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Dancing on Broken Glass

Page 5

by Ka Hancock


  “Do you have a mom?”

  “No. She died when I was a kid.”

  “I know a little something about that,” I said. “But at least I have my sisters.”

  “I’ve got a great business partner who’s beyond understanding, and I’ve got Gleason—Dr. Webb, my psychiatrist.”

  “So you’ve been fighting this bipolar thing pretty much on your own? For most of your life?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “I think that’s amazing. You’re amazing.”

  He shook his head. “No. I’m not. I’m just a guy trying to play out the hand I was dealt. And, you may not believe this, but I’m a lot of other things besides mentally ill.”

  I smiled. “No doubt.” Mickey Chandler was breaking my heart. I was trying to maintain perspective because it didn’t make a lot of sense to be so profoundly attracted to a mental patient. “So, are you supposed to be down here in the middle of the night or did you escape?”

  He grinned. “Actually I’m pretty good tonight, so I have cafeteria privileges.”

  “Well, then, congratulations on your good behavior.”

  He laughed and I remembered the way his smile had sucked me in on my birthday. I found myself looking for evidence of his illness in that smile, but I couldn’t see it. It was there in his eyes, but not in his smile.

  “Tell me about you, Lucy Houston.”

  “Oh, it’s late, maybe another time.” I started to get up from my chair, but Mickey grabbed my wrist. “I don’t think so, missy. I spilled my guts, now it’s your turn.”

  I sat back down, intensely focused on his hand. I didn’t want him to let go, but I pulled away from him anyway. “Well, okay,” I said, finger-combing my hair. “I go to Northeastern—well, you know that already—I’ll graduate next spring. Then I’m going to teach world history. I have two sisters, Lily and Priscilla—you met them. I was born here in Brinley and I’ll come back and teach at Midlothian.”

  “Parents?”

  “I had great parents. Unfortunately, my father was killed when I was little. He was a policeman. And my mother died when I was seventeen—of cancer. Cancer also got my grandmother and my aunt, which pretty much wiped out my entire maternal line.” This came out sounding a lot glibber than I’d intended and I struggled to correct my tone. “That’s why Priscilla’s here. They caught it, thank goodness, but we Houston girls are always steeled for the worst.” I was still playing with my hair, which I tend to do when I’m anxious. I stopped, feeling self-conscious. “That’s my demon. That’s the unknown I wake up with every morning. Am I healthy today? Did a cellular uprising take place while I was sleeping? Any cytoplasmic rebellion I need to be aware of? It’s hell. And if I do say so myself, my hell is worse than yours, because I not only have to worry about me and my cells, but I have to devote serious anxiety to my sisters as well. It’s exhausting, worrying like that. It’s a very unstable, sick, stupid way to live.”

  Mickey Chandler laughed as I threw his own words back at him. I laughed, too, not even realizing how badly I needed to laugh, and the rush felt so delicious after a day of worry over Priscilla that I couldn’t catch my breath.

  Mickey leaned forward. “Well, at least now you know why I didn’t call you.”

  “You should have called me.”

  He looked me over and smiled. “I remember everything about that night. I couldn’t believe you kissed me. I couldn’t believe you gave me your number.”

  “Why? I liked you.”

  Mickey Chandler shook his head, suddenly serious. “You liked him.”

  “I liked you. I still do.” He looked hard at me, and I thought in my whole life I’d never met anyone like Mickey Chandler. He was real and seriously flawed. No pretense of perfection. The package was open and damaged and sitting here staring at me, and I found it all incredibly refreshing, if a little frightening.

  I was the first to break away and glance at the clock. “I really have to get back to my sister,” I said, pushing the plate of fries closer to him. “She’ll spit nails if she wakes up and I’m not there.” I stood up and graced him with my most sincere smile. “But just for the record, Mr. Chandler, you kissed me.” I suddenly wanted very much to revisit that moment despite everything I’d learned tonight.

  Mickey grinned.

  “You haven’t scared me,” I said. “I just want you to know that. I can see that despite your diagnosis, you’re a good guy. And the way I see it, we both have problems—stuff beyond our control—although you could stay on your medication and control some of yours.”

