* * *
It was a beautiful time.
The day the two lines appeared on the test, we got Bodo’s Bagels and took our bikes to the park and had a picnic and basked in the autumn sun, vibrating with joy. The universe was trying to teach me about patience, powerlessness, the present, but I felt that it was a happiness I’d earned through my own efforts. My obsession with getting pregnant became an obsession with pregnancy. I read the books, subscribed to the magazines, researched the gear. I painted the nursery, designed and decorated, posed every little bunny and burp cloth and frame, everything a creamy oatmeal color, the color of the tiny Seventh Generation diapers I lined up in baskets. I loved being pregnant. I felt powerful and purposeful and in perfect communion with my baby. Perhaps it was the kind of communion I wanted with my husband. Or perhaps it was the kind of communion a mother can have only with her children, a pure and primal belonging.
Underneath the joy, a worry, like a strained muscle. My belly grew, stretched. Time was running out to get our shit together. I told Aaron what I wanted, more or less. He was already seeing a shrink. He was on an antidepressant. I guessed it was working? That box was checked. Now I wanted him to get a job. And I wanted him to stop smoking. Cigarettes, pot.
A baby in the belly is womankind’s oldest instrument of persuasion. I argued, joked, nagged, cajoled, flirted, pushed and pulled. I hope you’re enjoying that bowl because it’s going to be your last one.
He assented. He smoked the last of his weed. He smoked his last cigarette. He knew it was something he needed to do. He had quit before; he could do it again. If he was resentful of being coerced, he kept it to himself. I cheered him on. I’m proud of you! I know that wasn’t easy.
I helped him put together a résumé, some cover letters. In the spring, just as we started our birthing class, he got a job.
I had read about the company in our local alternative weekly, a wry joke about how hard it was to score a job there. It handled fan merchandise and concert ticketing. Aaron would be doing customer service, fulfilling orders over the phone. It was a glorified call center, but it was a respectable job, and it was at least adjacent to the music industry. I didn’t care that he could only attend the first birthing class because he had to be at work. My mom and my friend Gina filled in for the rest of the classes.
A job is many things. It’s a paycheck. It’s stability. It’s groceries and insurance and a roof over your head. It’s also a social identity. A business card, real or not, that we hand to our family and friends; My shit is together, the card says. What do you do? is still the first question we ask people after their names, in a culture that pretends not to equate our worth with our work. What does your father do? What school did you go to? What is your role in our market economy? To work is to do, is to be. To not work is to not do, is to not be. What might we ask each other instead? Who are you?
I knew this, on some level. I resented the expectations capitalism and classism and sexism had enforced upon my freedom to make the life I wanted. I had wanted to push back against those forces. I had fallen in love with a man who hadn’t finished high school because he was warm and loving and adorable and played guitar and made me laugh, and I married him. “We’ll make it work,” I said about just about everything back then. We’ll wait tables! We’ll live in a tent! We love each other! What did it matter?
But it was a piecemeal and provisional rebellion. I had always given the system one middle finger while hiding my face in the other hand. It turned out I wanted a roof over my head, an expensive metal roof with exposed bespoke beams, and all the social security that came with it. At least, I wanted other people to know I was capable of living the life that was expected of me.
There were problems with making it work. For one thing, it was a philosophy born of privilege. It was easy to tell the system to go fuck itself when the system had produced money and property, your father-in-law’s, that still sustained you. For another thing, it didn’t always work. Not for long. Waitressing did not pay for the house with the expensive roof. Our money was running out, fast.
So when Aaron got a job, his first real job in years, I practically melted with relief and pride. “My husband has to work.” They were the most comforting words I’d ever uttered.
* * *
If we wrote books about love without the trouble, the books would be filled with mothers staring at their babies, hours and hours of descriptions of their babies’ blank beautiful faces as they nursed, the milk pouring into their mouths the shrewdest sort of market exchange, and the most steadfast sort of love: I will feed you if you look at me that way forever.
Nicolas—Nico—didn’t nurse well, though. The first few weeks, I agonized about it. I wanted so badly for it to work. Then, my bloody nipples decided for me. I bought a pump. For six months, I pumped four times a day. My body kept trying to fail me, but still I felt like I had fairy-tale-level powers, Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold. I started each day by going into the nursery and sitting on the plush oatmeal-colored carpet while Nico kicked happily beside me in a bouncer, the music of his bouncer mingling with the music of the pump, then feeding him a fresh bottle. Aaron fed him the midnight bottle, warming it on the stove when he got home from work. And he fed him many of the daytime bottles, too, when I went back to work. When we moved Nico into the nursery to sleep in his crib, and he cried for us, I started sleeping on the floor in his room, and then Aaron joined me, and for weeks we slept there, huddled in sleeping bags. We laughed at ourselves. What are we doing? We were too tired to be logical, but we were happy.
I loved my baby with the fullness that I felt my parents had loved me. It was the kind of love I felt could mend our family. We had not been short on love, Aaron and me, but look, we had done it, something magical, we had produced a new kind of love, we had produced something in common. It was a love that raised our stakes, made me love him in a new way: the father of my child. And because I felt that it was the kind of love Aaron had been denied as a child, it felt like love with a vengeance. Aaron’s parents, too, had tried to improve their odds with a child. But had they tried hard enough? Had they slept together on the floor of their baby’s nursery?
