They didn't really start for months after Gabriel left; the episodes. For a long time, i mean weeks and weeks, she just wouldn't get out of bed. She just kept saying she was tired and I believed her because, I mean, she slept all the time. Not without a little chemical help, of course. Then she started crying, just sitting on the bed,staring at the wall crying and I almost wanted her to keep taking the pills because it was driving me crazy, just insane with rage, like she wanted me to just feel guilty every time I was in the room with her.
Then came the first episode. When the episodes started, so did the major semantic change in reference to them, to all of it. Bad day failed as a euphemism though we clung to it desperately and people, those who braved to inquire, knew it was their duty to smile and say "I'm sorry to hear that," and not ask for anything more from us.
I came home from the police station (I kept going there for months even after this; I couldn't stop going it had grown to be a habit) walked into our empty house, and of course, the first thing I did was call out for Cecilia. We had closed the hotel for a while but now my father and I had kept it running, had hired more people and taken in a little less money for ourselves but we had guests and most of them didn't even know the nature of our problem even if they had a vague idea. This was after months of progress and so naturally any scene made by Cecilia would be nothing short of devastating.
I looked through the whole house, even in places I thought she would never be. I should have looked in the hotel first and that was exactly what I was thinking as I ran across the solid three acres that separate the big plantation house from our modest carriage house. It is all uphill, up stone steps pounded into the side of the slope for guests even though they have little reason to come down to our house. The steps lead to the back door, the pantry door which is situated in what is basically the basement of the house (put in by my uncle in the sixties; it cost him his life savings to have that kind of work done).
The basement is solid stone all around, smelling always of bitter metal you can almost feel on your tongue. It is basically one long hallway with various rooms branching off: a large laundry room, an employee locker room with a shower, a deep, dark maintenance room with a private bathroom in the corner even I don't like to go into, and two smaller rooms both used for storage though they weren't originally intended for that. Naturally I didn't think Cecilia would be down there. She told me over and over that she hated it down there, that she felt like something was always lurking. I could understand that such a feeling would be quite frightening, so I was going to pass straight through the basement and on up into the house. But I heard noises coming from the maintenance room--that exact room, and when I opened the door the light was on, and across the way the bathroom door was open and I could hear the sharp, tinny sound of something being violently broken by the blunt force of something else, and the small, delicate grunts of effort coming from my tired wife's lungs.
Naturally I ran in, and I nearly lost my head as she swung a fucking sledgehammer over her shoulder and then down again onto the tile floor of the bathroom. She had already taken out the whole wall that once stood behind the sink and the mirror. The sink was in pieces, the pipes exposed and spitting out water, the mirror sparkling all over the floor. Cecilia's hands were bleeding and she looked like she had been at it for a while, having made it through the tile to the floorboards. Some of them in a torn pile in the corner like firewood. Cecilia raised the hammer one more time and I grabbed it, took it from her easily. She spun around quick and looked at me with these eyes like she wanted blood and could get it with her bare hands. For a moment I just stood there holding the sledgehammer, until she said something. Her eyes were so red, the rest of her chalk white.
I don't even know why I'm doing this, she said, you've obviously found them already.
Found what?
She started to cry.
"Don't say 'found what' Nathan," she said, "they'd be here if you didn't know they were here. Why didn't you just tell me you knew they were here?"
"Come on, you're under enough stress as it is."
She became angry and said that if I had just told her, she would have been saved the stress of having to break the bathroom apart looking for them.
"I had a secret spot for them," she said, "that hole in the wall behind the cabinet."
She pointed to the place where they would have been had there still been a wall. But of course, there wasn't. And there wasn't anything left to hide there, either.
"When did you find them?"
I have always been a quick thinker.
"I came down here to fix it. Randy said he saw mice down here and I thought they were coming in through there."
She covered her face because she was ashamed and I couldn't take that, so I held her close and said, "I knew you would come to a point where you didn't need it anymore. I knew you could do it on your own. And think about it, that stuff's been gone out of here for going on six months now."
I could feel her tense up against me, her face locking against some kind of realization.
"Right when Gabriel left."
I nod.
"You know I needed something to distract myself. Randy mentioned the mice...I didn't think it was the right thing to tell you about it."
Her spindly little hands curled around my back and she held me close and said, "I wish they were still here. I wanted to find them so badly. Are you sure they're not here?"
I didn't let her go even when she wanted me to.
"No, sweetheart. They're not here."
