What I Had Before I Had You

by Sarah Cornwell

  When all this started, two years ago, Daniel was seven. First they diagnosed him with ADHD, like half the boys in his class, but the Ritalin multiplied everything by ten. He threw a chair at his teacher. During gym class, while pretending to be a fish as directed in some game, he went piranha and bit a little girl’s arm hard enough to draw blood. She bore bruises in the shape of his teeth. Temper tantrums were nothing new, but their causes grew stranger. He began to throw hours-long bargaining fits at bedtime; he said that the floor of his bedroom was rising, and if he went to sleep, he would be squished. He lined the hens up in a row and kicked them into the back fence, but later wept and called himself an asshole over and over, and slapped his arm with a metal spoon. I had to physically lift him out of bed in the mornings and put his toothbrush in his hand before he’d move a muscle, but later in the day, he would run around the house in his Batman cape, singing, knocking picture frames off the walls.

  Then he started to have the dreams. At first they sounded to me like normal anxiety dreams. We’ve all dreamed of being chased, tripping, falling, sitting unprepared for tests, teeth crumbling in the mouth. Daniel would appear in our bed, elbow-crawling up the middle beneath the duvet, slipping beneath Sam’s heavy arm. His small pale face inches from mine, the whites of his eyes blue in the moonlight, he would incant his night’s horrors. He had taken to heart the idea of exorcism—shaking his sillies out, getting things out of his system, and so on. It was a hopeful practice, and I miss it; now he dreams and will not tell.

  He used to dream of two lions with saddles but no riders that would come tearing around corners at him, slavering. Sometimes he was at school, sometimes in a stony place he called the “castle house,” sometimes in the old red velvet Austin theater where we took him to see classic movies in the summer. The lions would bound toward him, and he would run sticky-slow, and always they would overtake him. But where my dreams always end with this, the terrible sureness of death, his would go on. He felt the teeth closing through the flesh of his arm, the snap of bone, the pop of lung, and the hot let of blood. He felt agony that he had no words to express—that I could only read in his panicked breathing as he recounted the dreams, and in his surprised look—a look of discovering too early and too viscerally what pain is possible. Whenever he dreamed of falling, he hit the ground jaw-first. Whenever he dreamed he was in a car, he knew to dread the crash, the needling shower of glass, the impact, the sight of his leg hinging bloody from the bone. Sometimes he felt a crack along the nape of his neck and curling up over his skull; he put his fingers inside and he could feel his bad thoughts, little veined knobs on his brain that he couldn’t snap off without pulling up the whole veiny net, without ruining himself utterly.

  Three psychiatrists in, we got the diagnosis that I already knew in my gut. His terrible visions and his spinouts, though out of proportion with my own experience, were damningly familiar. Before we got married, Sam and I had discussed the likelihood that our kids would inherit bipolar disorder. Sam said it could never matter to him. Come what may. In the hypothetical, it flattered him to be broad-minded. Anyway, to worry that our kids would be bipolar would have been to worry that they’d turn out like me, and I never would have married a man who thought of me as a worst-case scenario.

  The diagnosis came ten months ago, and since then Daniel has been stuffed with antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and a parade of complementary drugs. A drug for each side effect, and for each side effect of each side effect. Nothing has worked; what doesn’t knock him out winds him up. We have rules and exercises and therapy sessions, which help, but the underlying problem is chemical, and so, too, will be the solution. Always, I hope: the next pill will bring my boy back.

  KANDY PUTS HER arm around me and rubs my shoulders. “I don’t think we’re going to find him this way,” she says. “Do you think he might have gotten on a bus or a train somehow? Trying to get back to Texas?”

  Carrie nods vigorously. “He’s done weirder stuff than that.”

  “Did he have any money with him?”

  I shrug. Not to my knowledge, but who knows what his father gave him in private at their parting? I can’t picture Daniel buying a bus ticket, sitting alone on a bus. Even in his wildest rages, he clings to me or pushes against me. But at least it is something to do, somewhere to look.

