What I Had Before I Had You (18 page)

“Not mine.” We walk a little faster, feeling suspicious but not sure yet that they are closing in around us, shuffling to invisible tactical marks all around the underpass.

“She'd fuck your shit up,” the kid says to another kid holding on to a white dog, and they start yelling back and forth, kind of friendly. Then they are laughing, and it seems like one of those moments that just passes away. But then the laughing T-shirt kid breaks out of the group and lunges at our red-nosed dog, pointing at the other kid's mangy white dog. He shouts, “Kill!” My understanding lags. The T-shirt kid leaps backward and claps his hands to his face, goes, “Oh shit!,” delighted as the red-nose breaks free of Jake's grip like he is a little girl holding on to that leash and surges across the pavement toward the white dog, who comes forward to meet her with the tragic energy of the clear loser.

The red-nose sinks her eager teeth into the fur of the white dog's neck and hangs bloodily to the wound, the white dog screaming and twisting from the tear, where the red-nose holds her off-kilter, so that every twist of her wiry body deepens the wound. Jake is yelling and waving his arms like an idiot, trying to get Max's dog back. I am still holding on to Blanche's leash. Blanche watches the fight with watery eyes, her muscles twitching as though she is asleep and only dreaming of a fight. Does this recall her savage puppyhood? I have no idea; I realize I hardly know her at all. I tug on her leash, turning to run away.

There isn't time to unloop the leash from my wrist before I am on the ground, skinning my legs on the asphalt, dragged into the fray of teeth and blood-wet fur and the brown intent eyes of dogs. I hear Jake scream, the higher pitch of real fear. I am vaguely aware of human movement around me as the boys come toward the dogs, and of the tightness of the nylon leash binding my wrist, Blanche's jerking pulling it tighter and tighter. My skirt is twisted up to my hips, and I feel a flare of anger at these boys looking at my bare thighs,
all these boys.
The red-nose looks huge above me as she raises her head to slam the white dog's body against the pavement. My sinus fills with the stink of blood and dog and fear.

The white dog takes advantage of the shift to get loose and lock his jaws into our red's sandy shoulder. I am thinking of the red-nose, and of how angry Max will be when he finds out, when I feel it: a cold stabbing pain in my thigh. Things go dark and delirious, and I imagine myself bound by the wrists to a giant dartboard, squirming to avoid the rain of dagger-sharp icicles thrown by shadow giants too distant to see.

I am aware of being carried by Jake and someone else, and then the warm staleness of Max's apartment. Somebody gives me something to swallow, and for a while things run clear, like a movie without sound. Where is Blanche? I want to ask.

Jake comes in through the door, the red-nose limping behind him with a huge tear running from her shoulder to her belly, the fur thick and sticky with blood, the edge of the wound discolored where the white dog's teeth penetrated deeper muscle. Blood oozes down her front leg. She looks at me panting, her tongue lolling from her wide smile. Max lifts her huge weight and lays her on the rug. He curses up at Jake. Jake goes to him, and the two of them gesture and yell until Elena comes out half-dressed, in a floral bra, screaming, “Oh! Oh!,” and kneels over the torn dog, patting the wound with her hands as if that will help.

I see Jake running around the house, picking up our few things and stuffing them back into the duffel. He picks me up last. I feel like a coat left draped over a chair. Then we are out in the sticky night. My leg feels gone. I will find out later that Jake and Max were arguing because Max wouldn't let Jake call an ambulance from his phone line. There was a warrant out for Max, and he refused to risk his safety for mine. Jake is crushed. He imagined a brother in Max; that we would go on living here, a wild, lawless family. But to Max, we are just some stupid kids. The door slams in our faces, and inside we can hear Max keening for his girl dog, and the thinner sound from a distant room of his baby daughter wailing, too, without knowing what for.

