Falling Apart in One Piece

by Stacy Morrison

  Done. Or at least doable. But I had no idea what it was going to cost to fix the house. I’d had a string of plumbers in to review the situation, a heating crew who replaced the ruined boiler and water heater, drainage-system crews, and hard-sell old guys with hair-sprayed side parts who were absolutely, positively certain that my waterlogged home was a haven for evil black mold. (I wanted to kick them for trying to take advantage of me, especially because they kept asking if I’d need to make this decision with “the man of the house.”) Each expert could solve only one piece of the problem. Finally I got a referral for a contractor, an early-model De Niro type who scared me a little but knew the neighborhood and was able to explain how he would get the job done. He would tear up the ruined linoleum tile floor and the cement subfloor; bash out the walls from shoulder height down; install an impermeable membrane to protect the house from groundwater; install a new drainage system, new pumps, and a check valve to protect the house from the storm sewer’s backflow; and install a stone floor, cement-board walls, and cast-iron heaters in the basement so that if water got in somewhere, the room’s finish would not be damaged. He would not be able to get a check valve behind the drain in the stairwell that led up from the basement to the sidewalk because getting in front of that drain meant excavating the city street, and that would definitely blow my budget.

  My contractor helpfully pointed out that I lived in the lower part of a neighborhood called Park Slope and so of course water was coming into the house, since I lived so far down the hill. In fact that’s what the basements had originally been designed for a hundred years ago when my house was built, to take in water. Gee, thanks for the historical perspective. All I knew was I had been sold a three-story house with a finished basement, and I was going to sell a three-story house with a finished basement, come hell or . . . high water.

  And so after months of consulting with lawyers and contractors and just a week after Chris moved out of the house, the basement floor was jack-hammered up and removed in gigantic concrete chunks. At least it was winter: the rain had turned to snow, so I had one less problem to worry about while all the demolition went on, laying a fine, ever-present dust over everything on the first floor. Chris promised to help with the renovation as much as possible, so I wouldn’t be left with the whole of the burden, but he wasn’t going to be the one managing the project, living in the dirt and turmoil, writing endless checks to the contractor, or figuring out where to find the money to pay for it all.

  The work on the house was slow, and this added to my sense that nothing was moving ahead in my life. The basement had a complicated series of problems that overlaid each other, and each step unearthed new problems, like discovering after the floor was removed that the main waste outlet for the house was an ancient clay pipe that was cracked and leaking into the ground under the house. Getting used to being in charge of the house alone was slow work, too. Simple life tasks, like shoveling snow or moving the car in the morning on street-cleaning days to avoid a ticket, became laden with emotional weight. I’d have to leave the baby in the house alone for a few panicked minutes at a time. I could keep an eye on him through the living room window when I was shoveling, but eventually I gave up on the parking and just paid the weekly tickets, figuring I was buying myself some peace of mind.

  The first time I went away on a business trip after Chris moved out, he came to stay with Zack in the house. My flight got delayed on the runway. The pilot powered down the engines and told us that we would be in an indefinite ground hold, so we were permitted to use our electronic devices. Everyone around me called their spouses, partners, boyfriends. I sat there looking at the phone in my hand and wondering who cared that I was stuck on a plane on a runway, a stack of manuscripts on my lap.

  That stack of paper was with me wherever I went. If I got stuck in traffic in a cab, or was kept waiting at an appointment, or my lunch date was late, I always made good use of the time, getting down to business with my blue pen. It was a lot of work, but it kept me focused on the good fortune of having a great job and a great team in a field of work that is inherently social. I was essentially kept from drowning in solitude by my work at Redbook, the days filled with meetings and talking about photo shoots and writing cover lines, all interrupted by lots of laughter and truth-telling and digging around for the next great story to publish, a story that would reveal the complexities and joys and challenges of trying to build a life you love.

