Songs Without Words

by Ann Packer

  She looked at him.

  “I’m really sorry. If this were something I could skip…”

  “Forget it,” she said. “Go. It’s fine.”

  He waited a moment, then gave her a perfunctory kiss and left the house.

  When Joe was ready she went up and told Lauren she’d be back soon. There was a heavy fog outside, and the air was cold and damp. She looked up and down the street, and there wasn’t a person visible, not a single sign of life anywhere. Days like this, the rest of the world, even the next block, seemed entirely hypothetical.

  “What a morning,” she said as she stepped up into the van, and from the passenger seat Joe looked over at her with nervous eyes. Lauren these days—how was it for him? “Oh, sweetie,” she said.

  “Just drive.”

  The school was up in the hills. The drop-off line started a block back, and you inched forward, more and more slowly as the first bell approached. Liz recognized a number of people, or recognized their cars: the khaki Sienna, the silver Odyssey, the massive dark orange Hummer. It was a community of vehicles. “Vehicular mayhem” came a phrase to her mind.

  The car in front of Liz moved forward, and when she’d closed the gap Joe opened his door and jumped out. “See you later,” he mumbled, and she watched as he dove into the stream of kids heading for the school. All those kids, all those backpacks: they reminded her of nothing so much as ants marching along, each with its own burden. Childhood was hard, mainly because you hadn’t learned perspective. Nothing was real beyond the present. The unknown future wasn’t comfortable or uncomfortable—it simply didn’t exist.

  She needed a little more time, and once she’d circled the school she headed north rather than turning south toward home. Thank God it was Friday; she didn’t think she could stand another day in this week.

  She found a parking place right in front of Starbucks, but the line was long so she ducked into the bakery next door and bought a loaf of bread first. Back at Starbucks, she waited in what was now a longer line, then realized only after she had her coffee that she was out of decaf and would need some for Thanksgiving. She stood in the beans line while the counter person tried to cope with the fact that she was being asked to work, here at her job. She was probably eighteen or nineteen, surly, and so slow it had to be intentional. Liz understood clearly that this would not bother her so much if she didn’t fear Lauren would end up just the same.

  Finally, a pound of beans in hand, she left the store. She got into the car and thought: It doesn’t have to be like this.

  Then she realized that she had it, the thing to say to Lauren. It doesn’t have to be like this. With concern, with hope, and without pressure. She had just the right thing to say when she got to Lauren’s room.

  But Lauren wasn’t in her room. For many hours she had fought an idea, and now the fight was over and she was grateful. The worst possible decision had turned out to be a great relief. She had done it, and she lay in the empty bathtub (she had not wanted to leave a mess), and bled, and sank into the thing the pills were helping her with, the not feeling, the not thinking that was going to help her with not being, because being was not…working…for her….

  Warm where her wrist touched her face.

  part two

  10

  Afterward, Brody would not remember the drive to the hospital, the adrenaline blast to his system, the way his hands kept slipping off the wheel as he sped across intersections where yellow lights were going to red. The entire thing would be lost to him, and in moments when he wasn’t plagued by other things he would be plagued by the idea that he might have hurt someone, that he didn’t know he hadn’t hurt someone on his breakneck race.

  What he started with, what his memory would start with, was the emergency room waiting area, where Liz’s parents were watching for him, both of them.

  “Where is she?” he said, and Marguerite tried to take his hands, and the image of her hands—her soft, wrinkled, slightly arthritic hands as he pushed them away: this was flash-printed onto his mind.

  He sprinted past them and pushed through a pair of swinging doors. All he’d really gotten on the phone was: Lauren, hurt herself, ambulance, hospital, now. He dodged an elderly man on a gurney, and there was Liz, turning and seeing him and bursting into tears.

  Again, all he could say: “Where is she?”

  “Brody,” she cried.

  He remembered himself and took her in his arms, felt her weight against him, felt, as he pulled away, her hair detaching from his cheek, where the dampness of her face had made it stick.

  “Where?” he said.

  “God,” she wailed, but then she indicated a door, and he pushed through it and saw: Lauren’s bare legs, three people standing over her, machines and an IV bag.

  “Sir,” the one man said, “you can’t come in here.”

