All the Things We Never Knew (11 page)

“Off,” Alice said. “David being David.” She put on her red coat and tied her scarf around her head.

The door closed. I sat in David's chair as Sophie's eyelashes batted slowly, heavily. She was fast asleep, the colorful presents still peeking out from the bag. Sophie would get to open them in the morning.

A week later I received a letter from Lew. It was written in careful handwriting.

            
Dear Sheila,

            
I am increasingly concerned about David's fits of aggression and erratic behavior. I believe he should seek professional care. You may be aware that David abused drugs as a teenager, and I believe it drastically changed his mental acuity and stability. I am telling you this so that you can make the right decisions regarding his future care. It is unfortunate our visit was cut so short. All my love to you and Sophie, Lew.

I folded the letter several times over, considering its contents. I'd known plenty of people in high school and college who took the same drugs David used, garden-variety pot, acid, some cocaine. They were fine today. I couldn't make sense of Lew's ominous warning, and when I later asked David about it, he groaned and pointed out that there was nothing to suggest Lew had ever considered his parenting to be part of David's problems. “He wasn't exactly father of the year,” he said.

David refused to apologize; Lew did the same. Alice and I talked on the phone shortly after the disastrous visit, attempting to find some way of reconnecting these two stubborn, like-minded men. They refused to speak to each other, and I finally accepted their decision. But it worried me.

If David replicated this bizarre family behavior, he might one day convince himself he didn't need his daughter either.

 

MENTAL ILLNESS AND DRUG USE

The National Alliance on Mental Illness says that
nearly one-third of people with mental illness and approximately one-half of people with severe mental illness (including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia) engage in substance abuse. Drugs and alcohol can be a form of self-medication. People may feel that their anxiety or depression is less severe when they use drugs or alcohol. Unfortunately, drugs and alcohol don't treat the underlying disorder and worsen mental illness.

The onset of psychosis during college years is particularly common, given the lack of sleep, an increase in stress, and experimentation with drugs and alcohol. David reported being unable to concentrate in college and having extreme difficulty sleeping. He also used drugs and alcohol during his teen years. David inevitably dropped out of college and showed worrisome signs that indicated his mental health was declining. He lost interest in the care of his apartment and his personal hygiene, he reported increased sensitivity to sights and sounds, and he withdrew from family and friends.

NAMI reports: “Abuse of drugs and alcohol always results in a worse prognosis for a person with mental illness. People who are actively using are less likely to follow through with the treatment plans . . . and more likely to miss appointments, which leads to more psychiatric hospitalizations and other adverse outcomes.”

Chapter Seven

Months later, I was on deadline at work, puzzling over the perfect combination of words and video for my story. We'd been pulled from a longer-format story about cuts in school funding to cover another gang shooting in north Portland. It was the third time I had been called to a particular intersection of Sumner Street in a month. I wished I had time to extrapolate the bigger picture: what the violence meant in relation to recent gentrification in the area, the job numbers, the divisions set up by the so-called Bloods and Crips, offshoots of gangs that had relocated from California.

I'd interviewed a couple of the mothers on the street before; harried and overworked, these women barely had time to get a decent meal on the table, let alone worry about a nearby crack house. One of the women had said it best: “I'm a damn rat on a wheel, that's all. No time to get off. I've got to keep running and running so I don't trip and die.”

I was from a far more privileged socioeconomic background, yet I wanted to grab her hand and say, “I know, I know how it feels.” As I tried to put the story together, my thoughts drifted away to my own chaotic life: running, always running, a rat on a wheel, scrambling to keep up with ten- to twelve-hour workdays, raising Sophie, trying to find time for paying the bills, buying groceries, cleaning the house.

I'd weighed the option of leaving enough times to understand why I stayed. I believed Sophie would be better off with David in her
life, and I was too distant from my family to handle single motherhood. We seemed to leapfrog from crisis to crisis: David's hospitalization for poison oak, my weeklong flu that turned into pneumonia, Sophie's recurring ear infections. As much as David seemed distant and erratic, at least he was helpful in a crisis.

And getting a divorce would be a full-time job. I didn't even have the time to pick up my dry cleaning. We'd have to set up separate households, and David would not make it easy. I had gambled his moods wouldn't get worse, his investment in his business would pay off, and we'd make it. The truth was, we were living further and further apart.

“Sheila,” my producer shouted from across the room, “get your story to editing!” I grumbled to myself about sensationalizing crime, feeling that I was part of the problem.

The whiteboard had a scribbled outline of the day's stories and the reporters assigned to them. These days, there were more news shows and less time for research, more rating grabs and less substance. We had two helicopters, not one, because research showed people liked pictures from the air. The investigative unit I had been hired to spearhead had been shelved in favor of more live shots and stories that were less than ninety seconds in length. I loved hosting the longer public affairs program we ran on Sunday afternoons, but the day to day had become grueling, sensationalized. I tried to remember the stories I worked on yesterday—and couldn't bring any of them to mind.

My phone rang, the newsroom bustled with other reporters and editors, and producers rushed around with copies of edited scripts in their hands. We called it the bunker, the place where we spent long hours with nothing more than vending machines to sustain us. There were no windows, so I couldn't tell what the sunset was like.

I let the phone go to voicemail—one more distraction wasn't what I needed. It rang again a few minutes later, and I picked up. “Hello, this is Sheila.”

