Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  There are six of us who meet afterward—a new, spontaneously assembled “us”—at the hotel bar. Then Adrienne, our American friend, joins us with two others, and we are nine people crowded around pushed-together tables in the loud lobby. Tourists come through to check in, pushing through the red velvet curtains, rolling their suitcases across the rustic tile floor. Aaron and I sit in the tall, throne-like chairs, order giant German beers and drink them slowly, listening to each person share their story. It feels like Al-Anon with alcohol, the kind of immediate intimacy that happens when strangers walk into a room, form a circle, and admit their shared trauma.

  There is our young couple from Prague, a gray-haired man from Wales, a neuroscientist from Amsterdam. Some of them have had lesions, but I’m surprised to learn that some of them haven’t: that their skin produces painful fibers and other materials without the presence of lesions at all. There are aches and pains and brain fog, fatigue for days and days. There is shame and disbelief, frustration. There is the same DIY philosophy that so many have had to cultivate, figuring this thing out themselves. The neuroscientist, who will send us emails afterward, will have to go to Bulgaria to treat himself with the antibiotics, according to Dr. Savely’s recommendations at the conference. Aaron shares his war stories, too, from the rash that appeared one day to the latest cycle of breakouts. My heart slows down, calming with a certain relief and pride, as though I’m a mother watching her kid make friends on a playdate.

  There is some other feeling, too, I try to pay attention to. Disappointment, that these other patients don’t match Aaron’s profile exactly. I was looking for the kind of recognition I found in the Morgellons book, Aaron’s agony mirrored back to us. Instead, everyone’s story is a little different. But this is a comfort, too, I guess—that their suffering is unique. Perhaps this is what they share more than anything—not the specific symptoms but the specificity of their symptoms, their aloneness in their disease.

  “You can’t turn it into a war,” the neuroscientist says. He has all kinds of theories about the way the disease affects the body and the brain, and all of the multisyllabic scientific words to convince me, but in the end, he seems to say, there is only one’s attitude about living with it. “If you’re not fighting it all the time, you can’t lose.” He shrugs.

  This, more than anything, is the wisdom Aaron will carry back with him. “I like that,” he’ll tell me later. “I need to channel that guy.”

  From the lobby, a ruckus, and we look up from our beers to see a group of thirty young men in Lederhosen flood the room, rowdy as a soccer team—maybe they are?—and begin to check in all at once. We all crack up, take photos with our phones, for which the men pose gamely. It is the answer to all of our German vacation dreams.

  After that, six of us adjourn to the hotel restaurant, order rich wood-fired pizzas and bottles of red wine, talk late into the night. We pass around my purple notebook, write down our names and emails. I stop taking notes. I let myself drink too much. There is the pleasure and ease of getting drunk with a group of new friends, of putting aside my worries. Aaron’s shoulder is warm, his scarf is soft.

  * * *

  We return the day before the full moon.

  The day after that, Aaron’s sores just beginning to light up, we drive the three and a half hours south to Dr. Bernard, the Lyme doctor. He confirms it: Aaron has Lyme disease.

  “Really,” Aaron says.

  Well, it’s up for some interpretation, the doctor says. The Western blot test, which looks for antibodies to B. Burgdorferi proteins, is considered positive by the CDC when at least five of ten specific Immunoglobulin (IGg) bands are present. Aaron’s test shows four positive bands, and one indeterminate. (“41?” Laura will ask us later. When we confirm, she says, “41 is usually the problem.”) But to Dr. Bernard, given the test results and the symptoms, the diagnosis is clear.

  We tell him what we learned in Germany, present the slides I’ve printed out from Dr. Savely’s presentation, the exact combination of medicines to fight Morgellons. For a moment the laconic doctor is interested. He adjusts Aaron’s prescriptions. We make a follow-up appointment for six weeks.

  Remember, the doctor warns. The treatment can take a while to work. Months. Sometimes up to two years. It will get harder before it gets easier.

  * * *

  Sometimes, when the moon grows big and his skin glows red, when he turns back into the fearsome thing, I want to be the werewolf that gets to howl at the moon.