  We drive to the bus depot and wander through the little convenience store, the dark dumpstery corners of the parking lot, the bus shelter strewn with trampled pamphlets for Ocean Vista’s beaches and rides. A fat man sleeps on the ground, a briefcase under his head. An announcement blares through the loudspeaker for the incoming twelve-fifteen bus from Philadelphia.

  By the street lamp light I can see a pink cast to Carrie’s cheeks and nose. I didn’t see her apply sunblock; maybe she thinks she got away with something. As a teenager, I believed that burns would always heal, my skin always return to a pale and perfect smoothness. My shoulders now are a dark and crinkly tan, like balled paper stretched flat. That faith in regeneration and return, that childhood blindness—that was the same faith that made me careless of my mother. I thought she would always be there.

  And what if Daniel has left me? Not secreted himself away to evaluate the length and intensity of my search but simply gotten on a bus? Again my mother looms above the skyline with her marionette crossbar and strings. It’s true, I lost patience with Daniel sometimes this year. There were times when I left the house with nowhere to go, just to get clear of him, to not care for a few hours. I screamed at him, I held down his arms and legs, once I shut him in a closet when I didn’t know what else to do. I tried my best, but that’s not what he is thinking if he is out there somewhere on a southbound bus. He is remembering how it feels to be pinned down, to be poked and prodded and shoveled full of pills, to be told he is not the same boy he was last year but worse. Today, to have built a dragon and seen it slip into the sea—to have experienced a miracle and tried to share it with me—and to have been disbelieved.

  12

  I LEAVE FOR NEW YORK on a still morning with a gym bag full of supplies: apples, a loaf of bread, tissue packets, a can opener, a few emergency cans of chickpeas, tampons, a fifth of gin, my camera. I leash Blanche and wear dark glasses so I can pretend she is my Seeing Eye dog if anyone gives us trouble. I swipe my mother’s expired driver’s license from the kitchen junk drawer. I look old enough that if I dress right, I can pass for my mother. As I walk away from the house, I feel the shiver of eyes on my back, though no life stirs behind those dark windows.

  Jake and I take commuter rail up the seaboard, pushing through towns and wildernesses and lots full of burnt tire. Jake keeps his knees apart so I can use him like a recliner, and with his head on the aisle armrest and mine on his chest, we can both watch the power lines snake blurry with the speed of the train. Blanche sleeps. At Metuchen, we make dirty jokes. The ground races invisibly beneath us.

  The ticket guy walks past and leans over us so that we see his face upside down. “Rock and a roll, thump and a bump,” he says as the train lurches, and chuckles to himself. Trees outside the window again, trees and fences and trackside backyards full of men sitting in lawn chairs and tending to charcoal grills, children playing unrecognizable running games, rusting cars, hoods yawning open like the jaws of animals. Taller and taller buildings as we draw near the city.

  JAKE DROPS OUR bag in front of the Sunset Park brownstone where Max lives with four pit bulls and a baby girl. The falling bag makes a whoomp sound, and the fabric ripples with impact, and the exact and slowed-down way in which I see this makes me realize how tired I am. Jake slept on the train, but I couldn’t. We find Max’s name on the buzzer panel and push the buzzer for the first floor. Dogs bark. I blink at the hot intersection. A Gulf station with a tire store, a nameless bodega, lines of solid housing, the fronts pink and brown and gray, dotted with fire escapes, plastic lawn furniture in fenced-in areas of concrete, air conditioners jutting from windows. Twenty f
eet from Max’s corner rises the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a green metal monster on which anonymous traffic moves in the sky. Smash-fendered cars are parked in gridlock under the highway, and ten boys about our age stand watching us in T-shirts and sneakers that gleam white from the shade. The small buttresses at the top of Max’s three-story brownstone shy away from the hot sun like curled toes.

