Your nurse woke me out of deep sleep to tell me over the telephone that you were attempting to eat broken glass from a shattered mirror, trying to kill yourself for the third time that month. She said that you are fine, though, heavily sedated and put on suicide precaution for the remainder of the evening.

The moments following the phone call slowly ticked away while I sat in the darkness of our house. I hoped for quiet, instead those disturbing thoughts of you ran through my head like a ticker tape. I pondered what the nurse had said, and wondered what my life would be like if I didn’t have you. Would I fall apart? Or would I be better off without you?

I listened to your cries, the screams from the beatings that you took in childhood. An innocent little brown girl whose pleas were never heard. These sounds seemed to emanate from every corner of our creaky old house. Our windows were frosted from the brutal Philadelphia winter. Tree limbs snapped off from the large oak in our backyard and the roof tiles swirled in the wind from surrounding homes.

I pulled the red woolen blanket over my body that still had your floral scent. I kept thinking of you while I nervously rubbed my cold fingers, feeling the goosebumps swell on my arms and legs. I couldn’t go to bed yet, not after the nurse relayed to me the image of you eating the glass, trying to shred your insides into little pointed and sharp pieces. I thought about what happened to you growing up: trashy neighbors calling you all sorts of horrible racist names and how your mother stuck your head in the oven the night she had too much vodka. Worst of all, I thought about what happened to you at the lake when there was no one around to help.

A family friend stole your innocence that afternoon; charmed you into believing that he could be trusted and that he had only the best intentions while grooming you to be his next victim.

“Just listen, Nora,” he said. “Do whatever I tell you and everything will be okay.”

His light blue eyes seemed trustworthy enough as you removed your clothing at his request. The wind howled on the lake, and you shivered in the bitter cold. He rubbed his hideous body against yours, and all you could think of was how angry your mother would get if she found out. You could see the corners of her mouth curl down in anger as she lost control, hitting your chest with her meaty fist, slapping the side of your head that drove you back against the kitchen table. You felt as if you were the worst person on earth.

Your father was even more unsympathetic. He cared less for you than for his prized church and the strange god he worshipped. You were hurting, but you couldn’t cry in front of him. You hid your mother’s bruises, kept the scars on your legs and back a secret, although you counted them every day like a strange game. He complained about his congregation, that there was a conspiracy against him, a church faction that continued to grow and wanted him out. You knew why they wanted him to be removed, he was a sick man and his evil shined through to others, but you never told him this. He took out his anger against you, and said to your mother, “You got to rule children with an iron fist, or they’ll rise against you.”

It was hard living under these conditions. You couldn’t be an innocent child like the rest of the kids, like the ones at school who always seemed to have happy faces. You had to be perfect. To be a serious student. Follow every rule, or you’d feel it in your bottom for a week from your father’s belt or from your mother’s hard paddle. The kids at school thought you were snobby because you wouldn’t eat lunch with them. But you were scared of getting close. They didn’t know that you weren’t allowed to have friends who didn’t belong to your father’s church.

 

“Why did you make up a story like that?” your mother snapped when she found out about that day at the lake.

“It’s the truth, Mom. I’m not lying. I wouldn’t lie about that.”

You stopped breathing for a second as she looked into your brown eyes for the truth. But she saw what she wanted to see. She didn’t want to be reminded of what happened to her at your age. She would only tell you later, at her deathbed, but by then it was too late to forgive her.

“Even if it is true,” your mother said, “you must have caused it. You showed that poor boy something that you shouldn’t.”

Your mother defended everybody else but you. She was a champion of the poor and neglected, an esteemed social worker in the community, but for you she had no sympathy or time. Even at a young age, you knew you had to get away from your parents or you would die in that cold Pennsylvania town. It was a backward place in the far end of the state where there was nothing for you but bad luck and misery. So, when you were old enough, and saved a little money, you packed your bags and took a cross-state Greyhound bus to Philadelphia, hoping that it would change your luck and help you forget the past.

Your dream was to become a writer someday, someone like Alice Walker or Maya Angelou. You wanted to write beautiful novels in a language so elegant and sweet that no one would ever suspect that you were a bad girl. You dreamed of getting the love and adulation that you never got at home and you believed that you could get that through your written words.

But once in Philadelphia, your mind was back at the lake. You were unable to write and couldn’t shake those horrid memories. You wanted to leave your soul, and the image of a little girl making futile pleas to the man without a conscience, with the wicked winds that circled the frozen waters of Lake Erie. His voice remained in your head to this day and still gives you migraines. You try to write but the pain is unbearable. You prayed for the perfect psychiatrist who could heal you with one magical pill. Some days you wished you had drilled a hole into the frozen lake and sunk down into the cold waters to the bottom like a heavy anchor, numbing your pain forever in the icy waters.

You were still sinking when you married me. I was supposed to be your savior who could change the course of your life, who could rescue you and stop your disturbing flashbacks. You depended on me, but I only disappointed you, ill-equipped to dig you out of that terrible abyss of the lake.

I tried not to think about your death wish as I drove to work the next morning, determined to keep you from preventing me from doing my job. I focused on my driving and the dark, forbidding clouds in the sky. I reminded myself that I am supposed to help people. That’s what I am paid to do. I am supposed to be the strong one whose life is in order and who knows the right things to say.

