Running Home

by Katie Arnold

  According to Mom, there’s a bad heart in the family. “The Minnis heart,” she calls it, referring to her father’s genes, in an ominous, accusing tone, as though the same ruined organ has been handed from one generation to the next, like a Christmas fruitcake nobody wants. Mom had her heart tested and supposedly she doesn’t have it, but I worry that it skipped a generation and is coming for me.

  Every few months, Mom sends me articles about the health risks of high-intensity exercise to the heart. F.Y.I., dear! I thought you’d be interested! Xoxox, she writes. I skim them dutifully, uneasily, then email her back with studies asserting the opposite: Look, Mom! Running proven to make you smarter! Running may add as much as seven years to your life! I know this is our way of talking about love and running without actually talking about love or running.

  In February I go see my doctor. Ira retired, and I’ve known Dr. G. for only six months. He listens patiently while I tell him my long sob story about Dad and all the ways I, too, might be dying or about to die, potentially right this very minute. He takes my vitals and hooks me up to the EKG monitor while I study his framed diplomas on the wall so I don’t have to see the bad news written all over his face.

  Instead he turns to me, smiling. “It’s normal,” he says affably, unhooking me from the machine. “Have you thought about antidepressants or anxiety medication?”

  I shake my head. I’ve always been wary about taking drugs or medicine—not because I’m tough but because I’m scared. I’m afraid that they’ll cloud my mind and I’ll feel as though I no longer belong in my own body.

  “I’d like to try other things first,” I tell him.

  I take St. John’s wort capsules and vitamin B to calm my nerves. I dose myself up with tinctures of the homeopathic Rescue Remedy, which is made of flower essences but, by its acrid taste, mostly alcohol. I swallow the smelly brown Chinese herbs that my acupuncturist gives me. They ease me into a nice, soft sleep, but I have to try very hard not to think about a friend’s thirty-eight-year-old yoga teacher who went to India, experimented with Ayurvedic herbs, contracted a mysterious illness, and died six months later.

  A few weeks later, I go back to the doctor’s office. My fingers are tingly, and I have to keep pinching my arm to make sure it’s not going numb from a stroke. Ann, the physician assistant, looks at my chart, then hooks me up to the EKG again. When I sneak a peek at her watching the readout, she’s shaking her head.

  Oh, God…please, no.

  Except she’s smiling.

  “If you could sell these numbers to people, you’d be a millionaire,” she says. “It must be all the running—you are so healthy.”

  Then, almost as an afterthought, Ann says gently, “You know, at the root of all anxiety is a fear of dying. Maybe this is a good time to become friends with death. We are all going to die.”

  This is simultaneously the most sane and the most insane thing I’ve ever heard. Of course, of course, of course I’m afraid I’m going to die. That’s the problem! But making friends with my own mortality? The thought of it makes me shudder. I’d be banging down the doctor’s door every other day.

  She must see the panic on my face, because she continues. “You know how I do it? Meditation. I’ve been practicing for twenty years, since I was your age.”

  I nod. I can almost feel the tweezers in my chest loosening a little.

  “It’s hard work and takes practice,” she says. “It’s not peaceful and quiet, where you get to turn off your brain. You see what your mind is doing, racing and worrying. In the beginning, this can be quite painful.”

  But she looks so calm, so not crazy. Maybe she’s right.

  * * *

  —

  My pain and fear leach into everything, like cancer cells run amok. At the first sign of a new symptom, I leapfrog over all the plausible explanations and the possible ones, too: the ones that aren’t exactly pleasant but won’t necessarily kill me. In the span of a day, sometimes a few hours, my imagination takes me all the way to the far end of probability, to the worst-case scenario, to incurable, fatal.

