Smacked

by Eilene Zimmerman

  I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to broach all of this with Peter.

  “No, that’s not true. Absolutely not true,” I say. “Dad loves you and your sister more than anything or anyone else in the world.” But I say this all the time, and it is starting to sound like bullshit, even to me, and I know it’s not bullshit. He does love them both. But I know he can be a narcissistic, selfish jerk too. Evan isn’t listening. I can tell from the way he looks that he’s thinking about something else.

  “Last week I was in the kitchen and Dad brought in this box from Amazon and started opening it,” he says. “And he was taking out all these things you would have in a doctor’s office, like cotton balls and Band-Aids and needles and alcohol pads.” Peter told him he thought it would be a good idea to stock up on medical supplies, just in case they were ever needed. “I’m telling you, Mom, he’s been acting so crazy I didn’t even say anything about it. I just put my headphones in and told him I had to go do homework. I stayed in my room the whole night.”

  “What the hell?” I say. “Needed for what? The apocalypse? What is he going to get next, a gun cabinet?”

  Evan smiles. “A couple of weeks ago we went to Home Depot and he got two safes. So maybe, yeah.”

  “Jesus Christ” is all I can say. I know Peter sometimes takes home confidential client files, and that for his own important documents and valuables he doesn’t have a safe deposit box, so maybe that’s why he got the safes. “You know, if you don’t want to stay there, you don’t have to,” I add. “You can stay here.” Evan nods. “Yeah, maybe I will start doing that. He probably wouldn’t even notice. I don’t think he even really remembers when I’m supposed to be there; sometimes he is surprised to see me.”

  At that moment, my instinct is to tell Evan he will not be staying at his Dad’s again, but I don’t. Peter, at least up until the last year or so, was always adamant about keeping his nights during the week with the kids. And despite the fact that Peter doesn’t even seem to remember when Evan is supposed to be at his house and spends almost no time with him when he’s there, that he hasn’t made the boy dinner in almost a year, I still feel afraid to make that decision. When something ticks Peter off, especially lately, he can’t let go of it. If he feels someone wronged him—an associate who turned in subpar work or a cashier who gave him the wrong change—he will obsess and obsess over it, getting angrier with each pass. I’m afraid of his reaction if I suggest that his behavior is endangering our son. Neither Evan nor I will defy Peter’s wishes, even though Peter probably doesn’t remember what those wishes are.

  On top of that, Evan is confiding in me. We have an agreement that whenever we talk about his father, his sister, or his friends, it is between us—it is venting and it is confidential. That night I ask Evan if I can call Peter and talk to him about all this. I tell him I am worried and upset. But Evan reminds me of our agreement and I need him to trust me. His reports about life with his father are the only information I have about Peter now, since he has all but stopped responding to Anna and me.

  After Peter died, I went over and over the conversation I had that night with Evan, asking myself why I didn’t just drive up to Peter’s house and demand he tell me what the hell was going on. “Why do you need sterile syringes and gauze pads? Why does it take you three hours to get a diet soda?” Maybe I shouldn’t have needed to ask, maybe it should have been obvious, but it wasn’t. In my wildest dreams, I could not have imagined Peter would be using those syringes on himself, so I struggled to find some other explanation, one that fit with my notion of who he was.

  Evan certainly didn’t know anything about intravenous drug abuse. He was sixteen years old. He respected and admired his father, so questioning Peter’s decisions and explanations—whether it was to stock up on mysteriously needed medical supplies or drive three times the speed limit—didn’t occur to him.

  The thing I’ve learned in the years since that conversation with my son is that there is no particular type of person that becomes a drug addict. People who struggle with addiction look like all of us—the lawyer in his corner office, the nurse who took care of your dying father, the mother sitting behind you at the soccer game who has been stealing painkillers from her friends’ medicine cabinets.

