Bridge To Happiness (19 page)

“Okay,” I said blankly.

“I need some help with the kids.” Scott was usually my calm and thoughtful son. He seldom overreacted or let his emotions rule his decisions, but he sounded stressed.

“Of course I’ll come with you now.” I turned for a moment and saw Molly and Spider were still talking heatedly. I had this sudden urge to get my daughter away from Spider. What he had said to me was unconscionable. “Maybe Molly will want to go with us.”

Scott shook his head. “She’s staying late, too.”

I could barely stand to watch them without wanting to drag Molly away. What if he told her that? I took a protective step toward my daughter, but Scott stopped me.

“Leave her alone, Mom. Spider Olsen has plenty of experience dealing with hotheaded twenty four year olds. We need to leave. Now.”

So I followed Scott instead, but in my head was the haunting question: if only Mike had stayed. If only he had taken that jet. If only . . .

Time slogged by, the days and hours and minutes, and I spent much of that time in my bed. I lay there unable to move, my mind as blank as I could make it. I had stopped sleeping at night. Some days, though, I could sleep all day. God knows I understood why, I’d had psych classes, but understanding the ramifications of trauma didn’t help me overcome my fear of falling asleep.

Intensely real dreams swept through my sleeping mind and I would awake with night terrors, something I have never experienced. In fact, in my lifetime I have seldom dreamt, or at least remembered any dreams. But now my mind played wicked games with me.

In those cruel dreams, I was in bed and I would wake up to discover Mike’s death had only been a nightmare, that he was there sleeping next to me, or he’d walk out of the bathroom in a towel, laughing at me. These moments of illusion seemed so real that sometimes, right after I awoke, I couldn’t stop my heart from racing as though it were trying to jump out of my chest. Other times, I would wake up already crying.

So instead of twisting and turning in bed, I tried to keep myself busy. There was a twenty-four hour market open a few miles away, and a twenty four hour Starbucks drive thru. Grocery shopping around giant pallets of organic soup and dog food wasn’t so bad, and I began to crave
venti
caramel
macchiatos
at three thirty in the morning.

The house had always been big but seemed hollow and cavernous now. So I cleaned all the time, even though I had a cleaning service that came twice a week.

It was a wide-awake Wednesday today, rather than troublesome Tuesday or frenzied Friday. (I had names for each insomnia-laced night of the week, now that I was better at knowing what day of the week it was.)

Around four A.M., I finished vacuuming, so I emptied the canister, took out the trash, did two loads of laundry, and wiped down the kitchen counters. Armed with a Pledge can in hand, I went from room to room, polishing the furniture, dusting lamps, newel posts, the wooden slats on the stairs, under the Louis XIV Bombay chest in the hallway. I cleaned the wedding silver I seldom used, my grandmother’s tea service, and changed the toilet paper rolls in the three downstairs bathrooms so they were all dispensing from the bottom. That way, when you tore from right to left, the paper ripped along its perforations and didn’t puddle down to the floor. Unless you were left-handed, like Scott and Molly.

These jobs were not important, except to me, but only because they were proof I was still functioning on some bizarre anal-retentive-toilet-paper-unrolling level.

Sometimes, when I looked up at a clock, I found time was belly-crawling by. I was born with a razor sharp internal clock and could look easily out a window or up at the sky and instinctively know what time it was. Now I lived within a skin and body where time had no reason to matter, and my instincts didn’t seem to work anymore.

Across the room Mike’s closet was empty, and if not for the three shirts the laundry had lost and delivered a month after his death, there wouldn’t be a single piece of his clothing left in my world. You could look in the closet and never know he existed. The thought almost killed me, to think he was gone and so many people would never know him. The day the cleaners delivered those shirts, I unwrapped them and ran upstairs holding them to my chest. I hid them in our dresser like some survivor of a plane crash who hid her granola bars from everyone.

The kids had each taken what they wanted from Mike’s things: Scott took shoes; Phil some ties; Mickey a leather jacket and Molly took a pair of blue sweats that were Mike’s favorite. I was numb to it all. Everyone had been so anxious to get rid of his clothes for me as if what was inside his closet were more deadly than driving on a one way street.

For some reason, in those first days and weeks, I had thought only in exchanges:
If I let them help me, they will leave. Give in, because they need to do something. What does it matter? Maybe then everyone will stop asking what I need.

So I had let my well-meaning friends and family strip Mike from the house in the name of good sense and protection, and later regretted it terribly. I had completely lost the ability to say no and was wrapped up inside my own helplessness, which seemed to escalate the more I let everyone tell me what I should do.

For my own sanity, I knew I needed to find the courage to take control back from everyone I’d rolled over and given it to, those who only wanted the best for me. I needed to find out what was best for me. That was now the uncharted journey I faced.

Inside our bedroom where the king sized bed was made perfectly; the Chinese lamps were on the nightstand; the damask bedding on the bed, the same throw pillows, the same striped sofa sat by the fireplace, and Mike’s leather chair with an ottoman was parallel to mine—an old club chair that had belonged to my mother-in-law I’d had reupholstered—I realized most of my life had been parallel with Mike’s. I had lived more years with him than without him.

Only last night I was reading the book that lay open on my chair. There was a woman wearing a dark dress and pearls on the cover, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember what the story was about. What happened while I was reading that book was what hounded me.

