Jackie’s voice as he explained something about R2D2 was cracking. He had some scraggly hairs in his armpits, and a girlfriend who saved him a seat on the school bus. Jason spent his spare time in the woods stalking birds and chipmunks with his BB gun. Soon they’d be gone. Never again to burst through the door and show her the garter snake they’d just trapped. Never to turn her living room into a space capsule or the interior of a submarine or a hockey rink.
Caroline could hear the rumble of Diana and Suzanne conversing upstairs. Soon Diana would be gone. Never again to lie in Caroline’s arms all morning watching snow swirl out the window. Never more would they run through sunny green fields together, walk through fiery stands of maples, ski through new snow, make love through a balmy spring night.
Even Amelia, who was sitting watching Arnold crunch chicken bones, having curled up on Caroline’s bed all winter, now preferred to stay out hunting all night. Where did this leave Caroline?
Alone.
Reassured, the boys departed to their room for homework. As Caroline washed the dishes, her burned hand hurting so much that tears filled her eyes, she tried to think positively. Like the aerial photo in Hannah’s office, what you saw depended on how you focused. Her life was in ruins, true. But somewhere in the wreckage surely a daisy bloomed? She still had friends to play poker with, to bowl with. She still had a badly paid job, a healthy body. She could add new ingredinow that she knew she was the chef. Maybe she should take up macrame. She could weave a shroud of many colors.
Or a new Pink Blanky. What about smoking?
Even Hannah smoked. Somehow the void had to be filled. But with what?
She fixed herself some coffee, turned on the TV, and sat on the couch for the news, hoping to fill the void for the time being with familiar routines. Some nights Walter Cronkite appeared to have the world under control, and one could go to sleep relatively confident of waking up the next morning still alive.
Unfortunately, not that night. Walter’s henchman was describing Idi Amin’s predilection for filet of small child. Caroline felt the slow grind in her stomach rev up like a B52 taxiing for takeoff. But this time she was ready for it: She felt undefended without Hannah, and was shifting her terror onto the world at large.
Abruptly she stood up and switched off the TV
She could choose not to engage with this madness. She’d phone someone. Who? Not Hannah, not Diana, not Brian. Her father hated long distance calls because they cost money. Marsha was dead. She had no number for Rorkie or David Michael. Jackson already felt she was hysterical. Jenny! Maybe she’d even take her up on the invitation to share her bed.
Anything not to sleep alone tonight. She dialed jenny’s number. No answer. She dialed Pam.
No answer.
“Hi, babe. What’s up?” asked Brenda.
“Nothing much. I’m just feeling crummy and wanted to hear a friendly voice.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Diana and I have called it quits again, and I’ve just ended therapy.”
“Both at once? Don’t you and Diana ever get tired of breaking up?
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And why are you stopping therapy so soon? God, it’s a wonder you aren’t in the loony bin.
Look, Barb and I are going to Maude’s for supper. Want to meet us there? Have a few drinks, a few laughs?”
“Thanks, but I can’t. I have the kids tonight.”
“Well, we’ll stop by on our way then.”
“That’s okay, Brenda. Really. I’ll be fine.”
“We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Caroline forgot she was dealing with an Emergency Medical Technician. By the time she fluffed cushions and picked up baseball cleats, Barb and Brenda were at her door carrying a bottle of rye and a plate of brownies.
“Jeez, you don’t look so great,” said Brenda, ushering Caroline to the couch and handing her a brownie.
“Eat this. It’ll raise your blood sugar level.”
As Caroline ate the brownie, Barb mixed drinks on the kitchen counter. Brenda told about a burly man who’d been brought into the ER from a rowdy bar the previous night, dead drunk with a broken leg.
When she cut off his trousers, she found he was wearing lacy bikini briefs and had a sausage taped to his inner thigh. Barb laughed so hard she spilled rye all over the counter.
After a couple of drinks, and Brenda’s description of every accident in the area for the preceding week, Barb said to Caroline, “Are you sure you won’t have supper with us?”
Caroline said, “No, thanks. I’m in charge on the home front tonight. But thanks for coming over, girls. You’ve cheered me up.” Saying it, she knew it was a lie.