That was when I first seriously thought about quitting. Right then and there, no more drinks. Not while Cecilia's tearing apart the house for her secret stash of pills and booze. Sobriety and honesty. That could become our motto, I thought. Sobriety and honesty. But she still needed her shit. She needed it more and more, the more she had to get out of bed and greet the guests. She needed her pills to do her hair properly, to put on her lipstick without screwing it up. She needed them to smile and shake hands.
Valium. Like anything else, it was once here to help her.
She made it six more days before the first episode occurred.
I woke up in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, a neurological impulse that began only after getting married and having sons. The bed was empty beside me and cold, like she'd been gone a while.
One more frantic search of a creepy old house, embarrassing and desperate and clueless. My only comfort was that all seemed normal in the place; dark and quiet like it should have been; no scenes made, no hysterics yet. I looked in the lobby, in the lounge, in every hallway, every linen closet. I asked the employees, I told them all to start looking I didn't care if everyone left their posts but it wouldn't make a difference; there weren't too many people working at that hour of the night. So I ended up going into the woods by myself, running along the path and calling calling for her. Dutch and a few others were tagging along behind me, the house having been searched endlessly by the few night attendants we had at the time.
It was nearly Thanksgiving and freezing and when we finally found her she was over a mile away but thankfully on the path. She was just past the boundary between our land and the farm we had sold to the county so the off ramp could be put in. Most of the land was still usable, still good for cultivation back then, and the land closest to us still grew juniper. I remember smelling it, feeling it down in my throat, when I followed a bend in the path and saw her. She was barefoot and walking fast, calling out Gabriel's name. When I ran up to her she grabbed my hand and said, "Oh good! You brought a flashlight! I saw him. I saw him through the window. He took the path so I followed him, of course."
She pulled ahead like her arm was a leash and she was an eager pet and I almost followed her into the woods but stopped her and when she looked at me she was like a child and I knew things had gotten bad. I felt things had gotten bad when I woke up without her, when I called and called and couldn't find her. But this was evidence. Her nightgown was ripped, her feet and ankles filthy and her lips were turning purple but she didn't seem to notice.
"Who did you see?"
Though I didn't need to ask. Of course I didn't need to ask.
"Who do you think? Gabriel, stupid!"
She goes to run again and I pull her back. Naturally, she starts to lose it, pulling against me, telling me "we're losing him, we're going to lose him if we don't go now!"
And she starts calling his name and cupping her hand over her mouth, calling louder and louder and saying, "Come on in, it's freezing out here!"
It took three of us to get her back into the house and she was calling Gabriel's name the whole time, the sound of it going from light and beckoning to raw and desperate as she began to realize her foray into the woods was over. Then she was calling his name like he might come help her, come rescue her from her captors. Then she called again and again and I knew the delusion was over. She was calling for him the way she called in the middle of the night after a nightmare she never told me about. She called for him like she was standing over his grave.
That was the first time I ever had to set foot in the psychiatric unit of White Chapel Medical Center. The first time in a long time I had to deal with a social worker and the first time i had to leave anyone in my family at the hospital overnight. But there was no way she could go home with us. We were carrying her into the hospital and she was still calling for Gabriel. She had sat in the backseat with Dutch and Randy and said his name like a broken record.
Gabriel. Gabriel. Gabriel.
Almost immediately she was given a shot and she went to sleep and the nurses carried her off as if there was some hurry and the doctor says "we're going to take good care of her, she just needs to rest, we've given her something to help her relax and we're going to put her on a Thorazine drip for the night..."
They wouldn't let me stay the night. They said, "get home to your son."
The next day when I went to get her, she looked like a photograph that had been crumpled up and then flattened again by someone's hands. Her hair was limp all around her and it didn't remind me of a mermaid like it used to and this was the first time I really thought she was starting to look old and yes, this was what I was thinking about when the nurse signed her over to me.
Dr. Patton, an officious little black woman with round little glasses and her hair all pulled back, she sat there across her desk with her pictures all angled so that I could see them; her beautiful daughters, her beautiful husband, her beautiful home, all free from the horrid burden of mental illness. She talked about psychosis. She talked about recent trauma and depression. She asks me,
"Has your wife experienced any recent trauma?"
"Our son ran away about eight months ago. We thought we were close to finding him a few times but...every time it turns out to be a disappointment, she gets worse."
