“Pretty sure Jaime Guzman doesn’t. She does, however, love retainer fees from quickie divorces which result from quickie marriages.”
“Too rash, right?” I bit my lip and tried not to feel rejected—we’d just been shooting the breeze with the Vegas wedding talk. But I’d also been gauging the air to see where we stood after the storms of LA, and I think Samuel understood that.
“Hey. Don’t stress about tomorrow, okay? Just focus on today.” His eyes crinkled. “Besides, Las Vegas is probably the worst place you can take someone in the throes of a manic episode,” he teased, breaking the tension. “If I didn’t go broke at the high stakes table, I’d end up hitched to a red-clawed cougar named Oona.”
I threw back my head and laughed.
We pulled off of old Route 66 for a picnic west of Flagstaff. The low rumbles of the desert wind bewitched my ears and I breathed deeply, and stretched.
We’d risen early this morning and hit the road in his new BMW convertible, journeying at a lazy pace despite the rush of summer travelers. Even though he was still tired from his episode, he’d done most of the driving while I played deejay with his iPod. After I put “The Crying Game” on loop he revoked my deejay license. I primly pointed out that he was the one with Boy George on his playlist. “Not for long,” he muttered.
Even though Samuel hatched the road trip idea during a hypomanic episode, it turned out to be exactly what we needed. What better way to get everything out in the open than being belted in a bimmer together for three solid days? Over breakfast in San Bernadino, we realized that the only recent photos we had of us together were from our skydiving excursion and Danita’s wedding. So we bought an old school camera and made up for lost time, taking pictures of ourselves, the sun-bleached terrain, rusted motel signs and wide blue sky.
Stepping out of the car, I put my hand to my forehead and scanned the horizon like a trail-weary Sacagawea. I loved spending time with Samuel, but really, I’d never seen anyone fret over a squeaky dashboard quite like him. I snapped several photos of highway, curving for miles until it vanished into an azure haze. Then I turned the camera on my fellow road warrior, catching him mid-stretch, a strip of skin and boxers exposed beneath his tee. Mmmm, Samuel. Sacagawea who?
“Are you ready for that talk?” he asked. Removing his sunglasses, he waved them in front of my glazed eyes.
“Um, sure.” I blinked rapidly. We spread a blanket and plopped down, my eyes still skimming over his muscled torso. He dug the cooler out of the trunk and placed it on the blanket.
“Ah…when did you first find out you were bipolar?”
“You mean when did I find out I have bipolar disorder,” he corrected. “I was diagnosed not long after our divorce. Before that, doctors believed it was clinical depression complicated by anxiety.”
“Am bipolar, have bipolar—is it that much of a difference?”
“I’m not bipolar. I’m Samuel.” He smirked. “Being something and having something are very different, yes. I don’t say you are curly hair because you have curly hair. Which is wonderfully soft, by the way.” He reached for one of my waves.
“Point taken.” I smeared peanut butter over a slice of bread, then dabbed a bit on Samuel’s nose.
Yesterday, after reading his few paragraphs about the ups and downs of his disorder, my first reaction was to crawl into his lap and hold him, then violently shake him for being so stupidly self-sacrificing. I cried for a solid hour, my cheek against his knees. He remained silent the entire time, allowing me my grief, sometimes stroking my hair. I choked and trembled and got snot on his shorts. And then the tears faded, leaving me spent. I rolled my shoulders in the shower, unwinding until I could go five minutes without tears. When I returned to his suite, wet hair dripping over my shoulders, he was asleep.
He slept for hours while Caroline, Justin, and I haggled with talk shows and journalists to make up for Samuel’s missed commitments. In the end, we appeased them with exclusives at an upcoming Water Sirens event in New York. They’d sell their mothers for a chance to cover Samuel and Indigo’s first public appearance together since their “split.”
Like cave creatures, we squinted against the sun when we emerged from the Roosevelt to wish Caroline good luck with her new author. I watched with blazing eyes as Caroline pressed her cheek to Samuel’s and whispered her good-byes. When she walked out the door, I counted each step until she rounded the corner and left our lives. Step…step…step…gone.