Our shit, from all appearances, was together. Nico was a beautiful and happy baby, with curls like his father’s. While I worked, Aaron was the one who fed him, diapered him, swung him back and forth while beatboxing his name, sending him into giggles, dressed him in his little sleep sack, readying him for his nap, before handing him off to me when I got home and he went off to work, leaving me with a kiss, ships passing in the night.
He liked the job. Lots to learn, but his coworkers were nice. There was the stress that comes with every job. The stress of getting to know new software, of people yelling at you on the phone, of meeting a certain number of calls per hour, of apologizing to your boss for being late. A job, too, is a place to go. A gym, a vending machine, a coffee station, lunch at the Subway next door, a bathroom you don’t have to clean, an ergonomic desk chair that molds to fit your body, work friends in their matching cubicles. Work friends! Over breakfast, Nico in his high chair, Aaron would tell me about them, silly things they’d gotten into at work, different ways they’d told customers to fuck off. There was the boyfriend-girlfriend couple who liked oxy, the couple who liked heroin, the guy who supplied the call center with weed, the guy who supplied the call center and much of Charlottesville with coke. That many of Aaron’s stories about his new friends revolved around drugs was not lost on me. But he spoke about them as though they were a different species: young, crazy, carefree. Aaron was the old guy with a kid. He was past those days.
On one particularly stressful day, he joined a friend for a smoke break, the guy who sold weed. He wasn’t smoking anymore, but maybe the guy saw the need in Aaron. He said, “You know what you need, dude?” and got him high in the bathroom. That was the way he put it, “got him high,” like a middle school video on peer pressure.
I laughed a nervous laugh. It sound
ed like the kind of pot-smoking that responsible people occasionally indulged in: a wacky thing to do at work, a one-time deal. “It was a one-time deal,” he said. I was happy that he told me, and happy, above all, he had friends. So many friends! He was so well-liked! He had become again the boy at the record store I had fallen in love with.
* * *
One morning when Nico was six months old, between Christmas and New Year’s, I dropped Aaron at Dr. North’s, parked the car downtown, and bundled Nico into his stroller. For the last couple of years, more often than not, I would tag along while Aaron was in therapy, driving into town with him, never getting close to his building but occupying myself a few blocks away, writing and drinking coffee at Mudhouse, or after Nico was born, pushing him around in his stroller. Afterward, we’d meet up for lunch. He wouldn’t talk about what he’d talked about in therapy. He went, and then we moved on.
I had barely steered the stroller onto the brick expanse of downtown when Aaron called. Weird. Maybe he had the appointment time wrong. I answered my flip phone.
“He’s dead. North, he’s dead.”
“What?”
The downtown mall was still decorated for Christmas, the lampposts hung with wreaths, the giant Christmas tree lit up outside the Paramount, though it was an unseasonably warm day, sixty degrees. Everything seemed wrong, inside-out.
“There was a note on the door. He died a week ago. It just says he died suddenly.”
“Oh my God. How?”
“It doesn’t say. It just says to call this other doctor’s office for more information.”
“Call,” I said.
When I hung up, I walked toward him, and he walked toward me. I walked quickly, maneuvering the stroller around a construction site. Men were working, building something, machines moving. A bright and normal winter day. I thought, how terrible, his family, right around Christmas. I thought, heart attack, heart attack, please say it was a heart attack. “It’s okay,” I said aloud to Nico, “It’s okay, we’re going to meet Daddy.” We met on the corner where downtown met not-downtown, alongside a concrete barrier. His jacket was off, tied around his waist. He looked like he was sleepwalking. He was hanging up his own flip phone.
“He killed himself,” he said.
He had to raise his voice to be heard over the construction. I reached out and touched his jacket, grabbed his waist.
“At the office.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. The earthmover rumbled. “He shot himself in the head at his desk.”
* * *
Go to the memorial. Pay your respects. Stand in the back of the packed funeral home, in the lobby. The lobby, too, was packed. He had been a well-regarded practitioner. He had held positions in state organizations. He had worked for the university. Stand by the door, the baby strapped to your chest. How many of the people standing around you had been his patients? Think of all the things they’d told that psychiatrist, all the secrets that died with him, and with them, their trust. It must feel, you thought, like a theft.
When the person who is supposed to keep your husband alive, who has been teaching him to get past his distrust, betrayal, abandonment, who has been helping him endure his suffering, decides to leave the planet, you should probably be worried. But you were too busy being angry. Not judgmental. The guy had his own world of pain. It made you sad. But also angry. You were the one who finally got your husband to go to therapy. He was finally making progress. Then this?
You had a baby, and you wanted to give your husband space to grieve. If you were scared, you shoved it under the bed. La la la la! Don’t let yourself think it. Forget that suicide is a contagion, an invitation. Look, the baby was standing! Look at the way he pulled himself up. Maybe his father would pull himself up, too.
