by Kyra Davis
“Yeah, but it’s the outskirts of the Tenderloin. I like to call it Tenderloin Heights.”
I laughed despite myself and followed him up a very narrow and somewhat precarious-looking outside staircase that led to a small apartment with bars on the window. Jeremiah pulled some keys out of his pocket and opened the creaky door. Inside, a Siamese cat was curled on top of a Victorian-style cushioned chair. He lifted his head as we walked in, and then after gracing us with a disinterested stare, settled himself back to sleep.
Jeremiah dropped the bag by the small television and went to the kitchen. “You like cognac? Dave’s always got a supply of cognac around.”
“Your friend drinks cognac?” I asked doubtfully as I surveyed the worn state of his furniture.
“It wasn’t always like this for him,” Jeremiah called from the kitchen. “He was doing okay when he was married, but when he got divorced, things got messy and he lost pretty much everything with the exception of these very fine snifters.” Jeremiah walked out of the kitchen and handed me an elegant glass filled a quarter of the way up. “Here, you look like you need this.”
“He had the money to go to Europe,” I said, taking the drink from him.
“Yeah, he’s doin’ the Eurorail and pensions deal. He just needed to take some time to find himself again.” Jeremiah sat next to me and looked into my eyes. “How ’bout you? Are you lost?”
I bit my lip. “I…I don’t think Tad is okay.”
Jeremiah’s gaze remained steady. “Neither do I.”
I turned my head away and closed my eyes. “Jeremiah, what have I got myself into?”
“Hey…” His voice was soft and he draped his arm over my trembling shoulders. “It’s okay. Whatever it is, you’ll find a way to get through it.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I know a survivor when I see one.”
A survivor. My grandmother, she was a survivor, but me? I shook my head. “I don’t know…I might not be as strong as you think I am.”
“Or you might be a lot stronger.” I felt his hand tighten around my shoulder. “Lay it on me. What exactly went down?”
I took a deep breath and told him everything, save the physical push Tad gave me in the kitchen. That was the one thing I couldn’t admit to anyone, not even Jeremiah. It was too pathetic-battered-wifeish. But the credit cards, the car, the rent, his unreasonable outbursts coupled with his intervals of hyper-activity—that all came spilling out. Jeremiah listened without interrupting or asking questions, and as I spoke I began to relax into him more and more. He felt so secure and comforting, which was odd because this was completely contrary to the image he projected. Tad was supposed to be the provider, the safe choice, and yet right now it felt like, of the two, the bad-boy title went to my husband.
When I was done, Jeremiah let out a heavy sigh and leaned his head back onto the back of the couch. “April, are you familiar with the word bipolar?”
Without disturbing the position of Jeremiah’s arm I twisted so that I was angled toward him. “Bipolar? I think…I’ve heard the term before, but I don’t know a lot about it. Is it like schizophrenia?”
“Nah, not that bad. The worse cases can get close, though. The brother of one of the other trainers at work is bipolar. I’ve met him a couple of times. He’s this bigger-than-life dude and smart as hell, but then he makes all these crazy decisions…like he got a hair up his ass and went out and bought a fifty-thousand-dollar horse. He didn’t even have a place to keep her. Then when things get bad he goes into these really dark depressions.”
“How dark?”
“He downed a bottle of sleeping pills with a cup of straight-up vodka.”
“Oh my God.” My eyes widened. “Wait…you’re not saying…” I stood up. “Tad’s not actually insane. I mean, he might be on drugs and he has issues, but there’s nothing wrong with his brain.”
“Maybe not, but the shit you’re describing isn’t normal, April. You know that. That’s why you’re so freaked.”
“I’m freaked because…” I scrambled to come up with a logical reason that didn’t allow for the possibility of mental illness. But there wasn’t one, not unless I stuck to the secret-drug-addiction idea, and I had found no evidence of that, despite the deep cleaning I had given the house the night before. I shook my head and turned away from Jeremiah. “He can’t be insane,” I whispered to the bare wall in front of me. “My husband can’t be insane.”
