by Brianna Karp
It didn’t end up mattering much one way or the other. The day after I was fired, I was offered a book deal, and Matt and I decided to accept it.
I’d stayed up long nights with Matt agonizing over the book proposal and sample chapters. I begged him to help me, especially with the marketing and technical stuff, since he was so much more attuned to the analytical side of his brain than I was, but he insisted it had to come from me, and that I’d feel much better about myself for doing it on my own. He’d proofread it for me and give me some ideas and input, but it was important that it come from my own heart.
At one point, I remember drifting off as I typed, and awakening to Matt yelling at me. I was completely confused. I couldn’t understand why he was angry. Matt never yelled at me. I hated people yelling at me—it sent me into freakout mode. In my mind, calm discussion was always better than angry confrontation. I sat up, wrapped my arms around my knees and reflexively started screaming back. What’s wrong? What did I do? Why are you yelling at me?
He was startled. He’d seen that I was asleep and had tried to take the laptop from my hands and tuck me in, and then I’d started picking a fight with him, he said. He told me that my eyes were open and that I seemed completely lucid and awake, if a bit drowsy. He said I was acting nasty, as he’d never seen me acting before, and I had even called him names and insulted him. He had no idea why I had suddenly started fighting with him, and his gut reaction was to fight back.
I was horrified. I remembered none of it. It wasn’t the first time I’d held an entire conversation in my sleep with a boyfriend. Dennis had related a similar experience to me, when he hadn’t realized I was still sleeping for a good twenty minutes or so, until I completely stopped making sense. Brandon, too, who occasionally let me crash at his place for a movie and a change of scenery when both of his roommates were out of town, once swore up and down that I’d conversed with him at length, when I was actually conked out on his couch and blissfully unaware. I kept shaking my head, trying to comprehend, and Matt eventually realized that I wasn’t messing around: I had absolutely no recollection of anything he was talking about. We held each other and both of us trembled at the thought that it could be so easy to fuck up a good thing over a little misunderstanding. I thought, meanwhile, that maybe I should go back to therapy. I’d been told that I had sleepwalked as a child, and my mom even said that she heard me speaking in French in my sleep in high school, when I had taken French class, but this was an altogether different kind of problem. I didn’t want it to ever happen again.
It was time for Matt to go back to Scotland. The farewell at the airport went tearfully, much as before, except that this time I knew we’d be apart for much longer, and that things would, one way or another, be irreversibly changed by the time we saw each other again. There would be a baby. I went back to the ranch and pressed my nose to the grindstone in anticipation of the event, trying to put on a happy face and subjugate my loneliness and fear; bury it beneath a smile and layers of bravado and confidence I couldn’t yet feel.
Matt kept me well informed on the baby front. He and Lori went to another scan together. While he’d been in California, she’d somehow fallen in her kitchen and knocked out several teeth, so now she was wandering around with a creepy, gap-toothed grin, he said. It was also clear that she’d completely disregarded the doctor’s instructions to put on weight. She had only gotten scrawnier and scrawnier. She was at a dangerously unhealthy weight, and the doctor told her that by no means could she be allowed to give birth naturally. They scheduled a C-section for her in Aberdeen on October 28, nearly a month premature. It was good that we’d decided to fly Matt home much earlier than the anticipated due date. Within weeks, the child would arrive.
He was frightened beyond belief, and it fell to me to give the pep talks, even if peppy was not what I was feeling. I was just as afraid as he was.
On the evening of October 27, I stayed up all night talking Matt through his bus trip to the hospital in Aberdeen. He was a wreck, and my heart broke for him. I would have given anything to be there for him, but all I could do was hope that my voice on the phone line would make a difference.
I was the first (and only, to my knowledge) person he called, an hour after the birth. It was a baby girl. I wanted my first child to be a baby girl, and she beat me to it. I tried not to get emotional. I was happy for him—really I was. I told him over and over again how proud I was of him. He sent me her first picture and her first video, shot on his camera phone. I watched the video over and over again. She was indeed beautiful, and obviously Matt’s daughter. She looked exactly like him. True to my prediction, he was madly in love with her the moment she arrived.
“See? What were you so worried about, honey?”
“I don’t even know anymore. You were right. She’s absolutely perfect. I love her, and I love you.”
Prior to the birth, Matt told Lori that Kelsey was a name that he really loved for a girl. It was his grandmother’s name, he explained to me. He hoped he could honor her in this way. If it was a boy, he wanted it to be named after his favorite grandfather, John, with whom he’d been incredibly close. Lori had never come up with any ideas for names, he told me, so they named the baby Kelsey Barnes.
Lori had to recover from her C-section, and she wouldn’t be able to take the baby home to Peterhead, Matt explained to me, since her stepfather’s house was not fit for a child. He brought the baby home with him from the hospital a few days later. Lori only took the bus to visit him and Kelsey every few weeks, he told me.
In the UK, Social Services checks up on every newborn baby at its home for the first several months of its life. Lori, he told me, had listed her home address as his, so that they would do all the checkups at his home. I wasn’t very fond of this idea.