  Sometimes we go out into the car parked in the driveway and yell at each other, so the kids and my dad can’t hear us.

  It feels like we’re watching ourselves fight. There is the terror of not knowing what we are capable of saying to each other.

  We go around and around in circles. We go around the world, and come back, and we’re in the same place, locked in a Nissan Rogue in the driveway.

  “Why didn’t you believe me?”

  “I was scared.”

  “Why were you scared?”

  “I was angry.”

  “Why were you angry?”

  This time I know this will be a fight I will remember, this one will stand above the rest. I know he’s not just talking about the last few months, even the last few years. He asks me again, slowly, and this time he is using the present tense. “Why are you so angry with me?”

  We are both crying now. It’s true, I hate us both. I am trying to think of the answer to his question. I reach back. Way back to the beginning. When I was a stupid kid and he was a stupid kid, and we got together and stayed together because no one believed we could. When we lay in that Colorado bed and he told me what our life would look like, and I believed him.

  “Because you let me down, too.” Maybe I’m shouting it.

  He looks at me, like he knows what my next sentence will be, and is scared.

  “You said you’d take care of me. And you didn’t.”

  He doesn’t need to ask for more. He closes his eyes. He rests his head against the window. There is the relief of having said it, a thing I haven’t known I wanted to say.

  “I’m sorry,” he tells me. “I’m so sorry.”

  THEORY 7

  I have made him sick.

  I have asked for too much. Or I haven’t asked for enough.

  Either way, he can’t give me everything I need. (Does anyone give anyone everything they need?) The stress of not living up to who you said you’d be: if that’s not enough to make you sick, what is?

  People give each other heart attacks and hernias and ulcers. It happens all the time.

  I scold myself: I’m not the center of the universe.

  But I think of his parallel life: where he might be without me, if we’d never met. On a beach, in a band. On the balcony of his father’s condo, smoking a bowl and watching the sun rise. Healthy. Carefree.

  IRONY 7

  Why don’t we talk in private?”

  The last six months have been a blur of waiting rooms—in Binghamton and Syracuse, in Wilkes-Barre and Woodstock—but here I am again, in the Ithaca ER, in the hospital where Henry was born. Down the bright, busy corridor, the social worker will come for me. It’s always a gentle-voiced, older man. This one I recognize—a big man in glasses and a golf shirt, his ID hanging from a lanyard around his neck—though he doesn’t recognize me. “I’m sorry. Did we meet before?”

  “In the summer.” I settle into a chair. It’s kind of a conference room, kind of a waiting room, off of the main ER waiting room, where a few months before I watched the commercial for New Amsterdam. Tonight there is the same People magazine I’ve read in two other doctors’ waiting rooms this week, Jamie Lee Curtis and her triumph over opioid addiction. It’s early November now. Through the window, bitter bites of snow are testing the dark.

  “I’m sorry. Can you refresh my memory?”

  “It was the same thing. We talked in the café.” I point through the double doors to the next wing. “He was super manic. Agitated. I couldn’t ca
lm him down. We waited I think six hours that time for a psych eval. In the private waiting room with the bed?”

  He shakes his head sympathetically. “Is that why you’d brought him here? For a psych eval?”

  “It was the same thing. He wanted someone to look at his skin.”

  “He was seeing bugs at that time?” He looks at his clipboard. “Parasites?”

  I nod. “I wanted him to get a psych eval. I can’t tell you how hard I tried to get him into the psych ward.” I laugh a little and shake my head, but I don’t even feel like joking with myself. “I mean, unless you’re a danger to yourself, it’s impossible.”

  “But we didn’t take him?”

  I cried that night in front of this man, sitting in the darkened café, begging him quietly for help. “There never seems to be a bed.”

  Now I’m too tired to feel desperate. I am nowhere near tears. What’s closer to the surface is anger, for the hours I’m wasting in this hospital, for the doctors who don’t have the time for us, for my husband and whatever is inside him.

  “I see he was on the behavioral ward before,” the social worker says now. “Suicide attempt?”

  I nod. “Five years ago.”