“Hey, you can’t think of it like that. He’s sick. Lots of people get sick, April. Then they take their meds and get better.”
“Medication.” I said the word slowly as if to test the feel of it on my tongue. “What kind of medication do they prescribe for this?”
“Well, they used to prescribe lithium.”
“Oh, God,” I gasped and tried to stave off another panic attack.
“But they got other stuff now, better stuff. Look, I may be completely off on this, but I think you should check it out. At least get him to a shrink….”
“We already went to a marriage counselor. It didn’t go so well.”
“Not a therapist, April, a psychiatrist.”
“Oh, God.”
“Hey, going to one doesn’t make you crazy. It can just be a place to make sure that you’re not. And if there is something off in his head then maybe he can find a way to deal with it.”
“How ’bout me?” I asked, my voice so faint that I could barely make out my own words. “How will I deal with it?”
Jeremiah walked up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. He positioned his head so that his mouth was just inches from my ear. “You believe in yourself, April. That’s how you deal with it. You get through this by knowing that you can.”
The morning after my second sleepless night I went to Golden Gate Park and found a seat in Shakespeare’s Garden. There, I spent two hours writing and rewriting what I was going to say to Tad when he got home. His plane came in at five-fifteen, which meant I had plenty of time to practice. Basically I had to find a way of suggesting that he see a psychiatrist without setting him off. But how does a person tell her husband that she would like him to get evaluated by a mental-health professional in order to verify his sanity? Hell, that would set me off.
I finally settled on a two-page script. I would say that I suspected that the pressure of his work was getting to him and that maybe he should see a psychiatrist so that he could get a prescription for Valium or some such thing to calm him down on the nights that he’s feeling particularly amped. I wouldn’t even mention the word bipolar. If he was bipolar let him hear it from the psychiatrist.
Of course, I still didn’t believe that was the case. There had been so many special moments that Tad and I had shared. There had been times when he had been there for me in a way that no one else ever had. Like when I had lost our baby. Surely someone who had a severe mental disorder couldn’t have functioned so well in a time of crisis.
I shook my head. There had to be another explanation. The psychiatrist was just a precaution. I shoved my notebook into a large tote bag that I had lugged with me and walked to the hated Z3. I didn’t yet have the money to have the windows fixed in my car. That seven hundred dollars didn’t even amount to half our rent and God only knew what Tad was going to do with his paycheck. I wanted to have some time alone in the house before he got home. I still hadn’t called Caleb or Allie to cancel our plans for the evening, although I knew I should. I needed to spend some time with Tad so that I could work out what was going on, but the truth was, I wanted the excuse to leave the house. I wanted to be able to confront Tad and then make a quick run for it. That didn’t make me the bravest little toaster around, but it did speak to the survival instincts that Jeremiah had credited me with.
I drove home and pulled the car into my miniature driveway. That was when I first noticed the woman who was sitting on my doorstep. She was wearing almost all black and was hunched over so that she was hugging her knees. I stepped out of the
car but kept the door open with the keys in the ignition just in case she was hiding a sawed-off shotgun under her leather jacket. “Can I help you?” I asked.
The woman stood up. At full height she was probably an inch taller than me. And she was wearing a black twinset and a knee-length, A-line floral skirt. Her hair was thick, brown and wavy and fell just below her shoulders. Her eyes were a piercing shade of green. Kind of like Tad’s.
“Are you April Showers?” she asked. Her voice was kind, but also a little nervous.
“Yes, I mean no, my last name is Silverperson.”
“But you’re married to Tad Showers?”
“Yesss…who are you?”
The woman stepped forward, extending her hand as she did. “I’m Maddy Showers, Tad’s sister.”
TWENTY-FOUR
I stood motionless, staring at the woman’s hand. “Tad doesn’t have a sister.