  “I’m her father.” He moved for a better look: her eyes were closed, and there was a tube in her nose, something black smeared all over her face. “What happened? Is she unconscious?”

  “Sir,” said one of the women. She was doing something between Lauren’s legs, and Brody looked away.

  “OK, I’ll go,” he said. “But just tell me…”

  The man—Brody took him to be the doctor—faced him. “Your daughter had a drug overdose. We’re monitoring her vital signs and giving her activated charcoal to absorb the toxins.”

  “A drug overdose?” Brody said. This was impossible; Lauren didn’t do drugs. Everything was happening too fast. “What do you mean, what did she take?”

  “Tylenol. And apparently some Benadryl. The medicine cabinet was empty when your wife found her.”

  Brody’s pulse raced. He knew from somewhere that too much Tylenol could be really bad; that was why the liquid stuff you gave babies came in such tiny bottles. He put his palms together and took a deep breath. He had to slow down. He turned away, only to realize that he’d been looking at Lauren’s left wrist and that it had been wrapped in a bloodstained bandage. He looked back: the other wrist, too.

  “Oh, my God,” he said. “She slit her wrists?”

  The doctor was studying one of the monitors. “The cuts are the least of it—we’ll stitch her up in a minute. It’s her liver we’re worried about.”

  “Her liver?”

  “Why don’t you wait outside? We’ll talk in just a bit.”

  To Brody, the lights were suddenly far too bright, and a wind roared past his ears. Then things were normal again.

  “OK,” he said. “I’ll wait outside.”

  In the hallway, Robert and Marguerite had joined Liz. As soon as she saw Brody, she broke away from them. “What’d they say? Are they pumping her stomach?”

  “The doctor said he’d come talk to us in a minute.”

  She put her face in her hands and wept. “No, no, I can’t stand this.” He touched her, and she jerked back. She looked at him and cried: “I went to get coffee.”

  He had no idea what she meant, and he turned to Robert and Marguerite. Was there a coffee machine in the waiting area? Did she want coffee?

  “After she dropped Joe at school,” Marguerite said. “She went to get coffee before she went home.”

  “No,” he said. He took hold of Liz’s shoulders and bent to look in her eyes. “Oh, no.” He meant Don’t do this to yourself, but a terrible sound came out of her, and she wrenched herself away and sobbed harder.

  “You didn’t know,” he said.

  “I did!” she shrieked.

  “Honey.” He reached for her again, but she pulled away. “Liz. Where did you find her?”

  “Stop!” she cried. And then: “In their bathroom!”

  He tried to picture the inside of the medicine cabinet in the kids’ bathroom, but all he could come up with was some very old Johnson’s Baby Shampoo sitting stickily on a glass shelf. There was Tylenol in there? Benadryl? He remembered bribing Lauren to take Benadryl when she was four or five—for every tiny sip she got a jelly bean. Joe stood nearby, w
aiting for a jelly bean or two of his own.

  The door behind him swung open, and he turned. One of the nurses came out, and behind him Liz and Robert and Marguerite moved forward, almost as one. They crowded behind him, and he had a sense of himself as not just their spokesman but also their protector. “What?” he said, but the nurse just held up her forefinger and kept going.

  After several hours in the emergency room, Lauren was moved to the pediatric ICU, but it was a while before Liz fully registered the change, how it was calmer here, and quieter; and the light, thank God, was dim. Lauren had a tiny room to herself, and she said over and over again that she wanted to go home: she said it crying, not crying, crying again. She couldn’t go home, though, and so Liz wouldn’t, and so it was Brody who left at ten to pick up Joe from Trent’s house, where he’d spent the evening.

  Joe. Sitting in the dark next to Lauren’s sleeping body, Liz thought back to the middle of the afternoon, when Brody had left for the first time, to meet Joe after school. The plan had been for Brody to call once he’d told Joe what had happened, but it was Joe who called, saying “Mom?” when she answered, his voice breaking slightly on the single syllable, and it had taken her long moments to be able to speak.