IT DOESN'T TAKE
long for someone to notice us: a frantic boy carrying a girl in a bloody skirt. The woman who calls us a cab thinks I am giving birth. “Breathe!” she keeps saying to me. “Just breathe!”

I remember nothing of my arrival at the Maimonides emergency room. I do remember surfacing, though, in a two-bed room next to a heavy sleeping woman with a wash of ripe yellow bruising under her eyes. White ceilings, blue curtains on curving tracks. A muted television, a fire on the news.

I have an IV. I feel an impulse to yank it out like people do in movies when they know the killer is still after them. I wince, picturing the thick needle splitting the flesh of my wrist, the twist-tied bouquet of clear tubes torn and gushing fluid onto the floor. Anyway, where would I go? My leg is bandaged and hot. I clench my thigh muscle tentatively, and pain flares from deep bone.

I sit up carefully and catch sight, through the open door, of Jake asleep on a sofa in a carpeted alcove in the hallway, next to a tall potted plant that bends over to shelter him with its leafy arms. He looks very young, curled there on his side. His dark hair falls across his pale face, his elegant cheekbones. My view is suddenly obscured by blue cotton: teddy bears and stars. The thick torso of a nurse shifts into focus, and a face looms down. Hands rearrange me to a lying position.
Honey, how are you feeling? Can you understand me?
A clipboard in her hands and then questions.

What's your name?

Olivia.

How old are you?

Fifteen.

Where do you live?

Far away.

Far away where?

Far, far away.

My leg hurts, and it hurts to think. Jake will wake up and we will have to go home. His parents will come get him, lecture him, make sure he is okay. They'll bring sandwiches for the car ride. But me, I will go home to the same old questions. The empty house or the raving mother. The same old ghosts. To go home now would be to have gained nothing.

I need an address, honey. I need a parent or guardian.
She is calling me honey. She is calling me honey, baby, sweetie.
A parent or guardian,
she says. Jake looks so young sleeping on that bench, like a little boy. I think, We are both very young.

“Six-oh-six East Seventy-third Street,” I say. “Christie Mader.” And then I sleep.

I DREAM OF
dogs: dogs who unzip themselves to let other dogs step out, dogs who eat each other cleanly, bite by bite, as if they are made of marzipan.

the next time I wake up, Christie is there. She lays her cold hand on my wrist. She says, “They gave you eighteen stitches.”

I ask her if they are the dissolving kind because I don't know what else to ask. No, she says, and we sit in silence. A nurse brings me a tray of mashed potatoes and chicken and a plastic spoon. I see my gym bag on a chair; Jake must have put it there. He is still asleep out on the couch. The way he sleeps, he could be out for twenty hours. The nurses coo over him from their station. Such a handsome kid. I wait for Christie to say that we are family now, or that she is glad I called her
because
we are family now, or something along these maudlin lines, but she sits tight-lipped and careful on the edge of the visitor's chair.

“You can have the guest room,” she says at last. I impale my chicken on my spoon and work the mashed potatoes into little balls between my palms. I don't say no.

I am supposed to keep my leg up for a week. They will wheel me downstairs in a hospital chair; off hospital grounds, I am to make do, to lean and lounge. Christie has brought me clean clothes. I recognize the green T-shirt as one of Laura's. A nurse reels in the privacy curtain on its rounded track before throwing back the sheets and helping me step into an elastic-waist skirt. My right thigh is pink at the edges of the bandaging. I am wearing hospital underwear, baggy and stiff like a cotton sheet. Someone must have changed me. Christie sees me embarrassed and turns away.

Christie has taken care of my bill, my paperwork, the invisible orchestrations behind my quick release. She gives me the same adult-concern smile the nurses do: How did this child come to such harm? Who let this happen? No one knows how to read my shrinking shoulders and my darting gaze as they wheel me into the elevator, because no one recalls that I did not come in alone, that the pretty boy sleeping on the couch carried me in, frantic, before he fell into this deathlike public sleep.