  The door swings inward and Max steps up to the screen. He is a white guy, short, with buzzed hair and biceps you can see through his T-shirt. His shirt has a Ziggy cartoon on it: Ziggy has just walked in the front door and seen his bird in the fishbowl and his fish on the bird perch, and he is saying, “I really DON’T want to hear about it right now.” Max is barefoot, and his hands are covered in white powder. Ideas flash through my head of the drug carnival that lies behind him in the house; I picture the baby daughter splashing in a kiddie pool full of cocaine, cocaine spraying in arcs from the ceiling fans, heaping dog bowls full of cocaine. I smirk, and Max takes it for friendliness. “Oh, shit! Yeah yeah yeah, Jake, come in! Who’s your lady?” He pushes open the screen with his elbow and ushers us through an unlit hallway into the kitchen, holding up his powdery hands. Boxes of cereal and pasta sit on the floor and table, milk crates stand in for chairs, high cabinets full of cookies and peanut butter are open to the flies. An open jar of stewed cherries, a wooden spoon planted in a bowl of dough. Turns out he was baking a pie.

  Blanche is on edge as Max’s dogs leap and smack into the sliding glass door to the backyard. She whines and snaps her jaws. “This is Blanche,” I tell Max, since he hasn’t acknowledged her at all. His attention seems strikingly selective. “Are your dogs okay with other dogs?”

  “Oh yeah, no worries, they’re trained as shit,” he says, and slides open the door. The four of them bound in, all slobber and muscle, and knock me back against the wall asking for scratches, rolling on my feet. There is a sandy-colored female red-nose, two old males, one blue and one brown, and a tawny-and-white-spotted puppy. Blanche does a low squirming dance of submission. They don’t pay any attention to her or to Jake, either. For some reason, all they want is me.

  THE FIRST DAY we stay with Max, I am left alone. Jake and Max take off in the morning, a slam of the front door and a be-back-soon note scrawled on the back of today’s page from Max’s daily factoid tear-off calendar and placed next to my face on the pillow. Today’s factoid: There is a city called Rome on every continent. I fix myself cereal. The sad-eyed missing boy on the milk carton stares at me. His age, his height, his weight. Last seen with . . . I envy him a little. Somebody is looking for him.

  I use Max’s old rotary phone to call up the 92nd Street Y, pretending to be the parent of a Flying Dolphin, though I could probably ask my questions directly.

  “Swim season is over,” says the lady on the phone. “We start up again in the fall.”

  “Then how is it that my daughter,” I say, exaggerating the vowels in “daughter” almost too much to sound plausibly adult, “tells me she has been swimming at your club?”

  “Well, there is free swim. Evenings six to nine.”

  “Thank you. I’m so relieved to hear that. I thought she was sneaking out.”

  “Okay,” murmurs the lady, bored.

  It is no use heading up to the Y until evening, so I explore. As I walk the streets of Brooklyn, I wonder how people put up barbed wire. Does it come in a roll, like a Slinky, that you stretch from end to end? Or do you wear inch-thick gloves and unwind it like a ball of yarn? I photograph men and women wearing Prada and do-rags, women with boots up to their thighs and men with oiled hair, oiled mustaches, oiled shoes. I can catch only a sidelong sense of who these people are, holding my head as I do, high and purposeful, my neck tight-arched, trying to be a New Yorker. I buy a slice of pizza and sit beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, watching tourists mill around the piers. Tourists are the same everywhere, it seems to me, and that lends a sense of home.

  Jake left me money, and I fill my pockets with subway tokens. As the 5 train screeches north beneath Manhattan, two kids perform a break-dance routine, spinning off the ceiling, their sneakers printing Nike in dust on the tops of the metal poles. I clutch Blanche’s leash and wear my dark glasses. People are very polite to me, letting me on first, offering me their seats. When I emerge at Ninety-sixth Street, I pocket the sunglasses. Here is a different world—waifs in sundresses with French bulldogs, and tired businessmen sitting at small round sidewalk café tables with their feet neatly crossed beneath their chairs, trying not to touch knees with other businessmen.

  Outside the broad facade of the 92nd Street Y, I wait at a bus stop, feeding Blanche beef jerky from my pocket. I scrutinize each girl who passes through those heavy Y doors, waiting for Laura and Courtney.

  FOR THE FIRST few days, New York is like a honeymoon. Jake and I put the baby down for a nap and have sex on the sofa whenever Max is out of the house. We go to the Met and wander through the galleries, sometimes pretending to be part of tour groups so we can listen to the docents. We are not dumb; we know when it is good to listen. I came here once with my mother, but I remember it only as pain in my feet and a little girl’s love of Degas. This time it is staggering.