  “Do you think he’s a danger to himself tonight?”

  He’s a danger to himself every day, I want to say. But that doesn’t mean he’s suicidal.

  “No.”

  “Do you want him admitted again?”

  “Honestly? I don’t think you can help him.”

  “What do you think he needs?”

  “I didn’t want to take him here to begin with. I know how this works by now. I knew the doctors would see one thing and dismiss him. But he begged me. He was desperate and scared and in pain. What was I supposed to do? I know he’s out of his mind tonight. But now I know more about why. That doctor in there? She put him in the crazy pile the moment she laid eyes on him.”

  The social worker looks helplessly at his clipboard, then back at me. “What’s changed?”

  “We finally have a diagnosis. But that doctor doesn’t want to hear it. I told him, ‘You don’t want to go to the ER. You’ll end up in the psych ward.’ If he ends up in the psych ward, now, after all this time—”

  “Do you think he has bugs infesting his skin?”

  Through the door to the main waiting room, I can see half a dozen college students in sweatshirts numbed out in front of the TV.

  I think carefully about the words.

  “There’s something infesting his skin. There’s also something infesting his brain.”

  The social worker makes a few notes on his clipboard. Then he rises and asks me to wait in the other waiting room, for another social worker. I rise with him, a little unsteady. This is not part of the drill. Usually the social worker places a call to the staff psychiatrist, who makes the call, having never seen the patient: Should he stay or should he go? We’ve been here four hours already. All I want to do is pay the copay, drive my husband home, and fall asleep, he with the help of a couple milligrams of Ativan. In the exam room, he’d refused it. I’d convinced him to take half a dose.

  “There?” I say, pointing to the main waiting room.

  He nods. “He’ll be right out to meet you.”

  I find a seat in front of the TV with the college kids. I am reading a graphic memoir about bipolar disorder, a book I bought months ago, when I thought Aaron had it. It seems like a long time ago. Knowing what it isn’t doesn’t help. And knowing what it is doesn’t help as much as we thought it would. It has not saved us from the ER. Anyway, I can’t concentrate on the book.

  Tonight, the TV is playing a game of football. The clock says it’s close to 9:00 P.M., but in the ER, time feels theoretical. It’s Friday night, and tomorrow daylight savings time will come to an end, but I’ve been in this waiting room for six months.

  Something is different tonight. Too much time has passed. Where is this guy, this other, mystery social worker? Has it been twenty minutes? More?

  When I left Aaron’s room, he’d been so restless that the fitted sheet had sprung up and curled under him. He writhed on the bare mattress, pulled the EKG disks from his bare chest.

  I’d been climbing onto the exercise bike at the gym when I’d received his text. I need to go to the fucking hospital now.

  I rushed home. Tried to rationalize. They can’t help you there. You’re on the right meds now. We just have to let them work. The doctor said it would get harder before it gets easier!

  “If you love me,” he’d said, “you’ll take me to the hospital.”

  I sit up, look around, shake myself out of my dream. Already I am mourning the quiet comfort of the waiting room, the few minutes of peace I have while someone else is taking care of him.

  But something is off. I can feel it. I stand and walk to the desk. I ask to be let into the back. They buzz me in. A few paces later, in front of room sixteen, I see a flurry of activity. Good, is what I think at first. They are paying attention to him. Then, a few steps closer, I can hear his voice. “You can’t do this to me! You can’t do this to me!”

  This is not part of the drill. Now you’ve slipped out of time. By the moment you’re at the door to his room, you’ve left your body.

  “Don’t do this! Don’t do this!”

  There is an intimacy in his voice, a lover’s plea, a hurt. Your husband is standing by the door, trying to force himself from the room, and then he’s lifted to, slammed on, the bed.

  “Don’t do this! Please don’t do this!” It’s your own voice saying this now, strangled with shock, and now the tears come. “Please don’t.”

  They are strapping him down, though, nurses in their scrubs, orderlies, security, each of his limbs encircled by a leather cuff. “Don’t touch me! You’re going to get the parasites! Don’t touch them!”

  “Aaron,” you say, and then he meets your eye.

