Love Is Both Wave and Particle

by Paul Cody

  I didn’t try to be hip or with-it. That would have been comical. I wore my cardigans and corduroy jackets, my khakis, and loafers, my V-neck sweaters, and my door was always open.

  Late on the first morning back, Meg stopped by my office and slumped onto the couch. She asked if she could close the door, and I said, Of course.

  She said, Ron, I don’t get it.

  Get what?

  These kids.

  Do any of us get these kids?

  I think of Levon. I think I’ve known him his entire time here, and I swear, he’s either on drugs, or off drugs, but something strange is going on with him.

  How so?

  He’s just not himself.

  I didn’t say anything. Silence is often the psychologist’s, and teacher’s, greatest tool.

  You know how with Levon, no matter what, there’s a sense that there’s a veil, a layer of fabric or glass or fog or something, between him and the rest of the world? Like he’s always at least one tick of the dial removed from everything? Well, it’s gone. It’s really gone.

  Have you asked him about it?

  Haven’t had the chance.

  Maybe it’s a good thing.

  Maybe it’s dangerous, she said. He was seen eating lunch with three or four other kids, and he apparently was out at the butt bench drinking coffee after lunch with three or four other kids. In this weather.

  Curious.

  That has never happened in five and a half years.

  I was silent.

  Ron, she said. Work with me.

  I smiled.

  Maybe it’s a good thing.

  Jesus, she said, and got up, and hurried out.

  God, but I liked that woman.

  Then one thing struck me, and for a moment I was worried. Schizophrenia often comes on very suddenly to patients in very late adolescence, often around eighteen or twenty years old. And it can seem to happen nearly overnight.

  I wondered if that was what worried Meg.

  After classes had ended, and most of the students had left, something almost equally curious occurred. I was at work at my desk, it was getting dark outside my window, and there was a soft knock on my door.

  I looked up, and it was Levon Grady.

  Ron, he said, do you have a few minutes?

  Absolutely.

  He came in, set his bag and coat on the floor, and sat on the sagging couch.

  Over the years I’d seen him perhaps a half dozen or a dozen times, just for routine check-ins.

  Can I ask you something? Something very important?

  I was almost afraid he was going to ask me if I heard voices too.

  Of course you can.

  I waited.

  I know this will sound weird, he said, and my anxiety rose. Voices? Secret powers?

  Do you think I have Asperger’s? Am I anywhere on the spectrum?

  I think I must have sighed with relief.

  Why do you ask?

  Can I close the door?

  I nodded, and he did.

  Because all my life I’ve had the feeling that I do. I’ve had that impression. I’ve read about it, and without saying so, I think that Susan, my mom, gave me the impression that I did.

  Funny you should ask. It’s all over your school records and evaluations, even though I’m not supposed to tell you that.

  That I have Asperger’s?

  That you don’t.

  What?

  You remember Carrie Miller at Fall Creek?

  Yeah. I adored her.

  She was convinced you did not, and she was convinced your mother, without saying so, thought you did, or was afraid you did. Carrie pushed your mother hard to have you tested, but Susan absolutely, adamantly refused.

  Why?

  I think you’d have to ask her.

  Do you think I do?

  I think you’re an exceptionally bright, sensitive kid. You were brought up by an unusually protective mother who seems to have been afraid of something. In retrospect, and everything’s easy in retrospect, she didn’t need to be afraid. Did this do harm? Let’s say it imposed limits that were unnecessary.

  So I’m more or less normal?

  Levon, what’s normal? You’re a very bright kid. There’s a great British poet, Philip Larkin, who wrote in this poem, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.” It’s dark and cynical, and not entirely true, but there’s a lot to that, I said.

  Levon started laughing. Philip Larkin, he said. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” God, that’s good.

  I smiled too.

  One other thing, he said.

  I looked at him.

  I found my dad. We emailed. He’s a big physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He knew no more about me than I knew about him, even though he wanted to. It was Susan.

