‘Until then . . .’
‘I will send the requisite letters keeping all the vultures at bay. And I’m sorry to say this, but I will need another five thousand from you as a further retainer. All going well this will be the last payment.’
‘And if things don’t go well?’
‘Try not to think that.’
But I did think that.
Again I didn’t sleep that night – my third in a row. The next day I found myself increasingly unable to concentrate, to focus, to make it through a lecture without having a ‘dead zone’ moment when, out of nowhere, I would zonk out for a few seconds – much to the amusement of my students, one of whom trenchantly noted out loud: ‘I think the Professor was wasted last night.’
When I snapped back into consciousness and scanned the classroom to see who out of the fifty students had made that comment, everything in front of me was a blur.
‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered. ‘I haven’t been sleeping . . .’
This comment got back to Professor Sanders who made a point of stopping by my office and catching me with the door open and in the midst of a doze at my desk.
‘I hope I’m not interrupting you?’ he asked, stepping inside.
‘Sorry, sorry. It’s just—’
‘You haven’t been sleeping. And you fell asleep in your class this morning.’
‘I am just coping with a great deal right now.’
‘Of course you are,’ he said, all coolness. ‘I really do advise you to get some sleep, Professor. The university might not be able to take action against you because of your association with deadbeats. But dereliction of duty while on the job, hinting at a larger psychological instability . . . that’s another matter entirely.’
That evening – when I changed at Park Street for the Red Line train back to Somerville, I felt myself getting so shaky that I actually had to grip the platform bench when the train rattled into the station. Did I feel like throwing myself under the Red Line? I couldn’t make sense of anything right now.
But I did manage to negotiate myself onto the train. I got off at Davis Square and went into a local pharmacy where I bought some over-the-counter sleeping aid that the druggist assured me would send me out for eight hours that night.
Emily was always able to read my moods – and when I came home that night she turned to her nanny and said: ‘My mommy needs to go to bed!’
‘How right you are,’ I said, picking her up. But she stiffened as I held her.
‘You’re upset with me,’ she said.
‘No, I’m not.’
‘You are.’ Then to Julia: ‘Mommy’s cranky.’
‘I’ve just got some stuff I’ve been dealing with.’
‘Mommy’s getting angry calls from people . . .’
‘Emily, that is enough.’
My tone was far too sharp, far too ‘end of my rope’. My daughter’s face fell, she burst into tears and she ran off into her room. I turned to Julia and said: ‘Sorry . . . there’s a lot going on right now.’
‘It’s no worry, it’s no worry. I go to Emily . . .’
‘No, no, you go home. I’ll calm her down.’
‘You OK, Mrs Howard?’
‘I just need one night’s sleep.’
When I went into Emily’s room I found my daughter curled up on the top of her bunk bed, her thumb in her mouth. As soon as I came in, she pulled her thumb out and guiltily shoved her hand under her pillow (I’d started trying to break her of the thumb-sucking habit). I sat down next to her and stroked her hair and said: ‘I am so sorry for getting angry at you.’
‘What did I do?’
‘Nothing. I just overreacted.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Getting angry unnecessarily.’
‘Why are you angry?’
‘Because I’m over-tired. I haven’t been sleeping.’
‘Because Daddy isn’t here?’
‘That’s part of it.’
‘You won’t run away too?’
‘And leave you? Never. Never in a million years.’
‘You promise?’
‘Of course I do. And I promise not to get angry again.’
‘That’s a big promise,’ she said with a small laugh. At that moment I couldn’t help but think:
This daughter of mine gets it all so damn fast
.
I took two sleeping pills that night, chased with a mug of chamomile tea. They knocked me out for around two hours, but then I was up again, staring at the ceiling, feeling as if my brain had been cleaved. I swallowed another two pills. I got up. I read through some papers. I waited for the pills to kick in. Nothing happened. I looked at the clock. It was now just one-thirty in the morning. I picked up the phone and called Christy. She too was up late, grading papers.
