by Ben Dolnick
The notes went on like this, page after page, sessions from all that summer and fall, like a biography written in shorthand and then thrown in a blender.
7/26
H was 8 or 9—walked in, Terri weeping (poss post g-mother’s death; associated w/ that news)—> H concludes: undependable, parent w/out emotional resources to take prop care. Persistent belief. Burden.
9/2
Setback, maj anx attack on train Weds PM: was reading article re heart transplant, decided was herself having med incident w/ heart or brain (had thought might be psychosom, fear re “what if it’s not?”). Once off train, humiliation, self-blame, “something wrong w/ me,” “nothing helps,” v disturbed sleep. Poss phobia developing re confinement, esp underground. Add 5mg Lexapro?
10/14
H tells (w/ strong trep, embarrassment) recurrent childhood night-fear: something crouching in laundry hamper, could hear it breathing/scratching, H knew thing was horr beyond describing, sent to punish her for unnamed sins (puritanism), couldn’t call to p’s or sis—> shame of having to expl reason for thing’s presence (also: sense they wouldn’t be able to help?)
The first batch of notes ended in November of that year. She’d been seeing Dr. Blythe once a week or so to that point, and now, apparently, she took a break; she seemed to have been feeling better—on a regimen of pills, living on her own. So this was the Hannah that I’d met: fresh from a rough patch, tentatively on her feet—and, to outward appearances, as content and self-assured as a woman in a shampoo ad.
The next set of notes—the ones that referred to anything more substantive than a prescription refill or a dosage tweak—came from a year and a half later, in the spring of ’07. Hannah had gone back in to see Dr. Blythe because she’d had another panic attack, this one at work.
5/5
H in meeting, felt prickle in palms, sense of being v far from own body, then sudd sense of emergency, heart “a balloon about to burst.” Coworkers staring—> made worse. Temp inability to speak. Ep lasted approx 3 mins.
The thing was, though: Hannah and I had been dating in the spring of ’07. Not living together, yet, but spending almost every night together, as involved in each other’s lives, as aware of each other’s doings, as if we’d been married. This had been our period of elaborate-meal cooking and street-corner kissing. I remembered when she’d had this panic attack, and it hadn’t been at all the way the notes described it—or at least the notes had the emphasis all wrong. She’d been dehydrated that day, hadn’t eaten breakfast, and, sitting in an endless hot exhibit meeting, had started feeling like she might faint. She’d called me as soon as she’d gotten back to her desk. I remembered us standing in the narrow kitchen of her apartment that night, Hannah with a jumbo bottle of yellow Powerade, and both of us joking about getting her a Life Alert necklace. And yet:
5/9
Describes terror/shame during night following attack—> re “what if something is badly wrong”—psych if not phys (“maybe the medicine isn’t working”). Had old nightmare of inner orgs being made of something soft, “like paste,” sense of falling apart. Incr fear of trying to sleep.
What I felt, reading this and the pages after, was a more distressing version of the thing you feel when you catch a glimpse of yourself on a store’s surveillance TV. Does my hair really do that in the back? Could that slump-shouldered stranger really be me? The Hannah in Dr. Blythe’s notes was so much sadder and more fearful and less stable than the person I’d been dating. My Hannah would have taken this Hannah out for lunch and given her hours of wise advice. Either she’d given Dr. Blythe a serious misimpression or I’d spent the beginning of our relationship—maybe all of our relationship—in an oblivious fog.
This, I thought, finishing my coffee, reading yet another page about her panic and night terrors, was as painful as things would get—and then I turned to the pages from when we were living at Wright. I could have, and probably should have, started with these pages, I knew, but something had stopped me; some suffering can only be approached on tiptoe.
The first call Hannah made to Dr. Blythe when we were living at Wright really had been the night of the meltdown out by the graves—in this, at least, my version of things did line up with the notes. But Hannah hadn’t just called Dr. Blythe to make an appointment for when we were back in the city, or to talk to him about her medicine; she’d wanted to tell him something. She’d called him again the next morning. They’d had multiple full-length sessions over the phone during the next couple of weeks, including one just two days before she’d died.