  I discovered that the best way to handle all the pressure and the too many to-dos was to let my days take on a very consistent and definite rhythm. I settled into a routine for the first time in my life as a way of taking care of myself. My 10:00 p.m. bedtime became my new religion out of necessity, since Zack was still getting up at 5:45 a.m. and hitting the snooze button was no longer an option for me. I needed to sleep to keep my wits about me, and fortunately fate had sent me a child who slept through the night.

  Another night, another round of crying, crumbling under the pressure. I got up off the sofa after the last ragged sobs had stopped and headed into the kitchen to get a paper towel. After I wiped the tears off my face, I turned the faucet on, running the paper towel under the cool water, wringing it out, and pressing it against my swollen eyes as I thought about how many manuscripts I had left to read that night. I thought ahead to how many more months it would be before the house was fixed. I thought about how many more months it would be before Chris and I had a separation agreement, let alone a divorce. I thought about my job, and how much I loved it, but that maybe it was too big, maybe I couldn’t handle it all anymore. Maybe getting a different job would be the way to relieve some of the pressure on my life, but that was almost impossible to consider. There was nowhere to go with this line of thinking but back into tears. I slid slowly down the kitchen cabinets until I was sitting on the floor and I cried for all the things I did not know how to do and all the ways I did not know how to fix my life. And in a few minutes, here I was, again, in full surrender on the kitchen floor, with no one to see me waving the white flag.

  Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. I filled my lungs with air a few times. I listened to my breath. I had stopped crying. I was thinking about the people who sold me the house. I was thinking about the repairs the house needed. I thought about a life raising Zack on my own. I was afraid. I didn’t feel up to the enormity of it all. I wanted to walk out the front door and never come back. Then a piece of the Rilke quote from the notebook I had given to Chris floated into my head:

  Don’t search for the answers, for they could not be given you now . . . And the point is to live everything . . .

  Live everything. Live this fear. I let myself fall into the fear, a fear so deep I knew that even my dearest friends wouldn’t be able to find me when I was in it. The fear that I wouldn’t be able to survive the terrible unraveling in my life and in my brain. The fear that I was falling apart into a million little pieces. The fear that I would cease to function, literally cease to exist. And I followed that fear, pulling aside the curtain in my mind, stepping into the void where my brain didn’t even send me words, where it was just pain and agony.

  Stepping into that fear led me to . . .

  Right here. On my kitchen floor. Safe in my house. In one piece.

  The fear that feels like it will swallow you whole can’t actually swallow you whole.

  Breathe in. Breathe out. Think that thought again, louder this time.

  The fear that feels like it will swallow you whole can’t actually swallow you whole.

  All these months I’d been trying to keep from falling apart, from giving in to my fears, because I was afraid I would cease to exist, sink into a dark place in my head and never come back. But instead, what I found when I hit bottom was solid ground beneath me. And I was still in one piece. I thought about how I had been looking in the rearview mirror for the place Chris and I had taken a wrong turn, a turn I couldn’t quite see. And I realized that here on the kitchen floor I had reached another
turning point, and I hadn’t seen this one coming, either.

  * * *

  As winter gave way to spring, and the snow that had sat around in hulking piles on the sidewalks and rooflines started to melt, the house sprang new leaks: in the second-floor hallway, in the first-floor bathroom, pooling into the kitchen light fixture. I was now in the habit of walking the house in the wee hours of the morning, going from room to room, and floor to floor, listening for the evil little plink-plink-plinks that crawled up the back of my spine. I actually shook my fists at the heavens on more than one occasion, begging them to stop sending me rain. (It seemed like the right thing to do.) I called in the roofers again, and they found a few more breaches in the roof that I had been told was new when we bought the house. (It had never occurred to me to ask if the new roof was a good roof.) They patched the roof but many of the drips kept dripping. I started to look for new roofers.

