All the Things We Never Knew (18 page)

We pulled into the driveway, and I said, “I'm really sorry about Lew, Alice. I liked him very much.”

She opened the car door, got halfway out, and then turned. “I know you did, dear. He liked you too.” She paused. “Everyone goes through hard times in a marriage. It wasn't always easy. But you work on it; you work
for
it. That's how you have a good marriage.”

Before I could respond to Alice's philosophy on how to make a good marriage, a good life, she opened the door to my house and hauled her bag upstairs.

That night, David came to my bedroom. “Can I lay down with you?” he asked.

“What is it?” I slid to the opposite edge of the bed.

“I think about us all the time,” he whispered. “I let you go, didn't I. I let you go?”

He touched my arm, then my face. “Please don't, David.” I turned away from him. My body ached, but not for him.

“I don't know if I can make it without you,” he said.

I was so tired and irritated by his erratic nighttime sojourns. I whispered, not wanting to wake his mother. “It seems to me if you'd wanted to save our marriage you might have made an effort to get help, to see a doctor, before now.”

“I was fucked up.” He sat up in bed, his hair askew and his beard much longer than I'd ever seen before. “But I'm getting better now, I am. I'm going to go to counseling, too. I'm not giving up on us, Sheila; please don't give up on me.” His eyes were glassy, bloodshot from lack of sleep.

I sighed and sat up to face him. My jaw was tense; I'd been grinding my teeth at night. “David, maybe you haven't realized how I've been suffering too. This isn't a life for me—it's not one for Sophie. I don't want to have her grow up thinking she doesn't deserve affection and respect from her husband. I don't want her to believe adults sleep apart.”

I hugged him, and my heart broke for the little boy in him, the kid who'd been shipped off to boarding school, the kid who was bullied every day because he was shy. He'd turned the anger inside and never really let me in.

“No, no, I won't go.” He started to raise his voice. I knew his mother would hear us fighting.

Maybe it was the lack of sleep, or the anxiety I had over worrying about Sophie's safety. I was really, finally done. I wanted to jolt him into reality, into seeing the seriousness of our situation. “I'm seeing someone else,” I said. “Just a couple of times, but I like him.”

David laughed a mocking laugh. “How charming,” he said. “Is he younger than me?”

“Why does that matter?” I said. “Why does any of it matter? You never cared before.” We hadn't slept together in two years, and neither of us questioned one another about how we survived the physical isolation of a marriage that existed solely for our daughter.

The beige-and-black law offices of Jody Stahancyk were designed in tones meant to neither soothe nor evoke emotion. Jody was Oregon's best-known attorney, a big woman, six foot two, with a voice that boomed through the hallway. The stories of her courtroom antics were widely circulated. She could intimidate judges. She could make male lawyers cry. I'd heard all the stories, but I really needed her help. It had been a long shot to get in, and I'd obviously waited far too long before calling, but she'd agreed, thanks to a series of interviews I'd done with her when I reported for the ABC affiliate.

We talked about shoes for ten minutes. Her daughter knew of a place in Chicago that sold designer brands at cost. How much was this costing me? I'd heard stories of people not being able to afford her after the first meeting.

When she finally asked, “What can I do for you?” I wasted no time.

I told her about David's illness, how I didn't want to make it worse by getting a contentious divorce. “I want to know the best way to work this out. And I know this sounds absurd, but I really don't even want him to know I've seen you.”

She peered at me over red horn-rimmed glasses. “How long have you been married?”

“Ten years.”

“Then you'll give him half of everything you own. Do you have savings?”

“Yes, a 401(k), a pension, a few hundred thousand dollars in savings and from investing in apartments,” I said. My own shoes were bought on closeout from a warehouse sale. I'd worked so hard to save. Now I was going to give away half of it. “And the house.”

“Do you both own the house?” Her female assistant, a young Asian lawyer dressed in a beautiful black suit, took notes as we talked.

“No, David didn't believe in buying on credit. I bought it. It's in my name.”

“Well, whatever you do, don't leave the house,” she said flatly.

I sat back in my chair, floored. “What do you mean? I'm packed. I've signed a lease on an apartment. I'm halfway moved in.” My silk blouse was stained with sweat.

“Well, unpack, and get back in that house. If things get ugly, and you've abandoned your primary residence, that house will be his, along with half of everything else you own.” She started scribbling on a paper and then addressed her assistant. “Krista, get Sheila the papers for a no-fault divorce. Fill them out for her. We'll have an asset sheet drawn up tomorrow.”

She turned to me. “Here's how it's going to go down. You're going to buy him out of the house and offer him half of everything you own. He gets to keep the assets from his business.” She looked up, struck by her own curiosity, “He does have assets, doesn't he?”

“I don't know.”

“Are you an officer of his company?” She leaned back in her leather chair, which looked custom-made to fit her frame.

“No, I've never signed checks; I know nothing about how he runs his financials.”

“Try to find out in the next few days, would you?” She smiled. “On the one hand, your ignorance may have protected you from some nasty corporate debt. On the other hand, your ignorance could cost you mightily if he's run up a bunch of personal debt. Does he
have credit cards? A mistress? A secret place in Vegas? Is he a drug dealer, a drug user? You need to know these things.”

