“What’s wrong, Daddy?” he asks.
“Nothing is wrong,” I tell him. “Everything is just right.”
And that’s the problem, because I know that soon, everything won’t be.
Jenna walks toward us. Keeping a protective watch on me, she says to Devon, “Sweetheart, why don’t you go clean up for dinner? Then bring down that lovely drawing you did at school today for Daddy to see.”
Devon takes off toward the staircase. After watching him disappear from sight, I turn toward Jenna. She places a firm hand on my shoulder and keeps it there.
“The MRI is clean,” I say and feel her hand tighten. “It’s happening. It’s my dad all over again. It has to be schizophrenia.”
Jenna falls into a silence that speaks what she cannot say. She knows where we’re headed, to the one place both of us hoped we never would have to go. I’m unsure what to say. I feel so lost in my helplessness.
She guides me to the couch. We sit.
“Chris, we will be okay,” she says. “We can handle this.”
Her assurance breaks my heart. It kills me because as strong as I know my wife is, as hard as she tries to be that way for my sake, I can’t bear putting her through this agony. Facts don’t lie. History doesn’t lie. Even though Jenna has heard all the horrific stories about my childhood, she didn’t live through them, can’t possibly imagine the kind of emotional torment that’s about to come barreling down on us. It’s something I can’t begin to describe, with so many deep and complex layers that unless you’ve been trapped between them yourself, they’re incomprehensible.
I bury my face in her shoulder.
“We’ll get through this, baby. I promise we will,” she tells me, “and I’ll be right by your side when you go back to see Rob. He’ll refer us to someone who can help you.”
Rob.
I haven’t thought about him since our call. If I’m diagnosed, I can kiss my job good-bye. I need to make arrangements before that happens. I have to figure out who’s pulling bodies out of Loveland, but even more critical, I must ensure that Donny Ray can’t follow through on his threat against Devon.
Jenna pulls from our embrace and offers a smile of warmth and encouragement, which sends me closer to the edge.
So I do what I did with Rob, with Adam, with myself for most of my life—the thing I swore I’d never do to my wife.
“I just can’t do this right now . . . ,” I say through my cracked voice and even more broken thoughts. “I’m sorry.”
I hide from the truth by avoiding it, and with stunning precision, become both my father and mother rolled into one.
62
THE RIPTIDE OF TWO CRIPPLED MINDS
Having a parent die suddenly is a pain sharp and swift. Watching him submit to a slow death is even more excruciating. But when the mind goes before the body, it’s like attending a funeral every day.
Sometimes I wished my father would just die and get it over with.
At the same time, a war raged within me between anger and guilt. I’d been cheated out of what should have been a continued and loving relationship with my father, and during the moments I found strength to be truthful with myself, I hated him for it. But that only made me feel worse, because I knew he hadn’t asked for this, and that his situation was far more tragic than my own.
That I had become the victim of a victim.
The father I loved so much was becoming the complete antithesis of everything I most admired, but it wasn’t just my dad who was falling apart. I could see my mother doing the same, unplugging from the world, drifting off into some distant place. Her everything-is-fine identity was evaporating like some thin, resinous smoke, and what lingered in its wake was the grimmest of pictures: a woman broken open by tragedy, only to find out there was nothing inside, that there never had been. Now, I was caught in the riptide of two crippled minds.
My mother could hide a pink elephant behind a thumbtack, but the saddest irony of all was that my father would be the one to finally end her magical thinking. For so many years, he’d allowed her the reality of her dreams—now he was tearing down that reality. My mother could no longer dismantle the truth because the truth was dismantling her.
I began catching glimpses of who she really was. Not the passionless woman I’d always thought her to be, but instead, and much like me, nothing more than a frightened child. And like a child, instead of facing the truth, Mom simply took the path of least resistance.
With each passing day, she fell deeper into paralyzing depression. The Southern Beauty I’d always known was fading away, her face weathered by grief and rapidly advancing far beyond its years. On most days, she sat at the kitchen table, staring sightlessly out the window and chain-smoking cigarettes. It was on those days that I felt the most pity for her, because I honestly believed she loved my dad to whatever degree she was capable. My father was her everything, her only source of strength, and without him, she became nothing. She began pulling further away, avoiding Dad whenever possible, and offering little of herself to him.
One day, I came home from school and found he’d been sequestered in the guest room.
“It’s better for him this way,” she said, as if he were a puppy quarantined for pissing on the rug.
But he wasn’t a puppy, and it wasn’t better for him—it was better for her.
Late one evening, I walked by his new living quarters and saw him mumbling incessantly to himself. My mother breezed past me carrying a laundry basket filled with clothes. She went inside, tossed some unfolded pajamas into my father’s lap, then, just as quickly, she was gone.
Dad held the pajamas up and stared at them, confused, as though having no concept of their purpose.
My heart sank.