The Ramblers

by Aidan Donnelley Rowley

  Clio leads him along the grass, clutching his arm tightly. She feels as if she might faint. Tears begin to rise as they reach it. She bends down to trace the etched letters of her mother’s name. Eloise Marsh. July 3, 1961–December 22, 2012. As she begins to read Darwin’s words, her body convulses and she begins to sob. She collapses to the grass. As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life . . .

  Henry pulls her up and holds her to him, wrapping her tightly. She buries her face in the wool of his sweater.

  “I’ve got you,” he says. “I’ve got you.”

  The three words repeat in her head like a heartbeat, I’ve got you I’ve got you I’ve got you, and time passes and she feels herself breathing again. She looks up at him.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says.

  “No,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

  She takes his hand and they retrace their steps to leave.

  “December of 2012?” he says, his eyes wide but kind.

  “She killed herself before Christmas last year, Henry,” Clio says, stopping, looking at him.

  “My God, Clio,” he says, pulling her to him, wrapping his arms around her. “I’m so sorry. I wish you would’ve told me,” he says. “You could have, you know.”

  “I was so scared,” she says, and the relief of allowing the tears to come warms her.

  Henry holds her for a long time. She waits for the panic to come, waits for her brain to scream, Run, but miraculously it is silent. Her mind doesn’t race. Her heart doesn’t seize and then quicken. She can feel herself grounded in her body. As if in a trance, she sinks deeper into his arms.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he says, and she can see now that his eyes are wet, his features soft and sad.

  “I liked you. I liked you even though it was so soon after. I was worried it would frighten you away. I can barely handle it and I have no choice. Why choose to deal with this?”

  After it happened, after she was back in the city, she holed up in her office at the museum, and instead of working on her bird research and grant proposals, she spent hours and hours researching suicide. She swam in statistics—that more people in the U.S. now commit suicide each year than die in car accidents, one every fourteen minutes or so. She developed a morbid fascination with all the famous writers and artists who had killed themselves or tried to: Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf and David Foster Wallace. She learned that it’s likely that Beethoven was bipolar. But the most harrowing statistic of all would linger and haunt her: children of a parent who has committed suicide have a one-in-five chance of committing suicide themselves. She doesn’t tell Henry this last fact; she knows better.

  “I understand why you were afraid,” Henry says, nodding. “But you needn’t be, okay? I’m here and I want you to tell me as much as you’re comfortable telling me. Now I feel like a bastard for talking about missing my mother, God. I can’t imagine what it would be like. Clio, I’m sorry.”

  No, he can’t imagine. That’s the thing. That’s the hard part, the loneliest part. Death is natural, her mother taught her that, but this isn’t. This is more than grief, more than loss. This is mystery and heartbreak and harrowing regret. This is shame blended with sadness, fear with the most ferocious anger. This is the opposite of closure. It’s an open wound that will never heal. What she would give to experience a purer grief, a cleaner breed of longing. What she would give to not lose so many moments trying to understand why, wondering what she could have done. What she would give not to feel the unannounced spikes of anger, the showers of guilt, the haunting howl of questions she’ll never be able to answer. What she would give to visit her mother’s grave and cry simple tears.

  She walks him back toward campus. A silence shrouds them and she feels a faint lifting, a sharp sense of relief. He holds her hand tight. She pulls him onto Old Campus, where she lived freshman year. “So, anyway, Mr. Kildare,” she says, laughing nervously, “this is Yale. My escape hatch.”

  She thinks back. To those first days of school, to that time of keen flailing when her mother, in the throes of mania, would show up unannounced on campus. Smith stepped in and took charge. She had this magical way of intervening, of escorting Eloise back home. Clio remembers the first time Eloise appeared in nothing but a red lace nightgown and a garish face full of makeup. It was October of their freshman year. She barged into their dorm room and started moving things around. Who is that? Smith asked, because how was she to know? Clio didn’t have any pictures up. She didn’t talk about her mother at all.

