Abducted
Page 9
“I don’t know if I’m ready.”
“What else are you going to do?”
Anita didn’t have an answer. Every day was a big zero, indistinguishable from the next. She was lucky if she accomplished minimal housework. It took great effort just to wash the laundry, buy groceries, and feed the fish. Sometimes she didn’t even shower. Inside the house, time passed, horrible thoughts rolled around in her head, the sun went up, the sun went down, that was about it. The house hurt, but it took enormous effort to get outside.
“You need to be with people,” said Maggie. “You can’t be alone every day. Aren’t you lonely?”
Anita nodded. She usually woke up after Dennis left for work. She went to bed, sleeping pills in her belly, before he came home. He was nothing to wait up for. Half the time he was late and drunk. They found no solace in each other.
She needed conversation in her life. But she didn’t want to talk endlessly about Tim. It was too painful. She didn’t want people pitying her. Maybe working would force her mind onto new things.
This coffee with Maggie had been a surprising lift to her spirits. Maybe returning to work would be another boost.
“OK,” said Anita. “I’ll give it a try.”
Maggie’s face lit up as if she wasn’t expecting an affirmative response. “That’s great! I’ll start setting up your office tomorrow. When do you want to return? How do you like your bagels?”
Anita felt something like good feelings start to move throughout her body, prompting a small smile. Maybe it was the caffeine, or maybe she was really feeling life stirring inside again.
Anita reached out and put her hand on Maggie’s hand. “Thank you for getting me out of the house. I needed this.”
The following Monday, cleaned up and back in makeup and a business suit, she commuted into San Francisco. The blue suit hung loosely on her frame; she hadn’t realized how much weight she had lost since the last time she wore it.
There was some comfort in entering the familiar surroundings of the job, as if she were stepping back into the world that existed pre-tragedy. Everyone greeted her with a hug and heartfelt encouragement. It did feel good.
There was not a whole lot to do during the first week. Everyone was in the midst of something, but no one asked her to assist yet. Maggie gave her a summary of the latest clients and activity. She also introduced Anita to Beth Lewis.
Beth was new, an attractive young kid out of UCLA. She was hired after Anita left. Anita quickly learned that Beth was already a star performer, charming the clients, putting in monster hours, and even finding time to do innovative things with software templates Anita had designed years ago. Beth was fresh-faced, peppy, perfect.
During week two, the realization hit Anita: They don’t need me. They have Beth. Why am I here?
Is it charity?
There simply wasn’t enough work for Anita to do. At times, she felt as though the others were holding back. Mita still juggled multiple accounts and worked evenings. Maggie continued to groan about being understaffed. Were they afraid to approach her? Were they isolating her from the clients?
Anita tried not to be a downer, forcing out smiles, engaging in pleasant chitchat that used to come effortlessly but now required great energy and focus. She didn’t want to be doom and gloom. Sure, she felt like doom and gloom, but she didn’t want it to surface on the outside and keep people away.
The work for Anita picked up during week three, bringing a new realization: She didn’t give a shit.
The presentations, the strategies, the stuffy, academic clients, the hours of programming to add a little bit of multimedia razzle dazzle to dry text… Was it always this dull? Or were they just giving her the unwanted scraps?
Or had her perspective changed? What used to be challenging, fulfilling, meaningful…was it now just a heap of trivial bullshit?
Anita found her mind wandering all the time. And not just to Tim. She would get fixated on a cloud outside her window. A car horn. The numbers on her clock. The murmur of conversation through office walls
As her attitude toward work became indifferent, the days became gruesomely slow. At the same time, she fell behind, slogging through projects as if she was underwater. When she tried to push herself, the only outcome was a killer headache.
Then there was the always aggravating commute between San Francisco and Oakland. Every bad driver, every logjam, every red light set her off. She ground her teeth until her jaws ached. She had no patience.
And she found no satisfaction in reaching her destinations. Not work. And certainly not home.
She barely communicated with Dennis anymore. He was just a tall, slouched figure moving through the house. They avoided conversation and eye contact, as if each other was a constant, dark reminder of the trauma they jointly experienced. Dennis had never been a big talker, but now their exchanges were even more sparse, fragments left hanging in the air.
He brooded. He drank beers until the recycling bin overflowed. And he played his rock CDs at a volume that prohibited conversation. Early on, she bitched at him to turn it down, but he would pretend not to hear and she had no energy to fight. So The Who assaulted their drums and guitars, The Rolling Stones snarled and riffed, and Van Halen screeched and soared. Maybe he can bury his depression in noise, thought Anita, but it doesn’t work for me.
Their sex life was all but over. They had tried a few times after Tim’s death, but it felt alien, remote. The passion was diminished, the emotions flattened, the arousal missing.
She wished he would open up to her, so that she, in turn, could unleash her own built-up thoughts and words, but Dennis, true to his nature, kept everything bottled up inside. There was no outlet.
My husband can offer no strength or comfort, she realized.
If this was the ultimate test of their marriage, they were failing.
