That wasn’t so bad.
I stuff myself into my bunk and wrap my body tightly in a flannel sleeping bag, just a giant plaid sausage of a woman. Then everything starts to melt.
The crickets’ incessant chirps start to drawl out like telephone rings, long, lazy jingles that lull me into numbness. The medicine feels gentle and kind as it reasons with all the fucked-up parts of my body, my searing temples, my hunched shoulders, and the stabbing pain in my spine. It’s like when my mom carried me downstairs at five years old and placed me into my sleeping daddy’s bed, where I snuggled up next to him and let the shelter of his love hush my deepest, biggest fears. It rolls over me as warm bathwater does, from the top of my forehead to my toenails.
A half hour passes. An hour. The motion-sensor light flicks on outside the cabin and a swell of grave teenage shushing erupts somewhere outside in the dark. I hear the inevitable chaser of laughter and I know I should get up and send them back to their cabins. I don’t, though. I let them run in the woods with their long, copper-colored legs and give their secret kisses knowing, as I feel the cool plastic of the pill bottle in my floppy hand, that you get to run in the woods for only so long before the young, pretty invincibility of fourteen wanders away. The drugs lurch into me, stronger now. They hold me down and force me into a peaceful, foggy sleep.
After we get home, I keep pretending for a while. I make our crisp white bed every morning, arranging our perfect grown-up pillows and wiping dust from the headboard. I light a candle that smells like old leather and take a long look at my work, a tidy little nest for tidy people. One day, I hike the mattress up on the edge of my thigh to make a perfect corner and my shoulders spasm. It’s too much, I can’t smile through it, I stop. I just can’t do it anymore. I stop lying to myself, I stop with the pillows and the candles. I stop trying to make everything look perfect and neat. I give myself permission to get back in bed and I decide not to get up until the pain drains out of me. I drop my aching body onto the duvet and let my head sink heavy. I call in sick to the church and tuck myself in with reality TV and Cool Ranch Doritos. I wait there, I wait for weeks, but nothing happens. I go to work less and less, later and later, and I get more drugs, from more doctors, and I take them. The medicine feels like the only loving thing left for me.
Jack watches it unfold, but it is too big and adult for either of us to understand. He wants me to feel better and still believes in our sweet tomorrow. I pretend when I need to. I’m brave in front of our friends, I can dance and laugh and light up, but my limbs and the spirit holding them together collapse as soon as we’re alone. Jack gets whatever is left of me after the show, the scraps. We stop having sex and he stops asking for it. Both of us are relieved to not have to navigate each other’s bodies anymore. I move the pills to our bedside table next to a beautiful old bottle of perfume and I display them the way an old lady displays her collection of ceramic cats: my little pink Ambien with the perfect embossed letters; the see-through canisters of Lyrica; the melty plastic Cymbalta capsules that almost taste like sugar on my tongue; and the hydrocodone, my first love. They all stand proudly together, ready to serve me and love me in a way Jack can’t, in a way he’ll never understand. He does try, though.
One morning after walking the dog, he lies back down in the crumb-covered bed with me. He turns the lights down and watches a sweaty, shirtless man on The Biggest Loser step nervously toward a giant scale. He starts kissing me. I just lie there staring blankly at the TV. My eyes twitch a little as a beam of light hits me in the face. I didn’t fall asleep until 5 a.m. and I am so starved for rest that my eyes have swollen to puffy slits. He stops with the kisses, gets up, and goes to the kitchen. He comes back with a box of Hefty bags.
“These are for the windows,” he says, “so you can get some sleep.”
Tenderly and lovingly, but with a sadness I can feel through my fog, he tacks them to the beautiful bay window, building me a fortress, helping me shut myself inside.
“Is this better?” he asks, begging for a sign of warmth from me.
I look at him, a sliver of hairy belly poking out from underneath his shirt as he flattens a piece of tape on the pane.
“Yes, it’s perfect,” I say, and it is.
It feels like the kindest, truest act of intimacy that has occurred in our lovely little bedroom. With gentleness and calmness, he helps me disappear. He was never able to figure out how I wanted him to love me in this room, but he knows what to do now.
He smiles, tucks the hair behind my ear, and goes to the bathroom for the first of a thousand glasses of water he’ll bring to me.
Neither of us really knows it, but we have struck a new deal. We invite the pain into our marriage; we make space for it in our home and become a family of three. The man Jack expects to become at eighty-five, he becomes at twenty-three. He’s the caregiver, picking up the laundry and ordering in. I’m the sick little wife. Pill after pill, season after season, I drift further away from him, from myself.
9 Harry Potter and the Little Black Spot
When something beloved breaks, people try to fix it. They panic, they spend the night on Google reading academic papers from the National Institutes of Health and watch tutorials on YouTube before YouTube can be trusted for anything other than cat videos. They leap down rabbit holes that are more like root systems, travel down winding corridors that sprout out in a hundred different directions, any of which might hold the answer, the method, the thing that makes it all better. When someone beloved is broken, however badly, whether they have the tools or not, those to whom that person is dear insist that she can be fixed. Over the next four years, everyone who loves me tries to make me whole again.
Jack tries to fix me first. He uses positive thinking and comforting words. When the Ambien doesn’t work and my nerves are shot, he stays up with me as late as he can, forming my body into a crescent moon and pulling it into his. He moves the sweaty tuft of hair from around my ear and whispers that everything is going to be okay; he says it over and over again, falling asleep with the words still moving through his lips.
In the mornings, he wakes with me to the alarm bells on my iPhone: Appointment!
Therapy!
Take your medicine!
Our life becomes a series of scheduled experiments on me and Jack promises that today is the day, almost every day. He clings to the hope that this appointment, this medicine, this deep breath could be the healing, while I let hope slip like white sand through my fingers. He stands beside me for an entire year as I quit working and take up sickness full-time instead. He never complains about having to support us; he just keeps believing that I’ll get better as we throw money at every possibility we can find, and as I slip away from myself to live life as a ghost covered up in our bedsheets. He loves that ghost the best he can, but it isn’t enough. I can hardly feel his love, I can hardly feel anything.
The next year, after Jack tries to fix me, it’s my mom’s turn. I call her one morning when he’s out on the road. I’m alone, and she knows she has to come see me the way some mothers, the best ones, can always tell when they’re needed. She drives eight and a half hours from Louisiana to Nashville to mind me while I zombie-shuffle around the pretty yellow house with my big Ziploc bag full of medicine. Just like she did after the accident, she travels into the dark space with me as far and as fearlessly as she can. She rubs grapeseed oil into my shoulders in long, loving strokes the way Jack does and listens to me cry about the pain, the bills, and how badly I want to have children. She brews stinky herbal teas that are supposed to reduce inflammation and takes me to prolotherapy, an $800 orthopedic treatment that bullies the body into healing by sending it into trauma again. My mom sits in the corner of the room twisting the straps of her purse as the doctor injects my spine with a hundred little needles filled with sugar water. I can hear each one amplified through the speakers inside my head as it punctures my skin, pop, hiss, groan, and the serum rushes into me. After my mom goes back to St. Francisville, it’s Katie’s turn.