Smacked

by Eilene Zimmerman

  “I know,” Angela says. “We actually see a lot of this now. Wealthy, high-powered executives that overdose and die, usually from some combination of amphetamines, opioids, and other drugs. I think Peter probably died of an overdose. We won’t know until the autopsy, but that’s what it looks like.”

  Wait, what…an autopsy? My mind is racing. Why? Why do they need an autopsy? I didn’t ask for an autopsy. And anyway, he died from working too hard, isn’t that clear?

  “But…” I am searching for anything, anything that will make what Angela believes is true not be true. Because in my mind it cannot be true. It would be like telling me the sun doesn’t, actually, rise in the east and set in the west. That it’s the exact opposite—rising in the west and setting in the east. We are talking about a man that used to snap at me for using my teeth to open stubborn toothpaste caps. Calling it stupid, to risk cracking a tooth. How does a man that gets pissed off about the irresponsible use of teeth to open toothpaste caps inject things into his body? Into his veins?

  “But,” I say, starting to cry, “he had kids. We have kids. They were here, they lived here part of the time.” Can’t she see how crazy what she’s suggesting would be? Angela nods her sympathetic nod. Anna and Evan are still in the downstairs bedroom, talking to the grief counselors. Well, Evan is talking to the grief counselors. Anna is texting and crying and pacing.

  “Are you sure?” I say. “How do you know?”

  “There were injection marks on his arms and legs,” Angela says.

  I’m stunned. I was standing over his prone body, I was yelling into his face, shaking his shoulders. I touched his arms, pulled at the right one, trying to move it aside so I could do chest compressions. I didn’t see anything at all. Except that one bloody hole.

  “I didn’t see injection marks,” I say softly, bewildered. A few months later, when I’m doing a special kind of therapy called EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) for post-traumatic stress disorder, I will learn that when faced with extreme shock or anxiety, it’s not uncommon for the brain to develop a kind of tunnel vision. Overwhelmed by an event, the brain decides to see only what it needs to see. And in this case, it saw a body on the floor. My brain decided everything else was superfluous.

  Angela turns her body so it is angled slightly toward mine. “What do you think it was?” I ask her. “Heroin?”

  “I think it was probably amphetamines,” she answers. “Cocaine. Maybe other substances too. But again, that’s why we’ll do the autopsy, so we can determine the cause of death.”

  I don’t even really know what an autopsy is, other than observing the occasional forensic pathologist character in movies and television shows. “There were marks all over?” I ask again. It’s like I’ll have to hear it a hundred times before I can get my head around it, believe it.

  “Yes,” Angela says. “On his torso too. And the police collected a lot of drugs and drug paraphernalia—there were safes with pills, baggies containing a white powder, syringes…” She’s still talking, but the voice in my own head is louder.

  Where were these syringes? These safes, where were they? Why did they take them without asking me first? Powder? I didn’t see any powder. I’m so confused and yet, as horrible as this information is, it’s also a relief. A bigger relief than I ever imagined.

  Everything suddenly makes sense. And no sense. Peter was a drug addict. Of course Peter was a drug addict. The whole country is in the throes of an opioid crisis, and he had all the symptoms. My mind is running roughshod over this new information, scrambling to keep up, to process it. No wonder he was acting the way he was, illogical, undependable, nonsensical, dangerous. Now I get it; I get all of it. Why he had to leave abruptly that morning last summer in Michigan, the weekend we took Anna to college for the first time. Why he missed the football game. Why he fell asleep on the furniture in the Ann Arbor Target. Now I see why he lost his wallet a hundred times, why he was twenty-five minutes from Evan’s school but took two hours to get there. Why he seemed to have the flu for months. The weight loss. The brittle hair and yellowing teeth. The shivering when it was seventy-five degrees outside. The never wearing short sleeves. What an idiot I am. How clueless and naïve and racist and classist. I thought I knew Peter so well, this friend and former husband and co-parent and sometime-nemesis that has been a part of my life almost every day for the last twenty-eight years. But I didn’t. I missed it—who he was, whom he had become—a deception so deep it feels obscene.