  He kept on grinning.

  “I don’t see the big deal,” I said, “about two people, with what basically boils down to just health issues, sharing a pizza sometime. If I give you my number again—”

  “I know your number, Lucy. I know it by heart.”

  The look he gave me made me shiver, and I hoped it didn’t show. And then I hoped it did.

  “Then use it sometime,” I said. “I promise I’ll say yes.”

  four

  JUNE 4, 2011—FOR GROUP THERAPY

  There’s a genetic link to bipolar disorder. My mom had it and I have it. I’m not sure about my brother. I’ve found that some people think knowing that about a person, explains everything, excuses everything, or rebukes everything. That’s not fair. A person is infinitely more complex than that. I like to think of my mental illness as supplemental to the rest of me, like emotional diabetes. Depakote is my current insulin, mood is my blood sugar. Like any good diabetic, I have to work hard to keep my chemicals aligned. If I don’t, I get sick.

  It takes some skill to navigate this disorder. It takes some grit to control it so it doesn’t control me. Sometimes it takes a guide. For me it takes a destination. Lucy is my destination. Whether I’m cowered in a dark corner or perched on a blindingly bright plateau, my aim is always to get back to her. Gleason tells me this is how I differ from my mother; she had no destination, nothing was more important than her illness. She trusted nothing but it. Not my father, not me or my brother. Her world revolved around the pain—dark, thick, encompassing emotional pain. It came to define her; I refuse to let it define me.

  But I’ve known pain like hers; it’s why I cheat with my pills.

  After she’d given Mickey his medication, Peony Litman dismissed us, and we walked to the common area hand in hand. “So,” Mickey asked, looping his arm around my shoulder, “what are you doing tomorrow? Can you come in for my session with Gleason?”

  “I would, but it’s Celia’s memorial service. Remember?”

  “Oh, right. How could I forget that? Have you seen Nathan?”

  I shook my head. “I called earlier this week, but he didn’t answer.” Both Mickey and I were quiet for a minute, lost in the cruelty of a life ended in midswing. Celia Nash had been watching her son’s soccer game last fall when she was stung by a bee that killed her. At the time they were living in Phoenix, where Nathan had a thriving orthopedic practice. But after the death of his wife, he decided to bring his kids back home to be nearer his and Celia’s parents. Now, six months later, the family was having a memorial service for Celia and burying her ashes in River’s Peace Cemetery. I hugged Mickey’s arm, remembering how happy Celia and Nathan had been.

  We were about to sit down when a lab technician claimed Mickey, who needed his blood drawn for a Depakote level. As I sat waiting for him, a cell phone rang and it took me a minute to recognize it as my own. I missed the call, but the screen flashed Charlotte Barbee’s number. My heart did a little thudding. I had left her office only three hours earlier. Three hours was scarcely enough time to discover anything amiss, right? As I sat there wondering what Charlotte could want, Peony walked in to say I had a call at the nurses’ station.

  It was Dr. Barbee, and she wanted to see me.

  Charlotte was with her last patient, and I’d been told by her receptionist, Bev Lancaster, that she wouldn’t be long. Bev could see I was a little anxious and did her best to reassure me with
a sympathetic smile. “Would you like some candy, Lucy?” She gestured to the crystal bowl she kept stocked next to the phone. I shook my head but took a Hershey’s Kiss anyway. Naturally, Bev knew my medical history, so she could probably imagine the source of my angst. “She shouldn’t be much longer,” Bev said, gathering her things. It was five o’clock and her workday was over.

  I had stayed at the hospital as long as I could, nodding as Mickey spoke, but having no real notion of what I was nodding to. Probably lots to do with Hawaii. Finally, I’d told my husband I had a headache and needed to go home. I promised to call him later. Now I was here, sequestered in Charlotte’s plush waiting room, trying to let go of the queasy feeling her call had induced. On her way out, Bev squeezed my shoulder. “Everything will be fine, hon. You’ll see.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said, sounding not one bit convincing.

