Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  This is six years ago, when it started.

  Watch him go out to the shitty little AstroTurf porch to smoke and pet the stray cats he’s adopted, Prego and Lobster. Count the hours he’s out there. When he comes in, smelling of smoke, with a Ziploc sandwich bag full of things coming out of the sores on his body, examine them from a distance of approximately three feet. They look like tiny twigs, like something he might have found on a mulch playground or pulled off the wing of a moth. They look like dust, lint, thread. They look like splinters and ash and bone. Some of them are white. Some of them are red and blue. Sometimes you think you see these things on or in your husband’s skin. Mostly you see them once they have already been collected.

  Watch him tape them to Post-it notes. Watch him slip them into matchboxes. You have no idea what they are. Find them on the coffee table, in the tool drawer, taped to the inside of the kitchen cabinet.

  “Look!” he will say. “Look at this.” He holds a tiny magnifying glass to a knuckle. Suddenly he is a person who owns many types of magnifying glasses, loupes, scopes. You peer through the even tinier glass within the glass. “Do you see it?”

  “Do I see what?”

  “I don’t know what! Something! Right there!”

  “Stay still.”

  “Do you see it?”

  “I don’t know, honey. I see skin.”

  “That’s not skin!”

  “I mean, it’s a sore. It’s not normal skin. But it’s skin. I think?”

  What is normal? What is foreign? Best to nod, or shrug, or both. Best to say, “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  It’s his mother who first tells you about Morgellons disease. For years she lived in New York but she’s in Santa Fe now, in a little adobe house filled with crystals and herbs. She has not been much of a mother to your husband, but she sends gifts to the kids on the holidays—books, birdhouses, cowboy hats—and she tucks in little salves and sachets for her son, sensing, perhaps, some looming malady. She is either supernaturally attuned to the body or she knows nothing; you’re not sure. “Look it up,” she says, and spells it: M-o-r-g-e-l-l-o-n-s. “Joni Mitchell has it. I’m sending you some emu oil.”

  You look it up, and there it is. The microscopic fibers, blown up to ten times their size, appear on the screen in full color, as clear as the red and blue wires on a car battery. In forum after forum, patients complain of the same symptoms that have plagued your husband: the pain, the fatigue, the stubborn skin lesions that appear overnight and sprout mysterious fibers in all the colors of the rainbow.

  “Oh, my God,” you both say, staring at the screen. The lesions look exactly like Aaron’s.

  You read on. You can’t stop reading. It is the jackpot you’ve been waiting for. There is the interview with Joni Mitchell. “I have this weird, incurable disease that seems like it’s from outer space,” she says. “Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm: they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral.” Yes! you think. You can’t resist the imagery, the flattery: your husband is without category, paranormal, an outlier. There is the Charles E. Holman Foundation for Morgellons disease page. There is the story, again and again, of the mother who named the disease, who revived it from a seventeenth-century letter from the English physician Sir Thomas Browne describing an “endemial distemper of little children” in France. Endemial distemper! You don’t know what this means but it sounds like your husband.

  But then, on page after page, is doctor after doubting doctor, who say that Morgellons disease is a fiction. The symptoms are in the patients’ heads. There is the Washington Post article, the CNN coverage, and finally, in January 2012, the CDC study, which concludes—again, try to read the words as far from the screen as possible—that these patients don’t have fibers in their skin, or bugs, or bacteria. They have delusional parasitosis. The recommendation? Psychiatric care. Antidepressants.

  Notice your stomach dropping. Take a deep breath.

  You try to read the skepticism with skepticism. Look at your husband. He’s not well. He’s not himself. And yet look at the things his body is producing. He didn’t make them up!

  You must make a choice. Are you with the deluded patients? Or the unfeeling doctors?

  You are a writer and a professor of fiction—you love a good sci-fi monster; you love, too, a good underdog: your imagination believes the world is bigger than what we know of it.

  But you are also a professor of rhetoric and composition. You believe in science. You believe in research. What is it you’re always telling your students about supporting their arguments with evidence?