  It’s my mother, Clio said, panicked, feeling frozen. But Smith was all action; she waltzed over to Eloise and held out her hand. Hello, Mrs. Marsh, so lovely to finally meet you. I’m Smith, Clio’s roommate. Why don’t we take a walk? There’s a great coffee place nearby. Clio stared in disbelief as Smith efficiently extracted her babbling mother from the dorm. She watched from the window as Smith led Eloise out, down the small set of stairs, and out of view. Smith returned an hour later as if nothing had happened. Clio thanked her, still stunned. And then she explained. My mother is crazy, Clio said, even though she tried not to use that word. They talked for hours and hours that afternoon, just as they’d done a mere month before when Smith found out she was pregnant. What a wild relief it was to finally open up, to have someone listen and not judge. It was more than tit for tat. It was friendship. Swiftly formed, swiftly cemented.

  Clio looks around at the glorious green campus, the place that once intimidated her. “Sometimes, I’m still dumbfounded that I managed to get myself out of that broken house in good enough shape to come here.”

  “Were your parents proud of you? They must have been, right?” he says, rolling with the abrupt topic change. “I mean, it’s Yale.”

  “Yes and no,” she says. “I think they wanted to be, but it was never that simple.”

  School was a salvation for Clio, a place that felt safe and normal, and she worked hard and got good grades and this got her mother’s attention. A science teacher encouraged her to apply and shepherded her through the process, reading all of her application materials, with the exception of her personal essay. “It’s just sort of private,” Clio had said. Her teacher had nodded in understanding. She got in. And then she hatched this foolish plan to come here and start over and forge a normal life.

  The plan, at its most cellular level, was to get out. To climb in the backseat of her parents’ battered Ford wagon one final time and travel the measly few miles to campus, to walk with them, maybe even between them, through that big fancy gate. They would help carry her things. They would climb together the steps of her assigned dorm and watch as Clio quite literally kicked open the door to her future. They would help her unpack, get settled.

  It didn’t happen this way.

  She arrived alone. She walked through the door of her dorm and there was Smith, glamorous and tall, all tanned legs in a pair of white shorts and a blue floral blouse. She wore her dark hair in a ponytail and flashed a beatific smile. In the background, Smith’s crisply coiffed parents hovered. Bitsy snapped tags from fancy tasseled throw pillows. Thatcher fixed Clio with his squinty, judgmental eyes and pinned her with that cruel question that’s stayed with her.

  Where are your parents?

  Oh, they couldn’t be here today.

  Clio left it at that, but what more was she supposed to say? That her mother had tried to kill herself days before? That she was all drugged up in a small room in the psych ward at Yale–New Haven Hospital, that her father wouldn’t tear himself away from his wife even for an hour to take his only child to college?

  “I remember that April day when I got my acceptance letter. And I just thought it would be a happy thing, that we’d celebrate, but it wasn’t that simple. I hate to admit it, but I was so relieved to be getting out of there and then so guilty about my own relief. When I got here, I was so overwh
elmed, Henry. So excited, but I also felt like an impostor.”

  She remembers now those flutters of optimism she felt standing on this grass for the first time as a student. Yale. A world she’d glimpsed from the little coffee shop where she’d sit with Jack as he worked shifts in high school, stacking napkins, refilling stirrers, watching college students come and go, students lugging big books that would lift them up in some poetic and heralded way, students brimming with easy laughter, students who were on their way to a species of greatness well beyond what she herself could hope for.

  She remembers the dizziness and awe and gratitude and respect and mostly fear, always fear, that it would all be taken away. And so she worked very, very hard to make sure it wasn’t, to prove that she in fact belonged. And yet she never quite did feel that she did. She always felt fringe, peripheral, like an observer studying an exotic breed of bird, taking notes, doing research. It astonished her how many of her classmates seemed to take it all for granted, these four years, this tremendous opportunity. They skipped classes and got drunk night after night and many of them, like Smith, managed somehow to pull off near-perfect grades. Their nonchalance was a badge of sorts, something Clio both envied and felt sickened by.