  But the basement was slowly shaping up, with all its new underpinnings and mechanics, and the walls rebuilt and painted. The slate tile floor, which was both practical and beautiful, had been laid, and the metal plates to cover the sump pumps in the corners of the room had been ordered. I was desperate to get the house on the market, but realistically we couldn’t close the deal until January of the next year so that Chris and I wouldn’t have to play a flip tax for selling less than two years after we’d bought it. I’d had to borrow tens of thousands of dollars from my parents (and was so lucky that they even had it to spare) and needed to be sure that I could pay them back when the deal was closed, and still be able to make a down payment on a home for Zack and me. I fantasized every day about living somewhere else. I prowled through the online real estate listings obsessively, trying to handicap how much apartment I would be able to afford—assuming that the house was fixed enough to hold its value and that Chris and I would get all of our money back out of it.

  The night the first big spring rainstorm hit, I couldn’t make myself stay in bed to wait for the sound of water somewhere in the house. Instead, I got up and went barefoot down into the almost-finished basement and stood sentry, facing down the drain outside the basement door that led to the staircase up to the sidewalk level in front of the house. I heard the sump pumps firing, drawing groundwater away from the house, and nothing was coming in from the two drains in the floor. Five minutes went by. Six, seven, eight, and the rain was still pounding on the house. Then a gray trickle slipped in under the door, very quickly turning into a gush. There was no point in panicking. I just grabbed the push broom and started pushing the water toward the pumps, across the beautiful slate floor that wasn’t going to be ruined by the water. I wanted to fill the entire staircase with cement and brick up the door with my bare hands to stop the water from coming in, but instead I stood there for more than an hour, pushing the broom, sweat dripping from my nose and my brow, escaping to a quiet part in my mind where the house was already sold and this wasn’t my life anymore.

  The next morning I called the good plumber and told him the basement had flooded again. He was disappointed. Neil Weiss was the owner of his business, and when I’d told him my story, he’d taken the time to come over to my house to look at the basement himself. That morning he came over again, and I told him about my fantasy of bricking up the door and filling the staircase with cement, but I said that I had a different idea, too. What if we just capped over the drain? It was there ostensibly to drain away any water that pooled in the stairwell from a rainstorm, but I pointed out that water pooling in the stairwell would be the least of my problems. Neil stood there with his hand on his chin, thinking. Finally he said, “Well, we could cap off the sewer inlet and then install a small sump pump there to take the water up to the street side. We wouldn’t be able to hide the pipes, but it would work.”

  I almost clapped my hands. I still had a leaky roof, but that seemed like small potatoes when compared to having to face down gallons of water. So in the next weeks, the pump was installed, the drain was capped, and the mason came in and covered everything with a thick layer of cement, sloping the stairwell toward the sump pump. After twelve months of watching the weather reports fanatically and dreading rain. I couldn’t wait for the next storm, to see if we had succeeded. Finally, another spring rainfall hit. I stood in the basement holding my breath. Then I heard the little sump outside the door start wheezing, and I could hear it coughing out water onto the sidewalk above from the little white plastic pipe that poked out between the slats of the house’s white picket fence. (Yes, the house had a white picket fence.) I danced a victory dance in the basement, and then I got down on my knees and clasped my hands together, thanking the universe for having sent me Neil, thanking God that I had had the strength to make it this far.

  And so I dared to consider a vacation. In the past twelve months I had lost my husband, started a big new job, fired two nannies, taken my son to the emergency room, poured $55,000 into house renovations, and survived endless nights of crying on the kitchen floor or mopping the basement dry. There was a little money left in my savings account and I was ready for some time off. I knew that going out of town anywhere with Zack would be hard to handle on my own, so I looked for a house to rent near the beach and near friends in Amagansett for the month of August. Paul and Marnie (with their son, Luke) were renting a house there for the month of August as well, and my friends Rose and Scott (with their daughter, Rachel) owned a house in the Dunes. I found a tiny, cute house in the Dunes, just a four-block walk from the beach. It was a splurge, to be sure. I planned to take a few long weekends that month and one whole week off, to really enjoy being with my son for so many days in a row and feeling out the new shape of our family. I packed up beach towels and bathing suits and sunscreen and all manner of plastic buckets and set out for the beach.