  But tonight, even though I am seeing all the signs of someone in the throes of addiction, I type “bipolar disorder” and “anorexia and bulimia in men,” “cognitive decline in middle age,” and “can depression and stress make someone act crazy?” into my Google search bar. I don’t Google “symptoms of opioid and cocaine addiction” until after Peter dies. And that is when I will see how obvious his problem should have been to everyone, because he had so many of the symptoms: weight loss, chronic flu, sleepiness, “nodding” (falling asleep suddenly), bruises, sores, scratching. Chronic cocaine use (Peter was using that and methamphetamine, a highly addictive stimulant that affects the central nervous system) can cause ministrokes and gastrointestinal damage; it can lessen the brain’s ability to solve problems, make decisions, pay attention, and remember things.

  I wasn’t the only person in Peter’s life that didn’t read these signs correctly. No one, not his family, friends, or colleagues, ever floated the suggestion that Peter might be a drug addict.

  ■ SEVEN

  May 2015

  THREE MONTHS LATER, I am in the college advising office at my son’s high school, meeting with a counselor named Donna to discuss Evan’s best options for college based on elaborate questionnaires he and I have completed in the last few months, as well as his test scores and projected GPA. This meeting has been on the calendar for months and, as usual, Peter is late. The counselor and I stare politely at each other and decide we’ll wait a few more minutes. I try calling Peter, but it’s mostly for appearances’ sake, to spare my teenage son embarrassment about his father, who is no longer capable, it appears, of arriving anywhere on time. I get no answer, so I text: “Peter, the meeting was supposed to start five minutes ago. Are you coming?” No answer.

  Somewhere deep down in my heart I have not given up believing Peter is the same person he was a few years ago. It’s not that he wasn’t an egotistical workaholic then—he was—but he made it to the important stuff. He came to Anna’s college counseling meeting two years ago. He was a few minutes late, but he made it. And he texted to let me know he was “almost there, just parking, will be up in two minutes.” Now, he just ignores us. I keep thinking he is going to snap out of this. Snap out of this funk, the strange sickness he can’t shake, the exhaustion he can’t sleep off. He still has plausible reasons for being late or not showing up. It’s work, a doctor’s appointment, he’s still got a bad cold or it’s food poisoning, the car battery is dead, there was an accident on the 805, a client called as he was leaving the office—there is no end to the explanations.

  Donna, a tall, imposing woman whom I have never seen wear anything other than a dress and heels, has to meet with another set of parents in forty-five minutes. We move ahead without Peter. I text: “We’re starting, so just come into the office whenever you get here.”

  Donna starts talking about schools she thinks would be appropriate for Evan based on his interests and academic strengths. I ask a few questions and look thoughtfully into my lap as she answers so I can surreptitiously check the time. About thirty minutes later the door opens and in walks Peter, smiling and shaking Donna’s hand as if now the party can really start. He tucks his phone into the pocket of his pants and says, “I’m sorry I’m late, I had a doctor’s appointment that ran over.” Donna smiles her professional, closed-lipped smile. “I hope everything is okay, yes?”

  He sits down to the left of me on a small sofa. “I have Hashimoto’s disease,” he says. “I was at the endocrinologist.” I don’t understand why Peter is providing these details to Donna instead of just answering yes, but I’m alarmed, so I turn toward him and ask about it. “What is that? I’ve neve
r heard of it. Is it serious?”

  “No,” he says. “It’s actually pretty common. It’s a condition where your immune system attacks your thyroid, and that causes your thyroid to be underactive. Probably why I’m always tired.”

  “So, you went to the doctor about the lump? On your thyroid?” I ask, trying to clarify why he went to an endocrinologist, even though we are at a college counseling meeting, and that counselor is sitting right there, behind the desk, getting more irritated with us by the second. “Or because of the weight loss?” He has had a lump on his thyroid for nearly two years, but the doctor assured him it wasn’t cancer, it just needed to be checked out.

