Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  I went to the wedding with my mom. As Penny danced by me, she asked, “Your dad isn’t here?” Apparently my mother’s RSVP indicated that he would be. I realized Penny had paid for his plate. I cringed, apologizing. My mother was accustomed to leaving her husband at home for nebulous reasons not easily explained on a dance floor, and so was I. Ahead of me was a lifetime of enthusiastically vague RSVP comments: “We’ll both try to make it!” My father was old and tired and it was hard for him to be on his feet. Anyone who saw him with a cane could deduce that. But I wondered if there were times when they were younger when my mother had left him behind, made up excuses, when his physical weakness was a convenient camouflage for a social anxiety that was equally crippling. I didn’t ask her this, but what she modeled through her silence was a certain willful unconcern. She coped through smoke breaks. We had our own antisocial streaks, anyway. When the Electric Slide started, we exited the ballroom and took a walk down by the water while my mom smoked a cigarette in the wind. We took a selfie with a digital camera, and in the blurry picture she is fixing her hair and laughing.

  * * *

  By the time we were ready to put Kissinger down, in September, Morris had contracted pneumonia again. The hospital called and left a message.

  “Do you want to go down?” I asked.

  He didn’t. He couldn’t run to Florida every time his dad caught pneumonia.

  We brought the cat to the vet. We petted the little lump of his tumor, the dark stripes on his head. We kissed him. We were not brave enough to stay in the room while they put him to sleep. Aaron was already crying, though, when we left the vet’s office, and he cried all the way home.

  We were sitting in the living room one evening in October, sharing a khaki love seat with Blue and watching The Weakest Link, when the phone rang. I answered it. It was the VA hospital in Florida. I handed the phone to Aaron. He took it and stepped into the hall. I sat in front of the muted television and by the time he was off the phone a few minutes later I understood that his father had died.

  Aaron didn’t cry. He went outside to smoke a cigarette. When he came in, he moved around the house in a dull daze. There is not much to do on the night a faraway father has died. We called the relatives, the children of Morris’s three dead brothers. We called Aaron’s mother and my parents.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him.

  He said, “Yeah. I just want to go to sleep.”

  We put ourselves to bed and Aaron lay on his side with Blue tucked under his arm like a teddy bear. This morning a man lay in bed a thousand miles away, breathing. He was the reason my husband was breathing beside me, and also the reason for his restless dreams. Now he lay somewhere, in the morgue, in a freezer, no longer breathing. He had been dead to us for almost five years, a body whose brain had shut down. Now his body had shut down, too. What did that mean for Aaron? What did it mean for me? Sadness? Anger? Guilt? Relief? I watched his eyelids, trying to figure out if he was asleep. I tried to locate an organ to emit a feeling that made sense, but this death was an abstraction.

  * * *

  The next morning, I shifted into gear. I would take care of the logistics, give Aaron space. It gave me something to do with the tie-dye swirl of feelings I couldn’t name. I called the VA hospital, a crematorium, and Arlington National Cemetery, where he’d long wanted his remains buried. It wasn’t possible to schedule the funeral for another month. Morris would be cremated in Florida, and his remains would be shipped to Virginia.

  Aaron was grateful for my help, and stressed out and stoned and sad, and withdrawn into what seemed to me a new state of brittleness. Usually he dealt with death by joking. He’d inherited his dark sense of humor, in fact, from his father. I was thinking of this, hoping for a moment in which we might connect over the absurdity of death, the absurdity of these long-distance logistics we were navigating, when I made a terrible joke. I was trying to arrange for the postal shipment of his father’s cremains. I remember feeling a little flame of satisfaction upon conceiving it: a death-dark, Aaron-style riff. I put on my best post-office-clerk voice. “Is there anything fragile, liquid, perishable, or potentially hazardous in this package?” Aaron had been asked this question hundreds of times, each time he mailed off an eBay sale. Each time, he answered no. This time, I joked, he’d be able to say yes.

  He looked at me, pained. I had made a grave miscalculation.