“You mean, as far as they’re concerned, you two live together. You’re a couple.”
“Well, I never really thought of it that way, but I suppose so, yes.” I was silent. “Come on, Bri, this isn’t for me. All three of us know the truth. She visits Kelsey, but she will never stay overnight in this flat, I promise you. It’s just that if they see where she lives, they may take Kelsey away.” I guess I did understand, but I was still protective. I didn’t want to hate Lori, but in some corner of myself, I did. She had complicated our lives beyond belief, made demands upon Matt that had cost me exorbitant amounts of money, and put me in the position of having to make concession after concession in order to be a supportive wife to Matt. Now, in a manner of speaking, she was getting her way on another point—she was his girlfriend, too, if only on paper.
“How are you going to explain Lori’s complete absence from your flat every time they do a welfare check?”
“Out at the store? Visiting family? Don’t worry. They only do these checks for a little while. Besides, soon it will be her flat. I’m coming home to you for Christmas, right? I figured we’d get married on this next trip out…if you like. Then I can sign the flat over to her and she can move in with Kelsey.”
All my fears were forgotten. I was ecstatic.
“Yes, of course I like, baby! Oh my gosh, I love you so much! I didn’t realize it would be so soon! Let’s do it.”
“We will. I just need to keep her happy until next week. That’s when we go down to the registrar’s office and put both our names on Kelsey’s birth certificate. If she only puts her own name on the certificate, then I don’t have parental rights unless I go to court for them. But if we do it together, then she’s automatically given me equal parental rights. So then, I won’t even have to have her fill out that form you gave me.”
“You still should, you know. Just because you have equal rights on the birth certificate doesn’t prove the custody arrangements you agreed on for Kelsey—equal time in the United States and the UK, and once she’s old enough for school, the school year in one country, vacations and holidays in the other.”
“We’ll worry about that afterwards. I need to keep her happy until my name is on
that certificate. Then you and I are getting married and building our life together.”
In a mere couple of months, I would be a wife, and there was so much for me to accomplish before then. I’d better get started.
Matt did indeed get his name on the birth certificate, and continued to care for Kelsey in the following months. He was a lot more exhausted than usual, obviously, with a new baby in the house. We still spoke over gtalk nearly every day, but our chats were constantly interrupted.
“Uh-oh…we have company! She’s coming around.”
You may think that this irritated me, but I wasn’t usually bothered. If anything, it made me love him all the more, seeing how much he clearly adored his daughter. If I was going to eventually take on parenting (and step-parenting), I wanted my husband to be an excellent and attentive parent, and Matt was. Lori still didn’t come around to visit her very much, he told me, so he was mostly on his own, and the rest of Lori’s family had never met the baby once, or even expressed any interest in seeing her. They hadn’t even come to the hospital when the baby was born, which made me feel a bit sorry for Lori—something I hadn’t expected.
He often joked about getting Kelsey a passport, tucking her under his arm, and “making a run for it” to California with her. Lori would barely notice, he said. I would laugh and talk him out of it.
“I’m quite sure she would notice and mind very much if you kidnapped her daughter, Matt. Besides, then you’d be leaving me with all the diaper changing, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, that would finally be my chance to sleep.”
“Ah, yes, there is that.”
Right around this time, Matt seemed to begin developing unnerving fears about my becoming a public figure. It was a complete role reversal: I was gradually becoming more comfortable with the decision to ditch anonymity, and he was, seemingly out of nowhere, obsessing over whether he would be able to keep meeting my needs, or whether I would eventually leave him.
“Everyone leaves me,” he would insist. “You’ll leave me, too. What if I’m not able to support you, to take care of you? All you’ve ever done for me is be the one person in my life who’s always there for me. What if I can’t even do the same for you?”
I had no intention of going anywhere, and had never considered that there was any possibility under the sun he was anything other than exactly what I needed, and said so. I couldn’t understand why this was coming out of the blue. He was working himself into an anguished lather.
“You just don’t understand, Bri. No matter how much you say that it doesn’t bother you, it’s going to bother me from now on. You’re going to leave me. The thought’s in my head now and I’ll just have to deal with it forever….”
Finally, it dawned on me. “Matt…you’ve been taking your medication, right?”
Pause.
“Sweetie?”
“I ran out the last week of my trip in California. I haven’t gotten around to going to the doctor and picking up more yet.”
I calculated quickly in my head. He’d been off his medication for months. What did this mean? I knew how my mom acted off medication; she’d never been on it. But I didn’t know exactly what it meant for Matt. He’d once told me that it was a place he never wanted to go back to. He’d described his behavior off the meds as completely irrational—outbursts of frustration or tantrums. Plus, sans meds, he had trouble sleeping, and could be up for days, no matter how tired he was, and he experienced terrible memory problems.
“My wife could ask me to pick up milk from the store, I’d say yes, and then, later that evening, I’d swear up and down that the conversation had never taken place.”
“So you’d forget to pick up milk? That’s what would cause huge arguments between you and your wife? You didn’t have anything more important to fight about? You couldn’t just laugh it off and one of you go get the milk?”