  “For both,” he says. We turn toward Donna, outwardly calm and poised in her chair, Evan’s records in her hands, waiting for Peter to finish the story of his doctor’s appointment, which has absolutely nothing to do with our son’s college prospects. “We only have about twenty minutes left,” she says. Evan sits quietly next to me, staring down at his hands folded in his lap.

  I turn toward Peter and lightly touch his knee with my fingertips, to get his attention and prevent him from glancing at his phone, which I can hear buzzing with incoming texts. “We’re talking about Evan’s options for college and what Donna would recommend,” I say quickly, trying to catch him up on the last half-hour’s conversation in one sentence and show Donna I really was paying attention. She nods politely and then picks up right where we left off. Peter asks a few questions and I turn to hear him speak, but I’m not really listening. All I can see is how awful he looks. He is so thin it is hard to imagine how his neck can support his head, and although he is wearing a dress shirt and khaki pants, he looks disheveled. Maybe it’s that his face is sweaty; odd, as I am freezing in this over-air-conditioned office. I assume it’s because he ran from the car to get here and it’s hot out. I suddenly notice how thin the hair on his head has gotten. What remains is wispy and a little too long, so it’s starting to curl at the ends. He looks like a mad scientist.

  The meeting ends and we are ushered out past well-dressed parents waiting for their turn to discuss with Donna the intellectual and academic attributes of their son or daughter and the prospects for his or her future, for whom they are paying a yearly tuition that allows them to command the undivided attention of a woman who knows the insides and outs of every admissions office at every university. We say goodbye to Evan, who heads back to class. Peter looks smug as the two of us walk out and into the parking lot. Evan is smart, has great scores, will have lots of options. And he is proud of that.

  Our kids attend this school because Peter wanted them to attend it. They went to our neighborhood’s public elementary school—in fact, we bought the house I live in because the elementary school nearby was considered a “good one”—and Anna went to the public middle school for a year too. In fifth grade, she couldn’t make sense of the math lessons, so Peter decided he would teach her fifth grade math himself. Each weeknight, no matter when he got home from work, he retaught Anna the day’s math lesson, following the textbook. Some nights he whined about it, about how our taxes were paying for incompetent teachers, but once he got started he was in his element, sitting beside Anna at the kitchen table, teaching her mathematics and enjoying it. In seventh grade, however, there were fifty kids in Anna’s science class and she complained that she couldn’t hear the teacher or see the board. That was the last straw for Peter.

  We applied for Anna and Evan to attend private school. That fall, they began the eighth and sixth grades here, at the Francis Parker School.

  My car is in the school parking lot but Peter has parked a few blocks away, so he gets into mine and I drive him to his. We sit in my Prius for a few minutes first, reviewing what Donna said and what each of us thinks. But I can’t just leave it at that, as if Peter isn’t sitting across from me, disappearing. “You look like you’re dying,” I say. He starts laughing. “No, seriously, Peter, you look awful. Your skin is gray. You were sweating in Donna’s office and it was freezing. And now, it’s eighty degrees out and you’re shivering. What’s wrong? What’s going on with you?”

  He is still laughing. “I’m not dying, Eilene. I have Hashimoto’s, I told you.”

  “So, is this why you’ve been losing weight? And why you have been sick all year? Is that what the doctor said?” I am so desperate for a reason, something that makes even a tiny bit of sense, to explain his declining health and crazy behavior.

  “I guess. I have a prescription for Synthroid, so I’ll get that today and start taking it. It’s a synthetic version of the hormone your thyroid makes.” He isn’t saying what I need him to say, that once he takes this medication he’ll start to feel well again. So I ask.

  “And does the doctor think that once you’re on that, you’ll start to feel better? You’ll start to gain weight and stuff?” I ask.

