The Breakdown Lane

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  I tried to jam my pillow over my ears, stuffing it around my head like a life preserver, so that I wouldn’t hear them crying, all that long night. I know Caroline finally went to sleep, but I heard the coffeemaker click on at about four in the morning, and Mom and Gram talking.

  “…be back after she has a little…”

  “…imagine him being able to…”

  “…so foolish, because of her age. It frightens her.”

  At one point, then, Mom sort of shouted, “It frightens me, too, Hannah! Just because I’m an adult doesn’t mean that I don’t know I’m going to live my life alone, when the kids grow up, or with some kindly helper I pay to feed me. I want what I have left while I have it, Hannah—”

  “Hush, Julie, you’ll wake the children,” Gram said. I wondered why she was still there. We were sort of the Holiday Inn of the Fucked Up. You could drop in anytime. I got up and sort of curled up next to the crack in my bedroom door. “There’s Cathy—”

  “You know that I want Cathy to fall in love and have her own family one day. Hannah, I know how you feel about…how Cathy is, but she’s the dearest friend….”

  “I won’t argue with you there. I admit I had my concerns about her influence on the children.”

  “Be quiet. She’ll hear you. I heard her come in.”

  “But her door is closed tight.”

  “She’s been the most loyal friend I’ve ever had.”

  “I see that.”

  “But she’s going to want her own life, and perhaps another child. She’s only thirty-five, Hannah. And Gabe will grow up and go to school….”

  “Every one of us is afraid of being alone, Julie,” Gram said, and I heard the clink of her spoon as she added more sugar.

  “It’s one thing being alone if you can travel, or go to lectures, or whatever it would be that I’d do. It’s another being alone if you fall and have to lie in your own excrement until the mail carrier comes.”

  “We’ll get an alarm, Julie, and a beeper, when the need for that arises, and it may never arise. You might never have another bad stretch again.”

  “But I might. I had a really severe onset of this, Hannah. I have to face the fact that in a few years, I might be using a wheelchair.”

  “Julie! Let’s burn that bridge when we come to it.”

  “And, Hannah, more than that. I’m not some kind of saint, but really, right now you should be with your son. I don’t want to come between you and Leo. I don’t want you to think that being loyal to the children and me means ruling Leo out of your life….”

  “We won’t, Julie. When things settle down. Right now, Gabe is having a very hard time dealing with what Leo did to his grandchildren and to you. Julie, remember. You’ve been married so long to our son. You were a pip-squeak, you and him, under the canopy. I’ve known you all of your adult life. You’re not like a daughter-in-law to me, Julie, but like my own—”

  “I know, but this has completely messed up the plan we had for you. Your friends, your traveling. All of it.”

  At some point, I must have fallen asleep. I dreamed of Tian, in Con-nie’s kitchen that day, saying she felt like a princess of America. But she had grown taller—well, tall for a Thai person—and had short hair cut to turn under and was wearing one of my mother’s jackets. Gabe, she said, taking my hand and patting me on the arm, how good to see you. What grade are you in now? And I was still the same age, still fifteen. In the dream, I kept trying to stand up taller, willing myself to be taller and more imposing, so she’d see me as a man, but she was walking away, telling me how great it was to have seen me again, that I should do good in school. That she’d see me again…but that wasn’t a dream. It was really Caroline, crouched down next to me on the floor.

  “Wake up, Gabe,” she said. “I want to go while she’s asleep and Aurora’s asleep. Dad is outside.”

  I got up and walked past her to the bathroom, and took my time, brushing my teeth. I knew the silence would drive her nuts, but I also didn’t trust what I might say.

  “Gabe,” she whispered, outside the door. “Come on out here. I want to give you the number of their house and the Quality Inn, so you can call me if Mom needs me. Not like I won’t come back here to say good-bye to her, but she’s too upset now. I don’t want to upset her any more.”