  Then I was alone. I looked around Charlotte’s waiting room, which was soothing by design: dark paneling, overstuffed furniture, soft lamplight. It didn’t look like the last place on earth a person would want to be—it just felt that way at the moment. I was sitting in a cushy chair upholstered with black and ivory toile. The fabric depicted French ladies drinking tea and probably discussing lovers with bad teeth.

  The door to the outer office opened and Charlotte followed Elaine Withers into the waiting room. “Remember what I said,” Charlotte boomed. “Rest. Rest.”

  Lainy looked at me and rolled her faded blue eyes toward the ceiling. “She’s so darn bossy, Lucy. I don’t know why I put up with her.”

  I stood up and smiled at my neighbor. “Yes, you do, Lainy.”

  “Well, I hope she’s nicer to you than she was to me, sweetheart,” Lainy said as she left.

  I watched the door shut behind her and waited for Charlotte to say something. When she didn’t, I took a deep breath and turned to find her looking at me just as my mother would have. She smiled. “Let’s sit out here, darlin’. Everyone’s gone and it’s quiet—not so clinical.”

  “Do I have something to worry about?”

  “That depends.”

  I sat back down gingerly in the midst of the tea drinkers, and as Charlotte took the chair across from me, I felt my heart pound. The conversation I’d been imagining hung unsaid between us as I looked into the eyes of my mom’s dear friend. Every line in Charlotte’s face was beautiful to me, maternal and tender. And I did not see pity in her dark eyes, which I found profoundly reassuring.

  “What is it, Charlotte? Why am I here?”

  Charlotte brought a hand to her face and contemplated me. “Lucy, it’s not what you think. I have no oncological results back yet.”

  “Then what’s going on?”

  “Well, I do have results from one test I thought you should be aware of.”

  “Is it serious?”

  Charlotte looked at me and smiled. “Lucy, you’re pregnant.”

  Minutes, maybe hours, passed. What had she said? I’d seen her mouth move. I’d heard something come out, but the words had frozen on impact and never actually penetrated, so they couldn’t actually be true.

  Charlotte was nodding. “Are you okay, darlin’?”

  “I don’t think I heard you.”

  “Yes, you did. I said you’re pregnant. Pregnant.”

  That single word had a visceral effect on me, like fire spreading through my blood. Pregnant. “No.”

  As Charlotte nodded, all the reasons that this was an impossibility poured through me. Mickey’s mental illness, the cancer that seemed magnetically drawn to my bloodline. All the women in my life who’d been taken by that heartless disease. Including me, almost. Despite the fact that Mickey and I would have loved a family, we’d long ago accepted the reality of these undeniable factors and made the hardest decision of our lives. “How can that be, Charlotte?” My vision blurred, not with tears, but because I seemed incapable of blinking. “Check again, because it’s just not possible.” Even as I rambled, I was trying to remember when I’d had my last period.

  Charlotte reached over and took my hand.

  “I don’t understand. My tubes . . .”

  “It happens,” she said softly. “Sometimes—granted it’s rare, but sometimes—a valiant little swimmer gets past the knot.”

  “After all these years, I have a knot that can be swum through?”

  “A knot or tubes that reattached. It’s hard to say, but it happens.”

  “Charlotte . . .” My mind was reeling. This was too big. How long had it been since I’d had a period? They weren’t regular and I didn’t really keep track, but, dear Lord, how long had it been? Charlotte smiled her reassurance as I sat there shaking my head. I didn’t know what else to do. “I can’t even remember when I had my last period.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Lucy. It doesn’t change a thing.”

  “It matters to me, Charlotte. What am I going to do?”

  “How ’bout this: for tonight, let it be. Just be. You are a woman doing what women do. You’re pregnant. Natural, beautiful, normal—”

  “Unbelievable. Insane.”

  “Not tonight, Lucy,” Charlotte said calmly. “Tonight just go with it. We’ll think about the hard things tomorrow. This isn’t the end of the world.”

  “Really?”

  Charlotte took my hand. “Really.”

  “Why now? Why after all this time? What happened?” A dozen feelings screamed through me.

