Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  “Do it,” he said. We held hands, smiled, kissed.

  “All of it?” I asked.

  “All of it.” He spread his arms across the table at our bounty.

  “Even that?”

  I gave him a wide-eyed look. There had been a time when even a hint at his father’s abuse, even a look, would have sent him out of the restaurant into the street.

  He chugged his wine. He shrugged and said, “Even that.”

  Then he let me feed him something sweet and fatty from my fork.

  Some might call this grooming.

  But wasn’t he consenting to being seen by me, by my camera? Wasn’t he entrusting me with his story?

  * * *

  “I’m a person,” Aaron tells me on another day. We are in bed in our new house, piles of laundry at our feet, no wine glasses in our hands. Around me are stacks of dog-eared books: Loving Someone with Bipolar Disorder. Total Recovery. The Body Keeps the Score. The sores on Aaron’s arms look like they’ve been painted on by a talented but overzealous special-effects makeup artist.

  “Not a project,” he says. “Not a mystery.”

  THEORY 6

  His parents made him sick.

  “We now know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive,” Dr. van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score. “These changes explain why traumatized individuals become hypervigilant to threat at the expense of spontaneously engaging in their day-to-day lives.”

  Does it matter if the trauma isn’t remembered?

  Once, a dentist looked at his X-rays. He looked inside his mouth. “What kind of injury did you have as a child?” he asked.

  Aaron said, “What do you mean?”

  His jaw had been impacted, the dentist said, as though from a heavy blow. It was early, before he’d lost his baby teeth.

  You’re not the only person who had a shitty childhood, is a sentence that sometimes knocks around in my mouth, like a loose tooth. Maybe once or twice, I’ve said it.

  I know I’m not the only person who had a shitty childhood, is a sentence I’ve heard him say, once or twice.

  QUAY NORTH

  2002

  A few days after we moved from New York to Florida, to the condo called Quay North where Aaron had spent his teenage years, I went about cleaning his father’s refrigerator.

  It had not been cleaned for years, or maybe ever. It required Formula 409, several rolls of paper towels, and, perhaps too late, a dishcloth tied around my face, covering my nose and mouth, like a bandit’s. It required great powers of distraction, as I tried not to think about the steaks that had been stacked in the freezer, tried not to wonder whether the dried, meat-colored trails of grime that were despite my best efforts now caked under my fingernails were cat food or human food or some alien fungus our planet had not seen before.

  “Gross,” Aaron said over my shoulder.

  I narrowed my eyes at him over the dishcloth.

  “I told you I’m not touching that fridge. My dad got E. coli in this kitchen once.”

  He had told me that before. E. coli had seemed like a mythical, abstract organism. If it was too small to see, was it real? Now I believed him. But it was too late.

  Almost immediately, I got sick.

  Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe it was the change of climate, moving from smoggy Manhattan to salty South Florida. Maybe I had caught something on the plane. (We’d left in such a rush, fleeing our apartment before our lease was up, that we couldn’t afford a moving truck; we’d sold our furniture to other people in our building and FedExed everything else.) Maybe it was the stale cigarette smoke that stained the walls of his room. But that night my throat closed up and my body grew hot, and then clammy, and then cold, and I lay moaning in Aaron’s old bed and thought I would die.

  I’m going to die here, I thought.

  I thought, scene of the crime. I’m living in a crime scene.

