Swallow

by Theanna Bischoff

  Dr. Garza rattled her pen back and forth between her thumb and pointer finger. “Your mother has signed consent forms allowing me to go over her file with you. I’d like to get as much information as I can. Do you know when your mother’s depression started?”

  “I — I didn’t really know she had. . .I mean, I guess you’d have to be pretty depressed to. . .but she never really told me for sure. . .”

  “Let’s talk about symptoms. Fatigue?” She paused, waited. “Sleeplessness? Physical slowness or agitation? Weight loss or weight gain? Loss of interest or pleasure? Prominent feelings of sadness? Irritability? Hopelessness? Excessive guilt? Any of those sound characteristic of your mother?”

  I couldn’t catch it all, rattled off like that. I wondered how many other patients Dr. Garza had to see. She seemed to want to get this over with, fast. Well, so did I.

  “I haven’t really seen very much of her. I live in Calgary. When I call. . .” When did I call? “We don’t talk about feelings. We barely talk at all.”

  “What about when you were a child? Does she have a history of any of the symptoms I described?”

  “I. . .say them again?”

  “Fatigue, sleeplessness, physical slowness, weight fluctuation, prolonged depressed mood, physical complaints. . .”

  I rubbed my left temple, feeling a headache brewing behind it. “She used to sleep all the time. She complained about being sick. Things got better after she married my stepfather. Did you talk to him?”

  Dr. Garza consulted her notes. “Upon admittance, your mother gave us your name as the contact person.”

  The symptoms, all rattled off like that, didn’t just describe my mother, but described Carly, too, in the last weeks of her life, but even before that. My mother, Carly, and me, too. Not just since Carly’s death, but in the months after Patrick first left. Unhappiness was, apparently, heritable.

  “Your mother reported her marital status as separated,” Dr. Garza added.

  “Separated?” Since when?

  “She didn’t mention it to you?”

  “We haven’t really been in contact.” My mother had swallowed a bottle of Paxil and a handful of OxyContin and her daughter, her only surviving daughter, hadn’t even known that she’d separated from her husband.

  “Your mother has signed a release indicating that you have full access to her health records. Now, I understand that you were a child when she first began exhibiting symptoms — ”

  “I don’t know that I want to do this — ”

  “ — but I’d like to do my best to verify as much as I can about her psychiatric history and fill in the information I don’t have on file so I can make an informed decision in terms of to what degree she at risk of harming herself again.”

  “It’s a lot of pressure. I mean, I didn’t know she was at risk of harming herself in the first place.”

  “Why don’t we try?” Dr. Garza flipped open my mother’s chart, a battered manila folder as thick as my wrist.

  I rubbed my eyes. “I guess.”

  “What information can you give me about her parents?”

  “Um, single mother, who died in. . .in ’88 or ’89, I guess.”

  “Siblings?”

  “No. Only child.”

  “Partners?”

  “She married my father at age nineteen; they were married until. . .she must have been twenty-five or twenty-six. I’m not sure. She married my stepfather about seven or eight years after that. I didn’t know they had split up.”

  “Children?”

  “Two — me, and my younger sister. . .she died about a year ago. In February.”

  Dr. Garza looked up from her notes.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Do you mind my asking the cause of death?”

  “That’s not in the file?”

  “We don’t have information after November 2006. It appears your mother stopped seeing her psychiatrist.”

  Her psychiatrist?

  “My sister uh. . .” Motor vehicle accident. “Uh. . .suicide.”

  Dr. Garza scribbled this down. I wondered how much exposure to trauma one had to have before it no longer stabbed in the sternum. She brushed her hair away from her face. “Your mother spoke of missing her daughter, but, she was quite upset and incoherent, with the information we had I assumed that she meant her third pregnancy.”

  “Two pregnancies,” I said. “Just me and my sister. Two daughters, two pregnancies.”

  Dr. Garza appeared not much older than me. She put her pen down. “There is mention of a third pregnancy in your mother’s medical records. . .perhaps it would be a good idea to have a social worker present while we discuss — ”

  “No.” I put my hands up to my face, almost to hold it there, to hold it steady. “It’s better that I know. Please.”

