I Liked My Life Page 6
I can’t remember the drive—did I speed? stop at streetlights?—but suddenly I’m at the ER. A double-wide door opens for an exiting patient and I walk through, ready to shout Eve’s name. I stop short when I notice clumps of her hair on the floor of the first exam room. It’s the same sandy blonde as Maddy’s.
I throw the curtain aside and there she is. My daughter. Alive and looking rather bored. The front part of her hairline is shaved and covered with a bandage about an inch long. My instinct is to collect her hair off the floor, to keep every part of her together.
“What happened to you?” she asks.
I follow her stare to the bloodstain on my shirt, but don’t answer. Hearing her talk is such a relief to my senses that for the second time my legs buckle, only this time in gratitude.
“Dad, seriously, are you all right?”
I kneel by her side and grab her hand, crying into the sheets. This is the scene I was robbed of having with Maddy. I’d been directed straight to a conference room, where a doctor came in, looked at his feet, and apologized. I replied that we’d find a way to work it out, still certain the tragedy consisted of installing wheelchair ramps and accommodating physical limitations. “You don’t understand,” he said, shaking his head. “Your wife didn’t survive.”
Maddy is dead. Eve is not. For some reason that feels like breaking news.
“There’s blood on your shirt,” Eve says, trying to lift my head with her other hand. I stay furrowed, my forehead pressed into her arm. I picture her veins beneath me. Working. Pumping life through her.
I play through our history. Eve and I have memories without Maddy. They pop to mind as if someone’s spoon-feeding them to my brain. Tennis. We played together. When Eve was younger, I let her win, but at some point her lessons paid off and we routinely and legitimately split the victories. I’m stronger, but she’s more strategic, and a trash-talker like her mother. “You’re getting too old for this,” she jabbed on our last trip to Florida. “Maybe we should play bingo instead.”
I go back further. Bean. When she was an infant, skinny and long, I was the only one who could calm her down from a fit. The trick was to hop from foot to foot at an even pace. The faster I jumped, the more she relaxed in my arms. I’d press the right side of her face against my heart to keep her head steady and whisper, “It’s okay, my little jumping bean.” That’s where the nickname came from. We had a connection, she and I. Maddy actually called me home from work one day when Eve wouldn’t let up. I think she was only four or five months at the time. “If Daddy’s little girl doesn’t stop crying Mommy is going to have a nervous breakdown,” Maddy said. I knew she was serious from her use of the third person. Maddy wasn’t one to disassociate from her thoughts.
There’s more. When we were en route to her first day of kindergarten, Eve announced that she and I were getting married. Maddy laughed and asked what she’d do without us, alerting me this was not cause for alarm. “Don’t worry, Mommy,” Eve said, “you can live in the guest room.”
Yes, there was a time when Eve preferred me. I know I’m now forever relegated to a pinch hitter, but I have to step up. I am all our child has left. And it suddenly seems so obvious, this detail I’ve been overlooking: she’s all I have too.
Eve gives up competing with my internal trip down memory lane and instead gently rests her hand on my head. It’s soothing. I wonder how Eve thought to do it. How do women just know?
The doctor appears, forcing me to stand. He looks a little put out by my lack of composure, but then softens in a way that suggests he knows about Maddy. It’s a small town. Our neighbor is the chief of surgery here. With a series of nods he directs me to a little room off the registration area. I’m confused why our discussion requires such privacy until he speaks.
“She’s a tough young lady. No one else got hurt, but there was heavy drinking involved. The boy who was driving—Jim? John?—will definitely be charged. Your daughter might too, for underage consumption, although with your family’s recent struggles, I wouldn’t be surprised if they let it go. That’s what I intend to recommend.”
If he expects a thoughtful response, mine will come up short. “Okay. Can we go?”
He seems ready to repeat his speech, assuming a miscommunication of some sort, but instead yawns. “I’ll send a nurse to give care instructions. The staples in her head are going to hurt once all the medicine and booze wears off.”
I linger in the room. I haven’t prayed in years. As a kid my knees were permanently scuffed from all the kneeling we did as a family, but Maddy and Eve weren’t into it, and my hectic schedule left me content to drop the extra obligation. I have no right to ask for anything, but I make a pledge. I intertwine my hands, still standing, and say, “Thank you, God, for keeping my baby girl alive. I’ll do better.”
When I return to Eve, she’s asking the nurse about John. “He’ll be fine,” she assures. Eve asks if she can see him, but the nurse says, “I’m sorry. I really am. He asked the same thing and his parents forbid it.”
Eve’s expression is unmistakably grateful. We’ve become loners. Maddy was our spark. When we get in the car our words are short and to the point.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“Me too, Eve.”
Sorry for her. Sorry for me. Sorry for Maddy.
CHAPTER FOUR
Madeline
The worst part of watching the cars collide was Eve’s eerie calm. Her eyes were wide, not with panic, but acceptance. She’s become comfortable with tragedy having a seat at her table. The lesson she’s pulling from all this is that misfortune is commonplace; chaos lurks everywhere; no one can be trusted. It pains me—those were the realities of my childhood. I worked tirelessly to give Eve a different start, and yet here she is, arriving at the same conclusions.