‘You have me worried,’ she said.
‘I have me worried too.’
‘It’s not just insomnia you’re suffering, it’s depression.’
‘I’m functioning just fine. A good night’s sleep—’
‘Bullshit. You’re in a dark wood. My advice to you is to get to a doctor tomorrow and get some help. Otherwise . . .’
‘OK, OK.’
‘Stop dodging the obvious. Depression is a serious business. If you don’t deal with it now—’
‘I’ll deal with it, OK?’
But the next morning I dropped Emily at nursery school and dozed off on the T. Later I caught sight of myself in the mirror in my office and saw just how strained and netherworldly I looked. I drank three large mugs of coffee and got through my lectures, constantly sensing that I was a bad actor inhabiting the body of this alleged professor of English, trying to sound erudite and engaged with her subject matter while simultaneously knowing that I was nothing less than a sham . . . and that life as I knew it was nothing but a series of misadventures and setbacks, in which people disappointed you hugely and – worst of all – you kept disappointing yourself. And had it not been for Emily I might just now—
No, no, don’t go there. But do go to a doctor. Now.
However, another voice in my head – the voice that didn’t want to begin to face up to what I needed to accept, that, yes, I was in something akin to free fall – told me: ‘
You’ll sleep tonight and all will seem better tomorrow. Why add another goddamn wrinkle to your life by deciding you’re depressed? Get home, go to bed. Show the bastards this won’t bring you down
.’
So even though the faculty doctor was on duty that afternoon and I could easily have seen him and begged for some pharmaceutical way out of this sleepless hell, something in me forced me back across Boston on the T, and to Cambridge to pick up Emily. (Julia herself had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon.)
‘Mommy, Mommy!’ Emily said as she saw me in the doorway of the nursery. ‘Can we go get a treat?’
‘No problem, my love.’
‘You tired, Mommy?’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
And I helped her on with her coat and led her by the hand out the door.
‘I think there’s a coffee shop near here that does great sundaes,’ I said. ‘But first you’ll have to eat something nutritious . . . like a hamburger.’
‘Are hamburgers good for you?’
‘They’re better than ice-cream sundaes.’
Suddenly, in front of us, there was a commotion. An elderly woman had been walking her terrier. The lead had broken and the terrier was running free, heading towards us. The woman was yelling its name. Emily, all wide-eyed, broke free of my grip and chased right after it. I lunged for my daughter, screaming at her to stop. But she was already off the curb . . .
And at that precise moment, out of nowhere, a taxi came barreling around the corner.
Again I screamed my daughter’s name. Again I lunged for her.
But I was too late.
Part Four
One
T
HEY FOUND ME
in a snowdrift. It was around two in the morning – so they told me later. Had they arrived an hour later I would have been dead.
But that was the idea of driving into that snowdrift – and turning the engine off and taking the two dozen Zopiclones that I had in my pocket, and waiting for the moment when I could finally summon up the necessary
. . .
Courage? No, that wasn’t the right word, because there was nothing courageous about what I was going to do. Rather, the actual word here was ‘
finality
’. After all those weeks of an agony that was so unendurable, I was finally going to yield to the only bearable solution. And so, when I turned the corner of that backwoods road and saw the snow banked up on the edge of a dark wood, I suddenly braked. Digging the pills out of my pocket and flipping open the top of the bottle, I emptied all the Zopiclones into my mouth. I nearly choked as I chased them with water, the clustered tablets scraping my esophagus as they went down. Then I turned off the car’s heater, unbuckled my seat-belt, disengaged the airbag and hit the accelerator.
All this was accomplished in under thirty seconds. It was a fast, instinctual decision, done without pause for thought. Maybe that’s how many suicides work. Weeks, months, years of consideration and hesitation. Then, one morning, you’re on a subway platform, you hear the approach of an express train rattling through the station and . . .
Heater off. Seat-belt off. Twenty-four heavy-duty sleeping tablets still burning my throat. Without further thought I slammed my foot down on the accelerator. The car shot forward, plunging deep into the snow before crashing into something solid. I was thrown forward. The world went dark. And . . .