  I used my powers of distraction. I tried not to think about what had happened in this apartment. I tried not to remember that Aaron had fled to this room and locked the door to keep himself safe from his father. I tried not to think of the girls he’d brought to this bed later, the one who had lived here with him in this room, all of the skin cells and fluids and microbes and ash that were trapped in the urine-colored shag carpet. In the dark, that night, I tried to forget it all; I could float for a few minutes in black un-memory, I could will myself back to New York, on a blanket with a book in Central Park, or ahead to some other future, in a house where I would have dinner parties on a long farm table, with little sprigs of herbs on the edge of each white plate, where I wasn’t living in this place, but then I was here again, heavy in the bed, feeling the springs of the mattress stabbing every muscle. I dreamed dreams of dark shapes. My head felt as if it would fall off, backward, back to earth. My arms ached, my legs, and mostly my throat, which felt swollen to twice its size. I couldn’t swallow. When I swallowed, I felt like I was swallowing glass. So I didn’t. I didn’t drink the water Aaron brought me in the night. I let him bring me a wet washcloth for my head. He did his best to care for me. In the morning, when I wasn’t better, when I didn’t dare open my mouth to speak, he sat on the edge of the bed. The sun was too bright, coming in the sliding glass door, shining off the too-beautiful water. How was it so beautiful out there, and so miserable in here? “I think I should take you to your parents’,” he said.

  “Please,” I croaked.

  * * *

  Tucked under my turquoise sheets, against the forest-green wall I’d painted myself, under the SAVE THE RAINFOREST poster, I was as cozy as a bug. Still sick, but cozy. My mom brought me lemon tea I was too sick to drink, crossword puzzles I was too dizzy to look at, but she was there, the familiar, warm shape of her on the edge of the twin bed. I pressed my cheek to her blue-jeaned hip. She brushed my hair with her fingers. I had just turned twenty-three, but I could pretend for a day that I was thirteen again, before I had fallen in love and left home and moved into an E. coli-infested apartment.

  I tried to be objective. I had once hated my house, too. I couldn’t wait to move away. My parents smoked in the house here, too, it was probably in the walls and the carpet—years later, I would catch a whiff of it on an old sweater or stack of papers, and sneeze—and the dust! Did we even own a duster? I had never seen my mother mop the floors. We had ants in this house. And, once, rats! It was too horrible to even remember. They had come through the rotten walls, the wood under the kitchen sink soggy from the humid hurricane air. Nothing was sealed properly. Everything was wet. In my room, the AC unit in the window was attached to the glass with duct tape, but not enough. As a teenager, I had once been sleeping in this bed when a tree frog leapt, as though out of my rainforest poster, onto my face.

  So. Others might find this place gross. I once thought it was. Still, it was what I knew. It was home. In my feverish state, I understood for one moment why Aaron, at home alone in his own childhood bed, felt safe.

  * * *

  My next mistake, after cleaning the refrigerator, was going to the ER.

  “I’ll take you in the morning,” my mother said, “if you’re not better.” She looked down at me. I know now, as a mother, as a veteran of emergency rooms, she was assessing the emergency level. Was I being dramatic? Like when I was eight and riding my bike to school and found a baby bird fallen out of its nest on the sidewalk, and I begged to stay home, saying my stomach hurt, and please could we take the bird home? Fine, she had decided then, to my great joy.

  She put her hand on my forehead now. “Or do you want to go tonight?”

  I nodded.

  Here is what I wasn’t thinking about: health insurance. I had aged out of the plan my parents had paid for when I was in college. My part-time job at Poets & Writers—I would be continuing, with a new title, contributing editor! from afar—did not pay health insurance. I hadn’t seen a doctor since going to my college health center. But I felt terrib
le and it was nine o’clock at night and I felt I needed to go to the hospital.

  I lay in a hospital bed for four hours. They tested my blood and gave me an IV of fluids. You have to swallow, they told me. Don’t be afraid to swallow. And then they sent me home with a diagnosis of a throat infection. A throat infection! Because it was viral, they couldn’t give me antibiotics. I was on my own. I watched my mother hand over her American Express card and saw the canary-yellow receipt. $495. My parents didn’t have that kind of money. I had never felt so foolish, until the next bill came in the mail, addressed to me this time, for $2,700.

  I didn’t have $2,700. I’d spent my last five hundred dollars FedExing everything in my apartment to myself. My parents didn’t have $2,700, and Aaron didn’t have $2,700. I went into the billing office and inquired about a sliding scale. By that time, my throat had gotten better on its own. I provided my income for the last year. I had made too much money to qualify for a reduced fee. Too much money! I’d left New York because I couldn’t even afford to have my hair cut.

