All the Things We Never Knew (24 page)

He laughed a hearty laugh, his earring catching light as his head shook.

Jody Stahancyk had one of her younger attorneys call me back. I briefly told him the story of David's hospitalization, the enormous debt I'd uncovered, the guilt of asking him to sign the divorce papers now that he was in lockdown.

The attorney sat quietly on the other end of the phone and then spoke in measured tones. “If you are still married, you will be responsible for his personal debts. And it will be very difficult, given the circumstances, to get a judge to grant a divorce now that he's been institutionalized.”

So two of us were on lockdown now.

I thanked him for his time and told him I would be in touch.

When I returned to the hospital, the mental health visiting area was busier than I'd ever seen it. Alice was sitting with David, as was Jim McCall. Alice was wearing a gray wool dress with red ballerina flats and a red scarf around her neck. She smiled faintly when she saw me.

Jim was talking with David in soft tones about how to start sorting out his business trouble. Jim, always the gentleman, stood when he saw me. “How are you doing?” he asked, shaking my hand.

“I'm okay, thanks, Jim.” I turned to David's mother. “Hi, Alice. Hello, David.” It was an awkward, formal moment, reminiscent of
how couples must feel in the lawyer's office before they divorce, trying desperately to be polite and functional while their worlds fall apart.

Jim had stacked the legal documents in the middle of the coffee table that separated the chairs. “Shall we begin?” he asked the group.

David turned to Alice. “Mommy, what do you think?”

I was stunned. I had never heard him refer to his mother as “Mommy.” I had never heard his voice so soft, or so lacking in authority. I wanted to stop the meeting right then and ask him what drugs he was on, or what had happened to destroy his confidence. Where was the strong, opinionated, brilliant man I had married? Where was the voice that would boom through the house when he called for Sophie or me? I bit my tongue as acid rose up in my stomach.

Alice nodded decisively. “I think we need to get a clearer picture of everything, David.”

His face looked soft and more rounded, like a child's. The tremor that had affected his leg and hand seemed to be under control today, but he looked stressed by the number of people, the attention, and the decisions before him. He was still painfully thin for his size, even though the nurses reported that he was eating again. Was it the drugs or the illness robbing him of his manhood? I had heard about people who become mentally ill reverting back to childhood. If I hadn't seen it myself, I would never have believed it was true.

It was only in the reading of David's medical records that I later learned how far he had fallen: “It is imperative that this man be kept in a safe situation until he gets enough relief from the psychotic depression. He has annihilistic delusions, believing that his mind is gone, cannot be recovered, and that things will only get worse for him. He feels an overwhelming unilateral guilt in the loss of his marriage and business. In my interview with him, it became clear that he is so convinced of this that from his perspective it would not make any sense to go on living much longer. He cannot even decide whether his daughter would be better off with him or without him.”

Jim knew I was the person who would be responsible for David's personal debts. He outlined the process. “This will be a temporary measure, David. We'll give Sheila the authority to make decisions for you and look after your financial affairs for a period of three months. That should give us a better idea of what we need to do next. Are you sure you are okay with this?”

David nodded yes. He didn't look at me before he signed the document. His signature looked exactly as it had a decade or so earlier when he'd signed our marriage contract—all loopy and slanted heavily to the right. The nurses from behind the glass wall shot me their customary dirty looks. David handed me the papers and said, “I'm so sorry for doing this to you. To you and Sophie.”

I swallowed before I spoke. He was so vulnerable here. “We'll work it out, David. We'll take care of everything.”

Jim sensed his intrusion and excused himself briefly to the table nearby. Alice excused herself to the restroom. “David,” I asked, “why couldn't you tell me your company was in trouble?”

“I thought you'd think I was stupid.” He lowered his gaze to the floor.

“But what about your accountant, your taxes?”

“There are a lot of people who owe me money. I just couldn't ask. I couldn't ask for payment.”

“What? What do you mean? There are people who owe you money? For how many jobs?”

“I don't know, six or seven.” He motioned for a pen and the pad of paper I held. “These are the names. Some of the jobs are nearly finished. Others have been done for a long time but the clients want some minor changes. I just lost track of it all, Sheila. I'm sorry. I feel like a fool.”

I was beginning to understand the depth of his illness in terms that now tied David's past to the present. I thought of the story his mother had told me in the kitchen when we first met, how his paper route had turned sour when he became too paralyzed to collect money from his clients. I put my fingers over my mouth, pressing against the sadness
welling up inside me. David squirmed on the couch, looking like a kid forced to stay after school. His left leg bounced up and down.

“Do you think I'll ever get out of here?” he asked.

“Of course you will, David. You'll stay for a couple of weeks, maybe. Then we'll move you back home, and you can rebuild your life.”

“I just can't see it, you know?” He searched my eyes to make sure I understood. “I just can't see being the guy who picks up Sophie from another person's house. I don't want to do it. I can't.”

Jim must have sensed David's agitation. “Everything okay over there?” he asked. David nodded yes.

“You know what's weird?” he said, turning back to me. “They have this manual, this huge physician's manual that talks about all these different psychiatric illnesses. One of the aides here let me read it when I finished the books everyone has brought me.”

He leaned forward in his chair as if he were sharing a secret. His eyes widened, and he spoke in low tones. “I'm bipolar. It's true. It's like, check, check, check. Even the strange things I think I'm smelling.” He made a sign with his hand as if he was counting off the warning signs that applied to him.

It was the first time I had heard anyone mention a diagnosis. My spine stiffened, and I felt my jaw drop.

