“Please don’t hang up. I need to talk to you.”
“Katya doesn’t live here anymore.”
“That’s why I’m calling. Oh, look, I’ve got this all balled up already. My name is Rae. I’m friends with Katya. At least, I ran over her and then she lived with me and I think we’re friends.”
His silence on the other end of the line is not surprising, given what I’ve just spewed at him. I can hear the shift in his breathing.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” he asks. “That’s why you’re calling. God. Just tell me.”
“It’s not that bad,” I blurt out. “I mean, it’s not good. She made a second attempt, but she’s okay. She’s in the crisis house, but—”
“Why?” His voice is pain incarnate. “Why are you telling me this?”
My resolve wobbles, but I press on. “Because you’re her husband and she needs you.”
His breathing is ragged now. “She has a different opinion of that. I’m sure you mean well, whoever you are—”
“Rae.”
“Right. I’m assuming you mean well, but I’d appreciate it if you don’t call here again.”
I can feel him making the decision to hang up. I need to hold him, and it’s my anger that rises to the rescue. “I’m trying hard to understand how this works. You marry a woman and make all of those promises of sticking with her through good and bad, and then beat her up when she can’t have a baby—”
“Is that what she told you?”
“Not—”
“That I beat her?”
“What? No. I meant beat her up in a metaphorical sense.” Guilt colors my voice, as if I’d whispered my secret earlier suspicions down along the gossip chain.
“You mean emotional abuse, then. Look, lady, I don’t know you. I don’t know what my wife has said or implied, but I . . . oh shit.” His voice breaks, and now he’s going to hang up for sure. Desperation drives me. I have to find a better end for this conversation.
“She’s asking for you,” I lie. “She wonders why you don’t come to see her. She thinks it’s because she’s not good enough, because she couldn’t give you a son . . .”
“I don’t care about the babies. I told her that. Over and over I told her, but she couldn’t hear me. Shit,” he says, again. “I can’t do this. There’s a limit on what a man can take.”
Slow tears roll down my own cheeks as his pain flows through the phone line and into me. My own fault. I opened this door that was better left shut. In my head I still had him down as maybe an abuser, a self-centered jerk at best.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have called. It’s just—she’s so sad. And I know she loves you, and there’s nothing I can do to help her.”
“Maybe there’s nothing anybody can do to help her. That’s a truth I rolled around to. It’s like trying to fill a black hole. Everything you give her gets sucked up and is gone.”
He ends the call so gently it takes a minute before I realize the line is dead. Tremors of reaction shake me from head to toe, and I wrap up in a blanket, even though my brain tells me it’s nearly eighty degrees in my house.
What have I done?
Wandered in where angels fear to tread, that’s what.
It occurs to me, a bolt from the blue that should have been apparent to me from moment number one, that my call to Tom has more to do with my own emotional well-being than with any true love for Kat. I want to stop worrying. I want to stop hurting. I want my life back. So what do I do? Try to drag somebody else in to fill the gap. Somebody else who is hurting every bit as much as Katya, and certainly a great deal more than me.
Crazy cat lady, here I come. I’m not fit to be around people.
This house once felt like a sanctuary, but now the walls press in so tight I can’t breathe. I can’t think, can’t feel—I only know that I have to get out. Without stopping to check what I’m wearing or to fix my hair, I grab my keys and bolt.
Nowhere to go on foot, so I get in the car and drive to the only place I can think of, all the way telling myself I’m crazy and there’s no guarantee of my welcome.
Tana opens up at my first knock. Instead of sympathy or shock or worry or annoyance or any of the other emotions I’d anticipated, all I see on her face is joy. She doesn’t say a word, just opens the door wide.
I open my mouth to let out a stream of excuses and explanations, but she shakes her head and holds up a hand for silence.
“Hush,” she says. “It’s all right.”
The yoga mat is in the middle of the floor now, along with blocks and a strap and a folded blanket. I’ve interrupted her practice, but the only emotion I pick up is a genuine delight at my presence.