She nodded her head with her eyebrows pressed. She glanced down at her daughters and I don't blame her. But when she spoke again she sounded pretty sensitive and she didn't insult my intelligence. Cecilia would take anti-depressants and for a trial period, antipsychotics, just to see.
Already I felt like a traitor by being there, in that office, with that woman. I didn't say anything and Dr. Patton leaned forward, lessening the space between us and she said, "are you prepared to go forward as her legal guardian? I know it is difficult to have to make certain decisions, and you will have a great many to make but it is very important for you to adopt this way of thinking."
"What way of thinking is that?"
"The understanding that your wife's wants and needs may not necessarily be in her best interest. I'm sorry, I know it's difficult."
I asked her what kind of medication.
"Something like Zyprexa. Should be safe with Fluoxetine."
I still don't know why but at that moment, in my mind, I started to hear this Jeff Buckley song, this song "Mojo Pin." Some song Gabe used to listen to all the time, and Jeff's squealing falsetto began to drown out this woman's voice and I was lost in this vivid memory of barging into Gabriel's room. I had barged in and yelled at him to turn that flaming homo off or I would bust one of his eardrums. We had had a pretty bad round earlier, so he did.
Dr. Patton said my name, asked me if I was alright. I think she may have been talking for a while before I began to hear her again.
She asked me if I thought Cecilia would agree to the medication.
"She's been on anti-depressants before. She'll agree," I said.
Dr. Patton smiled a little bit, the first smile of the whole conversation, like somehow she had just gotten her way. She said, "we'll take it one step at a time."
We'll. That made me feel better. She gave me her card and my dirty thumb put an ugly smudge on it right away.
I took Cecilia home and she seemed to be herself, just groggy and horribly, horribly depressed. She hardly blinked and the whole ride she just stared out the window, her chin in her hand, until she fell asleep again. I was relieved. I carried her into the house and put her in our bed and covered her up then looked for something in the top of the closet, in the drawers, under the bed, in the bathroom, everywhere. I had taken to doing this for months now and I never found anything. I put a glass of water on the table by Cecilia and went downstairs, looking for my father.
He was sitting on the back porch in a lawn chair, smoking a cigar. It was deadly hot and yet he still had a thick cube of ice in his tumbler of good old Jack. I stood behind him, looking out past him into the yard. He didn't even turn his head to look at me and I decided it would be easier that way, so good. He had the bottle of Jack on the table next to him and he was smacking his lips after every sip, playing with his glass and clinking the ice around and waiting for me to say something.
"You know, I'd think that you'd try to support my efforts to quit, dad. Do you forget the conversation we had?"
"Oh, son, of course I remember. And I think it's a great idea. But if you can't watch an old man enjoy a drink without sweatin, you're in trouble."
"I'm going away. There's a place in Greenville I've heard good things about."
Then dad asked me about the boys. Both of them.
"Matty will be fine with you. He likes you more than me anyway."
"And what about Gabriel?"
"What about him?"
This was eight months, two weeks and six days. I wasn't about to let it become a year.
"You were there, dad. Wallace said even if we had the money and the resources, Gabriel is the least likely--"
"Oh, horseshit--"
"--to be found if he chose to disappear--"
"--You're not trying hard enough and you want to give up."
"I don't want to give up. I want to get sober. And I really want it, not like before. Not just because I know I need to."
Dad sat up on the chair and swung his legs over the edge so that he was turned towards me.
"You don't have to justify yourself to me, son," he says, "I wish you the best of luck. We all gotta quit sometime, right?"
I thought back in my mind, at that moment, to the times in my childhood when my father would be gone, for days, for weeks and sometimes months, to some drying-up place out of state, and I would sit for as much time with my uncle, who really pressed the Bible readings during those particular times. My father had only recently returned to drinking in his older years, after some thirty-five years without a sip, he said to me one day, "I'm not living the rest of my life without a taste of fine whiskey."
But there on the porch, the drink in his hand, he said to me, "Just think of Gabriel whenever you start to lose your resolve. It'll guilt you right back into sobriety."
My father's addiction had never really touched me directly as a child. There were no slamming doors, no cruel slaps to the face, not even a drunken insult. I stood there looking at his drink, at ice cube melting down into a sliver in his glass, and searched my memory for an image, a word, a clumsy stumble to use against him as he was belittling me. But there was nothing, which meant only that my father was even a more successful alcoholic than I ever was.
He looked at me with his eyes wide and quick, repeated nods of his head, and said,
"trust me. It works."