Last night, as Samuel softly kissed me good night, he peered down at me with a curious face.
“Why aren’t you angrier?” he asked.
Was I angry? I didn’t feel angry. I wrapped my arms around a throw pillow. “Being angry doesn’t solve anything,” I concluded.
“There’s such a thing as fair anger, Kaye. You can have that toward me and I’d deserve it.”
“If I don’t feel anger toward you, I don’t feel it. Can I ask you something, though?”
“Anything.”
“Were you ever going to tell me the truth?”
He toyed with a pillow tassel, pensive. “Storytelling has always been the way I express my thoughts.” Yes, I knew this. “In my mind, I had this grand plan laid out. I’d write a book from childhood to the aftermath of our divorce as a way to explain my illness to you. I titled it after something you could relate to—the highs and crashes you experience in that Colorado whitewater. Then, after you had read it, you’d know everything and we could both move on.”
“How very logical.”
“I’m a man, Kaye—I’m hard-wired to fix and protect. Of course it blew up in my face. Once you were back in my life, I should have told you right away instead of waiting to finish our book.”
“It’s not too late, Samuel. You have an entire road trip to tell me your secrets. Please, help me to trust you again…”
So now, on the road to Planet Bluegrass, he was sharing his story—the entire story.
Samuel split an apple with a paring knife and gave me half. “Bipolar II is heavy on the depression, light on the mania.”
“Hypomania.”
His eyebrows shot up. “You’ve done your research.” He leaned against the car tire, crossing his long legs. “I’ve never had a full-blown manic episode, though the night you found me in New York and my arrest in Raleigh are arguably borderline. The cocaine intensified them. That, and I was on strong antidepressants when I left for Raleigh with Caroline. High doses of antidepressants also exacerbate manic episodes.”
“But you’re taking antidepressants now.”
“Just a low dose. Not enough to cause problems.”
I frowned. “When were you diagnosed with depression? Surely not while we lived in Boulder?”
“No. My father had his suspicions when he found me in New York, but I wasn’t diagnosed until Christmas.”
“Alonso and Sofia conveniently didn’t mention that. Son-of-a—” I mumbled.
Samuel flinched. “I asked them not to. Actually, I forced them—I held a figurative gun to my head.”
“You threatened to kill yourself if they told me you were depressed? That’s kind of extreme.”
“Not exactly,” he sighed. “I’m not being very clear, am I?” He drummed his fingers, then snapped. “Did you know in the Middle Ages, people believed in fate? That they had no control over their futures?”
“Is that supposed to be a segue?”
“Shush, you. So if your life was fated to suck and you couldn’t do anything about it, you might as well accept it. For the longest time, I believed the same thing—I was going to end up self-destructing exactly like my mother, and there wasn’t a thing I could do. It started as a black thought here, a disappointment there. When I went to college, those feelings grew heavier. I didn’t know what the heck was going on in my mind or where this blackness came from, but I was desperate to maintain some shred of control. Thus, the drug use.”
“Self-medicating.”
“Yes.” He told me how once he left for New
York, he holed up in his brownstone bedroom, did lines, and wrote. Finally, Togsy had enough of his “moping” and made it his mission to get him high and laid. He leaned forward. “That day was the first time I felt a shift in my head. After months of hopelessness, I began to feel euphoric. Powerful. Angry. I actually looked forward to Togsy’s party. I’d already messed up my life, so why not thoroughly destroy my soul? Very emo—I was three bucks short for black hair dye at the emporium.” He gave a humorless laugh. “As fate would have it, you decided to fly to New York and visit the very night I had my first brush with mania.”
I watched his hands clench and noticed they were trembling—either residual symptoms of his episode, or just plain nerves.
“Is the mania why you can’t remember what happened?”
“Yes. It’s only happened twice, though, in New York and Raleigh. Those memories are comparable to peering through a frosted window—I can see shapes and colors, but nothing’s clear. My doctors believe the coke had something to do with it.” He stilled his hands, but then his knees started jiggling. “You may have noticed I’m also a randy bastard during hypomanic episodes.”
“Just a little.”
“I am so very sorry for that, Kaye. You deserve better.”