“Ah, he didn’t tell you about me.” It was more of a statement than a question. She dropped her hand and rubbed it against her skirt. “I hadn’t really suspected that he would, but I hoped…Oh, well. I suppose I can’t fully blame him.”
“Tad would have told me…” My voice trailed off. Did I know that for sure? For that matter, was there anything about Tad that I knew for sure?
The woman nodded and started rummaging through her large purse. “I wouldn’t believe me either if I were you. Here.” She pulled out her wallet and a miniature photo album. “Here’s my license, and you can see my name really is Madeline Showers. I’m sure you’ll agree that Showers isn’t a very common name.”
I stared at the license.
“And here’s a picture of us as kids. That’s me, Tad, our mom and the little one on her lap is our half brother, Otis.”
My eyes darted back and forth between the four figures in the photograph. It was one of those quasi-professional photos you bought at Sears. The backdrop was made to look like the North Pole depicted in children’s Christmas stories, and the eldest child was a boy of about fifteen. His hair was cut in a militaristic fashion, his mouth was set in a straight line and his arm was flung protectively around the shoulders of a girl who looked to be four or five years younger. I studied the cut of his jaw, the way his ears stuck out just a little too much, making his hairstyle less than flattering. He was wearing a sweater that brought out his eyes. There was no way that the boy in the picture was anyone other than Tad, and the girl was a perfect miniature of the woman before me. I swallowed and looked around me. I was in a soap opera.
My eyes went back to the picture. The older woman…the one Maddy had said was her mother, was attractive, most likely in her midthirties at the time the picture was taken. She was laughing in the photo. Her long mane of chestnut hair was tossed behind her and she was looking up at the camera with the kind of joie de vivre one would expect from a woman who had just won the lottery. Her high spirits were in sharp contrast to the apparent mood of everyone else in the photo. While Tad looked somber and determined, Maddy just looked frightened. She was leaning into Tad as if silently pleading to be safeguarded against some unknown force. And the little boy couldn’t have been more than six. He had jet-black curly hair and his skin was the color of milk chocolate.
“The little boy…” I began.
“I know, he doesn’t look much like us. His father’s Haitian.”
“Your mother had a child with a black man?”
Maddy nodded, clearly finding my surprise puzzling. “I’m sorry, but you’re biracial, too, aren’t you?”
“Isn’t your mother racist?” I asked, ignoring her question.
“Mom?” Maddy laughed. “She had a lot of faults but racism wasn’t one of them. I think the father Tad and I share was the only white man she ever got involved with.”
“But there aren’t a lot of minorities in Georgetown, Massachusetts, are there?”
“Georgetown? Tad and I are from Reno.”
My fingers tightened around the edges of the photograph so that my fingertips turned a shade of white. “I need to sit down,” I whispered.
Maddy rubbed her hands against her skirt again. “Perhaps you’ll allow me to come in? I promise I won’t stay long.”
I nodded numbly and led her into the house, only taking my eyes off the photo long enough to unlock the front door. We walked into the living room and I stood by the fireplace as I contemplated the somewhat grotesque smile on Tad’s mother’s face. I had seen that smile before…on Tad’s lips.
“May I sit down?”
I looked up, inexplicably surprised to see that Maddy was still there. I motioned toward the couch and Maddy sat down without letting her back touch the pillows. “I know this must be weird…”
“I believe that’s what one would call an understatement.”
Maddy rung her hands and looked down at the carpet. “I’m so sorry about this. I had hoped that Tad would be the first to arrive. He should be the one to explain things to you. But I didn’t know a good time to reach him, and it seemed better to show up at his home instead of his work…perhaps that was a mistake.”
“He didn’t know you were coming?”
Maddy let out a bitter laugh. “If he had known he probably would have moved out of the city just to avoid speaking to me.”
“You two had a falling-out? Is that why he kept you a secret?” But even as I asked, I knew that a falling-out didn’t even begin to explain the photo that I was still holding.
Maddy was now scrunching the fabric of her skirt into her fist. “Not a falling-out, not with me anyway. Tad…He left the family. He got his GED at sixteen and then he just disappeared.”