  “That’s a terrible thing to say,” he said.

  * * *

  The funeral took place on a chilly but sunny fall day, American flags whipping in the wind. Aaron and I wore black suits and black gloves, and scarves that also whipped in the wind. Over his suit, Aaron wore his father’s long black wool coat. A handful of relatives had flown in for the service, Aaron’s two cousins and their families. We stood in a cluster on the green grass. The white headstones spread around us like too-straight teeth. They were the most beautiful and frightening thing I had ever seen. Under them were the ashes and skeletons of soldiers who had been killed on battlefields far from home, and those who had lived long enough to suffer strokes on their scooters at the zoo.

  We sat under a small khaki tent. A group of military officers stood in salute, straight as the gravestones. Another group of officers held out an American flag, flat, four men preparing to make a bed. Beyond them, more officers discharged their rifles, piercing the gray sky. I startled in my chair. I felt it in my chest. I heard the rifle of a teenage boy discharged in the snows of the Hürtgen Forest. Then the bugler played “Taps,” the saddest song on the earth. It loosened something in me.

  Did anyone want to say any words about the deceased? asked the officer in charge.

  Aaron did not move.

  His cousin Ann stood. “My Uncle Morris was the most wonderful man,” she said. He had always been so kind to her and her sister and cousins, welcoming them to his big house on the bay. She had swum in his swimming pool, visited his upstate farm. On the website where the obituary I had written appeared, she wrote, “My Uncle Morris was my best friend.”

  Months later, Aaron would tell Ann what Morris had done to him as a child. She was the first person, beyond me, he had told. Had he ever tried anything like that with anyone else? He wanted to know, now that his father was gone.

  No, Ann said. Dear God, no.

  After that, for a while, they didn’t talk much. Ann tried to contact Aaron. He didn’t respond. Months later, Ann emailed Aaron. You tell me this about your father, and then you disappear?

  It was almost, Aaron said, as though she didn’t believe him.

  Well, I said. You did kind of disappear.

  Years later, it would be clear that Ann had believed him, and that being believed was important, more important than he thought.

  At the funeral, though, I was the only one who knew. The flag was folded by the officers into a triangle. One officer knelt before Aaron, the next of kin, and presented the flag to him. It was a gift he hadn’t expected, hadn’t asked for, but he took it. I had never seen his face so solemn, though I imagined the sorrow and bitterness and confusion the mask concealed. It was the face of a good son accepting the flag of a good father.

  * * *

  In the same house, months later, Aaron got the call from his brother’s social worker. David had died. Also of pneumonia.

  There was no funeral for David. His brother would be buried, we were told, in a cemetery behind the home where he lived.

  Years later, after we move to upstate New York, we’ll drive through Rome, knocking on doors, looking for his grave. The kids will be napping in their car seats. But the place has moved, or we have the wrong address. There is no record of him here, as though he didn’t exist at all.

  Q NORTH

  The morning after Aaron is taken to the psych ward, a Saturday, I do the only rational thing, which is to descale the Keurig. All these months I’ve been putting it off, waiting for the perfect time. I scrub the reservoir, replace the filter, run twelve cups of vinegar through the machine until the
water smells clean. I stand alone in the kitchen and drink my perfectly pure cup of coffee.

  Where’s Dad? the kids want to know.

  The hospital, I say. They kept him overnight.

  I’m sort of disappointed and sort of relieved when they don’t press for more. Henry wants pumpkin pancakes. Nico wants to start a fire. Aaron is allergic to the smoke from the fireplace, so we don’t usually light it. But he’s not here. So we do, somewhat guiltily at first, then enjoying it, my dad happy to have a job, pulling up a chair to stoke it, the boys dazed in front of the flames.

  At nine o’clock, I call the hospital. Press two for Behavioral Health.

  “Q North,” someone answers. The phrase knocks against some metal plate in my memory. Q North. What does the Q stand for?