She leads me through the house and out into the backyard, and only then does she speak.
“Tell me,” she says, gesturing toward the picnic table.
And I do. I sit down and tell her everything. All about Kat this time, from the minute I saw her on the road to my call to Tom. The way I screwed things up with Cole. My parents and my failure to meet even their smallest expectations for me. And finally, worst of all, with tears pouring down my cheeks, I tell her about my recent revelation about my own deep and abiding selfishness. She doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t even make little sounds of either sympathy or dismay.
When I exhaust my supply of words, I sit in a wide stillness, awaiting judgment.
The garden is quiet today, with not so much as a breeze to ruffle the leaves of the tree or set the wind harp singing. All of the sounds are background noises. A low hum of bees, busy in the clover. A burbling of water from the stream. An occasional birdsong and the buzz of hummingbird wings. Not a single one of the small creatures in this garden is worried about me or Kat or the mess that seemed so all-consuming to me when I fled from my house.
Tana isn’t worried, either.
“The great revelation of selfishness is harder for those who care,” she finally says, smiling at me. “Here’s the paradox. If you were completely self-centered, you wouldn’t be worrying about being self-centered.”
“That hurts my brain.”
She laughs, with delight, not sympathy. “It’s meant to. Try this. If you didn’t care deeply about the feelings of others, you wouldn’t be faced with a selfish need to make them better. You’re self-centered, as you say, because you feel things so deeply.”
“You’re saying being selfish is good?”
“I’m saying it’s not really selfish. Consider adopting the term self-care.”
“No.” I shake my head to clear it. “That can’t be right. Look what I’ve just done.”
“You think this Tom person didn’t have all of those feelings before you called him? All you did was open the door and let them out for a minute. You didn’t miscarry babies or run away from a relationship. You didn’t leave without a note or try to kill yourself. Neither did you stay at home instead of riding to the rescue. That marriage began without you, struggled for years without you, and will end or struggle on without you. All you’ve done is put yourself into the middle of an emotional storm that doesn’t belong to you. Not such a great sin, my dear, in the grand scheme of things.”
“But see—even there. I want to be able to fix it. I want to make the pain go away, soothe it back to sleep. God, Cole’s right. I am hopelessly codependent.”
“You care about people, even this Tom whom you have never met. Let me ask you this question. Why are Katya’s emotions, Tom’s, even Cole’s, so very important, but Rae’s don’t matter at all?”
“Because . . .” I try to verbalize a reason but come up empty. There has to be one. The certainty of the fact that my emotions don’t matter sits in my belly like a stone.
“Keep trying,” Tana says. “I’ll wait.”
I breathe in the smell of tree leaves and grass and roses. An ant wanders across the picnic table by my hand and is rewarded by the discovery of a tiny seed, which it picks up and carries away. Losing the train of thought,
I glance up to see Tana’s keen eyes focused on me.
“What was the question again?” A trickle of laughter flows out of me, and the stone in my belly shifts, ever so slightly.
“The question, slightly reframed, is why do other people matter more than Rae?”
“The answer comes back to selfishness. Right where we started.”
“Step outside your head for a minute. Pretend you’re holding a camera. Adjust the focus back and away. Let’s put five people in front of the lens. Katya. Tom. Cole. Me. And Rae. Can you see it?”
I see it all right. In my mind we’re all lined up like suspects in front of a two-way mirror. An invisible accusatory finger points in my direction. That one. She’s the fraud.
“Now. Of all these people,” Tana says, “is one less human than the others? Less deserving? And if your answer is Rae, be prepared to explain to me why.”
That’s when I see it. Just for a flash, an instant caught out of time, I see that all of us are equal, that my weird self has just as much right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as anybody else in the lineup.
A glimpse, and then the insight is gone. An impression remains, the footprint of a thought that came in the night and vanished again.
