My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward

by Mark Lukach

  On a slow decline into a valley in Arizona, I saw off in the distance an eighteen-wheel truck that was climbing up the hill, miles away. We drove toward each other and I felt time slow down. I couldn’t look away from the truck. The closer it got, the more I knew what was going to happen. A deer was going to run out onto the freeway and the truck was going to slam on the brakes. The sudden stop would send the truck into a wild tailspin, and it would skid across the highway into our lane with the loud groan of steel. It would be too late for me to react. At ninety miles per hour, we would smash into the sliding truck. The impact of the crash would kill all of us immediately, our bodies crushed under glass and metal, our dog thrown from the car into the rubble.

  I fixated on the impending crash and gripped the wheel. I was sweating profusely, my tongue chalky and dry, so I cranked up the air-conditioning. The truck got closer and closer. I scanned just off the road for the deer that would trigger all of this, and I waited. I wanted to slow down, but I sped up instead.

  The truck hummed along past us. No deer, no crash, just more empty road.

  Giulia woke up with a start. “Why’s it so cold in here,” she mumbled as she turned off the air-conditioning. She fell asleep again in a few seconds.

  I kept driving.

  At our campsite in New Mexico, I couldn’t sleep. We’d crawled into our sleeping bags around sundown. Giulia and Goose were both snoring, again within minutes. I ached with exhaustion, but no amount of reading or meditating could distract me from the certainty I felt was coming, the man lurking near the campsite with a gun. I had spotted him at dinner in town, sitting by himself in a restaurant booth. He and I had a second of eye contact, and then another, and it was in that second instant of connection that I knew he had picked us as his victims—young couple, full of promise. I looked over my shoulder when we left the diner and the man remained in his booth, but I knew that he had figured out where we were staying. Which is why I needed to be awake. I listened for the snap of a nearby stick, the crunch of footprints in the sand. Once he arrived, I knew there wouldn’t be anything I could do to stop it. He would be armed; we were in a nylon tent. I planned to throw myself over Giulia’s body as soon as I heard the gunshots, protecting her to the very end, but he would empty so many rounds into the tent that it wouldn’t matter.

  At two a.m., I dug into my backpack and took a sleeping pill that my therapist had suggested when I had been struggling to sleep in the thick of my caregiving. I hadn’t taken one in months. I didn’t try to stay quiet as I looked for it. I knew Giulia needed her sleep, but I wanted her to wake up so she could keep me company and tell me that my thoughts were nonsense, that everything was okay, to reflect back to me what I had done for her through her sleepless nights. She didn’t stir.

  I returned to my sleeping bag and tried to forget the man with the gun, who wasn’t even real. I focused on how uncomfortable I was, lying on the desert floor. I fantasized about escaping. The next day, if we survived the night, I promised myself that I would pull over while Giulia and Goose dozed and hop one of the barbed-wire fences that lined the highway and walk into cattle land. I would climb the hills until I was too tired to walk any farther. Then I’d lie down in the hot sun and see what would happen. Maybe then I would fall asleep.

  We made it to Nashville. My family was there, waiting for us, a giant ball of positivity. The Lukaches are a loud, enthusiastic group by nature—especially at a wedding. The festive spirit was amplified with the collective will to celebrate Giulia’s return to health. “Giulia is doing so much better,” my mom and my brothers and my sister and my dad kept whispering to me throughout the weekend.

  I unloaded Giulia on my family. My mom and my sister took her to get their hair and nails done, and I focused on being my brother Matt’s best man. I had put so much of myself into being a husband that I had neglected all other aspects of my identity. We celebrated his bachelor party the day before the rehearsal dinner, a group of guys at a Mexican restaurant to watch Mexico beat France in the World Cup. We nearly brought the place down with our cheers.