  Light from the hallway bisected Lauren’s face. Liz leaned forward and ran her hand over Lauren’s hair, then held the backs of her fingers over Lauren’s mouth to feel her breath. Terrible things had been done to her today, following the terrible things she’d done to herself: they’d punctured her veins for IVs, pumped bottle after bottle of charcoal into her stomach. By far the worst was the vile liquid they’d made her drink, four separate times—it was sulfurous and repulsive and necessary to counteract the effects of the Tylenol on her liver, which remained, even now, in great danger.

  She could go into liver failure. She had to keep drinking the horrible stuff, every four hours through the weekend, and she could still go into liver failure.

  Liz leaned back in her chair and tasted salt at the back of her throat. How could she have allowed this to happen? How could she have let the last months happen, sitting by while Lauren fell? She was on a tiny island, surrounded by the vast ocean of her guilt, and the water lapped and lapped at her ankles, its undertow strong enough to pull her in should she somehow avoid the headlong dive she kept imagining. All that kept her out was how much Lauren needed her now, how much more than ever, though she’d not need her now if only Liz had had an ounce of sense, a gram, in the last few months. What had she been doing this fall? Yoga! Painting a bench! In her mind she slammed a mallet against the bench, splintering the wood; she threw paint remover on it and watched with pleasure as it burned through her gay colors. She reached into her body and tore at her muscles, then plunged her fingers into the crevices of her joints and ripped at them until they were permanently damaged.

  Then she thought: Is this how Lauren lived? Ravaged by self-hatred? And she wept again.

  A sound woke her sometime later to the bed she had improvised, her upper body curled in a chair, her legs reaching under its wooden arm to rest on the metal frame of Lauren’s bed. She was incredibly sore, her mouth dry and sour. Lauren was still asleep. How soon before they came to draw blood again? To administer the next dose of the disgusting stuff.

  She pulled her legs back and sat up, moving as quietly as she could. Slowly, painfully, she stood. She edged out of the narrow space described by the chair, the bed, and the table, and she went into the windowless bathroom. She hit the light and hid her eyes for a moment, then stared at herself in the mirror. She was wrecked, hideous. Then she realized that was exactly what she was looking for, evidence that this had undone her, and she turned from the sight of herself and wept. She eased herself onto the closed toilet and sobbed at her own self-pity, and she sobbed at it all: Lauren, Joe, Brody, her parents, her family, her life, her home, her child, her child. She sobbed and sobbed. And then, after a while, there came a moment when it ebbed, and she watched herself through it curiously, unwilling to allow a single moment of falsity; she felt she could cry, but only if she couldn’t not cry. She couldn’t not: it was back and she sobbed again. But it slowed, and it faltered, and after a while she could not, so she stopped. She mopped her face with a hand towel. She began to feel composed, and she glanced at her surroundings, a hospital bathroom, and then she was going into the bathroom again, the kids’ bathroom yesterday, Lauren bleeding in the bathtub, and she began to cry again. This happened several times, the slowing and the fresh onslaught. Finally, in a lull, she went to the sink and ran cold water over the towel and pressed it to her eyes, and because the coolness felt so soothing she bathed her eyes with handfuls of water, then dried her face and ventured the mirror again. You, she said to herself.

  11

  Sarabeth had made a rule for herself that she would never drive down Billy’s street, and she’d followed it to the spirit if not quite to the letter: she’d driven by only twice since the breakup, once just a week or two afterward, on an afternoon when she knew he’d be teaching; and once at five o’clock in the morning, when no one in his family could possibly be awake. On this Friday evening, though, two days after her dinner with Liz, she happened to be in Rockridge, just blocks from his house, and she felt such a strong pull in that direction that it alarmed her. She imagined stopping out front, cutting the engine, getting out. She’d lean against her car and look: at the handsome craftsman styling; the wide, deep porch; the long driveway back to the garage in which were kept, she knew, the family’s four bicycles, hung on a wall rack that Billy himself had built.

  She remembered the look Liz had given her across the table Wednesday night when the subject of Billy came up. A look that seemed to say: I know. Liz knew, and somehow that allowed Sarabeth to keep driving.

  She was on her way to a read-through of a play written by her book-group friend Miranda, and while she’d envisioned a borrowed house with a large living room, what she found instead was an elegant concrete cube, fronted by a beautifully landscaped garden illuminated by carefully placed yard lights. TEATRO MIO, said a discreet plaque on the front door.

