by Kyra Davis
She had left several messages on my cell and I had listened long enough to determine that it was her before pressing the delete button. “You could have tried my home,” I mumbled, knowing damn well that I wouldn’t have listened to those messages, either.
“What are you talking about? I left at least ten messages on your answering machine last month and at least that many the month before.”
“No you didn’t or I would have gotten them….”
I felt a stabbing sensation in my chest. Tad always checked the messages from his work. And if he was checking the messages he could have been deleting them, too.
One by one, more of the puzzle pieces were fitting together. Tad had good reason to encourage the recent estrangement between my mother and me. He hadn’t wanted me to find out that he had conned her and her friends. Once again he had been trying to conceal the true nature of his character.
“How much money have people shelled out for this little business venture?” My voice was icy. I was beyond angry. I was beyond any emotion that I had ever experienced.
“A little over three thousand.”
“For calendars and bumper stickers?”
“Well, there were about a hundred and thirty or so orders for calendars and almost two hundred orders for bumper stickers…”
“I’ll talk to Tad.”
My mother shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “April, I’m picking up some very bad vibes. Have there been other problems between you and Tad? You just don’t seem as…as shocked as I suspected.”
“You were trying to shock me?” I let out a humorless laugh. “You should have shown up with a French manicure and an Ann Taylor suit.”
“There have been problems, haven’t there? The few times I talked to Tad on the phone, he had a lot of negative energy.”
I met her eyes and considered my options. Telling the truth about Tad’s illness might buy him some time with the jilted Earth Children. That would be a good thing, especially since California was a community-property state, which meant his debt was my debt. “Tad’s been going through a hard time,” I said slowly. “He was recently diagnosed as being bipolar.”
My mother gasped. “Bipolar? Who diagnosed him with that? A western medical doctor, I bet.”
“Well, it wasn’t his acupuncturist.”
“They’re always trying to diagnose people with things these days. I bet they put him on medication, too. That’s why he’s acting this way.” My mother shook her head in dismay. “Listen, April, Tad’s just a free spirit. I’m sure he’s simply having a hard time harnessing all his creative energy while working in that corporate job of his.”
“SMB isn’t a corporation, it’s a private partnership.”
“Private partnership, corporation—” she waved her hand in the air dismissively “—it all falls under the same evil capitalist umbrella. He needs to find a career more suited to his enlightened mentality. It’s the medication, I’m sure that’s why he hasn’t been able to fill the product order. When you were a little girl I hooked up with this guy named Jordy. His doctor told him he was bipolar, too, but he didn’t buy it. He never took a pill and he was just fine.”
“Jordy…I think I remember him. He was the one who was arrested for writing bad checks, right?”
My mother tapped the table thoughtfully. “I forgot about that.”
I threw some money down on the table and got up. “Mom, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you as soon as I talk to Tad, okay?”
She flashed me a relieved smile. “Thank you, April. I knew I could count on you.”
It took me exactly sixteen minutes to get home. The first thing I noticed was Tad’s car. He was home early. Good. That saved me another unpleasant trip to SMB. I stormed inside and found him sitting in the living room listening to Mozart while staring into a glass of what looked like whiskey or bourbon. He didn’t even bother to look up as I entered. So it was Barcelona all over again. Wonderful. But this time his behavior didn’t scare me as much as it just pissed me off.
“Tad?” I spoke his name at a volume that would suggest that we were separated by a football field rather than a coffee table.
His eyes rolled up in my direction but he didn’t say anything.
“Why are you home?” I asked, although I wasn’t at all sure if I cared.
“I decided to call it an early day.” His voice sounded hollow. “It was just a bad day, that’s all.”
“You had a bad day? What a coincidence, I had a bad day, too. I bet if we compared notes we might even find out that we both have the same problem.”
“What would that be?” Tad asked.
“You.”
He straightened up. Now I got a real good look at him. His face was flushed and his eyes were glazed over and red. No doubt he had been drinking for a while now.
“What are you talking about?” With an unsteady hand he lifted his glass and slammed the rest of his cocktail.
“I just had lunch with my mother.”
Silence.
“You son of a bitch,” I hissed. “All this time you were telling me that I needed to cut my mother out of my life because it was the best thing for me but it wasn’t about me at all, was it? It was all about you, as always.”
Tad shook his head and clumsily pulled himself to his feet. “No, I didn’t want you to talk to your mom ’cause she’s bad for you.”
I took a step back in disbelief. I wasn’t sure if I had ever seen Tad this hammered before.
“She’s bad for you, April,” he continued. “You don’t need her.”
“Oh, really? So I should just disappear from her life the way you disappeared from your mother’s life?”
“Yes!” Tad nodded enthusiastically.
“Because that worked so well for you. I mean, look at you. You’re just the poster boy for mental health, right?”
Tad didn’t answer, just gazed at his empty glass.
“And your advice didn’t have anything to do with the fact that you ripped off my mother’s Earth Goddess cult to the tune of three thousand dollars?”
Again, no answer.
“You are amazing.” I crossed my arms over my chest and looked up at the ceiling. “The bipolar piece is just the tip of the iceberg isn’t it, Tad? I mean, your problems go way beyond that. You’re a full-blown sociopath.”