  “All right. Our information is from June 1994, when your mother was admitted following a suicide attempt.”

  I remembered Papi staying with us, my inability to sleep, tiptoeing past his sleeping form on the couch late at night. Wondering where she’d gone.

  “She. . .I was thirteen. My last day of school, I got home, and she had already left.”

  “She committed herself voluntarily at the recommendation of her psychiatrist. It also says here that she completed an outpatient twelve-week group therapy treatment for depression.”

  Weekly outpatient groups.

  Or, it occurred to me, book club.

  “Because of her pregnancy?” I asked.

  Dr. Garza glanced through the papers again. “It appears the pregnancy was much earlier, in August 1988. She was hospitalized, overnight, on August 9th, for a D&C.”

  My voice came out flat. “She had an abortion.”

  “It was a medically necessary D&C, for a late-term miscarriage — eighteen weeks.”

  I mentally calculated; eighteen weeks in August 1988 would have made her about four months pregnant just before Carly’s first birthday, making her due sometime in late January. If it had survived, Carly and the baby would have been only seventeen months apart. I tried to remember my mother being gone overnight that summer, but nothing came to mind.

  “That’s around when — ” I realized it as I said it. “That’s when my father left.”

  &In the last few weeks before Patrick and I broke up, he spent most of his time in the law library researching and writing a case study for his Family Law class due in class on the Friday; that night he came home, walked right past me, and slept twelve hours straight. I wondered if he’d taken anything, and if so, what; he hadn’t slept for more than a couple hours at a time in almost a month and seemed immune to sleeping pills. Law school made his naturally thin frame even more pronounced. He said he didn’t have time to eat. I continued to make Patrick’s lunch, hoping that it might help, but the cellophane-wrapped sandwiches and carrot sticks stayed untouched in our fridge. Once or twice, I brought them to work for Conor.

  Usually a restless sleeper who would wake if I came into the room or moved too much in bed, Patrick slept steadily even when I came and lay with my face right beside his, listening for breath, waiting for a twitch or a snore. His chest rose and fell in small, shuddery gasps.

  He finally emerged from our bedroom, the sheet wrapped around his torso like a chrysalis, its edges dragging on the floor, and stood in the doorway to the kitchen where I sat at the kitchen table, grading math tests.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  He shuddered a little. His hair appeared smashed all to one side, and his skin washed yellow under the hallway lights. “I failed my paper.”

  “That’s. . .I’m sorry.”

  He just stared.

  “Can you do a make-up?” I asked.

  Nothing.

  “Patrick, seriously, it sucks, but it’s not the end of the world. Why don’t you let me — ”

  “Look,” he said, and I realized he had the paper in his hands, all tangled up there with the sheets. He’d slept with it in bed with him. “We had to do the, the
. . .” He coughed. “We had to argue the evidence for a case. This guy. . .on trial for. . .abuse, child abuse.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “I wrote that the guy didn’t do it. There wasn’t enough evidence.”

  “And?”

  “Our prof came in today and said, I want to tell you guys the real outcome of the case, in case you’re curious.” Patrick’s voice wavered. “It actually happened. The dad — this guy was acquitted and then, a year later, the police got called to the house again — he shook his other kid. His baby. His four-month-old freakin’ baby. Have you heard of shaken baby syndrome? This kid’s brain sloshed around inside her skull until she hemorrhaged. She was dead when the. . .when the paramedics got there.”

  “That’s awful!” I said again. “Did they eventually convict him?”

  Patrick shuffled a bit closer, put his paper down on the table, face down.

  “If I had been this guy’s lawyer. . .” he turned his face away from me. “I would have argued to set the bastard free. Free so he could go home and murder his little girl.”

  “Okay,” I said, “yeah, but, so did his actual lawyer. That’s what the evidence said, right? You can’t feel responsible for. . .”

  “This kid died of a brain hemorrhage! So what about the fucking evidence?!”

