My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward

by Mark Lukach

  I carried him into our bedroom, which already felt foreign without Giulia, and cracked the window to let in the cool breeze. The air was still wet and fresh from the rain of the morning.

  I changed Jonas out of his costume, lay down with him in our bed, and wrapped him in my arms. As I drifted off to sleep, my last thought was a wish that we could freeze this moment and never have to face tomorrow.

  twelve

  November 2014

  I woke with the sunrise and couldn’t find a reason to get out of bed until I remembered the Switch Witch. Distant cousin of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, the Switch Witch comes to children’s houses on the night of Halloween and turns their candy into toys. We told Jonas he could keep his five favorite pieces of candy but should put the rest by the fireplace so that the Switch Witch could perform her magic as he slept.

  Jonas was curled into a tight ball against me, as he tended to do, the two of us over on the edge of Giulia’s side of the mattress, most of the bed empty and unused. I felt dazed: from my first full night of sleep in almost three weeks; from going straight from the ER to trick-or-treating; from missing Giulia. I wondered how I was going to pull off the duties of the Switch Witch without waking Jonas. Everything felt fuzzy and out of reach.

  As I tiptoed out of the room to retrieve the two toy cars I had hidden in the guest room closet, I heard Jonas rustle in the sheets, but he didn’t wake up. I smiled with pride when I reached the living room and saw that he had remembered to put his bucket of candy at the base of the fireplace, with his five chosen pieces on the coffee table nearby. For that brief moment, all I felt was a love for my son that eclipsed the worry and dread.

  With Jonas still sleeping, I had time to be alone in the silence of the morning. I sat on the couch and tried not to think, but how could I not think? There were too many logistics to figure out. Cas and Leslie should be at our house by noon. I would visit Giulia during Jonas’s nap. I would visit again on Sunday morning before they left. Then I’d need to figure out Monday, with work and day care and another hospital visit. Then Tuesday. Wednesday. And then how much longer was this one going to last? We had gone from twenty-three days to thirty-three days. And what was going to happen with Giulia’s job?

  When Jonas woke up, he found me dozing on the couch. I jumped up and made a big production out of the toy cars from the Switch Witch, and he set out to play with them, inventing stories of the cars as they did huge jumps and crashed and zipped all around the room.

  We lazed through the morning as I watched the clock, waiting for Cas and Leslie to arrive. I held it together till they got there and I could put my guard down. I knew what lay ahead of me with Giulia. But for now I was with friends, and my son, and I wanted nothing more than to be vulnerable and feel loved and connected and unafraid.

  Cas and Leslie brought a DVD of the dreamy Japanese anime movie My Neighbor Totoro, their favorite pick for sad, rainy days. The movie doesn’t have much of a plot, just two sisters befriending a gentle monster in the forest, who takes care of them and helps them as their mother is in the hospital. Not much happened, but Totoro felt so comforting, with its stunning colors, charming soundtrack, and gentle dialogue. I had never seen the movie before, even though I grew up in Japan in the era of Totoro’s peak popularity, but I was captivated, and so was Jonas. The characters became friends with Totoro and a bus shaped like a cat, and that was kind of it as far as the story was concerned.

  Acorns are an important part of Totoro. The sisters and the monster give each other acorns as gifts, sometimes wrapped in leaves. Sunday morning, we all went for a hike in Briones, and in early November the mighty oaks were flush with acorns. Jonas was ecstatic as he collected acorns, and we left piles of them along the trails as gifts for Totoro. I pocketed a few dozen acorns so that later I could wrap them in leaves and hide them along our favorite trails for Jonas to find. He needed to feel protected by a kind forest monster like Totoro.

  I loved to make believe with Jonas. As a dad, I wanted to build a world for him where logic, gravity, time, and other restrictions didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Jonas was loved and cared for. Everything else was fluid. So we made up stories of Totoro in Briones, friendly coyotes who came to our back door at night and brooms that could sweep monsters out of the house. I wanted to build for Jonas a cocoon against the harshness of the world, a safe, beautiful retreat. I needed that, too.

