OTHER TITLES BY
ROCHELLE B. WEINSTEIN
What We Leave Behind
The Mourning After
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 Rochelle B. Weinstein
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
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Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781612184432
ISBN-10: 161218443X
Cover design by Lindsey Andrews
For Steven, Jordan, and Brandon.
Because of you, my heart is full.
And in memory of my beloved mother, Ruth Gratz Berger
CONTENTS
SPRING 1997
ABBY
FALL 2014
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SPRING 1997
ABBY
Imagining things any other way would be impossible. It’s always been the three of us. Lauren. Ryan. Me. And this. This crazy, beautiful seam that fastens us together. I am flattened across the oversized boulders, soaking in the sun; Ryan and Lauren are steadying the inner tube against the water that shoots and winds down the rocks. Their toes sink beneath the frigid water, and Ryan calls in my direction: “C’mon, Abs, the clouds are moving in. You’ve got to take a run by yourself. Just once. Before we graduate. You’ll love it.”
“No,” I say. “I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Lauren says. “We’ve done it a million times together. Try it solo. We’ll tape you!”
I stand up and grab my video camera while my best friends nuzzle each other. Ryan kisses her head, and I feel the shiver of his lips down my legs when I walk. “Let’s go down the three of us. Like we always do.” Relenting, he positions himself along the tube, waving us to sit down. Lauren falls into his lap, and I wedge myself nearby. The plastic is not made to hold three people, but they have never left me out.
The natural slide is about fifty feet long, and the bouncy ride on the rugged rocks makes it feel longer. We are fused together—friendship and more—bound by arms and legs. The camera captures us coasting down the falls, where we blend and flow. It’s exhilarating and daring, like us.
We are falling into one another, screaming all the way down, clasping on to one another for support. I point the lens toward the sky. The view is fast and fleeting, though it hinges on memory.
The drop at the end of the run meets us in a rush of crystal rapids. The first touch shocks as we land in the pond below and come apart. I raise the camera above my head to keep it from the water below. Lauren breaks the surface first. Then Ryan. Then me. Our faces are pinched in red, and our hair sculpted down our backs. The surprise dissolves and we laugh. Ryan grabs Lauren from behind while I jump on his back and straddle my legs around his waist. His hand reaches for hers, and he guides us to the warm rocks nearby.
The three of us. Perfectly happy.
Imagining things any other way would be impossible.
FALL 2014
CHAPTER ONE
ABBY
I am stirred awake by the demons that bothered me throughout the night. The crumpled sheets strangle my ankles, though they might as well be around my neck. My eyes adjust to the thick custard of dawn and fix on the bedroom I share with Ryan. The space beside me is empty, though I don’t need to fan my fingers across the sheets to know this. His absence taunts me, much like the clock beside my bed. I wish the bright light of 6:07 away. Ryan is out for his morning run, before heading to the high school for his first class. The window is open, and a whiff of brisk autumn air fills the room. It should rouse me from the bottomless depths of sleep, but it does not. I am a prisoner in my bed. Much like I am in my mind.
Lately, it has been harder and harder to push through the thoughts.
If only they encompassed the trials of raising a teenager, the kinks in a marriage, the weathering that time has on our minds and our bodies. At thirty-eight, my flat stomach feels more dimpled to the touch. Gravity has taken over my lean arms and legs. Ryan would tell me, “You get better each year,” without even glancing at me. That’s Ryan’s way. It’s one of the things that makes me loathe him at times, the artificial, insincere praise. But that’s the least of our problems.
Last night, we slipped into bed, aware of the gentle quiet of our daughter Juliana’s absence. The calm swathed us in a forgotten time, one when we had the whole house to ourselves and making love stemmed from raw, untainted desire rather than obligation. The expectation added to the pressure and pulled us apart. His cool foot grazing mine beneath the sheets felt more like an intruding guest than seduction. His solid arms weaved around my waist, yearning for something I could not give him. I long ago stopped feeling sorry for my inability to be the wife he deserves.
Our bedroom is a pillowy white with faint splashes of ivory. It emanates light and breeziness, but when I step over the threshold at night, darkness cloaks my shoulders and burrows into my chest. Nobody can understand. I barely understand it myself. There are horrible thoughts that trespass in my brain, imposters lurking, preying on my weaknesses. It takes all of my strength to annihilate them without doing further damage to the tender parts.
I have known battles with external forces—heated debates with loved ones, bad habits that need breaking, a loss not easily accepted—foes that are logical, though immeasurable. Those struggles made sense to me. What I can’t understand is the feud that now dwells in my head, the two opposing sides that are dueling.
The door swings open to our bedroom, and in walks Ryan.
