Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  I stood outside the door when the undertaker came for him. I remember the loud zip of the body bag.

  “It was just four Ativan,” Aaron says. “And four Aleve PMs.”

  “That’s all?”

  “And Ambien.”

  “How many?”

  “Maybe four.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t know if that’s fatal.”

  “Well, I’ll let God decide.”

  “Aaron.”

  “Call them back.”

  “I’m not calling them.” And yet I do call them, somehow, for some reason, I call them back helplessly and say, “My husband says he didn’t take a fatal dose after all.”

  They are still sending the ambulance. “Just let them check him out,” the operator says reasonably.

  I manage to convince him to walk downstairs, to lie on the little love seat in the family room near the front door. Aaron is deranged and scared. I am afraid he will hurt himself or hurt one of the officers. It is two months since he was strapped down at the hospital. “This isn’t the hospital,” I say. “I won’t let them hurt you.”

  I pray that the ambulance and our friend won’t arrive at the same time. Above all I pray that the kids won’t see or hear the ambulance. It seems futile. It is in motion. My brain is still outside my body, and the shame is out there, too, leaving me through my pores. You can’t un-piss yourself.

  Except something lucky happens. Up the driveway comes the white SUV. Demitra. A little over a month ago, she placed her own suicide calls. She said good-bye to her mother. In the background was her son, yelling, “Mom! Mom! Where are you?” It was his voice that brought her out of it. She told her mother where she was. A Rite Aid. The police found her out back, by the Dumpster, and drove her to the hospital. She was in the psych ward, Aaron’s psych ward, for two weeks.

  Now I lean out the front door and wave Demitra inside. She sees the urgency in my wave. Zero degrees outside, but she bundles up her baby and comes into the house.

  I explain the situation. “I’m so sorry to say this but Aaron may be overdosing on something. The ambulance is coming any minute.” He watches us from under a blanket on the couch.

  “Hey man,” she says, not blinking. “I get it.”

  What I want is for her to help draw him out of it, the way her son’s voice did for her. I want her to speak to him in their language. I want him to see the beautiful baby on her hip and want to live.

  “You want me to take the kids so you can deal with this?”

  Relief like a river of piss. Yes, yes, that would be great. I run upstairs to get the kids. “I’ve been where you are,” I hear her say to Aaron.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  When the kids come down, they are elated to learn that they’re going home with their friend. “You guys want to do pizza?” Yes! Quickly, quickly, get your shoes, don’t worry about your car seat. Daddy’s sick. Go have fun! Thank you so much!

  “Thank you,” Aaron tells her, and his face is more open now, not a dark and jagged thing, only scared.

  Twenty seconds after her car leaves the driveway, the police car comes up it, followed by the ambulance. It’s been perhaps seven minutes since I called 911.

  I try to talk to the cop outside, warn him that my husband isn’t in a good place, that he was held at the psych ward, that he can’t be forced there again, but it’s zero degrees. “Can we talk about this inside?” he asks.

  The paramedics trail wet puddles of snow onto the concrete floor. They talk to him in calm voices. They call Aaron “man” and he calls them “man” back. They just want to check him out, make sure he’s okay. This is exactly what I want. “Okay,” he says. He sits up and lets them take his vitals. They ask what he took, and he tries to remember. Meanwhile I leave Stu a message, and though Aaron hasn’t seen him in months, he calls back within a few minutes. I repeat the same combination of drugs into the phone. “Doesn’t sound fatal,” Stu says. “Can I talk to our friend?”

  By the time I hand Aaron the phone, he’s making jokes about 1970s TV stars with the paramedics.

  “Neat house,” one says, packing up his equipment. “I saw them building it. Always wondered what it looked like inside.”

  He has an appointment with his therapist tomorrow, I assure them, and though I am not at all assured Aaron will go, they leave him talking to Stu on the phone. They make him promise not to take any more winter walks. Aaron lifts a hand in good-bye. “Thanks, fellas,” he says, and then, a little later, with some warmth, “Thanks, Stu. Thanks for being there.” And hangs up.

