Hope and Other Luxuries (77 page)

How can she be so cavalier about this?
I thought indignantly. I was shadowing Gemma around the coffee table now, like a spotter in a gymnastics competition.

“Let's go get childproofing stuff,” I told Valerie. “I'm buying.”

“It's your money,” she said with a shrug, and she stood up and found her keys.

But being in the car was even worse. I didn't just see the traffic. I saw exactly how every
other
car on the road would end up hitting
our
car. The busy street was like a coach's whiteboard, with big blue arrows all over it: that van pulls out
here
, and that gray Mazda turns left
now
, and that banged-up pickup truck slams on its brakes
now
 . . .

“Watch out!” I said as Valerie made a swift right turn.

“Have I ever had an accident?” Valerie pointed out.

“You
could
, though,” I said. And then, “Okay, I'm sorry. I guess I'm just a little edgy.”

But over the following days, and then weeks, I realized that I wasn't just a little edgy. Edgy didn't begin to describe it.

“Oh!” I gasped as Joe was driving down the freeway.

“What?”
Joe demanded, on edge because I was on edge.

“Nothing . . . I just thought that car next to us was coming over into our lane.”

Not true. What I'd really seen was that the car came over, Joe swerved, there was a massive smack and a shock, and the world went spinning as the SUV behind us caught the corner of our bumper. Then came the view through the spiderweb cracks in our windshield of an eighteen-wheeler barreling down on us. I could hear its brakes screaming, see its massive grille, as we sat, stopped dead in the center of the freeway, facing the wrong direction . . .

All that, in milliseconds. It had happened so fast, it was the sight of the eighteen-wheeler that made me gasp.

For months, I had been haunted by that Edward Gorey mother, with her feelings of fluttery panic and feeble cries. Now, she had swallowed me whole. I wasn't just living
with
fear anymore. I was living completely
inside
fear. And the feeble cries were my own.

“Oh, my
God
!”

“Clare, would you just stop it with the
Oh my Gods
? It's a broken glass! It's no big deal!”

But that broken glass
was
a big deal because I had seen Joe's lacerated hand that didn't happen, and the severed thumb tendon that didn't happen, and the emergency room visit that didn't happen—all in the time it took the glass to fall.

I barely seemed to register that things were getting better. Elena was back in treatment, having her ups and downs, but she was working hard. She was doing a new kind of therapy called DBT, and it seemed to have clicked with her. Little by little, she was filling out and starting to look normal again. She was even sitting down to meals with us.

Clint was doing well in tech school, too. Soon, Valerie and he would be ready to move to their first assignment. Valerie was a joy. Gemma was a dream. And Joe's job might be grueling, but he was in charge, and he relished the challenge.

My family was doing well again. But if my family was doing so well, then why was I doing so badly?

My nerves were shot, I told myself. My nerves were completely shot. I had heard that expression before and thought I had known what it meant. Only now did I understand.

And it wasn't just danger that got to me, either. It was . . . well, everything, really.

At the grocery store: “I
knew
they wouldn't have the right kind of tuna! I
knew
I should have picked a different recipe!”

Or, when Joe called from Japan: “I
knew
you were going to forget something if you put off packing!
Now
what are we going to do?”

Oh, no! Oh, no! What are we going to
do?

So stressful were these wails of terror for me and everyone around me that I tried to stop things before they got that far. I spent my days checking, analyzing, examining, and planning for everything before it had a chance to go wrong. And since my disaster footage warned me ahead of time about everything that possibly
could
go wrong, my advice was absolutely flawless.

All my family needed to do was listen to that flawless advice. Then nothing bad would
ever
happen.

“It's forty-five along here. They have traffic cameras here, you know.”

“Don't stop to talk now—get that dog to the backyard! She's been in all night, you know.”

“If you park over here, it's easier to get past that traffic, and it's a simple right turn out of the parking lot.”

“Did you remember your wallet? Your phone? Your ID? Your lunch?
Your passport? Your meds? Extra diapers?”

As the weeks unrolled, my entire family started sending me subtle clues that I had morphed into a madwoman.

“Whoa, there, Mamacita!” Valerie said. “Deep breath! It's just a misplaced debit card. I've already ordered a new one.”

“You know what?” Joe said. “I don't think I'll park way out here. I think I'll do something
crazy
.”

“You're being kind of a B, Mom,” Elena said. “It's menopause, isn't it?”

Maybe it was.

But all I knew was that I had lived with so much pain that I seemed to have hit some kind of limit. Like our insurance payments, I'd hit my catastrophic max. Before, I had been cautious and overprotective, but now, I was this terrified, shattered person who saw pain coming from every direction. And I couldn't take it. I just couldn't take it. I couldn't bear one more little tiny bit of stress. I stopped reading books, and I stopped watching movies because I couldn't bear to witness any more suffering.

“So, do you have a chapter for me to read yet?”

“No!”

It was a Saturday in December, and Elena was home because Sandalwood's program didn't run on the weekend. Joe was gone—Guam this time, I think—and I was shut up in the bedroom, trying to write. Joe was right, I needed to try again. I
had
to try again. Besides, there was no reason not to try.

Elena wasn't dying anymore. Gemma was happy and healthy. Clint was earning praise from all his instructors. Valerie was her usual sunny self. Joe was back to sending me photos of interesting exotic places.

Everything was fine. My family didn't need me right now.

Everything was
fine
.

I didn't have to work on the memoir. I could write whatever I wanted. I could write something fun, something that wouldn't take me back into the past. I could go somewhere completely new and different, somewhere I'd never been before.

So I sat down on my bed, picked up my laptop, and pulled up a blank Word page. And I asked—just as I've always asked:

Where am I now? What am I seeing?