  “Patrick!” I exclaimed. “You can’t know what you would have done as the actual lawyer. It was just a case study. A baby didn’t die because of you! You’re scaring me.”

  He turned away, walked back towards our bedroom.

  I took his paper and turned it over.

  Good arguing of the relevant points, Patrick. Your detailing of the evidence was well organized. Occasional mechanical errors detracted from the overall quality of the piece. B+

  &I stepped outside the hospital and debated calling Aubrey. But what the fuck would I say? I could see my breath in the dark. At 4:30 AM, even faithful morning runner Aubrey would still be asleep.

  I walked the loop around the hospital driveway where the cars pulled in and out. When I’d come in, patients lined the doorway, puffing on cigarettes out front, some wearing only housecoats despite the wind. I’d had to pass through a circle of smoke to get through the front door. But, so many hours later, even the smokers had retreated inside. I wondered which ones had gone back inside to heal and which ones had gone back inside to die. I didn’t remember where in the hospital I’d left my jacket. I opened my wallet to see if I had enough change for a coffee, and realized I still had the scrap of paper on which Conor had written Joel’s phone number. I’d slipped it in beside two folded-up five-dollar bills.

  I dialled, expecting to get his voicemail, too. But then, he answered, his voice deep and husky with sleep. “Hello?”

  “Um. . .hey,” I said. “It’s Darcy. I was just um, calling to say that I can’t come to your party tomorrow. Or, today, I guess. Because it’s technically tomorrow already, and um, I’m in Toronto.”

  “Hold on a second,” he said, and I could hear him getting up, getting out of bed. “Darcy? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. But talking aloud was like unclogging a drain, all the gnarled hair and spit and toothpaste and grime yanked up from the depths.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey, I can’t hear you through all that crying. Take a deep breath. What’s going on?”

  “My. . .my mother tried to kill herself.”

  I heard him let all his air out. “Oh, god. Is she okay? Who’s there with you?”

  “She’s — she’s not dead. I don’t know, I haven’t seen her. They asked me all these questions — ”

  “You talked to her doctor?”

  “Yeah. The doctor, she um, she said — ” It swelled up in me again, and crashed. I smeared the tears across my face with the back of my hand.

  “Okay,” he said, “It’s okay. One thing at a time. Who’s there with you?”

  “Um. . .no, just me, I — my stepdad bailed, apparently, so — so it’s just me, here. I just talked to the doctor, so — I guess I have to go find a hotel, or something, now. I probably have to talk to, to come back in um, tomorrow — or, today, I guess. It’s morning now.”

  “Okay, Darcy. Listen to me. I’m going to hang up for a minute and call the Holiday Inn on Bloor, the one right off Huron. I’ve stayed there before. I’m going to get you a room. I want you to go outside, and see if you can get in a cab, and just ask them to take you there. I’ll take care of the reservation. Is there someone I can call to come be with you? A friend maybe?”

  I thought of Aubrey, somewhere, probably in bed, asleep, her arm draped casually over the naked back of her fiancé, a man I’d never met.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want anyone to know.”

  “You should have someone there with you.”

  “No, no, I can’t.”

  “When life gets this stressful, you deserve to have someone take care of you. Everybody needs — ”

  “No, no one can know. Maybe I should just — ”

  “Okay,” he said, “let’s just take this one step at a time, okay? I’m going to call the hotel right now. You just get in a cab. I’ll call you back as soon as I have the reservation.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  The sheets on the Holiday Inn double bed felt scratchy against my legs. Patrick would have hated them, would have imagined them smeared with body fluid and covered in tiny, imperceptible flakes of human skin. Then I realized that the new Patrick was supposedly fixed, didn’t obsess about germs or law school or rules anymore. A Patrick I didn’t know, would likely never know. I would never talk to him again. Could never talk to him again.

  The room phone started ringing. I grabbed at it with sweaty, clumsy hands. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Darcy, it’s Joel.”