I was helpless in that moment, desperate to transcend the invisible boundary that separates us. Eve isn’t done yet. She still needs to find her true voice and chase down a passion and get married and have children who will no doubt expand her perspective like she did mine. She needs time. Decades more time. As metal crunched into what sounded like a cacophony of death, I pleaded, Oh God, please, please, no, please don’t take her. An unexpected calm warmed me like a slow-burning fire that carried with it the knowledge Eve would live. More than live. Eve would prosper. And then a peculiar thing happened: my position in the universe, which hadn’t budged since death, shifted higher. A slight but discernable rise. After the noise ended and Eve was still in one piece, I questioned what transpired. My plea was more a wish than a prayer—I didn’t realize I had an audience—but the response was authentic, spiritual. Thank you, I said. Thank you, God. My gratitude pushed me up higher still, and Eve’s promising future stayed rooted as a fact in my soul, not something crafted for comfort, but the truth, offered as a gift.
So maybe I haven’t been abandoned after all. I didn’t acknowledge my unease until hope presented itself, but I’ve had a nagging fear about what will become of my spirit after Eve is grown and Brady remarries. Today I’m a ghost with a purpose, but if I’m successful, at some point I’ll be reduced to a plain old ghost. Bored and frightening. The possibility that I’m still on some cosmic radar is a tremendous relief.
Eve’s apathy at death’s door also made me realize that Brady should show her my journal. Not all of it, but pieces. Enough to prove that in many ways I am who she remembers me to be. She needs reassurance that my happiness was real to affirm that happiness is possible. I distill my request to two simple sentences. Show Eve the journal. It documents Maddy’s love. I match Brady’s communication style because, secretly, everyone is their own biggest fan. I wouldn’t use the word document and love in the same sentence, but Brady would. He once wrote in an attempted love letter that he was “nearly certain” I was the love of his life. He was confused by my disappointment. “It’s the most anyone can hope for,” he said in earnest, “since nothing in life is an absolute guarantee.” Clearly I married a pragmatic man.
When Brady gets to the office, the song is pushed aside and work takes over. He poses questions to himself formally, then answers as though he’s presenting to an audience. His process is methodical enough to border on disturbing. What are the risks of outsourcing development to India? Well, quality for one, management for another. You don’t save money if you spend as much time fixing code as you would to develop it in the first place. On and on he goes. Paige is easy to infiltrate. I said, Grab a condom for Eve one time; she smiled and stopped at the pharmacy on the way to our house. Brady isn’t as malleable, but I stick with my plan. Show Eve the journal. It documents Maddy’s love. Show Eve the journal. It documents Maddy’s love.
Standing at the urinal appears to be the only place his mind rests. For a short moment, I have the stage. Show Eve the journal. Brady tilts his head to one side, straining to hear. I say it again: Show Eve the journal. His voice comes back, talking over mine. He asks it to himself as a question because, of course, it has to be his idea. Should I show Eve Maddy’s journal?
I shoot right back. It documents Maddy’s love. He receives it, but still as a question. Will it help? I have one more chance as he washes his hands. I repeat the full sequence. It works. Brady adds my request to his mental checklist, which is more reliable than death and taxes.
I wish I’d discovered this rational, simple approach while I was alive. Brady and I would’ve avoided so many confrontations. Every couple has one never-ending fight, one conflict that rears its head again and again. Each time it ends, you assume you’ve found resolution moving forward, but the same battle reinvents itself under a different pretense and bam! you’re right back where you started. For Brady and me, it was about vacation. I wanted to go; he didn’t. By our second night away, tanned and relaxed enough to wear a Tommy Bahama shirt, he’d offer a toast as an apology: To my beautiful wife who realizes that taking a wonderful vacation is worth a fight. I promise I’ll remember this moment next time.
And yet, when vacation rolled around again, getting Brady to agree to time off was like getting dried Parmesan off a dinner plate. Somehow his previous epiphany of appreciation was overshadowed by everything he was juggling at that moment. The fight always commenced the same way. I’d say, “Eve has a week off coming up and I thought we could go somewhere as a family.” Brady would agree to check his schedule. Tension steadily mounted over the next two weeks as I sought confirmation on our pending plans, until we hit the true beginning of the fight, when Brady said something like, “You know, honey, with work it’s just not in the cards for me right now, but you and Eve should go anyway.” Some variation of this sentence started about two fights a year throughout our entire marriage. That’s forty fights, fierce and long, on the same subject.
I went ballistic twice a year, calling him everything from a martyr to a cheater. I cried and questioned why he didn’t like spending time with his family. I stormed out of rooms. I cursed. One time, after a few glasses of wine and to my sincere embarrassment, I broke a plate on the floor. That night he accused me of acting like my mother. He’s lucky he survived the insult.