  I was surprised. Like everyone else, I’d had no idea.

  But he was in a better position than you to find out, I said.

  Levon looked thoughtful. I suppose so.

  We sat there awhile in silence. The room grew darker and darker. Without my noticing it, the streetlights had come on.

  Don’t hate Susan, I said as shadows crept across the room. Don’t demonize her. Whatever she did, I think she was trying desperately to protect and love you. She may have fucked you up, as Larkin says, but all parents, in some way, do that to their kids. They may not mean to, but they do.

  It was quiet again.

  Finally Levon said, Hey, Ron.

  I looked at him.

  Did you fuck your kids up?

  He was putting on his coat, picking up his bag.

  We never had kids, I said.

  Hmmm, he said. Then, Thanks, and he went out and down the darkening hall.

  Thirty-one

  Vera

  I remember it, of course, very clearly. Sitting in the great room in the house in Chestnut Hill, watching Sense and Sensibility with Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant, sipping wine, and Nathan was in his small office just off the big room, doing something on his computer, and my cell phone rang.

  This was somewhere around eleven on a Saturday night, and I could see it was from the dean of students at Groton, and I froze for a moment, could feel the panic in my bowels because you don’t get good news at that hour from the school where your child is a student.

  I answered on the fourth or fifth ring, and a male voice asked if this was Ms. Van Resse, and when I said it was, he identified himself, and said he had some alarming news. That Samantha had harmed herself, had been drinking alcohol alone in her room, had locked herself in the bathroom, had cut her wrist, and had been taken to Emerson Hospital in Concord. The cut was not minor, he said, and I said, Please hold, and called, Nathan. Please, Nathan, louder, the panic in my voice, and he came in, and I handed him the phone.

  I heard him say, Yes, this is Nathan Vash, and I sat down on the couch, and took a deep swallow of wine, and heard him say, When? and, Emerson Hospital? And, Do you have an address? And, I’m sure you did all you could. And, Thank you.

  He put the phone on the table and said, Let’s go. We were both wearing jeans, and I pulled a light coat on, and loafers, and Nathan and I were in the Accord, and he had on a suit jacket and sneakers and we drove to Emerson Hospital, through mostly empty streets, and the emergency room was busy, I seem to remember, and we identified ourselves, and were led to the cubicle where she was lying on a gurney.

  Her hair was matted and damp, and she was woozy, and she was very pale. Her left wrist was elevated, and she was surrounded by two nurses and several doctors, and there was an IV line in the back of her right hand, and a monitor for pulse and blood pressure on her upper right arm, and a small clamp on the forefinger of her right hand, and her left wrist was wrapped and elevated.

  I wanted to touch her, but the best I could do was stroke her calf, over the thin hospital blanket, and she didn’t seem to see us.

  One of the doctors, wearing blue scrubs, wit
h the blue hairnet, took us aside and said that he was Dr. Kimble, that Samantha had cut her wrist, had had a good deal to drink, had lost quite a bit of blood, and was shocky, the word he used.

  The cut was deep, but luckily had not severed any arteries, but had she not been found when she was, she might have been dead within another hour.

  They were waiting for a plastic surgeon who lived in Lexington, who was on the staff at Brigham and Women’s in Boston, but who had privileges here at Emerson Hospital, and was coming over to help reattach the severed tendons. He should arrive any minute. Then he would close the wound.

  Samantha should spend the night, and he recommended we find a psychiatric facility.

  Nathan said, McLean.

  The doctor said, McLean would be excellent.

  I don’t know when I had begun crying. In the car, in the cubicle, in the hallway. But tears were just streaming down my face.

  We sat in a waiting room, and sometime later, when someone on the staff found out that Nathan was a vice president of the Harvard Corporation, they put us in a lounge with a bed, and a kitchenette, and comfortable chairs. Nathan sent emails to friends at Harvard, and arranged a bed at McLean, and we spent the night, sleepless, and I don’t need to say it, but it was the worst night of my life.