  While there were moments of fun, I had a hard time fitting in. These were the people I loved and I knew loved me, but their lives had kept spinning along as Giulia’s and mine fell to shambles, and it hurt to see how fully they had lived while we suffered. I was mad at them, which was absurd, and I knew it was absurd, but that didn’t stop me from feeling mad. I didn’t get the inside jokes that my siblings told about Saturday Night Live skits, so I awkwardly interrupted. I wondered how many e-mail chains I hadn’t been cc’ed on. My sister’s husband, Alex, made a video from the Tokyo Christmas trip; everyone was in it except me and Giulia. The whole family piled into the living room the afternoon before the rehearsal dinner to relive that trip. When the video came to Kamakura, where they wrote Giulia’s prayer card, I couldn’t take it anymore. I stood up and stormed away from my family. I couldn’t accept that their year had been so rich while ours had been lost.

  The wedding itself was a welcome relief. Matt and Grace Ann met even younger than Giulia and I did, at age fourteen, and the perseverance of their youthful love reminded all of us in attendance how pure a joy it can be to love someone. Giulia and I danced together and raised toasts, and at one point while we sat around the table, we instinctively reached for each other’s hands at the same time and had a quick smile and another shared memory to add to our repository.

  The morning after, I went for a run with my older brother, Carl, and my sister, Cat, and as we jogged through Nashville, the conversation quickly turned to how much better Giulia was doing. Carl and Cat couldn’t stop talking about it.

  “I don’t care how well Giulia is doing!” I exploded at them. “Of course I realize she’s doing better. Will everyone stop telling me about it? And why doesn’t anyone seem to care about how bad I feel?” I sprinted away from them and left them behind to muddle through my outburst in the swampy Tennessee heat.

  “I don’t think I want to go to Italy this summer,” I said somewhere in Arizona, speeding back to San Francisco from Nashville.

  “Why not?” Giulia shifted in her seat. “We always go to Italy in the summer.”

  “I know, but I don’t want to go this summer,” I said again. “I need a break from your parents.” I’d had almost daily contact with them for nine months. Many of the conversations had been very difficult. We didn’t always agree on how best to care for Giulia, and it felt at times like a turf war over who should have the final say: her husband or her parents.

  “Well, that’s really lame,” Giulia said. A few minutes later, she reclined her seat even deeper and fell asleep.

  I fumed through most of the drive home as Giulia slept. Me? The chauffeur to her cross-country nap, and I was the one being lame? Her disregard for my experience, one-liners that wrote me off as the bad guy, and an inability even to stay awake with me as I drove filled me with a dangerous rage that had me ready to punch through the windshield.

  The outrage in the moment rested on the surface. Underneath lived a more existential rage that Giulia had gotten sick in the first place. She’d made life so hard for us. Everything that had been certain to us—our jobs, our finances, our goal of becoming parents—had evaporated. What would our lives look like from now on? I knew she hadn’t done any of this by choice. But that did nothing to assuage my anger.

  The time driving solo as she slept at least allowed me to calm down. I needed to talk to her, to try to explain why I was angry, so that I could get rid of it. When she woke up an hour later, I said to her, pleading, “I feel so angry, Giulia. I need to talk to you about what’s going on.”

  “Oh, come on, Mark,” she said back. “Can you please just lighten up? I think we had a serious enough year to last for a while. Just relax, would you?” She turned up the music and pretended I hadn’t said anything, and my plan backfired.

  When we got home, she bought a plane ticket to Italy. I wondered what to do with myself for the ten days she’d be gone. Whatever it was
, it had to be something big. I needed to pull myself out of this sinkhole.

  On a whim, I decided to bike down the California coast. I’d catch a ride to the Oregon border and then bike home, all 450 miles. I wasn’t an experienced cyclist. I hadn’t even changed a flat tire before.

  But I have always been a fitness maniac. Happiness always included pushing my body and flooding it with endorphins. So I figured what the hell. Jump on a bike and see what happens, see if I couldn’t lose my feelings out on the Northern California coastline.

  Giulia wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of my bike ride, but she didn’t try to stop me. She worried that I pushed myself too hard physically and that at some point I was going to hurt myself. But she was headed to Italy, so there was nothing she could do.