Ryan is beautiful to look at. Not because he has faultless features on a chiseled face—he has neither. It is his imperfections that make him just right. The hazel-green of his eyes coaxes and charms. One of his eyebrows is slightly thinner than the other, the result of stitches a few years back, and his thick, dark hair is matted in sweat with slick strands of gray. His skin sprouts a day-old shadow, and his lips are neither sensual nor deman
ding, but rather pursed and serious. His youthfulness disguises his thirty-eight years, and when he stands on the sidelines, coaching high school football, he appears more the kids’ age than his own.
He leans over the bed and kisses the top of my head. His smell engulfs me, and our eyes meet. In his stare, I always hear what he’s not saying. His voice bears the rhythm of a Southern drawl. “How you doin’, sweetie?” he asks. “Have you heard from Jules? When’s she coming home?”
When my inner voice starts poking away at my common sense, I get mean. “I told you already.”
He backs away, recognizing immediately it’s going to be one of those days.
Ryan’s no stranger to bouts of depression. He’s been dragging me off the floor for years. He’s watched me sleep for days straight, withering into something more skeletal than human. He has begged me to return to therapy, but therapy doesn’t work, not when my brain isn’t working. “And medication?” he would plead. “Stay on it; don’t go off it once you’re feeling better.” But I did go off it, and we tiptoed around the quicksand, trying not to sink through.
“What are you doing today?” He questions me while I study him from a safe distance. He is dressed in damp navy athletic shorts and the school’s football T-shirt. The sleeves fit snugly around his arms; his wedding band stares at me. He is always tan, my husband, from days spent outdoors and on the field. Plus, he is generally happy. That can make anyone light up from within. The question means that he is worried and wants me to get out of bed. He does not wish for my insidious sorrow to unravel.
Before I can answer, an awful thought bursts into my brain, setting the kindling ablaze. I am lying in bed, safely hidden under the covers, though I am far from safe. I have to move. I have to escape.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, as my bare feet hit the dark wooden floor, and I knock past him.
The bathroom door is a mere couple of steps away, but the effort to get there makes it feel farther. The walls are closing in around me. I lunge forward for the doorknob and push my weight through.
“Abby!” he yells.
There is an indescribable force that wills me to keep moving. It is at once a safety measure and an unstoppable energy that pushes me toward an unspeakable hell. The vanity mirror reflects my tangled dark hair and swollen eyes, and I don’t recognize the person staring back.
“Abby!” he yells again, banging on the door that I have locked.
“Go away, Ryan,” I beg, while my fingers crush the wadded-up picture and stuff it into the pocket of my pants. It was in a drawer of Ryan’s, one I never bothered to look through. Their arms are around each other. Ryan is someone other than my husband.
“What the hell’s going on?” he screams. “I’ll break this door down, Abby! I will. Open up. Let me in.”
“No,” I shout back. “Just leave.” I have collapsed to the floor and grabbed my knees to my chest. When he continues to pound on the door and demand that I open it, I place my hands over my ears and rock back and forth. The cotton pajama bottoms and flimsy tank top are no defense for the cold air that coats my body in a frosty layer of fright. Thoughts are bouncing around my head, terrifying and comforting me at the same time. I am at their mercy, submerged in doubt. This doubt guides me to the back of the bottom cabinet, where we hide dangerous things. I take them out, fingering them, rubbing my palms across their warnings before setting them beside me on the floor.
“Abby, you’re scaring me.”
“It’s never going to work,” I whimper, tears pooling around my eyes. “It was never meant to be.”
“What are you talking about? You’re not making any sense. Honey, just let me in. Talk to me.”
The doorknob is jiggling, and I am torn between wanting him to break the door down and needing him to vanish. To my right, by the Jacuzzi tub, a glass cabinet holds tiny framed photos of Juliana as a baby, a picture of Ryan and me at the field, the two of us in front of Looking Glass Falls. My mind swirls with menacing thoughts when I crawl over to the case, grab hold of the glass frame, and throw it against the mirror. My face splinters into pieces before my eyes. And then there is black.
CHAPTER TWO
ABBY
I awake in a hospital bed in Charlotte’s CMC-Mercy with a throbbing headache. Ryan later tells me that when he broke down the door, the hit to my head knocked me unconscious. He found me lying beside a bag of razor blades and some pills. They weren’t Tylenol or Advil either. They were the stronger kind, capsules we’ve used when one of us can’t sleep, and when Ryan broke his wrist at practice. The doctors had searched my body for evidence of damage, but there was none.
Unless you count the picture they found rolled in a ball in the pajama pocket.