I don't even leave him a note. I watch him sleeping there looking like a disguised prince or a shipwrecked boy god, dark curls on pale brow, and the thought of his waking exhausts me. He will be concerned and heroic; he will make plans. As I am wheeled backward and away from him, into the elevator, I see those filaments that connected us cobwebbing away. I think of his house and his mother and her seven shades of white and his Roman candles and Kandy laying her blond head on his shoulder, dancing, and none of it has anything to do with me. I have been a tourist in his life, and in Ocean Vista, and in my own life, and I feel that I am finished with everyone and everything I know; that my real life has been here in New York, wrapped up like a present, waiting for me to come find it.

 

13

O
CEAN VISTA'S ONLY
hospital is called Mercy. The emergency room waiting area is empty, clusters of seats upholstered in a stain-camouflaging navy plaid. I walk to one side of the room and Kandy walks to the other, checking behind things. Carrie stands, hood drawn around her face, arms pretzeled, on the tiled runway that leads from the great sliding doors straight to triage. I imagine a gurney shooting across the linoleum, sparks flying from the wheels, my concussed son lifting his head weakly, asking strangers,
What happened? Where am I?

Carrie's voice rings out and seems to carry the hard blue quality of the lighting. “We would already know if he was here.”

“If he
were
here,” I say, and I approach the little desk station by the triage doors, looking for a bell to ring. Where else in the world is an emergency room unmanned? “Hello?” I call out. “Help, please. I'm dying, come help me.”

“The police would know, Mom. They keep records. It's a hospital.” Carrie is adhering to a too-strict logic. What of amnesia, what of clerical error?

A short, rosy, piggish woman pushes through the triage doors with both hands to stand behind the desk. Her thin black hair is plastered tight to her head, and she is wearing patchwork blue jeans. Her oddness takes my breath away. Is this the woman who will tell me that my son is dead? And then: these terrible thoughts, these hard, bright, almost funny thoughts that are springing to my mind—are these the thoughts a mother should have?

“Can I help you?” the woman asks, as if she is bored of emergencies.

“Has a nine-year-old boy come in tonight?”

“No. Did you just say you were dying?”

“No.”

She hoists herself onto a stool behind the desk and glares at me. Kandy is sitting on one of the plaid sofas, and I join her.

“I bet he'll turn up with some story he'll tell forever,” she says. She smiles faintly. The evenness of her breathing calms me down.

“Who
are
you?” I ask her. “When we were kids, you were the last person I thought I'd still know at forty.”

“I didn't think I'd make it to forty. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll, baby.” She makes a little headbanging gesture and flicks her tongue out. “I remember when we met, the night you climbed the roller coaster. Jesus Christ, that was dangerous. I thought you were so cool.” She sighs and rests her head on the back of the sofa. “I wanted to be you.”

“You're kidding.”

“I was a whole production, you know, and you walked in and you were just effortless.”

“Effortlessly what?”

“Lovable.” She eyes me.

“That's not true.”

“Yes, it is. You were like a magnet. You don't know that?”

The sliding glass doors whoosh open, and two old men enter, one hunching to prop up the other, a bearded man in a Hawaiian shirt who grits his teeth and moves heavily. We stop talking to regard their progress toward the triage station. The taller man readjusts his arm low around the other man's back, to take more weight, and the gesture is so tender and so intimate that I have to look away.

IT IS NOT
only through the grace and goodwill of my family that I am about to take up residence in the Seventy-third Street house; half of it belongs to me. It has been vacant for eight months, since Christie left on a fellowship to Oxford, to lecture. She isn't sure when she'll come back. The last time I spoke to her, she said that she has made connections at Oxford that she never expected to make. She sounded robust on the phone; I don't think she was talking about professional connections. I'm happy for her. She deserves whatever happiness she can find. If she comes back, we'll decide which half of the house is mine. We have joked about the possibilities: every other room, basement and attic and a fireman's pole between, each room from waist-level to ceiling. Though they never formally separated, Tom hasn't slept in the house in years.