  An hour later, when we pick up the kids, they are still shrill with excitement, playing with the baby, taking pictures of their distorted faces with an app. They are almost wholly uninterested in what has happened tonight, or maybe they don’t want to know. “You okay, Dad?” Nico asks, not looking up from the iPad.

  “Yeah, I’m okay.” Aaron eats three slices of pizza. We each give Demitra a giant hug. Here she is, proof that you can be at your lowest, behind a Rite Aid Dumpster, and then what feels like five minutes later, prepping your coffeemaker for the next morning, planning to live another day.

  “Cannot thank you enough,” I whisper. Her son will be coming home with my kids on the bus again tomorrow. “If you don’t feel comfortable—” I say, but she stops me.

  “Girl, please. If anything, I trust you guys more now.”

  It feels like a week has passed when we get home. It’s long dark. We put the kids to bed.

  “What did she say?” I ask him when we’re in bed ourselves. “When I went upstairs.”

  His skin is still cold to the touch, but his face is his again.

  “She said I was lucky to have a wife who cared.”

  I like this, of course. I hold his icy hand in mine.

  * * *

  A few days later, while all the boys watch The Simpsons, eating the fried rice I’ve made them, I sneak upstairs and read the Donald Antrim essay in The New Yorker that’s just arrived: “A Journey Through Suicide.” Antrim writes of suicide as a force that resides in a living person. “I believe that suicide is a natural history, a disease process, not an act or a choice, a decision or a wish. I do not understand suicide as a response to pain, or as a message to the living. I do not think of suicide as the act, the death, the fall from a height or the trigger pulled. I see it as a long illness, an illness with origins in trauma and isolation, in deprivation of touch, in violence and neglect, in the loss of home and belonging. It is a disease of the body and the brain, if you make that distinction, a disease that kills over time. My dying, my suicide, lasted years.”

  The words bring me some comfort. Here he is, having survived, alive for now. The suicide speaks.

  Mostly the words bring me dread, because I know them to be true. They provide the clarity of a good diagnosis. What does your husband have? Suicide.

  It was a disease Aaron says started in childhood. When he was a little boy, he found a jar of silver beads in a kitchen cabinet. He thought they were bullets. He ate them one by one, then lay down on the kitchen floor to die. He found out later they were cake decorations. He’d overdosed on sugar.

  When I was a little girl, I had dreams of calling nine-one-one. What a thrill it would be! That girl married the boy who’d swallowed the silver bullets. I wanted to be close to that desperation, that sharp edge between life and death.

  I had been deathly afraid of death. Aaron’s courtship of it emboldened me. He was so close to it. Perhaps his lack of fear of it would help me to be less afraid.

  But of course I misunderstood his proximity to death for fearlessness. He was fearful. He was fearful because he was so close to it.

  It’s like the people who jumped from the burning towers, Aaron told me once. That’s what being suicidal feels like. They didn’t want to die. They were just trying to escape the fire.

  * * *

  You want the suicide attempt to be the climax, because not
hing is worse than suicide, but it’s not the end, it’s a chapter in a ceaseless story, and there is something worse than suicide. Worse that suicide is hallucination. Suicide, the long disease of suicide, is manageable, familiar. You like your sad husband more than your crazy husband. You like him forlorn, in bed, supine, drained of energy: you can climb on top of him and take some of his heat. Or you can wake him up, revive him. And you recognize him: you know this guy, the guy you have lived with for twenty years. The psychotic one, though. You don’t know him. And what you don’t know, you fear.

  Aaron’s body is covered in sores, more than I’ve ever seen. Old sores, new ones. They mottle his thighs like the flesh of a blueberry scone. One on his side, under his armpit, I accidentally graze while giving him a hug, and he howls in pain. I don’t touch him again for the rest of the day. It looks a little like Ohio, but I don’t say so. Last week, after several nights of no sleep, his brain on fire, he saw all kinds of things in his sores. Just one kind of thing, actually: athletes. “Doesn’t this one look like a golfer?” he says. That one, a basketball player.