It sits next to my bed atop the wooden furniture piece they call a nightstand. Their faces are crinkled and bent so Ryan’s nose looks frighteningly large, despite someone’s efforts to smooth the photo out. I don’t like the way they are smiling at me so I turn the picture facedown.
“I thought you were dead,” he whispers to me from his seat beside my bed. He is cupping my hands in his, and he is trying to conceal tears.
Ryan rarely cries. The only things that can move him to weakness are seeing his wife in a hospital bed with a mild concussion and the endless stream of questions that must be bouncing around in his head . . . like why is there a picture of him and Lauren, the one he kept hidden in his drawer, sitting next to me in this awful room?
Despite my condition, I feel remarkably calm.
“Were you planning to take those pills?” he asks. “Were you going to hurt yourself?”
“It’s not what you think,” I whisper.
“I don’t know what to think anymore,” he replies, his head drooping downward, his eyes opening and closing with an effort that tells me he is having a hard time with this, with me. Usually he is much stronger. Usually he picks up the pieces and puts us back together, and no one ever notices the scratches.
Then I turn the picture back around so he can see what he has done to me.
I can tell by his eyes and the way he lowers his head that he saw it there by my bed.
“How did you get that?”
“Why are you still holding on to it?” I fire back.
But then the shot of adrenaline is replaced with the icy cold liquid filling my veins and I don’t hear his answer.
Frightful images race through my mind, voiceless weapons that strike unseen, but with palpable destruction. There are a thousand miles between a thought and an action, but try telling that to someone imprisoned by her unwanted fears: Obsessions. Phobias. Plane crashes. Lizards. Swallowing pills. Hurting one’s own child. The preoccupation with bizarre ideas blares in my ears without making a sound. They are invasive, sneaky, and more powerful than physical touch. They are the thoughts that have plagued me for years.
“Ma, it’s me.”
I hear my daughter’s voice through the fog of dense memory.
“Mama, can you hear me?”
My eyes open, and there is Juliana, our baby girl. She is standing over me with her choppy bangs shielding her fear-filled eyes. Her palm is wrestling with my fingers, which are controlled by an IV spouting a cocktail of Ativan and ibuprofen. “Juliana.” I smile up at her. It is only her name that I whisper through dried lips; it tells her I am happy to see her.
“Is it true?” she asks. “They said you had pills . . .”
“No, honey, it’s not what you think.”
“Are things really that bad?”
My beautiful Juliana. The green of her eyes darts around the room. This is what I’ve done to her. Once she was the reason for the momentary calm between my rising storms. For her, I could buck up. For her, I could quiet the madness in my head. Until I couldn’t anymore.
“Where’s Daddy?” she asks, her eyes pleading.
I grab her hand. “He’s here. He went to speak to the doctor.”
“They said it was an emergency! They took me off the bus!”
&nbs
p; As a small child, Juliana would ask why I was holed up in the dark for days. Ryan was gifted at interference and explained that I was sick with the flu, or fighting a cold, and then he would fling her on his shoulders and distract her with tales from the football field and promises to bring her to the next day’s practice. As she got older, her wisdom surpassed her years and Ryan’s answers provoked more questions. We decided to be straightforward with our child and tell her that I was depressed.
The violent, obsessive, uncontrollable urges were one aspect of my neuroses. That they turned me into a sad, hopeless person was another. After a thought would attack and penetrate, I felt stained and soiled. I could muster the strength to chip away at the frightening images that disarmed my mind, but their residual gook remained.
Juliana grasps my fingers tighter. “What are we going to do?”
As the only child—the domestic glue for bickering parents—Juliana has always taken on the role of the grown-up. She is the fixer, the unifier, the one who regrettably believes she can repair the damage and make wrong into right. Children like this mistakenly think they have the power to control any situation—which makes for altruistic teenagers, and ultimately very disappointed adults.
“You need help,” she whispers. “Like real help.”
Throughout my life, Juliana and Ryan witnessed the subtle entry and hastened departure of four different therapists. Each one pledged that with time and a commitment to healing, I could live a “normal” life. And while I would settle into the glowing promise of therapy and the life-changing medicines they threw my way, the light would return to the sky and brighten my fading universe. I responded extremely well and rather quickly to the boosters that were resetting my broken circuitry. Once I returned to “normal,” though, I would abruptly stop taking the colorful pills. Then I would immerse myself in redecorating the house or shopping online or tending to Juliana’s never-ending list of teenage demands. I would miss an appointment here or there. It would turn into more, until soon it would be months and hours of unreturned phone calls from Dale, Irene, Babs, and Lois, the band of therapists.
Where We Fall: A Novel Page 1