“So we’re all equally important in the grand scheme of things. I can see that. But how does that give me the right to pursue my own happiness at the cost of others’?”
Her lined face breaks into a grin. “Ah, that’s the catch, isn’t it? Everybody is important; everybody is responsible for their own path, their own happiness. But we are still responsible to each other. To each other, mind. Not for each other.”
For her sake, more than my own, because she is so patient about explaining, I do my best to wrap my head around this concept. No dice. Tana sees it in my face, but instead of reacting with disappointment, she just smiles again. “There is no easy answer, Rae. It’s a lifelong puzzle, that’s what it is. Personally, I’ve made peace with the problem by focusing on what I am meant to do on this planet, rather than on happiness. There is some justification there, I find.”
“So—the fact that I’ve refused to go to medical school all these years, even though that is the one thing that would apparently make my parents happy, means I’m not selfish. Is that the concept?”
“Probably.”
“Probably? I thought maybe I finally had it.” With a heavy sigh, I sag back into my chair.
“Should you be a doctor?” Tana asks. “Would you be a good doctor?”
“Me? Hell no.”
“There you go, then. Not what you’re meant to do here.”
“What if what I’m meant to do is be a codependent doormat who gives away all of her possessions and dies in the service of the homeless?”
“Then be that. Nobody accuses Mother Teresa of codependence, a fact which I find at least of interest.”
“You’re kidding. Mother Teresa was a saint.”
“Did you meet her? Do you know what drove her?”
“No, but—”
“Then how are you qualified to decide that?”
While I’m trying to think of an answer, she gets up from her chair. “I need to go, shortly. I have an appointment.”
Before I have time to draw an apology-laden breath for my disruption of her day, she goes on. “I have something for you. Two things, actually. Wait a sec.”
I watch her cross the yard with her light, quick step, so fluid and full of grace for a woman of her years, and then let my eyes drift closed, rolling around the emotions this conversation has stirred, trying not to think too much.
Her voice startles my eyes open, as once again I fail to hear her coming.
“You walk like a ninja,” I tell her.
“Thank God I have not yet resorted to shuffling.” She hands me a framed picture, and I stare at it for a long time before I truly realize what I’m seeing.
It’s me, standing under the tree in Tana’s backyard. Cole is blurred out of focus beside me. I’m spinning, my arms reaching up toward the tree, my face tilted back, laughing. And hovering just above my upturned face hangs a golden orb.
Maybe it’s just a water drop or a bit of dust, or a trick of the light. Maybe it’s not. Whatever it is, it’s beautiful. I’m beautiful.
Wordless, I press my fingertip to the picture glass, absorbing what I am seeing.
“It’s yours,” Tana say. “Maybe it will help get your world figured out.”
I take the picture, but I don’t think it will help with the figuring-out process. If anything, it adds a new layer of complexity to a reality so textured I’m far from understanding half of it.
“There’s much more to the world than we can process with our limited senses,” Tana says. “Just like there’s more to people. You see more than most do, or maybe feel more would be the right word. It gives you extra perception, and that makes it harder to keep boundaries.”
“Thank you.” I clasp the picture to my chest. “I know I sort of barged right into your day.”
“You are welcome anytime. Here’s the other thing I have for you. You might give this a try.”
She hands me a piece of paper, a printout from the Internet, with the heading “Loving-Kindness Meditation.”
“Do you meditate?” she asks.
“Sort of.” Bernie has taught me a basic breathing meditation. She’s had me visualize my emotional self as a chalkboard, talked me through observing thoughts and feelings floating down a river. Not exactly anything transcendental.
“Give this a try,” Tana says. “If I didn’t have to go, we could do it together.”
I’m torn by the idea of that. It sounds wonderful, but also frightening, a new kind of intimacy I’m not sure I’m ready for.
“Thank you. For everything. And I have to go to work anyway.” I follow her through the peace of her house. On the front porch, when we stop to say good-bye, my eyes are drawn again to the bottles in the tree.