“Well, sort of. It’s not just that I’d forget, but that instead of just realizing I’d forgotten, I’d never remember it happening in the first place.”
Forgetting the milk became an “in joke” between us, a sort of code phrase for a massive overreaction to a petty mistake. I understood what he was driving at, though. But the problem was, he’d only told me about all this; I’d never had to witness it myself, so it never had the opportunity to become a deal breaker between us.
I understood mental illness, I figured. I’d known my fair share of people who grappled with it. I also knew, from firsthand experience, that it’s perfectly possible and acceptable to love someone with a mental illness. And Matt had never seemed the type to lapse. He very much liked who he was on medication, he had remained on it since he was diagnosed and he had constantly claimed he didn’t want to return to the abject misery of being off it. I was always so proud of his bravery in admitting it up front; of baring the darkest side of himself to me and trusting me not to run.
“Besides,” he continued, “you know it regulates my sleep schedule, and I’m watching Kelsey. I need to be up all the time! I can’t allow myself to sleep for the normal eight hours anymore.”
We just needed to figure something out for a couple more months. When we were married, we could share child-care duties during his visitation with Kelsey, and then he could get his full eight hours’ sleep. I begged him to see the doctor, he promised to and the crisis was averted. He was still terrified, though, and nothing I could say soothed him.
“Maybe I’d better not talk to you about it. It’ll just make you worry more. It’s probably something I just need to deal with on my own. It’s not your fault.”
I was hurt. The last thing I wanted him to do was feel as if he had to internalize any grief or pain or fear he was feeling. We’d always been all about being completely open and honest with each other. And of course I understood irrational terror. Remember those demons I’m still terrified of?
“You know that I always want you to be able to talk about things with me, and this is important. I don’t want this to be something that affects our relationship later, down the road. Please keep on talking to me about it. I’ll keep reassuring you.”
He went back to having upbeat chats with me from then on. Every time I asked him about his fears, he’d just say that they were still there, and that he was doing his best to overcome them, and no, he didn’t feel like talking about it any more. I was happy that at least he was being honest with me. I’d reassure him that I loved him and would always be there for him, and he’d change the subject. “Hey, have you decided whether you’re going to go by ‘Brianna Karp’ or ‘Brianna Barnes?’”
“Barnes, of course.”
“Aw, baby, really? Even though most of the world knows you as Brianna Karp?”
“Yup. I want nothing more than to take your last name. Who wouldn’t want to be a Barnes instead of a Karp? Much more sophisticated!”
“I’m so glad. That’s my girl.”
“…even though Brianna Barnes kind of sounds like a porn name.”
“What?! It does not!”
“Yes, it does. Haven’t you ever heard of Brianna Banks?”
“Brianna Barnes is a lovely name. You’ll only ever be my porn starlet.”
Chapter Nineteen
While Matt learned to diaper a baby, back in the trailer I was dealing with an invasion of mice, spiders the size of a very small fist and giant crane flies—which Sage referred to as “mosquito eaters.” Despite her assurances that they were completely harmless, they freaked me out by swooping around my face, and I would dart from one end of the trailer to the other, screaming as if Satan and his demons themselves were after me. Goddammit, if I had to deal with giant pests, I wanted them to be in the attic of my own nice old Victorian house. Here in the trailer, it was just adding insult to injury.
Right around now, Matt and I decided to make his daughter’s birth public. We knew that we’d have to at some point, but he worried about losing his crew’s respect, or the implication that perhaps he had cheated on me, or on Lori with m
e.
Also, not even his own family knew about the baby, or about me. He had been fully estranged from his father for a long time, and there was no hope of reconciliation there. His brothers and sisters lived all over the world, and weren’t in touch. None of his family had ever even known that he’d been homeless. He still loved his mother, although they hadn’t spoken for a couple of years, since he had been with his first wife. She was, he feared, in an abusive relationship with her second husband, and he felt guilty about that, as though he had abandoned her. He worried about his mother often, and talked about eventually calling her up or writing her a letter to let her know he was OK. I encouraged him to do it. He became deeply sad whenever he thought of her.
“But what am I supposed to do, Bri? Walk in there with you and Kelsey, and say, ‘Hi, Mom. This is my wife, and this is my baby…from some other woman, not my wife?’”
“She loves you. Don’t you think she’d understand that these things happen?” I was hurt. Was he ashamed of me?
“I’m not ashamed of you. I’m ashamed of me. I want her to see that I’ve succeeded, that I’ve done something right. Maybe I’ll contact her later. Soon. But later. Once we’re married.”
I’d come to understand, by this point, that you just couldn’t push Matt, so I let it go. I was getting good at letting things go.
He felt too embarrassed to write up his daughter’s birth announcement for Homeless Tales on his own. He thought perhaps it would sound better coming from me. Perhaps if I wrote it, his crew would realize that everything was hunky-dory, I was onboard with the baby and nobody had cheated on anybody. So I wrote something up, he approved it and made a couple of minor alterations and additions of his own, and it was published on both of our websites. I tried to write it as delicately as possible, to take some of the inevitable heat and focus off Matt.