  I bought panniers for my bike and loaded them with rocks to get used to the weight I would be carrying—tent, sleeping bag, clothes, food, and water. The training rides hurt, and I liked how my legs burned under the weight of all the gear. I wanted this to be difficult.

  The day before the trip started, I added an extra hurdle: I decided that I would take a vow of silence for the trip. I had spent the prior year writing e-mails to family, talking to doctors, calling Giulia. I was fed up with so much communication, especially right now. It seemed like whenever I spoke to someone—Giulia, my parents, even my therapist—I worked myself into a sour, indignant mood. I needed silence to defuse my resentment, which was too explosive to manage.

  I took a note card and wrote on it: For personal reasons, I have taken a vow of silence. Thank you for respecting this choice. I hope we can still enjoy each other’s company. I laminated the card and threw a reporter’s notebook and pen in my pack for moments when I needed to write down details to buy food or reserve a campsite. Giulia was skeptical of my vow of silence, so I promised to e-mail her my location from my phone each morning.

  My friend Thomas was a pilot and had been wanting to visit a friend in Crescent City, a working-class town twenty-five miles south of the Oregon border, so he flew me up to my starting line, and I clipped my feet into my pedals and began riding south toward my home.

  I had only an hour until dark after landing in Crescent City, and I biked on a quiet, flat road to a campground that was perched on dunes overlooking a broad, windswept beach. I set up camp and ate a peanut-butter sandwich slowly as I watched the sunset. I crawled into my tent, used a flashlight to read The Brothers Karamazov, the only book I packed, and fell asleep.

  My first climb out of Crescent City was a six-mile, twelve-hundred-foot incline through ancient, foggy redwoods. My body was focused, my spirits were soaring, and almost immediately I felt my agitation and depression start to slide away.

  I intended to average 50 miles a day, to stretch the 450-mile ride over nine days, and I stuck to the plan the first day. I made it to camp by two p.m. I swam in the ocean, did nearly four hundred push-ups, read one hundred pages of Dostoyevsky, and was bored silly by sundown. I woke up the next day at five a.m., charged and ready to ride.

  On day two I had already put down 50 miles by lunchtime, so I upped my goal. I rode another 40 miles, for a solid 90-mile day. The third day I did almost 110, and the fourth was 80. I loved every rotation of my bike chain. I pedaled silently through shockingly beautiful coastline, nothing to rush to and nothing to run away from. I biked along the Eel River, ate a dozen Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in the shade of a redwood, and took naps. A girl in Garberville offered me weed and then hugged me and called me a prophet when she read my laminated note card. A waitress in Klamath asked me if I was deaf.

  Most of all, I loved my warm cocoon of silence. I crawled in and found peace. I dreamed and wandered through my mind in whatever direction I wanted. Of course I thought about Giulia, but I always tried to rein back into the present. I focused on the details of my bike, my route, my body. I’d never eaten my food so slowly or enjoyed it so intensely. Everything was now, immediate, and alive.

  At the bottom of a hill I spotted a group of three riders at the top ahead of me, and I set the goal to catch them within the next five miles. I sped past the slower of the two riders at mile two, but the leader of the group accepted my unspoken challenge, and we ended up in a game of cat-and-mouse chase, bombing down hills at forty miles per hour and straining on the uphills. The race lasted fifteen miles and brought us to the town of Elk. I pulled to the side of the road, huffing and puffing, to catch my breath. He stopped about two hundred yards behind me.

  I chomped on an apple and watched him as he paced and waited for his friends. After fifteen minutes, he jumped on his bike and rode back in the direction we had come from, to make sure that everything was okay with his friends.

  I had spent all year just like that, pedaling through life at Giulia’s pace. If I ever rode at my own speed and broke away from her, I looked back nervously, worried that something had gone wrong. I pitied the cyclist, just as I had pitied myself.

  I finished my apple and got back on my bike to ride away from Elk by myself, free of the responsibility to look back with worry.

  I liked to ride before breakfast, to work up an appetite. On my fifth day I pedaled 20 miles, then stopped for breakfast in Gualala. I checked the map I carried in my pack. I was only 110 miles away from home. I could be home that night.

