My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (37 page)

The days I couldn't see Sarah, I'd go home and drink alone. More naughty water. Spending time in isolation wasn't good for me, but I didn't know how to ask anyone for help, felt that I needed the alone time, which was idiotic. I called my family, spoke to my mother and sisters and sometimes Dan, but their concern could reach only so far.

I decided I needed to see a psychiatrist and get on some sort of anti-depressant or mood stabilizer, and Sarah recommended someone who did God's work, since I was losing my health insurance, which I'd had through Steph. I met with the guy one afternoon and recounted the recent traumatic events, said I was in near constant hysteria and I wasn't sure how I could endure it much longer. Not a problem, he said, and he prescribed Wellbutrin, one of the many scripts Steph's friend, Lisa, was on.
Fantastic
, I thought.

It was about here that I started going crazy.

The Wellbutrin combined with the Xanax and the gin kept me awake for days on end.

I could get it together to drive to the hospital every morning by 8:00 a.m., listen to Steph's mother and father discuss any updates, sit with Steph for a while and stroke her hand, let her know I was there, then talk with her parents in order to figure out what the next steps were and where she was headed. I would pick up any visiting friends or relatives from the airport and bring them to the hospital, and then at about 3:00 p.m., I'd see if anyone needed any rides anywhere, needed anything further, and then I'd head home, with a stop by the liquor store en route.

I had managed to move Cleo from Sarah's house to the home of a friend who ran the karate school and was a veterinarian, along with her husband, and had a pack of three rescue dogs where Cleo would feel right at home. Couldn't have been more perfect for her.

This was a great solution, since the only time I was left alone with her, while I was house-sitting at Andrew's for Christmas, a few weeks after Steph's accident, I managed to lose her. Fucking dog took off through the side door and it was twenty degrees outside, and I'd been drunk for two days and had forgotten that Andy didn't have the end of his yard secured. The dog took off and started running around a busy street, and I lost my shit and chased after her in the dark and cold, ran around the neighborhood for an hour before I gave up, thinking,
Fuck, now I've done it, now I've lost the fucking dog
, when she showed up at the door with a stupid smile, asking to be let back in. I was so upset with her, I put one of Andrew's daughter's fake mustaches on the dog and took humiliating photos of her and put them on Facebook, as retribution. See if she does THAT again.

Later on, when things started getting really serious for my mental health, I was much more destructive, much more in need of professional health care, much more dangerous.

I'd gone for more than four days without sleep. I just couldn't fall off, couldn't stay down. When I'd lie down to sleep, lie on my side and curl up with a pillow, I'd get these violent hypnic jerks, the long muscle twitches, short muscle spasms. Nothing would help. I'd chug a bottle of wine and take ten Benadryl. I'd drink most of a bottle of NyQuil. I'd drink a six-pack and gin, then take sleeping pills. I'd be groggy, chemical sludge in my veins, but dead awake. I'd watch horror movies on Netflix, or romcoms, or a full series, but nothing stopped my brain from exploding like fireworks. I was finally going completely crazy, and when I realized how far down my mental health was, it was almost reassuring: At least I knew what to call it. Like when an exorcist gets the demon's name.

One day, Sarah came by to tell me that I needed an intervention. It was 10:00 a.m. and she'd made her way through my building, had knocked on my door, and I was sitting talking to her while my body was blooming in sweat. I had a towel and I'd wipe down my head and back—I'd removed my shirt to show her what I was going through—and I sat there, opposite her, while my body blossomed from the top of my head to my knees in a sweat flower, in eight-minute cycles, and she was at once repulsed and fascinated, and asked how long that had been happening.

“Three days,” I said. “I can't sleep.”

She helped me make a number of emergency appointments and even drove me to an emergency room to have my blood pressure checked. It was through the roof: 210/160. I saw the nurse actually blanch when she took it again, to make sure she had it right the first time, and I thought,
Fuck, I'm going to have that stroke after all
, and I waited for them to give me something to get it down, but instead they just had me sit and talk with Sarah for a half hour, and sonofabitch if it didn't decrease considerably, just with us talking quietly.

When she left, I took a long shower and tried to get it together so I could visit Steph once again.

At this point Steph had been moved to a long-term care place, a nursing home in West Seattle, and they were not managing her very well. There had been no “magic moment” where her eyes fluttered open and she regained consciousness. She had simply started moving around more, and it looked as if she was trying to focus her attention on you, and then something else would catch her eye, and she'd spend all her time looking at that. It was unnerving, watching her focus like that. She never stopped squirming. They had her in an ordinary bed, and she shifted and moved and squirmed so much that she was in constant danger of falling off the side. Also, she never slept. Neither of us was sleeping; we had that in common.

These types of facilities, nursing homes, were very common to me because of Dan's career. I knew how they operated, and I knew the characters and nurses and people to talk to there, how to navigate them. I actually felt a bit safer in this environment than I had at the ICU, and I was both encouraged that she'd been released there and also frightened: I had this image of Steph recovering only so far as the sad, shattered patients I'd seen who lived in nursing homes the remainder of their lives, medicated and broken, the light in their eyes a soft glimmer of the person they once were, smoking in the restricted areas and wearing pajamas, their hands clutching a newspaper or dog-eared paperback, looking at you sadly as you left from your visit, remembering who you were together, and it just tore my heart apart, imagining that this could possibly be in her future.