  We buy sweet sausages on Orchard Street, and Jake asks me midbite, “Do you think you could live here?” I watch a woman on the fourth floor of an apartment building pull her laundry in from a bowed clothesline strung across the street. I have seen photographs of these streets when the buildings were all tenements and the laundry lines crisscrossed the sky. I picture time as transparencies, see myself lifting one layer after another away from that picture until there is this one clothesline left, this one woman stretching out her window from the waist to tug her children’s socks back inside her apartment. This is how time works: a simplification of things, a peeling away of layers of confusion until the present is a clean and simple refinement of history’s clutter.

  “Olivia?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Sure.” The woman’s clothesline makes me hopeful. I snap a photograph.

  ALL MY CONVENTIONAL wisdoms come from my mother. You can’t shake your common sense. You can’t even resent it. I think of this especially as I keep house for Jake in the city, shocked at his ignorance of simple things: what a steamer is, how to kill a flea. You must drape wet coats on chairs because they will mildew in the closet. Don’t eat the outsides of onions. The attic is always hotter than the basement. When you walk through a city, always look like you have a destination and you’re in a hurry, and you will be left alone.

  i develop a routine. In the evenings I sit at the bus stop, staked out, and each night at ten I descend once more into the oven of the subways to wander, to brood, to eventually drift back to Max’s, where I find Jake sleeping, stoned, or waiting up. In the daytime we play together, but by evening I shake him off. When my stakeouts end, I take the train down to Coney Island and Sheepshead Bay, out to Canarsie or Corona, up to Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. The subways are an abandoned city in the very early morning—pits of iron and rat poison where you can walk for miles in the dark and sometimes catch the sound of faint, sourceless music. Men and women sleep curled into buildings and cradled by benches. The city above wheezes and whirs. In dim rooms, strangers meet and part. Babies open their eyes to the blinking lights of the night city and, comforted, drift back to sleep. One night I see, through a third-floor window in an ancient warehouse, a man stark naked with his back to the street, painting a portrait. I can’t see the woman he is painting from my vantage point, but I can see her image, pornographic, oversize, red and white, reclining with her hands above her head. I take a photograph, but all I get is the hot glare of a streetlight on a window.

  I find a place in Sunset Park not far from Max’s apartment where, in the morning, grave Chinese men appear in their front window to string up roasted ducks and pigs. The animals’ bodies are crimson, like fat sunburned beachgoers.

  I wonder what kind of searching m
y mother will do. I picture bloodhounds and trench-coated detectives fanning out through a pine forest. Or just my mother on our increasingly stained sofa, passed out drunk in a pile of overdue poetry collections from the library.

  When I cook and shop, when I brush my hair, when I speak or sleep, I see her habits pushing up through mine. I see my hand holding a knife as hers does to chop an onion, left thumb weighing down the blade, and my voice taking on her lilt when I call to Jake from another room: a two-note slide, Ja-aake.

  WHEN THEY FINALLY appear, Courtney holding open the door of the Y for Laura, I am calm. I am glad that I left Blanche at Max’s today. They look even more corporeal here in New York, away from the dizzy light of the beach. I wait at the bus stop, unmoved by the ebb and flow of commuters. An hour and a half later, they come back out with wet hair, laughing. Laura with a friend, Courtney half a step behind. I follow them at a short distance, keeping them in sight through the sidewalk throng. Then Laura dashes into the street and throws her arm up for a slowing cab.

  My ex-sisters and their friend clamber into the back of the cab and start rolling down Lexington. I run to keep up. I try to make it look like I am jogging for exercise, but nobody cares. We turn onto East Eighty-eighth, and soon, right onto Second Avenue. Luckily for me, it is eight-fifteen on a Tuesday, and Second Avenue is a clogged artery (the poor bloodless heart of Manhattan). I have little trouble until the cab makes a left onto Seventy-fourth; not to lose the trail, I make a mad dash through the traffic. A bumper touches my leg with such gentle pressure that the screech of brakes seems unrelated. A sour man curses out the window of his car, but I am through and jogging down Seventy-fourth while the girls spill out of their cab. They could have so easily walked. Spoiled girls.