Remembering the day of my suicide, I see myself at the hospitalās intake desk, holding in my nail-bitten hand a red and white health insurance card embossed with the seal of Harvard University. Veritas, it promises: Truth. Weighing in the low triple digits, Iām sheathed in a black knit minidress with a boat neck (Vogue headline: SUICIDE DRESSING: THE FINAL CHALLENGE).
In sobriety, I havenāt so much gone insane as awakened to the depth and breadth of my preexisting insanity, a bone-deep sadness or a sense of having been a mistake. Maybe because I feel I am not now who I was then, I have to stare askance at that time, squint to see past clotted and curdled thunderheads to the initial instant of what then seemed like my last crashāa time I now call my nervous breakthrough.
The woman who takes my insurance card has tangerine-colored nails and a soft Caribbean accent. She hands me a fistful of pink tissues and asks do I want some herb tea. She keeps some in her drawer. Itās Sunday, and the office is empty but for her and a guy in golf clothes in the corner.
I want the tea but say no thank you, for thatās how I believe the human economy worksāon some perverse system in which people who offer to do nice things for me are furtively pissed off by acceptance. So itās better to refuse most kindnesses I come across, an interpretive model of human behavior thatāitās clear enough nowāfosters the crappiest of conceivable attitudes in me.
Itās no bother, she says. Iām getting some tea for myself.
The warmth beaming from her face canāt reach me. Iām too bent over some rotted core, as if to protect it from her. She stands, and a glance from the golf-clothes guy makes me want to crawl under her desk.
God how pale I look in the hospital. Crying through my globbed-up mascara has pinched my lashes into clownlike points, and the swollen eyes give me a lizard look. And rivers of snot I keep honking into wads of pink tissue. How long have I been crying? Days, in some ways, years.
(If I could tap my own shoulder, Iād say, Of course youāre crying, honey. Youāre fucking starving. Drive through a burger joint. Hell, super-size it, spring for a shake. Then go home and take a bath with some dish detergent. Tell your son youāve gone to Tahiti for an hour. Take the longest bath in the world.)
Iām so watery at my edges, so permeable, so easy to hurt, and my inner monologueāwhat you would hear more or less constantly, should we turn up the volume on itāwent, Oh shit, stupid bitch. Whatāve you done now? Fuckup fuckup fuckupā¦The only way I know to twist the volume off is to choke it with exhaust.
Hence my need for custodial care at the place all Harvard spouses go. The diagnosis was underwhelming: severe depression, along with insomnia and unfettered sobbing. With the taglineāpersistent suicidal ideationācame the inpatient recommendation of my therapist, whose house Iād been driven to by Granada House staff. My shrink had been on her way out of the country, and maybe I had the sense to go inpatient before she vanished.
The intake nurse brings me back a steaming mug of tea, taking from her drawer packets of honey and sugar and little red plastic stirring sticks, and the small civility of this makes me want to run out the door. Iām in a state of mind that can only be described as feral.
She settles back to typing the form, asking, You and your husband are at the same address?
We go back and forth, I say. Weāve been separated less than a month.
Iāve refused to call my husband so far, though my therapist rang him before she arranged for me to get admitted. The mere sound of Warrenās voice would slam down on me a sledgehammer of guilt at leaving him to care for Dev solo.
If my four-year-old has a nightmareāa new trend since his dad and I split upāI pretend to unscrew his head and shake the scary parts out, and thatās what I hope the hospital staff can do for me. (Ever notice, a lady in a meeting once said, that people only shoot themselves in the head?)
After the paperwork is done, two large but understated men show up to steer me to the ward.
Before I walk out, the Caribbean lady studies my face with a notch in her brow. (Where is she now? Maybe she told her husband about me that night, or maybe she just got on her chubby knees to pray for some peace in me, and maybe thatās why Iām alive to type this. Dear Caribbean lady, last seen typing up my plastic wrist bracelet: You mattered.)
One guy offers to carry my purse, and I start to say no thanks when I realize I signed away my purse and who gets to carry it the instant my name flourished across the paper saying I was a danger to myself.
We cross the sloping green hills as evening comes across, me bookended between the two men. The high windows on the redbrick buildings with shades half drawn seem like lidded eyes looking down at my collapse. The grass level is straight as any crew cut. The grounds seem grander than my college.
Are you at Harvard? one guy says.
My husband works there, I say. I teach one class.
I feel so dead inside, as if the giant oaks are moving across us rather than us under them. I wonder aloud if Iāll keep that teaching job after my stay.
No worries, the other guy says.
Itās true that Warrenās former teacher Robert Lowell wrote of himself among the blue-blooded āMayflower screwballsā here in Bow-ditch Hall.
We reach a metal door, gray as a slab, and one guy draws a heavy ring of keys from his belt. Without warning, I think of my son. The image comes unprompted and hits me like a linebackerās tackle, with the force of Old Testament thunder that all but knocks the wind out of me.
If I were right in the head, Iād at that instant be bathing him, gathering his slippery body from the suds, rubbing his head hard with a towel. I could pause to bury my face in his buttery neck.
