Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  “Is that all?” And then he kisses me, and we’re belly to belly. I fit my fingers to his bony spine like piano keys. Inside the circle of my limbs are all the warm, aging organs that keep him alive.

  Afterward, I tell him, “You don’t fuck like an old man. Or a sick one.”

  But already his smile looks a little strained. By the afternoon, little candle-tips of red burn through the skin on his arms. We’d planned to go out for a birthday dinner, but he spends the evening in the bathroom, chipping away at his skin. This was not part of the plan. We’re in the safe hammock between the new moon and the full moon. But the tide is finding him here.

  He emerges in his new bathrobe, still in its tags. One half of his mustache is coated with what looks like a creamy sawdust. “Your mustache is blond,” I inform him. He puts a hand to his face. His hands are coated with it, too, like a lotion he hasn’t rubbed in. We barely blink. All the husbands I might have had, I think, are here in one body: a dark-haired one, a fair-haired one; a big one, a thin one; a sick one, a well one; gentle and rough, moody and sunny, hopeful, hateful, fearful, loving, tender.

  I say, “I’m sorry this is happening on your birthday.”

  He puts his forehead to my forehead. “I don’t want to do this again,” he mumbles.

  “I know,” I say. “I know.”

  * * *

  At the end of May, it’s our turn to go to the couples retreat on Owasco Lake, our third. Every year now, we trade childcare with our friends in the RCA program. We drop off our kids with their bags of groceries and sleeping bags and then we drive an hour north, through farm country and lake country, cow dung and canoes and what reminds me and Aaron of the sea grass of our Florida youth. Lilacs and wisteria bloom along the road. Last May, when we stayed home, Aaron was on lithium. He was puking in the school parking lot. Our world has been around the sun since then, and we can feel it.

  Last time we were here, two years ago, we opened the retreat as the speaker couple. We were so nervous we were shaking. We sat around the circle of fourteen couples and shared every detail of our story, an hour of it, reading from the script we’d written together—the drugs, the suicide attempts, the childhood abuse, separation, recovery. Afterward, the other couples surrounded us as though we were a bride and groom, hugging us, thanking us, sharing their own stories. “It was remarkable,” one man from our home group said. “It was almost too much,” he admitted. “Like watching surgery.”

  One couple was from another upstate group. Theresa and Steve. She was a little older than me, with dark curly hair she tamed into a neat braid, and had a calm, direct way of speaking that made me want to be at ease. He was a little older than Aaron, with a neat haircut and a penchant for board games. We asked them to be our sponsor couple at the end of the retreat, sitting on the porch. “Wow,” she said admiringly. “You just came out and asked, like a prom date.”

  They thought about it. Then they said yes.

  After that, every two weeks, we spoke on the phone, saying the serenity prayer together, the unity prayer, meditating, sharing, working on our steps. They listened, validated, challenged, soothed. They were like our coupleship fairy godparents. Sometimes just hearing their voices through the speakerphone made me sit up straighter, slowed my breath down.

  Now, at the retreat again, in the big wood-paneled room Aaron says looks like the library in Clue, Theresa and Steve are leading the icebreaker. We pass a ball under our legs, over our shoulders. We guess which famous person we are. Then, on a piece of paper, we write down a regret. We ball it up and throw it into the middle of the room. Anonymous. Then we grab one and, going in a circle, read it aloud. Missed opportunities, uncontrolled anger, unmet needs. The chemist in our home group reads mine.

  I can’t tell if Aaron flinches. Part of me wants him to acknowledge it. Wants him to need this and only this to heal, a public amends in this place of recovery.

  Afterward, Aaron skips the bonfire—the smoke makes his chest close up. It’s just me and Theresa and the chemist left when I remember the bag of balled-up regrets. Together we feed them to the fire, watch them disappear. It feels pretty good, in that way that manufactured rituals feel good, though I wonder if Aaron should be the one doing the burning. I feel unsettled. Is he mad that I stayed at the bonfire? Does he resent that I aired such a sore subject? When I get back to our room, after ten, he’s already asleep, facing the wall. In past years, we’ve always pushed our beds together, but tonight I fall asleep in my twin bed across the room.