Laura lives in San Diego, where she runs marketing for a design firm. Her home is full of furniture reupholstered in vintage fabrics, blown-glass sculptures, iPod docks made to look like little tree stumps. She married a journalist and had two sons, and they are a California family. They eat on a porch shaded by palm trees and visited by green Pacific tree frogs who suicide in the kidney-shaped pool. Daniel likes it there, likes diving down to touch the robotic pool vacuum. It is too glossy a world for me; I clunk through it. I never know what to say.

Courtney is still in New York, vanished into the world of theater. She lives downtown with a longtime boyfriend. She is a stage manager. I go to her plays when I can and wait for her in the lobby afterward until she emerges, red-lipsticked and tired and flocked around by interns. She offered to help us move into the house, though she is as unreliable as I am, and I expect her not at ten
A.M.
with the movers but at ten
P.M.
with a pizza and apologies. If we make it up to New York at all, if we survive this day, if Daniel is found.

Here is what I hoped for: We move to the Seventy-third Street house and it becomes a new environment, in no way comparable to the ranch in Austin, an environment in which I am mother enough to fill the gap where Sam used to be. We get a puppy. Two puppies. We go to plays. Carrie discovers literature, or chemistry, or tuba, or
something.
Daniel is stimulated but not overstimulated. The new psychiatrist figures him out in three visits. The kids help me chop onions and shell peas before dinner and tell me about their days at their high-scoring magnet schools. Everything knits itself up neatly.

The psychiatrist whom Daniel is going to see in New York is an authority on early-onset bipolar disorder. He has published a book in which he rails against other psychiatrists who refuse to acknowledge the diagnosis, and who refuse to prescribe mood stabilizers for children because of the side effects with which we are now so intimately familiar, and against all the psychiatrists of the past, all the Freud fanatics, who didn't want to diagnose and medicate kids too soon, until their symptoms coalesced into clearly recognizable patterns. I would have had reservations if we had gone to this man first, but now I want anyone with a plan.

And what about me? I ask myself. Where am I in my own hopes? I will have to get a job. My last several in Austin were in dismal academic offices: making copies at a private school, making copies at a university, making copies at a law library. My retinas will burn away, so often do I find myself staring at the moving bar of light beneath the glass plate. People tell me I should be doing more, and I know it. As a teenager, I thought I would become a photographer because I took pictures. In college, I thought I would be a writer because I wrote poems, or an anthropologist because I studied people. I suppose that anyone who does anything is a doer of that thing. But it is a mystery to me how people choose one thing to be and then feel comfortable being that thing forever. It does not serve me well to be so baffled; I have become, by inaction, a professional copier. Like the Xerox machine itself. I guess I hope I figure out what to hope for.

SAM AND I
sat together in the child psychiatrist's office but always emerged having heard different things.

“She said not to give in,” Sam said, wrestling a bowl of ice cream away from Daniel. “She said to pick our battles,” I said, trying to fend him off. Daniel banshee-screaming. Sam tried to do the right things for Daniel at home but was easily discouraged by failure. A reward system failed to make Daniel do his chores, so Sam gave up on all reward systems.

At least at home Sam tried. It was in public that he failed us, not occasionally but every time. At the public pool, Daniel dunked another boy too vigorously and refused to come out of the water. The boy coughed, clinging to the lip of the pool and to his mother's bronzed ankle. Daniel swam toward another kid.

“Control your son!” the mother shrieked at us, as if Sam and I were not already yelling for him to get out of the pool, threatening no more swim time, no more TV, no more dessert. The sun beat down on us, and sunbathing women flipped on their towels for a better view. Sam, agitated to shaking, backed away from me, toward the angry mother, and said
to me,
“Well?”