  “Don’t even start,” I say.

  I don’t know then that this is better, this is good: that the things he sees and feels are on, in, his own body. I can simply say, “I don’t see that, babe.”

  It starts with a string of texts. They arrive while I’m driving home one night, the car full of groceries. I don’t see them until I’m inside.

  “Did you see them?” Aaron says, taking my grocery bags from me.

  “See who?”

  I check my phone.

  Please hurry. Seriously. I’m hearing cars And the people are on that lot next to us with flashlights again I’m not kidding. scared

  I’m worried. It also might be police. do not invite them in. Seriously

  They can’t come in unless invited

  If it looks sketchy call the cops

  I ignore the contradiction: call the cops on the cops. “I didn’t see anyone out there, babe.”

  “Will you look with me?” he says. “Please?”

  We leave the groceries on the floor. He puts on his boots, his jacket, grabs his heavy-duty flashlight with the broken button, which needs to be pressed with a paperclip to turn on. The driveway is slick with ice; the night sky is still mostly blue. He bounces the light across the field. Next door, three acres away, I can see the weak lights of our neighbor’s house, the wisp of smoke from its chimney, the black square of the barn. In the field between, nothing but snow and scrub, and the camping tent and horse trailer left behind months ago by the people who bought the land. They have been in the field before, on a handful of days, walking the property, truck parked in the grass. But now the tent is collapsed with snow. Cars come and go on the road. The flashlight bounces off the Adopt a Highway sign.

  “I don’t see anyone out there, babe.”

  Aaron drops the flashlight. “Oh, good.” Hand to chest. “They’re gone.”

  THEORY 9

  Sometimes I just don’t get it. How the formication, the wriggling, the itching, can bother him so much. How it can scare him so much. So there’s something, a parasite, in his body. So what?

  It takes him spelling it out for me. When your body has been violated, anything that’s in your body without your permission is another violation.

  NEW MOON

  I like listening to Dad play his music,” Nico says, falling asleep one April night. “It’s so soothing.”

  Aaron himself hasn’t slept in days. From the living room, the sound of his keyboard climbs the stairs, slow and eerie and electronic, part horror movie score, part love song.

  “Me, too,” I say.

  “I don’t know why he doesn’t do something with it,” Nico says. Without his glasses, his eyes are a painfully beautiful gray-blue. I fear he’s repeating my own words back to me.

  The music spikes now, tendrils, skates over a glass lake. Pac-Man meets Brian Eno meets Edward Scissorhands meets Vic Chesnutt’s “Speed Racer.” Maybe he’s recording it and maybe he’s not. Probably no one else will ever hear the song, if a song is what it is. It is notes without a beginning or end. Every day the song is a little different. But mostly it’s the same.

  “It’s for him,” I tell Nico. “It’s for us. Lucky us.”

  * * *

  Thing is, he doesn’t want to take his meds. They are making him miserable. They exacerbate everything, making his agony only more agonizing. They force everything out: a reckoning. “They’re killing me, too,” he says.

  He says, “I don’t have the strength.”

  He says, “I can’t do it anymore.”

  Abruptly, he drops all of them.

  It makes no sense to me. He wants to stop trying just when we have answers?

  “Please don’t do this,” I say.

  I say, “I know it’s hard.”

  I say:

  “It’s not forever. Maybe just a few more months.”

  “They said it would get worse before it gets better.”

  “What’s your treatment plan, then?”

  “You’re so brave. You’re amazing. You can do it.”

  “‘Nothing’ is not a treatment plan.”

  It goes like this for a few days. Time stretches out, all the little orange bottles untouched, the pill chart standing there on the desk like a fool, and the panic reaches into my throat. It’s the kind of adrenaline that comes with trying to give medicine to a very scared and angry cat. How to get the medicine into the cat? If I am clever enough, I can do it.