At work, the relationship with her coworkers also felt damaged. People simply didn’t talk to her the same way. Everything felt forced, phony, brief. While Anita still hurt, the sympathy and sensitivity her friends had shown at the time of Tim’s murder dissipated like yesterday’s news. And nothing took its place.
Then Maggie bought a dog. A small, yappy terrier that she insisted on bringing to the office and calling “baby.” Anita’s nerves were far too jittery for this high-strung animal that scampered restlessly from office to office. Anita started closing her office door, an anti-social move to be sure. But she still became preoccupied with the sound of the dog’s jingling tags, its panting, its toenails scratching the carpet.
Returning to work had provided a brief lift, but now it was over. She felt just as gloomy as before, except now she had to hide it. After six weeks, she could no longer hide it.
The others pretty much ignored her, but Maggie gave her strange looks as if to say “C’mon. Cheer up.”
Finally, she said it directly.
She came into Anita’s office and closed the door. Anita knew what was coming. And she was in no mood.
“You can’t be down in the dumps like this for the rest of your life,” said Maggie.
Often, with Maggie, the best approach was to just nod and let her go. But this time Anita couldn’t.
“You—” Anita said in a tone that was more personal than she meant, but there was no turning back. “You think I have a choice in this? Like I can flip a switch? You don’t understand. You don’t know what I’m going through. Even if you did almost get hit by a car thirty years ago, you don’t understand. You don’t understand.”
“I am trying to help you,” Maggie responded forcefully. “You are wallowing in this. You can’t bring Tim back by wallowing.”
Anita didn’t even want Maggie to say Tim’s name. Somehow, it angered her. “Leave him out of this.”
“I want to!” Maggie was almost shouting now. “But you won’t. You can’t. Anita, look to the future, or you will never get out of the past. It doesn’t have to be like this. You can always have another child, right?”
Her return to Digital Learnings had lasted less than two months.
“I tried to reconnect,” she told Dr. Andrew during one of their final sessions. She was only seeing him sporadically now. It was getting too expensive, with diminishing returns. “I really made an effort, but I’m just not ready yet. I don’t know when I will be able to connect with anything anymore. I’m just floating around like a ghost that can’t pick up anything or touch or feel.”
Only her parents could offer any small semblance of comfort. But they were far away. They were aging, and she hated to drag them down into her darkness. Meanwhile, her friends were scattering.
Dennis, too, seemed to lose touch with his friends. He continued to disappear with his San Francisco Giants golf bag on Saturdays, like always, but admitted one night that he rarely played with others. Instead, he went to the driving range and smacked bucket after bucket of balls. She could imagine him taking out all his aggression on the little white golf ball, pounding it as hard and as far as he could. One after another, for hours.
Whenever he left the house, he usually came back drunk. She berated him one night. “Doesn’t it even bother you that you’re driving drunk, that you could kill someone, and send another family into the same kind of grief that we are feeling?”
Dennis just shrugged.
“Is that your response to everything?” she said.
“Yes,” he stated. He headed for the family room.
“And now you’re going to drown everything out with the stereo.”
He turned to face her. “Do you have a problem with that?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then what would you rather I do?” he said, placing emphasis on every word.
“Talk to me.”
“About what? What is there to talk about?”
“I don’t care. Anything!”
“Today was a beautiful day,” he said in a mock tone. “Temperature in the seventies, clear skies. Not a hint of rain. The Giants beat the Cardinals 6-4.”
“Go play your fucking music,” she spat back at him. He was nonsense, she lived in a crazy house. They were now twisted, ugly, distorted caricatures of the people they used to be.
Dennis cranked his music and drank his beer. Anita took two sleeping pills, put on her nightgown, and climbed into bed.
This isn’t the way we really are, she told herself. We are not these people.
She reached deep for memories of the man she married. The good times seemed decades ago. Who was the real Dennis Sherwood?
They had met five years ago when he fell off his bike.
In college at Berkley, she jogged a lot. She thrived on it. She was very conscientious and protective of her appearance. She wanted to look good. She wanted to look hot.
Boy, how things had changed since then.
The jogging burned away the starchy cafeteria food, kept the butt firm and the thighs taut. When she worked up a good sweat, she imagined that the sweat was actually pounds dripping off her body. It gave her energy, a buzz, and cleared her head when the homework and classes clogged her brain.
If she missed a day of jogging, it bummed her out, as if she were going to instantly grow blubber and lose focus.
In college, she was fairly striking: willowy, lively dark eyes, square-jawed, with black hair that shined. She always sat alert in her seat, her back straight, articulate and outspoken. The boys gravitated toward her. The brave ones, anyway. She later discovered that some classmates thought she was too serious or pretentious, not approachable. They didn’t know that she had a sly wit and could get silly with the best of them. She could let slip with a case of the giggles, usually a sign that she had been won over, because she didn’t offer it up undeserved.
She was running in place, off the curb, waiting for a light to change, when she met Dennis. He was whipping around a curve on his bicycle and didn’t see her until it was too late. To avoid hitting her, he wiped out on the pavement.
She gasped.
He sat up and smiled, straightening his glasses. “I meant to do that,” he said. He was handsome, athletic, and already scoring points for wit.