So I jumped in, fully dressed, and wrestled my boy to safety. As I toweled him off, the angry mother approached us for a redundant browbeating, and it was me that she glared at. Only me. As if by failing to help, Sam had excused himself from fatherhood altogether.

When I wasn't there, things were even worse. Sam's usual tactic was flight—cram Daniel in the car out of sight, roll up the windows, and beeline home to dump him on me. I'd like to know what it is in Sam that made his embarrassment so acute. What backbone-forming experience did his parents deny him? When I think of him shushing Daniel in a restaurant, shaking him by the shoulders, gripped by that selfish fear, I feel no love at all.

Once he made an effort. It was a few weeks after we got Daniel's diagnosis, and Sam was still excited, as if by having a word for Daniel's disorder, we had it cornered. At two-fifty the bus dropped the other kids in front of our house. Carrie slumped up the porch steps and into the living room, where she rested her head on the door frame, formulating some request. I asked her why Daniel wasn't with her, and she raised her eyebrows. “Dad didn't call you?”

I left three messages on Sam's cell before he picked up. “It's hard to hear you,” he said through a roaring wind.

“What?”

“It's hard to hear you.”

“Where are you?”

“Enchanted Rock,” he shouted. “Hiking. Boys' day.”

“The doctor said routine is really important right now.”

“What?”

“Routine. Is important.”

“So's this.”

When they got home, it was dark. Daniel went straight to his room and slammed the door, then opened it again momentarily to throw his sandy socks out into the hallway. Sam looked exhausted, which pleased me. See how hard it is. I had taken my job at the university down to part-time so I could watch Daniel in the afternoons after his rages became too much for the babysitter. Sam rarely spent time alone with him.

Sam's T-shirt showed pale wavy lines of dried sweat. I followed him to our bedroom, passing Carrie's room, where she lay on her zebra-striped bedspread with her face in her social studies textbook and pretended she hadn't heard Sam come home. Carrie loves to hike with her dad. Left behind again.

Once we were behind closed doors, I questioned him. “What were you doing? Why didn't you call me?”

“I was going to get a pizza on the way back, but . . .” He shook pebbles out of his shoes right onto the carpet. “It was a sudden thing. I just thought it might help.”

“And?”

“I don't know. We climbed to the top and threw the bad parts of ourselves off the edge. Something I read about.” I couldn't see Sam doing this imaginary thing. At a party once, I saw him forced to play a theater game where you throw an invisible ball from person to person. He almost couldn't do it, he was so embarrassed.

“What bad parts?” I ask.

“What do you think.”

“What are the bad parts? Bad like evil or bad like fruit goes bad?”

He eyed me. “Please be nice to me right now,” he said. “He cried the whole way home. Two hours, nonstop.”

“About what?”

Sam blew out air. “I don't even fucking know.”

Later I found the browser search history on Sam's laptop full of exorcism videos. Monks chanting over a cancerous woman, dancers in hideous masks circling a little boy holding a bound pigeon. An article about the curative power of intention, about a doctor who cured a man's skin condition because he thought he could, but lost the ability once he found out the condition was incurable.

WHEN SOMETHING BROKE
in our house, a lamp or a glass, I would take it to my workbench and try to glue it back together. But if Sam found it before I did, he would drop it in the trash without a thought. This is why I left him in the end.

kandy and i stand outside the emergency room under the concrete ambulance-port and blink for a moment. It is almost one in the morning. The fireflies have gone out, and traffic has dwindled such that I can hear the surf clearly.

“Where did Carrie go?” Kandy asks. “I thought she was out here.” I look around and see empty benches, two EMTs with cups of coffee leaning against a hospital van.
Oh, come on, universe
, I think.
You've got to be kidding
.

“Carrie?” Kandy calls, but I hush her, because I catch the sound of my daughter's whispering. That sleepover sound, drifting from the family room up to my bedroom through the air vents and always with such urgency, such a rush of breath. What is so important? I would wonder as Sam slept on. What is such a secret?