  “I had this interesting optimism. Told myself it would all work out,” she says to Henry. “I had these vivid recurring dreams. They were really simple. My parents just turned around and told me they loved me.” She plays it out in her head now, this hopeful story. Eloise and William Marsh said they were proud of their only child, Clio; they owned up to their shortcomings and apologized, noting how overwhelmed they were by life and circumstance. There was always a happy ending where they told Clio how much they loved her.

  But they were only dreams.

  “I just wanted to be normal, Henry,” she says. “That’s all I wanted. I didn’t want to break any records or win any prizes. I just wanted to fit in.”

  Even then, she knew normal was a chimera, that, if anything, normal is a pejorative, boring, anti-Tolstoyan term. Clio knew that smart kids, Yale kids, would shun normal and embrace oddity, originality, wildness, whimsy, that if anything darkness and deepness would be championed over light and surface and ease, but those were the things she wanted: light and surface and ease.

  From across the campus, Clio eyes Vanderbilt Hall, where she and Smith went freshman year for a party. Clio’s first college party. Before it all went black that night, the details were sharp. She was just another freshman girl and she trailed behind Smith and a group of other freshmen along High Street. They all seemed to know each other. They were giddy, skipping, tripping, already drunk, or maybe just happy. Clio hung back, watched her own feet plod along, progressing on the pavement where so many great people had walked in their day, one foot and then the next, and she wondered if she would ever catch up, whether she’d ever be one of them, those who led the way. They all filed upstairs, swam into a crowded room. Bodies bumped, hands flailed, pretty lips were curled into victorious Ivy League smiles. The revelry was full throttle and red cups were everywhere, dotting the darkened scene—in fingers, on heads, on mantels, on ledges and sofa cushions. She drank a cup of punch and then another and felt like she was floating, like she was fine. She had more.

  The next morning, she woke up in a hospital room at Yale–New Haven and learned that she’d come in with a .12 blood alcohol level, that her stomach had been pumped.

  “There was this one night just a few weeks into college,” Clio says, holding Henry’s hand between both of hers. “I was so frightened, Henry. I was so sure it was my time. I went to a party with Smith and I felt so anxious in that room with all those kids, so out of place. And I drank and loosened up and the next thing I knew I was waking up in a hospital room and I was convinced that the disease was there, just lurking in my genes, waiting to pop. I’m still anxious about it.”

  The memories of that one night continue to haunt her all these years later. She was all alone, tucked into a hospital bed. Her arm had fresh scratches and was tethered to an IV bag. She tried to hide her tears, but the room was menacing in its brightness and they were big, her tears, tumbling down, streaking salt on her cheeks. The nurse looked away, said nothing. The black sky outside veered gray, and morning came. They called her parents, but there was no answer.

  “I actually requested a psych consult and this young doctor comes and I tell him all about my mother, about her illness, and I want to know if I have it. And this poor guy starts asking me these questions about how I sleep and whether I talk fast sometimes and whether I ever feel my mind racing. And these questions make me even more nervous, but he releases me. He tells me he thinks I’m fine, a wait-and-see kind of thing.”

  “But look at you,” he says again, optimistically. “You’re okay.”

  Is she though? Is she okay? Wasn’t she the one on a street corner in a bathrobe and heels, what, seventy-two hours ago? Bipolar usually presents in adolescence or in one’s early twenties, often during college years. For Clio’s mother, it emerged soon after she gave birth to Clio—at eighteen—and there Clio was, her age at onset, and all she could feel was fear. She learned to deal with the fear—maybe she internalized it—but it was always there, in the corner. And when she graduated, it was so hard for her to go to New York even though it was all she wanted to do. Though the guilt she felt for leaving, for not sticking close, was acute.

