Falling Apart in One Piece

by Stacy Morrison

  Three weeks later, I had drifted off to sleep after my moment of gratitude for the tree when I was jolted into full consciousness by the sound of water somewhere in my apartment. I was up and on my feet in an instant, adrenaline rippling up and down my spine. How could I possibly be under siege by water? I stepped into the hallway and heard it pouring down between the walls. I padded onto the cold tile floor of the bathroom and saw it dripping from a spot over the sink and another breach in the ceiling right over the doorway. But it was the sound that made me sick, the sound of water coursing unseen above and around me.

  I bolted down the hallway, out the door, and up the flight of stairs to my upstairs neighbor and started pounding on the door. Lori, startled, let me in; she’d been visiting with a friend in her living room, far away from the bathroom, and hadn’t heard a thing. But as we headed down her hallway we spotted water pooling outside the bathroom door, and inside, the toilet was overflowing like a fountain, two inches of water covering the entire floor. The toilet was instantly fixed with a jerk of the handle, but as I headed downstairs to find Pat in the hallway, knocking on my door because the water had found its way into her apartment, too, I couldn’t calm my heartbeat. It was just a leaky toilet, I kept reassuring myself, but I wasn’t able to get back to sleep for a long, long time that night.

  “Wow. What is it with you and water?” my friends commented when I told them the tale of the latest leak. I just shrugged. When people said it was creepy, I had to agree, but I said that instead I’d decided to call it “poetic,” another of these weirdly literal and dramatic expressions of all I was struggling with: beating back floods, treading water, rebuilding foundations, trial by fire.

  The unsettling memories of the fire at the beach house were all stirred up again one spring evening a few months later. Zack and I were sitting on the floor in the dining room, pushing a ball back and forth between us, our legs open in Vs to catch it, when he pointed at the bulky carbon monoxide sensor plugged into a nearby outlet and said, “It beeped.” After a few more pushes back and forth, I learned from Zack that the battery had died, making the alarm go off and “beep,” and that Sezi, our nanny, had unplugged the alarm and replaced the batteries.

  Then Zack said, “Fire.”

  I felt prickles up and down my arms, but I calmly pushed the ball back to him and repeated, “fire.”

  “Fire,” he said more firmly, as if making a point. “Big orange. Beeping.” Now I was afraid, feeling the terror of that night, remembering the wall of flames, the sound of the sirens. I stopped the ball and looked straight at him.

  And then he said, “Scared,” in his little baby voice, pronouncing it “Skeeoud.”

  “Are you remembering the fire at the beach house?” I asked. He nodded. I tried to figure out what I was supposed to do with his memory of that terrible night. I said, “Yes, that was a very scary thing, but we were always safe, the fire was never going to hurt us.”

  I pushed the ball back to him, and back to him, and we drifted off the subject of the fire.

  But as I was tucking him into bed that night, Zack said, “I see fire, big orange, Mommy.” And then he said, “Eric,” naming one of the two friends who had been in the house with us that night. Trying to prove to myself he wasn’t recalling the fire with such intense clarity, I asked, “And was Kim there, too?” Zack shook his head no. And then he named Dave, Eric’s partner, and Angus, their dog, all the people and creatures who’d been in the house that night.

  I gathered Zack up in my arms and said, “Oh, Zack. I know, honey. That was a scary time. Mommy and Eric and Dave were scared, too. But you and I are safe. And they are safe, too. It’s Mommy’s job to keep you safe and we are safe here where we are. This is a big, strong building and no fires can burn it. Don’t you worry.” Our apartment was in a limestone building, so this wasn’t a total lie. I stayed in his bedroom with him for a long time, rubbing his back until he was asleep, but my mind stayed restless. What was it I was promising him? What was it I was trying to promise myself?

