Undone
Page 27
“Sweetheart,” Chiara greets me as she takes me into her embrace and kisses both of my cheeks. “Hunter was just telling me you’re going to pack up Patrick’s house over the next few weeks. Of course I’ll watch Noah for you.”
Hunter is watching me closely. Is this some kind of trap? Even if it is, the offer is too enticing to refuse. So much for changing strategies from avoidance.
“Chiara, that would be amazing. Thank you so much.”
Once Chiara is gone and Hunter and I are alone in our living room, I turn my gaze to him.
“I got the impression when we were in the car that you didn’t want me to ask your mom to watch the baby while I’m at Dad’s.”
“You said you need time,” Hunter says, cheeks coloring. “I told you, Beth. Whatever you need, I’ll make it happen.”
I guess if ten years with Hunter should have taught me anything, it would be that he has my back at all times.
I just can’t help but wonder if he’d still be Mr Supportive if I told him the truth: that we spent half a decade trying to become parents, and after just five months, I’m convinced it was the biggest mistake of our lives.
Grace
November 2, 1957
I don’t know what I intend to achieve with these little notes. The first time, I actually sat down to write a letter to Maryanne, just as I’d done so many times before. This time I was going to do something new: I was going to tell her the truth. I’ve painted such rosy pictures of our life here over the years, but in this new slump, I was determined to reach across the divide with something real . . . something raw.
The problem was that when my pen hit paper, I couldn’t bear the thought of my sister knowing. Even after all of this time and even after all of my failures, I’m still proud enough to want her to think I made the right choice in Patrick. I suppose that’s why what came out of my pen that day was more like a letter to myself. I’ve decided it’s for the best. I don’t doubt that if Maryanne knew how bad things are for me, she’d blame him and him alone—she does so love to blame men for everything. In this case, she’d feel he’s proven her right, because she tried so hard to warn me against this life.
I chose Patrick anyway, and that decision has forced a distance between Maryanne and me that I’ve never figured out how to close. In some ways over the past few years, that distance has been a necessary evil. If she knew, she’d probably try to intervene, and I might not have much these days, but at least I have my pride. Plus, I love that Maryanne thinks I’m a good mother. I can’t bear for her to know the truth.
Even so, I had the urge to write to her because although there have been so many things about the past few years that have been difficult, the isolation has been the hardest. The irony of course is that I haven’t been truly alone in well over two years now, given I haven’t had so much as an hour without some company since the twins were born. It’s not even silence I crave. I’m starving simply to be present with someone who doesn’t want something from me. I have reached the point where I don’t fantasize about making love or relaxing or even sleeping anymore. Now I daydream about sitting down with someone who will listen to me—who will understand me. And these notes have somehow tricked my brain into thinking I’d been heard by someone, at least for a little while, and I have been doing so much better. Ordinarily, it takes me a few months to rise out of the funk, but after I wrote those notes, something immediately felt a little lighter inside.
Until today, that is. This relapse hit without warning, and it took me back to my very darkest months. Ruth has a bit of a cold and kept waking up because her nose is blocked. I got even less sleep than usual, and maybe that’s what triggered it. All I know is that I was buttering the toast for breakfast and Jeremy and Ruth were fighting and the noise rose all around me like a tidal wave until it took up too much air and suffocated me.
I asked the children to be quiet. I told them to be quiet. I shouted at them to be quiet. I shouted at them to stop. And then I screamed at them to shut up.
That’s when the thoughts came back.
I looked at the knife in my hand and I pictured myself dragging it across the smooth white skin of my wrist. I imagined the dark red blood bubbling up and the silence rushing in. I don’t know how long I stood there, but when those god-awful thoughts finally cleared from my mind, I was standing beside the table in front of my four babies, who were all sitting in terrible silence, staring at their breakfasts with the kind of desperate intensity that only comes from being completely petrified.
I didn’t actually hurt myself this time. I’ve never done something as drastic as cutting my wrists, except for that one night when I—no. I don’t think about that night; it’s too dreadful and too hard. Instead, these days when I feel this stretched, I have developed a coping mechanism, as awful as it may be. I sneak away to the bathroom and I scratch myself, as if breaking the surface of my skin will let all of the frustration bleed out. I always scratch beneath my clothing because I have no idea how I’d explain such a thing. It was bad enough when Patrick saw a mark on my breast and I had to lie and say that Beth had done it when I was feeding her. I was lucky that time, because it was just the smallest little thing. Other times I’ve scratched so hard and so long that my breasts and my belly have been speckled with blood and black-and-blue with bruises. Anything to let the frustration out. Anything to let the sadness out. Because if I bottle it up inside, it finds other ways to burst out of me . . . like that moment today in the kitchen.
I hurt my children today—not with the knife, but with the threat of it. My frustration and irritability and this pervasive misery drowned me in that moment and I was hopelessly out of control. Even after all these years, I don’t actually know what those moments are . . . the moments when I can’t outrun the bad thoughts. I don’t see images with my eyes, more with my mind, but they swamp me anyway. Are they hallucinations? Visions? Prophecies? Whatever those thoughts are, they are vivid and real and worst of all, they are stronger than I am.
I set the knife down on the cracked white vinyl of the table and I stepped away from it. I spoke to my children in a voice that had become artificially high with panic, and I called them “my darlings” because I always call them that when I’m well, and I gently ushered them out to play. Once they were all in the yard, I locked the back door and sank to the linoleum and curled up in a little ball—my back pressed heavily against the door as if the kids could push hard enough to break the lock.
They were fine out there at first, climbing the pear tree and riding their tricycles, but the hours went on and I just kept thinking about the knife and the frustration and their scared little faces, and I couldn’t convince myself to get up. Soon, Beth was crying at the door because she was hungry again. My fear and my rage had faded, but a paralyzing guilt and numbness had taken their place. I stayed on the floor, and when I didn’t answer their increasingly insistent knocks and calls, Tim climbed through a window, fetched some bread from the kitchen and ferried it out to his siblings. He’s such a good boy. He deserves so much better than the life I give him.
What scared me wasn’t the vision or my rage or the mood I was in. It was how unexpected the resurgence of the madness was. I’ve walked this journey before—twice before, and the end doesn’t go like this. With my first two births, as soon as I felt better, I really was better—there was no sinking in and out of funks once the babies were toddlers and the darkness had cleared. So was this just a one-off bad day, or is it a sign that I’ll never truly be able to trust in my stability, not ever again? How exactly is a person supposed to live if she can never trust in her sanity?
That’s why I’m sitting down with this notepad tonight. I’m hoping and praying that once these thoughts are on paper, they will break the endless echo chamber of my own mind. Left to my own devices my thoughts get louder and louder and louder, until I can’t eat or sleep or do anything except think.
I need to prevent the spiral that leads to the quicksand thoughts, because once I’m
submerged, I don’t know how to climb out.
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