My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward

by Mark Lukach

  I said good-bye to Jonas as he was still waking up. My mom was in the room with us and she took over, playing with him as I fumbled through my sloppy tears to kiss him good-bye. I trudged down the two flights of stairs to my dad’s car.

  My mom opened Jonas’s bedroom window, and I heard him innocently ask, “Where’s Daddy going?”

  “He has to go back to work, but you will see him soon,” my mom said.

  Then Jonas started to panic. “I want to go with Daddy,” he said. He shouted out the window, “Daddy! Daddy! I want to come with you! Let me come with you!”

  I couldn’t look up, I was crying so hard from where I sat in the passenger seat. I yelled out, “I’ll see you soon, Jonas, have so much fun with Grandma and Grandpa,” and my dad started the car.

  Jonas kept yelling, “Daddy! Daddy! I want to come with Daddy! I want to come with Daddy!” My mom tried to reassure him, but he wouldn’t stop yelling, and I was dying to stop the car and bring him with me, but we drove away through the lifelessness of winter and I hated myself for not having enough courage to bring him home with me.

  Monday, I taught a full load of classes and then had four hours of parent conferences, and it felt like the easiest day of the month. With that schedule, at school from eight a.m. until eight p.m., I once again couldn’t visit Giulia, which meant I hadn’t seen her in three days, the longest I had ever gone without visiting her in the psych ward. I called her as I drove home from school.

  “Mark, they think I’m almost ready to come home,” she told me.

  “That’s great,” I said, not believing it. Giulia was clearly doing better. This was her best hospitalization by far. Her psychotic ramblings were in check within a week of arriving. The two weeks of taking antipsychotic medication may not have kept her out of the hospital, but they set the stage for a shorter stay. “You remember that Jonas isn’t here right now, right?” I asked. “He’s with my parents.”

  “I know,” she said. “When is he coming back?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “It depends upon when you’re coming home.”

  “Well, I think I’m coming home soon, in the next day or so. And I want Jonas home when I get home.”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  “No, we won’t see,” she snapped back. “We have a family phone conference tomorrow, and I want to come home and I want Jonas to come home. Are you going to fight for me, Mark? I want to come home. Get me out of here. It’s been long enough.”

  “Yes,” was all I could say.

  “Mark, are you going to fight for your wife?” she said. “Are you going to fight for your wife?”

  “Of course I am, Giulia,” I tried to interject, but she kept repeating herself.

  “Are you going to fight for your wife?” she asked me over and over, each time emphasizing different words. Are you going to fight for your wife? Are you going to fight for your wife? Are you going to fight for your wife? She was furious. It wasn’t a psychotic anger; it was her first release of the pent-up agitation of being locked away for the third time. Half of me didn’t take the outburst personally, because I could only imagine how frustrated she must have felt. But the other half was crushed at her accusations. I had followed our plan down to its finest, most unreasonable detail, and she was still mad. Each query took a piece away from my crumbling sense of myself as a husband and father.

  She must have asked me twenty times, so quickly that I couldn’t say anything in response. It was the one moment she granted to herself to be the bad patient, the one who spoke her mind against the injustices of being locked away from her family. She had learned that following orders with a smile got you out of there quicker, and she had been on her best behavior as soon as the psychosis faded enough to give her that sense of control. But on the phone, it was just the two of us, and she let all of her simmering agitation with the hospital explode, if only for a few minutes.

  She finally calmed down and then quietly, one last time, she asked again: “Are you going to fight for your wife?”

  “Yes, Giulia, I’m going to fight for you,” I said. “I’ve been fighting for you for five years.”

  She sweetened up at that answer. “Well, that’s good,” she said. “It’s going to be so good to be home. I can’t wait to see you and come back home to help out with Jonas, you must have been so busy at home without me there . . .” And on she rambled for five more minutes with as much kindness as she could.

  But I was still going to fight for Jonas, too. I was going to fight. For Jonas. Even if it meant that I might have to fight against Giulia and her psychiatrist. Jonas’s pediatrician never specified what I had to protect Jonas from, so I had to trust my instincts. If Giulia’s good behavior was just an act, and there was still sleeplessness and paranoia and delusional thinking, then I was going to have to put my foot down, no matter what her psychiatrist said.

  I was going to fight for Jonas.

  The family conference call on Tuesday was during my lunch break, and it was quick and decisive. The doctor felt that Giulia would be ready to come home the next day. He was confident that she would be fine with Jonas home as well.

  The night before, she was aggressive. Now, she was remarkably self-aware.

  “I’m so glad I get to come home, but you need to remember how fragile these hospitalizations leave me,” she said. “I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s a good thing that Jonas stays with your parents for a few more days. I miss him so much, but I know that it’s already overwhelming to be home, and that it will be even more so if Jonas is there.”

  I breathed a huge sigh of relief. There was going to be no fight. Giulia would come home to just me, and I could see how that went for a few days before we brought Jonas back into the mix. I had been worried about a showdown—Giulia home, demanding that Jonas be there, me skeptically checking to see if it was the right environment for him—for over a week, but we would avoid a confrontation for the first few days.

