by Julia London
“You’re funny, Mr. Price,” Tracy said with a laugh.
No, he wasn’t funny. He was scared.
Fatigued from a morning spent navigating enormous slides, Asher sent the kids off for food and lay on the beach, holding their spot. A beautiful woman with a tail of sleek blonde hair and long, tanned legs strolled by him. She was wearing a very revealing bikini with a transparent cover-up, and she smiled at him the way women smiled when they wanted to be approached.
Asher’s body reacted—movies of hot sex with the woman instantly took up real estate in his brain, images that might have heated his blood, but damn it all if Jane Aaron didn’t pop into his head and crowd out the images. Happy, smiling Jane and her wild hair was pummeling the sex goddess into smithereens.
It was the same image he’d had running in his brain since that first kiss in the utility room. He heard her laugh, saw her smile, could see her running, or hanging out with the kids.
But Asher wanted her off his mind. He did not want to imagine what sex with her would be like, or how his days might be a little easier if he woke to that smile every morning. It was a dumb fantasy—he couldn’t take up with the nanny. Get a grip, pal. Think of the complications, think of the kids.
But the more he thought of the complications, the more they began to erode.
Invariably, however, the pleasant memory of Jane was ruined by the memory of her standing in the studio, looking so shocked. Yeah, well, who could blame her? The signs and symptoms of a bipolar mind could be very shocking, especially for those who were not familiar with it. Jane had been smart to stop him from kissing her any longer. She probably recognized a wagon full of baggage when she saw it. Asher didn’t think for a minute that he was worth that kind of baggage to Jane. No one was worth that—well, maybe she was—but not him, and he had no illusions. She could have anyone. She didn’t need some forty-year-old guy with a history of heartache hanging around.
It was so unfair, all of it. Unfair to Susanna, unfair to those who had loved her, unfair to her children. Asher had been struggling with her disorder for years. He knew it had not been her fault, that it had been an imbalance in her brain chemistry, but he’d never quite accepted the maddening characteristics of her illness, or the raw fear that his children would inherit it.
And his mother, God bless her, would never be convinced that Riley, especially, didn’t have a propensity for the illness. Asher had learned that even the mention of bipolar disorder could put the suggestion in some people’s minds. Last year, when Riley had had such a hard time at school and attacked that boy for some perceived slight, the school counselor had said, “Have you considered that Riley might have a treatable condition?” She had not meant the measles.
But Riley had been to therapy after Susanna’s death—they all had. Asher had told the school counselor in no uncertain terms that the psychiatrist in Austin had told him flatly that Riley was fine, that she was grieving the loss of her mother.
Nonetheless, Asher had put a lot of energy into hiding the truth about Susanna and keeping his kids safe from remarks and assumptions. Yet Susanna sat like a ghost perched on his shoulder, her presence everywhere, in his children, in their family’s collective memories. When he’d told Jane about Susanna and the studio, he’d felt as if a burden had been lifted from him . . . but only for a few short hours. The full truth had crept back into his consciousness, had sunk into his bones again. It was the burden he feared he would never shed. And now it was a burden he had handed to Jane.
Saturday night, while Asher’s mother made chicken fajitas, Levi and Tracy walked down to the stable with his father to feed the horses. Asher was on his way there, too, when he saw Riley sitting on the diving board of the pool, her feet dangling just above the water.
“Hey, baby girl,” he said as he strolled out onto the decking. “What are you doing? Don’t you want to feed the horses?”
“Dad,” she said, looking up at him with clear blue eyes, “today Grandma told me I should never be afraid to talk to you if I’m blue.”
“Are you blue?”
“No! I was just tired. But Tracy is so bubbly and she talks all the time, and Grandma thinks I should be like her, and if I’m not, I must be blue. It’s epically annoying.”
Asher smiled. “I can imagine that it is. My advice is to ignore Grandma. That’s what I do.”
Riley smiled. Then sobered. “But why does she say those things?”
Asher shrugged. “She cares about you.”