She'd begun therapy there, was developing enough cognitive ability that the therapists had started her on small rehabilitative programs. She still hadn't slept, that I remember, never stopped looking and shifting and writhing in her bed, not so far. This was now late January, early February, and I'd missed my fortieth birthday, like in
The Great Gatsby
. It was also my writing deadline: I had made it a point to decide whether I was going to continue writing, keeping alive my secret wish to publish as an author, or give it up entirely and start really sharpening my skills as a designer and learning web design in earnest—basically, the “I give up my dreams” point. I still took my notebooks with me everywhere I went at this time, would cite notes and make little observations and comments while I sat in waiting rooms, sat at hospital bedsides, bars near my home.

But that day just slipped past, like every other.

Instead of any celebration, I went home and lay in bed, about my sixth night without sleep, and I lay there thinking about Steph and feeling horrible and guilty, decided that I would frame photos of her and bring them to the home and place them all around to warm up the place. Her mother had made all these posters and lurid banners, used Tibetan prayer flags as decorations, and created these placards with an entirely fictionalized depiction of Steph as a human being and had posted them all around the bedside. Steph would have been insane with anger at the sight of them, at their failure to describe who she really was, and I was equally upset with the inaccuracy of the description, for some reason. I'm not sure why.

Her mother listed a number of authors as “Steph's Favorites,” which Steph had at one point or another made clear she despised. Her mother recorded a number of “favorite movies” that Steph had never seen, music, painters, and so on. It was awful, and a reproduction of the daughter her mother wanted, not the daughter she had.

All this was creating an atmosphere of tension and growing menace.

I drove to the nursing home around 2:30 that morning with my stack of framed photos and saw that her room was lit up and a number of people were already there. “Oh,” I said, “Nice to see everyone here.”

They looked happy to see me and welcomed me in, not telling me anything at all, and I came in with the photos and placed them all about. I didn't think anything about the fact that Steph was on the floor on a series of mats, because that made much more sense to me, given that she had been shifting and moving and in constant danger of falling off the bed since she had arrived. Around 3:30 a.m., they turned off the lights and I lay there next to her, with her not sleeping or making any sort of acknowledgement that she saw me even when she looked right at me. I kept whispering to her, “Sleep, Stephanie; go to sleep, sweetheart; stop moving, please. Come on, you can sleep, just close your eyes, just close your eyes and sleep,” but she wouldn't; she'd just keep staring at me and through me, and I couldn't sleep either, because my body was doing the same thing, shifting and twitching and moving, and I couldn't stop, not for longer than three seconds or so because of the Xanax, as I lay there on the mat next to her in my karate jumper, trying to keep warm and keep her safe. We spent the night lying next to one another like that, until about 7:00 a.m., when breakfast time came, and I had to go home because I had to work that day.

I could hear it in his voice that morning, when I first spoke to him. Alfred was the publisher of the bilingual “newspaper” I was producing and the owner of the Hispanic media company out of eastern Washington and was my boss, and he was never any good at diplomacy. I heard the switch in his voice when we were talking about that issue's content, and I knew my number was up. He didn't have the business sophistication to disguise or massage the message that he'd made the choice to let me go, as a contract employee, and in order to delay the news I changed the subject and said that I had to take another call.

But I knew it was in the mail. I just knew it. Unbelievable, that he'd do this to me, after his whole, “As Hispanics, we're all a big family and should look out for one another” speech, that while Steph was in a fucking coma, he'd let my contract end and refused to renew it for the next year. I was making decent money for a print designer, but obviously, the Republican side of Alfred's “Mexican Businessman” thing saw this as too large an expense, and I knew I was out. Also, I had no benefits to speak of, since I was on contract.

I couldn't fucking believe it. Another bottom falling out from under.

Alfred and his wife were second-generation Mexican Americans living here in Washington State, the children of fruit pickers and farm laborers, and they reminded me entirely of the people I knew back home. That's why it had all worked so well, when we'd started. But this—he knew what I was going through, he knew about Steph—for him to cut me out like this at this time, my head was just exploding.

Un-fucking-believable.

Everyone fucks you. Here's the trick: When it comes right down to it, when you're down,
everyone
fucks you. It's better if you just accept it.

It's entirely biological: When your luck turns bad, the herd wants you out, subconsciously.

I didn't give Alfred the opportunity to introduce the topic of my penury that morning so I was able to ingest it myself, first. I didn't want to attack him and needed a chance to center myself. I knew his speech would be pathetic and bilingual and Christianly and Republican—he was like Reagan, in the '80s, who conspicuously gave veterans awards for service, then cut VA benefits left and right.

And I wasn't sure I couldn't keep from yelling and cursing him, though I had started cursing him, deeply and profoundly, in my heart, cursing his kids and his wife and his family, hoping the most horrible fucking things would befall him, that he'd know what I'd been living, would eventually face what I was facing, but I knew that I had to keep this quiet.

So I made an excuse and cut off the call, and he sounded relieved that he hadn't had to have that conversation with me just yet.