When I entered the therapy office, I smiled at all the ancillary staff, convincing them that nothing had changed. I was still the happy-go-lucky healer, smart and sure of himself. Only I knew that I wasn’t that person underneath. My wife broke a mirror in her hospital room and tried to eat the shards of glass. She attempted to cut her insides and bleed to death. No one here but me knew that my wife was in a state of danger, rebelling against a world that caused her so much pain. And even if they did know, what could they say that could change any of this?

I wore my phony smile to the waiting room, shaking my patient’s hand and making small talk before a session.

“Are you keeping warm in this cold weather?” I asked.

“Trying to,” she said.

“Did you finish all your Christmas shopping?”

My patient gave a perfunctory smile, wanting to get down to business.

I mustered everything I had then because it was all I could do to keep from crying in the presence of the auburn-haired patient, the one who vaguely resembled you. I gave my patient the indication that I was following her every word, but my mind kept seeing you in a hospital gown, your bloodshot eyes full of tears, trying to hang yourself from a door hinge or slitting your wrist while the nurses weren’t looking. I visualized the hospital staff putting you in four-point restraints, taking you to the “quiet room” where you stayed without windows or chairs, just a mattress on the cold hospital floor. After you screamed yourself to sleep, you lay on that mattress with just a top sheet, drooling saliva from the corner of your mouth, face up with leather belts tying your hands and feet to the corners of the room like a tortured prisoner of war. How I wanted to miraculously save you.

I apologized countless times for calling the psychiatrist to have you committed. But you forced my hand when I found the suicide note on the kitchen table with your scratchy printing that reeked of desperation. Please, don’t rebel against me, Nora, as if I were your parent. I love you. You have to know that I would never betray you like them. I was only trying to keep you alive.

My depressed patient lost her husband recently to a heart attack. She begged me for advice that would make her grief disappear. She kept crying and crying as I handed her tissue after tissue to dry her eyes.

“Weather the storm,” I said in my therapist voice. A voice that is believable, trustworthy, and assured. “Don’t make any commitments to anyone but yourself right now.” She nodded. “Care for yourself as if you were caring for a best friend.”

These words were nothing but clichés. I remember telling these things to you too, Nora. Over and over as if you could snap your fingers and everything would be fine.

In your suicide note, you said that I deserved a better wife, one who wasn’t crazy or trying to shoot herself. A normal woman, you repeated, one who was capable of giving love and not an albatross around your neck.

“You will forget me,” you wrote. “In a couple of years, you’ll meet someone else and will forget that I ever existed.”

I could never forget the day I found the loaded gun under our bed, in a shoebox next to your slippers. I stared at it in disbelief, feeling the full extent of your depression and hopelessness in that loathsome revolver. Then I drove you to the nearest emergency room as fast as I could. You said you didn’t want to go into another crazy house, that you were tired of taking medications that didn’t work and watching poor demented souls wander the hallways like zombies.

Between patients, I received another phone call about your status, this time from a social worker. The social worker informed me that your mood was much brighter and that the doctor was planning to remove you from suicide watch if you continued to improve.

“Thank you,” I told her, “for keeping my wife alive for another day.”

After my last patient, I completed my progress notes for the evening and locked the office door behind me. I drove home in a flurry of snow on the same route across the slippery Ben Franklin Bridge towards Philadelphia. I felt like nothing had changed, that my work in therapy had no real consequence and that you would never overcome your problems and always be in a state of suicidal purgatory. We have been doing this same dance across this same road for many years now.

As I inched along the icy bridge, I realized that your mental illness, Nora, was also a bridge. You needed to suffer, to figure things out in the hospital for you to cross the bridge between the past and present, and to become safe in your mind. “”However long it takes,” I had told you. Think how beautiful it will be when you rid yourself of the demons in your head. Then we could start a family. Something that we both want.

The lights on the bridge made the snow flurries float down from the sky like little white angels. It was below freezing, and the snow stuck to the ground making driving conditions worsen. Even though I was driving in hazardous weather, I knew that this snowy mess would be temporary. The snow was falling, but in another month it would be spring. The flowers would bloom in our backyard, and our fruit tree would blossom.

Once you get out of the hospital, Nora, I’ll drive you to your favorite nursery in Mount Airy where you can pick out some roses, lilies, morning glories, or any other flower that you prefer. I’ll help you dig up the soil in the garden. We’ll get our hands nice and dirty, add some new topsoil, and together we will plant our garden more beautiful than ever.

I pulled into the garage over the crackling ice, dusted off the crusty snow from my boots, and realized that you weren’t there and that I was once again alone in a cold house full of all the sounds and smells of you. My sadness crept back in. The optimism that I had quickly vanished, but I refused to let go of the hope. So, I wrote down a list of all the things that we needed for our new garden.

Mark Tulin is a former family therapist from Philadelphia who lives in Santa Barbara, California. Mark has two poetry books, Magical Yogis and Awkward Grace, available on Amazon. He has an upcoming book of fiction, The Asthmatic Kid and Other Stories, available in August of this year. Mark has been featured in Vita Brevis, Amethyst Review, Poppy Road Review, Family Therapy Magazine, New Readers Magazine, as well as anthologies, magazines, and podcasts. You can follow Mark at Crow on the Wire.

Header image: After Soft Rains by Richard Wu