  Dr. Pearlman came in around two or three, and said that all had gone well, that Samantha was comfortable, that her wrist would be fine, and that he expected her hand would function normally. He said he was very sorry. He had teenagers of his own. He knew how unpredictable and unexpected and mysterious they could be.

  He said he understood that Nathan had arranged for Samantha to be transferred to McLean, that Nathan was on the board of the Harvard Corporation, and he gave Nathan his card and said to call him if there was anything he could do. He said we could see her. That she was in room 217 on the second floor, and he wished us good night. We thanked him.

  We sat up all night and held her hand, which was heavily bandaged, and stroked her hair and face, and I said, It’s me, Nathan. I did this to her.

  No, sweetheart. It’s all of us. It’s a giant clusterfuck.

  We whispered back and forth, over our sleeping child’s body.

  I said, We need to leave Boston, Chestnut Hill, Groton, the Van Resses, the all of it. The money, the Benzes, the everything.

  He looked thoughtful.

  I felt like I wanted to die sometimes, and I guess that feeling never completely goes away.

  We had both known we had to change this life, I know now, for a long, long time.

  This was the worst night of my life, and of Nathan’s life, and probably of Sam’s life as well. But from here, from now, from well over a year later, it was one of best moments of our lives too.

  It made us see what we had come to. We had somewhere between twenty-five and fifty million dollars. We lived in a museum. But we had no meaning, no purpose, in our lives. We hated ourselves, and what we had become.

  After Sam was in McLean, and they said it would be a long stay, perhaps as long as a year, Nathan began to listen to the offers from the headhunters who had always been calling him. Finally, in November, we visited Ithaca and Cornell. We had always heard what a lovely city it was. Nathan would do his usual IT security work, but he could also have a hand in institutional investing, he could teach a little at the Johnson School, their B-School, and I could teach an undergraduate class or two if I wished.

  The money was fine—nothing like Fidelity or Harvard, but it was more than handsome. And we’d never need money again.

  We found a lovely house, a house that felt like a home, and moved just after Christmas. McLean recommended that Sam spend the full academic year in a hospital, so she was transferred to Austen Riggs, in Stockbridge, in the Berkshires, roughly halfway between Boston and Ithaca.

  This isn’t to say it was easy. I found a new shrink in Boston, and then in Ithaca. I took antidepressants. I didn’t teach that first spring term in Ithaca, but unlike when Sam had been at McLean, Nathan and I were allowed to make the drive to Stockbridge once a month to see Sam. She was still shaky, but she was calm. She was emerging. She was looking forward to coming home to Ithaca in June.

  I took a three-week training course, and began to volunteer at Hospicare. It’s a small facility, with six beds, but also services people who choose to spend their last days at home. I work each Sunday night at the main facility, serving meals to those who are still eating, helping to clean up in the kitchen, talking to the patients who want company. Though most do not. Maybe it’s my penance for being a disgusting rich bitch for so long.

  In their last days, the dying patients begin to draw themselves inward, to somehow prepare themselves on their own terms.

  But even when I am only washing pots and pans, loading the dishwasher, cleaning the counters, taking the compost out, past the beautiful gardens, I find the work incredibly rewarding.

  Not that I’ll ever atone for my sins, or heal Sam’s scar or emotional wounds. I’ll live with those forever. Just as I know, rationally, that I didn’t create Sam’s depression, that I suffer from the same disease, the same chemical imbalance, that I’ll struggle and do my best, still, deep down, in my heart and bones, I know too that I inflicted scars, and that knowledge will never go away.

  Our life now is far from perfect, and I still wonder if Nathan and I, if Sam, will make it okay.

  In the fall, I taught my first undergraduate course, Introduction to Business. I was assigned a graduate student to assist me, thank God, because without Becky, I would have been sunk. But it went okay. In the spring term, I was on my own, and I did okay.

  I think of Sam, and I watch her, and sometimes I think we are even, in some way, slowly, tentatively, growing less distant. And yet I know, and will never recover from the fact, that it was her life, her blood, that saved us from spiritual hell.

