Dr. Wyatt doesn’t make us wait long—she’s already gone through my records and she knows what she’s dealing with: the concern is written all over her face. She enters the room, a talking blur of skin and doctor jacket and orange cat–colored hair, and I can feel her looking in my eyes and trying to find me. She huffs fast and hard out of her nostrils and the rush of hot nose air makes me blink.
“Ruthie.” She grabs my hand. “I’m not even concerned about the narcotics. The first thing we need to do is get you some sleep. You can’t find relief without rest.”
Lile and Libby become ten years younger in an instant. There’s a plan, there’s hope.
Dr. Wyatt prescribes me something strong for anxiety. She’s bewildered when she looks at my meds, seven different kinds in staggering doses.
“How did this happen?” She shakes her head but doesn’t expect any of us to answer.
I wouldn’t even know what to say if I could form words properly. I just did what I was told. I took the pills they told me to take and waited to feel better but it was too many, too much, the kind of cocktail given to a terminal cancer patient entering hospice, a little something to make death taste better. All it ever did for me was make life taste worse.
When we get back to the house Tim and my mom are there drinking sweet tea. Little Lile is back from camp and he’s playing football all over the tan couch cushions in the living room with his brothers. Their little bodies fly into old thigh-shaped pillows and make the fabric bunch and ripple. They want to talk to me.
I sink into the beige furniture, square in the center of the people who love me. Tim and Laura, dressed as though they’re going to a luncheon for the Horticultural Society; Lile and Lib, dressed as though they’re going to a tailgate party; and my mom, looking as beautiful as ever and lonely without my daddy sitting next to her.
“Baby, there are places you can go to get help.…”
I’m not sure who says it. I’m too tired to find the face that the voice belongs to and too overwhelmed by the gravity of the words to respond to them. I don’t want to be sent away.
I travel from them while they talk, back to my childhood. Back then, all I ever wanted was to be the center of it all, to be seen and doted on, but today, in the middle, holding every eye and heart in the room, all I want is to disappear. The distance between Jack and me is big, but the one between who I am and who I long to return to being is bigger.
They go on, avoiding words like hospital and pain clinic, and I half listen, terrified not only of the hospital, but of that great distance and what other people would think. Little Ruthie who danced on the porch, dripping with promise, can no longer function without pain pills and had to be shipped off like a bad dog. I won’t let it happen.
Tim pulls me back into the reality and asks me a question I haven’t been able to answer in a long time.
“Ruthie, do you want to live?”
I nod, bug eyes still wide and empty. I’m surprised I still know how.
“Then, babe, you need to get out of bed and begin. You can lie there and hurt or you can live your life and hurt. You can love people and experience things and hurt at the same time.”
They decide to let me stay, to let me try to get better at home. I promise them that I’ll start making changes, weaning myself off the drugs, if they give me another chance. I don’t know if it’s remotely possible, but I commit to it and they don’t bring it up again. That night, I take my anxiety medicine and I sleep for the first time in twenty-one days. Dreams come: I’m six years old, dancing across the wide green lawn, smacking jade-colored beetles as I twirl, letting the sun be my stage light. My foot hits a dusty hill and the red ants come. They sink their teeth into me. There are dozens. I swat them away and I keep on dancing.
15 Operation Sunset
In life, sometimes we make lists of things. We make them so that we don’t forget, so that we know what it is we’re supposed to be doing. I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. I forget how many times a day to brush my teeth and when people eat lunch and what to do in the blocks of time stuck between meals. So I source the information of what a regular day entails from the life happening around me at Lile and Lib’s. Showers are in the morning, lunch occurs around noon, the cleaning up of books and toys falls in the evening. I write everything down in a list and I cling to it just like my mom clings to hers. I call it “Day”:
8:00 a.m. Get out of bed. Do NOT get back in until it’s dark outside.
8:05 a.m. Brush teeth.
8:10 a.m. Make bed.
8:15 a.m. Toast
It’s 8 a.m. I’m four minutes into weaning myself off the drugs and I have felt every second go by. The sun finds its way through the curtains and into the margins of my little Walgreens notebook, the kind that divides your life with flimsy plastic partitions. I pick it up from the bedside, stare at my schedule, and the warmth from outside waves at me through the window. It’s time to begin.
The rest of the house is awake. Rubbery kid shoes squeak on the floor and water rushes through the pipes. The door opens and closes, letting hot breaths of Louisiana air whoosh their way inside. Lile, Lib, and the wild little boys they made all know what to do with a chunk of morning, but I’m so nervous about surviving the time between tasks that I can hardly stomach the sound of them all living so expertly. To me, it all looks impossible, like acrobatics. Little Lile’s Tiger clock ticks at me while I walk to the bathroom and wait by the sink until exactly 8:05 a.m. I squish a blue bar of goo onto my toothbrush.
Libby is in the kitchen when I walk out. Lile has taken the older boys to school and Parks is singing a song to a giant tower of foam blocks, swinging his torso from side to side. As soon as he sees me he drops his gaze, mumbles to himself, and latches onto the edge of the couch.
He’s afraid of me.
Libby swats him playfully with an old, lumpy pillow and he giggles. It’s probably not easy having a crazy person live in your house, but Libby acts like she’s proud to have me wandering her halls in my sweatpants, thrilled to see me slowly coming back to life. I’m somehow never in her way as she flits around the room with the phone tucked between her shoulder and her chin, gossiping with her friend Sunny from BootyBarre class, preparing snacks for the boys, and mopping up a mess that was probably never even there. I’m another hand to hold in a house full of needy, sticky fingers, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She pours me juice and kisses my cheek, and when I tell her that I slept for five whole hours, she hugs me and tells me she’s taking me for lunch to celebrate. My teeth are covered in moss and I haven’t worn pants without a drawstring since I arrived, but still, she’s proud to show me off, all disheveled and insane.
There’s toast for me, two slices of wheat on a plastic Elmo plate. I sit down cautiously in front of it and stare. It’s overwhelming to look at, there’s too much of it, too many seeds and ten thousand spongy holes. Parks starts singing a version of “Jingle Bells.”
“I love toast! I love toast! I love toasty toast.”
I pick it up and insert it into my mouth. It tastes like buttered sandpaper, but two slices of toast is a victory, two slices of toast is the first mountain I climb. Parks claps for me.