“Are you OK?” She came near, and he quickly rose, indestructible macho, but couldn’t hold back a grimace. Then she noticed a torn hole in his jeans, a bloody knee.
“Maybe we should exchange insurance information,” he said. Chalk up another point for humor.
They got out of the street and wound up talking through dozens of light changes, oblivious to the traffic around them. He was an economics major, a junior to her sophomore. She found him charming and confident. He looked a little familiar—and they realized she had once dated someone in his fraternity. A guy named Ernie who spent two dates complaining about his girlfriend back home before Anita cut him loose.
The day after the collision, Anita sent Dennis a care package: gauze, bandages, Bactine, and a note begging him not to sue.
It cracked him up. And accomplished exactly what she wanted: a date was set for that weekend. Inside a month, they were inseparable. She spent a lot of money on movie tickets for her roommate to send her off when Dennis came by. The top bunk saw a lot of wild activity. Fortunately, no one ever rolled off.
After two years, they realized they must be pretty serious, and the marriage talk began. It seemed like a natural progression and they set a date, timed to follow his graduation. She didn’t want him escaping into the real world without her. They were both in love, fresh with enthusiasm to jointly take on the future.
In college, Dennis was a heavy drinker. It never seemed to hurt his grades and, in fact, fit in nicely with his fun-loving, fratboy persona. Outside of college, however, it quickly lost its youthful charm. In the second year of marriage, the drinking got in the way. It jeopardized his job. It tainted his mood and ignited rage. It earned him a DUI. And, worse of all, it led to an ugly incident where he struck Anita during an argument.
Although she later regretted doing it, Anita picked up the phone and called the police to report domestic battery. Assault was something she would never take lightly.
“If you ever hit me again, I will divorce you,” she had told him. The police came, and there were cooled tempers and tears. Dennis actually cried. He begged her forgiveness. She forgave him.
The following day, Dennis cleared out the liquor cabinet and announced he was going cold turkey. And he did.
Dennis attended a few AA meetings but mostly conquered the booze by himself. The marriage strengthened, and when Tim arrived, Dennis became a wonderfully responsible, doting father. She was impressed and proud. Tim brought out the best in him.
After Dennis defeated the bottle, Anita remembered thinking, “That’s it. We hit rock bottom and survived.” Little did she know, it was nowhere near the rock bottom she would later experience.
The death of Tim brought back the old demons. In the chaos, a doorway slipped open to allow them in. Now she couldn’t chase them away. Arguing with Dennis about drinking was more difficult than ever because she knew firsthand the horrors that fueled it. In a way, it was hard to blame him, especially when she was leaning on pills to sleep through the night and provide a fog for the days.
She was lost in her own stupor now. She couldn’t connect to Dennis, her job, her neighbors. Unable to draw comfort from familiar people, Anita turned to strangers. She went online.
At various times, she had been encouraged to join support groups, including one specifically for parents of killed children, but just couldn’t do it. And Dennis refused to join her.
But on the Internet, faceless and anonymous, from inside her home, she found it easier to communicate with others who had suffered a similar tragedy. There were chat rooms, web sites, newsgroups, and she became hooked on them, surfing and exchanging dialogue until the late hours.
It was well after midnight whe
n she came across one particular piece of information that sent shockwaves through her body. It was just too believable.
Eighty percent of couples who suffered a murdered child subsequently divorced.
Anita wondered, Are we going to be part of the eighty…or part of the twenty?
One afternoon, Dennis came home early, unexpectedly. He had trouble walking; he had to lean into everything. He was very drunk, even for him.
She came downstairs, and he told her the news in a single sentence.
The real estate company had fired him.
Anita lost it. She exploded. She tore into him. “You have done nothing but make this whole experience worse. You have used it as an excuse to get drunk and screw up, and now you’ve ruined your career, the only thing that was still standing.”
“I don’t see you working,” he shot back.
“I’m not stinking drunk, either.”
“Just shut up.” His sloppy inebriation quickly turned to hard rage. “You’re in no position to talk.”
“I’ve kept quiet long enough. And now you’re going to listen to me, and you’re going to TALK to me.”
“I have nothing to say to you.” He headed for the kitchen, and she knew he was going for the liquor cabinet.
“So drink and puke and pass out!” she screamed.
He grabbed the gin bottle. No beer this time. Hard stuff. He poured it into a glass.
“Why don’t you just suck it out of the bottle?”
He looked at her, dopey-eyed and pathetic. “You think I like this life?”
“You think I do?”
“Why don’t you leave me alone, and we can both be happy.”
Anita felt a swirl of rage and sadness. She didn’t know whether to scream or burst into tears. As Dennis finished the glass, she said, “You are destroying us.”
Dennis allowed the gin to seep into his system. He put the empty glass on the counter. She could see his chest moving. He was breathing hard. He replied.
“No. You destroyed us, Anita. If you had stayed home and been a mother, none of this ever would have happened. I could sense all along that there was something weird about her, and I said things, on many occasions, which you ignored. You turned a blind eye to it because all you cared about was preserving your career. Tim was the last thing on your mind.”