  When are visiting hours? Twelve to two. Can I bring him anything before then? Yes, but I can’t see him until twelve. Can I talk to his doctor? There are no doctors in today. What do you mean? Well, the head of the unit will check in on him in the afternoon when he makes his rounds. But he won’t be assigned his own doctor until Monday.

  Monday.

  When I text his psychiatrist, Dr. Pascal, to tell her what happened, she says. “Worst time to go to the psych ward is a Friday night. Nothing happens on the weekends.” She adds her customary sunflower, which almost makes me weep. It’s the same way I felt the night before, after they wheeled him away, and I stood there helplessly with the plump young nurse with the green eye shadow, one of the ten people who had held down my husband. “I’m sorry about this,” I found myself saying to her. I knew Aaron was the one who deserved the apology, but he had yelled and sworn and caused a scene, and there I was, sorry for the disruption. She gave me a hug, and I fell apart. On the way home, I called Ursula, and Jen, and fell apart some more. I came home and sat at the edge of my dad’s bed and fell apart some more. So many nights he’d stayed home with the kids while I took Aaron to the hospital, and this was the first time he hadn’t come home with me. My dad held me while I cried.

  At eleven thirty, I leave the kids with my dad and drive to the hospital. I walk past the fountain in the lobby Henry and Nico always want to put their hands in, the café, the wall of the main corridor with its life-sized photos of the hospital’s smiling patients, their lives restored after hip replacements, physical therapy, bariatric surgery. Hang a right at the end of the hall to the new maternity wing, built after Henry was born here. Hang a left to Behavioral Health. I ring the bell beside the steel door and after a minute an orderly lets me in. I sign in, get my Visitor sticker, wedge my giant handbag in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet. I hand over the paper bag I’ve packed for Aaron with a change of clothes, toothbrush, all his meds, some books and pens and drawing pads, but I can’t leave the pens or drawing pads because, oh yeah, he might impale himself or someone with their sharp parts. It’s all coming back to me.

  I walk through the second door and look down the long hall. There is the murmur and smell of lunch down there somewhere. But there he is—right there, in the first room to the right, the door open, lying on a bed under a pale-pink blanket. On the floor, wedged up to the bed, is a blue tumbling mat. “Nell!” he says when he sees me, sitting up and throwing off the blanket. There is gratitude in his eyes, and fear.

  I crawl into the narrow bed and hold him. There he is again, my husband. The Haldol has worn off but it has chilled him the fuck out.

  “I didn’t know if you’d be glad to see me,” I say.

  “Of course I’m glad to see you.”

  “I thought you’d think I put you here.”

  He shakes his head. “I know you’d never do that.”

  He’s in the same clothes as yesterday, a long-sleeved waffle-weave shirt the same pink as the blanket, a pair of sporty gray shorts. White socks. He’s cold. I rub his forearms through his shirt, the way my mother warmed mine. And I remember the way his head rested against the bare, eggshell wall—so bare, this room, nothing but the twin bed and a giant, sinfully empty bookshelf—while he told me here, five and a half years ago, how he was going to save his own life.

  “Have you had lunch yet?”

  He shakes his head, shivers.

  “Let’s get you some lunch.”

  The psych ward is full of a lot of people who—like Aaron last time—did not get suicide right. Now they are in a purgatory of failed suicides. Or are there others who—like Aaron this time—aren’t suicidal but psychotic? I wonder how many of them have been here in both states. It seems to me this feat should earn recognition of some kind, two Webelo badges. Either way, the sadness and shame smell the same, like the starchy rice pilaf they are serving in the lounge. An irresolute pink punch swishes around. There is decaf coffee only. Plastic forks and spoons, no knives. A young Asian woman in socks and flip-flops and a Cornell sweatshirt pads around the lounge without making a sound. An old white woman in a wheelchair is tucked up under a table, and two men—one young, one old—square off at another, newspapers in their hands. A woman in a hairnet hands Aaron a tray with his lunch. A lump of chicken rests on the nest of pilaf beside a pile of ribbed carrots. “He’s vegetarian,” I tell her. She tongs off the chicken, and Aaron takes the tray.