  Giulia was pleasant and steady when I picked her up Wednesday morning. We took Goose for a hike, which was now becoming a post-hospital tradition. We Skyped with Jonas and my parents in Delaware. He was ecstatic to see Giulia for the first time in two weeks. We drove to her favorite sushi restaurant to celebrate. It was a smooth night. No vomiting up of medicine. No waking up at two a.m. to try to sneak out of the house. Just a quiet, comfortable sleep together, husband and wife, back in our bed, our bulldog snoring between us.

  It all went remarkably fast. I worked on Tuesday, picked up Giulia on Wednesday, and was back at work on Thursday. Giulia enrolled again in her IOP and set to filling the rest of her time with horseback riding and volunteering. It was clear that the hospital doctor had been right: Giulia was ready to be home, with all of us. There wasn’t going to be any showdown.

  My parents flew with Jonas back to California on Saturday morning. He had been gone for a week. Giulia had built up noticeable confidence over the three days she’d been home. We drove to the airport together and were waiting curbside. Jonas’s smile lit up when he saw us, and he ran to me and I grabbed Giulia into my side so when he jumped he was jumping into both our laps, right there on the curb at the airport, a tightly wound hug of smiles. Jonas chattered nonstop on the drive home about the different outings he’d had with Grandma and Grandpa. My parents stayed overnight but politely kept in the background as we found our new footing.

  I resumed waking up with Jonas and dropping him off at school before I went to work. Giulia busied herself throughout the day with IOP, dog walks, and grocery shopping. There were no signs of the post-psychosis depression that had hit her so hard in the past. In the afternoon, I picked up Jonas from day care, and we all spent the evening together. Within a few weeks, Giulia tapered off the antipsychotic medication. I didn’t have to watch her take her pills, because I knew that she had conceded how important they were for her recovery.

  The single biggest difference of Giulia’s third hospitalization was that she didn’t leave her job. She to
ok a full month off, but after that she returned to a twenty-hour week and then, when that went well, a thirty-hour week. She found her greatest sense of value by returning to the job she loved to do.

  We had mostly followed our plan. It was far from perfect, and I had already identified tweaks we needed to make, but those could wait. What mattered most was that we had used the plan we created. Now here we were, a month after her shortest hospitalization, feeling in control and optimistic that this time would truly be different.

  Giulia’s impressive rate of recovery—discharged from the hospital after thirteen days, back to work on a limited schedule only two weeks later—lasted through December. But in January, the depression returned with unforgiving intensity. Giulia insisted that she keep working, and she trudged through her day and sat at her computer and somehow got her work done, but she heard the nagging voice of suicidal depression all day long.

  By February, Giulia was coming home from work defeated by the effort it took to focus on her job, without much energy left over for us. She almost never talked about her feelings. She didn’t go to any support groups and saw her therapist only every other weekend.

  While at first it felt like we had discovered how to prevent her bipolar from ruining our lives, now I worried that we had resumed normal life too quickly, pretending that if we ignored Giulia’s depression, it would go away on its own. But it wasn’t going away, and the old routine of her depression left me standing alone as the sole parent. Just as when Jonas was six months old, Giulia was too withdrawn into her depression to engage with us. She wasn’t on antipsychotics, so at least she wasn’t sluggish and muted, but she was distant all the same. At night she just wanted to sit in the bathtub while I played with Jonas, then lie in bed alone as I put him to sleep. She didn’t wake up with us in the morning, so I handled solo the mad dash of dressing Jonas, wiping yogurt out of his hair, and shepherding him into her room to kiss her good-bye before we left.

  The one exception to Giulia’s disengagement was our nightly dance parties. We resumed the ritual borrowed from Cas and Leslie and their boys, and every night after dinner we cranked up the music and danced around the house.

  I was the DJ. We had our favorites—“Bright Whites” by Kishi Bashi and “Inside Out” by Spoon—but the number one hit was “True Believers” by the Bouncing Souls, a punk band I first saw in concert when I was fourteen years old. I’ve never forgotten the intensity of that show, how the crowd of individuals morphed into a single living entity that was fueled by the strumming of the guitar and the banging of the drums.

  Jonas loved to look at his reflection in the glass door as he pretended to be a rock star. I taught him the difference between playing air guitar to regular songs and playing air guitar to punk songs: regular guitar is about the wrist, but for punk songs you have to drive the strumming through your elbow. Jonas had already perfected his glam face of puckered lips and intense eyes, and as the Bouncing Souls blasted through the speakers, he danced and strummed his imaginary guitar, his eyes always on himself.

  Our dance parties were a collective moment of escape, just like our aerobics class in the red-carpeted gym years before. We danced to shake free of our worries, if only momentarily. We danced together in the same room, but we mostly danced alone, working up a sweat so that we could feel our hearts race with endorphins and freedom.

  In the bath one night after an especially energetic dance party, Jonas asked me what a true believer is. He’d been paying attention to the song lyrics: The kind of faith that doesn’t fade away. We are the true believers. I thought about how to answer without too many big words. It was an important question.