Listening to his systematic thought process, I now see that the fight for him was no longer about taking off work, it was that not taking off work didn’t make a person a masochist or adulterer. Logic owns my husband—being a hard worker does not equate to screwing someone else. That’s a fact; that’s what he was arguing.
“Maddy,” he’d say, “listen to yourself. You’re not making sense.”
His analytical response burned me. “You don’t care how upset I am.”
“I care, but come on, you’re being theatrical. I can’t take time off right now, that’s all. I don’t have a secret life, or any of the other crazy shit you’ve rattled off.”
I should’ve stated my case more simply. Brady is a numbers guy. Things add up to be correct or incorrect, not because of hype but in spite of it. I wonder how he’d have responded if I’d said something like, “We need to vacation as a family. It’s important for our marriage and your relationship with Eve. You can bring your iPad and check email, but I’m asking you to make this a priority.” I bet with a concentrated message like that, he wouldn’t have fought so hard. He would’ve respected my reasoning and agreed to go, perhaps with the caveat that we shorten the trip from seven days to five.
I could have lived with that.
Eve
Another lecture about drinking and driving is on its way. I’ll apologize and my predictable father will say, “That’s not good enough this time,” and announce the punishment he’s been “mulling over” all week. Whatever it is, I won’t give a shit because there’s nothing he can take from me that matters. This entire conversation is a waste.
“Help me understand what happened,” he says instead.
Oh, I get it. He’s attempting to approach it how my mother would have. I slouch, not knowing how to answer now that we’re off-script. I decide to make him uncomfortable so he’ll drop the act.
“I’m not a respected executive that people are afraid to offend, Dad. I hear people whispering about us. Not just Saturday. All. The. Time. It blows.”
“Not having to hear it doesn’t mean I don’t know what people are saying.”
He’s talking to me. For real. Maybe I should’ve gotten in a car accident sooner. “Well, it’s humiliating.”
He twitches. Humiliation is new to us both. I used to be proud of our family, not that I appreciated it at the time. Dad was successful and Mom wasn’t like the other moms who spent like three hours a day at the gym and kissed everyone’s ass. When I was twelve, she overheard this girl Lauren (whose dad owned practically every gas station in Boston) call this other girl fat. Mom barely knew either of them, but she paused her conversation with Paige, looked Lauren right in the eye, and calmly said, “That was mean. You should consider saying you’re sorry.”
“You’re not a teacher,” Lauren said.
“And that girl’s not fat. You saying otherwise was unkind.”
“But, I—”
Mom was never a fan of the word but. She turned back to Paige, leaving Lauren looking foolish at the sideline. Something changed that day for those of us who saw it—we stopped giving Lauren the power to stomp on us. She switched to private school the following year, and I always thought we had my mom to thank for it. I wanted to be exactly like her.
So what do you do when you find out the person you most admire hated her life?
In the ambulance after the accident I ignored the EMT moving around the stretcher with air masks and tubes and his personal judgment showing in huffs, and thought about how unfair life is. My mother was wrong; there’s not a reason for anything. I don’t even know what to want anymore. I don’t want to die, but I’m no longer excited to live. Not that I can say that to my dad. He’d freak and ship me off to some high-end loony bin for suicide watch.
“I still don’t understand how you ended up in a car with John on Route 9.”
Why can’t he drop it? The case is closed. With John’s family connections, the city got everything settled in four days—John lost his license for two years and I got thirty hours of community service—yet here we are a week later still on it.
“It just … happened. Everyone was talking about Mom and then Mrs. Anderson was wasted and asked if I picked out the dress with her beforehand and I lost it. I had to get out of there.”
“Christie Anderson is a douche bag. Your mother and I used to call her Cruella de Vil.”
Finally something he and I agree on: Mrs. Anderson is a douche bag. The channeling has stopped; Mom never would’
ve admitted that.
“The thing is, Eve, you should’ve called. I would have picked you up, no questions asked.”
That’s crap. He would’ve picked me up, but he would’ve been a pain in the ass about it. And he probably would’ve been as drunk as I was. I debate calling him out but decide it’s not worth it. “Well, you don’t have to worry. That was my last school dance.”
“Still, you’re grounded.”
“Fine, I’m grounded.”
I don’t even ask how long. There’s nowhere I want to go with a runway of missing hair where my wispy bangs used to hang, and there’s no one to hang out with anyway. John’s father is on the Massachusetts Supreme Court and viewed our actions as a call for help. He added thirty days in rehab with no communication from me to John’s sentence. John’s friends are mad at me and my friends are tired of begging me to care. I have officially become what I’ve felt like for months, an outsider.
Dad gives me a weird look, then jumps to his feet as if he forgot something. He returns with a book tucked under his arm. “It’s your mom’s journal,” he explains, rubbing the cover. I reach for it, but he pulls it close to his chest. “I’ve been reading an entry a day. You have to respect that these are her personal thoughts and there’s only certain pieces you’ll benefit from at this point.” He flips through a few pages and hands it to me opened on June 23, 2013, my last day as a freshman. “I thought you’d appreciate this one.”