Hannah prepped for her show earlier in the day, in between seeing patients, Olivia’s nap time, and running the household errands. Peter was up and out of the house by five a.m. daily, and occasionally did not return until well after ten p.m. Needless to say, the arrangement put a strain on the marriage much earlier than then, but an unspoken tolerance for moving so completely in separate directions was continuing to be maintained. This created a larger wedge between Hannah and Peter, who soon became reduced to being roommates; seemingly, passing through the days and nights on separate trajectories. Everyone simply registered the silent compliance as status quo. This was a very unconventional family, at best.
Adelita was more than a nanny and housemaid. She was the Murphys’ lifeline in keeping everything running smoothly and giving Hannah the ability to work and raise her daughter with as much consistency as possible. Plus, Olivia simply adored her. Hannah had first resisted outsourcing her domestic responsibilities any more than she absolutely had to, but the decision to bring Adelita on full-time in order to cover the many nights that Peter’s work obligations kept him from coming home in time for Hannah to leave, made it necessary.
By seven-thirty p.m., Hannah was tired and spent, but somehow managed to pull herself together for another late- night show. She would shower, change, and then somehow manage to shift gears. With coffee in hand, she headed for the station with dedication few professionals could match. This was her choice. Buford Jones and the callers simply needed her.
She would arrive at the studio with a clearer mind by the time she drove the thirty-five miles into the city. It was an odd time to be commuting, as busy rush-hour traffic had since died down and the buildings and streets were empty. The deserted halls and corridors of the office building were left lit here and there for the cleaning crews and late-night shifters like herself. Sometimes she felt a nagging sense of guilt for sneaking out of her house after dark to do a job that was not financially necessary, but rather, something that made her feel purposeful—important. It was more than a job to Hannah. It was fast becoming a new source of identity for her. And she liked the way it made her feel to directly help others.
“Hi, Dr. Hannah. My name is Jess. I am a transgender teen.” A listless voice floats across the airwaves. “I’m keeping my voice down. I don’t want my stepdad to know I’m calling you.”
“Are you in a safe place, Jess?” Hannah says, punching up the volume a bit on her headset.
“Yeah, I’m in my room. The TV is on. He can’t hear.” The caller swallows hard and goes on. “The thing is . . . he hates the sight of me. He always has. He calls me names like ‘tranny boy,’ and he’s—”
“He’s what, Jess?”
Dead air. Then the sound is muffled. Finally, the caller breathes, “Once. He threw a pan of bacon grease at me for wearing eyeliner.”
“Are you hurt? I mean, right now. Are you in any danger, Jess?” Hannah bridges the question skillfully.
“No. He’s only done that once. He hates me, though. He hits my mom when she defends me.”
“Listen to me, Jess. Can you leave the house? Is there someone you can confide in? Are you in middle school or high school?” Hannah asks.
“I’m a junior.”
“Do you have a teacher or counselor that you feel that you could talk to? Who might that be?”
“I have an English teacher, Ms. Paddock. She’s nice. I wrote about this in an essay that I handed in, and she asked me about it. I told her that I made it up.”
“Why did you do that? Lie, I mean?” Hannah asks.
“This thing that happened to you—when your stepdad threw the bacon grease. Did you tell anyone else other than Ms. Paddock?”
“No. Not until now. I didn’t want her to report it.”
“Do you feel unsafe?”
“Sometimes. Yeah, usually. I guess I just wanted to see if anyone cared. I don’t know how to make him stop hating me.”
Hannah bristled. The teacher should have, by law, reported the incident of suspected abuse. It was a matter that would be better solved off the airwaves. She scrawls on a notepad and lifts it up to signal her producer: GET HIS NUMBER.
“Jess, I am going to ask you to wait while I go to break, okay?” Hannah says, and quickly cuts to a commercial. There would be no spectacle of a minor who was in need of intervention. Hannah would call Child Protection Services herself and report the incident and the errant teacher. It was not always easy or glamorous work. Often, it broke her heart.