  So I didn’t pay the bill. And for seven years, there went my credit.

  In the coming years, I would spend many late nights in the ER with my husband, and though we would be insured up to our eyeballs and lucky to have a $100 copay, I’d enter under the fluorescent lights and smell the sick, shameful tang of rubbing alcohol and remember that no matter how friendly the staff was, this was not friendly territory. It was my first adult lesson about the health care system: it sucks.

  I was also learning that it was easy to blame everything on Morris.

  * * *

  It was the year of disgust.

  I spent a lot of time trying to clean that apartment, to air it out, transform it. The main room was tiled with those almond-colored tiles with dark brown grout that tiled every other South Florida house I’d ever been in. I hated that tile, but I scrubbed them, square by square. I took Aaron’s old urine-colored desk and painted it white, and set it up in the living room, overlooking the balcony and the water, and if I didn’t move my head too far to the right or left, if I just sat at my white desk, looking at the ocean, working on the magazine columns, or writing—I was trying to put together an application for grad school—everything would be okay.

  The cats—we still had two, but these were Morris’s evil cats—had peed all over the white Pottery Barn couch. The couch was now the same pale yellow of the rest of the apartment. I removed the cushion covers and soaked them in OxiClean in the pale-yellow bathtub and Febrezed the cushions on the balcony, hoping the beachy air might cleanse them. It kind of worked. The couch was usable again, if you didn’t tell anyone of its history. Tell no one of the filthy past! If you just soaked it all enough! That’s what I was teaching myself. This was 2002 and Febreze and OxiClean were still new and it seemed they might be able to fix everything.

  Morris’s bedroom door, for a long time, stayed closed. We didn’t need the master bathroom. It was filled with boxes and boxes of his junk, of collectibles and books and art. Every once in a while, Aaron went in there looking for something to sell and found it and closed the door again.

  Slowly we formed a plan. We would stay in Florida for the year. Aaron would sell off the collectibles inventory, empty the storage units. We would fix up the apartment. We wouldn’t gut it—we couldn’t afford that—but we would give it a good facelift. And then we’d sell it. It was clear by now that Morris wasn’t going to recover from his stroke. He’d never come back here again. Aaron had accepted that.

  It was the way I got through the year, hating the apartment, waiting to be rid of it, telling myself, soon it will be gone. I was beginning to understand the hostile sense of possession Aaron had always had over his father’s riches: that he was owed. It was a kind of passive aggression I was perfecting myself: I, too, felt I was owed, for the sacrifice of having left New York.

  When I finally opened the door to Morris’s room, I held my breath. If I didn’t breathe in the toxic dust, I would be safe. I crossed the room quickly, like a child afraid of the dark, and whipped open the curtains. Sunlight streamed in. It traveled across the ceiling and across the wall and to the bed, with its bare mattress, its rusting brass frame. It was where I had met the man, where he had looked up from his newspaper, sitting shirtless on that bed, and waved to me.

  * * *

  My disgust did not extend to Aaron. Aaron was, if anything, more beautiful to me, more precious; he was a child again, easier to love, easier to forgive. When you learn something about someone you love, something terrible, you find a room in yourself you didn’t know you had, a new organ of understanding. I had a small key now for a very small, sticky lock. But when I could turn it, it made a kind of sense. Ah yes, I thought, of course. This is why he is the way he is. The key granted me a frightening sort of order.

  Disgust is a breed of fear, though. And fear is a lack of understanding. There was disorder in Aaron, a chaos. Something had happened to him that was beyond solution, maybe beyond grace. It was a dark power let loose in the apartment. And that is what I feared.

  * * *

  He was sitting in the recliner in the TV room, as though we had just left him there that morning to run an errand. General Hospital murmured on the screen, one pink, airbrushed hospital inside another.