11/3
Extreme insom, 6–7 nights/week out of bed, “mostly working,” in frenzy of excitement/fear. Won’t describe nature of work. Just says is consuming, expresses (humorous?) concern that she’s “gone off deep end.” Dismisses q re Risp (insists she just took 2 wk break due to pharm issue), says main prob is sleep, asks if cd prescribe something new. I say new med wd require in-person appt, H demurs.
11/10
Hallucinations/vivid dreams—> transformed into various figs: bird, writer, etc. Still sleeping v little. In re to my expr of concern, desire for in-person appt, becomes angry, says v impt project at work, lack of understanding from Nick, now me too, etc. Refuses to sched next phone app. Poss rec drugs? Psych break?
11/18
V gloomy, dark—> depressive ep? Apols for prior sessions, embarr, blames sleeplessness. Says doesn’t need new meds, wants to handle on own. Describes stress re Nick, uncertainty re marriage, becomes incr upset, cries, distraught. “Am I making a giant mistake?” Describes terror re something she’s seen (won’t spec), asks (v unus) whether I’ve enjoyed my life—in re my saying focus ought to be on her, cries again. What abt putting off engagement, I sugg—> no firm decision nec just now, just delay. H says no, not poss, cries again. I say: clear you’re in great distress. Come for in-person appt or cannot respons continue to treat. H proms to consider.
Isn’t there a medieval torture device in which all the blood is let out of a person, like a bathtub being drained? This is what seemed to have happened to me by the time I put down the last page of notes. The deli’s window reflected a picture of me sitting frozen with my elbows on the table, a piece of paper and an empty cup in front of me, my head in my hands. The girl who had been behind the counter was now moving quietly around the dining room, sweeping under tables with a plastic broom. For a few seconds I didn’t even have any thoughts—I just sat there vibrating with the awful, empty, staggered feeling, pain in the shape of a human being. If the police had stormed in at that moment, I wouldn’t have cared about being arrested—I wouldn’t have cared about being shot.
But, of course, my thoughts wouldn’t stay back for long—Hannah hadn’t wanted to marry me. This had been the problem. This had been her secret. How many nights had I thrown my arm over her in our bed at Wright while she lay there trying not to cry? How many conversations had she spent churning with secret misery? How could she have—? How could I not have—? And did this mean she’d—? And if she had, was it really because—?
So consuming was my suffering, my feeling of having fallen into a whirlpool, that it took me a few seconds even to notice that the pink-haired girl was now standing next to me.
“Did you drop this?”
She held out a yellow post-it note covered in Dr. Blythe’s writing.
Phone message from H on 11/19 @ 10:15PM
Says pls call, she has to tell me something about the Kemps, used to live in the house, papers she found in fmr director’s box (sounds v scattered—manic? intox?); something happened to female Kemp; H worried could be what’s happening to her.
Msg returned 9AM on 11/20. No answer.
. . .
Driving at semi-normal speeds, it takes an hour and fifteen minutes to get from the Bronx to Hibernia. I made the trip, with Dr. Blythe’s notes now scattered in my lap, in just over forty minutes. The state troopers nestled behind their little hills on the Taconic had never concerned me less; slowing
down on unlit, shoulder-less curves had never seemed to me more optional. My phone, in the passenger’s seat beside me, showed that I’d missed half a dozen calls in the past couple of hours—at least a few of them from the Rampes—but the only responses I could muster to this news was to turn off my phone and drive faster.
It’s incredible how sensitive your mind turns out to be to geographical details that you didn’t even know you remembered; just the sight of the gray trees and electricity towers, the low dark mountains and wide black reservoirs, touched some nerve in me that had been left bloody and exposed since Hannah’s death. The exit signs ticking by—Cold Spring, Sylvan Lake, James Baird State Park—could, for their effect on me, just as well have read: Doomed, doomed, doomed. My cells knew a disaster had taken place in this direction. The human animal is an obsessive and hopeless self-protector.