“Would you like to leave a prayer?” Tana asks. “There’s just time for that.”
“How does it work?”
“You write your request on a slip of paper, tuck it in a bottle, and leave it hanging on the tree.”
“It’s like wishing.” I reach up to touch an old green bottle and set it swinging. As its arc swings out of shadow, it seems to fill with light. “Do you believe in a God that answers prayers, then, Tana?”
“As it happens, I do. But whether you believe or not, I think prayer is an act of love, a conscious desire for good. It also helps to create a separate space for what you feel regarding the well-being of others.”
I picture my wishing stones, skimming the surface of the water. Maybe making wishes is not foolishness after all.
“I’d love to leave a prayer on your tree. Can it be more than one?”
“What you put into the bottles is your business. There’s no limit on prayers, last I heard. Hang on a second.” She vanishes into the house, returning a moment later with strips of paper, a pen, and an empty bottle with a length of twine tied around its neck.
“I’m going to go inside and get ready. You take whatever time you need and hang that bottle when you’re done. You can use the stepladder to help you reach.” Her hand waves toward a wooden ladder leaning against the side of the house. Her smile, so clean and uncomplicated, warms me from the inside out, and then she’s gone, leaving me to my own devices.
In the end, I put four slips in the bottle. One for Katya, one for Tom, one for Mason, and, after a moment, one for me.
Instead of going home, it seems like a natural transition to stop at my wishing beach. If a prayer is good, a wish and a prayer should be even better. It doesn’t take a counseling degree to know that I need all the help I can get.
Instead of skipping rocks, though, I head straight for the boulder I sat on last time I was here, thinking dark thoughts and trying to grasp hold of that strange, elusive emotion. I think maybe I know what it is now. And there’s something here I feel the need to do.
The stone isn’t really a boulder, after all, just a big old rock. Flecks of mica flash and sparkle in the sunlight. A vein of quartz crystals runs up the side and into its heart. It’s solid. Heavy.
But not all that heavy.
Bending my knees and using my weight as leverage, I heave it up and over toward the water. The underside is cool and damp, coated with sand. My thighs and lower back protest and thrum as I roll it over again. It topples onto the smaller stones with a rattle and thud. Again and again I lift and roll that rock across the beach toward the water, until it splashes into the shallows. Cold water sprays up into my face and soaks the front of my shirt.
Muscles aching, heart thudding, I brace myself on my thighs to catch my breath, then step into the water, shoes and all, to give the rock one more rotation. Submerged underwater, all of its colors come to life. Patterns of vivid red and green appear where before it was only gray.
Straightening my protesting back, I lift both of my arms toward the sky and breathe in deep, deep, the scent of river and stone. I wonder if there’s a golden orb above my head, invisible to me but there all the same.
My body feels so light I could almost drift up above the earth and across the water, like the dragonflies. Or like the Oscar Event balloons. Just for this one moment in time, there is nothing but sun and water and the experience of what I think I might call joy.
My uplifted mood lasts about an hour into my shift. Usually I can make it through an evening just fine without getting torpedoed by other people’s feelings. Emotions in general are more muted here, mostly to low-level despair and resignation, and I’m usually able to fend them off, to get through my shifts without feeling much at all. Now, I’m not only lacking a dimmer switch, my “Off” button seems to be broken as well.
I go through my tasks, playing a sorting game in my head with every interaction.
Rae.
Not Rae.
Rae.
Not Rae.
Depression and hopelessness stick to me like gum to the bottom of a shoe. So many of these residents are just waiting to die. Visits from busy family members, even the attentive ones, are too infrequent to allay the boredom of meaningless days. They’ve lost the satisfaction of doing useful work, and the arts and crafts, the endless loud TV, even the occasional programs put on by schools and church groups can’t give back the sense of being a valued and important part of society.
I Wish You Happy: A Novel Page 23