Dancing on Broken Glass

by Ka Hancock

  The police officer apparently found enough logic in my explanation to lower his weapon and call for an ambulance.

  “Thank you,” I said, suddenly aware I was shaking.

  An hour later, in the same hospital where we’d talked away the night a year before, Mickey was tied to a bed, smeared with paint, bathed in sweat, and psychotic. He didn’t know me. I was a stranger in the world he’d fallen into. I’d watched the making of what was now culminating, completely unaware of what I was seeing. I’d naively enjoyed his endless energy. Now I was appalled at where it had led. Somehow, Mickey had hidden the extent of what was happening to him. It seemed that, despite his promise, he’d been wearing the mask he’d told me so much about.

  A crabby nurse was doing her best with him, but Mickey was spitting at her. He was yelling obscenely, and the cords in his neck protruded like stiff ropes. The rage—the terror and desperation, the utter loss of control—took my breath away. I remember feeling like I was going to faint and running down three flights of stairs to find a place where I could breathe. What was I doing with this man?

  Gleason Webb found me on a bench outside. Not prone to emotional displays, he simply sat down next to me and placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder. We sat like that for several minutes before I turned and asked, “What’s happening to him?”

  “This is what happens when mania gets out of control.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Full-blown mania turns quickly to psychosis. Mickey crossed the line.”

  “I didn’t see the line. What’s the matter with me?”

  “You didn’t know what to look for. And I’m not sure if Mickey recognized it himself until he couldn’t turn back.” Gleason shrugged. “He’s been so happy since he met you, Lucy, but for him, there’s a fine line between joy and exhilaration. Crossing it can lead to this.”

  “I never imagined he could be like that. I don’t know if I can do this.”

  Gleason looked at me. “It can be very overwhelming. But this is what happens, Lucy. Mickey’s been here before, and he’ll probably come here again. It’s the nature of his illness.”

  “How many times has he been like this?”

  “A few.”

  “And there’s nothing we can do?”

  “We don’t have any power, Lucy. The power is Mic’s. It’s how he manages his disorder. And the bottom line is, he wants to feel good—like anyone wants to feel good—so he tries to balance on the edge without falling off. When he’s down, or he thinks he’s headed down, he self-medicates to stay on the upside. And sometimes that leads to irrational thinking and trying to correct that can make it worse. Mickey has a chronic illness, Lucy. And even when everything seems fine, the possibility of an episode like this can be just under the surface.”

  “Why didn’t I see it?”

  “It takes a long time to know someone like Mickey. He’s a great big onion, and it’s an extraordinary task, peeling back the layers of his illness, his personality, his character.” Gleason looked hard at me. “You can’t fix him. And if you’re having second thoughts, it’s completely understandable.” Gleason’s thick, gray brows were knit together, watching me.

  “I had no idea.”

  “Then it’s good you got to see this, Lucy. Next time you won’t be so surprised. Assuming you’re around next time.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Gleason, I’m afraid,” I said, fighting tears. “I love him . . . but . . .”

  “Fear is healthy.” He patted my shoulder.

  After a while I said, “Could he hurt me?”

  “I can’t say. Right now he’d probably hurt his nurse if he wasn’t restrained. But that’s the psychosis. You’ll learn to recognize the signs before he gets to this point.”

  I was quiet for a long time thinking about this. Gleason was quiet, too. After a few minutes, I turned to him. “Tell me what my life will look like if I marry him.”

  Mickey’s doctor considered me for a moment, then took a deep breath. “Lucy, every marriage is a dance; complicated at times, lovely at times, most the time very uneventful. But with Mickey, there will be times when your dance will be on broken glass. There will be pain. And you will either flee that pain or hold tighter and dance through it to the next smooth place.”

  I let his words sink in as my tears fell. “I can’t imagine my life—my future—without him, but I don’t know.” I pushed the tears away and ran my hands over my hair. “You’re right, though, Gleason. It was good for me to see this now.” Then I looked at him. “Do you think I can do this?”