  I threw the door open and Caroline almost fell in. I walked past her as if she were invisible. “Goddamnit!” she said. “You don’t have to be so rude.” I went into my bedroom, the door of which did not lock, and got into my bed. As zonked as I might have looked, my mind was banging like an engine opened up full bore. Should I try to talk sense to her? Beg her? Curse her? What would ultimately be best for us, all of us, for her to stay here and resent the hell out of Mom, get pregnant, smoke dope, whatever? Or would she settle down after he left and stopped filling her head with pictures of the glories of the Happy Valley in spring. I could imagine the Happy Valley under three feet of snow was probably a pretty grim and isolated place. There was also the matter of what kept spooling through my mind, the pictures of her and me huddled in the bus station in West Springfield, Massachusetts, wondering if we’d get out of town before they found the gun, the two of us sitting pressed up next to each other as if a storm had broken over our heads. Just her and me. My sister. Irish twins, they called us, born in the same year. Another part of me wanted to remind her of that, of the fact that she was not only leaving Mom, who would always be more loyal to her than Leo, but me. Me. Who saved her, who followed her all the way to the road across from the Breakdown Lane sign. Caroline, I wanted to say, you’re a fool, but you’re part of…I secured the pillow around my head, harder. “Gabe,” I heard her say. “Gabe? Aren’t you even going to say good-bye to me?” I wouldn’t let myself speak. “Gabe, you’re my brother,” she said, and I could tell by the break in her voice that she was crying. “Not everybody is the same. Okay, maybe you’re a bigger, stronger person than I am. But I’m not evil, Gabe. I’m not mean. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I’m afraid I’m going to hurt her feelings. Mom’s feelings. That’s why I’m going, partly. It’s not just for me, Gabe.” Like, a sixteenth of my brain knew she was telling the truth. Finally, after what seemed a couple of hundred years, I felt her reach out and put her little hand on the back of my head. “I’ll write to you, Gabe. I’ll call you from the hotel. You’ll always be my bro, Gabe. I’m sorry I called you a ’tard. You’re the smartest person I know.” Oh, shit, I thought, this cannot be happening. It was some, like, surreal fucking joke. I could imagine how kids would act. I didn’t want to go there. To the Steiners, the award for best transformation from an ordinary family in the lower forty-eight. After a couple of minutes, I got my mouth to stop shaking and lifted my head. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say to her.

  But she was already gone.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Psalm 78

  EXCESS BAGGAGE

  By J. A. Gillis

  Distributed by Panorama Media

  Dear J.,

  Who the heck are you to give other people advice that could change their whole lives? Tell them their marriages aren’t going to work out, when it’s completely possible that if they prayed and tried to give up their pride, they might turn out to be very happy? That’s what happened to my husband and me, after he stepped off the path. We found the lowest place in our house—in our case, the basement powder room—and got down on our knees and asked the Lord to heal our marriage. And he did. I think you’re crazy yourself, and that’s why you don’t want anyone else to be happy. What are you, a psychologist? A minister? Or just a busybody with a big mouth?

  Curious in Clayvourne

  Dear Curious,

  Probably the final choice.

  I have no credentials. I never went to school to try to help people live their lives. And mine hasn’t been anybody’s idea of a rousing success, especially in certain areas. But I do the best I can. And I listen. Isn’t that all any of us can do?

  J.

  Car
oline had not been much of a presence in our lives after Leo left for the first time. She’d made sure of that. But when she left for good, she was an absence. Though I was sure (almost hopeful) that I would become symptomatic (a little mental sludge can’t hurt once in a while), I did not. I felt great. In fact, I’ve never had as bad an episode again as I had around the time of the divorce, which is probably no coincidence.

  My mind remained brutally lucid. I could see my Caroline’s pixie-ish upper lip as I gathered the detritus left behind by her hurricane departure: barrettes with tendrils of blonde hair; notes folded into those complicated, eight-sided paper pyramids you can only manage to construct when you’re an adolescent; a half-empty bottle of Eau Leonie (mine). I could see her, hair twisted and pinned up, wearing the things she’d left in her closet—her long black formal skirt, her parka, the Mary Janes that made her feet look so dainty and trim, that she, of course, hated. I boxed them up, first pressing each to my face, as I had boxed up my mother’s cardigans after her funeral. But I realized then I’d nowhere to send them. So I gave them to Hannah, not really wanting to know Leo’s post-office-box number.

  My sense of my own worthlessness was past measuring. I don’t know if it’s possible to put yourself inside the body of a woman who’s been ditched by her husband, her child, and at least some big part of her health. Perhaps what had animated the marionette was the sense of being Julie-who-was-wife-and-mother-and-writer. And then all but one of the strings was snipped. One hand moved, jerkily, up and down over my keyboard. Gabe was there, and Aury-now-Rory. But I couldn’t give myself to them, or only sporadically, and in bursts of affection, rather than a dependable level of maternal steadiness. I would look at them and see Caro’s wrinkled nose cross my little girl’s face. I would hear some note in Gabe’s laugh that was hers and want to shut myself away from him. And so I behaved…like shit. Rory would get a stack of Golden Books one night, a rude wave from me the next to go away and let me sleep. One week, I’d be emptying the book bag each night with Gabe and going over his calendar. The next week I didn’t notice whether he came home. Jennet said some of this might come from the lesions that either were or were not cratering away in my brain tissue, crumbling the tissue surrounding my nerves like burned toast.

  Gabe was like a rock. Actually, he was like a stone. He showed almost no range of emotion or motion. He moved like a weighted diver traversing the ocean floor.

  But he always made sure his little sister got home.

  He always made sure she got fed and to bed, whether Cath was working late or not. I took him so for granted. He knew it.