“No,” Riley said, twisting around on the diving board to face him. “What makes her think she needs to say it? What was wrong with Mom, Dad? I mean, I know she got drunk a lot, but what was really wrong with her?”
Asher hesitated. God, Riley was growing up fast. He’d always known these questions would come, if for no other reason than Riley would eventually confront her memories. For some reason, he thought of one of those dark days when he’d discovered Susanna had been off her meds and had been cheating on him. “You disgust me,” he’d told her.
“Get over yourself, Ash,” she’d said hotly, teetering on a pair of perilously high and expensive heels, a drink in her hand. “You think you’re so above promiscuity? Don’t you ever look at a woman and just think you’d like to fuck her and nothing else?”
“No, Susanna,” he’d said hotly. “I don’t think that or have a lover because I am married to you. I love you. And we have a child who deserves to have a mother she can respect.”
Susanna had thrown her drink at him.
It had been all he could do to keep himself from leaving Susanna then, but there was Riley, just three or so at the time, and then Susanna had flamed out of her mania and straight into suicidal depression within a matter of days. He’d come home to find Riley crying and banging on the bathroom door for her mommy, promising to be good. He’d found Susanna inside, on the floor, her wrists bleeding.
The doctor at Shoal Creek Hospital—Fleming was his name—was thin as a reed, with an Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down like a cork in the water when he talked. He’d told Asher that leaving Susanna was the worst thing he could do for her and her recovery. He’d said Susanna needed her family’s support now more than ever. He’d said that now she was on her meds, she wouldn’t act on what the doctor called “hypersexual impulses” with the proper combination of medicine.
“So let me get this straight,” Asher had sneered. “If your wife was out banging one of your patients, you’d stick with her, no questions asked?”
“Mr. Price,” the doctor had said with strained patience, “would you leave Mrs. Price if she had diabetes? Or would you recognize that something was obviously wrong and seek to help her? Without the proper medications, your wife really can’t control her hyper-impulsivity. She has a chemical imbalance in her brain. She’s sick. Very seriously ill.”
Hyper-impulsivity. Asher had thought of the Energizer Bunny when he’d said it, and it had made him shudder. It had been difficult to wrap his mind around the idea that his wife was seriously ill, that her actions were because her brain didn’t function properly, but the more he’d thought about it, the more things had begun to make sense. Susanna couldn’t help the drama she created. She was sick. Really sick.
Asher looked at Riley now, wondering if she remembered that day, or the dozens of other days that had followed. He’d thought—hoped—she’d be older than thirteen before she questioned him, but maybe it was time he told her about Susanna. He went down on his haunches at the pool’s edge. “Mom was bipolar, honey.”
Riley frowned. “What does that mean?”
“It’s when people can’t regulate their moods and they go from extreme highs to extreme lows. It means that Mom tried really hard not to get depressed and drink, but her brain wouldn’t cooperate.”
Riley frowned suspiciously. “That doesn’t make sense. Like her brain made her drink?”
“In a roundabout way, yes,” he said. “The chemistry in her brain was off. People who are bipolar find some
sort of relief from it when they drink. I can’t explain it very well, but it was something she worked really hard to control with medicine.”
Riley looked at the water. “Does that mean . . . does that mean she was really crazy?”
“No, baby girl. She wasn’t crazy, just sick. She loved you guys so much, and for the most part, she was fine. But sometimes the medicine didn’t work and she got sick and she drank too much and got really depressed.”
“Riley!” Tracy suddenly bounced out of the sliding glass doors. “Your grandpa says we can go riding now. Are you coming?”
“Yes,” she said and backed off the diving board. She paused uncertainly and looked at Asher. “Will I, Dad? Will I get sick like that?”
He looked into her blue eyes and smiled as confidently as he could. “No,” he said. And he truly believed it.
“Are you riding Socks, Ri?” Tracy asked, bounding into their midst. “If you’re riding Socks, I am going to ride Bailey.”