  As it happens, your husband is the one to decide for you. He makes his choice quickly, chastened. He does not want to be with the crazy people. He stops collecting the fibers. He throws away the quart-sized bottles of emu oil that have sat unopened in the cabinet, because he definitely does not want to be with his mother.

  Still, his skin doesn’t heal. Knowing what it isn’t doesn’t help.

  * * *

  The only thing that seems to help? Alcohol. “You need to relax, honey,” your father tells him one day when he comes to visit and pours Aaron a glass of bourbon. He hasn’t been much of a drinker since you met him, but he accepts the glass, and then another. He doesn’t love bourbon, but he falls back in love with gin. The quart bottles begin to appear in the cabinet, in the recycling bin, on the kitchen counter. Blue gin the color of mouthwash.

  Watch him relax. Watch the sores fade to rosy scars. Watch his belly stretch wide and hard. Watch him sleep on the couch, on the cot he has set up downstairs. Give him some space. Sleep in your bed with your baby, nursing him all day and night. Nurse him while you half-sleep, while he half-sleeps. Watch the wall grow between you and your baby’s father, too tall to scale. Stand in the kitchen with your husband. Almost without words, agree that you need to return to couples counseling. The first time, in Charlottesville, didn’t really count.

  You choose the first man’s name you see in the yellow pages. Stu. On his voice mail recording, he has a voice like a game show host’s.

  In the waiting room there is a chocolate-covered suede love seat, a bottle of Cherry Almond Jergens, a well-maintained selection of People magazines, and more M&M paraphernalia than you have ever seen. Inside the office are M&M pillows, M&M candy machines, M&M cups and salt shakers and picture frames. Your homework was to bring a list of ten things you like about the other, and ten things you are unhappy about. The first item on your first list is He makes me laugh. The first item on your second list is Chaos. You can barely articulate further. It is written on a sheet of your son’s Spider-Man note paper.

  Who knows if it helps? You keep going. Your insurance doesn’t cover acupuncture but, praise be, it covers every cent of couples counseling. Instead, you spend the money on a sitter, every Wednesday at three o’clock. Stu has a salt-and-pepper beard, a Queens accent, white sneakers, and a gold chain. On the stereo he plays the Grateful Dead. He tells you he was a medic at Woodstock. “He definitely did mad drugs,” your husband jokes in the car on the way home, because doing mad drugs is something you still joke about.

  Watch your husband drink. Watch your husband sleep on the cot. Watch your husband grow so big that, one night, he breaks it. Watch him rage and cry in shame.

  Watch The Bachelor. The sexiest thing about the Bachelor is that he owns a vineyard. Drink red wine, but just a little. Your son is nursing, always, at your open bathrobe. You have an excuse, because suddenly your mother is dying of lung cancer. Your mother, who smoked a pack a day while pregnant with you. A little glass of wine can’t be so bad.

  Your father turns eighty. At your brother’s house in Virginia, where your parents live, the whole family surprises him, grandsons running around like puppies, your other brother sitting with your baby in his lap, letting him hold his empty beer bottle. Watch the hospice nurses come with their oxygen and meds. Wash your mother’s hair. Cut it. Slic
e off a crescent of your left thumb. She would have been the one to clean the wound, if she were all there. But she isn’t all there. She is going. She is breathing on one lung. You want to breathe for her, to inflate her lung through the nipple, like a balloon. “Good-bye,” she says before you leave. “You are wonderful children.”

  Come back the next week, after she’s gone. Find your father sitting on the couch eating pistachio ice cream. Find your baby book. “13 months. Weaned Nell. She’s mad at me.” Sleep with your baby in her bed, his body an anchor against your ribs, a bullet-proof vest. Nurse him. Drink in the vinegar sweat of his matted hair on the damp sheet.

  When your mother dies, your husband quits smoking. He loved her, your mother. And you love him for quitting. But he does not quit drinking. Your husband is no longer diseased, but he is an alcoholic. “You’re an alcoholic,” you tell him, realizing as you say it that this is what he is. Watch him realize it, too. Watch him rage and cry. Listen to him admit it. Watch him pour the blue gin down the drain. Listen to his promises.

  It brings you some comfort that the therapist is as surprised as you are.