  The next morning, when I come back from the early meditation, he’s gone. I find him taking a walk down by the water. He’s got that look on his face, says he’s fine but I know he’s not.

  In the next session, led by our sponsor couple’s sponsor couple, we struggle. Aaron’s not feeling well, can’t sit still. His hands are turning blue. He says he feels like his blood isn’t flowing. He leaves the session, and I cry. People bring me tissues. I clear my tears, try to focus. The session is on acknowledging our universal human needs.

  In the afternoon, Theresa and Steve invite us to their cabin. Most of us stay dorm-style in the main house, but they won the lottery this year and have a separate place down the road, with a private porch overlooking the lake. The air feels thinner here, silkier. We sit in our rockers and talk.

  The morning’s quarrel seems like it happened last week. We try to explain what it was all about. Mixed signals, cold shoulders. We both felt abandoned. “It’s hard for me to see him get up and leave,” I say. Theresa reminds us that, at her first retreat, she almost got in her car in the middle of a session and drove away. We laugh, imagining the sight.

  Steve is sharing a porch swing with me. “Are you powerless over Aaron?” he asks. And for the tenth time that day, I cry. I nod. Aaron smiles at me from his rocking chair.

  I used to think retreats were cheesy. The ice breakers and nametags and craft table, the gratitude meditations. But we’ve come to find some ease here, even some transcendence of our wretched selves. Some higher power.

  It isn’t until that night, lying with Aaron in bed, that I think to ask him if he heard my regret read at the icebreaker. He didn’t. He didn’t feel great that night, couldn’t focus. I tell him what I wrote. I regret not believing in my partner’s pain. He pulls me close to him. All night we hold each other in our pushed-together twin beds.

  * * *

  The week after we get home, Aaron announces he wants to take his meds again. Not the antipsychotics, but the antibiotics, the antiparasitics. Even the liquid stuff that looks like egg yolks, that once made him say, “I’d rather die than take this.” He takes it. By himself. Then he settles on the couch and closes his eyes. I tell him, “You’re the bravest boy I know.”

  He says, “Fuck right I am.”

  * * *

  He takes it as long as he can, when he can. Which is not long, and not often. But there’s something else going on, he says. There’s something this medicine isn’t touching. In the middle of the night, in the middle of a flare, I check on him in the living room. He’s doing something in his bathrobe. When he sees me, he nearly jumps out of his skin. He closes his bathrobe. The next morning, sitting on the couch, he tells me, calmly, firmly, that there’s something inside him. He shows me the video on his phone. “Just wait for it,” he says. In his distended navel, on the screen, something is breathing. Seething. If I ask myself, Could that thing be a giant worm, could those pointy pores be a lamprey’s suctiony teeth trying to break through the skin, the answer is yes.

  “I see this thing with hair,” Aaron explains. He’s said this before, but his tone is different now. It’s Aaron saying it, not some scary-eyed stranger. “At least it looks like hair. Black hair. It darts out of my skin, and quick as it comes out, it’s gone again.”

  The internet is no help. Look up “Parasite + Hair” and what you will get is the same skin-tingling story about a parasitic twin discovered in the belly of a teenage boy in India. The story says, WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTEN
T. The growth, which is still technically alive but not technically human, resembles a rock implanted with Halloween-costume teeth, sprouting a rope of black hair six feet long, that has been growing for eighteen years. It looks like it belongs in a Ripley’s museum. The parasitic twin, absorbed through the umbilical cord, has been living in the boy’s abdomen since birth. “That evil has been tormenting him for years,” his father says.

  Aaron says, “That is the most horrifying thing I have ever seen.”

  There have been only two hundred such cases reported worldwide, the article says. So rare! Impossible!

  Do we suppose that Aaron has a parasitic twin inside him? Odds are: no. But do we believe, at this point, that whatever is inside Aaron is as rare and as evil as this twisted hulk of brain and bone? Absolutely.