  I decided not to go to Amagansett that next summer, after four years of summer weekends out there. It wasn’t quite that I felt it had been ruined for me by the fire, but it wasn’t quite not that, either. Renting the house for the month had also been a lot of responsibility and work and a lot of planning. It was also a lot of stressful driving in heavy summer traffic, which was hard on Zack and hard on me. More than once I’d had to careen off the highway onto the shoulder in a panic because Zack was getting carsick or just crying because he’d had enough of the traffic and being in the car. The mantras that I invoked whenever I was making a decision for myself and my life became “Choose simple” and “Choose the path of least resistance.” I envisioned myself as a delicate egg, and imagined carrying myself around in my two cupped hands, as a way of acknowledging that I still felt hurt and fragile all these months after Chris had moved out.

  And so instead of planning a big vacation for the summer, I accepted an invitation from my friend Tina to stay at her weekend home on the Cape for a week. Her husband and one-year-old daughter, Julia, would join us for the weekends on either side. I had spoken with Tina and she knew I was feeling very vulnerable and very needy. She said the magic words that I could not resist: “Let us take care of you.”

  Another college friend, Nancy, was going to join us for the first weekend with her infant son and husband, and Eric and Dave were going to join us for the second weekend, a perfect complement of personalities and people I trust—and a relief from the challenging and exhausting one-to-one adult-to-child ratio that I lived every day. It had been a year since I had taken a week off from work, and I allowed myself to dwell in vacation fantasies: the outdoor runs I’d be able to sneak in while Zack napped and the other adults were in the house, or the thought that I might actually get to read a book or a magazine on the beach while Zack was entertained by Julia and the sand.

  But things did not go as planned. (Of course they did not go as planned. When would I stop expecting things to go as planned? When would I stop having plans?) First, I injured my hip while running right before the vacation, and wouldn’t be running anywhere on the Cape. (And of course I’d hurt myself because I was running through the pain, instead of giving in to it. Another lesson.) Then when we got to Tina and Matt’s house, Zack, used to having me all to himself, had no interest in sharing me with my friends. In the late afternoon of the first day, as Tina and Matt; Nancy and her husband, Kevin; and Matt’s mom, Elsa, and her husband sat around the grill in the backyard, sipping wine and beer and dandling babies on their laps, Zack kept devising different tactics to pull me away from the adult conversation I craved. He would either drag me by the hand or arm up out of my chair and across the lawn, or would simply take off running, toward the street, toward the wooded trails, into the garage. I went into the house and came back outside with different toys to engage him, but he leveled a steady, flat gaze at me when I told him Mommy wanted to sit down and spend some time with friends, and could he play by himself for a few minutes. His answer, unspoken but clear, was no.

  I felt foolish, being held hostage by my toddler. “Stace, come and sit and talk for a while,” Nancy would say. “I’m trying,” I would answer, keeping my voice as light as I could. I felt as if I were standing behind a glass wall, and though I kept playing scripts over and over in my head, I couldn’t open my mouth to speak the words to ask my friends to help. They were busy with their own children and divvying up the duties of getting dinner ready. I was hideously jealous of their ease, the unspoken sharing of the tasks, the way their partners seemed to be managing the challenges of parenthood without feeling like they were being robbed of something else, the way Chris had.

  Eventually all the babies, including Zack, were put to bed, and I got ready to nestle into the conversation I’d been hoping to enjoy around the fire pit with a nice glass of red wine. But when I rejoined the group, I still felt as if I lived in a different country and didn’t speak their language, th
at language of quiet confidence and contentment and daily doings and lives that are unfolding just as they should be. No matter how mundane the start of the conversation had been, after a few minutes I’d be coughing up the viscera of my life, and that kind of unvarnished truth-telling wasn’t going to fit into the relaxed mood here. After listening for about twenty minutes, I realized I was disappearing into myself, so I got up and walked out into the middle of the lawn and lay down, staring up at the dark, dark sky dotted with stars. I listened to the husbands chat about mountain biking and kayaking and muse about doing these things together in some potential someday, Tina and Nancy making encouraging noises. I counted the minutes to see how long it would take the others to notice that I was brooding in the grass, collecting sour apples while their laughter washed over me.

