“No, Mom.” Anna wriggles away from me. “He doesn’t. You don’t know, you’re not there. You don’t see how he’s acting.”
Evan is standing in the family room, a step down from the kitchen, tossing a small green ball up in the air and catching it, over and over again. “Evan,” I say and he stops.
He is wearing a blue T-shirt with the words Waffle House printed over a photo of a waffle, a Buffalo Bills cap on his head. He turns to face me.
“She’s right,” he says. “That is exactly what it’s like.”
* * *
—
ANNA AND I SPEND all of the next day trying to reach Peter. We need to make arrangements for the weekend, find out if he’s feeling better and figure out what to do about his car. His Tiguan was supposed to be Anna’s to use this summer, but it’s been undergoing repairs from the accident he had in late April; it is ready to be picked up today. We can’t do that without him and he’s not responding. (A month from now, with $1,000 still owed for repairs, the car will be repossessed by the San Diego County Credit Union.) I leave a message on Peter’s work phone about all this, hoping his secretary will hear it and track him down.
After dinner, frustrated and angry and worried, I decide to go for a hike in Mission Trails Park to clear my head. It’s only a few miles from my house but it feels rural and far away, 7,000 acres of rugged hills, open valleys, even a couple of small mountains. It’s so quiet here but also so alive, with the sounds of birdsong, of squirrels, mice, and snakes rustling in the brush, of crickets starting their chirping as the sun goes down. The mountains ahead of me are pink, and in the sky, thin strings of clouds lit from behind glow orange, crimson, and lavender.
As I walk, I struggle with my conscience. We have not been able to reach Peter in two days. This has happened before, but not when he was as sick as he is now. I am both worried about him and afraid of him at the same time, and have been vacillating all day between driving up to his house and forcing him to go to the emergency room and not doing anything, just waiting it out.
Years later, when I think back about that night, I will recognize that I knew in my heart some kind of crash was coming. I didn’t understand why it was coming or what it would look like when it arrived, but I knew it was inevitable. And soon. It seemed impossible to me that Peter would be able to continue to function much longer—personally and professionally—while so sick and distracted, vomiting, sleeping much of the day and then being irrational when he was awake.
I know one reason I didn’t drive up that night and try to drag him to the ER was because I was sure he would not go, would fight with me the same as he did with Evan, and I would leave questioning myself—my logic, my sanity. I felt sure that if I just waited a little longer the inevitable crash or breakdown—whatever it was going to be—would finally occur. I believed the end of this madness would be a trip to the hospital for Peter, and with that a proper diagnosis and treatment plan for whatever was wrong. And then his and all of our lives would start to make sense again. I never considered he might die. Peter had become so powerful, so busy, so depended upon by clients and co-workers and family that it felt to me—and likely to Peter—that he was incapable of dying. This was a man who went to work the day after he had a motorcycle accident that fractured his elbow and scraped off a good deal of the skin on his arms and legs. Only the weak-willed took sick days, in Peter’s estimation. He never did.
It’s dark when I get back to my car, the air thick with the smell of sage, evening primrose, and jasmine. Stars litter the sky. I open the door and ease myself behind the steering wheel.
Tomorrow morning, I decide, no matter what, I’m driving to Peter’s house and taking him to the hospital. I’ll call an ambulance if I have to, but he’s going. Enough is enough.
PART II
■ NINE
July 11, 2015
I’M OUTSIDE PETER’S HOUSE, standing in the street, the phone pressed against my ear, the 911 operator my lifeline, the only thing keeping me tethered to the here and now. I’m sobbing, gulping air, saying to her, “Are they coming? Are they on their way?” She reassures me the ambulance is on its way. Then I hear the sirens. “Okay,” I tell her. “I can hear them. Can you wait until I can see them?” Yes, she answers, she can stay on the phone with me as long as I need. Two minutes later, there is a fire truck, an ambulance, and two police cars are outside Peter’s house.