  Teatro Mio. My theater?

  Billy had been an actor when he was younger; he’d liked to quote Shakespeare to her, lines from the romances as they lay in bed together, Henry V’s battle cry as he returned from the bathroom and stood naked in the doorway: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” This on an occasion when he had to head back to campus for a department meeting. She recalled his ironic smile, the way he stood naked in the doorway, entirely unselfconscious. He was generally naked the entire time he was at her house; she’d never been with someone so comfortable with his body.

  Nina was already in the lobby, standing with the two Karens—doctor Karen and dentist Karen, as Sarabeth thought of them, even though she’d known doctor Karen—Karen Grimes—for twenty-five years, since long before she was a doctor or needed to be distinguished from any other Karen.

  She hugged each of them, tried to bring herself to them, but all of her leaned toward Billy. They were talking, and she let herself go, to his strong arms, his whispering voice….

  “Sarabeth,” Nina said. “Weren’t you thinking about getting tickets?”

  “Tickets?”

  “Hello? To go hear the Nigerian guy?”

  Sarabeth had a vague memory of a talk Nina had mentioned, but she couldn’t remember anything else. “I guess maybe I was,” she said. “But I never did.”

  It was warm in the lobby. There were twenty-five or thirty people milling around, and she eyed the door, wondered if she had time to go outside for some air. “Hang on,” she said to the group, but as she edged away from them a bell rang, and she turned and saw that Miranda had appeared.

  Miranda was one of the quieter members of the book group, and she generally dressed to match her personality, but tonight she wore a sapphire-blue silk dress, and her honey-colored hair was piled on top of her head. What was this going to be like? Sarabeth didn’t know Miranda very well,
had not understood until this moment how much must be at stake for her.

  Miranda climbed onto a chair and rang the bell again, and when the crowd fell silent she smiled and said, “Please join us.”

  The theater consisted of four rows of steeply banked seats in front of a bare stage. Sarabeth followed Nina in and sat down. What was this going to be like? The whole thing had started with The Hours, which the book group had read and unanimously loved back in the late nineties, and then loved again when the movie came out.

  “I kept wanting them to meet each other,” someone had said as they sat together afterward, in a café near the theater.

  “I know,” someone else said. “Actually, I wanted Virginia Woolf to meet Mrs. Dalloway.”

  “Mrs. Dalloway? You mean the modern-day Clarissa?”

  “No, Mrs. Dalloway the character.”

  “But Mrs. Dalloway wasn’t even in it.”

  Miranda had taken the bait. A museum administrator, she was finally curating her own show, hanging not paintings but people in the hopes of making a meaningful convergence. Writers meeting their own characters; that was the task she had assigned herself.

  When everyone was settled, a man came out onto the stage, dressed in a dark suit and carrying a script. Focus, Sarabeth thought as he began to speak, but into her mind came a picture of Billy reading stories to his boys, or washing dishes while She read the stories, and she couldn’t focus. What is he doing right now? What, right now? This was a game she had played with herself—against herself—throughout the affair. She would imagine him shooting baskets with the boys, standing in front of a classroom of students, practicing tai chi with his Sunday morning group, and anywhere he might be, no matter how unlikely it was that his wife would be with him, Sarabeth imagined Her too, penetrating some fourth wall to stare back at Sarabeth.

  He never said he was going to leave her, and that was not the issue; Sarabeth did not expect him to leave her. The issue was, she was sad. I love you, he would say, I love you, I love you, and she knew it absolutely: they were a great couple, someone might have thought who saw them only through a keyhole, with 99 percent of the picture hidden. When he was with her he was fully with her. She wanted to have dinner with him at a restaurant? No problem, he said, and they met for dinner at a restaurant in the city, no big deal. She wanted to have a whole night together? No problem, his wife was taking the boys to LA, and he stayed all night three nights in a row and woke her with kisses on her shoulder each morning. Nothing she wanted was impossible, except all she really wanted: total ownership. We’re here for such a short time, he said to that—meaning on earth, meaning in this state of being alive. This was his way of telling her not to be greedy, not to long for something you couldn’t have when what you did have was so nice. But she was greedy.