Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel (14 page)

Just last night, I woke up to pee. I was half asleep, with no concept of myself, a blank, and then the data started reloading—
Bernadette Fox—Twenty Mile House destroyed—I deserved it—I’m a failure.
Failure has got its teeth in me, and it won’t stop shaking.

Ask me about the Twenty Mile House now, I’m a twister of nonchalance.
That old thing? Who cares?
It’s my false front, and I’m sticking to it.

When the miscarriages started, Elgie was there for me, leaning in.

“It’s all my fault,” I’d say.

“No, Bernadette,” he’d say. “It’s not your fault.”

“I deserve this,” I’d say.

“Nobody deserves this.”

“I can’t make anything without destroying it,” I’d say.

“Please, Bernadette, that’s not true.”

“I’m a monster,” I’d say. “How can you possibly love me?”

“Because I know you.”

What Elgie didn’t know was that I was using his words to help me heal from an even deeper grief than the miscarriages, a grief I couldn’t admit to: grief over the Twenty Mile House. Elgie still doesn’t know. Which just adds to my bottomless, churning shame, that I have become so demented and dishonest, a stranger to the most brilliant and honorable man I’ve ever met.

The only thing you can blame Elgie for is he makes life look so damn simple: do what you love. In his case, that means working, spending time with his family, and reading presidential biographies.

Yes, I’ve hauled my sorry ass to a shrink. I went to some guy here, the best in Seattle. It took me about three sessions to fully chew the poor fucker up and spit him out. He felt terrible about failing me. “Sorry,” he said, “but the psychiatrists up here aren’t very good.”

I bought a house when we got here. This crazy reform school for girls with every building restriction conceivable attached. To make something of it would require Harry Houdini ingenuity. This, of course, appealed to me. I truly intended to recover from the body blow of the Twenty Mile House by making a home for me and Elgie and the baby I was always pregnant with. Then I’d sit on the toilet and look down, my upper body a capital C, and there it was, blood on my underpants, and I’d weep to Elgie all over again.

When I finally stayed pregnant, our daughter’s heart hadn’t developed completely, so it had to be rebuilt in a series of operations. Her chances for survival were minuscule, especially back then. The moment she was born, my squirming blue guppy was whisked off to the OR before I could touch her.

Five hours later, the nurse came around and gave me the shot to dry up my milk. The surgery had been botched. Our baby wasn’t strong enough to endure another one.

Here’s what inconsolable looks like: me sitting in my car in the parking lot of Children’s Hospital, all the windows rolled up, wearing my hospital gown, twelve inches of pads between my legs and Elgie’s parka over my shoulders, Elgie standing outside in the dark, trying to make me out through fogged windows. I was all torture and adrenaline. I had no thoughts, no emotions. Inside me roiled something so terrible that God knew he had to keep my baby alive, or this torrent within me would be unleashed on the universe.

Ten in the morning, a knock on the windshield. “We can see her now,” Elgie said. That’s when I met Bee. She was sleeping peacefully in her incubator, a little blue loaf with a yellow cap on, the sheets perfectly stretched across her chest. There were wires and tubes stuck on and in every piece of her. Beside her towered a rack of thirteen monitors. She was plugged into every one. “Your daughter,” the nurse said. “She’s been through a lot.”

I understood then that Bee was
other
and that she had been entrusted to me. You know those posters of baby Krishna, “Balakrishna,” as he’s known, the incarnation of Vishnu, the creator and destroyer, and he’s fat and happy and
blue?
That’s what Bee was, the creator and the destroyer. It was just so obvious.

“She’s not going to
die
,” I said to the nurses, like they were the stupidest people on earth. “She’s Balakrishna.” The name was put on her birth certificate. The only reason Elgie played along was because he knew the grief counselor was scheduled to meet with us in an hour.