It’s hard for me to reconstruct now what exactly I thought I was going to Hibernia to get, or to find. The box of Jim’s papers, at least. Whatever it was that had made Hannah leave that last message for Dr. Blythe. But there was something more basic than that too. When I was a kid and I would lose something—my backpack, a soccer cleat—my mom would always say, in her infinite-patience voice, “Now where was the last place you know you had it?” This is maybe the most complete explanation for what I was doing: I was returning to the last place where I’d had even a slight grasp on Hannah. If she really had decided not to marry me, I needed to find the place, needed to find the moment, where it had happened.
The car, by the time I passed the exit for Poughkeepsie, had started making the ticking/flapping noise it did sometimes at high speeds, and the roadkill had taken on a forbidding, head-on-a-pike quality. There was a deer with its neck doubled back. A turkey, or anyway some sort of bird, whose feathers had arranged themselves into a fan poking straight up from the pulp of its body. I’d spent the past half hour thinking, in a desperate, banging-your-head-against-the-wall sort of way, about why Hannah hadn’t called off the wedding, and about the Kemps, whose name I hadn’t thought of in months. They’d lived at Wright in the 1950s, before it became a museum, and the wife had disappeared, and Butch had gone to school with one of the kids. That Hannah would have called Dr. Blythe to talk about them the night before she died—that their story could possibly have had any sort of urgent meaning for her—was so bizarre, had so little to do with any version of her last weeks I could imagine, that I thought I must have misread something. For her to have killed herself because she couldn’t bear the thought of marrying me, or because she’d been gripped by her old psychological demons—these were horrible to think about, but I could at least semi-understand them. But for her to have killed herself because…
So that was something else that had happened, apparently: my doubts about whether Hannah had committed suicide had collapsed completely. The rest of my grieving, the rest of my life, was going to have to be conducted amidst the rubble.
Entering Hibernia—exiting the Taconic, driving past the hardware store with its lumber yard and the gas station with free air, making that swoop of a turn onto 82—was so clearly unacceptable to the instinctual parts of me that I had to physically restrain myself from making a U-turn. Part of the horror, I think, had to do with how unchanged everything was. The volunteer fire station was still standing there with its open garage and its marquee (“CALLS YTD: 216”). The farm stand was still advertising specials on chicken sausage and winter squash. The diner was still looking to hire a cook, no experience necessary. I guess I’d half-expected Hibernia to fold up its tent as soon as Hannah died. The death of an emperor is the only kind of death in which the world’s response makes any sort of sense: the silent parades, the darkened houses, the weeping strangers all in black. Here my sun had fallen out of the sky, and Peck’s was still selling buckets of night crawlers for $2.99.
I turned onto Culver and drove toward the museum—it was now almost six o’clock, dark in that total, Hibernia way—and as I approached, gravel and branches popping and crackling under my tires, I noticed something strange: there were cars parked along the road. Maybe half a dozen altogether, Subarus and pickup trucks and old beaten Hondas, all just in front of Wright. So not everything was exactly the way I’d left it. The lights in the first floor of the museum were on. Walking up the driveway, I thought I could hear, or maybe just feel, music coming from inside the house, like a fever through skin. No explanation I could think of made any sense. A party in memory of Hannah. An unprecedentedly successful evening event. Festive home invaders.
I walked up onto the porch, and there just inside the front door—which was unlocked—stood Donna, wearing a silver party hat and a look of cheerful welcome that dissolved the second she saw me.
“You came,” she said, wrapping me in a clumsy hug.
There were maybe a dozen people scattered around the museum’s foyer and kitchen area, all holding little clear plastic cups. On the welcome table there was a tray arrayed with half-wrapped Brie and a plate of crumbly cookies. All the overhead lights were on, and the feeling—jazz was playing from computer speakers in the living room—was of a not-very-successful office party. I felt, for no good reason, obscurely outraged, as if I were an adult who’d come home to find teenagers doing keg stands. One of the volunteer educators, Edna, nodded at me from over by the wood stove—she was sipping a beer and gesticulating to a woman in a tan baseball cap. The Wrighters stood clustered by the Wright family portrait in the living room, dribbling crumbs and providing a good three-quarters of the party’s animation (“He hadn’t even read her!” I heard the Viking type bark). A bearded man I didn’t recognize was taking a picture of one of the wall signs with his iPhone.