  Jeff is still here, he’s been sitting in a chair listening this whole time, but now begins speaking to Angela, the medical examiner. In her report from that afternoon, she wrote, “The decedent’s boss reported that around November 2014, the decedent’s work had started to decline. He was missing calls from clients and failing to show for appointments. This was really unusual behavior as the decedent had previously been one of his top attorneys and an extremely hard worker.” Jeff also tells Angela that a co-worker had seen a package of tourniquets delivered to Peter’s office. This she will also include in her written report.

  Now I have to decide if I should tell the truth to my children. I look at Angela. “Do you have kids?” I ask. I wish Jeff would leave. I don’t want him privy to this, but I don’t know how to say that.

  Angela looks surprised. “Yes,” she says quietly, not in the habit of talking about herself in situations like this.

  “What do you think I should do?” I say. I’m feeling desperate for someone to just make a decision for me. “Should I tell my kids the truth?”

  A grief counselor has silently entered the patio area and is beside me now, as if she knew I’d need her. Her presence is ethereal, calm, supportive. I fantasize about asking her to come live with us for a while, but instead give her an imploring look. “What would you do?”

  Angela and this retired nurse exchange a glance. After a few moments, Angela says, “I would tell them the truth.” The grief counselor agrees. “They are going to blame themselves for not getting their father to the hospital, especially your son, because he saw him last.” In fact, after I told Evan and his sister that their father was dead, the first thing he said was, “Oh my god, I should have taken him to the hospital. I should have taken him to the hospital,” and then he collapsed, sobbing, onto the lawn. Evan had tried to take Peter to the hospital, but when you’re sixteen and your father yells “No, leave me alone!” you back off. Even if your father is vomiting. Even if he’s mumbling incoherently most of the time. Or falling asleep upright in a kitchen chair while reading the mail.

  Angela says, “I think the truth will be very freeing for them. They will understand there was nothing they could have done.”

  “Okay,” I say. I believe in telling the truth, I always have. The truth is important, is liberating, is healthy. If nothing else, everything will finally make sense. They can stop guessing about what was wrong with Dad. So I finish the paperwork with Angela, and then we call the kids out to the patio.

  I ask Anna to put down the phone, that we have something important to tell them. She does. She’s so angry and frantic right now I can feel the heat coming off her body, like she wants to jump out of her seat and hit someone.

  “It looks like Dad died of a drug overdose. He was a drug addict. He has needle marks all over his arms and legs. So there was nothing any of us could do, because he kept it a secret from all of us. That’s why”—I turn to Evan—“he wouldn’t go to the emergency room. He didn’t want anyone to know.”

  Anna is ashen. “A drug addict? How? Why?”

  I have no answer. “I don’t know. I am as astonished as you are. But it makes sense now, all the weird stuff he was doing, the car accidents, the long, nonsensical texts. The big rant he went on Wednesday night.”

  Anna nods. Her anger is dissipating. “Yeah, it totally makes sense.”

  Evan is visibly, physically relieved, almost insta
ntly. It was as if his whole body, inside and out, had been clenched like a fist for the past two hours. “Well,” he says, “that puts the whole thing in a different perspective. Now I understand, it wasn’t our fault. So there really was nothing I could do about it, right?” He is looking at Angela and the grief counselor, but especially the counselor, with whom, I now see, he has been talking about this very thing, what he could have done. It’s the conversation we will have with one another over and over again in the coming months, the one that tries to answer the question: Could we have saved Peter?

  Evan’s entire being is pleading with us to say the words he needs to hear, and the retired nurse does. “No, there really was nothing you could do. I mean that.” The other grief counselor is here now too, and this one glances at her counterpart. “We both worked in the ER for many years and saw many, many addicts overdose and die. There is absolutely no way you could have stopped this. It wasn’t within your power.” Evan nods his head up and down, breathes out. I can see that until this moment, he’s blamed himself entirely for Peter’s death, for not insisting his sister help him force their father to go to the emergency room.

