Five Days (39 page)

I broke off, the words swimming before me but unable to find their way into my mouth. God, how I needed to sleep.

‘Depression can be there for years,' Dr Bancroft said, ‘and we can function with it for quite a long time. It becomes a bit like a dark shadow over us that we choose to simply live with, to see as part of us. Until the gloom begins to submerge us and it becomes unbearable.'

I left Dr Bancroft's office with a prescription for a sleeping pill that was also a ‘mild' anti-depressant called Mirtazapine. One per day before bedtime, and she assured me it wouldn't leave me feeling groggy. She also gave me the name of a therapist in Brunswick named Lisa Schneider whom Dr Bancroft considered ‘sound' (and that was high praise from her), and whose services would be covered by my health plan. I got the prescription filled at my local pharmacy. I drove the two hours to Farmington. I was relieved to see Ben looking far better than I had seen him in months. I viewed the work in progress. It was astonishing in its scale – a huge nine-foot-by-six-foot canvas – and in its ambition. Seen from afar it was boldly abstract: wave-like shapes, contrasting blue and white tonalities, with an energy and a ferocity to the brush strokes that called to mind the anger of the coastal waters which so defined Ben's childhood and also (I sensed) a reflection of so much of the turmoil that had characterized the last year of his life. Maybe it was my lack of sleep, my own personal turmoil, and seeing how Ben had articulated his own recent anguish into this clearly remarkable work (all right, I am his mother – but even given my natural maternal bias, this was such an impressive and daring painting), but I found myself fogging up again.

‘You OK, Mom?' Ben asked.

‘I'm just so impressed, overwhelmed.'

The tears now began to flow – despite my ferocious efforts to curb them and the sobs that suddenly accompanied them. To his immense credit, my son did not blanch in the face of such raw emotion. On the contrary, he put his arms around me and said nothing. I subsided quickly, apologizing profusely, telling him I hadn't slept well the past night or so, and I was just so incredibly proud of what he had achieved, how he had bounced back from such a difficult moment in his life.

Ben just nodded and said that I was the best mother imaginable. This set me off crying again, and I excused myself and found the bathroom off his studio. Gripping the sink I told myself that all would be better after a night's sleep.

Once I pulled myself together Ben and I went out to eat at a diner.

‘We could have done something a little more fancy,' I told him as we slipped into a booth.

‘Why drop money on restaurant food? Anyway, this is my hangout – and even though it's cheap I've yet to get food poisoning.'

A waitress came by. We ordered. As soon as she was out of sight Ben looked up at me and said:

‘Sally called me the other day.'

‘Really?' I said.

‘You sound surprised.'

‘Well, I just didn't think you guys were in much contact.'

‘We speak at least twice a week.'

And why hadn't I figured this out? Or noticed their closeness?

‘That's wonderful,' I said.

‘And you sound a little amazed because you thought my cheerleader sister and her arty-farty brother could never be close.'

‘I stand corrected.'

‘She's a little worried about you, Mom. As am I. And she told me about the other night when you got back from Boston and she found you asleep on the porch. It's a little late in the year for that, isn't it?'

‘I was having a bad night, that's all.'

‘But you told me earlier that it was the only last night or so when you hadn't been able to sleep. Sunday was six nights ago – and judging from the rings under your eyes . . .'

‘All right, I've been having a bad week.'

‘Why?'

‘Stuff.'

‘Stuff with Dad?'

I nodded.

‘Sally told me that too. Do you want to talk about it?'

Instinctively I shook my head. Then:

‘I do . . . but I also don't think that's fair to you. Because it means you're hearing my side, not his side.'

‘Not that Dad would ever dream of telling me his side of anything.'

‘I know you have your problems with him.'

‘Problems? That's polite. No communication whatsoever is more like it. The guy and I just don't connect. Haven't for years. I get the feeling he doesn't really like me.'

‘He loves you very much. It's just that he's become so lost over the past few years. That's not making any excuses for him. I think he's genuinely, clinically depressed. Not that he would ever acknowledge that, or seek help.'

‘And what are you?'

‘Functionally depressed.'

‘That's news to me.'

‘And to me too. But this sleeplessness I've been having recently . . . my doctor feels that it's as if the depression, which I've kept so submerged for years, has finally found some sort of physiological outlet to let me know I am really not in a good place.'

‘So you are getting help for it?'

I nodded.

‘That's good,' Ben said, putting his hand on my arm and squeezing it, a gesture so sweet, so benevolent, so grown-up that I found myself choking back tears again.

‘Sally also hinted that there was something which triggered all this.'

‘I see,' I said, thinking:
My children really do discuss their parents when they are out of our field of vision.

‘Did something happen?' Ben asked.

I met my son's gaze and said:

‘A disappointment.'

Ben held my gaze – and in his eyes I could see him registering this, considering its deliberate vagueness, its multiple possible meanings, its implications . . . and eventually deciding not to push the matter further.

‘Sally told me you've been very much elsewhere all week – that she was cutting you a wide berth you seemed so withdrawn.'

‘No sleep does that. But I have some pills to help me now. And I am determined to do what you did – get myself out of the dark wood.'

Some hours later, in the little motel room I had taken for the night (there was no way I was dealing with darkened Maine back roads on no sleep), I found myself crying again as I replayed my conversation with my wonderful son. I also made a mental note to call Sally first thing in the morning – which, for her on a Sunday morning, meant sometime after twelve noon.