  “Only you can answer that, Lucy.”

  “But . . . I can learn to recognize the line?”

  He nodded. “Mic will help you. One of the best things he’s got going for him is he doesn’t want to be sick. He doesn’t want his illness to dictate who he is. He tries to be compliant, and for the most part he succeeds. And when he slips, this is what can—but certainly doesn’t always—happen.” Gleason looked at me, clear intensity shining in his eyes. “All that said, Lucy, no one could love you more.”

  I tried to smile. “Why are you so devoted to him, Gleason? You can’t possibly care this much for all your patients.”

  Mickey’s longtime psychiatrist looked wistful as he sighed. “I lost a patient a long time ago. It was a bad suicide, one of the hardest of my career.” He shook his head. “I just couldn’t do enough to save her, and it devastated me. So much so that I almost left the profession. I went to her funeral and I remember I was sitting on the back row thinking of replacement careers when this skinny kid found me. He just sat down next to me, and for the longest time he didn’t say anything. Not a word. Then he looked at me with big tears in his eyes and he said, ‘It wasn’t your fault, Dr. Webb. My mom just really, really wanted to die.’” Gleason nodded. “Two weeks later he showed up at my office and asked me to check him for crazy. He said he’d do anything, have any kind of operation, take any kind of pill, if it would keep him from turning out like his mother. It was his birthday. He was twelve years old.” Gleason shook his head at the memory. “We’ve been together ever since.”

  I pushed more tears off my cheeks. “He never told me that.”

  “He will.”

  “He really is incredible, isn’t he?”

  “Lucy, I’ve never known anyone who tries harder not to be sick, or takes it harder when he is. Mickey’s an extraordinary man who just so happens to be mentally ill. If I were to give you any advice, it would be to make sure you focus on that Mickey.”

  I nodded.

  “Weed through all his fine print. When you find a man you truly love beneath all his symptoms, memorize that man. And know that man will, at times, be missing in action.”

  I cried like a baby all the way home, mad that love couldn’t fix the mess I was in. Madder still that I thought it was a mess. As I got ready for bed, the papers I’d found at Mickey’s fell out of my pocket. I smoothed them out and didn’t recognize the writing; the uneven scrawl looked like a child’s, written in haste, maybe desperation. It had no periods, and by the end, no spaces between the words.

  My Lucy,

  I’m speeding I did a bad thing when I first started to notice it I didn’t tell anyone I didn’t tell you or Gleason or anyone because it just feels so wonderful to have this much energy and this much faith in myself I feel invincible like I can do anything Now I’m going too fast to stop on my own and something is going to happen that I want to warn you about so you won’t be afraid I never want you to be afraid of me I would die if I scared you Lucy I’m jumpy and losing it even as I write this I can’t sit still I can’t stop thinking of what I can do to hold onto this feeling go back to yesterday which was a good day and look forward to today which was a better day until right now The working part of my brain knows I’m going to crash am crashing I’m seeing things move that aren’t supposed to move Im in a cloud and it is laughing I see things falling d
ripping from cracks Its red then its blue and I know its not real I’m trying to hurry so I can tell you Im sorry This hasn’t happened for so long I forgot to be careful You make me so happy and my happy is not to be trusted No thats not what I mean You are happiness You are every happy beautiful wonderful thing in the world and I am so worried that I will make you hate me because I screwed up again and pretended I was good when I told you I wouldn’t pretend I can’t make you understand whats happening to me You don’t want to know I’m trying to stay away from the edge, but I cant I’m floating above the hole and Im going to fall I’m sorry I love you I love you I love you If my love came in a better package it would drown you That’s how big it is Don’t be afraid of me Please please please don’t be scared of me Whatever I do or say the next time you see me I’m sure I don’t mean Except if I say I love you Because that’s the only solid unshakable thing I have If they call you to come to the hospital don’t come Please don’t come I don’t want you to see me like this I never want you to see me like this Call Gleason he can explain I’ll call you when I get my head back on straight I love you I love you Mic.