“Let’s check in with a caller who is looking to find love again at fifty, caller are you there?”
“Yes, I am here, Dr. Hannah. My name is Debbie. I’m newly divorced and terrified of getting out there again. Any advice for the forlorn at fifty?”
“Well, the first thing I would ask is why should anyone choose you over a younger prospect? What do you bring to the table in a relationship? I’m sure if you think hard enough, you will be able to come up with the upside.” Hannah had a method for everything. “Let’s role-play your response to that question. I’m a potential suitor, and you’re going to convince me that you are more than an average catch. Let’s go—!”
And so it went.
Hannah would return home in time to grab a few hours of sleep before Broderick, her third born, would get up for school and Olivia would be calling for her cartoons and morning juice cup. Hannah was there when Broderick came home in the afternoon, or after his part-time job at the mall, to hear about his day over dinner, which was more than she could say for Peter. He always seemed to be on call, running off to the hospital, constantly tending to one crisis or another. This fact, most probably, served as the basis for her mounting feelings of guilt. She wondered apprehensively if, with Peter never around, she should try to make up for his absence in some way.
She did manage to continue to see some choice clients during the afternoons, but made it a point to clear her calendar on weekends to dedicate to her family. Without Peter’s support, though, she held completely the sole task of arranging their family outings, keeping the care packages going out to Ty and Marc to their dual-coast campuses, and planning fun excursions for Broderick and Olivia. When she did plan a family vacation at summer breaks, Peter was unable to join them, spending time, instead, immersed in his job at the hospital and climbing the corporate ranks. This made Hannah feel more like a widow than a wife.
One unfortunate time, Peter left them all midway through a four-day trip to Disneyland to attend a nearby symposium, saying, “I’m so sorry, but my hands are tied. Goddamn hospital politics. I won’t be able to fly back with you and the kids.”
No one was more disappointed than Hannah, who was standing by watching with a horrified dread as her marriage and family slowly shrank, bit by bit. She began to take a hard look at herself. It’s not me, personally, or the work, she reasoned to herself. Peter has never been prouder of my accomplishments. It was something far less definitive, yet she could not figure it out. Instead, it seemed easier to imagine that her unconventional career was the thing that was pushing him away.
For the sake of her sanity and the stability of her family, Hannah continuously chose to make up the deficits where she could when Peter buried himself deep within his work, preening his career, cultivating connections and working double shifts with aspirations for higher management. He deserved it, didn’t he? She encouraged his success with willful support, even though it meant having less and less of Peter for all of them. It would just be until he made chief resident, she would tell herself.
Even back when the boys were young, she was the one who oiled Ty’s mitt for practice, re-wired a Game Boy on the fritz, or assembled a tricycle at daybreak on a snowy Christmas morning, when Peter was grounded in Denver and Santa Claus just could not wait. She recalled sitting beneath the Christmas tree that she had to purchase and tie to the roof of the Volvo with three excited children in tow, wondering to
herself it all was worth sacrificing just to keep up with the Joneses. It seemed that it had always been a struggle, back as far as when Peter first started his residency. What happened to the young lovers who once could not spend one night apart?
She had remembered long afternoons spent when they were first married and had moved back to Ohio, just she and Peter, traversing the Cuyahoga River in a fiberglass canoe on a long, lazy six-mile float. Or, hiking the trails of Cascade Valley and stopping to picnic at Canal Park. She remembered his loving glances and his eagerness to please her at every turn. Was it ever real? she’d wondered, or just something she had imagined? No, she was certain that they had found in each other what her mother and father had once had—and still did, even though Charlotte had been wrestling with the debilitating effects of dementia for the past sixteen years. Still, Robert cared for her as if she were a child, tending to her every need and filling in the gaps of her fading and failing mind that seemed to grow worse with the passing years. There were no limits to love as far as Robert Courtland was concerned, and he not only preached this fact, he lived it. Would she and Peter ever know that kind of devotion? In sickness and in health, for better or for worse? Hannah realized that she could not answer her own question, and the reality of that terrified her.