  The bike ride was taking a toll on my body. My knee ached constantly, my back was sore, my butt was chafing, and I was cold. I had hoped for sun and sweat, but instead I rode mostly through wind and fog. Each night I bundled up tight in my sleeping bag but couldn’t shake the chill.

  Fifteen miles after breakfast, I stopped for a snack in Salt Point State Park and to refill my water. I knew from the map that the stretch ahead through the Sonoma coast was going to be hard and the final leg through Marin harder still. The road was windy and dangerous, with steep, dramatic cliffs only a few feet from the shoulder.

  I grimaced as I got back into the saddle of my bike. The pain was a deliberate intention of the trip. I could choose when to stop and when to start. I could control my suffering.

  As I rode, I focused on how much my knee hurt, distracted from the pain in my back. Once the knee pain felt unbearable, I focused on the gnawing chafe under my butt. I did this over and over, transferring my pain from one area of my body to the next, and the next thing I knew, I was delicately balanced on the edge of the road. My bike had drifted as my mind wandered, and my wheels were centimeters from the drop-off.

  As soon as I realized how close I was to the edge, my front wheel slid off the road. I tried to pull myself back up, but my bike responded by flipping forward. My legs and my gear rushed over my head. I heard the scraping of metal and flesh.

  I lay in the gravel of a turnout for a few seconds, unsure if I had really crashed my bike or I had just imagined it. My feet were still clipped into my pedals. I crawled out from under my bike to assess the damage. My bike was mangled, and my stuff was strewn across the right lane. I tried to gather everything and drag it to the side, but when I reached forward with my right arm, I felt a hot pain in my chest.

  I sat down and felt around my body to see where I was hurt. I found blood on my legs. There was a giant dent in my helmet. Any time I moved my right arm, my knees went limp with the pain. I felt a sharp, pointy bulge on the collarbone.

  A few minutes later, a car slowed down and then pulled off into the turnout. A woman rushed out to see if I was okay. I nodded. She ran back to her car and I heard her on the phone. “This guy on a bike wiped out and he looks really hurt. He’s all cut up on one side.” Pause. “I don’t know, he didn’t say. Let me ask him.”

  She returned to hover above me. “Did you black out? Did someone hit you? Did you break anything? An ambulance is coming.”

  I reached for my notebook, the one I used to communicate through my vow of silence, and realized how foolish that was. The bike ride was over. I’d broken my collarbone.

  I stared up at the fog above me. I could hear the ocean gently mocking me through the trees. I
had tried to ride 450 miles to escape my anger, but I could feel it lying in the turnout with me, ready to pounce now that I had stopped pedaling.

  The first word I said was, “Fuck.”

  It was a ninety-minute bumpy ride in the back of an ambulance from the site of my bike crash to a hospital in Santa Rosa. I called my parents. They called Giulia in Italy, who called me back after an X-ray confirmed that my collarbone was broken.

  Giulia was pissed off. She hadn’t wanted me to go on this trip in the first place.

  “You always push yourself,” she said. “I knew you were going to get hurt someday, and now you’ve done it, at the worst possible time. You’re there, I’m here in Italy with my family, on the first vacation that I’ve taken after the worst year of my life.”

  “Giulia, I didn’t mean to get hurt.”

  “Well, you did.”

  We didn’t talk for more than a few minutes. She got off the phone to return to dinner with her family.

  I reeled in shock at how Giulia reacted. Because I was hooked up to a heart-rate monitor, I could hear and watch as my heartbeat raced from my phone call with her. I focused on the numbers to will my pulse to slow down, but it only beat faster. I tried to put myself in her shoes, to understand why she had been impatient and dismissive with me—on vacation, a day’s travel away, so what could she really do?—but I couldn’t do it. My view was too clouded by the past year. I wanted some acknowledgment of my sacrifice. Lying in the hospital bed, feeling helpless and worn, I pandered to my hurt feelings of abandonment like a petulant child. I gave up on trying to calm myself down, or rationalize why Giulia had acted that way, and lay back in defeat and cried for myself.