A warm, deep voice spoke up. “Hey, Sheila, I know you're probably on deadline, so I'll keep it short. This is Bill Gehring.” He was
one of the most respected radio talk show hosts in Portland. I'd heard through the grapevine that Bill was putting together a team of top talent for a new radio station in town, and I'd let other professionals know I was restless. “Let's grab some lunch sometime this week. What do you say?”

Was anyone listening? I lowered my voice and tried to mask the thrill that was moving through my body.

“Hi, Bill, thanks,” I managed to reply. “Here's my cell phone so we can talk later.”

Later that night, I sat at my desk. The picture I had of Sophie on my desk needed to be wiped down with Windex. She was three and a half now, outgrowing her toddler's tummy in a pink ballerina outfit and tutu.

Three weeks later, the photo of Sophie in her tutu sat on my new desk overlooking Fifth Avenue in downtown Portland. I now sat behind my own microphone at my own radio show.

When the station general manager at KATU had asked me if I wouldn't miss being on television, I answered honestly. “I'll miss the work. I'll miss the thrill of chasing down great stories. I just can't miss any more of my daughter's ballet recitals.”

The offices had been custom built for the launch of the new talk radio station. The staff had been pulled from prime stations all across the city. Two producers sat across from me, next to a computer screen, ready to take calls. Sunlight beamed through floor-to-ceiling glass windows. I'd negotiated better pay, and even better, hours that would allow me to tuck Sophie in and be there in the afternoon to pick her up. Plus I had my own talk radio show, discussing politics and issues that I considered important. It was a startup station, a place where I could redefine myself.

“Good morning,” I said into the microphone. “This is Sheila Hamilton.”

I was driving to work when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. The CBS news cut-in interrupted the song I'd been listening to on the radio, something from the Barenaked Ladies. “How odd that a plane could be that off course,” I thought at first. I'd worked in New York several weeks in my twenties, helping ABC with a documentary on a Utah outdoor wilderness camp that was under investigation for child abuse. I'd stood at the top of the World Trade Center. I knew the flight pattern. Planes were not supposed to get that close.

By the time the second plane hit the second tower, I was watching it live on television, disbelieving the surreal screams and the terror the news anchors themselves were attempting to mask.

Nothing in my journalism career had prepared me for this day. I'd been witness to what I thought was the worst disaster I would ever see, the explosion of the space shuttle
Challenger
, when the engineers at Utah's Morton Thiokol had gathered to see the first teacher off to space. It was one of the first national assignments I'd been given; it was supposed to be a fluff story, engineers attending another routine shuttle launch. It was, instead, the first story that would sear a memory into my brain so clearly that I can recall the temperature, the smells, the way the plumes parted as the rocket boosters headed off in different directions in the sky.

I opened the microphone, my hands shaking. The music bed faded. My earphones pressed tightly against my ears. My producer eyed me warily from the glass room where he would be taking people's frantic phone calls.

I spoke very slowly. “I'm Sheila Hamilton. And it is not a good morning. It is a morning you will remember for the rest of your life.”

Thirteen hours later, I drove home to Sophie and David. As I drove, the images of people throwing themselves from the upper floors of the towers replayed in my mind, immediate, terrifying. I made it home and walked through the door to find Sophie, now four, sitting in David's lap as he read a book out loud. I rushed to both of them for comfort.

“What's wrong, Mommy?” Sophie sensed my grief. She had her pink pajamas on and carried Bear tucked into her chest as she balanced her book in her lap.

I couldn't speak. I knelt by David's chair and listened to his voice finishing the book they must have read together a dozen times that week, the one about the greedy monster who wanted so many cookies for himself he turned a beautiful tree into a cookie factory. Sophie giggled at all the familiar parts, filling in the lines David skipped.

I couldn't tell her how guilty I felt. I couldn't share with her, or David, that in the minutes before the first plane flew into the towers, killing thousands of innocent people, I'd been contemplating my own escape, from this—this doomed marriage. Somehow, the tragedy of 9/11 made that seem selfish. Myopic. And wrong.

In the weeks that followed the attacks, I followed closely the stories of couples reconnecting, of rushed marriages and canceled divorces. Strangers reached out to one another for comfort. Wayward sons and daughters called home. I understood—just having a family to come home to suddenly made me feel that I'd won the lottery.

I spent the Christmas after 9/11 in a rush of breaking world news and strong opinions on both sides of the political spectrum. Christmas was a blur without the traditional trip back home.

So when the next Christmas came around, a year later, I was determined to let Sophie spend the holiday with her grandparents and cousins, where Christmas was always a huge, happy celebration and David's disdain for the holiday would be less noticeable. We had made it through the year okay; despite the beginning of the war in Afghanistan and the lingering fear of terror attacks, David's business was actually busier than ever. More people were remodeling their dream homes rather than buying or building. He bought two cell phones so he could be on two conversations at the same time, but he and I were as distant as ever.

By early December, I was wrapping the last of Sophie's Christmas
presents to send ahead to Grandma's house. I'd tried to select things she would love, chapter books and a toy cash register, a stuffed giraffe that defied gift wrap, and a new snowsuit for snowboarding. At five, she was tearing through books just like her dad and walking around the house spelling anything that seemed relevant. “C-h-r-i-s-t-m-a-s,” she'd say happily. “R-u-d-o-l-f.” My brother and sister were planning on bringing their kids to Utah as well. Sophie would have playmates, the adoration of Grandma and Grandpa, and a guaranteed white Christmas.