  Peter doesn’t answer, but reaches into his pocket for his phone, which has been vibrating intermittently since he got to the meeting. He glances down at it and then back up at me. “You know, the general counsel called and told me to go to a doctor. Don, the general counsel of the entire firm, called to say I needed to see a doctor.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I guess they were concerned about me, about my health. So he called me. And he doesn’t usually call people at the firm to tell them to go to the doctor.” Peter has a half-smile on his face and it is dawning on me that he is proud of this. Here I thought he was confessing something embarrassing, that he—a grown man—had to be told to go to the doctor by the management of his law firm. But no, that’s not at all what this means to him. To Peter, that call confirmed his importance, confirmed how essential he is to the firm, confirmed that, yes, after all the years he has given to that place and all that he has given up for it, this firm cares about him. They are worried. And Peter is flattered by this attention, I can see that. I feel slightly nauseated sitting here, looking at the smile blooming on his large skeletal face, his teeth stained from too much coffee and diet cola, the whites of his eyes slightly yellow, jaundiced.

  “Wow” is all I can say. “Do you do anything else besides take the Synthroid?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says, “I have to have another blood test in six weeks to make sure the hormone levels are right.”

  “Did you already make that appointment?” I ask. It’s like Peter is my son, rather than my ex-husband, but it took him two years to figure out why he is feeling so bad, and I want him to get better.

  “No, but I will,” Peter says. I take out my phone and make a note on my calendar to ask him in three weeks if he’s scheduled a blood test. “I’ll remind you, okay?”

  “Okay,” Peter mumbles, but I’ve lost his attention. His head is bent over his phone as he answers a text. I start the Prius and drive around the block to where his white Nissan sports car is parked. “I’m so tired,” Peter says, looking out the window toward his car, as if contemplating the amount of energy it will take to push open the door of the Prius, get out, climb into his car, and drive back up the freeway. “Maybe I’ll go home and take a nap before going to the office.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I say as he closes my car door. I reach across the seat to shout out the passenger window, “Don’t forget to fill your prescription!”

  That afternoon I tell Evan that Peter has finally figured out what’s wrong with him. “It’s something called Hashimoto’s disease,” I say. “It screws up your thyroid. Hopefully, once he starts taking the medication for it, he’ll stop sleeping all the time.”

  Evan starts his homework and I go online to Google Hashimoto’s disease. The first thing that comes up is the Mayo Clinic website. A quick glance at it, and I can see that Peter does have many of the symptoms of Hashimoto’s—fatigue and sluggishness, increased sensitivity to cold, hair loss, pale and dry skin, memory lapses, depression, muscle aches, weakness, and joint pain. I actually feel, for the first tim
e in a long while, my anxiety lifting. But then I read that a hallmark of the disease is unexplained weight gain. Peter is the thinnest he has been in the twenty-eight years I have known him. I look it up on the National Institutes of Health website too. It gives more detail about both the gland and the disorder (“The thyroid is a small butterfly-shaped gland in the front of your neck….Thyroid hormones control how your body uses energy, so they affect nearly every organ in your body….”). I scroll down to “What are the symptoms of Hashimoto’s disease?” They are nearly identical to the Mayo Clinic’s list of symptoms, including weight gain. Every single medical website I check that night says weight gain is among the most common symptoms. I call Peter, and for once he answers. I can hear in the way his voice is clipped that he’s annoyed. “Hi,” he says. “I’m slammed right now, what is it?”

  “I think you need to see a different endocrinologist, Peter. I looked up Hashimoto’s and you’re supposed to be gaining weight, not losing it. I think your doctor might be wrong. You should get another opinion.” I know he will never get a second opinion, considering how long it took him to get the first. I’m worried though; I think he’s been misdiagnosed.

  “No, that is what I have,” he says. “I don’t know why I’m not gaining weight, but all the tests show I have Hashimoto’s. So I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Look,” I offer. “Can I find another endocrinologist that takes your insurance? I can make the appointment for you. I think you should at least talk to someone else.”

  “Eilene,” he says, exhaling. “I just spent two hours today at the doctor dealing with this, after blood tests and all that shit. This is what I have. He’s a good doctor. Let me start taking the Synthroid and we’ll see how I feel. Okay? I have to go. I should be on a conference call right now.”