She told herself that she would talk with Peter about it as soon as he returned. After all, she could dispense advice to strangers, why not heed what she knew was the best course of action? When the time was right, she would do it. Unfortunately, the right time never seemed to come.
It did not keep Hannah from crying when no one was looking. Moments of total breakdown and dread enveloped her as she fought to keep the momentum of the life they had created going. Sometimes it would hit her in the studio, just after a show, when the phone lights went out and the microphone cooled. Other times while she was driving home in the early hours, pulling into the driveway, or crawling into an empty bed; rising with the pre-dawn haze only to find that Peter never even made it home to bed. Again.
There was little trace of him, except for the deposit of dirty laundry left routinely in a heap on the bedroom floor or randomly timed text messages or voice mails that begged off dinner for one reason or another. They made love so sporadically that Hannah did not even bother to refill her prescription contraceptives. Her periods were becoming more and more erratic in concert with her age and in relation to the stressful demands she had placed on her changing body.
Whenever they did make love, Peter used a condom. The ritual took less than sixty seconds from snap to finish. Still, she could not help but feel so utterly slighted by the whole ordeal, as if she were not even there at all. He would simply roll on top of her, bury his face in the pillow, and pump away mechanically until, at last, he released with a contented sigh. After which, he would promptly head to the sink to wash himself.
Once, when they were having sex, she did not make a single move throughout, but he never even noticed—nor did he note the fact that she had been crying the entire time. That was the definitive moment she had known that it was over. The insightful Dr. Hannah knew what her gut had been dreading. The realization that she was in a loveless marriage.
Unfortunately, it would be twelve more years before she actually ended it.
Chapter 18
Hannah pulled onto the winding driveway of the two-story Colonial-style home that looked more like it belonged to a broker or lawyer than a private healthcare provider. It was a group home nestled in the pristine and tranquil woods near the Cuyahoga Valley National Forest, and it had the most assuring of names—Serenity Lane. It had taken Hannah weeks to find the ideal location in which to entrust her treasured mother, Charlotte, in the care of strangers. It had been time. Robert had long been increasingly unable to care for Charlotte’s needs any longer as the throes of the disease had progressed, rendering her incapable of being left alone for any length of time. It had already been six years, and Hannah never missed a daily visit or phone call, even knowing that Charlotte was in the best of care. It was Hannah’s father, Robert, however, who concerned her most these days.
The decision to place Charlotte in a residential facility came after a long and loving road of at-home care and daily devotion supplied by Charlotte’s loving husband of forty-two years. It was he who first noticed the changes in his beloved wife back in 1987, which were subtle at the start, suggesting that at only age sixty, the hand of time had begun to press upon her beautiful and sharp mind with the hazy fog of occasional forgetfulness and the loss of a word, or the vexatious misplacement of her car keys. Robert and the family had come to regard the occurrences as nothing more than the natural progress of aging, although it did seem to worsen with each passing year.
Once, Hannah recalled mixing up a batch of dough for Christmas crullers, which were delicious oil-fried confections that when cooled, literally melted on the tongue. It was one of Charlotte’s famed traditions. The ritual was one that they had enjoyed since Hannah could remember; before she was even old enough to manage the ancient rolling pin used to flatten the dough. It was an heirloom that had once proudly belonged to Charlotte’s mother, brought to Ohio straight from the Old Country, along with the revered recipe. It was Hannah’s hope that three-year-old Olivia would have the opportunity to one day make the crullers with her—three generations of Courtland women tangling in a mess of powdered sugar and laughter, cracking eggs and pouring out the love and Myers’s Rum (Grandma Charlotte’s secret ingredient) into the batches of loving delight. Sadly, she would never have the opportunity, as Charlotte, who had already been placed at Serenity Lane three years before Olivia was born, simply was incapable of it. It was the Christmas of 1992 when Hannah had first noticed “mistakes” Charlotte was making, namely mixing up the flour with the salt and the pained look on her face when she had stopped abruptly and simply stared off into space. It was the last time that they would make the crullers together as each passing year robbed them of so much more than a cherished cookie recipe.