“Take two aspirin and go to bed with a friend,” said Brenda, exiting with a hearty laugh.
As their car pulled away, Caroline wondered if she herself would ever laugh like that again. Brenda had done her best, but there was nothing she could do. There was nothing anyone could do. It was finished. She’d tried everything. All that was left was to take a hundred and two aspirin and go to bed alone. She carried a glass of water into her bedroom and set it on the nightstand. Then she went into the closet, collected all the pill bottles from the shelf, and grouped them next to the water.
Methodically she removed and folded her clothes.
Then she put
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on her flannel nightgown. After brushing her teeth, she went into the boys’ room. Intent on homework, they scarcely glanced up as she kissed them good-bye and smoothed their hair.
As she climbed into bed, eyeing her pill bottles, she remembered promising the boys at supper that she’d take care of them. Damn. She studied the Luke Skywalker glass full of water. She never broke promIt set a bad example.
Shit. She couldn’t even weigh the options and decide to stay alive. She was stuck here. She swept the bottles off the table and into the wastebasket on the floor.
With a disappointed sigh, she scooted down in her bed, turned out the light, and pulled the covers to her chin.
She began to examine her void from every angle.
Eventually she realized it wasn’t really new at all. She’d carried this feeling of emptiness with her all her life. Like malaria, it flared up periodically. She pictured that toddler trying to find her way to the bathroom through the dark hall, pink blanket clutched around her shoulders for protection against the monsters and Japs lurking in the shadows.
She felt the same terrified emptiness on the bus carrying flowers to Marsha’s grave. And looking out on her lawn covered with Rorkie’s toilet paper. And standing on the street watching Arlene in her office with Dusty. And entombed in
Jackson’s neo-Tudor house, to which he rarely returned. And hearing David Michael’s headboard clatter against the wall on his nights with Clea. And listening to Diana by the fire the other night saying their relationwasn’t working. In a flash she understood that her feeling of abandonment and despair had almost nothing to do with those other people. They were just ordinary flawed mortals, doing their clumsy best to get through life with some measure of pleasure and meaning. Her void was hers and hers alone.
Let them go, it suddenly occurred to her. Let them all go. Let them all go in peace. Her parents, Marsha, Rorkie, Arlene, Jackson, David Michael, Diana, Hannah-they all had to go.
She’d revolved around each of them like an Israelite around the golden calf. Whomshe turned the searchlight of her soul on had become instantly deified. But now they all had to go. All the persons, places, and possessions; all her memories, imaginings, and desires. They caused her too much pain. The only solution was to give them up voluntarily, before they could be wrenched away.
There was more than one way to
kill yourself off, and she proceeded to do just that, slashing through the tangled jungle of her past with a machete of renunciation.
When the mayhem was over, Caroline looked around and found this void she’d cleared wasn’t empty. It was full of the dark healing stillness she felt when she dreamed of jungle birds. She felt it on the floor by the fire with Diana, and sitting in silence with Hannah. But the birds, Diana, and Hannah were no longer present. She had given them up, along with everything else. And had just discovered there was no need to fill the void because it was already full.
A plop at the foot of her bed caused her to start.
Sitting up, she saw Amelia’s yellow-green eyes blinking as she settled into a nest in the comforter.
Caroline could hear steady purring.
Lying back hoping to recapture the state of mind Amelia had startled her out of, Caroline closed her eyes. And suddenly she saw that terrified toddler rise up to her full height and fling off the pink blanket, like Wonder Woman her cape. The toddler stood there in the dark, frozen, waiting for monsters to attack. When nothing happened, she looked around and found there were no monsters, only shifting shadows from the play of moonlight through the trees outside the window. Not only were there no monsters, there was no longer a terrified toddler.
Through Caroline’s head ran the thought: The strength you’ve insisted on assigning to others is actually within yourself.
“I feel like a failure.” Caroline sprawled on the tweed couch in jeans and a work shirt. What was the point of that seizure of renunciation last month, Caroline wondered, if here she was weeping in Hannah’s lap again?
“Forget it. We don’t use that word in here.” Although Hannah had to admit, at least to herself, to feeling disappointment at hearing Caroline’s anguished voice on the phone that morning asking for an emergency appointment. were they going too fast?