“I’m not a sociopath,” Tad growled.
“Really?” I raised an eyebrow. “Let’s see what Webster’s dictionary has to say about that.” I marched over to the bookcase, pulled out the dictionary and flipped to the correct page. “‘Sociopathic—characterized by asocial or antisocial behavior or exhibiting antisocial personality disorder.’ So let’s think about that. Do you think you were being very social when you were staring at the wall of our hotel room in Barcelona? Do you have a healthy social relationship with your sister or brother? Oh, that’s right, you’re an only child.”
Tad snatched the dictionary out of my hand and threw it to the ground. “Listen, I didn’t—”
“No,” I said, cutting him off. “I don’t want to listen. You’ll just lie to me. You know I could have forgiven the unfilled bumper-sticker order, but for you to try to convince me to disown my mother just to protect yourself…that you could erase her messages…” I shook my head and fought back the tears of hurt and anger. “I’m leaving you, Tad. I’m going to pack my things right now and I am leaving you.”
Tad’s eyes widened. He looked shocked. Shocked! Had he actually thought that I was going to just stand by while he hurt my family and lied about it?
“April.” He grabbed both of my arms, but the gesture was one of desperation rather than violence. “April, you can’t leave me. I love you.”
“Maybe you should have thought about that before.” I pulled away and went to the hall closet where we stored the suitcases.
“April, wait, it’s the bipolar disorder. It makes me do crazy things. Just give me a few more weeks on the medication and everything will go back to the way it wa
s.”
“How was it, exactly?” I pulled out the largest bag and lugged it into the bedroom. “As far as I can tell, everything about our lives together has been one cleverly orchestrated lie.”
“That’s not true.” Tad stumbled after me and I turned to see him wobbling in the doorway. “I’ve always loved you and I always will.”
I glared at him and started to remove my clothes from my dresser.
He grabbed my hand. “No, you have to know it hasn’t all been a lie. You remember when we lost our baby, right?”
I swallowed and looked away. I didn’t want to remember that.
“I stood by you, April, you know I did. Now all I’m asking is that you stand by me.”
I yanked my hand away. “I’ve been standing by you. I stood by you when I found out that you lied to me about the rent. I stood by you when I found out about the credit card. I stood by you when I found out that you had been lying about your family. I was there for you when you had to face your own mental illness. I even stuck it out after you trashed my car and threw me on the kitchen floor. But now you’ve hurt my family. And I can’t stand by you while you do that.”
“So I’ll stop!” Tad screamed. I shook my head and continued packing.
“I’ll stop, April, I will. I didn’t mean to hurt your family. I’m just sick, but I’ll get better. You have to give me some time to get better.”
I ignored him and continued packing. I couldn’t let him weaken my resolve.
“April, I can’t live without you. You’re my life. You’re everything to me.”
I bit my lip and kept packing.
I didn’t look at him but I could hear him sobbing. I wanted to go to him, but I knew that if I did I would have to stay, and I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t survive it.
I listened to his heavy footsteps as he left the room and traveled to the kitchen. Was I being unfair? Should I give him another month or two on the medication? I looked around the room. You need to get out, my little voice screamed. But didn’t my little voice remember all the times Tad and I had laughed together? And where had my little voice been during our lovemaking sessions? Probably shocked into silence. I glanced at the door. I would talk to him.
I put down the clothes in my hand and went to the kitchen. I was still leaving but I would try to do it on a better note. Tad was standing over the sink with his back to me. He was shaking and I could still hear his little sobs. I stepped forward quietly. “Tad,” I said gently.
He turned and that’s when I saw the blood coming out of his wrist. His eyes were wild with fear and pain.
“Oh my God.” They were the only words I could think to say.
“April, help me. Please help me.”
I rushed to his side and noted that only one wrist was cut and that the slash was horizontal not vertical. He wouldn’t die. But still, there was a lot of blood. “Sit down,” I ordered and ran to the bathroom and yanked open the drawer where we kept the first-aid supplies, and then ran back to the kitchen with a long strip of gauze that I wrapped around his wrist. He was crying too hard for me to understand him, but every few sentences or so I caught “can’t live without you,” and “want to die.”
I knelt in front of him. “Tad, listen to me. We have to get you to the hospital.”
“I want to die,” he cried.
“No, you don’t. You know you don’t. We’re going to the emergency room now, okay?”
He didn’t answer, so I gently took his elbow and guided him into a standing position. I led him to the Z3 parked in front of the house. I opened the passenger-side door and he obediently got in. I went around to my side and stuck my key into the ignition. Before I pushed the gearshift into Reverse, I took a second to look at him and for a sudden and brief moment I had my first full-fledged out-of-body experience. But unlike the out-of-body experiences that you hear about on Lifetime, there was nothing wonderful or enlightening about this. I didn’t feel like a free spirit or an angel. Oddly enough I felt more like a Hollywood producer, studying a film that I needed to edit. I could see Tad and I could see April and I could see the chaos and the pain that those characters were both in but I was watching the scene with an impassive and detached eye. It was the visual details that had my attention…like all the blood, Tad’s blood. It was still coming, soaking the bandaging. If the blood leaked onto the interior of the car it would be a lot more difficult to sell. April would be stuck with it. She would have to learn to live with it and accept it even though the audience would know that she wanted to be free of that car so badly she could taste it.