  With Cathy, there was almost a shame, a smell of failure. A sense that Abby Sun would never leave Cathy as Caroline had left me. She greeted me each morning with a strong shoulder hug I had to force myself to return with a pat of my hand. It was not my finest hour. These were not my finest six hundred hours. The perpetual dull pain and intermittent bursts of flame along my legs and the tremors in my hands and brain that made me have to S.T.O.P. and T.H.I.N.K. to type drove me mad with rage. The inability to recover words I knew as well as my own name—and, more than once, when someone answered the telephone, I had to pause and reflect before I could say my own name—had the same effect. I knew that it was necessary for me to lie down each afternoon, and that when I had my bursts of energy or creativity, and “overdid,” I paid later with hours of falling asleep during conversations or talking like a drunk. I took Valium to stop the jits and the rampant anxiety—there were times I was certain I could see Caroline lying dead in the Vermont mud, knocked off a bike by a drunk driver, while Leo and Joyous toasted each other with fucking grapes they’d stomped themselves and congratulated Leo on his excellent sperm count. I took antidepressants to thrust me out of bed in the morning, or I’d have lain, without washing my face, for days, past caring how I looked or smelled. The children never seemed to notice, and though Cath made tentative hints about the importance of getting up and at it every day (“If you get dressed and showered, Jules, everything thereafter can legitimately be considered a nap…”), it seemed so much easier just to brush my teeth and haul my computer up onto the bed. Eventually, Cathy or Hannah would wash the sheets.

  Did I think I had this kind of sloth coming to me because I was a poor lady who had MS and had been dumped?

  Uh. Yes.

  I showed Cathy my poem “Soup in Winter,” on which I’d worked for two months, counting out dum-da-dum-da syllables. I was kind of proud of it.

  Soup in Winter

  An onion, as a symbol for love dissected

  Translucent skin making visible the rejected,

  And the layers—a tree’s memory rings, halves bisected,

  Is too easy.

  And yet we do it.

  An exercise, a verbal excision of a small dark place of rot,

  The sharp poignancy, blended, easily forgot

  Over low flames, a boost to flavors more kind, lost to mind.

  We forget, until we cut again, how shrill are love’s demands

  And how our eyes fill and stream, the scent stubborn on our hands.

  How easily an onion falls to pieces,

  How fit for disconnection.

  As if in its conception

  Was its insurrection.

  Cathy looked at me and said, “Well, it’s not that it’s really bad writing. But, um, the message is that love stinks, right?”

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  But I had to agree. Damn her!

  “It doesn’t necessarily, Julie. It’s not written that you’ll never fall in love again. You’re a young woman—”

  “Oh, please! ” I brayed at her, my dearest friend. “I mean, women my age can’t get a date if they’re millionaires. How about if they’re broke, have neurotic children and a debilitating deteriorative disease? I think that describes the dream date of the millennium.”

  Then I pounded on the table until my hands hurt and apologized profusely.

  “I think this thing is getting to my brain, literally. I never used to be so prone to, well, ups and downs of mood,” I said, expecting Cathy to hurry to deny that. When she didn’t, a cold black shaft opened inside me.

  It was entirely possible that I was having what they call “cognitive” issues—in other words, brain damage.

  With Jennet, I worked it out that I somehow believed Leo was to blame for having leached away my health by leaving me behind. I somehow seemed to think that if Leo would come back, I’d behave like a tape played in reverse—all the strings would connect again if Leo would love me. And yet, much as I loved Leo, my fantasies about Leo were not sexual but homicidal. I pictured him coming to me, frozen and bleeding, and my closing the door against him in a blizzard. I actually dreamed that, so it wasn’t my fault. Jennet said that images of Leo as cold and threatening were not bizarre, but rather ordinary. But also, I would take out his letters to me, our honeymoon scrapbook, and stare into the faces of those smug, slim, utterly sensual young people and think, Where is the clue? Where is the seed that grew into the Whole Holistic Leo? His pinch of arrogance? His touch of impatience? I was a dozen times more arrogant and impatient any day of the week, even back then. But I never, not ever, would have slipped through my wedding band and fled. As closely as Jennet questioned me, trying to probe for the soft spot, the place that admitted a certain immune deficiency in my marriage, I could not honestly find one for her. Gabillions of people have midlife wackies and come home, wagging their tails behind them, I alleged. No, Jennet would argue. That was not true. Those who take off on extended flings are practicing divorce, as a suicide practices with shallow cuts. But he had been such a wonderful father, I would counter. So were many wife beaters, Jennet came back at me. Many never laid a finger on their children.

  “Okay!” I shouted at her one day. “I knew I was being a wuss, letting him go on photography vacations! I knew he was juggling with torches and he was going to drop one on me! But if I’d forbidden it, he’d just have left sooner, right?
He’d just have speeded up the whole thing and booked out.”

  “And would that have been the worst thing that ever happened?” she asked softly.

  “I loved him!” I cried. “I was used to him! We were a team. Are you suggesting that a nice clean cut, sooner, between the children and their father would have been better than the good times we had—and we did still have good times—right up until the last trip?”

  “Yes,” Jennet said. “I am.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the way it happened was sordid and deceitful and, for both Gabe and Caroline, has created lacerations that will remain open for years. Hate to be the one to say it.”