  I had thought that I hadn’t planned a vacation in a year because I’d been busy, but as I lay on the lawn, feeling the weight of silence and grief pulling again on my mind, I realized it was really because I’d been afraid of this: the way that having a moment to reflect still revealed so much hurt.

  Later on, after the fire was extinguished, and the fourth or fifth bottle of wine had been emptied, my two girlfriends and I got some time alone together, sitting on the floor in the living room. I tried to express the loneliness I’d been feeling in my life, and even here with them. I fell apart, crying for all the months of crying alone, and for the relief of being with two people I knew loved me deep and wide. Nancy had to leave early the next morning, but she just held me tight, and Tina held my hands in hers and said, “We’re your family, Stacy. You can count on us.”

  But there’s an unbreachable divide between what people want to do for you and what they can do. Though Matt and Tina were generous in their hospitality, planning the meals, arranging activities, we could not get our children’s schedules to mesh. Julia’s two-naps-a-day schedule and Zack’s one-afternoon-nap routine meant that we were always in the house at different times, and, like most couples, Matt and Tina had their own schedule-sharing, with one or the other of them disappearing for an errand, a run, or a bike ride when Julia was asleep. I found myself knocking around with Zack alone a lot, the very situation I’d been hoping to avoid.

  After a difficult morning getting Zack to slowly eat breakfast, slowly get dressed, and then slowly getting ourselves together and out the door, I started pedaling my bike, with Zack in the carrier, the few miles to the beach to meet Tina and Matt, who had left an hour or so earlier. As I turned the corner to the final stretch, Tina and Matt drove by me, on their way back to the house. I stopped, confused, and turned around and pedaled all the way home, walking the bike up the big hill that led to their house, exhausted and disappointed. I tried not to feel I was on the outside of their life looking in, but it was hard, and I was miserable about being a bad guest.

  Zack and I began to take long walks together each morning, down the hill, across the road, and down a long, winding path that led to some abandoned train tracks that crossed over a marsh. I felt safest when it was just the two of us, which was both comforting and ironic. But I simply breathed in and enjoyed the hours we were alone together, Zack looking for ways to charm me, me looking for ways to make him laugh, the two of us holding hands and taking in the beautiful scenery, his blond curls whipping around in the wind.

  When all of us were together in the house, I felt very self-conscious about Zack’s classic toddler behavior, which didn’t bother me in quite the same way at home. Here I felt as if it was unsettling the household’s calm order in a way that wasn’t welcome. We kept bumping into rules that I didn’t have at home and that Zack wasn’t prepared for. On Wednesday, he put surface scratches in a much-loved coffee table when we were playing in the living room with Julia, despite the fact that Tina had put a towel on the table to try to protect it; he took all the toys out of the toy basket at once, spreading them around the playroom, while Tina quietly picked up behind him because Julia played with only one toy at a time; he grabbed toys away from Julia in a way I knew was just a normal part of toddler life, but that made Julia cry and thus put Tina and Matt on edge. I found myself saying no to him over and over and over. Zack was confused by his new role as a bad boy, and he reacted against it, throwing tantrums and expressing his frustration in a way he didn’t at home. He could feel the tension in the house and he was reflecting it back at me, the way children will. I was desperate for him to settle down. I was desperate, period.

  I kept thinking, I hate being a parent alone. If I just had another person here, this wouldn’t be so hard. I needed someone to help entertain Zack. Someone to help discipline him. Someone to distract him. I wondered when I would stop missing my lost partner. I felt weak and worthless that this was where my brain went, and I cursed myself that free time only created the space for me to feel all my fears, all my loss, still. And I felt even more foolish that I had dared to believe that I could let down my guard, relax, be safe.

  I spent the next day racing after Zack, trying to keep him quiet, trying to make him play more like a one-year-old girl than like an almost-three-year-old boy, an experiment that failed. Matt and Tina bought Zack a brand-new truck, to distract him and thrill him—which it did—but it didn’t change the dynamic of the situation. By dinner that night, we adults were all strained and polite, tiptoeing around each other. After dinner, Tina and Matt disappeared into their bedroom without saying good night, and I heard snatches of an argument.