  “Yes. Maybe,” she says. “Maybe now I’m okay. But I wasn’t. I was a mess. I joined this awful suicide support group in midtown. I had this horrifying recurring dream where I found my mother and she wasn’t breathing and I did nothing to help her. But then something happened, and these things got better.”

  “What happened?” he says.

  “I met you, Henry. And I began having moments where I wouldn’t think of her and you and I have had so much fun, but then the other night when I saw the apartment and you said all those wonderful things, I felt like this big liar, you know? I felt you needed to know about all of this. To know what you’re getting. I come with a lot of baggage. It didn’t seem fair. And then you mentioned wanting us to have a life together. To be a family. And this was incredible, Henry, but you know something? I haven’t allowed myself to even consider having kids. Even if I’m spared in this game of genetic roulette, what’s to say my kids will be? I’m not sure I’m willing to risk that.”

  He takes her face in his hands. “And what’s to say I won’t be hit by the M79 next week crossing the street going to get my New York Times? Or that I won’t wake up with bloody cancer all over my body like my poor mum did? Or that you won’t discover some brand-new species of hummer in some remote isle or some much younger and better man and leave me? Clio, we never do know about anything, do we?”

  She has a sudden urge to grab him tightly and hold on for dear life. So she does.

  We never do know about anything.

  “No,” she says. “I guess we don’t.”

  3:47PM

  “I’ve never wanted you more.”

  So, this is it,” Clio says, walking Henry through the front door of the house. Somehow, it looks different, and feels different, with him here.

  “I’m picturing you as a little girl,” he says, looking around. “Bouncing around here in your pigtails.”

  There wasn’t much bouncing. Or pigtails. There was tiptoeing and sneaking and she did her own hair and learned to cook her own meals.

  “Sorry it’s nothing fancy,” Clio says, ashamed of the humble surroundings.

  “Don’t apologize,” Henry says, standing still, surveying the space. “This is the kitchen, I see?”

  “Yes,” Clio says. “We spent a lot of time in this room. Mostly at this little table my father built. Had all of our meals here.”

  She had many breakfasts alone. Her father often worked odd hours and frequently slept through until noon, and her mother was either in bed too or up and about, buzzing with energy, cooking up some elaborate meal she would never finish. Often the ingredients would end
up thrown on the floor.

  “And the living room through there,” Henry says, walking into the dimly lit wood-paneled room.

  Clio nods and follows him into the room, the room Eloise never called a living room. Living was done in every room. “She called it Darwin’s Parlor,” Clio surprises herself by saying. After all this time avoiding the topic, it feels strange to talk about her mother.

  Henry reaches into an open box and pulls out a few books. “All Darwin,” he says, studying them. “My God, you weren’t kidding around.”

  Eloise had a manic fixation with Charles Darwin. She’d spend thousands of dollars, blowing through money they didn’t have, buying books and artifacts en masse. Packages would arrive daily and her elation was wild when they did; she’d rip into the boxes and stockpile her treasures in the room off the kitchen, Darwin’s Parlor, leaving the shelves ominously empty, stacking books into precarious towers that would invariably tumble, flipping an internal switch to black rages or brooding depressions. To make up for her epic sprees, her exhausted father took extra shifts at work. There were times when they only ate ramen or leftovers Jack’s mom, Katherine, brought over. On more than one occasion, Eloise insisted she saw Darwin in their small yard. Clio and her father learned quickly to play along; questioning her claims was too risky.

  Clio meets Henry’s eye, shakes her head, forces a smile. She joins him in sifting through the boxes. She finds it, holds it up. “And here we have the pièce de résistance, an expensive early edition of On the Origin of Species. My childhood Bible. Other kids learned about princesses and pirates and I learned about natural selection.”

  Henry takes the book from her and studies it.

  When it came in the mail, Eloise called Clio in and sat her down and presented it like it was a new puppy. She let Clio hold it, run her fingers along the spine. You should know it’s actually called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.