  I can’t look at Facebook, because people get sick or die there all the time, right in front of your eyes, and they’re all too young. I get a sore on my tongue and I worry for a week that I have a rare form of tongue cancer, but then I forget about my tongue because my jaw has begun to hurt and someone I heard about on the news had a rare form of jaw cancer. My brain is a lazy Susan of incurable diseases. Spin it and see where it stops! I’m so porous, I can catch a fatal illness from a radio report, from a single line in a newspaper article, from a novel, from a passing mention of someone else’s sickness. I even get what the dog has—my chocolate Lab, Gus, who survived bone cancer and getting his leg chopped off and beat the vet’s odds by four years but who is really, finally dying this time, of lymphoma. Which of course I have, too. Somehow my grief has gone all wrong. I’m so preoccupied imagining my own death that I’ve stopped mourning Dad’s.

  During my nanoseconds of sanity, I recognize that this is my way of holding on to Dad a little longer, and that my anxiety is an unconscious defense mechanism gone awry, paranoia short-circuiting my grief so I won’t have to feel sad. On days when I emerge from the anguished fog, I know I’m lucky. Nothing is really wrong. We are all healthy. I think of others who are truly suffering and I am ashamed, and this only sends me deeper into anxiety.

  “Are you ever afraid that you’re dying?” I ask Meg one day on the phone.

  We call each other more often now, sometimes for no reason—not like when Dad was sick, to compare notes or to strategize, but just to check in.

  “Not specifically, no,” Meg replies agreeably. “I worry about other things, but not that.” By other things she means: single-parenting two small children, holding down a full-time mega-stressful job as a CEO, and navigating her own thorny divorce. She’s so much tougher than me.

  Every few weeks, I call or email Lesley, who, after the frenzied buildup to the memorial service, has gone quiet. There’s so much I wish I could ask her, just like there’s so much I hadn’t asked Dad in his final weeks: Are you afraid, or curious? Are you sad? I wish I’d done his dying better, for both of them. I hadn’t gone to Huntly enough, and when I had, I’d been in such a hurry to get home and sandblast the sadness off my body.

  Mom is mourning in her own way, too. After Dad got sick, she mailed him a funny movie on DVD to cheer him up, with a short note. “The girls have turned out so well,” she wrote. “They are your legacy. You should be proud.” He never responded. She sent Meg and me money to pay for our flights to Virginia. And I can tell now, by the way she asks after the farm and his photographs, that it’s hitting her all over again: Dad missed his opportunity, with his pictures and with us.

  I don’t tell Mom or Steve or Lesley about my imaginary tongue tumor, because I don’t want to worry them or sound like a maniac, but also because I am superstitious that saying the C-word out loud will make it so. Nor do I dare write about it in my notebooks, because it would be only a matter of time before someone found them, in a plot twist too fantastic to be believed, and tsked mournfully, wiping away a tear, She was too young. Too young.

  * * *

  —

  The irony, of course, is that my anxiety takes me away from Steve and the girls every day. I’m short-tempered, easily distracted, too busy wondering if I’ll survive to know Pippa and Maisy as teenagers to see them as they are right now, at two and a half and not quite one. At night, after they’re asleep, I realize my error and sneak into their rooms and watch them, trying to memorize their soft, breathing bodies, their musky night smells, their limbs stilled for now and so small, but not for long.

  On my better days, I shriek into a pillow; on my bad days, I yell at Pippa to Stop whining! when I give her five dried cranberries and she asks for ten. Her face when it crumples just about destroys me. I am the worst mother on t
he planet. Which becomes its own, new worry. Maybe they’d be better off without me.

  The pressure builds until eventually the panic spills out of me in a torrent and I lie in bed next to Steve, sobbing that I’m going to die. “Please take care of the girls,” I wail. Steve does not know what to do with me. “There is nothing wrong with you,” he says, exasperation creeping into his voice. But he is not in my brain. He is not in my body, feeling that something’s not right. And doesn’t he know that telling someone not to worry does not make them not worry?

  I train him to say five words: “Everything’s going to be okay.” I know it’s trite and, in the long term, patently untrue, but there’s something about the way he says it each night before bed, in monotone, like a robot, half asleep under the pillow, one hand patting mine, that makes me feel the teensiest bit better.