  But instead of having an idyllic break, I slammed headfirst into the hard realities of my life and slid directly into depression. Being alone with Zack, a demanding toddler, exhausted me and only served to underline how much I was on my own. On the beach, he wasn’t interested at all in playing in the sand. He just ran and ran and ran toward the ocean, into the ocean. Once when we were standing in waist-high water, Zack in my arms, he tried to wriggle out of my grasp just as a big wave came in. We got knocked underwater, and I felt Zack starting to get pulled out of my arms by the waves as I struggled to get my feet under me in the surf and stand up. We lurched up out of the water, both crying and coughing. (Thank God Zack was crying and coughing!) I got us to the beach and pounded on his back and then held him until he stopped crying, but I was still shaking. Two minutes later, he was up and running into the water again. I fell apart. Not knowing what else to do, I dragged him home, him screaming and crying and so disappointed, me with my head down so that I wouldn’t have to meet other parents’ eyes.

  And I’d had unrealistic expectations about how much time Zack and I would spend with our friends. I was starved for adult company in a way that my friends weren’t. We met for breakfast, we met at the beach, but they had their own plans, their own nap schedules, and babysitters so they could go out to dinner alone, as couples. Even after all this time, I hadn’t learned how to say I needed help, and I needed company. I called Kim at work and burst into tears. I tried to make the invitation I was offering for her and her family (daughter Julia and husband Stephen) to come and stay out here for a weekend sound inviting, not panicked. Alison from work. Eric and Dave and their dogs. I made a list of everyone I thought would come and visit and I called them, to fill the house and buffer myself from that awful feeling of lonely panic, and to surround myself with some helping hands.

  The last night of Labor Day weekend, our last night in the house, with Eric and Dave and their dog, Angus, asleep in the guest bedroom, I awakened to the sounds of breaking glass. Thinking the wind must have blown a vase over, I jumped out of bed and ran up the three steps to the living room. As I was turning the corner, I heard a second explosion—Was someone breaking in?—and when I finished the turn I was met by a wa
ll of flames ten feet away, engulfing the back wall of the sunroom. I stopped dead and screamed “OhmyGodOhmyGodOhmyGod!” over and over, remembering the citronella candles we’d carefully extinguished and checked twice. I knew an ember must have escaped into the dry bushes, and I felt the full weight of the responsibility for disaster in the pit of my stomach. I willed my brain to snap into gear and scream something more useful: “Fire!” Eric and Dave were up and barking out orders: “Call 911!” “I’ve got Zack!” I was pushing the buttons on the phone, but the call wasn’t going through. I jumped back down into the bedroom, grabbed a pair of shorts and my cell phone, and ran out of the house behind Eric, who was carrying Zack, and Dave, who was carrying Angus. We stood in the gravel driveway and screamed to the neighbors’ houses for help because my cell phone wasn’t getting service. In the meantime, the dry brush around the house was going up in flames.

  We stood in the chill summer night, watching the house burn. Lights went on in houses nearby. Neighbors called 911, and they came outside in their robes to start hosing down their bushes so that the fire wouldn’t jump. Then fire engines came screaming up the dirt road and firefighters got to work putting out the flames. Police cars pulled in, and police officers started questioning me. The sirens and the spinning lights and the sheer horror of having been awakened in the middle of the night to full-fledged panic was starting to get to Zack, and he began to shake uncontrollably. I wrapped my arms around him, looking for someone I could ask for a sweater. I had to get him out of there, but where? Rose appeared at my shoulder at just that moment—she’d awakened to the smell of smoke and had had a sixth-sense sensation that it was us—and I burst into tears and fell into her arms. She talked to the police officer. She gave them her phone numbers. She found the fire chief and told him where I’d be. All of us got into Rose’s car and drove the eight blocks to her house, where she put Zack to bed and found a place for Eric and Dave to sleep. Reeking of wood smoke, I sat on her white sailcloth sofa waiting for the police. I was numb. Totally numb.