The first people to reach me are EMTs, both of them young men, their faces blank and experienced. Used to this. “Can you tell us what happened?” the taller one asks. I unload in a torrent of details and tears what I’ve discovered. “I tried to do CPR,” I tell them in my nonstop narrative. “The 911 operator told me I should try, but I couldn’t move his arm. I don’t think you can move his arm, it’s very stiff.” The men keep nodding at me, as if nothing I could say would ever surprise them. “Thank you,” says the tall one. “We’ll go in and see what we can do.” I nod. I’m so cold. It’s eighty degrees outside, and I am shivering, my teeth chattering.
I retreat to the backyard and a policewoman enters with a male partner behind her. Her name is May. She asks me some of the same questions as the EMT guy.
Anna texts me—she’s about to leave for work—“How’s Dad?” I look at my phone and look at May. “My daughter is asking about her dad. I…I…do I tell her?” There is nothing that can prepare a mother to tell her children their father has died.
May puts her hand over mine, in an effort to dissuade me from any impulse texting. She suggests instead that I tell them only to come up to their dad’s house. “That way, when you tell them,” May says, “you will have the grief counselors here to help.” About five minutes after the police arrived, two women, grief counselors who volunteer for the police department, walked gingerly through the open back gate. They are both retired nurses who spent decades in hospital emergency rooms. These are women who know unexpected death and the hysterical disbelief that surrounds it, and they know it well. I text Anna back “Can you guys come up here? Drive carefully, there’s no rush. The ambulance is here. They are working on Dad.” Anna texts back in all caps “WHAT DO YOU MEAN WORKING ON DAD? IS DAD OKAY?” I don’t want to lie, but I don’t want to tell the truth. “They are with him right now. I’ll know more when you get here. Don’t rush. It’s fine. They’ll be here for a while.”
About twenty minutes later my kids arrive. Anna charges through the open gate into the backyard, Evan behind her, staring at his sister’s back. She looks around with wild eyes and I can see her physically beginning to panic, taking in the police and firefighters and the two EMTs going in and out of the house. “Mom,” she says, glancing around. “Mom! Where’s Dad? Where’s Dad?” Her voice is shrill. Evan is silent, his downcast eyes are unfocused, staring at a point somewhere behind me. He is afraid, I think. He is afraid of what’s coming because he knows what’s coming. He was the last one to see Peter alive.
“Mom!” Anna yells at me, her eyes still darting around the yard. The grief counselors are behind me, standing with sympathetic looks on their placid faces. They aren’t stupid, my kids. They know something horrible has been set in motion, they just need me to say the words. And I do. I walk toward them and I am shaking as I take my daughter’s hand. “Daddy,” I say, pausing for a millisecond. “Daddy died.” I say it again, as my kids stand there looking at me. “He died.” Anna yanks her hand away and covers her ears. I start crying. “I’m so sorry,” I say, sensing that in a moment, all hell is going to break loose. “I’m so, so sorry.” Anna looks at me as if I’m crazy. “What?” she shrieks. “What are you saying?” And then “No, No. No. What the fuck! WHAT THE FUCK? Dad died? No, no, he can’t be dead. No!” She is screaming.
My son puts his hands on his head and starts sobbing, the way he hasn’t cried—big choking sobs—since he was a little kid. His face is beet red. Then it’s like he’s gone blind, or his head is too heavy to
hold up any longer. He puts both hands out in front of him, trying to feel his way to the ground, as he crumples onto the grass.
“Anna,” he shouts, trying to interrupt her shrieks, “can we just lie down?” He yells it louder. “Can we just lie down here for a minute?” His arms are reaching up and out to her. She turns to look at him and stops screaming, as if she just remembered he was there too. And she does lie down in the grass, she and her brother holding each other and crying. I know they feel guilty for not getting Peter to the hospital. I feel guilty, too, and probably more than they do, since I’m an adult and I could have done it. The thought of him so sick that he had to lie down in his underwear and socks on the bathroom floor, had to put his head on an empty box, that he was unable to sit up or to dial anyone’s number for help, even 911, just three buttons, that he might have been in terrible pain or just afraid and alone, is making me want to pull my hair out.