I asked to be left alone with my daughter. Elgie once gave me a locket of Saint Bernadette, who had eighteen visions. He said Beeber Bifocal and Twenty Mile were my first two visions. I dropped to my knees at Bee’s incubator and grabbed my locket. “I will never build again,” I said to God. “I will renounce my other sixteen visions if you’ll keep my baby alive.” It worked.

Nobody in Seattle likes me. The day I got here, I went to Macy’s to buy a mattress. I asked if someone could help me. “You’re not from around here, are you?” the lady said. “I can tell from your energy.” What kind of energy was that? That I asked to be helped by a mattress saleslady in a mattress department?

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been in the middle of a perfunctory conversation, and someone will say, “Tell us what you
really
think.” Or “Maybe you should switch to decaf.” I blame the proximity to Canada. Let’s leave it at that; otherwise I’ll get onto the subject of Canadians, and that’s something you seriously don’t have time for.

I recently made one friend, though, a woman named Manjula, who runs my errands for me all the way from India. She’s virtual, but it’s a start.

The motto of this city should be the immortal words spoken by that French field marshal during the siege of Sebastopol,
“J’y suis, j’y reste”
—“I am here, and here I shall remain.” People are born here, they grow up here, they go to the University of Washington, they work here, they die here. Nobody has any desire to leave. You ask them, “What is it again that you love so much about Seattle?” and they answer, “We have everything. The mountains and the water.” This is their explanation, mountains and water.

As much as I try not to engage people in the grocery checkout, I couldn’t resist one day when I overheard one refer to Seattle as “cosmopolitan.” Encouraged, I asked, “Really?” She said, Sure, Seattle is full of people from all over. “Like where?” Her answer, “Alaska. I have a ton of friends from Alaska.” Whoomp, there it is.

Let’s play a game. I’ll say a word, and you say the first word that pops into your head. Ready?

ME:
Seattle.

YOU:
Rain.

What you’ve heard about the rain: it’s all true. So you’d think it would become part of the fabric, especially among the lifers. But
every time it rains
, and you have to interact with someone, here’s what they’ll say: “Can you believe the weather?” And you want to say, “Actually, I
can
believe the weather. What I can’t believe is that I’m actually having a conversation about the weather.” But I don’t say that, you see, because that would be instigating a fight, something I try my best to avoid, with mixed results.

Getting into fights with people makes my heart race.
Not
getting into fights with people makes my heart race. Even sleeping makes my heart race! I’m lying in bed when the thumping arrives, like a foreign invader. It’s a horrible dark mass, like the monolith in
2001
, self-organized but completely unknowable, and it enters my body and releases adrenaline. Like a black hole, it sucks in any benign thoughts that might be scrolling across my brain and attaches visceral panic to them. For instance, during the day I might have mused, Hey, I should pack more fresh fruit in Bee’s lunch. That night, with the arrival of The Thumper, it becomes, I’VE GOT TO PACK MORE FRESH FRUIT IN BEE’S LUNCH!!! I can feel the irrationality and anxiety draining my store of energy like a battery-operated racecar grinding away in the corner. This is energy I will need to get through the next day. But I just lie in bed and watch it burn, and with it any hope for a productive tomorrow. There go the dishes, there goes the grocery store, there goes exercise, there goes bringing in the garbage cans. There goes basic human kindness. I wake up in a sweat so thorough I sleep with a pitcher of water by the bed or I might die of dehydration.

Oh, Paul, do you remember that place down the street from the Twenty Mile House, on La Brea, with the rosewater ice cream and they’d let us have meetings there and use their phone? I’d love you to meet Bee.

I know what you’re wondering: When on earth do I find time to
shower? I don’t! I can go for days. I’m a mess, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve gotten into a dispute with a neighbor—yes! again!—and this time, in retaliation, I put up a sign and inadvertently destroyed her house. Can you fucking believe it?

The tale of woe begins in kindergarten. The school Bee attends is wild about parental involvement. They’re always wanting us to sign up for committees. I never do, of course. One of the parents, Audrey Griffin, approached me in the hall one day.