  He’s been saying it for months—for years—and I’ve been telling him, telling myself I believe him. Mostly, I’ve been thinking, Maybe. Mostly I’ve been thinking, I don’t know. It’s not just the video on Aaron’s phone. I’ve seen a dozen videos like this, explained them away. It’s his end-of-the-rope, you’ve-gotta-be-fucking-kidding-me voice. It’s the fact that no doctor we’ve come across can explain the insane cycle of symptoms except for Laura’s full moon theory, and that no patient we’ve come across has a parasite load big enough to trigger it. It’s that thing that was in his lung, and now isn’t. How to explain it? I’m lining up all the cards still, trying to use logic to justify this conclusion, but now they’re not just cards dealt by others. It’s what they’re leaving out. It’s a hole. It’s a feeling. “There is Still. Something. In. Me.”

  The day of the Strawberry Moon, we drive down to meet Laura in her office for the first time in months. In the car, we agree our expectations are low. How can they be otherwise? But there’s something reassuring about her office, with its essential oil diffuser, the little rack for our shoes. Laura is freshly blond, her toenails royal-blue on the plush cream carpet. “Well, you look great,” she says to Aaron. He does: he’s in a smart plaid button-down with a peach T-shirt underneath, peaking out of the collar. He’s thin. He’s got a few days’ beard. The lesions on his hands have healed for now.

  “So. What’s been going on?”

  Aaron asks me to tell her what I’ve seen. I tell her. There’s something inside him. There’s still something very wrong. At first Aaron sends me pictures to show her; he can’t do it himself. But the Wi-Fi isn’t working, so reluctantly he tilts his phone to her. The flukey things. The flies. His distended stomach. Her eyes go big. “Send that one to me,” she says again and again.

  She takes notes, does research, bouncing between her notebook and her laptop and her phone. Could it be cutaneous leishmaniasis, a parasitic infection spread by sandflies? It causes skin lesions that look not unlike Aaron’s. She shows us the pictures. Could it have been transmitted by a tattoo needle? When was Aaron’s last tattoo? About five years ago, he says. He pats his right shoulder. Underneath his shirt is a half-sleeve of Keith Haring people, dozens of little figures spilling to his elbow. She turns up some articles about NIH research on parasites introduced by tattoo needles. She says, “I have a lot of reading to do.”

  Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be affecting the other people in our house. “This is something that was transmitted directly to you,” Laura is certain. This puts Aaron at some ease. “Either that, or your immune system was so compromised that they were able to fight off what you weren’t.”

  She puts her pen down. “I have a client who just saw a parasitologist in Manhattan. He’s the only person on the East Coast who tests live in the office.” A Dr. Caine. She will call him after we leave.

  “I have to tell you, Aaron,” she says, tapping on her phone. “I absolutely believe you.”

  I think Aaron might cry. “Thank you,” he says.

  * * *

  After the appointment, we stop at the medical marijuana office in Binghamton to pick up some oil. Aaron vapes it in the car like a madman on a full moon trying to ward off a parasitic infection. He once created a fake Facebook group called Vape Dads, before he’d ever vaped, with a logo and everything. Don’t judge my path until you’ve walked my journey! Like some of his public attempts at humor, this one either fell short or flew over most people’s heads. Most of his friends thought it was serious. Now, in the car, I say, “Let’s go home, Vape Dad.”

  He has stopped taking his meds again—what can I do?—but he drinks and he smokes, smokes and drinks. Beer, whiskey, vodka, downing it in shots like medicine. He doesn’t like the vape pen, so he takes to smoking the oil on a sheet of foil out on the deck, like someone who knows what he’s doing. Catching sight of it shoots me in the heart with a dull little Nerf dart. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I wish I didn’t have to do this.” I’m sorry, too. I wish I didn’t have to see it. I wish it didn’t work so well. Four days after the full moon, he’s feeling the crawling all over his body, and he’s bearing ten new pounds, but he’s not breaking out.

  “I can’t go through it again,” he says. When I tell him, “That whiskey might kill your liver before the flukes do,” he says, “Then at least I’ll be out of my misery.”

  * * *

  Meredith visits. She sees the fifth of whiskey on the floor by the couch. She raises both eyebrows. Later, over tacos and margaritas, she brings it up. “Trust me,” I tell her. “I wish alcohol were the only problem.” I don’t worry about it much anymore, I tell her. The alcohol helps with his symptoms. He drinks when he’s in pain.