Hannah had been through this with so many people that she sometimes forgot it was the first and only time through for each client.
“Well, anyhow, thanks for seeing me.” Caroline had held the phone receiver to her ear that morning like a pistol to her temple. It was her last resort.
“You can come back any time you want.” Hannah studied her, trying to figure out if this was what Caroline needed to know, or if there was a real issue. She had dark circles under her eyes, and the same clenched mouth and pained squint as when Hannah first met her. She slunk into the office and plopped down on the couch like a beaten dog, not even noticing her shawl, which was hanging over the couch.
“You look pretty awful,” said Hannah.
“What’s wrong?”
Caroline sighed. “I did great for three weeks.
Felt good. Handled everything that came up. But a few days ago I fell apart. Finally I decided to call you because I’m supposed to go to Boston for this twoweek course, and I don’t see how I can go feeling like this.”
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“Like what?”
Caroline rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I’m terrified.”
“What of?”
Caroline tried to decide what label to put on the grinding in her stomach this time. “Of leaving the boys.”
“Whom are you leaving them with?”
“Diana.”
“Has she kept them before?”
“Lots of times. It’s always been fine.” Diana was their secondstring mother, just as she herself was Sharon’s.
Whatever else went on between Diana and her, this was never in doubt.
“Are things bad between you?”
“No. Everything’s okay. Ever since we gave each other up for good, we’ve been getting along great.”
Hannah smiled. “So what’s the problem?”
“This is going to sound screwy, but you’re used to that with me.”
Hannah shook her head vigorously. “Don’t put yourself down in here.”
“Yeah, okay. Anyhow, I read in the paper last week about this creep in Vermont who raped and killed an eight-year-old bay. They haven’t caught him yet, and I keep thinking he’ll turn up at the cabin and hurt Jackie or Jason.
Or abduct them as they walk home from school.
Last night I dreamed a carload of men broke down the cabin door and tortured them.”
“I don’t think that’s screwy at all,” said Hannah. “Most mothers feel anxious when they go away from their children. It’s perfectly normal. It’s what’s kept the race going all these eons. But once you’re on the road and no longer the adult in charge, you’ll probably feel fine.” For years after Mona’s and Nigel’s deaths it had been impossible for her to leave Simon and Joanna, and she turned down vacations with Arthur all across the Caribbean.
“I guess my imagination is too vivid. I can picture the whole scene
w’th that little boy in hideous detail. And I get so … furious.”
Hannah felt tension building in the room. “That’s understandable. It was awful. I read about it too. I murdered the motherfucker in my mind, slowly and painfully.” Actually, she castrated him, then murdered him. First things first.
“I started thinking if little kids can’t rely on adults, who can they rely on?”
“Did you hear yourself? Do you remember what you said our first session, when I asked what was the most painful thing that had happened lately?”
Caroline struggled to recall.
“You said the Jim Jones thing.”
“How can you remember when I can’t?”
“It’s my job. You should instead ask yourself what’s preventing you from remembering. Anyhow, you talked about how his followers adored him and called him Dad, and he turned around and killed them. Betrayal by parent figures has been one of your themes all along, hasn’t it? Daddy went off to war, and Mummy took to bed with depression. Marsha died.
Arlene took up with a new student. And what’s just happened between you and me?”
Caroline looked pained and perplexed as she rubbed the tweed sofa cover with her fingertips.
“I didn’t betray you. But we’ve been ending our therapeutic relationship. That could feel like betrayal.”
Caroline frowned.
“But who’s doing the leaving this time?” Hannah shook a cigarette from a pack of Mores.
“I am,” said Caroline.
“And in truth, who’s always done at least half of the leaving?” She put the cigarette between her lips and lit it.
Caroline frowned again.
“The painful part about growth is the need to leave behind whatever you’ve outgrown.” Simon and Joanna had knocked themselves out trying to make their need to move out her fault. They accused her one day of being a suffocating busybody. And the next, of being a rejecting witch. She observed their fluctuating assessments of her with a fascination that annoyed the hell out of them. But Nigel and Mona departed so abruptly. This endless nonsense with Simon and Joanna was a real luxury.