  Who was it—some poet—who said that the child is father to the man? He meant it, no doubt, in some deeper, more metaphorical way, but here it is kind of true in a more fundamental way.

  So now I watch. I wait. I am careful. I try very, very hard to follow the Hippocratic oath: Do no harm. Because God knows, Nathan knows, Sam knows, I know, I damn near killed my lovely child.

  And she, in turn, gave us life. Perhaps without knowing it, she gave us this second chance.

  Thirty-two

  Nathan

  The thing I remember best about all those years working and making money, and Sam growing up, is how little I remember. It’s all just Teflon and numbers, and dots on a screen. Millions of dots making millions of numbers and the years go by at warp speed. She’s a little squirt, then she’s lying on a gurney at Emerson Hospital and Vera and I are looking at each other like we’re viewing a corpse, wondering how our daughter, our beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter, got dead all of a sudden.

  But it wasn’t all of a sudden, of course, and we both knew it, and we both knew how and what had happened and why it happened, and we knew it was all going to have to change, and change right away, if we were going to save our daughter and save our souls if we had any souls left to save.

  Because selfish as this is to say, miserable as Sam was, at least she was in shock. She wasn’t feeling much at that moment. They’d given her drugs and some medicine for the pain of stitches and depression and anxiety, which wasn’t to say it would not be agony for her.

  But Vera and I didn’t have that. All we had was the knowledge that we had, if not caused this—because depression is a disease of the brain, a lack of serotonin and norepinephrine and dopamine, and was inherited—we had paid far too little attention. We had spent the past sixteen years ignoring our daughter, and working, and hiring nurses and nannies and maids and mothers’ helpers, and then we’d sent her off to boarding school. That was our part, and we knew it, and we had to live with it.

  Now we had our fortune, and we had nothing else.

  The only small consolation I had was that my dad, who was dead three years at the time, wasn’t
around to see this, because I could not have looked him in the eye. He was probably the sole and only normal thing in Sam’s childhood and she adored her Pops, as she called him, as he adored her.

  He had retired from the post office in his late fifties when they found an irregularity with his heart, and he was eligible for a full pension anyway. I was making the big, big money by then, and he was proud of that, and I kept offering to buy him a house or condo in Newton or Wellesley or West Roxbury, even, but he would never hear of it.

  I’ve got everything I need right here, he said, and in a way, he did.

  So after his retirement, he read, listened to music, actually went to the symphony and museums, to Fenway for Sox games, and saw a few old pals from the post office.

  Sam loved going to Roslindale. She loved the small houses, the chain-link fences, the Madonna on the half shells in front yards, the mom-and-pop stores and sub shops on corners, the whole small crowded life there.

  At the Van Resses’ she had to dress up, and be careful not to bump into things, and eat carefully while sitting up straight, and answer carefully and in turn. None of that applied at Pops’s house.

  Sam loved to climb in his lap, and he loved to cover her eyes and do animal noises and make her guess what animal he was. She could crawl under and around and behind furniture, and sometimes we went to Red Sox games at Fenway. Fidelity had Valet seats, which were high above the action, but Dad got me to trade them for seats a few rows behind the Sox dugout. Sam loved the noise, the rhythm, the vendors, Hey, Coke heah, Hey, hot dogs, Hey, peanuts, and how the vendors tossed the bags of peanuts way down the row to the buyer, and money was passed quickly back and forth from buyer to vendor, hand to hand.

  The lights, the Green Monster, Big Papi, Pedroia, and the giant Citgo sign in Kenmore Square, beyond the outfield, which changed constantly, and as the game got later into the night, the colors of the sky changed, and Sam sat small and warm between me and Pops.

  Sometimes, in the middle of an afternoon game, we’d walk down to Sal’s, a sub shop, and Sam always got the small meatball sub with provolone, and Sal, the owner, threw in a few bags of chips for Sam ’cause she won the cutest customer of the day contest.