  I sank to my knees and read the letter again. In it, I could hear Mickey’s voice, which by the end was screaming off the page. And I saw him. In my mind’s eye I saw Mickey writing this to me, trying to outrun his illness, trying to capture every word before it overtook him. In the center of Mickey’s madness, in the eye of his horrible storm, here was his heart, open and aching. For me. I couldn’t imagine not loving him. And I couldn’t imagine not being loved by him.

  I knew then and there that a life without Mickey Chandler would not be worth living. I loved him with my whole heart. And I loved him broken.

  ten

  JUNE 12, 2011

  A baby. The idea lifted me to a place completely unfamiliar. A place where I could almost imagine the small heft of an infant in the arms of someone else, anyone else, not me. Little head, tiny hands and feet, all alien to my experience. A baby. A family. Our shot at immortality.

  Before Lucy’s cancer, a family was our down-the-road plan, put off indefinitely until stability could be achieved. But after she got sick and cancer took its toll on us, our future seemed too precarious for babies. So we made the option impossible, or so we thought. We climbed back from hell to regain our footing, and life again became a small haven, safely two-dimensional. Until today. Today it seemed a place of miracles.

  A baby. A little family. The thought blew through my chest and filled me with terror. Would I be a good father? Would I love and protect and behave like a good father? I thought of my own dad—distant at times, drowning in my mother, beaten down. I know he did the best he could. Who could ask more of a man? How could I be any better at it than he was? I trembled thinking of all the ways I could screw up. All the damage I could do. What was I doing?

  Lucy found me in this panic and slipped her hand in mine. We’re both going to make mistakes, she said, but we will balance each other. Then she settled my racing pulse with these words: “You will be a wonderful father. You will tell your child every day how much she is loved no matter what. And she will believe you because it will be true. And because she believes that one truth down deep in her core, it will be enough to temper everything else.”

  When we got home from sailing Sunday night, a note from Priscilla was sitting on the counter. It said she had slept on our couch since we’d taken the boat. She sort of halfway apologized for not talking to anyone about using it, which I appreciated since sorries were not my sister’s strong suit. She closed by letting me know I was out of milk. All things considered, Priss could have been madder. I’d call her tomorrow.

  While Mickey caught up on the mail, I lit candles and ran a bath. I had just eased into the suds when I felt the tickle in my throat and started coughing. I wished I had remembered to grab something to drink. But as if on cue, Mickey showed up with two glasses of ice and a liter of bottled water. He said he knew I would have preferred wine, but of course there would be no wine until after the baby. Then he joined me in the tub, and my plans for a relaxing bath became a bit less relaxing, but I couldn’t complain.

  For the longest time, we just lounged in the water and continued the conversation we’d started on the boat. I was amazed at the way this baby had so quickly come to dominate our every thought. How completely she’d become the new point of reference in our marriage. I had a feeling the conversation that had started yesterday would be the conversation we’d have for the rest of our lives. I supposed that’s what it meant to become a family.

  I woke up early the next morning not feeling too well. My stomach was queasy, and virtually nothing sounded good to eat. I wanted Mickey to feel bad for me, but when I looked over at his sleeping, solid, peaceful form, I didn’t have the heart to whine. This is how he sleeps when he’s stable. No restlessness, no terrors. Of course, the increase in his Ambien didn’t hurt. I kissed him on the nose and crawled out of bed.

  While I boiled water for some tea, I checked the changes Gleason had made to Mickey’s psychotropic recipe. I dug through his backpack for his drugs. It looked like he’d started him on Tegretol again, and bless his heart, Mickey’d taken what he was supposed to while we were on the boat. The teakettle whistled, and I steeped a bag of herbal mint. As soon as I felt better, I planned to start the laundry, then maybe make a big fat breakfast for Mickey, but I got sidetracked. I found myself in the junk room, sitting on the window seat.