  But I never got to the answer. Before I organized my thoughts, Jonas smiled and said, “Oh, I know, Daddy. A true believer is me. I’m a true believer.”

  “That’s right, Jonas, you are a true believer,” I said.

  “And Daddy, you’re a true believer, too.”

  “And Goose?” I asked. Goose always sat in the bathroom with us during bath time.

  Jonas looked at him and smiled and said, “Yes, Goose is a true believer.” Then:

  “Is Mommy a true believer?” Jonas asked. Giulia was in bed, as she always was after our dance parties, not to go to sleep, but to sort through her thoughts and reconcile the fitful joy of our dance parties with the heavy suffering of the rest of her day.

  I wanted to tell him yes, but I needed him to say it instead. He had identified himself, Goose, and me as true believers, and I wanted him to be the one to include Giulia in that circle.

  “Do you think she’s a true believer?” I asked Jonas.

  “Yes.” He nodded seriously. “Mommy is a true believer.”

  It was decided. We were all true believers.

  From then on, Jonas had a new question to ask strangers, as a part of his interrogation of getting to know them better: “Do you like the Giants?” “What’s your favorite color?” “Are you a true believer?”

  I signed up for corrective laser eye surgery so that I wouldn’t have to wear contacts ever again. Giulia and I both started wearing glasses in the fifth grade, another one of those small coincidences we learned we had in common. I tried to get her to sign up for Lasik as well.

  “No more glasses, no more contacts. Wake up each morning and be able to see. What freedom!” I said, trying to convince her one morning as we lay in bed together. “Besides, the surgery pays for itself in fifteen years. Tally up all the costs of wearing contacts, with the new contacts, and solution, and eye appointments. Each year after that, you’re actually saving money.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know if I’ll be alive in fifteen years,” she said.

  “None of us knows that, Giulia. But I plan to be alive in fifteen years, so I think it’s worth it.”

  “I don’t know if I’m planning to be alive in fifteen years,” she said quietly. “I still don’t know if I’m going to make it or not. I’ve made it through three episodes, Mark, but that doesn’t mean I’ll make it through four, or five, or six.”

  “Oh,” I said, disoriented by the quick change from a conversation about Lasik to one about suicide. I waited to see what else she had to say. I stayed quiet and listened to the hum of the humidifier from across the hall in Jonas’s room. I could sense that she wanted to pick up her phone and forget about this moment. This was a rare moment when she opened up about her feelings.

  “I will say this,” Giulia said, breaking the silence. “If I get sick again, I’m not as scared of it.”

  I said nothing.

  “I mean, of course I don’t want to go psychotic again,” she said. “But if I do, I know it’s okay. I’ve been in the hospital before, I know what to expect, it’s not as scary as it was the first time. I know that you and Jonas will be okay while I need my time to get back under control. . . .” Her words got lost in the marbly sound of her tears, and she trailed off.

  “I’ve got this thing for life, Mark.” She looked up at me, gracious and dignified under the weight of her diagnosis. “Call it ‘bipolar,’ call it a ‘disease,’ call it whatever you want, but the main thing is that it’s not going away. It will always be with me. But at least I’m not as scared of it anymore.”

  Her rise out of her third depression was muddled and lethargic. There was no flick of the switch as with the first two. But by March it was mostly gone.

  “You seem like you’re doing well lately,” I said to her one evening as we picked weeds around the tomato plants that we had just planted. Even though the plants were barely saplings, they filled the garden with promising smells, and we liked to come out there and just breathe.

  “I guess so,” she said, her eyes still on the soil.

  “I mean, it’s been a few weeks since you’ve talked about suicide.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” she said.

  “Do you still feel suicidal?”

  “No, not really,” she said. “I haven’t for a while.”

  “So would you say that this e
pisode is behind us now?”

  She sat back on her heels and looked up at the sky for a moment and then at me. “Yeah, I think I would. I don’t feel sick anymore. I think the third episode is over.”

  We were hit with a soaking rainstorm in early April, and all of California rejoiced. We were in our fourth year of drought, and the snowpack and reservoirs were at historic lows. The California drought was an international news story.

  We always rushed out into Briones for a celebratory mud hike whenever it got wet. We loaded up the back of the car with towels and changes of clothes and trekked out.

  The clay of the East Bay hills turns exceptionally sticky in the rain, and it takes only a few steps for the mud to cling to your shoes. The mud attracts more mud, and soon enough you are walking with mud Frisbees on your shoes as you slip and slide along the trails. Which for a toddler is about as fun as it gets. Jonas adored our mud hikes. We all knew he was going to get soaked and dirty, so Giulia and I just let it happen. He was always grinning from ear to ear.

  On this day, I wanted to explore a trail that I had been eyeing for a little while but had never followed. Our family map had grown, with the addition of places such as Mommy’s Favorite Hike, the Ridge Hike, the Totoro Tree. Still, I sought new places to call our own.

  The trail wound near a picnic area and then disappeared into thick trees. We followed it through the forest into a gorgeous opening, a flat valley between two steep hills. The basin was full of old trees, gnarled and leafless in the winter, half of their branches dead. They were arranged symmetrically like an abandoned orchard, except they gave no fruit.