  The next afternoon I stood in the living room, tears streaming down my face, begging Tina just to call the week a failed experiment and let me go home. She prevailed on me to stay, but in the morning I caught Tina and Matt in another row after Zack had made Julia cry by grabbing a toy from her again. This time I hurriedly packed up my car, hugged Matt and Tina goodbye, and left, two days early, on Zack’s birthday.

  We drove the seven long hours home—seven hours during which I replayed every incident in a hopeless spiral—and parked in front of the house. To decompress from the trip, Zack and I played out front of our building for a few minutes before unpacking the car, blowing bubbles, both of us relieved to be back in our regular orbit. As a neighbor’s babysitter let herself into the building, Zack stopped to give her a big welcome, but then he stumbled and fell down the stoop, his face slamming into the cement. He sat up, screaming, blood pouring out of his mouth. I ran to pick him up and take a closer look, and through the copious blood, I could see he’d put his teeth all the way through his lower lip, making a big, ragged tear. I carried him inside to try to clean off the wound. I got a good look at the tear and saw it was even worse than I thought, so I grabbed hold of him, ran out of the apartment, and ran the three blocks to the hospital, amazed by how little attention we garnered along the way, a mother and her screaming son, blood all over both of us.

  In the ER, we attracted almost no attention, either, and after ten or so minutes in the waiting room, which was lined with people who looked like they’d been waiting for hours, I once again took a car service to that hospital in Manhattan. We were admitted instantly, and seen by a nurse in ten minutes; she gave me a friendly, sad look after she asked for Zack’s birth date. She leaned over and gave him extra stickers, while he, exhausted and bloody, leaned his head into my shoulder. I called Chris to let him know what was happening; he offered to come but I declined, not wanting to add him to the mix after our last ER visit. Zack perked up again when the doctors tried to examine him; he screamed and kicked and would not let the doctors get near his face, no matter how I tried to reassure him. The doctors left and a nurse came into the room and gave me the tools to clean the blood away from the wound, and then she left the two of us alone. I did my best to soothe Zack, explaining what was happening in soft, slow tones as I sponged off the blood from around his mouth and nose, and reminded him that I would never do anything to hurt him, and so he should let me clean his face so that the doctors could see his boo-boo. The fear in his eyes was so big, and when he tried to talk to me—“Mommy, let’s go.
Mommy, I want to go home”—it was hard to make out the words with his lip swollen to more than twice its usual size.

  In the end, the doctors had to sedate Zack in order to give him the necessary six stitches (two inside, four out), but even in twilight sleep, he cried out, “Mommy, no!” as they put the needle in his lip. I was holding his hand, turned away from him so I wouldn’t ever remember what it looked like to have my son’s face sewn back together, but his cry made me weak in the knees. Spots spun in front of my eyes and I came right up to the edge of passing out. A technician made me leave our little curtained area and got me a glass of orange juice while the doctors finished the procedure.

  When Zack came to in my arms twenty minutes later, he looked at me and said, “Mommy, you left me.” There was no explaining that he’d been the one who left me, disappearing into the anesthesia, but I felt guilty for having had to leave during the procedure anyway. I just kept smoothing his hair and trying to wipe the dried blood from his hairline, telling him that we were fine, telling me that we were fine, though all I could feel was the sense that my life was closing in on me.

  A taxi dropped us off at our home at two in the morning; our car was parked out front, still packed with our vacation luggage. My son had turned three today; he was growing up, growing older, and I was growing more and more certain that there was nothing in this life that was for certain.

  If the safe place wasn’t an actual destination in life, then where would I find it?

  In the following weeks, Tina and I exchanged cautious letters, the confusion too heavy for e-mail, the thought of a phone call unbearable. We apologized to each other for . . . nothing, really, except for how it had all turned out. Because sometimes that’s how life goes. Because sometimes life is hard and hard is what you get.