On my drive up to his house this morning, I mentally steeled myself for what I’d find—I figured he might be sleeping or even, potentially, semiconscious. I would call an ambulance. His bed might be covered in vomit or urine. I readied myself for all of that. I’d even brought a book with me, preparing for what could be a long wait in the emergency room. And I said out loud, as my stomach began to shake and the rest of my body started to feel cold and shivery, “It’s not like he’s dead. He’s not going to be dead or anything.” My hands were sweaty on the steering wheel.
Now I am bent toward my sobbing children, unable to move. I want to lie down, too, onto the neglected green-brown grass. I want to shimmy right in between my kids and be cocooned and hidden, not be the person everyone is looking to for directions and answers and assistance. I have been shaking from shock and fear almost continuously for three hours, and I am so tired I could probably sleep standing up. Instead I crouch down in a squat and put my head in my hands and pull myself together.
Anna and Evan are, after all, just teenagers. It’s been more than a year since Peter acted like any kind of parent, and they need to believe I have things under control, that I know what I’m doing. When Peter and I split up five years earlier I fell apart, and for two months spent most of my time in bed, crying. Ever since then, any time I get teary-eyed, Anna will put her hand on me and say in an urgent voice: “No, Mommy, don’t be sad. Don’t be sad. Don’t start crying again.” I need to hold it together now.
I stand up. It feels like I’m in the middle of a slow-motion hurricane, my life literally coming apart at the seams. Everything around me is washed out in the noon sunshine and heat, a slight breeze making the thicket of wind chimes hanging over the porch of the house next door bang together, creating a tinkly, dreamy, dripping-water sound. Everyone is standing and waiting for the sobbing and screaming to die down, for the kids to sit up, for the mom to say something. The grief counselors have pamphlets in their hands, the police officers and the medical examiner cling to their clipboards and pens. There is information that has to be gathered for the death certificate, for the police report, for the autopsy, before they can go home to their own, presumably intact, alive families, and chalk this up to another day’s hard work.
Then my daughter disengages from her brother and starts walking toward the house while rapid-fire texting, holding her phone directly in front of her face, screaming and crying the whole time. She nearly bowls over the grief counselors trying to be of service. She stops, looks at them, and then looks back at me. “What the fuck are they doing here?” she screams. I explain that these are counselors here to help us. I want Anna and Evan to sit down and talk to these calm women, who appear to be completely unmoved by any of the hysterics taking place around them. But Anna is behaving almost as if she’s been violated. To me, the backyard containing all this medical and police activity feels like a crime scene. To her, however, this is an intensely private event that has turned, by all appearances, into some sort of vulgar circus.
Out of the corner of my eye I see Evan, red-faced, sobbing, weeding the gray and white gravel path, picking out the tiny green plants that try and poke through to the sunlight. Peter kept asking him to do this, saying he would pay Evan $10 an hour to weed the gravel, and he did do it, sporadically, but he hated it and recently flat-out refused. Evan knew Peter was just giving him something to do instead of spending time with him—which Peter couldn’t physically do, at that point, because he was either out of the house or sleeping most of the time. Now, wracked with guilt and remorse, Evan is crouching down, picking out every green leaf and blade of grass he can find.
One of the lawyers with whom Peter works, the head of the San Diego office, is walking into the backyard. He is saying a neighbor called him, someone who had seen all the commotion in front of Peter’s house. But what neighbor? And why would they call Peter’s boss? I’m confused but don’t have time to ask these questions because the cops are looking at me for approval: Do I know this man? I don’t immediately recognize him, so he says, “Eilene, it’s Jeff. Peter’s partner.” And then I remember: Jeff. Peter’s boss really, as well as his colleague, for many years. To the extent that lawyers at this level in the firm’s hierarchy have any friends at the office, Jeff was one of Peter’s.
A few minutes later, Evan, Anna, Jeff, the grief counselors, and I are in the house’s first-floor bedroom, which was Anna’s before this morning but is now a waiting room for everyone other than emergency personnel. The police and EMT people are upstairs in Peter’s bedroom, taking photos and clearing out drugs and syringes I don’t yet know exist, documenting everything they see and wrapping Peter’s body in a pale yellow bag in which he will be transported to the morgue. May and the other police officer are filling out paperwork on the white counter upstairs in the kitchen. None of us in the downstairs bedroom want to see Peter’s body being brought down—even covered by a bag—so we’re hiding out instead in this hot room, the sun pounding on the other side of the closed room-darkening curtains.