  “Okay,” he says. “I just need to know I couldn’t have saved him if I had gotten him to the hospital that night.” Both Angela and the nurses are shaking their heads, saying no. “When someone is addicted, there is very little you can do to help them, truly,” one of the counselors says. “The only person that can help an addict is the addict. If they don’t want to get help, you can try all you want, but you will not be able to save them.”

  This was the right thing to do, I think to myself. They are calmer. I’m calmer. All this mounting craziness is over, and it finally makes sense. If nothing else, the not understanding-anything that was going on—and the anxiety that created—has now come to an end. I’m not yet sure what this information, this truth, will bring any of us, other than the spreading warmth of relief I feel at this moment. But there is something incredibly powerful about it.

  After I sign the required paperwork to take a body to the city morgue and have it autopsied, and the grief counselors (how they do this for free, I still can’t fathom) provide me with a list of places that perform cremations, as well as the requisite “What to Do After Someone Dies” pamphlet, and Angela gives me a list of companies that will clean up death—disinfecting the floor where fluids have leaked and the dying have soiled themselves—and Jeff tells me he will connect me with “the folks in HR” Monday to deal with questions of salary and health benefits and life insurance, my kids get into their car and I climb back into mine. Anna keeps asking me if I am okay to drive. The police ask too.

  What is “okay to drive” anyway? How many times did Peter drive our son when he was high? How many times did he shoot up in his bedroom, with Evan and Anna sleeping just down the hall? I’m not intoxicated or medicated, I’m in shock. My brain is shutting out all the horrible things I’ve seen so I can’t quite remember seeing them, but it’s not shutting down generally. I can certainly see the road, understand the traffic patterns. And the last thing in the world I want right now is to be with other people. I want to be alone; in fact, I need to be alone. Five hours in the company of EMTs and cops and grief counselors and Peter’s boss, having to repeat what I saw and what I did over and over again, every single step I took recounted to the emergency responders and police and then the medical examiner and my kids. All I want is to sit in silence.

  My daughter is driving right behind me, in the car that belongs to her brother now that she is at college. They are tailing very close behind me, so close I can see they are talking; my daughter now desperately afraid I will be the one to die next.

  I feel just the way I did when Peter and I first separated six years ago, like I’m under water, every movement slow and heavy. Back then I couldn’t imagine how I would make it without Peter, and that’s what I’m thinking again, now, as I merge onto the 805 South. I’m not sure how to be in the world if Peter isn’t in it too. For the last twenty-five years I’ve measured myself against his expectations, living my life in partnership with—and in opposition to—him, always seeing myself through his eyes and then making adjustments to get him to see me the way I wanted to be seen, although it never happened. Even in the first few hours of this new, post-Peter world, I am acutely aware of my lost bearings.

  My legs feel heavy as I drive, and I am bone-tired. As I round the corner to my street, I can see some of my friends getting out of cars with food in their arms, making their way toward my house. Jennifer and William, who live a few blocks away, look as if they are carrying a boatload of bagels and cream cheese. Irina is balancing a pan of roast chicken in her arms, and her husband, Gary, carries what I assume is a tureen of soup. Joan and her husband, Steve, and Bette and Edit, and Sabine, some of their children too, all of them are walking up the front steps of my house. This is my family. I have told just two people that Peter died, no more information than that, but here are ten people, about to carry whole dinners and plates of cookies and bottles of wine into my kitchen, which they know well. I sit in the car a minute before getting out. I know this is the end of one kind of misery and the beginning of another. No more of Peter’s manic, crazy, hurtful, frightening behavior. Now, instead, I will have to navigate a continent of grief and anger and shock. I will have to be the widow, even if I am no longer the wife.

  * * *

  —

  THE FRONT DOOR IS open to the street the whole night, with people coming in and out, eating, drinking, speaking softly and urgently, teary-eyed. When the night ends, I won’t even remember seeing people clean up, but the dishwasher will be running and the dining room and kitchen will look as if no one had been there.