  As the numbness dissolved, I found I was profoundly relieved not to have been told I was sick again, but this news filled me with fear and such anxiety I could hardly breathe. Anxiety and—if I’m being honest—a sudden, incomprehensible joy. I was pregnant? I was pregnant.

  When I finally left Charlotte’s office, I drove around for a while and tried to follow the advice she’d given me: Just be pregnant. Don’t worry. Don’t horribilize. It wasn’t working. I drove down the old country road that connected Brinley to the next county. It was sunset, quiet and familiar as old shoes, and I ended up crying so hard I had to pull over.

  Pregnant.

  I should have gone to dinner with Charlotte as she’d suggested, but I had to get away. Now I was sorry I was alone. Pregnant?

  Despite everything, I started imagining things I had no business imagining. Me, a mom. Me, with a baby. Oh, how I love the way new babies smell, and those great big eyes in an itty-bitty person. A toddler with curly hair. I imagined a little one who’d had a bad dream, screaming for me in the middle of the night: “Mama.” I started my car, turned up the radio, and drove home.

  I grew up in the house Mickey and I now live in. It’s an old Victorian cottage with lush trees my dad planted before I was born. Sometimes when I pull up to it, I am fifteen years old again and my strong, healthy mom is waiting for me in the gabled sitting room. I’d give anything to have her there now. I get the mail and fiddle through the bills, appearing to anyone who might happen to be looking as if nothing was on my mind but the envelopes in my hand. I pick up the paper and unlock the front door. A robbery at the Nicklecade made the front page. I imagine it saying LUCY CHANDLER PREGNANT! WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?

  Then I hear it again, in my mind, a little voice calling me, crying, “Mama, Mama.” She’s had a nightmare. She? I barely make it into the house before I’m overwhelmed all over again.

  The same thoughts follow me up the stairs and into the shower. They’re with me as I open a can of tomato soup and there when I dump it, untouched, down the drain. A baby. I could put her—I am now somehow painfully certain it’s a her, which only compounds my angst—in Priscilla’s old bedroom. It’s just a catchall room now with a treadmill, computer, and lots of ironing that never gets done. All that junk could be moved downstairs. Growing up, Priss had the best room in the house. Right next to Mom and Dad, with a big window seat and lots of delicious light. Perfect for a nursery.

  It became my room when it was just Mom and me, and Mom was dying. Close enough to hear her cry out for me in the middle of the night when she needed a
pain pill or had to go to the bathroom. The room was definitely close enough to hear a baby who’d had a bad dream. No. What was I thinking? This wasn’t happening.

  The phone rang and the caller ID said Edgemont Hospital. Mickey. I couldn’t talk to him now. Not yet. Not now. Mickey might be ecstatic about this turn of events. He’d forget about our agreement, our oath, our reasons. Oh, how he’d love to be a father. Despite his many, many liabilities, he would love this news. He’d be no help at all.

  When the phone stopped ringing, I went to the ancient armoire in our bedroom and opened the creaky door. On one side, the mirror screamed back my battered reflection: tangled, wet hair, Mickey’s old 49ers T-shirt—the one I always slept in when he was gone—and my puffy, shell-shocked eyes. On the other side hung the framed contractual agreement I had with my husband. It was our bible, the Geneva Convention of our relationship. Scripted in various inks—as over the years we had added conditions as circumstances dictated—and framed in flimsy brass, hung the practical provisions we placed on our commitment to each other. It was inviolate. After I got sick, we’d penned the sad addendum: No children.

  We’d come to this heartbreaking decision after a particularly brutal breakdown that landed Mickey in the Connecticut State Hospital for seven weeks. It happened smack in the middle of my cancer hell. After he got out, we put it in the contract. No kids. We’d written it in bold blue ink, underlined it, and sealed it with our tears. I never told Mickey that later, after that hellish year of almost dying—later when we were both back on top—I’d had second thoughts, but only fleetingly.

  I pulled the contract from the peg where it hung. The very fact that this child would have parents who required a written document to safeguard their marriage was probably a good enough reason not to have her. What would she think if she ever stumbled across the terms of our agreement?

  Mickey Chandler agrees never to hit his wife or abuse her in any way.

  Mickey will never have sexual contact with another human being.

 

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