  I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t understand how Aaron wanted to see him. But every few days, he drove to the VA hospital and visited his father. If Aaron could do it, I thought, I could, too.

  Morris sat in a pink gown and pale-blue hospital pants, his hands gripping the arms of his chair. His mouth hung open, his head weighted back, his eyes resting on the place where the ceiling met the wall. A paper bib, leftover from lunch, was smeared with the dried crust of what looked like applesauce.

  Was this his punishment? I wondered. To be trapped in this purgatory of old men in La-Z-Boys, year after year?

  His steely eyebrows rose up, fierce. The wrinkles in his forehead had deepened. He was so weak, so fragile, his skinny collarbones were poking out of his V-neck.

  Was it cruel to wish that he’d die? Or would it be too gentle for him, a gift? Was God drawing out his life on purpose?

  Morris didn’t believe in God. He’d told Aaron, When you’re dead, you’re dead.

  Aaron put his hand on his father’s shoulder. “Hey, Pop.”

  His eyes searched the room a moment before finding Aaron’s face. He spoke one long, affirmative vowel. He touched Aaron’s hand.

  Before you can change your mind, touch his other shoulder, birdlike. Put your lips to his scalp. It’s more out of curiosity than kindness, certainly not yet like forgiveness. Is this still him? Is he still there? He smells—your heart breaks—like Aaron. You know just what his skin will feel like when he’s an old man.

  * * *

  Still, there was a kind of comfort in Florida.

  It was a place I’d never wanted to return to, but now that we were there, it had its perks. I spent hours reading by the pool, watching the palm trees sway, watching my skin remember how to tan. I worked out in the women’s gym off the pool, riding the ancient exercise bike. I remember reading all of Middlesex on that bike. Aaron and I revisited the hot tub where we spent so much time that first summer we’d met. We went out to eat at all the old restaurants and we hung out with old friends and we spent too much time at the Gardens Mall. It was so clean! Was there any place cleaner than the Gardens Mall? They had even banned smoking! I went there just to drink in the clean fountain air.

  Now it was my parents’ house we went to for dinner. Not every Sunday. Just when we felt like it. I helped my dad with a stir-fry. Aaron watched Westerns with him or helped him figure out something on his computer. I started substitute teaching at the middle school where my mom taught English, and we’d ride in together every morning, and I’d read her Alice Munro stories and we’d talk. She’d roll down the window to smoke her cigarette, and then roll it right back up.

  There was a kind of acceptance required in living
in Florida, an acceptance of ease, of idleness. I had fled such idleness. I was drawn, as we know, to difficulty. I craved change. Seasons. The windburn of winter. From our balcony, we could see the same old man tanning himself every day by the pool. He wore a royal-blue Speedo and royal-blue egg-shaped cups over his eyes and he was the color of roast beef. I was scared of turning that indolent shade of bronze. After spending hours dragging around a lounge chair to chase the sun, I would get up, sun-sick and disgusted, and go sit on the stationary bike, trying to pedal somewhere.

  Aaron had his Range Rover back, its own little carport spot to park in, and he hosed it down lovingly and drove it all over town, to see friends, to go shopping, to go to the beach. He drove mostly to his friend’s warehouse, where he practiced with his band. “How come I’m never allowed to see you play?”

  “You are.”

  “Well, how come I haven’t?”

  “We’re just practicing.”

  Mostly, I knew, he was hanging out and smoking pot. The warehouse was like a bar for stoners. It was his guy space. I got it. I was glad, in a way, he had it. In New York, he’d had virtually no friends. Here, he was with his people. It was like we’d never left. It was a perpetual adolescence he was choosing to live in, and I could kind of see why.

  At home, he read an old copy of Gray’s Anatomy he’d found in his bedroom. He told me he used to want to be a doctor. Also, it was the secret bible of metal lyrics. But now it inspired lyrics to a rap song he went around singing.

  Yo, I live in my dad’s condo

  My favorite part of the brain is the fissure of Rolando!

  In spite of myself, I laughed.