  The chairs are hard plastic rockers, purple and blue, something you might see in a preschool classroom, but when we try to move them, they are heavy-bottomed, practically bolted to the ground. Too heavy to throw across the room. Aaron and I lower ourselves into them. How cruel, I think, these chairs, the embodiment of the pain these patients must try to lift.

  What happened? we ask each other.

  We say what we know, which is not much. Aaron picks at his rice.

  What do you want? I ask him.

  To go home, he says.

  And so it is what I want for him too.

  After Aaron puts away his tray, before he leaves the lounge, the young man at the next table stops him. He’s wearing a button-down shirt and slacks and carrying a gray hooded sweatshirt. “You cold?”

  Aaron’s hugging himself, shivering, but he says no, he’s fine.

  “Here.” The guy extends the sweatshirt. Has he just been carrying it around, ready to lend it out? Is he a family member? An orderly?

  “Aw, no, man, that’s okay.”

  “Take it,” I say. “Yes, he’s cold. Thank you so much.”

  Aaron accepts it, checks the tag. XL. The guy is skinny, with curly strawberry-blond hair and glasses. He looks not unlike Leaf, the guardian angel paramedic who brought Aaron to this hospital months ago.

  “Thanks, man. I’ll get it back to you.”

  “It’s too big for me.” The guy shrugs. “I think it’s yours.”

  * * *

  I come back again for evening visiting hours. Just after dinner—it’s the end of daylight savings time; tonight we’ll turn back the clocks—the clouds are hanging over the lake in such a way that there is a fine curtain of light falling across the yellow trees. “It looks like a spotlight,” says one nurse, with delight. “Did you see it out there?” The girl in the flip-flops pads over to take a look, then walks on.

  * * *

  On Saturday a doctor—but not Aaron’s doctor—comes in to check on him. Aaron asks for his regular meds, but the doctor won’t give them to him. “How’d you get those marks?” he asks, pointing at the bloody lesions on Aaron’s legs.

  Aaron is calm now, the opposite of manic, almost dead. He does his best McMurphy, a well-behaved robot.

  “I scratched them,” he says.

  “You did this to yourself?”

  He nods.

  The doctor writes something on his pad.

  A few months later, Esmé Weijun Wang will publish The Collected Schizophrenias. In her essay “On the Ward,” she’ll say: “a primary feature of the experience of staying in a psychiatric hospital is that you will not be believed about anything. A corollary to this feature: things will be believed about you that are not at all true.”

  “Why’d you do that?” I ask him when I
visit.

  Aaron shrugs. “Told him what he wanted to hear.”

  “Proclamations of insanity,” Wang writes, “are the exception to the rule.”

  * * *

  He keeps his head low, sits by himself. He walks the halls in his socks, nodding to the other hall-walkers like regulars walking around a lake. He gets moved to a room with a roommate in the middle of his second night, and the one thing his roommate says to him is, “Lunch, man,” and Aaron says “Thanks.” Aaron is rereading The Bluest Eye, which he found in the lounge. I wonder if reading The Bluest Eye is a good idea. He sleeps most of the day. Is it the Haldol, still coursing through his system? Or is he just tired? Or just trying to disappear?

  At home on Saturday, I dial the hospital number. Press two for Behavioral Health. “Q North.” That dreadful pang of déjà vu again. I leave a message for the head of the unit, asking why my husband hasn’t been given his regular medications. Then I look on my phone, at the hospital website where I have looked up the number, and I pull up the hospital map. No Q North. I search for it. Q North does not exist on the map, nor on the Web, nor does Q South, nor any other letter. I wonder if I have made it up, if my ear is mishearing.

  At visiting hours on Sunday, I wait for ten minutes outside the ward for someone to answer the big metal door. I wait with a guy delivering what smells like cheeseburgers from Grubhub. I wonder who has ordered food in there—an employee or a patient? I wonder if I’m pressing the right button. “I been pressing it before you got here,” the delivery guy says. Finally, someone comes to the door and lets us in.