  “Really?” I say. This is his cue to repeat it.

  “Yes,” he sighs. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  One winter night, after the girls are asleep in their cribs, we’re lying on the sofas reading magazines. Steve has the latest issue of National Geographic spread out on his lap and is eating vanilla ice cream straight from the carton. He’s trying to get all the last bits of melted drippings from the bottom, attacking it with such diligence, like it’s his only concern in the world. Scrape, scrape goes the spoon.

  Is there any more irritating sound in the history of humankind?

  “Check this out,” Steve says, passing me the magazine. It’s open to a picture of a man whose arms were torn off by lions in Tanzania.

  Scrape, scrape.

  Steve shakes his head solemnly. “Next time you think you have it bad…”

  I nod and furrow my forehead, trying to look appalled. “That sucks,” I say, and does it ever, but secretly I’m relieved. I’m not going to Tanzania anytime soon, which means chances are slim that I’ll be mauled by wild African lions. Here at last is one thing I don’t have to worry about.

  * * *

  —

  Dad comes to me in wispy, passing moments. Usually when I am doing something else. (I am always doing something else.) Often when I’m driving.

  There’s an intersection in Santa Fe, diagonal from the state capitol and a neighborhood grocery store, where you can look straight up the Santa Fe River canyon into the watershed. The city’s drinking water comes from two reservoirs that collect snowmelt from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The watershed has been closed to recreation since the 1920s, to protect it from wildfire, and so it remains a largely untracked swatch of forest just a few miles from town.

  Within the watershed, in the layered canyons behind Picacho Peak, there’s a small mountain in the shape of a pyramid. I’ve tried to decipher it from other vantage points in town, but the mountain looks this way—exactly triangular, a perfect emoticon for a mountain—only from this exact spot. Sometimes when I sit waiting for the green, I wonder what lies up there that I cannot see. Mountain lions, trees scarred by lightning, old sheepherder paths, trails that Kit Carson once roamed. And I wonder who else sees this and is wondering the same thing.

  My desire to run there isn’t as strong as my desire to keep wondering.

  This is where I’m stopped one afternoon when I feel Dad in the car with me. I lean over and rest my forehead on the steering wheel and sob. It feels so good to cry. So easy. How long has it been? But my tears stop almost as soon as they begin. Through the windshield, the pyramid rises, steadfast in its place, even when I can’t see it and don’t understand it.

  You can’t speed grief. The light turns green, and on I go.

  13

  Breaking Down

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Student, Wittenberg University, Ohio, 1958

  Time skids by. The ice luge melts into mud and spring winds howl, blowing dust in through the windowsills. Damp ground becomes sunbaked dirt. The girl looking back at me in the mirror isn’t a girl anymore. She’s thirty-nine. She has dark circles under her eyes, deepening crows’-feet, and sparse, dull hair. She’s nothing like the girl who stood with one hand on her hip a million years ago, grinning confidently at the camera.

  My running is erratic. I have good days and bad days, and many days when I can’t get out the door. It’s nearly impossible to establish any kind of routine. Pippa goes to daycare twice a week; our nanny comes the other three mornings, but I’m still nursing Maisy, so I have two hours, three at the most, to be out of the house. I write and run on the edges of the day, stealing time whenever I can find it.

  The only fixed point in my schedule is a weekly hike with my new friend Natalie. I met her a few weeks after Maisy was born, but I knew her before that, the way that people in Santa Fe and around the world know Natalie Goldberg. I knew she was a Buddhist who lived in town and had written a book called Writing Down the Bones, sort of a Zen writer’s bible, and that she taught writing the same way she taught meditation: as a mindfulness practice. I’d seen her once, strolling near one of the local Zen centers, and a thought popped into my head: Someday we’re going to be friends.

  Then Maisy was born and I had two babies and I took a break from freelancing and my writing consisted of frantic, illegible scribbling in my notebook. Occasionally I would think of Natalie, walking so serenely down the middle of the road. If only I could sign up for her next retreat, but I was doubtful that I could pull it off while breastfeeding a baby. I was waiting for a sign.