“Let me decide who I deserve.” Dang it, his hands were shaking again. I buttered another slice of bread and handed it to him, something to keep them busy.
“When my father found me, I was frantically running up and down the street, rambling about my mother and begging him to send you home before I hurt you. He thought I was having some sort of drug-induced anxiety attack.” He winced. “I think he was afraid I would off myself, or even you.”
“Would you have?”
Blue eyes flared. “You, never. Myself…I’m not sure. But given my birth parents’ suicides, can you blame him for believing I might?” Samuel explained how Alonso relented and sent me home. I went back to Lyons, and Samuel went to detox. As the drugs left his system and he visited a therapist, he started to feel like himself again, even hopeful. During this time, Caroline scored his first book deal with Berkshire House.
“Once I was ‘cured,’ I had these grand plans of sweeping back to Boulder and asking you to forgive me.”
It was my turn to wince. “I bet all of you were really ticked when you received the divorce papers.”
I’d hit the mark, but he didn’t validate it. “I was angrier at myself. Rationally, I knew why you did it. Toss my cruel little good-bye note into the equation, and what choice did you have? I was so sure I knew what was best for you, but now I see how condescending it was. I don’t need to be a perfect man—just your man.” Samuel looked at me so hopefully, so nervously. “You’re too far away. May I hold you?”
“Not yet,” I murmured, absently digging seeds from an apple slice. “So you were planning to return to me, but you had a setback.”
“The blackness returned. It was so bad, there was no doubt I was clinically depressed.”
“What was it like?”
“Just as I described in my story—like I was imprisoned on the very bottom of the ocean, trapped under thousands of years of sediment buildup.” His voice went flat. “I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t breathe. I was afraid to write because I’d fail. Each morning I woke, I was heavy with the knowledge that I had to get through another day. And love?” He snorted cynically. “The connection was bad—I couldn’t hear love for all the static, and I couldn’t speak it because the line was dead. That’s why I agreed to the divorce.”
Samuel’s haggard face flashed through my memory. “I remember how horrible you looked in Jaime’s office.”
“Our marriage was over, Kaye. My only consolation was that I freed you to be happy again. Seeing how heartbroken you were simply reinforced my belief that you were better off without me.”
“I wish I’d known.”
I wondered if our divorce also split the other Cabral marriage down the middle: Sofia sided with me, and Alonso, with Samuel. But, more than ever, the fact they’d kept me out of the loop while Samuel suffered was biting. And even more painful was this: I rarely asked how Samuel was. If ever. Heated tears pricked the corners of my eyes. I needed to move again. Grabbing Samuel’s hands, I tugged him to his feet. “Come on. Let’s get to Flagstaff before sunset.”
We didn’t return to Samuel’s story until we’d safely climbed the hills carrying us up to Flagstaff, through lush ponderosa forests. After dropping our bags at the quaint bed and breakfast Samuel had selected, we wandered into town.
It felt like home. The mountains here were arid, where spots of green mingled with red rock plateaus below our inn balcony. Flagstaff itself was an Old West timber town and, if we weren’t leaving at the flipping crack of dawn to visit the Grand Canyon, I would have explored more. Instead, Samuel and I took a quick jaunt along the main stretch for dinner before making our way back to the inn.
Knowledge of the Cabrals’ seven-year silence ate at my peace. I envisioned Alonso villainously twirling a handlebar mustache, Sofia sporting a stove-pipe hat, and Danita leering at me with rope and two miles of railroad track.
“Okay,” I said, my fingers skimming a hedgerow. “From where I’m sitting, it looks like your family either hated my guts or thought I was so incompetent, I couldn’t be there for my own husband.”
Samuel pushed up the brim of his ball cap and kissed my forehead, and my hackles smoothed. “I should tell you that Danita has only known since May. She found my meds in my bathroom cabinet and confronted me right before her bridal shower, of all times.” Ah, that would explain her dourness during hors d’oeuvres. “And Angel knew something was wrong, though he never understood the extent.”
I felt relieved that Danita hadn’t been hiding this from me for seven years. But wow, no wonder she’d been angry with her brother.