Over the years that followed, Charlotte had grown further confused and disoriented on a regular basis. What started as a gradual lapse of cognition when playing a board game, or mahjong with her lady friends, led to minor scrapes on the car and missing pocketbooks. Charlotte eventually began to lose track of dates and days of the week. Occasionally, she would wander off in the supermarket or at night, once even ending up in her nightclothes standing in the middle of the backyard. Robert had to coax her back into bed after she struck him in the face for touching her. He cried for days when she asked who the man in their wedding picture was in the winter of 1997. The call that came to Hannah in the night was one she would never forget. Her father’s haunting sobs, once again, breaking her heart in two. “I’m coming there now, Dad.”
The next several weeks were spent seeing doctors and performing standard blood tests and examinations. Charlotte underwent countless cognitive assessments—memory tests, problem-solving puzzles, counting and language drills. These were followed by physical tests including brain scans, computer topography, and magnetic resonance imaging to rule out other possible causes or symptoms. Family members were asked to answer a battery of questions that even for Hannah, seemed excessive, all revolving around Charlotte’s health and changes in her behavior. Many of the inquiries, Hannah regrettably could not answer. She had been so busy with juggling her own life, graduate school, her job at the counseling center, and her husband’s often distant, brooding behavior that she was not able to attest to her mother’s mental acuity. Conversations with her siblings revealed even less, as Muriel, the eldest, was off teaching at a professorship out of the country and her brother, Robert Jr., was somewhere in Utah, navigating his own mid-life crisis in an RV with his two German Shepherds and girlfriend of-the-moment in tow.
Hannah was relieved to learn that Robert had kept numerous journals all throughout his and Charlotte’s married life, which included his deep and distressful angst at watching his beloved s
lip away in the passing years, bit by bit, chronicled in explicit detail.
“Dad, you are so amazing. These stories are so wonderful.” Hannah pored over the box of bounded volumes, journals and spiral notebooks. “You kept it all. Everything, from the beginning.” She smiled, wiping a tear from her cheek.
The love story of Charlotte and Robert Courtland was nothing short of remarkable. Hannah had always known it. But now, the past several years had revealed a story of a different kind; one that recorded the changes in her mother in vivid detail. Everything was there—the decline, starting in June of 1992, when she was forgetting to pay the monthly bills, putting things in unusual places, and finally, the minor car wreck at the mall. Then, in 1995, when they took away her car keys, she began to grow confused and suspicious, depressed and fearful. She lashed out at Robert, thinking at times that he was a stranger, or calling the police to report a break-in when once the chicken thawing on the kitchen counter, according to her, went missing.
Charlotte could not be easily comforted. Even the decision to hire in-home help from a respite care center providing Robert with assistance tending to his wife’s many needs bathing, toileting, dressing, and remaining mobile became increasingly more difficult for Robert to bear. Regular visits to an adult care facility seemed to be the one thing that brightened Charlotte’s mood. They had arranged to take her to the center twice a week to experience planned activities with other patients who were in various stages of Alzheimer’s disease, which was what the test results had determined was Charlotte’s fate. Remarkably, the planned activities, particularly the music and art programs, reached Charlotte in a way that nothing and nobody else could. It caused her to smile and close her eyes, summoning up some distant memory, perhaps of her and her sweetheart, somewhere frozen back in time. Robert got her a small recorder and loaded cassette tapes with old songs and stories recorded in his own voice taken from his journals of their meeting, courtship, and incredible life and love for one another.
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