“I see you didn’t sign up for any committees,” she said, all smiles and daggers.

“I’m not so much into committees,” I said.

“What about your husband?” she asked.

“He’s even less into them than I am.”

“So neither of you believes in community?” she asked.

By now, a gaggle of moms was circling, relishing this long-overdue confrontation with the sick girl’s antisocial mom. “I don’t know if community is something you do or don’t
believe
in,” I answered.

A few weeks later, I went into Bee’s classroom and there was a thing up called the Wonderwall. On it, kids wrote questions like, “I wonder what children in Russia eat for breakfast?” or “I wonder what makes an apple red or green?” I was bursting with cuteness when I came upon the following, “I wonder why all the parents except one volunteer in the classroom?” Written by Kyle Griffin, spawn of the trout.

I never liked this kid, Kyle. In kindergarten, Bee had one hell of a scar blazing the length of her chest. (It’s melted away with time, but back then, it was a beaut.) One day, Kyle saw Bee’s scar and called her “Caterpillar.” I wasn’t thrilled when Bee told me, of course, but kids are cruel, and Bee wasn’t even that upset. I let it go. The principal, who knew this kid was a bad seed, used Bee as cover and convened a bullying forum.

A year later, still miffed after the Wonderwall, I got over my bad self
and actually signed up for my first volunteer job, as a parent driver for a school visit to Microsoft. I was in charge of four kids: Bee and three others, including this kid Kyle Griffin. We were walking past a bunch of candy machines. (Microsoft has candy machines everywhere, set so that without putting in money you can push a button and candy will come out.) Young Goodman Griffin, because his default is low-grade destruction, whacked a machine. A candy bar dropped down. So he just started banging the shit out of the machines, and all the kids joined in, including Bee. Candy and soda tumbled to the floor, the kids screaming, jumping up and down. It was too fabulous, something out of
A Clockwork Orange
. Just then, another group of kids, chaperoned by the principal herself, happened upon our mini-droog rampage. “Which one of you started this?” she demanded.

“Nobody started it,” I said. “It’s my fault.”

What does Kyle do, but raise his hand and rat himself out. “It was me.” His mother, Audrey, has hated me ever since, and she’s gotten the other moms in on the action.

So why didn’t I switch schools? The other good schools I could have sent Bee to… well, to get to them, I’d have to drive past a Buca di Beppo. I hated my life enough without having to drive past a Buca di Beppo four times a day.

Are you bored yet? God, I am.

In a nutshell: Once when I was a kid, there was an Easter egg hunt at the country club, and I found a golden egg, which entitled me to a baby bunny. My parents weren’t at all amused. But they grimly bought a hutch and we set up the bunny in our apartment on Park Avenue. I named the rabbit Sailor. That summer, I went away to camp, and my parents repaired to Long Island, leaving Sailor in the apartment with instructions for the maid to feed him. We returned at the end of August to find that Gloria had run off two months prior, with the silverware
and Mom’s jewelry. I ran to Sailor’s hutch to see if he’d made it through alive. He was backed into the corner, shivering, and in the most wretched condition: he had become so malnourished that his fur had grown horribly long, his body’s attempt to compensate for his slow metabolism and low temperature. His claws were an inch long, and worse, his front teeth had curled over his lower lip so he could hardly open his mouth. Apparently, rabbits need to be chewing on hard things like carrots; otherwise their teeth will grow. Terrified, I opened the cage door to hug little Sailor, but, in a spastic fury, he started scratching my face and neck. I still have the scars. Without anyone attending to him, he had gone feral.

That’s what’s happened to me, in Seattle. Come at me, even in love, and I’ll scratch the hell out of you. ’Tis a piteous fate to have befallen a MacArthur genius, wouldn’t you say? Poof.

Bernadette,

Are you done? You can’t honestly believe any of this nonsense. People like you must create. If you don’t create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.