  All the while, Giulia was lost in her own world of make-believe. So lost that she was once again in the hospital, heavily medicated, unable to live in the rational world.

  The hospital was in Oakland, about thirty minutes away from our house. The weekend disappeared, and it was Monday. I was alone with Jonas. I dropped him off in the morning, only a few minutes after his school opened. I taught all day. I raced out of school and drove to the hospital. I stayed an hour and then ground through bumper-to-bumper traffic to pick up Jonas, only a few minutes before his day care closed. One of the kids first dropped off and one of the last picked up. Then it was a matter of figuring out what was in the fridge, what I could cook, and the inevitable acceptance that it was going to be another night of takeout. I bathed Jonas and bundled him in his pajamas, and we retreated to the master bedroom to sleep together. I didn’t even try to put him to sleep in his own bed. I drifted off after the first book, even as he was still awake beside me. Then my body woke up around midnight, no alarm necessary, painfully aware of how much schoolwork I was failing to do. I sometimes fell right back to sleep, but most of the time I worked for a few hours, until three or so, then slept again until the six a.m. alarm rang and started it all over again.

  The psych ward was much smaller than the other two Giulia had been in. We held our visits in a cramped, closet-sized space called a “quiet room,” which was offset from the TV lounge. I never visited during traditional visiting hours, so I didn’t know where visitors typically went.

  Giulia was calm and settled in the hospital. She didn’t seem scared. Her fixation now wasn’t on the Devil or heaven, but on helping the other patients in the hospital. She adopted a mothering role with all of them. Each time I visited, people came up and introduced themselves to me, to say what a helpful presence Giulia was for them. They also made fun of me behind my back after I left and called me Mr. Buttoned-Down Shirt.

  I missed a few visits. One afternoon I was hung up at a work meeting and couldn’t make it in. Another day I simply didn’t have the energy to drive to Oakland for another visit that I knew would be mostly the same thing it had been for twenty-three days, then thirty-three days, and then now. Most of all, I couldn’t stomach the guilt of leaving Jonas in day care for eleven hours. When Giulia was first hospitalized five years earlier, I was appalled to leaf through the guest book and see so much white space, so many empty slots from families who didn’t visit. If they did visit, they didn’t stay long. I was becoming those families.

  “Can Jonas come and visit?” Giulia asked on the phone.

  “No, honey, he can’t,” I said. “Remember, we made that a big part of our plan. No Jonas visits.”

  “But I really miss him,” she said.

  “I know you do. He misses you, too. But he can’t visit. We agreed.”

  Jonas was now two and a half. He had questions. He had memories. Impressions would linger. I didn’t dare bring him into the psych ward. I didn’t even ask the hospital if Jonas could visit, but Giulia did. Their rules prohibited children under the age of fourteen. She asked them each day anyway, unwilling to take no for an answer, but they didn’t budge. Thank God.

  I called Jonas’s pediatrician for insight on how this might impact him—the time away from Giulia, her strange behavior in the days before the hospitalization, his signs of being scared of her.

  The doctor was unflinching. “You have to protect your son, above all else.”

  “Jonas is fine now. Giulia’s in the hospital, I don’t have to protect him,” I said.

  “Yes, but she will be coming home. She proba
bly wants to come home soon. You might have to refuse it. If she’s not ready to be around Jonas, you can’t allow it.” I felt nauseated hearing this advice. “He’s so little. He doesn’t have the capacity to process what he might be feeling, nor the words to explain himself. I know this is hard to hear, but your wife is an adult. She’s in the care of professionals. If things need to be uncomfortable for anyone, it’s her, not Jonas. He is a little boy. He needs to be protected.”

  I knew she was right, but I couldn’t say “yes” or “okay” or in any way verbalize that I agreed with her. Not because I disagreed, but because agreeing was acknowledging that I might have to make such an awful choice.

  “If it comes down to a choice between Giulia and Jonas, you have to choose Jonas. You have to.”

