay at work?”

He cleared the last of the gravy from the aluminum holder and threw it in the garbage can. “Nothing out of the ordinary.” He refused to meet my gaze.

“Okay, I'll say it.” I pushed myself away from the counter and faced him head on. “What are you doing? Trying to kill yourself? Nobody can survive on pot pies, David. This is the second one you've eaten today.” And the eleventh he'd eaten that week.

He ran his fingers through his hair, and his nostrils flared. “So what? They taste good.” He pulled his shirt down over his belly.

When I first met David, he'd just finished a month cycling in the California desert. The first time we'd slept together, I remember running my fingers down the toned muscles of his back, feeling the suppleness of his skin. I'd loved his smell, his entire way of being. So much had changed.

He burped and left the kitchen.

Later, I watched him rolling on the Persian carpet with Sophie, her giggling over his attention, then lazing on his stomach. Her head was turned sideways on his chest, completely relaxed in pajamas the color of cotton candy, her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. She looked ethereal next to David's large frame. His eyes were closed in a rare moment of peace, his hands folded gently over her back.

In some ways, it was all I'd ever wanted: that scene of my daughter being loved so completely I knew she'd grow up with her self-esteem intact. And yet, it was not enough for me. I had compromised my own needs, physically and emotionally, for too long.

The phone rang as I rinsed Sophie's plate. “Sheila,” the voice said, “this is Shannon Presser.”

I wiped my hands on a towel and moved quietly from the kitchen into the bedroom, focusing all my attention on the call. Shannon was Sophie's school administrator.

“Hi, Shannon, what's up?” I was concerned by her tone. Shannon was a wiry, energetic woman who had built the most successful Montessori school in Oregon from fifteen families to several hundred.

“This is very uncomfortable for me to say. I don't know how to frame it, so I'll just go ahead. Sandra, Sophie's after-school art teacher, came to my office this afternoon. She was very upset.”

I sat on the bed, prepared for some news of Sophie, something terrible. Maybe she'd drawn or said something profoundly troubling or revealing. David and I had been fighting so much lately, arguments that could spin out of control over anything. In the past, I had trained myself to walk away, to make sure Sophie was nowhere in earshot. But these days, he followed me, antagonizing me. I had even looked up the contact information for a divorce lawyer, preparing myself for the inevitable.

“Go on,” I said.

Shannon lowered her voice, almost to a whisper.

“Sandra says David asked her out on a date.”

“What?” My eyebrows lifted, my eyes widened, and my lungs filled as I took in as much air as I could possibly get.

“What, when? When did this happen?”

Shannon spoke louder now, with more authority. “Sandra said David had been talking to her quite a bit about Sophie's artistic ability. Sandra offered to give Sophie private tutoring since she's so talented. But then, out of the blue, he asked her out. He said you two were getting a divorce.”

The heat suddenly felt too high in the house. I was sweating. My ears buzzed. I heard a rush of air come out of my lungs, a sound mixed with so much sadness it softened Shannon's tone. “I'm sorry,” she offered. “I hope I did the right thing by telling you. If you
are divorcing, we should be prepared. You know, to watch for any signs in Sophie that might be troubling.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” I said. “I will let you know, Shannon. Thank you for calling.”

My head swayed, or was it the room? I tried to stand and could not find my legs. I lay back on the bed, barely breathing, a throbbing pain at the base of my heart.

There was a part of me that had always known he would take a lover—he'd never admitted to the first affair, and I'd stayed despite his infidelity. We'd eventually moved into our dull separation without ever signing a legal agreement: separate beds, separate rooms, separate lives. I didn't ask where he spent his nights. He did the same for me. Now our arrangement seemed humiliating, laughable. At work, I was so capable, so driven. I was able to get to the crux of a story quickly, to weed out the extraneous and find just the facts I needed. Yet at home, I was awash in a jumble of chaos, incapable of doing what I needed to do. Leave David.

Sophie's art teacher? A woman in her twenties? I wondered how many times Sophie had been present at other flirtatious moments in her father's life, moments that made her feel uncomfortable for reasons she couldn't yet understand. The phone call had cleared my mind. We had both known we were divorced, in spirit, physically and emotionally. The only thing left was to pay the lawyers.

The following week, as I formulated the plans for how I would tell David I was leaving, it finally happened. Oprah would have called the phone call from Sophie's school my “moment,” the time we finally confront what we've known all along. I was done. Our marriage was over. As it turns out, David was also on the brink.

He was late again, the third time that week he'd forgotten to pick Sophie up. He was supposed to be taking her to a birthday party across town, another nine-year-old who would be waiting for all her guests to arrive before the fun began. Sophie was an hour late.

Finally, David ran up the front steps, breathing hard. “Fucking traffic,” he said, his face dripping with sweat. His pupils were dilated. I took a step back from him.

“If you're not going to be on time, I'll take care of her on my own.” I grabbed my purse.

“The fuck you will,” he exploded. “You fucking bitch, don't you ever threaten to take my daughter from me.” His eyes were pinched so narrowly I could barely see them. His white shirt was untucked, and there were large sweat rings under his arms. Everything about him stunk of craziness. I recoiled, shocked by this unfamiliar person.