While turning a page, I casually glanced up and saw Mike coming around the corner as he had a thousand times before. I sat forward so fast, afraid to breathe. For that one, heart-stopping instant, I really thought he was still alive. Struck almost frozen, I couldn’t move or breathe or blink, because of the sudden, intense, almost blindingly exquisite joy that raced though me . . . until reality checked in. I was living a nightmare, not waking from one. Talk about your mind playing tricks on you.

Dear God in Heaven wasn’t I pitiable enough? I felt crushed and mired in feelings and thoughts I couldn’t control or stop. My life had become one that existed in another dimension to the chairs, to the sitting area, the bed, which all looked as if they belonged in someone else’s world.

No matter how long I had looked in that same spot, nothing was there but proverbial thin air. Like some fairy tale character standing over a caldron and chanting, looking for a magic goblet or ring, I tried to bring Mike back to me. I turned on the lights. I turned off the lights. I carefully positioned myself in that exact spot again, holding the book just as I had been, and I glanced up, again and again. Before me was only the doorway, unchanged and empty.

Rational thought told me seeing Mike was impossible, but what I had seen was such a vibrant image. He’d been wearing his favorite aqua blue sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up his arms, dark hair swirling around the scar on his forearm from an old board injury. Does a person hallucinate in color? You don’t imagine images that sharp and real.

Human desire was a powerful emotion. When you wanted something with such need perhaps the mind could almost make it happen. Almost. Was I seeing him in some other place, halfway back into this life and coming back to me? I’d always been a spiritual person with a strong faith. I wanted to believe in Heaven, that Mike was safe and waiting for me, but I had this big beef with God now. We weren’t on speaking terms.

No matter how desperately I wanted to conjure or wish or dream Mike back to me, he wasn’t there. When a tree shadow from the window traveled over the carpet I had my rational answer. What I had seen was only a shadow of the tree outside the window. It was just a shadow.

So I had tried to go to sleep with the drapes closed, but woke up anyway. Now, there wasn’t a single piece of furniture left in the house that wasn’t polished into shining perfection. I set down my trusty Pledge can, my panacea to tormented moments of wakefulness, and I opened the drapes.

Looking around the room, I couldn’t shake an odd feeling that I was a stranger in the one room that was most personal to me. I angled the Bose on my nightstand so the time read more easily from different spots in the room (I tested each angle myself), then adjusted the amber lamp cord so when you stood back, you had to really look closely to even notice it.

My mind flashed with the image of Jack Nicholson’s M & Ms separated into jars by color in
As Good As It Gets
. I wondered if grief could make you OCD. I shoved the hair out of my face—when did I wash it last?—and caught a whiff of lemon oil in the air, which felt kinetic, like it could bend spoons.

For someone who couldn’t feel anything for weeks and weeks, I was acutely aware of the hair on my arms and the back of my neck, and I sat down hard on the bed, hugging myself, looking around and feeling lost, then dragging my nails down my arms because my skin was so itchy.

Was it really possible? If he were there, maybe he could talk to me, like the Ghost and Mrs. Muir or Topper. “Mike?”

Nothing.

“Mike? If you’re there, give me a sign.”

I saw no floating pictures, no rattling of chains, or visions of my husband.

Those kind of things only happened in movies and books and TV, fiction from someone’s vivid imagination. Deep down inside I had to believe the persons who wrote those stories had lost someone very close to them. You so desperately want another chance.

Outside the first morning sunlight was coming up in the eastern horizon, and the flower box hanging on the iron balcony spilled impatiens the same salmon, violet, and neon pink as the edges of the dawn sky. I heard Mickey’s alarm go off down the hall, and a few moments later the rush of water from his shower.

For years at that time of the morning, when outside the city stood still, I would be sitting in bed, sipping coffee Mike had brought me, reading the paper or a book, my quiet time before I had to get up and make breakfast if Mike hadn’t already. Now I would have given anything for some chaos and noise, for the sound of Mike on the treadmill in the next room or in the shower. He sang horribly.

I laughed out of a lost habit; it sounded as odd to me as speaking in tongues. My eyes burned with tears and my throat tightened. The reflection in the wall mirror was a pale image of me I barely recognized. Most days my skin held no color, as if my crying had drained it all away. I laid down to get away from what I saw, and there I was crying again, so I reached for the damned Kleenex box, one that was still embossed with gold Christmas ornaments.

Then I saw our photo was gone. It had been there last night. I was sure I remembered looking at it when I got into bed. For years I had looked at that photo of us before turning out the light.

Perhaps I knocked it off last night while tossing and turning and trying to find sleep, and sadly, another vision of my dead husband. I rolled over and looked on the floor beside the nightstand. Nothing was there.

Then I hung off the side of the bed and pushed back the dust ruffle and saw only a forgotten
Ab
machine that needed dusting. I slid to the floor, cheek pressed to the wool carpet, and looked under and behind the bed, opened the nightstand doors, but slammed them shut quickly to keep a shaky stack of out-of-date
Oprah
and
Coastal Living
magazines from falling out.

I had turned into a packrat who kept everything. Too much had been thrown out already in the name of good sense.

And I hated to admit it, but I had been doing strange things when I did sleep. I awoke in the bathtub once and honestly didn’t remember getting into the water, and again in kitchen, where one night I was standing in the pantry as if I were ready to cook something.