“I’m riding Socks!” Riley said and looked at Asher. “Thanks,” she said. It seemed to Asher that she wanted to say more, but she didn’t. She hurried to join Tracy.
Asher stood up by the side of the pool, staring into the water. How could he explain his wife’s illness to his children? What could possibly make them understand mania?
It had taken several years of living with it for him to understand it. His first taste of it had been when he’d converted a room in their first house to a studio. Susanna had been thrilled with it and had painted every day, filling the room with easels and canvasses. She’d taken some samples of her work to a local gallery. They’d said they’d wanted to exhibit her work in a fall show. Susanna had been ecstatic. She’d been brimming with ideas and had begun to keep odd hours, sometimes painting through the night. On more than one occasion, Asher would get ready to go to work and find Susanna still up, still painting. She’d made colorful, spirited pieces and talked constantly about her exhibit. “It’s going to be a huge show,” she’d told him, puttering around in her smock. “It could get national attention.”
Asher had known nothing about art or the art world, but he’d been proud of his wife. How could he have known she’d been manic then? It wasn’t as if he’d gotten a checklist when they married: Behaviors to Clue Spouses into Manic Behavior.
He learned never to say much about her work, however. She’d asked him once what he’d thought about a particular piece. She’d painted the canvas with orange and pink, big swaths of color. “Does it represent the colors of the sun?” he’d asked, trying to be appreciative of the abstraction. Susanna had gaped at him. And then she’d thrown a bottle of paint across the room, barely missing him.
“You’re so cruel!” she’d accused him.
It had shaken Asher, but a friend of his had laughed about it when he’d told him later. “Dude, haven’t you learned anything yet?”
Still, he hadn’t realized anything was wrong, and hadn’t until Susanna went shopping again. That time, she didn’t just run up a credit card or two. She’d almost destroyed them financially.
Asher would never forget the sick feeling he’d experienced that day. He thought the pain and fear of that afternoon had been what cancer felt like, devouring him from the inside out. He’d come home from a long day to find a pink Jaguar convertible in their middle-class driveway in their middle-class house. Asher hadn’t known it was even possible to purchase a pink Jaguar. When he’d gone inside, Susanna had met him at the door, her blue eyes bright, too bright, dangerously bright. “Darling!” she’d cried, and had showered his face with kisses.
“Whose car is that?”
Susanna had laughed, caressed his cheek. “I’ve had the best day,” she’d said in her sultry voice. “I found the greatest deals.” She’d twirled around and skipped into the living area, and that was when Asher noticed the bags and boxes. They’d been everywhere, covering the furniture and the floor. Susanna had ignored him as he’d walked into the room, gaping at everything. She’d been busy pulling out clothes and shoes and jewelry to show him. And even as she’d chattered away, he hadn’t been able to fully grasp that she’d bought all of it. It had taken several moments of watching his giddy, excited wife. She’d seemed high to him.
“High?” she’d echoed when he’d asked, and laughed, long and loud. “I’m not high, Ash! I’m happy! I needed these things and they have made me so happy! Don’t they make you happy? Look, look, I bought you this,” she’d said, thrusting a watch at him. “You know how your watch is always skipping ahead? I bought this.”
That was probably the moment Asher realized she’d bought the car. “We can’t afford this!” he’d cried, panicking. “Susanna, what have you done?”
Her bright smile had faded, and a pall had come over her. She’d collapsed as if he’d hit her onto the couch in between the bags and things. “You’re always like that,” she’d said hopelessly. “You expect so much, and the one time I do something for myself, all you can do is criticize!” And then she had kicked the glass coffee table with enough force to crack it.
Asher had called Helen again. Unfortunately, neither of them had been able to calm Susanna. She’d wound up in the hospital the following day, having gone from raging to suicidal in the dizzying space of twenty-four hours. Helen and her husband, Bill, had accompanied Asher and Susanna, and Asher had sat numbly while Helen had explained to the doctors that Susanna had had anorexia at one point in her life, but that she’d been cured. Asher remembered Helen saying those exact words: “Susanna was cured.”