Samuel continued. “They were walking a tightrope, trying not to upset the tentative balance and send me tumbling, but still be there for you. It didn’t help that I threatened to disappear into Mexico if they called you—that’s what I meant by holding a gun to my head. In the end, my parents were scared and went into protective lock-down mode.”
“But they had seven years to tell me, Samuel. They could have said something after you got back on your feet.”
“What would be the point? Everyone believed you were doing well—happy, even, so why drag you into my drama?”
I wanted to argue, but we were at an impasse. “So you were going to run away to Mexico, but Caroline held your publishing contract over your head. You followed her to Raleigh instead, and were arrested there. What happened?”
He explained how he’d fallen back into cocaine and slipped into another episode. The night of his arrest, the cops found him at two a.m., sprawled under a row of pear trees, no coat, reeking of vodka and fiddling with the drug paraphernalia scattered over his stomach. He told them he was counting tree branches. They, of course, tossed him in a holding pen with ten puking frat boys until Caro bailed him out. “Not a shining moment,” he professed. “Part of my sentence was hospitalization—did you know this?”
“Caroline told me.” I struggled to hide my hurt, but he must have read it in my face anyway.
“Kaye, please don’t think Caroline means more to me because she knew. This may sound cruel, but I didn’t care if she left me because of it. I do care, though, about losing you again.” He began to walk. “The judge agreed to treatment in New York rather than North Carolina. I don’t need to tell you how I felt about discovering I had the same illness which most likely killed my mother.”
“The whole fate thing.”
He nodded. “I drifted, fluctuating between bewilderment and anger—bewilderment that I actually had bipolar disorder, and anger that I couldn’t fix it. I used my writing to channel a lot of the anger. I also used it to escape into a fairy-tale life where you and I were together, where I hadn’t cut off my friends and family.”
“That’s very sad,” I murmured.
“It was a way to cope.” He explained how he struggled to hide his illness and live a normal life. He established a routine. Finished his degree. Furthered his career. Stayed on his meds. Alonso and Sofia returned to Lyons, and he left bustling lower Manhattan for the quieter Fort Tryon neighborhood.
“What made you decide to return at Thanksgiving, two years ago?” I asked.
“I missed you. And I’d been doing well, so I thought I was permanently healthy. In reality, I was slipping again. Several episodes swiftly followed—a lot of The Last Other was written during that time. It was a mess to edit, chock-full of what Caro calls ‘self-loathing metaphorical prose garbage.’ The same kind of stuff I deleted a few days ago.”
“So that’s why she thinks I cause your episodes. Between our divorce and Thanksgiving—”
Samuel halted and grabbed my elbow, staring down at me with cold-sober eyes. “Caro is absolutely wrong. Stress causes my episodes, not you. Never you, Kaye. If we’re going to be together, you must understand this.” He gave my elbow a gentle squeeze, then dropped his hand.
Ugh, manipulative woman. “So why now and not two years ago?” I asked. “What’s different? Do you feel you’re ‘permanently healthy’?”
He shook his head. “No such thing. Most days I’m healthy, other days I’m not, and it will be this way for the rest of my life. The difference is this: you asked for answers. You want me in your life. I’m hard-pressed to refuse you.” He smiled down at me.
I lovingly traced his jawline with my index finger, and stood on my toes to place a lingering kiss on his lips. Then I glanced at my watch—seven o’clock. The sun would set soon, and I wanted to watch it ignite the mountains from our inn balcony.
“Are you ready to go?” Samuel asked. The edge of his pinkie brushed mine; he was unsure whether he should hold my hand.
I tangled my fingers with his.
Later that evening, Samuel and I reclined together on the patio’s chaise longue, he with his Moleskine notebook and me with the sunset. A yellow pool of porch light circled us, growing stronger as the day dimmed. He leaned against me, shirtless back pressing into my stomach despite the cool mountain breeze. His long, jean-clad legs were bent so he could write against them. My arm rested across his sternum, claiming him. Every now and then, I’d run my hand over the soft hair of his chest and feel him tense as he wrote. He’d turn his face and kiss the crook of my elbow, then go back to his script writing.
Skygods (Hydraulic #2) Page 18