  “Alcohol doesn’t really help with pain,” she says.

  I shrug. “He says it does.”

  There’s nothing moderate about Aaron’s drinking this week. But he’s not drinking like a man trying to kill himself, either. He is drinking like a man trying to outrun God. Outrun death.

  Plus, he’s present when he drinks now. He doesn’t even seem drunk, and he says he isn’t. I don’t tell Meredith this part. Who would believe it? He’s happy, goofy, jokey. He snuggles Henry on the couch. He goes to Nico’s fifth-grade graduation. He’s Vape Dad. If he weren’t drinking, I know, he wouldn’t be at graduation. He’d be home, on fire.

  Eventually, we know, it will catch up with him, and he’ll stop, at least for a while. Is this messed up? Of course. Is it more messed up than the horror that’s happening to his body? I’m not sure. Was alcohol put on the planet to suppress the horror of nature, or is it a horror of nature? How can it be anything but both?

  “Don’t be mad,” Meredith says. “I just worry about you.”

  “I know,” I say. “I worry about me, too.”

  “I just think that, look, maybe he’ll be cured of whatever this disease is, but you’ll still have a lot of problems on your hands.”

  I shake my head. I sip my margarita. I can’t remember what those problems were, before he was sick. I don’t want to remember.

  ETNA ROAD

  2010

  It was a dump. An old country house, built in 1850, without all of the charming renovations of our Virginia country house. Peeling, sloping vinyl floors I could never get clean, and that sagging AstroTurf porch, and industrial-blue carpet up the steps that were so steep and so narrow we couldn’t get our bed upstairs. Layers upon layers of ancient wallpaper. We didn’t have the time or money to gut anything, to get to the bottom of the rot. We just carpeted and papered over everything, swept it all, literally, under the rug.

  It was a dump, but it was our dump. One way to outsmart a mortgage is not to have one. With the money we got out of our first house and with the first installments from my book, we were able to buy the house outright. We had gone to Ithaca to hunt for houses and found one at the cheapest end of the cheapest range on the market. We were going to live within our means! It even had an accessory apartment, which we thought one day my parents might live in. For now, it would be a little extra income. The apartment opened onto a little deck and a nice flat lawn with a clothesline and the relic of an old wooden fence that bloomed with sunflowers. An
d on the other side of the fence was a squat little duplex with a shake roof and a satellite dish. It did not take long for someone to tell us that the duplex had been the site of the Christmas murders. What Christmas murders? We were new in town.

  This was not quite true. In 1989, days before Christmas, in an eerie echo of the Clutter murders, a family of four had been bound, shot, and burned. That house was miles away. The duplex next door was where the killer had lived. When the police had found him, he was sitting on his bed with a gun under his chin. He fired a shot at the officers, and they shot him dead.

  At least we don’t live there, I reasoned.

  * * *

  Our move to Ithaca had been decided by the fates of the labor market, but it had been sanctioned, pre-approved, by Aaron. Go for it, he’d said when I applied for this one and only job. Neither one of us had set foot in Ithaca. It was just an idea.

  “It’s awfully far,” my mother said.

  That he wouldn’t look for work in Ithaca had also been settled with little conversation. Perhaps there was some unspoken math involved: a sacrifice for a sacrifice. He did a little eBay on the side. “He’s a stay-at-home dad,” I told people when they asked, and he was. Aaron stayed home with Nico while I worked, potty-training and making oatmeal and taking him on long drives for his naps and watching Yo Gabba Gabba and making up songs that should have been on Yo Gabba Gabba, singing them in his robot voice. “Don’t—Pick—Your—Nose!”

  If we could ignore the smell of sulphur from the well water, if we could keep our gaze from the neighbor’s house, it did feel like a fresh start. I loved my new job. I loved my new friends. I loved Ithaca, the waterfalls and the lake and all the playgrounds, every weekend a new playground for Nico to explore, with their elaborate wooden bridges and rocket ships and rope webs Aaron and I stood under, wood chips in our shoes, saying, “We’re right here, you’re fine!” If I think hard back to that first year in Ithaca, I think I can remember that Aaron loved it, too.