The doctor asked several questions that had made no sense to Asher. But at the end of a stupefying session, the doctor had said, “Mr. Price, based on your wife’s history and symptoms, I believe she suffers from bipolar disorder.”
Those words had shocked him. Asher had looked at his mother-in-law, but Helen had been gaping at the doctor. It had been the first time anyone had used that term when talking about Susanna.
Susanna had remained in the hospital a week for observation. They’d gotten her on an even keel by beginning what would be a long tail of medications she would take for the rest of her life, cocktails of Ativan, Librium, Klonopin, Xanax, Stelazine, Thorazine, lithium, and more. Some of them had made her groggy. Some of them had made her anxious. In addition to seeing a psychiatrist weekly, Susanna also had to see a psychopharmacologist to keep track of all her medicine combinations. But they’d seemed to work—Susanna had evened out, and Asher had remained cautiously optimistic that they could manage as long as she stayed on her meds.
Their sex life had returned, and it had been good. Hot. But something had seemed a little different—Asher hadn’t felt connected to his wife when they’d made love. It seemed to have been all about the sex. It had been a minor complaint.
The happy days had stretched into a year. One day, Asher found empty pill bottles in the bathroom. Alarmed, he’d called her in there. “What’s going on here?” he’d asked, holding up the empty bottles.
Susanna had been beaming. “I don’t need them.”
“You do, sweetheart, you know you do—”
“I’m pregnant!” she’d cried and thrown her arms around his neck. She’d told him excitedly that she’d poured all the pills down the toilet, that she’d never take those things and risk harming her baby. “I don’t need them, Ash,” she’d assured him. “I’m over it.”
She’d been right. In the days and weeks that had followed, she hadn’t needed them. It had almost been as if the bipolar thing had never happened, and Asher had wondered if maybe she’d been misdiagnosed again. Susanna had been her old, beautiful self. They’d called Riley their miracle baby. Something about the pregnancy had reset the balance in her. Even Susanna’s doctors had agreed her chemistry might have been altered with a change in her hormones.
Riley was a healthy, happy baby, and Susanna had been a great mom. She’d doted on her daughter, and everything was perfect until Riley was about three, and then, just like the first time, Susanna had su
rprised him completely.
Asher hadn’t seen it coming.
At least, Asher didn’t think he’d seen it coming, but ten years later, he had a bad habit of second-guessing himself. Had he really not known that his wife was sleeping with another man? Could he have been so blind? Hadn’t he worried that Susanna’s need for sex was at times insatiable?
It had been the most humiliating period of Asher’s life. It was one thing to discover his wife had been unfaithful. It was another to have had one of his partners tell him what everyone else in the office knew.
Asher had been working long hours. He’d hired a housekeeper-slash-nanny because Susanna had begun to paint again and complained she had too much to do and never had a moment to herself. When Rosa had started, Susanna had joined an art appreciation class. “I have to get out of the house,” she’d told Asher. “I need to clear my head after being cooped up with a toddler all day. You have no idea how stifling that can be.”
Perhaps that should have been a warning.
The class had met twice a week at the Austin Museum of Art. Jeff Green, Asher’s partner, had told him that Susanna had met the gentleman there. Susanna had failed to mention him to the man she was married to. And she’d failed to mention to Asher that her lover was a client of GSD&P.
The ensuing confrontation with Susanna had been painful and mortifying. He’d come home to find Susanna ready to leave for her so-called class. She’d been wearing makeup and earrings and high-heeled shoes, and no wedding ring. Asher wondered if he’d ever noticed how she’d dressed for class, if he’d been that blind to what his wife had been doing behind his back.
Worse, Susanna had had the audacity to look annoyed that he’d come home early. She knew. Asher could see in her expression that she knew why he’d come home, and worse, that she was determined to go in spite of it. “What are you doing here? I have to go, Ash. I have to get to class.”
Asher had expected shame or denial, not a determination to go to her lover. He’d been as baffled by it as he’d been angry. “You’re not going, Susanna. I know what’s up.”