That should have been it. The end – with either the crash, the pills, the cold (or a combination of all three) killing me.
But that wasn’t the end. Because . . .
I woke up. And found myself on a narrow gurney-like bed. As the room came into focus I could see that the walls were painted some institutional color and the ceiling tiles were chipped and crusted with mold. I tried to raise my arms but couldn’t. They were being held in place by straps. I blinked and realized that one eye was covered by a bandage. I touched my lips with my tongue. A mistake. There was a railroad track of stitches on both lips. My mouth was parched. When I squinted to my left I could see tubes attached to my immobile arms and assorted monitoring devices next to the gurney. I could also feel something sharp and unpleasant coming out of me. Even in this fogged-in, back-from-the-dead state I knew immediately that a catheter has been inserted into my bladder.
Oh God, I’m alive.
‘Well, hello there. You’re back.’
The voice was flat. Prairie flat. Plain, unadorned, dry. I tried to sit up. I failed. I blinked with my one good eye – and could make out the outline of a woman standing in front of me. Another blink and she came into better focus. She was rail thin with a lined face and sharply delineated features. But it was her eyes that unnerved me. They were eyes that tolerated no artifice, no self-pity. They were eyes that looked out on the world with a ruthless clarity. They were eyes that – even in my semi-conscious state – told me immediately:
She knows everything
.
‘Guess you weren’t expecting this, now were you?’
‘Where am I?’ I asked.
‘Mountain Falls Regional Hospital.’
‘Mountain Falls?’
‘That’s right. Mountain Falls, Montana. You had your “accident” just outside Mountain Falls, on Route 202, around two days ago. Do you remember that?’
‘Uh . . . sort of. I lost control . . .’
I let the sentence die.
‘You lost control of your car after ingesting a near-fatal amount of sleeping pills and driving right into a snowbank without a seat-belt. And I suppose the fact that the airbag was disengaged and you didn’t have any heat on in the car was also an “accident”, even though it was minus five the other night.’
‘I lost control . . .’
‘I know that,’ she said, the tough tone slightly softening. ‘We all know that. And we also know why . . .’
‘How can you . . . ?’
Again I couldn’t finish the sentence.
‘Know
why
? You had a wallet on you. The wallet told the cops who found you who you were. They did a little investigating, being cops and all that. They found out what they needed to find out – and let us know about your situation. That’s why you’re strapped down right now. A precaution – in case you feel like doing yourself some serious harm again.’
I shut my eye, taking this all in.
They know. They know everything.
‘Name’s Nurse Rainier, by the way. Rainier like the mountain in Washington State. Janet Rainier. I’m the matron on the ward here. Do you know what ward this is?’
‘The psych ward . . .’
‘Got it in one. You are in the psych ward – on suicide watch. My guess is that you kind of made a last-minute decision to end it all. Like you could have checked into a motel with all those Zopiclone pills and a bottle of whiskey and done it in a bit of comfort. But you chose something kind of instantaneous, didn’t you?’
I closed my eye and turned away.
‘I’m being just a little gruff, right? That’s kind of how I run things around here. Now I can completely understand why you might think I’ve got all the sensitivity of a car crash – and yeah, I know that is probably
not
the most opportune thing to say right now – but there you go. As long as you’re on my ward you’re gonna have to get used to my no-crap approach to things. ’Cause the goal is to send you out of here not wanting to drive into another snowbank again. You hear me?’
I stayed turned away.
‘You hear me?’
She hadn’t raised her voice a decibel, but she still unnerved me.
I nodded.
‘Good. Now let me ask you another question: If I remove the restraining straps from your arms, are you going to play ball with me and
not
do anything rash, stupid and/or self-harming?’
I nodded again.
‘I’d love to hear you express that thought.’
It took me a moment to summon up the ability to talk again. When I did speak, the mere movement of my lips was agony.
‘I promise.’