  Well, your husband has taken pains to mask it. There had been so many drugs before you were in the picture—acres and acres of drugs. Cocaine and mushrooms and LSD, liquor bottles carpeting his teenage bedroom. You had thought, silly girl, that they were in the past tense. You had seen the tattoo artist affix the straight edge tattoos!

  The first stash you found was in college. Pot. “Just don’t hide it from me” became the refrain, so for a while he didn’t. For ten years, he smoked his pot in the open. He said it made him less sad, so it made you feel less sad, too.

  Then, the text messages. You don’t even want to touch his phone in the first place. But your own phone is dead or broken or lost when you pick his up from the bookshelf to set the alarm for the next morning and discover the texts from a woman with an abbreviated name, an alias, it seems. You don’t know what her name is, but you know that your husband is calling her sweetie and planning to meet up with her, for he’s gotta get out of this house soon.

  You drop the phone. It may as well be a gun. Always something else. Always some other secret, ready to discharge in your hands.

  You wake him, present him with the evidence. He begs forgiveness but does not explain. He is actually down on his knees. He didn’t get down on one knee to propose, but here he is now, begging. It feels appropriate. You say maybe. You are in your bathrobe.

  Go to Boston for a conference. Cry on the phone to your friends. Is there any forgiveness? You feel as though you’ve been drowned.

  On the phone in your hotel, listen to your husband admit who the woman was. Is? The ex-girlfriend with the glasses. Married to someone else now but still knocking on the door.

  You’ve always suspected that the reason your husband didn’t get down on one knee is because he got down on one knee for her. That it would feel dishonest, or something.

  Listen to your husband try out the phrase emotional affair. There are still unresolved feelings there. There is guilt and blame, wounds to heal, and forgiveness, yes. A door reopened. He will close it now.

  You aren’t still that teenage girl, are you, so jealous of those exes you can’t see straight? You are a full-grown woman in a conference hotel, with a dead mother and a hangover. Think about going downstairs to try to pick up a guy in the bar. So many writers hooking up with other writers, fish drawn to fish. How do you even do that? You feel like Ruth in Lorrie Moore’s story “Real Estate”: “The idea of taking her clothes off and being with someone who wasn’t a medical specialist just seemed ridiculous.” You don’t want to have a revenge affair. You miss your babies and your bathrobe. You don’t want anyone else. You just want things—everything—to be different.

  Return home. Drop your suitcase at the door. How can you not try, with these beautiful boys you’ve made together, hugging your knees?

  For a few weeks, there is peace. He carries your suitcase up the stairs. He does the laundry, the dishes. He gives you space. He sleeps on the couch.

  And then, weeks after he’s poured the gin down the sink, you find something else. Your heart has learned to seize up. It recognizes the fear like an old enemy. Not a text message, but a stash. Buried in the back of the bathroom drawer is a darling little balsa-wood box, and inside is a metal cigarette and a lighter and some little straw scraps—you are such a square—that look to you like pot.

  “It’s not pot,” he says. “It’s an herb. I got it online.”

  “Then why were you hiding it?”

  “Because you’d be mad!”

  For a week he stays at the hotel by the mall with the ugly turquoise roof. It’s the first time you worry, really worry, that he will kill himself. It’s a feeling of panic in the stomach. He comes home to visit the kids, and then you drop him off in the hotel parking lot, and you scream alone in the car, sure he will die. So you ask him to come home. Anyway, the money has run out. You can no longer afford the hotel.

  Why is he spending so much time in the bathroom? You can’t find another balsa-wood box, but it almost doesn’t matter. You have become a crazy woman, searching everywhere, trusting no one, a small forest rodent, vigilant of every predator, every sound. One night you are sitting at the kitchen table in your bathrobe with a towel on your head when you see him smile weakly from across the room. It is a smile he puts on. The smile of a child who hopes his mother will feed him. He wants forgiveness, or affirmation, but you realize you have neither. “I have nothing left to give,” you tell him.

