She took phone messages for me that I never received. She made a mess of our apartment. She ate my food. She stole money from my wallet, checks from my checkbook. She used my credit card to buy herself things. She denied doing it, of course, but I’d look at my bank statements later and find checks made out to places like hair salons, department stores,cash. When I asked the bank to produce the processed checks for me, I could clearly see that the handwriting on them was not mine.
I could have pressed charges. For whatever reason, I chose not to.
She wore my clothes without asking. She brought them back wrinkled and dirty, sometimes stained, reeking of cigarette smoke. I’d find them hanging in my closet like that. When I asked her about it, she’d gaze at my filthy clothing and say,You think I actually wore that ugly shirt of yours?
Because on top of everything else, she was mean.
I put a lock on my bedroom door. That didn’t stop her.
Somehow, she still found a way in. I’d come home from a night out to find my door open, my things rifled through.
I didn’t want to live like that.
I offered to move out, to let her keep our place. She was angry to the point of being combative. Something about her scared me. She couldn’t afford the unit all on her own, she told me, seething. She got in my face, told me I was crazy, that I was a psychopath.
I held my ground. I didn’t flinch.
I said calmly,I could say the same about you.
In the end, she was the one to leave. That was best, seeing as I’d recently met Will, and needed a place where we could hang out. Even after, I had my suspicions that she was still letting herself in, going through my things. She’d given me her key back, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t taken it to the hardware store first and made a copy of it to keep. In time I had the locks changed. That, I told myself, would have to stop her. If I thought she was still coming in, it was only my paranoia speaking.
Still, that wasn’t the end of her. Because I saw her some six months ago or so, when I passed her on the street, not far from Will’s and my home. She looked the same to me, strutting her stuff down Harrison, just as arrogant as she’d always been. I ducked away when I saw her, slipped down another street.
It was just after graduation when Will and I met, at the engagement party of a friend. Will and I have different versions of the time we met. What I know is that he came up to me at the party, handsome and gregarious as ever, thrust out a hand and said,Hey there. I think I’ve seen you before.
What I remember is feeling awkward and insecure that night, the awkwardness abating ever so slightly with the cheesy pickup line. He hadn’t, of course, seen me before. It was a come-on, and it worked. We spent the rest of the night intertwined on the dance floor, my insecurities lessening the more I had to drink.
We’d been dating only a couple of months when Will suggested he move into my apartment with me. Why he was single, I didn’t know. Why he chose me over all the other beautiful women in the city of Chicago, I also didn’t know. But for whatever reason, he insisted he couldn’t stand to be away from me. He wanted to be with me all the time. It was a romantic notion—no one had ever made me feel as desired as Will did back then—but it made sense financially, too. I was finishing up my residency and Will his PhD. Only one of us was earning an income, albeit a small one, most of which went to repay med school debt. But still, I didn’t mind covering the rent. I liked having Will with me all the time. I could do that for him.
Not long after, Will and I got married. Shortly after that, Dad died, taken from this world of his own volition. Cirrhosis of the liver.
We had Otto. And then, years later, Tate. And now I find myself living in Maine.
To say I wasn’t completely bowled over when word arrived that Will’s sister had left us a home and child would be a lie. Will always knew about the fibromyalgia, but we learned about the suicide from the executor of the estate. I didn’t think any good could come from our moving to Maine, but Will disagreed.
The months before had been merciless and unsparing. First, Otto’s expulsion, followed immediately by the discovery of Will’s affair. It wasn’t days after that that a patient of mine died on the table. I’d had patients die before, but this one nearly wrecked me. He’d had a pericardiocentesis done, a relatively safe and routine procedure where fluid is aspirated from the sac that surrounds a person’s heart. When I looked back at my medical notes, the procedure was well warranted. The patient was suffering from a condition known as cardiac tamponade, where the accumulation of fluid puts excessive pressure on the heart, stopping it from functioning properly. Cardiac tamponade can be lethal unless some of the fluid is drained. I’d done the procedure before, many times. There’d never been a problem.
But this time, I didn’t do the procedure. Because, according to my colleagues, I walked out of the room just as the patient went into cardiac arrest, forcing a resident to perform the pericardiocentesis without me. The patient on the table was dying, and without the procedure he would have died.
But the procedure was done incorrectly. The needle punctured the patient’s heart so that he died anyhow.
They found me later, upstairs on the hospital’s rooftop, perched on the edge of the fourteen-story building, legs dangling over the edge, where some claimed I was about to jump.
But I wasn’t suicidal. Things were bad, but they weren’t that bad. I blamed Otto’s expulsion and the affair for it, for wreaking havoc on my emotions and mind.A nervous breakdown, claimed the rumors circulating throughout the hospital. The buzz was that I had had a nervous breakdown in the ER, marched myself up to the fourteenth floor, prepared to jump. I’d blacked out is what happened. When all was said and done, I didn’t remember any of it. It’s a period of my life that’s gone. What I remember is examining my patient, and then coming to in a different room—except by then I was the one spread out on a table, hidden beneath a sheet. When I later heard that my patient died at the hands of a less experienced doctor, I cried. I’m not one to cry. But that time, I couldn’t keep it inside.
The triggers of a nervous breakdown were there: a period of stress that hadn’t been dealt with, feeling disoriented, worthless, unable to sleep.
The next day, the head of the department put me on forced medical leave. He subtly suggested a psych eval. I said thanks, but no thanks. Instead, I chose to resign. I couldn’t go back there ever again.
When we arrived in Maine, Will and I found the foursquare farmhouse in quite a state. The step stool was still in the attic along with three feet of rope, snipped at the end while the rest remained bound to some sort of exposed support beam that cut across the ceiling. Anything within reach of Alice’s thrashing body had been knocked over, implying death hadn’t been a breeze.
I make my way to the attic door and pull it open. From up above, a light glows. I climb the steps two at a time as, beneath my feet, they creak. The attic is an unfinished space, complete with wooden beams, a plank cork flooring, wads of fluffy pink insulation scattered here and there like clouds. The light comes from a single exposed bulb on the ceiling, which someone, whoever was here, has forgotten to turn off. A string dangles beneath. A chimney, wrapped in exposed brick, runs through the center of the room, venting outside. There’s a window that faces onto the street. It’s so dark outside tonight, there’s nothing to see.
Sheets of paper catch my eye. They’re on the floor with a pencil, one I recognize right away as one of Otto’s graphite drawing pencils. The ones Will and I got for him, the ones he never lets Tate use. They’re expensive and also Otto’s prized possession, though I haven’t seen him use them in months. Since all that happened in Chicago with him, he hasn’t been drawing.
I’m stricken with two things: disappointment, for one, that Otto would disobey me and come into the attic when I said not to. But also relief that Otto is drawing again, the first step, perhaps, in a return to normalcy.
Maybe Will is right. Maybe if we give it time, we can find happiness here.