  One afternoon I arrived to find Giulia and a few other patients in music therapy class, out in the garden. The social worker was playing “Let It Be” on the guitar. The group had written their own song lyrics to express how they felt. The chorus: “Let me free . . .” Even Giulia, who wasn’t much of a singer, sang along.

  I had a hard time being fully present with Giulia during our visits. From my seat in the quiet room, I faced a giant clock on the wall behind her, and I glanced up at it constantly. I knew that the longer I stayed, the worse traffic would be, which meant a later pickup for Jonas, no walk for Goose, more takeout for dinner.

  Our script was overplayed. We had exhausted our psych ward conversations on the first hospital stay and were no better now. I told stories about Jonas, and she told me about the other patients, and group therapy, but those ended within ten minutes. I wanted to make sure that Giulia was safe and in good care, which she was, but I knew by now that I couldn’t unlock the mystery to her psychosis. We were just in a waiting game for the medicine to kick in.

  One day our typical chat was interrupted by the loud thud of someone smashing into the wall. The door to our room had a glass window on it, but we couldn’t see anything. We just heard it. Loud, profane screams—“Fuck you, motherfuckers! I hope you all fucking die!”—amid a swarm of firm, professional voices.

  Giulia and I sat in chairs across from each other, but at the startling noise of the confrontation, she got up and sat in my lap.

  She recognized the voice as belonging to a woman who had been admitted that morning. The new patient railed over and over again at the staff: “Get the fuck off me! I’m going to fucking kill you! Fuck you and die!” The nurses, doctors, and orderlies worked together to keep the woman pinned to the floor. We could hear the sound of her arms and legs flapping against the tile as she resisted.

  “Are you okay?” Giulia asked me over the noise. She looked worried, not for herself but for me, as though she wanted to protect me.

  “Yeah, sure, I’m okay,” I said. I was surprised that she was checking in on me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, I’m okay,” she said. “I just want to make sure you’re okay. You don’t spend a lot of time in here, and don’t see what happens here.”

  “Yeah, I’m fine, honey, thanks for asking.”

  We waited and listened to the whole thing. It was disturbing to hear someone driven to such hatred and violence by the thoughts in her head and the violation of orderlies restraining a person for her own safety and the safety of others. It was even more unsettling because we couldn’t see anything but heard it all in vivid detail. Disturbing, unsettling, but I wasn’t scared. I’d shed my fear of the psych ward years ago.

  But the longer it dragged on, the harder it became for me to avoid my fear. The woman wouldn’t stop screaming, and Giulia and I looked at each other with each outburst. In her mothering psychosis, she was clearly worried about me.

  But the thing was, I wasn’t going to stay here. Once we got the “all clear,” I could walk out of the quiet room and through the locked doors, gather my phone and keys, and drive home.

  But Giulia wasn’t leaving. This was her home, at least for now. She was going to sleep here and walk these halls, with this woman. The same nurses and orderlies could pin Giulia down if she ever exploded like that. Giulia had real reasons to be afraid: for her own safety and of her own mind. I had somehow forgotten how terrifying this place must be for her.

  I knew I had to protect Jonas from a world like this. I didn’t need the pediatrician to tell me that. But in the charge to protect Jonas at all costs, I couldn’t forget that I had to protect Giulia from a world like this, too.

  We stayed in the quiet room for an excruciating thirty minutes that felt like hours, until the staff subdued the woman and took her to a different part of the hospital. A nurse checked in to make sure we were okay. She explained that the patient’s family had visited, which had agitated her.

  The nurse led us out of the quiet room through a hallway I didn’t know existed. “Are you okay?” Giulia asked me again.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks for checking, but I’m okay.”

  “I don’t want you to be scared,” she said.

  “I’m fine, I promise.”

  Standing in the hallway, she leaned into my body and rested her head on my shoulder and gently slipped her arms around my waist.

  “Good, I’m glad,” she said, releasing a big sigh. “I don’t want you to be scared,” she repeated.

  I gave her a kiss on the forehead, but it was time to go, so I left. I walked to the locked doors, gathered my phone and keys, and got in the car to drive home.