I could ponder Warren making the bed as Dev bounced naked on it, his sturdy body flying under the flapping mainsail of our king-size sheets. How Warren would bundle him up like a ghost and wrestle him down and let him escapeāthe pure loving ritual of all that Iāve walked away from.
The attendant slides the key into first one heavy metal door, then another. Each man holds one open for me, and itās all I can do to keep from buckling in half, folding up like a lawn chair.
But my legs obediently carry me into the metal stairwell. I hear the deadbolts twist behind, and a clawed panic starts scrabbling through me.
We face a final door whose long glass window is embedded with chicken wire. Through it, I see people move as in slow motion. The door swings open, and their heads turn curiously to stare at me, and stepping onto the ward, I smell piss.
Piss is the territorial marking of the predatory animal. It also signals the uncontrolled release of fear in terrorized prey. I know people pissing in hospital corridors is frowned on and must be quickly mopped up. But the smell persists anyway, and as I enter that urinous climate, the kernel of fear Iād kept buried in my center cracks through its shellac casing. Terror begins to sprout its black ivy up my spine and down along the insides of my arms. I become very small then, telescoping down in some inner tunnel as the world shrinks and gets far away.
And pumping through me like methamphetamine is the screaming message that Iāve lost Dev, lost Dev, lost Devā¦
I sit woodenly before the next intake nurse, water coursing down my mask face.
She has an open faceāItalian, maybeāround as a skillet. And sheās tiny. She could be in fourth grade, except for being pregnant enough to use her belly as an armrest.
By the time she asks, Did you have a plan?, Iāve already told so many strangers, I forget to be embarrassed. I was gonna spirit away our rusting car to a town called, metaphorically enough, Marbleheadāthe very name seemed aptālike I have a big, swirly marble on my shoulders where a human face should sit. There Iād suck off a garden hose purchased for that purpose.
We can take care of the insomnia starting tonight, she says.
I donāt want any barbiturates, I say. Nothing addictive. No valium. No ambien.
Iām almost crying again. Itās as if some paper-thin membrane in my head holds back this flood, and any discomfort tears through, cranking the sob machine to full bore.
The nurse looks up from her notes to describe some old antidepressant I can take as a sleeping pillāonly if I need to. Not addictive at all. No side effects other than dry mouth in the morning. She sets down her pen, saying people who are sober take it all the time. (She pronounces it sobah, in the manner of the inner-city Bostonians at the halfway house.)
Do you mind if I talk to somebody about it? I mean even tonightāon the phone. Before I take it.
She fixes me with her almond eyes, and the calm she gives off reaches me. Maybe itās some pregnancy hormone juju, for her skin is dewy in the manner of the seriously knocked up. But just sitting there, I sense a warm light the color of faded violets settling around us.
She asks, Are you in some kind of recovery?
Nine months, I say, digging into my purse side pocket for the little medallion Iād gotten. I suddenly notice that the hand holding the medallion has a plastic wrist bracelet. I tell her Iām not exactly a poster child for the sober.
Youāre laughing at yourself, she says. Thatās good. Were you depressed before you quit drinking?
A thousand times worse then. Thatās the nutty part. Iām actually better now, but look where I am.
Sheād twisted her black hair up the back of her head, but itās that frazzly kind of hair that could tear loose any instant. She asks, Do you have a higher power yet?āpronouncing it hi-yah powah in a way that loosens the knots in my shoulders.
Telling her about the few sentences of prayer I march through morning and night, I notice around her neck a small gold cross. She says, So nothing changed with the praying?
It sounds so fake to say it, but only after I started praying was I able to put sober days together.
The nurse is looking at me with a steady gaze. You know whatās amazing? she says. Even planning a suicide, you didnāt pick up drugs or alcohol.
I knew they didnāt work anymore, or I would have.
Which is both miraculous and true. I tell her how many people helped me, how drinking or doping would feel like letting them down.
When I ask what I should call her, she tells me her name is the same as mine.
On the narrow bed, I lie in the sweaty certainty that Iāve saved my own life but lost my son. Surely Warren will divorce me now and take him from meāthatās part of the fear that has kept me in the marriage, his family redolent with lawyers. Every fifteen minutes, a flashlight shines on my face to be sure I havenāt hanged myself, andāso Iām not unnerved by the lightāthe person whispers check, which process I intend to speak to them about tomorrow. If youāre not suicidal when you get here, these intervals could drive you to it. Check.
My roommate looked at me with glassy eyes when I came in. She didnāt budge then, but now, every time they shine the light and say Check, she shifts around under her sheet.
I think back to the morning when Iād worked on the suicide note feeling already dead. Itās a thousand years ago, the writing of that note.
Six A.M. Iād been in the old house alone with Dev, getting ready to leave for a few solo days in the sublet. I stared into the small screen of the big honking computer, typing onto its moss green surface, which was free of any welcoming iconography, a blinking letter C is the cursor. The C had a greater-than sign after it: C>.
C for cunt, I thought, for thatās what I am, a worthless cunt of a mother who canāt take care of her own kid without ingesting enough alcohol to stun an ox.
To my left, the light shifted, and there was the red-cheeked Dev in his Superman costume, half the cape listing in back. To his blue shoulder, heād attached one side w...