  When I was four years old, I was prescribed an antibiotic for an ear infection. The medicine was a viscous liquid the color and taste of chemically produced banana. It was horrible. I refused. My father drove to Mike’s Bookstore in downtown Gainesville. Mike’s sold books and pipe tobacco. It was our favorite place. He brought home Old Mother Hubbard. I remember the thrill I felt seeing him slide it out of the familiar white paper bag, the thrill of a new book and the thrill of understanding how a bribe worked. Okay. It was an easy choice. I took the medicine.

  This is the desperation that leads me to promise to have sex with my husband every day that he takes his meds.

  It’s a joke, ha ha, but then it’s not. We make it light, flirty. Oh really? Why not? Well when you put it that way. I rationalize. What’s wrong with sex? He’s in agony; I can help relieve his pain. I can reward him for his obedience.

  April moves on. Our plan is carried out cheerfully. There is a certain afternoon when the clouds clear and the snow has melted into the distant fields and we sit on the deck in our shirt sleeves, feeling that spring might come.

  It lasts eleven days. Not a bad run. Then it comes for him and brings him to a place even sex can’t touch, where he’s lost to me again, and he is in one room, and I’m in another. He is on the couch, drinking. I am in the bedroom, where the medicine bottles sit like neglected children, and I cry in defeat and shame, because I have lost.

  * * *

  He has lost more weight. He’s one-forty, skinny as a sickle, a Demogorgon. “There’s not much left of me,” he says. He drops his pants and shows me his testicles. They are red, swollen; they look as though they’ve been scraped on a sidewalk. He holds them in his hands fearfully. And then his testicles move. Something is inside them, moving. Like a baby’s foot across a pregnant belly. Like a wind across a plain. They move.

  On a video conference with Laura, he’d complained about his testicles. He was frantic. I was embarrassed. “Hold on,” she’d said. She’d put on her reading glasses. She typed something into her keyboard. We were sitting on our bed. “That sounds like Bartonella,” she said.

  It made a kind of sense. He was already on Bartonella meds. We knew that Morgellons patients responded well to Bartonella treatments. He’d all but been diagnosed with it, even though he’d tested negative for the bacteria. But there I was, ashamed, and he was suffering, and it was real.

  Now I watch his testicles move. Is this Bartonella? Something wants out. In fac
t, something will get out. Things shed from them, cells, fibers, flakes, flukes. Who knows. He reports it when he leaves the bathroom. He looks like he’s just seen someone killed.

  * * *

  He flares; he crashes; he heals. He drinks. We wait for the next time. He breaks up, over email, with Dr. Savely. It’s a friendly breakup, but still, I have to swallow my disappointment.

  And then something unexpected happens. In early May, the new moon passes. And for the first time in over a year, Aaron doesn’t break out.

  * * *

  A week later, Aaron turns forty-seven. In the morning, the kids present the cards they’ve made for him. From Nico: “Happy Birthday Dad. You don’t suck.” From Henry: “Happy Birthday Dad. You are a stinky ass. You smell like beans and cheese.” He opens his presents: a summer bathrobe, pajamas, boxer briefs (size small—the mediums I bought him last month are too big). He models everything for us, twirling around.

  It’s a rainy, gloomy day, and after the kids are at school we go back to bed together. The bed is in the closet. “Let’s put the bed in the closet,” he said last week, joking, and then we measured it and realized it fit snugly, a queen-sized bed in a walk-in closet. We rolled out the hanging clothes. We’ll turn the closet into the room and the room into the closet! When we close the doors, we’re in a little nook, a cave. I’ve strung up little globe lights above the bed. It makes me absurdly happy, this secret bedroom within a bedroom, the weird magic of it.

  “Forty-seven,” I say. “You’re the oldest guy I’ve ever slept with.” It’s a joke, every year.

  “Oh yeah?” He climbs over me. His arms and chest are firm, but he has lost so much weight so quickly that, in this position, his belly sags with extra skin. “I look like an old man,” he laughs, screwing up his face.

  “You look so good,” I say, pulling him closer. My own belly sags with extra skin, the flesh of pregnancy I don’t seem to have any hope of shedding. “You’ve spent nearly half your life with me.”