Sophie ran to her bedroom. I went up and tried to calm her. “Hey, sweetheart, I'll drop you at the party. Let's get out of here. What do you say?”

Sophie's anger turned my way. “Why can't he just be normal? He's never on time. He's not nice anymore.” She gathered a big purple box with a bow on it in her arms and wiped away her tears. “And I am so sick of you fighting.”

“I know, baby. I'm sorry.” My purse felt heavy on my arm. I could hear David slamming cupboard doors and pacing the kitchen floor.

We sneaked out the back. I dropped Sophie at her party and drove home. David was fixing himself a sandwich when I walked back in the house.

“I want a divorce.” I said it in measured tones, trying not to let my voice rattle. “I'm leaving you.” My shoulders straightened. I was lighter, liberated by my own truth. Why had I waited so long to say those words? This was easier than I expected. Just then, his body slammed to the floor, a collapse that looked exactly like it does in the movies, where the person's eyes roll back in their head, and then slowly, they fall sideways. He barely missed the dining room table going down. It was a dull, unforgiving thud on the floor. His eyes were closed, but he was breathing.

I sprinted to a neighbor's house, a friendly doctor who never seemed in a hurry. As I ran, I replayed the image of David's sprawl; it reminded me of the many yellow outlines I'd seen on the nights
when I covered murder investigations. The tape outline always looked fake. People don't really fall that way, do they? Actually, they do. One arm was higher than the other, one knee bent as if scaling a climbing wall. He was that taped outline, a human being in limbo, not dead, not alive.

I reached the neighbors' house. “David collapsed,” I panted. “Please help!” The friendly doctor's wife, also a doctor, looked up in concern.

Dr. Benson turned from the sink. He had a head of broccoli in his hands. “Is he breathing?” He wiped his hands quickly on a white towel and slipped on a pair of flip-flops. Their lives looked so normal—the baby in the high chair, a toddler tugging at Mommy's leg.

“Yes, he was breathing.” I was barely able to catch my breath. “But his eyes fluttered like he might have had a seizure.”

“Call 911,” Benson said to his wife. We ran back to the house together.

Two neighbors heard the commotion and followed us into the house. David was still sprawled on the hardwood floor, unconscious but breathing. Benson kneeled by his side, took his pulse, and opened David's eye. Then both of his eyes flashed open. “What the hell?” David asked, staring at our neighbor.

“Hey, David, you gave us all a good scare,” Dr. Benson said. “Don't go moving yourself right away. Answer some questions for me. Did you hit your head going down?” The doctor touched him gingerly, on his shoulder and then his head. I stood back, relieved he was in good hands.

David shook his head no. “I don't think so. My elbow hurts.”

The ambulance drivers knocked on the door, breathless from running the flight of stairs. Benson explained the situation to them; they loaded David in a gurney and told me I could drive to the hospital behind them.

It was in the emergency room, when David was tethered to beeping machines, that he finally realized he was trapped.

“Get me out of here,” he yelled, ripping the monitors from his chest. The young doctor was exhausted from the pace of the ER—a stab wound, a broken hip, a homeless guy who sliced his foot open, and a baby with a raging fever. The doctor ran his hand through his disheveled hair. “You walk out of here, sir, and none of the bill you've racked up today will be paid for by insurance.” The ambulance ride alone would be hundreds of dollars.

David's eyes looked like those of a caged animal. He'd always hated hospitals from the multiple surgeries he had had to fix his cleft palate as a child. “You don't have to stay here, you know,” he hissed at me. “I'd prefer you leave.”

“I know,” I said, dreading the outcome of what would be expensive, and useless, testing. “But I'm staying anyway, David. You need help.”

I knew it wasn't his heart, or his lungs, or a tumor in his brain that was making him sick. It was something more pervasive, and more deadly. He was slipping away from me, and Sophie, and anyone who could help him.

I walked away from the emergency room thinking that David had fooled the physician. It was only later, as I read through David's medical documents, that I learned differently. “Admitting physician Dr. Replogle suspects bipolar affective disorder largely based on presentation.”

After David's first visit to the emergency room, it didn't take long for him to leap from partially functioning to full-blown madness. The ensuing eight weeks were the most horrifying of my life.

 

CARE FOR CAREGIVERS

Spouses of the mentally ill, unlike other relatives, tend to get less support and feel less connected to each other and to family members. They face additional financial and social problems. Many people decide that they are not able to endure persistent symptoms or cannot live with someone who is unable to sustain a healthy relationship.

To watch someone you love slip away is torturous. To watch that person resist intervention, stubbornly refuse treatment, and show callous disregard for his life partner is even more difficult. I wanted David in Sophie's life, not just every other week, but every day. But when I recognized that my own ability to cope was slipping, I felt as if I needed to save myself in order to allow Sophie one functioning parent.

I may have been better able to weather the storm of David's illness and its impact on our family if I had asked for help earlier, or known where to go to find it.

I have since found that there is support out there.

In 1979, families frustrated with the lack of services, treatment, research, and education available to them founded the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). It offers education and support for family members of people with mental illness. Many people report finding a “safe place” in the communities of people NAMI supports. NAMI's family-to-family group meetings are designed for adult loved ones of individuals living with mental illness. The meetings are facilitated by relatives of people with mental illness who have been trained to provide critical information and strategies related to caregiving.