He was seeing another doctor right away. There was that. All of his psychiatrist’s patients had been assigned to other doctors, colleagues going through their own grief. I want you to know I won’t kill myself, the new psychiatrist told your husband, and she wouldn’t be the last to have to make that promise.
It became a secret of his own. “Don’t tell anyone,” your husband told you. Why? Don’t ask. To protect the man’s family? No. You could see he was protecting himself. He was trying to wrap himself up, ward off the world.
A new person for you to blame, then. First it was his father. Then, the closest thing to a father.
Ignore all the signs. When he stays out all night with his coworkers, be grateful that he has friends. A distraction. When he comes home feeling like hell, try not to notice. He has had headaches his whole life. Freeze the washcloth, like you learned. One night in April he came home looking worse than you’d ever seen him. All night he moaned in pain. Washcloth, Advil, water. You tried to soothe him, stayed up with him, rubbed his sweaty back. The next day, he could barely get out of bed. It was your parents’ fortieth anniversary. You’d cleaned the house to a shine. One of your brothers and his family arrived, then another, their dogs and children bounding toward your dog, your child; it was spring in Virginia and everything was in bloom. Then your parents! Surprise! They were surprised, and moved, and they drank champagne on the porch and chased after their grandsons and posed with them for a picture, the whole family. You roused Aaron for the photo. It still hangs in your hall, and in your brothers’ halls—your parents, silver-haired and jubilant, all of the smiling babies, all of the smiling young parents, and your husband, handsome, sunken-cheeked, in a wrinkled white T-shirt. Then he went back to bed. Aaron’s got a terrible headache. It barely needed to be said, even then.
Tell it fast. But you are slow. Would you even have found out, if he hadn’t told you? It wasn’t until a couple of weeks later that he came into the bathroom. The baby was sleeping in his crib. You were shaving your legs in the gleaming white claw-foot tub. He had to tell you something. His new psychiatrist had urged him to tell you.
“Okay,” you said, pausing your razor.
He leaned against the sink. He said, “I’ve been using heroin.”
Everything you’d been shoving under the bed—more!—came flying out of you then. All the rage came flying out of your mouth, out of your hands. You threw everything in the bathtub at your husband, the razor you were shaving with, the pumice stone, the bar of soap, the soap dish. Are you fucking kidding me What the fuck is wrong with you Great Fucking great Aaron Fucking beautiful You’ve gone and inserted in your son’s story in his tenth fucking month of life fucking heroin Fucking heroin Are you fucking kidding me You can’t undo that Aaron! You did that! You did that! You were murderous. You wanted to undo it. You wanted to kill what he told you.
He cowered. He was calm. Stop throwing things at me, he said. Please. He said, I wanted to tell you. I wanted to be honest. I’m sorry, he said.
You rose from the bath, a wet, hunched, furious beast. Wrapped yourself righteously in a towel. Marched into the bedroom. Began getting dressed, slamming drawers.
“How many times.”
“A few. Like three or four.”
“Who.”
Not the heroin couple from work. Someone else.
“Did you drive.”
“Yes.”
“Did you—”
“I didn’t shoot up. Never. I snorted it.”
A little wave of relief. Then it passed. Then disgust.
You have stepped into a pair of underwear, a T-shirt. You look at the bed from a different time and tense, like it’s someone else’s bed, a showroom bed with its microsuede headboard; you have stepped out of the age of microsuede into a time travel machine that allows you to view all of the dramas that have played out on this mattress. It is not the mattress you hauled together onto his Pathfinder at age eighteen, but a newer one, firmer, built for a grown-up life, where you made hundreds of attempts at reproduction, lying afterward with your legs raised up against the headboard, feet tingling with hope. It was in this bed where you brought him the pregnancy test with its two pink lines. It was in this bed where your water broke, and this b
ed where you pulled the bassinet as close as it could get, so you could sleep with one hand on your swaddled newborn. You have enough distance in this moment to think this is the worst, to mourn the ways he has fouled the marriage bed. They are not the ways some marriage beds become fouled, but he has found his own. You do not yet know that your next mattress will be soaked and stained with his blood, that you are not through soothing him through his feverish dreams. Now you stand on opposite sides of the bed.
“You were high that night you came home, weren’t you. When you said you were sick.”
Did he even really have headaches? It was the beginning of something poisonous, though you didn’t know this part then: that you will distrust his symptoms, that you will always be suspicious that he is the one who has made himself sick. When he is sick again, really sick, the wrath will return. You will reach for the razor, ready to throw it.
He nodded.
“What is wrong with you. My parents’ fucking anniversary.”
“I wasn’t trying to get high,” he explained. He held out his hands. The baby monitor on the nightstand was quiet. “I was just kind of trying to die.”
* * *
You didn’t call a rehab. You didn’t go to Al-Anon. You didn’t yet know that you have failed a test, that you have reacted in exactly the wrong way when an addict tells you he’s been using. Blaming, shaming, sarcasm, martyrdom, not to mention physical harm, like a woman in a movie slapping a man across the face. How many times have you seen that scene play out? How could you claim any of it, when you didn’t know that an addict is what your husband was?
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