  Several of Anna’s high school friends, now college students, are in the living room with her, hugging. They have, for some odd reason, brought water balloons and Silly String—the kind of string that is shot out of a can. It occurs to me that teenagers don’t know the first thing about death etiquette. Water balloons? Silly String? That’s what you bring to cheer up a friend whose boyfriend ditched her, not what you bring when someone’s father has just died. On the other hand, they are providing comfort to Anna right now and that’s what she needs. A friend says to me, “You should sit down. Have you eaten? Eat something.” I will, I say, but first, I head down the hall to Evan’s room. I knock. “It’s me, honey, it’s Mom. Can I come in, please? Evan?” There’s no answer, so I open the door and walk in.

  Evan is lying in bed, earbuds in. He’s just staring up at the ceiling, not looking at anything. He sees me and takes out the earbuds. I climb into his twin bed and put an arm around him. “Did you hear Simone and Katie knocking? They want to come in and see you. Can they?” I can see his eyes are bloodshot and red-rimmed. His hair is a little sweaty and matted. I put my chin on his head and inhale deeply. My sweet boy.

  “I can’t, Mom,” he says. “Is that really bad? I just can’t right now. I don’t want to talk to anyone.” We lie there together a minute, and then Evan rolls over onto his side.

  No, I tell him, you don’t have to see anyone if you don’t want to. “Can I bring you in some food or something? Water? Juice?” But I know that all he wants is to lie here and try to fall asleep and wake up and have it be Saturday all over again, a regular old Saturday. No dead father. No drugs, no police. No stiff bodies covered in yellow tarp being carried downstairs. On this let’s-try-it-again Saturday, Evan will wake up, work in the garage music studio we created in his dad’s old office, and then he’ll drive up to Solana Beach with his bandmates and go to the Bro-Am, a charity concert and surf competition where one of his favorite bands is headlining. It’ll be beautiful there and he’ll come back sunburned and happy, hair smelling like salt air. I stare at his back, his earbuds in his hands, and I know he is waiting for me to leave so he can plug in again and shut out the world.

  ■ TEN

  July 12, 2015

 
; IT’S BEEN BARELY ONE full day since I discovered Peter’s body, and now the kids and I are heading up to his house to clear out anything of value to us—real or sentimental. A friend’s sister, who is a lawyer, urged me to do this, reminding me that Peter had been hanging out with drug dealers who are just now learning he is dead. I don’t know if they will try and get into the house, or if any of them has a key.

  I ask my friend and neighbor William to accompany us. I know the house will be exactly as it was yesterday, only Peter’s body will be missing. Everything else, the pandemonium of the master bedroom, the stains on the bathroom floor, the drugs the police didn’t find, the vomit, the bloody sheets—everything will still be there, waiting to be cleared out and cleaned up. It’s too frightening right now to go alone.

  To William, the house is just walls and windows and doors and rooms. To us, it feels like a living, breathing, monstrous thing, harboring all sorts of secrets we have yet to uncover, truths we don’t know. Anna and Evan are anxious and sad in the car on the way up to Peter’s house, and I am also anxious, but not sad. I won’t feel sad for a long time. I have to get past angry first, and I am very angry. I am enraged at Peter for dying like this, for being so stupid and arrogant, for his drug use and his selfishness.

  The closer we get to the house, the quieter it is in the car. I can smell the ocean. There is a buzzing in my stomach and head as I take the Carmel Valley Road exit off the freeway and turn left at the light, heading west. My heart is racing like it’s yesterday all over again, except I can see William’s white Honda behind me. We drive past cars parked on the side of the road that leads to the state beach, boogie boards sticking out of back windows, parents helping young children into swim trunks and flip-flops. I make a right onto Peter’s road, climb the hill, and then pull into the driveway. William parks his car on the street. Anna, Evan, and I sit in the driveway a minute, looking up at the house, summoning our collective courage to open the car doors and get out. It’s hard for me to believe that less than twenty-four hours ago, Peter was here and this place was a hive of police and EMT activity. It’s quiet now, surreally peaceful. Birds in a bird feeder, a lemon tree heavy with fruit near the back fence.