And the audience would shake their heads and give each other knowing glances because that was life. Sometimes you get stuck with the things you don’t want.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The emergency-room doctors fixed up Tad, interviewed him, interviewed me and then sent us home. In their professional opinion Tad was suffering from severe depression and needed therapy. Thank God we had medical insurance, because if I had to pay for that advice I would have been seriously ticked. On the flip side I was freaked out enough that I was able to score myself a prescription for Paxil.
I love Paxil. It had been seven weeks since Tad cut his wrist, nothing had improved but thanks to my miracle drug I wasn’t perpetually on the verge of a major anxiety attack.
I flipped through some merchandise at Macy’s that I couldn’t afford. I was waiting for Allie, who was taking me to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory.
I had told both her and Caleb about Tad’s little accident several weeks ago. They had both been appropriately appalled and offered to help me move. But I had postponed my marital separation. I desperately wanted to leave him but I didn’t want him to commit suicide on account of something I did. Somehow I had to find a way to make it work, or at least give it a last try.
He was taking his medication now. I knew because I counted his pills every morning after he left for work. He had gained some weight and was somewhat lethargic, but other than that I didn’t see a big difference in him. He was still depressed to the point of being borderline suicidal, although he hadn’t had a manic episode for a while. After all, that would require exuberance and joy and Tad didn’t have a lot of that these days.
I held up a sheer DKNY shirt. It was a beautiful dip-dye, totally my style. I checked the price tag. Totally out of the question. I reached for my cell as I heard the musical notes come out of my purse. “Hello?”
“I’m at the elevator, where are you?” Allie asked.
I looked at the shirt in my hand. “One floor up from you, torturing myself.”
“I thought the reason you left Dawson’s was because you didn’t like torture.”
I giggled. “Be there in thirty seconds.” I clicked off the phone and took the escalator down to where she was. When she saw me, her eyes ran over my figure. “Shit, you’re skinnier then I am.”
“I haven’t had much of an appetite lately,” I said as we joined the crowd piling into the elevators. “But I have been taking care of myself in other ways.”
“Such as?”
“I’ve been working out a lot. I may be unemployed, on the verge of bankruptcy and married to a masochistic nutcase, but I do have defined abs and that’s got to count for something.”
Allie laughed as our fellow elevator passengers struggled to put more distance between themselves and us.
At the restaurant Allie gave our name to the hostess who escorted us to our table. She sighed and looked down at the square from the wall of glass adjacent to our seats. “I love this place—the view totally rocks.”
“Mmm, of course, the way my life has been going there’ll probably be an earthquake momentarily and we’ll plunge to our deaths amongst shards of glass.”
Allie shook her head in sympathy. “So I guess things are not well on the home front.”
“Things on the home front are never well. They’re always sick and twisted. Tad’s business is having problems and his partners think he’s embezzled some money or som
ething. He’s a mess over the whole thing and he’s scared to death I’m going to leave him.”
“Are you?”
I diverted my eyes and shrugged indecisively. “I have no immediate plans to do so. Before I came out tonight we got into it. He said he was so afraid of losing me he wasn’t sure if he could take it. He even threatened suicide again.”
Allie shook her head in bewilderment. “What do you say to something like that?”
“Well, I’m on Paxil, so I told him that if he must do it he should at least have the courtesy to do it in the kitchen where it’ll be easy to clean up.”
Allie smiled and looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know how you do it, April. If I were you I’d be losing it about now, and here you are cracking jokes.”
I shrugged again. Tad had been threatening suicide about once a week since our little hospital visit. At first the threats had scared me to death, but after a while the novelty wore off and I had sort of become reconciled to the idea that on any given day I might walk in to find my husband dead on the floor. I wasn’t happy about it, but in order to survive you have to take the horrors of life in stride. Just ask my grandmother.
“So how about you?” Allie pushed. “You say you’ve been working out…have you been doing anything else for yourself?”
“Well, I’ve been making one hell of a lot of bumper stickers.”
“I still can’t believe you did that.”
“That makes two of us. But it ended up being cheaper than giving everyone a refund, and since they all agreed to take the same sticker…”
“Bugs are people, too?”
“Bugs have rights, too,” I corrected. “Anyway, it’s done. And they agreed to accept the calendars as Tad made them, man-made structures and all.”
Allie narrowed her eyes. “And what has Tad done?”
I smiled. I appreciated that Allie was bitter on my behalf. After all, the stuff with the Temple of the Earth Goddess was not my mess to clean up. But it was clear to me that the other problems Tad was dealing with took priority over my mother’s grievances. Embezzlement—that could actually go hand in hand with jail time. I could end up being married to a convict. Wow, life just got better and better. The waitress came by and took our orders before I had a chance to answer Allie’s somewhat rhetorical question. I waited to see if she was going to push the issue more, but instead she casually unfolded her napkin into her nap and ran her fingers through her hair.