Donna pulled me toward Hannah’s old office, under the stairs. “How are you doing?” she said. “I mean, I can imagine how you must be doing, but I can’t believe you came all this way. I hope you didn’t feel like you had to or anything.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. She went on exactly as if I hadn’t spoken.
“Well, we sure appreciate you being here. You look pretty roughed up. Not that you look bad. Not that you shouldn’t look bad. But—can I get you some cider? Or wine? I wanted to be at the funeral, I was going to be, I heard it was a beautiful service, but then my dad fell, broke his pelvis, now he’s on painkillers, which the doctor says is usually the beginning of the end for somebody his age, he’s ninety-two, even though this same doctor said it was the end of the end when he had pneumonia like two years ago, so…Anyway, Jesus. Twenty-five years, huh? I guess it makes sense, but it still breaks your heart, doesn’t it? All our work, mothballed. Board didn’t even give a reason, just effective immediately, all that kind of stuff. And I wanted to say, Hey, Hannah loved this place, you wanna honor her? Try keeping it open. I know that’s how you feel too. But of course as soon as they announce it, there go all your school groups, there go all your funders. You sure I can’t get you something to drink?”
So that’s what this gathering was—the closing party for the museum. The board had voted a week after Hannah’s death, it turned out. That Monday had been the Wright House’s last day open to the public. Donna said she’d emailed me an invitation, or tried to (“Paperless Post keeps telling me my profile needs updating, but I don’t want a profile, I just want to—”), and maybe someone had sent me the news about the closing too.
“The thing I hate to think is, here’s going to be this whole generation of kids who don’t even know Wright’s name,” Donna said. I just nodded, looking down. She seemed nervous in a way I’d never seen her—eyes flitting around, sipping at her empty cup. So not even someone as socially oblivious as Donna could help acting uncomfortable around the boyfriend of the late Hannah Rampe.
“I’m actually not going to stay,” I said. “I just came to pick up a couple of Hannah’s things. Is our room open?”
“Oh, hey, I meant to write you about that, I took most of you guys’ stuff back to my house, figured it was safer there and t
hen I could just ship it down to you or whatever. Didn’t want, you know, looky lous coming by and peeking in the windows. Plus we’ve got so much space, since we cleaned up, it wasn’t really—”
“Maybe I could just go by and pick them up.”
“Yeah, definitely after the party we can do that. I’ll take you over. Wait, did you say hi to Butch? I know he’s been dying to talk to you. Hey, Butch! You said you didn’t want any wine, right?”
Butch, in his tan shirt and jeans, walked over and crushed my hand feelingly.
“How you holding up?”
“Well…”
So now I was a guest at the Wright House party. I hadn’t eaten all day, I realized, which might go some way toward explaining the floaty feeling that was building in me. I ate a few of the crumbly cookies, which turned out to have been made from one of Sarah Wright’s recipes, heavy on fennel seed. I drank red wine that made my mouth feel like decaying copper. I stood at the base of the stairs and listened to a woman I didn’t know, and who didn’t seem to know who I was, explain why she wouldn’t be able to get her felting machine fixed until March, and how this meant disappointed customers up and down the Hudson Valley.
At some point I found myself in the living room, standing by the knotty mantel with the Wrighters. “We’d love to induct Hannah into the society posthumously, if that’s all right,” said Barry, the leader. “It’s so rare to meet someone who comes into a new place and gets what it’s about right away.”
“You could tell she was just such a kind person,” said the female Wrighter, Annie, who wasn’t wearing a bra and whose hair was pulled into a single gray braid with a binder clip holding the end. I looked away for a second, and when I looked back I was surprised to see tears in her eyes. “And you seem so kind too. I know we didn’t get to spend very much time together, but just in that little bit I always got the feeling that the two of you…”