Slowly, a scene came into focus.

There was a mansion. It was near a wide river—the Hudson River, maybe. It was early spring, and there was a hard frost. When the sun came up, the short grass would be white, but right now, it was still a ghostly light gray.

The sky was clear, a bright clear brown with just a single strip of salmon-orange cloud in the east. And there was a pool of water in the short grass near the mansion—a perfectly round, deep, glass-smooth pool, catching the dawn light in a color like pink pearl . . .

But wait! Wait! What am I doing here? What am I doing? That's not right! That's
crap
!

What did I know about mansions on the Hudson? Nothing! I'd have to research that first. I needed books of architecture . . . history . . . No, that wouldn't be good enough, I needed to make a research trip! And did clear skies look like that? Did frost look like that? Did calm water reflect that light? I needed to see frost again! That trip needed to be in the spring! I needed to find a pool!

Oh, what am I even doing, thinking about stuff like this? I don't know what I'm doing! It won't work. This isn't going to
work
!

Okay. Blank out the mansion and the frost. I could figure that out later.

There was a girl standing by the pool. She had long blond hair. The dawn just gave her pale oval face a touch of rose. I could see her bare feet on the light gray frost of the grass. She smiled. And, even though it was cast-iron cold outside, she dove gracefully into the water . . .

But wait!
Wait!
In
what
? What is she wearing?

Was that a shift? A nightdress? Did it have lace? Machine or hand lace? What was the difference? I needed a book on lace! Was she wearing a corset? What kind of a corset? I needed photographs . . . costume books . . . novels from the time period . . . old movies . . .

Oh, what's the use? What's the
use
? This isn't going to
work
!

Slowly, I came back to the safe view of the walls of my bedroom. I was hyperventilating, stiff with terror, as stiff as a board. I sat there
panting, then talked myself into unclenching my shaking hands. I put the laptop back into sleep and folded it up for the day.

Word count: two hundred and ninety words.

Misery overwhelmed me. I pulled up the covers and burrowed down into their warmth. All I wanted to do was sleep. As long as I slept, I couldn't hurt, and I couldn't fail. As long as I slept, nothing bad could happen.

Voices. Loud voices. I tried to stay asleep, but the voices were pulling me back.

Laughter. Loud laughter.

Right outside my door!

Why
were they yelling and laughing like that? I wanted to
sleep
! I wanted to stay
asleep
!

In a frenzy, I jumped up and slammed open the bedroom door. “I'm trying to
sleep
in here! Do you
mind
? How about showing a
little
consideration? Do you think you can do that? Well?
Do
you?”

My brain captured a single image: Valerie and Elena sitting on the floor together, staring wide-eyed at me, their laughter frozen into shock.

I turned around, slammed the door, and threw myself back on the bed.

And yes, I was fully aware of the irony.

S
ix weeks later, I was driving Elena through morning rush-hour traffic. It was January again, a year after Elena's first admission into Clove House.

January. A new year. A fresh start.

Elena had been attending Sandalwood's treatment program for three months now. She was on much less medication these days, and that had been a rocky process for her and her care team there. The opposite of sedation is excitement—fight or flight. Elena had gone through lots of fight-or-flight moments as her body had learned to give up those powerful drugs.

For the first month, Elena had driven herself back and forth to treatment, but that hadn't been ideal. When those fight-or-flight moments had come up, Elena had grabbed her car keys and bolted. I got regular calls from Dr. Leben back then: “Elena's on her way home. Try to talk her into coming back.”

So Elena had asked me to start driving her to treatment. “That way, I won't have a getaway vehicle,” she said. I had been driving her in now for the last two months: thirty minutes there and thirty minutes back, twice a day.

Once upon a time, a commute like that would have played havoc with my busy schedule. It would have interrupted my writing and thrown everything off. It would have become the reason I let myself fail.

Now, it was the most pleasant part of my day.

Elena and I had stayed careful with one another for weeks. Each of us, for excellent reasons, saw the other person as the greatest threat to her happiness. As weak as we both were, if we had had the chance, we
probably would have drifted apart, and that sense of threat between us might have hardened into animosity.

But the commutes had brought us together. They threw us together in one small space, and they let us both do something we enjoyed. I got to drive, and Elena got to tell stories.

This morning, as we inched past a big drugstore, Elena said, “Did I tell you what Jamie's grandmother says about those places? She thinks they're secret gambling dens. ‘The parking lots have
so
many cars in them,'” she quoted in the grandmother's high, wavering voice, “‘but when you get inside, you hardly see
anybody
in the aisles.'”

“Hey, she's right!” I said. “I never thought about that!”

“‘Where
are
all those people?'” Elena went on, mimicking the grandmother. “‘
I
think there's a craps game in the back!'”

I laughed.

“I just love her,” Elena said. “You can never tell if she's going senile or just messing with your head. When I was there last week, they had these really cool dessert plates out, the kind with a raised pattern, a big fruit. The grandmother was sawing away at the plate with her knife—an empty plate. And the mom said, ‘What are you doing, Mother? I haven't cut your cake yet.' And the grandmother said”—and here Elena went back into that wonderful, wavering voice—“‘
Oh!
I
thought
that pear was very hard!'”

I laughed again. Even though my shot nerves still kept me from picking up a book these days, small stories like these were feeding a hunger that was starting to grow inside me. Little by little, they were pulling me out of my shell.

“When I'm old,” Elena mused, “I want to be exactly like that. Wonderfully weird, keeping everybody guessing.”

My imagination started to assemble a reel of film. Elena, old. Elena, white-haired, with a dancer's ankles like her grandmother, and a lift to her chin that showed that you'd better not mess with her. My daughter, old. My daughter, surviving. Surviving . . .