  A week later, I was walking on my trail, with Maisy strapped on my chest, when there, like an apparition, was Natalie. She was coming toward me down the trail, head bowed contemplatively and hands clasped behind her back. She wore baggy cotton pants and shirt, and her short dark hair poked out from her sun hat. She was nearly past me when she looked up and did a double take.

  “Is that a baby in there?” she demanded incredulously, pointing at the canvas baby carrier. Natalie has lived in New Mexico for thirty-five years, but she still has a Long Island accent and the unapologetic bossiness of a schoolteacher.

  “Yes,” I said, nodding sheepishly. I had that awed feeling you get when you’re in the presence of a real live guru, mingled with the peculiar shame of being a new mother who’s pretty sure she’s botching the job.

  Natalie scowled at me. “Is she suffocating? Can she breathe?”

  Maisy was pressed against my sweaty T-shirt, and I could tell by the slow, contented cadence of her inhalations and exhalations that she was already asleep.

  “Oh, yes, we do this all the time,” I said, trying to sound casual, confident. I hiked through two pregnancies and the whole first year after Pippa was born. I’d been spit up on, sweated on, wailed on, snowed on, and stormed on, but so far we’d always come back alive. “She’s napping—see?” I said, unsnapping the sun cover so she could peer in at Maisy, eyes closed and panting lightly through half-open lips.

  Natalie nodded brusquely—I could tell she wasn’t convinced. She left without a goodbye, and as soon as I got home I called the Zen center and signed up for the class.

  The next time I saw her was a month later, on the first day of the retreat. She was sitting on a folding chair at the front of the Zendo, and she pointed at me and called out loudly, “Oh, you’re the woman with the baby!” The other students, clustered silently around her on their meditation cushions, turned and stared. I nodded, feeling self-conscious and shaky. That very afternoon, I’d learned that Dad had cancer.

  After the retreat, Natalie and I started hiking together. We walk the same trail every week: two miles to the top of 8,500-foot Picacho Peak and back down the way we came. I strap Maisy to my chest, and we climb in silence and at our own pace, the distance between us gradually increasing as we wend our way through a narrow canyon, past a stout ponderosa leaning into the trail, and up a series of switchbacks to a granite overlook where Natalie stops to sit and meditate against a tree. I keep wal
king to the top, Maisy asleep in her carrier. Then I descend and meet Natalie, and we talk the whole way down. This is our ritual, and we seldom deviate.

  Natalie’s a teacher in her public life, so she doesn’t necessarily want to be a teacher on a Tuesday morning on the side of a mountain. This is fine with me. I’ve decided that I’m not going to grill her for meditation pointers, even though clearly I should be doing it more—well, doing it, period. Instead we talk about food, about traveling, about Dad, about writing. We joke that our hiking will save the world, but I know it’s saving me from myself, from my obsessive fears and imaginary ailments. Each week, Natalie listens as I catalog my latest disease. She’s kind enough not to state the obvious: that clearly I’ve gone bananas. Nor does she try to placate me with empty reassurances. She only murmurs a little, so I know she’s listening, and then she pauses for a long time before saying something enigmatic like “You need to know death in order to blossom fully. Life is so full for you right now.”

  The weird thing is, I know she’s right. I do feel full. Full of sadness, love, and my father; of writing that feels alive even while I’m sure I’m dying.

  “You have your whole life to grieve,” she goes on, her voice squawky and soothing at the same time. I don’t have to cram all my sadness into one manic year—I can pace myself—but the idea of spending my days in perpetual mourning sounds awful. As with most things, I’m in a hurry. I want to get it over with as fast as possible.

  * * *

  —

  My anxiety comes and goes like clouds blowing in from the west, wispy and innocuous at first, the wind building until the storm is directly overhead. It flattens me for days or weeks at a time with its charcoal skies and sideways rain. It is a meteorological event. I don’t have a say in the matter.