  I looked around Priscilla’s old room, now bathed in the sun of a brand-new day. Sipping my tea, I wondered how on earth anyone could wake up in this room in a bad mood. But somehow Priss had frequently managed to do just that. She’d even taped a threatening sign on her door when I was a little girl: TRESPASSERS WILL BE SPIT AT, AND IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE ME, JUST TRY IT!!!

  I looked around the room and imagined where I would put the crib, tried to picture the best color scheme for a baby girl. Maybe pink and moss green, maybe pale yellow and bright orange. Gingham and flowers for the bumper pads. Maybe when she was older, I could resurrect my old four-poster. I sipped my tea. Consciously, I wanted to imagine this room as a nursery, but my thoughts willfully veered off to a time when the room was mine.

  Priss had long since moved out and Lily was in college, so it was just Mom and me. I had always been in the little bedroom behind the kitchen. But while I was away on a summer trip to Washington, DC, she moved my things upstairs to Priss’s room. When I got back, Harry and Jan had papered the walls and laid carpet over the wood floor. Jan and Mom had made me a quilt, and there was a new bedroom set—a four-poster canopy bed with a double dresser. It was pretty over-the-top, and I wasn’t sure we could afford it, but it was beautiful.

  When I hugged my mom that day, it was the first time she felt small to me. I knew she was starting to shrink, to waste away, but until then, when she put her arms around me, she still felt the way she was supposed to. Substantial—like she was in charge and her child had nothing to worry about. But I clearly remember that day as the day my mother started to die. Four months later, right after my seventeenth birthday, she finished.

  Priss’s old room was next to Mom’s, and I knew I’d been put there because Mom needed me to be close. She didn’t want to be alone, but I don’t think she wanted me to know that. I know I didn’t have a full night of sound sleep for those four months. Near the end, I was no longer sleeping in Priss’s room at all. I slept in the chair by Mom’s bed. Even on her good nights.

  Sometimes, waking to find me there, she would scold me, remind me I had school. But those were just words she whispered through parched lips. Rather than answer her, I’d give her a drink or help her suck some ice. Sometimes she would reach for my hand and pull me next to her, and I would feel how terribly warm she was even though she said she was freezing.

  In a way, it was as if I’d been a new mom, responsible for a person who depended on me for everything. Sitting there on Priss’s window seat, rubbing my still queasy stomach, I realized I’d a
lready had lessons in mothering. Hard lessons. I was there when Charlotte spoke those terrible irreversible words to my mother: Cancer. Aggressive. Resistant. Poor prognosis. Mine was the hand she reached for to steady her when the current of those terrible words threatened to drown her. Mine were the tears I would not let surface in her presence, for fear of making her fear worse.

  I was there alone when Dr. Barbee gave me my instructions, told me what to expect. And the pep talk she gave me that informed me I had officially left my childhood. At sixteen, for all intents and purposes, she’d said, I was an adult in an adult world.

  Dr. Barbee taught me how to drain my mother’s catheter and measure her urine output and told me at what point I needed to call her to start an IV. She taught me to give Mom the injections she would plead for when the pain was unbearable. I was the caregiver, Dr. Barbee had told me. I was in charge. Mature beyond my years, people whispered. Old soul. But what other option was there, really, but to grow up and get ready to let go of her? None that I could see.

  I couldn’t have faced what I was facing without the utter belief in what my father had told me about death when I was little. If my father’s words were simply meant to console a little, frightened girl all those years ago, they served the same purpose twelve years later when I steeled myself for Death to claim my mother.

  My tea was cold by the time I realized how deeply I’d been contemplating the hereafter. Staying in the present required discipline. So I pulled away from thinking of my mom and focused my attention on my plans for this room. What would Mom have suggested? Maybe red and white. Maybe yellow and blue. I’d call Wanda Murphy. She was president of the Brinley Quilters’ Guild, she’d have some great ideas. But then I scolded myself. I couldn’t tell anyone about this baby until I’d told my sisters.