  On hospital day six, a Thursday, I called my parents on my drive from the hospital to Jonas’s day care. I called so I had someone who would talk with me and keep me awake on the drive.

  “Come to Delaware this weekend, Mark,” my parents suggested. “You need to be with family.”

  I balked. I couldn’t imagine flying across the country right now.

  “Why would I fly to Delaware? That’s so far.”

  “We’ve already talked to your siblings,” my mom said. “They are ready to come for the weekend if you are. You need a pick-me-up.”

  “Wow,” I said. They were spread around the East Coast, but they were ready to drop everything and go to Delaware for me. “That actually does sound really nice.”

  “We have another suggestion,” my mom said gently. “Maybe, just think about it, but maybe you should leave Jonas here with us.”

  “What?” I asked in alarm. “That makes no sense. Jonas lives here. He has school. I’m going to pick him up there right now. This is his home. I’m taking care of him.”

  “Just think about it, Mark,” my mom urged. “You won’t have to work in the middle of the night. You won’t have to scramble in the morning to get him ready and then rush to pick him up and get him to bed. You can have some time to take care of you.”

  “I don’t know, Mom. I kind of need Jonas right now.”

  “Sure you do,” my dad said. “But you also kind of need to take care of yourself.”

  “Just think about it,” my mom said again. “Let’s talk tomorrow on your drive to work, and see what you think then.”

  I drove the rest of the way home sullen, smothered by guilt. Guilt at not being at the hospital long enough, not picking up Jonas sooner, not caring for Goose well enough, not having the attention and patience for my students. No music, no phone calls, just guilt beating the shit out of me as I gripped the wheel tighter and crawled through jam-packed traffic.

  I didn’t even make it to Jonas’s school before I called my parents back. They were right. I couldn’t do this anymore. I selfishly wanted to keep Jonas with me, but our life right now wasn’t what was best for him. He could be with his grandparents, whom he adored, instead of being dragged around as a companion to my worry. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  That night I bought a round-trip ticket for me and a one-way ticket for Jonas. We would take a red-eye on Friday, the next night. I would fly back Sunday morning. Jonas would stay. I didn’t know for how long.

  I visited Giulia Friday afternoon and explained the plan to her. S
he was on edge and asked a lot of questions about discharge, so it took me almost an hour of diplomatic dodging before I brought it up.

  “I don’t like it,” she said. “I want Jonas to be at home.”

  “I do too, Giulia,” I said. “But it’s so hard for me. I’m so tired. Besides, he loves Grandma and Grandpa.”

  “I want him home when I get home,” she said.

  “I do too,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”

  We flew out of San Francisco International Airport at ten thirty p.m. and were eating breakfast through heavy eyelids at my parents’ house by seven thirty a.m. My flight home was twenty-four hours later. At nine a.m. my sister, Cat, arrived with her husband, Alex, and son Memphis. Jonas and I stood in the driveway with my parents, waiting for them. Jonas jumped into their arms and was immediately off and playing games with the toys Memphis brought, and Cat and Alex turned to me and bear-hugged me tightly. An hour later, my brother Carl and his husband, Jeff, arrived, and we returned to the driveway for more hugs and hellos. I was so tired, but it felt so vital to be with my family.

  After lunch, the children napped and we adult kids went for a run along the Brandywine River. We started with a slow jog together and chatted around the question of Giulia and Jonas and our twisted lives. At the turnaround point I separated from the group and ran through the cold so fast that I could feel my heartbeat pounding in my ears, and I gasped for breath as I waited for them to catch up.

  Sunday morning I was awake an hour before my six a.m. alarm, puncturing through the thin sleep of my nervousness. Jonas was in the bed next to me, and I was the most tired I’ve ever felt, but I knew I couldn’t sleep. I lay with him and gently held his hand and spent the hour reminding myself that this was what was best for him, and that was what mattered most. I was ready to protect Jonas from Giulia’s illness. I never thought I’d have to protect him from my own inability to navigate the impossibility of our circumstances. It was terrible. I was dropping him off in his elephant costume all over again.