“What do you mean, he disappeared?”
“He ran away, he and his eighteen-year-old girlfriend at the time.”
I felt the spark of indignation on Tad’s behalf. “Didn’t you and your parents look for him?”
Maddy shrugged. “My father had been out of the picture for a very long time by then, and my mom wasn’t in any shape to go searching for Tad. We knew he’d be okay. Tad’s always been resourceful and he’s incredibly smart….” Maddy’s face took on a faraway expression and I could tell that she was reliving something…something traumatic.
I looked at the painting above the fireplace. If I had run away as a teenager Bobe would have been out personally turning over every rock, pebble and leaf trying to locate me, but would my mother have expended that kind of effort? My mind traveled back to the one and only play I had ever performed in. I had been a freshman in high school and I had landed the part of Ursula in my school’s production of Much Ado About Nothing. I had only tried out so that I had an excuse to be near the boy who was playing Don Pedro, and when it came time to actually perform in front of other people I had nearly panicked. Three hours before opening night I had confessed my fears to my mother. I knew she wasn’t coming since she had a date with our building’s new super, but I needed to talk to someone and she was there. She had listened and nodded and told me all the standard stuff about picturing the audience in their underwear and so forth, and I remember thinking that was a pretty paltry defense against a roomful of critical strangers, but I had pretended to be comforted. That night I stepped onto the stage ready to make a complete fool of myself. I looked out at the audience and there she was…my mother, smack-dab in the middle of the front row, no date in sight. At that moment I knew I had what it took to get through my scene. She ended up coming to every performance, and every time it was my turn to bow she screamed and cheered like I had just won an Oscar. Would my mother have come looking for me if I had gone missing? The answer was an unequivocal yes.
I sat down on the opposite side of the couch from Maddy and handed the picture back to her. “There has to be more to this story,” I said. “What do you mean when you said your mother wasn’t in any shape to look for him? Was she ill?”
Maddy took the picture and examined it as if seeing it for the first time. “Ill…yes, in a way. Our mother was bipolar.”
I sucked in a s
harp breath. There was that word again. That horrible, terrifying word. I bit down on my lip so hard I almost cried out in pain.
“Tad doesn’t know that,” Maddy continued. “She wasn’t diagnosed correctly until shortly after he left…after she…tried to hurt herself again. She had been called a whole bunch of other things of course…irresponsible, flighty, eccentric, an alcoholic. Those were labels we all became familiar with during our early-childhood years. But bipolar…that was a new one.”
“But she got help, they fixed her, right?” I scooted closer to Maddy. I needed to know that this thing was curable, that it didn’t have to destroy my life.
Maddy flashed me a sarcastic smile. “‘Fixed her’? It’s not as if she was a car with electrical problems.” She must have seen the fear in my eyes because she immediately looked apologetic. “I just mean that you can’t exactly fix a psychiatric condition. You can treat it and make it manageable, but you can’t make it disappear.”
“And did she? Make it manageable?”
Maddy’s head bent forward so her hair hid her face. “They tried…they put her on lithium, and then later Depekote. Horrible drugs, both of them. My mother went from being this larger-than-life beautiful woman to being fat and lethargic. She couldn’t even stay awake during dinner. I remember trying to talk to her…tell her about my day, but she just couldn’t follow a conversation anymore. I didn’t blame her when she stopped taking the pills. Why trade one hell for another?”
“But there has to be a solution.” My throat began to constrict and I had to struggle to get the words out. “You said that the illness could be managed!”
Maddy gave me a funny look. “It can be managed. But it’s not easy. For one thing, every person responds differently to the various meds. Secondly, the doctors rarely prescribe the medications with the least amount of side effects first.” She shook her head in frustration. “The better meds are always newer and the doctors are often afraid of them. Patients really need an advocate in their corner, someone to do the research for them and motivate them to keep trying new meds when the first ones don’t work for them.”