Of course there was the little matter of sleep. Dr Bancroft had put me on a strong dose of Mirtazapine, 45 milligrams. And she told me that, if possible, I should take the first dose and not set the alarm clock: just let chemically aided sleep finally wash over me, and wake up when my body decided it wanted to resume consciousness. So I took the pill just after ten p.m., thinking:
If anything the drugs will take me away from this fifty-dollar-a-night motel's fifty-dollar-a-night decor.
Then I crawled into the somewhat mildewy bed with a copy of the book I'd brought with me: a collection of poems by Philip Larkin, whom Lucy had been raving about for a while. Shortly after that evening when I ran to her house after Boston, a package from our local independent bookshop in Damariscotta arrived on my doorstep. A new American edition of Larkin's
Complete Poems
, with a note from Lucy:

The book arrived on Thursday. Though hugely touched by the gesture, and the immense kindness of her note, given the nature of the week I didn't have the reserves of stamina to tackle anything so clearly close to the emotional bone. But I still packed it in my overnight bag before leaving today. Downing my prescribed dose of Mirtazapine I opened the volume. As suggested by Lucy I turned to page 28 and . . .

I read the poem once. I read it again. I sat even further up in bed and went through it a third time. So that's where I've been for the past few years. The shroud of despair which I mistook for everyday vestments, and which I had pulled over myself, thinking it was my destiny to wear it. I had become convinced that sadness was a condition I simply had to bear. As much as I still ached for Richard – thinking back that, around this time last year, we were making love in that big hotel bed in Boston – I also knew, after reading that extraordinary Larkin poem, that Richard was very much someone who, given the prospect of happiness, decided the hair shirt of ongoing sorrow was one he simply had to wear. He broke both our hearts by making that choice. But what the Larkin poem told me – that the veil of sadness is always there to enshroud us, should we so choose it – was strangely comforting. Because it reminded me that, yes, I wasn't alone . . . even if I also knew that the wake of grief trailing me wouldn't dissipate for some time to come.

Then I felt the ether of grogginess drift over me. I switched off the light. With the blackout came, for the first time in days, that vanishing act from life's harder realities. Sleep.

* * *

The pills worked wonders. They knocked me out every night and ensured that I stayed knocked out for at least seven hours. The ongoing sleep – coupled with (what Dr Bancroft called) the mild anti-depressive properties of Mirtazapine – seemed to let me get through the day without falling victim to the deeper recesses of my sadness.

But I was still sad. I was still not getting over it. Around a week after I'd started taking the pills, Dan surprised me by making an amorous move in bed one night (his pre-dawn schedule and my silent melancholy had, until now, kept us even more on our respective sides of the bed). I didn't push him away. Pulling up my nightshirt, he began to make gruff, needy love to me. He was inside me within moments. He came around three minutes later. He rolled off me with a groan, then spread my legs and started trying to arouse me with his index finger. I closed my legs. I rolled over. I buried my head in the pillow.

‘You OK?' he asked.

‘Fine,' I whispered.

‘We don't have to stop,' he said, kissing the back of my neck.

‘I'm tired,' I said, shifting myself further away from him.

‘OK,' he said quietly. ‘Goodnight.'

And there we were, alone together again in bed.

The next evening he came on to me again – a little more tenderly this time, but still with that undercurrent of rushed gruffness that had characterized our lovemaking for years. I can't say that I was attempting to augment things – as I remained quietly detached throughout. I felt bad about my dispassionateness, because my husband was trying to re-establish a connection so long lost. All I could think about was love found, love lost – and how I was back treading domestic water with a man with whom there had been no love for years.

After our ten minutes of sex, Dan kissed me goodnight and promptly fell asleep. It was still early – around eleven p.m. – and tomorrow was Sunday. Sally was out for the evening. The house was quiet. Disquietingly so. This was the future sound of silence that would become quotidian when Sally left for college next year. The deep silence of an uneasy marriage now devoid of the necessary clamor of children, with the left-behind couple wondering how to fill the void between them.

I went down to the living room, poured a glass of red wine, and found myself reaching for
The Synonym Finder
– omnipresent on the small desk I had set up in a corner of the room. As I sipped the wine, I turned the pages until I came to the word I was looking for:
Unhappiness
. There were – and I counted them – over one hundred and twenty-two words listed to denote the dissatisfaction that is such an intrinsic part of the human condition. Flipping back to the listings under the letter
H
I noted that
Happiness
only contained eighty-one synonyms. Could it be that we search for more words to describe our pain in life rather than the pleasures we can also experience? Would I, a few years from now, on the cusp of my half-century, be sitting here late one Saturday night, flipping through the thesaurus yet again and wondering why I had forced myself to stay put?

I closed my book of synonyms. I opened the front door, I stepped out on the porch. We were now deeper into October. The mercury was on a downward curve. So I could only stand outside, covered just in a robe, for a minute or so. But in that time I resolved to end my marriage just after Sally finished school in June.

* * *

I let only two people in on my plan. Lucy knew. And Lisa Schneider knew.

I called Dr Schneider the day after I made my decision to go. She'd already been contacted by Dr Bancroft, so she was expecting my call. Lisa – we were on a first-name basis onwards from our first session – was in her mid-fifties. A tall gangly woman who radiated quiet intelligence and decency. Though she had her clinical side, she was nonetheless always engaged in my story and the way I so wanted to change its depressing narrative. Her office was near the college. I began to see her once a week, every Wednesday at eight a.m., adjusting my work schedule to start at ten that morning in the hospital. As Dan was already at work by the time I drove off to Brunswick he never knew that I was now talking with a therapist about an exit strategy from our marriage – and about everything else that had been unsettling me for years.