This was her territory. There wasn't a scenario or scheme she didn't already know forward and back.

“No, none of that,” I said quickly. I had long suspected his infidelity, but I didn't know anything for certain about David's private life.

Two more hours passed in her office as I laid out the entire story of our marriage and my worry about preserving what little mental health he still had. I was spent, as if the energy had been squeezed out of me in drops, question by question. At the end of the session, she handed me some chicken scratch on some paper.

“Okay, this is a rough guess, but based on what you've told me, here's how you'd make the split.” She handed me the paper. The numbers looked completely devastating. My savings would be virtually wiped out. In my twenties, I'd worked two jobs, anchoring and reporting. In my thirties, I'd invested in apartments with an attorney friend of mine. All the missed nights from Sophie, all the weekends showing and renting apartments—it was all for nothing.

“What about custody?” she asked. “You want your daughter full-time?” I had never, ever considered taking Sophie from David. Ever.

“Absolutely not,” I said. “Sophie is all that David has left. I want her to be with him, at least half of the time.”

“And can he take care of her?” she asked.

My shoulders fell. “I don't know. I really don't know anymore.” As bad as David's condition had become, he managed to hold it together around Sophie. He was his best self with her. It was an irrational assumption, but I believed he would never harm her intentionally.

Jody's phone was lit up on all five ringers, people on hold, other divorces, other marriages crashing in around her, and yet she was perfectly composed, booming orders to her assistant like a four-star general in a theater of war. “Okay, that's a good start,” she said, wrapping up. “Look, I do this all the time. You are in a better position
than 98 percent of the women who come through here. You're a smart cookie. You'll earn it back. You've got your kid. We can keep you out of court. You can count on me. Now, go convince David to settle this quickly.”

I shook her hand, the firmest shake I'd encountered in weeks. I liked this woman; I didn't care what people said about her. She really did pull out all the stops for her clients.

Before I left, she added, “We'll help you file the divorce. The media doesn't have to know.”

This was the news I welcomed most. I'd read other local personalities' divorces unfold on the pages of local gossip sites. None of them had Jody as a lawyer.

“Thanks, Jody,” I said, the bones of my knees knocking. Standing next to her I felt pathetic, incompetent, tiny.

She softened. “Remember to breathe, would you?”

 

HEALING THE MIND

Brian Goff is a gifted therapist in Portland, Oregon, whose specialty is suicide. He's seen more than 500 significantly suicidal patients. Goff says,
“A large percentage of survivors I work with say they regret the choice of attempting suicide. Rarely have people actually wanted to die. They just didn't want to live the way they were living.”

Goff has worked at the forefront of several therapies that offer promise for the most deeply troubled patients. Intensive therapies, such as
dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and
cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), have reduced rates of repetition of deliberate self-harm. Goff cofounded a DBT clinic and has used that technique successfully with hundreds and hundreds of patients. Now, he's combined what he sees as the best elements of both in a treatment that uses mindfulness blended with cognitive behavioral psychotherapies.

Goff begins with this premise: people want to live a life worth living. And if they can be given the tools to help them ease the struggle of their present condition, they can begin building a life worth living. The new hybrid therapy developed by Goff, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), focuses on modifying the functions rather than the forms of symptoms, using acceptance and mindfulness strategies.

“Western medicine moves the locus of control so that the solution is no longer inside of us,” Goff says. “Someone else will take care of it. ACT puts the construction of one's life and the reorientation of one's experience back in the hands of the individual.

“We teach people to experience their thoughts as thoughts. When they think, ‘I'm going crazy,' we teach them to change the thought to “I'm having the thought I'm going crazy.” Thus participants
develop a different relationship with
the thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations that would normally form a toxic spiral, deepening hopelessness and the sense of entrapment and opening the way to another suicidal crisis.”

With ACT, people learn to move beyond the thought that “my situation is hopeless” by changing it to this: “I notice a thought that my situation is hopeless.” “ACT therapists are giving people tools to put these thoughts in context,” says Goff. “So much of traditional CBT focuses on symptom reduction. So often, people are doing the things they do to avoid unwanted internal experiences (i.e., thoughts and feelings) rather than doing things that are important and meaningful to them.”

In ACT, there is something more worthy of one's time than reducing discomfort (which often backfires like trying to get out of quicksand): that is, learning to be flexible enough psychologically so that you can do the things that feel meaningful, vital, and important to you. It is often said, “Living well is better than feeling good.”

Goff asks his patients a theoretical question that provides insight into the behavioral component of suicidal ideation: “If I had a magic wand and I could do something, anything, for you, would you say, ‘Please kill me'? In all the years I've asked it, I've never heard ‘Yes, please kill me,'” Goff says. “The answer is, ‘Cure my Parkinson's.' ‘End my depression.' ‘Save my marriage.' ‘Prevent my bankruptcy.'”

“Most people who suffer from mental illness begin with a host of vulnerabilities: environmental, genetic predisposition, early trauma, nutritional deficiencies etc.,” says Goff. “You inherit certain qualities of your internal world, among them sensitivity, reactivity, the ability to return to a normal mood.”