  “Nell,” he says. He is afraid.

  “Honey.”

  “What the fuck! What they fuck are they doing?”

  “Honey, you have to calm down.”

  “Fuck this! Fuck all of you! Don’t touch me!” He fights their hands, then relaxes, then flails, then falls against the pillow. There are ten of them. Count them. What else can you do? When he lifts his head, he recognizes someone else at the end of the bed: not a paramedic, but a security guard. “I know you, man,” he says, and something about the man’s presence jars awake his humanity, his manners. “Hey, man,” he says. “You’re cool. I’ve got nothing against you. But fuck all the rest of you. Fuck this hospital! It’s not personal. Just fuck you all!”

  The nurse at the head of the bed says, “That’s fine.”

  “That stupid fucking doctor? Who laughed at me? Who wouldn’t look at me? What kind of fucking place is this? Fuck him. Fuck this place.”

  “Okay now,” says the nurse.

  “I should never have come here,” he says. “I should have gone to fucking Denny’s.”

  The nurse holds back a laugh, then thinks again and lets it out. He is strapped down now. “I’m sorry,” she says, and she must be talking to you. “We have to sedate him.”

  “Please don’t,” you say, standing over the security guard’s shoulder. But it is happening. Here comes the big needle. Haldol, you will learn later. You will write it down in your notebook. You will learn about the scene your husband threw, yelling at the doctors, demanding to be let go, and you will learn that aside from attempting suicide, adding belligerent to delusional is a good way to get a seventy-two-hour hold in the psych ward.

  “I didn’t do this,” you say to him, because you know what he is thinking.

  But how you have wanted to strap him down. And how you have wanted to free him.

  “Aaron,” you say. “I swear. Listen to me.”

  Already his eyes are starting to close, but he levels them at you once more.

  “Who is that?” the security guard asks him, still holding his feet, trying to get him to focus on your voic
e.

  “Aaron, I’m here.”

  “Is that your wife?”

  Your husband laughs. He closes his eyes. “Depends,” he says.

  THEORY 8

  The ER doctor has curly hair and glasses and purple scrubs; she looks tired and pissed. We stand with our arms crossed in the hallway. “This isn’t Lyme.” Her voice is firm. “It’s psych.”

  WELLFORD STREET

  2004

  Kissinger, Morris’s tabby cat, was dying.

  The townhouse we’d lived in, our first home in Charlottesville, had gone condo, so we’d moved into a real house in a real neighborhood, a little brick ranch with a carport and grass that Aaron cut while listening to metal. I stood by the very tall oak tree in the front yard telling my friend Penny on the phone that Aaron couldn’t attend her wedding in Florida because our cat had cancer. A pot sat in the driveway; popcorn burnt black. I’m certain these are separate memories, but this is the way memories present themselves, fused by images. The years are stored as one dull day, heightened by smoke alarms.

  Aaron’s father had pneumonia. At the VA hospital, he had been moved from the nursing home to the ICU. Morris was a few months shy of his eightieth birthday. We could tell from the doctor’s voice on the phone that when an old man caught pneumonia, it was serious.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go down with me?” I asked Aaron.

  “I’m sure.” He wanted to stay with Kissinger.

  By the time I got to Florida, at the end of August, Morris had recovered from the pneumonia and was released from the ICU. I went to visit him in his regular room. As I stood by his bed, I tried to think of him as the guy who owned too many cats, who watched Airplane! with Aaron, who chaperoned a Cub Scouts camping trip, who took him to gun shows at the fairgrounds, who drove him to school with the hatch of the car up, embarrassing him, who drove him to the comic store in Lantana, who drove him and his friends to concerts at the West Palm Beach auditorium. In the final years of his life, he had driven a high-tech minivan with a hydraulic lift for his scooter and hand controls for driving. When it was clear he would no longer need it, Aaron had shipped it to his mother in New Mexico, a gift. She had had the equipment removed. I tried to think of what he was leaving the people who had been in his life: a lot of weird junk but a lot of wealth, too. I tried to think of it as a gift. I kissed my father-in-law, who did not recognize me, and said good-bye.