  I’d fallen asleep in my clothes. The suitcase I’d packed the previous night in a hurry contained six shirts, most of them left over from my summer collection and therefore unsuitable for the cold that had descended upon Toronto. To add to that, I’d packed the entire contents of my underwear drawer, but not a single pair of pants other than the jeans I had on. I’d also forgotten to bring a toothbrush or contact solution. My eyes burned. I didn’t know what time it was, or how long I’d slept.

  “How are you coping this morning?” Joel asked.

  “I’m okay, I guess.” I ran a hand over my face. “What time is it?”

  “It’s about nine here, so, about eleven there. Are you going to see your mom’s doctor?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We had a case study in grad school about a guy who attempted suicide seven times,” Joel said. “Then he found a really good psychologist, found an antidepressant that seemed to help — anyway, now he works at the Distress Centre hotline helping others. So, you know, sometimes really shitty things happen, and the outcome seems totally bleak, but then gets better.”

  Except when people succeed the first time.

  “Thanks, Joel,” I said. “Really. I appreciate the hotel and everything. It means a lot.”

  “No problem! It’s what I do.”

  &I brought coffee to my mother’s hospital room, though I didn’t know whether such a gesture was within hospital policy. She slept semi-reclined in bed, the way one might sit in a lounge chair on a beach at an all-inclusive resort. Maybe this was the closest she would get to a vacation. When I was thirteen, Papi had glazed over the story to make it less horrific. He could not sugarcoat the idea that she had shirked her duties, tried to abandon us. But he had kept me from knowing just how much she had tried. How had he become involved, I wondered? Had she changed her mind, at the last minute, drowsy with medication, slipping from reality, and phoned him to come rescue her? Had she seen him, the way I did, as a saviour, a stable force in our broken little family?

  Or had he walked in, twisted his key in the lock, and discovered her, unresponsive, or, perhaps, in a bathtub, swirled with blood from slashed radial arteries? Had he discovered our mother, attempting to die — had he
simply wandered in, as he always did, to babysit — he had probably not been alone. Papi did not come over randomly. He came over after picking Carly up from school. She would have walked in with him. She would have seen —

  My mother looked puffy and swollen, eyes closed, eyelids yellowed and veiny. Her hair lay snarled and matted against the pillow and it had grown out, longer than I remembered. How long had it been since I’d looked at her — really looked at her? I’d spent most of my childhood avoiding looking at her; sad, beseeching, naked and motionless in the bathtub, or screaming to some customer service agent over the phone, or sucking coffee just to stay awake. She had a needle threaded into the delicate skin on the back of her palm, feeding into an IV.

  The heat from the coffee cup I had brought for her burned against my hands. I set it down on the window ledge. I could tell my mother had cried herself to sleep. Either that, or cried as she was being drugged to sleep. Dr. Garza had said my mother had cried so hard they couldn’t understand her, saying she missed her daughter. Carly? The baby she’d lost? Or had she meant me?

  I left the coffee on the ledge, unwilling to wake her. At the nurse’s hub, I asked them to page Dr. Garza. When she arrived, I asked her how long my mother could stay. “I want you to keep her here. I want you to keep her from doing this again.”

  &Sitting there with Patrick’s B-plus paper on the table beside me, I didn’t know what else to do but phone Aubrey. I took the phone into the bathroom and turned the fan on so that Patrick wouldn’t hear.

  “What’s with the echo?” Aubrey asked.

  “I’m in the bathroom. Patrick just flipped out. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Are you guys fighting again? You know, relationships shouldn’t cause this much stress.”

  “No, we’re not fighting, he just. . .” I hesitated, unsure whether or not to tell her, feeling disloyal to Patrick. “He just. . .I dunno, he’s super stressed. He flipped out over a paper he wrote. He came home and slept basically the whole day. He’s super upset.”

  I heard her turn the ignition off in her car. “I just got home. Listen, grad school makes you crazy. It’s a lot of pressure. He probably just had a few too many nights without sleep and got bummed out over a grade. One time, I got a 42 percent on a test and ate three bags of Oreos. He’ll get over it.”