“Is that what they say, David? Is that the diagnosis?”

He nodded.

No wonder David felt so paralyzed he couldn't bill the clients who owed him money. No wonder he couldn't sleep, couldn't eat. No wonder he had huge variations in his weight and his energy. People with bipolar II disorder are often highly prone to lying. They experience irritability and anxiety instead of the joyous, manic high associated with bipolar I. They also suffer from maddening swings in energy and focus. They are highly sexualized, and infidelity is common. All the signs were there.

My temples began to throb. A wave of pity and longing for the man he used to be washed over me. I stroked the top of his head and kissed him on the cheek.

“David,” I said, “we'll all be here for you, no matter what happens.” It was as if a small lens I'd used to view him had suddenly opened wide, and finally, the big picture was in view.

David stood up and shook my hand, as he had the last time. “Goodbye for now,” he said, walking toward his mother.

I swallowed hard and tried to compose myself. Jim sat down next to me.

“You're going to need to be tougher than all of us put together.” He patted my hand.

“I don't know, Jim,” I said, “I don't know if I have it in me.”

Later that day, I took the legal papers to David's bank and asked for a printout of all the deposits he'd made in the last six months, all the checks he'd written, and the balance left in his business account. The woman behind the counter looked at the power of attorney document, her eyebrows penciled in and pinched.

She made several long phone calls before she finally pushed a slip of paper under the glass and reported the account balances. Ten thousand dollars remaining—not enough to make a ding in any of his debt.

I remembered attorney Jody Stahancyk's admonition: “Your ignorance may have saved you, but, on the other hand, if he's rung up personal debt, you're on the hook.” I raced to the car and called David's accountant.

“Did you know anything about this?” I asked him.

“I had a feeling things were way out of control,” he said, Hendrix music blasting in the background.

“Why?”

“Because he hasn't paid me either.”

David's mother, his sister, and a friend of theirs were sitting in my living room when I got home. I poked my head in on Sophie. She was listening to her iPod in her room. “Hi, love, how are you?” I asked.

She threw her arms around me, and I could hear the music too loud from the earbuds. Things had settled between us since the scene in the car. “I'm okay, Mama,” she smiled. “How are you?”

My heart melted when she called me “Mama.” There's something so profoundly personal about that term of endearment. “I'm good, too, sweetheart. Just fine—better now that I see you.”

I smothered her head with kisses. “Hey, turn the tunes down a notch, would you?” She rolled her eyes, smiling. If she worried about David every day, every moment as I did, it did not show.

I settled in the living room with Alice and Adele. “I'm in real trouble,” I said. “It looks like a large portion of David's debt, his taxes, his county debts, will fall to me and Sophie. I know you want David to be able to stay in the house, but I don't know whether he can afford it. And I don't know where Sophie and I would go, either.”

I loved this house, this kitchen, the place we had finally settled into as home. The thought of leaving it now, unsettling Sophie when things were so chaotic, packing her clothes and stuffed animals and moving to a tiny apartment, all seemed incomprehensible. The last few weeks had taken my spirit. I bit my lip to stop it from trembling.

Alice avoided the topic. There was a chicken in the oven, which she must have cooked. The aroma wafted through the air, a mix of rich olive oil, herbs, and sea salt. “What do you say we eat something? You must be starved.”

Her denial never waned.

I stayed up reading with Sophie and then tucked her in. “Is he going to be okay?” Sophie asked. I knew from her tone she was not talking about Harry Potter.

“I hope so, baby. We're doing everything we can for him.” I kissed her on the forehead, and she turned over, as she did every night, so that I could scratch her back. Her tiny waist and long torso looked so much like David's sisters, all beautiful women.

Their emotional struggles hadn't meant much to me before David's illness; every woman suffers from a bout of sadness and anxiety now and then. But now, I obsessed over his family's propensity for depression and mental illness.

I had more of the story than Alice knew. Adele had given me the complete history. David had been sent away to boarding school in England at the age of ten, a year in which he was brutalized by the other students. He returned home to attend school at a Boston prep school as his father studied at Harvard Business School. The transitions were hard on him; he'd made few friends since the kids at both schools had been together for an extern long time, and David was an outsider.

Although David always did well academically, and his test scores were off the charts, he was kicked out of school because he quit going to class. Next came another boarding school, another difficult transition. David was finally kicked out of the house at sixteen. Michael's sister Adele says her father suffered from erratic mood swings and David was often the target of his anger.

But Alice never let on about any of this, not to me. She never shared the details of David's upbringing that I would later realize were central to his feelings of abandonment. There was so much unsaid about their family's pain—no mention of Lew's erratic behavior or his affair with a family friend, no mention of both parents kicking David out of the house at sixteen. They were a family good at keeping secrets.

His father, prone to shutting himself off in his bedroom during our visits, had given up a lucrative career and a Harvard education at the age of forty-three. He never worked for another person again, instead buying, remodeling, and then selling houses to keep his family afloat between sporadic moves around the world. Adele would later tell David's psychiatrists she was convinced Lew was bipolar, and that her mother suffered from depressive episodes. Adele's mother, however, would never accept the designation of a psychiatric disorder. She was deeply skeptical of the profession and refused to categorize her loved ones' suffering as mental illness.

Watching Sophie sleep, I knew I needed to understand everything
I could about the genetic nature of bipolar disorder and the genetic risk of depression, one from his side, another from my own mother. A double whammy from two gene pools. Sophie deserved my vigilance. I kissed her on the cheek and wished her peaceful dreams. When her breath was even and deep, I went to my bedroom and opened my laptop.