Anna is kinetic with grief and anger and cannot sit still. She’s texting her friends and walking around the room in circles. I wish Jeff would leave. I’m not sure why he feels the need to be here, witnessing all this. Twenty minutes ago, after I remembered who he was, I started shouting at him. I hadn’t realized until I saw him how angry I was with the law firm where they both work; how angry I am with Jeff, the other partners, the clients, all of them.
“That job killed him,” I say, crying, raising my voice. “You guys and all that pressure and the clients always coming first.” Jeff doesn’t say anything, doesn’t try to defend himself or the firm. Everyone working at Peter’s level in Big Law is working just like he was, with that same intensity, and they aren’t all dropping dead from it.
We sit for a minute, not saying anything. “He hadn’t even really showed up the last three months…really the last six months,” Jeff says quietly. What? I’m thinking. No, no, no. He was working all the time, that’s why we could never reach him. That’s what he told us. The client breathing down his throat. The complaints about his attendance because he was working from home. Surely Jeff knows that, right?
The medical examiner—her name is Angela—is sitting beside me. We moved outside to the patio as soon as Peter’s body was taken from the house, so we could talk away from Anna and Evan. Angela is a young woman with kind eyes and a very gentle manner. This is a person who is accustomed to seeing all kinds of death—from homicides to motorcycle accidents to suicides to heart attacks, which at this point is what I’m assuming has taken Peter’s life. She asks me questions about that morning, almost exactly what the police asked me a few hours earlier. Then she asks me about Peter’s history. Any mental illness I knew about? Any drug use? Any problems with alcohol? It seems an odd line of questioning until I remember the bloodied hole below Peter’s elbow.
“Wait a minute,” I say. “Are you asking me these questions because of that hole I saw, the one that was bleeding, below his elbow?” Angela nods once, a
n almost imperceptible up-and-down with her head. There is a clipboard on her lap, and I can see into the bag next to her. It’s filled with papers. She has a photo ID in plastic on a lanyard around her neck. Angela is so patient, just sitting there, waiting for me to catch up to her.
If you could crack open that particular second or two in time and examine what was happening in my head, here is what you would see: I have a picture in my mind of Peter’s arm, pale, skinnier than I have ever seen it, but still, just his arm. And there, oddly, is what I assumed to be some kind of cut, some small injury that may have happened as he fell. If he fell. Or before he lay down on the floor to rest. To have the heart attack I am assuming he had.
The little injury was caked with dried blood. Or maybe not exactly dried, but not new. Not red. Not red enough to have alarmed me, so it had to be old and darkened by time. The only thing that struck me as odd, though, was that it seemed so round. Like a little puncture. And then there was Angela’s nod. One nod, on the heels of those questions about alcohol and drugs.
And now, in an instant, I know what she is trying to tell me: that it is a self-inflicted injury, or not really an injury at all. Indeed, it is a hole. In that split second, I know what she’s thinking. And I want to laugh at how wrong she is, how mistaken her line of thought. It’s completely ludicrous. “No,” I say, shaking my head. Now we understand each other. “No way.” He was a lawyer and had been a scientist, a chemist, someone who knew exactly the kind of damage a particular compound or drug could do to the human body. “He…he…” I’m struggling to articulate all that is going through my head at that moment. “He went to Cornell. He…he is rich.” Angela nods again. “He lives…he lives here. In Del Mar. This house cost two million dollars.”
She has a look of such compassion for me at that moment, it’s suddenly clear I’m the ridiculous one. I’m defending Peter. And I’m admitting that without even consciously knowing it, I have completely bought into the stereotype of a drug addict—poor, living in a squalid apartment with other addicts, or homeless under a bridge, or sitting at an intersection off the freeway with a cardboard sign that says Homeless veteran. Anything will help. Not a white, wealthy, well-educated partner in a prestigious law firm. That is definitely not what an addict looks like.
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