  You are planning to leave town tomorrow to visit your family in Virginia. Tell your husband, “You can stay here. I’ll take the kids with me.” But he doesn’t want to stay here. His smile turns to rage. He grabs his jacket and keys and is gone before you can stop him, peeling out of the driveway in your shitty little Kia.

  All night, all bad night, in bed in your bathrobe with your baby, you have that feeling you had while he stayed in the hotel with the turquoise roof. Is that where he is now? You call all night. Finally, in the morning, he picks up the phone. That fucking phone. He sounds half dead. “I just want to make sure that it’s true,” he says.

  “That what’s true?”

  “That it’s over,” he says.

  “Yes,” you recite. The words are like wax. “I’m sorry. It’s over.”

  He hangs up the phone.

  You dress yourself. You dress your children. You invite Emily over for lunch. She lives in the apartment in your house. She brings over her daughter. You make peanut butter sandwiches. You busy yourself, your stomach a pit of worry. When he bursts in the door, the children are playing with Play-Doh in the kitchen. Emily takes one look at him and shepherds the kids upstairs. He won’t look at you. He rummages, he rages. He finds his backpack. He pushes into the kitchen. He’s standing at the sink when he turns and looks at you, his eyes wide with black joy. The word you think is “monster.” “I’m going to do it,” he says.

  “No,” you say. “No no no no no!”

  But he is outside before you can stop him. You know what he’s going to do but you don’t know how he’s going to do it. So you make a choice. Follow him, or stay in the house with your children. When he comes back to the door, the door to the kitchen on the shitty AstroTurf porch, and jiggles the knob, he will find that you have locked it. He looks at you through the glass. You shake your head. He looks back at you with hate. And then he is gone again.

  The 911 operator wants to know how your husband is trying to kill himself. You say, “I think he’s taking pills.” You can’t see him through the door. He has the car door open in the driveway, and he’s hidden behind it. It’s the middle of the morning on a Saturday in April.

  The ambulance is there within minutes, the police cars, the fire truck. You watch through the window as they load him into the back and drive him away. He looks, you think hopefully, alive.

  Emily comes downstairs and holds you and now that it’s over you let you
rself cry. “Thank God for you,” you say. The children have seen nothing.

  And Emily whispers to you then that her ex-husband, her daughter’s father, tried to do it once, tried to hang himself from a shower rod. “Don’t worry,” she says reasonably. “It’s hard to kill yourself.” And it’s true—it’s hard to overdose on antidepressants. If he’d come back into the house for the Ativan, he might not have been so lucky.

  Put the kids in the car. Drive the six hours to your brother’s house. Sit in the backyard in the sun, because even though it’s still winter in Ithaca, spring has arrived in Virginia. Tell your eighty-year-old father what has happened. Listen to him tell you about the time he ended up in Bellevue after a woman left him and he tried to kill himself, too. His friends found him days later in his apartment, OD’d on pills, nearly dead. Your gentle, brilliant father, shirtless in a lawn chair, his sun-stretched skin. Watch the backyard spin. Think how your father lived a whole life before he met your mother. Think how close you were to not being.

  Imagine the first time your father told your mother this story. Did it make her love him more?

  Call your husband’s mother and tell her. Listen to her say, “I knew this would happen.” Listen to her say, “It’s that Morgellons. It’s destroyed his brain.”

  Don’t correct her. Don’t remind her that she abandoned him at six years old, leaving him with a father who destroyed him. Don’t say, “You might as well have dumped those pills down his throat.”

  Try not to pay attention to your love for him. Remember that he’s transformed into a monster. Don’t wonder if he can transform back.

  Leave your kids with your family. Say, “Thank God for you.” Drive home and spend the week looking for an apartment. Bring your friend Katie. Thank God for her, for all the women in the world.

  Visit him in the psych ward. Tell him he looks nice in his scrubs. Already the weight of the gin is vanishing from his body, but there is his body, he has one, blood washing through his veins. His skin is clear and healthy. His eyes sparkle and fizz. When he says, “I want to kiss you,” don’t let him yet. First, remember the way he looked at you when you were seventeen, over the counter at the record store. Wonder if the monster has been, somehow, killed. Wonder if he didn’t kill himself but killed the monster.