So Much for My Happy Ending (32 page)

Tad's eyes widened. He looked shocked. Shocked! Had he actually thought that I was going to just stand by while he hurt my family and lied about it?

“April.” He grabbed both of my arms, but the gesture was one of desperation rather than violence. “April, you can't leave me. I love you.”

“Maybe you should have thought about that before.” I pulled away and went to the hall closet where we stored the suitcases.

“April, wait, it's the bipolar disorder. It makes me do crazy things. Just give me a few more weeks on the medication and everything will go back to the way it was.”

“How was it, exactly?” I pulled out the largest bag and lugged it into the bedroom. “As far as I can tell, everything about our lives together has been one cleverly orchestrated lie.”

“That's not true.” Tad stumbled after me and I turned to see him wobbling in the doorway. “I've always loved you and I always will.”

I glared at him and started to remove my clothes from my dresser.

He grabbed my hand. “No, you have to know it hasn't all been a lie. You remember when we lost our baby, right?”

I swallowed and looked away. I didn't want to remember that.

“I stood by you, April, you know I did. Now all I'm asking is that you stand by me.”

I yanked my hand away. “I've been standing by you. I stood by you when I found out that you lied to me about the rent. I stood by you when I found out about the credit card. I stood by you when I found out that you had been lying about your family. I was there for you when you had to face your own mental illness. I even stuck it out after you trashed my car and threw me on the kitchen floor. But now you've hurt my family. And I can't stand by you while you do that.”

“So I'll stop!” Tad screamed. I shook my head and continued packing.

“I'll stop, April, I will. I didn't mean to hurt your family. I'm just sick, but I'll get better. You have to give me some time to get better.”

I ignored him and continued packing. I couldn't let him weaken my resolve.

“April, I can't live without you. You're my life. You're everything to me.”

I bit my lip and kept packing.

I didn't look at him but I could hear him sobbing. I wanted to go to him, but I knew that if I did I would have to stay, and I couldn't do that. I couldn't survive it.

I listened to his heavy footsteps as he left the room and traveled to the kitchen. Was I being unfair? Should I give him another month or two on the medication? I looked around the room.
You need to get out,
my little voice screamed. But didn't my little voice remember all the times Tad and I had laughed together? And where had my little voice been during our lovemaking sessions? Probably shocked into silence. I glanced at the door. I would talk to him.

I put down the clothes in my hand and went to the kitchen. I was still leaving but I would try to do it on a better note. Tad was standing over the sink with his back to me. He was shaking and I could still hear his little sobs. I stepped forward quietly. “Tad,” I said gently.

He turned and that's when I saw the blood coming out of his wrist. His eyes were wild with fear and pain.

“Oh my God.” They were the only words I could think to say.

“April, help me. Please help me.”

I rushed to his side and noted that only one wrist was cut and that the slash was horizontal not vertical. He wouldn't die. But still, there was a lot of blood. “Sit down,” I ordered and ran to the bathroom and yanked open the drawer where we kept the first-aid supplies, and then ran back to the kitchen with a long strip of gauze that I wrapped around his wrist. He was crying too hard for me to understand him, but every few sentences or so I caught “can't live without you,” and “want to die.”

I knelt in front of him. “Tad, listen to me. We have to get you to the hospital.”

“I want to die,” he cried.

“No, you don't. You know you don't. We're going to the emergency room now, okay?”

He didn't answer, so I gently took his elbow and guided him into a standing position. I led him to the Z3 parked in front of the house. I opened the passenger-side door and he obediently got in. I went around to my side and stuck my key into the ignition. Before I pushed the gearshift into Reverse, I took a second to look at him and for a sudden and brief moment I had my first full-fledged out-of-body experience. But unlike the out-of-body experiences that you hear about on Lifetime, there was nothing wonderful or enlightening about this. I didn't feel like a free spirit or an angel. Oddly enough I felt more like a Hollywood
producer,
studying a film that I needed to edit. I could see Tad and I could see April and I could see the chaos and the pain that those characters were both in but I was watching the scene with an impassive and detached eye. It was the visual details that had my attention…like all the blood, Tad's blood. It was still coming, soaking the bandaging. If the blood leaked onto the interior of the car it would be a lot more difficult to sell. April would be stuck with it. She would have to learn to live with it and accept it even though the audience would know that she wanted to be free of that car so badly she could taste it.

And the audience would shake their heads and give each other knowing glances because that was life. Sometimes you get stuck with the things you don't want.

T
he emergency-room doctors fixed up Tad, interviewed him, interviewed me and then sent us home. In their professional opinion Tad was suffering from severe depression and needed therapy. Thank God we had medical insurance, because if I had to pay for that advice I would have been seriously ticked. On the flip side I was freaked out enough that I was able to score myself a prescription for Paxil.

I love Paxil. It had been seven weeks since Tad cut his wrist, nothing had improved but thanks to my miracle drug I wasn't perpetually on the verge of a major anxiety attack.

I flipped through some merchandise at Macy's that I couldn't afford. I was waiting for Allie, who was taking me to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory.

I had told both her and Caleb about Tad's little accident several weeks ago. They had both been appropriately appalled and offered to help me move. But I had postponed my marital separation. I desperately wanted to leave him but I didn't want him to commit suicide on account of something I did. Somehow I had to find a way to make it work, or at least give it a last try.

He was taking his medication now. I knew because I counted his pills every morning after he left for work. He had gained some weight and was somewhat lethargic, but other than that I didn't see a big difference in him. He was still depressed to the point of being borderline suicidal, although he hadn't had a manic episode for a while. After all, that would require exuberance and joy and Tad didn't have a lot of that these days.

I held up a sheer DKNY shirt. It was a beautiful dip-dye, totally my style. I checked the price tag. Totally out of the question. I reached for my cell as I heard the musical notes come out of my purse. “Hello?”

“I'm at the elevator, where are you?” Allie asked.

I looked at the shirt in my hand. “One floor up from you, torturing myself.”

“I thought the reason you left Dawson's was because you didn't like torture.”

I giggled. “Be there in thirty seconds.” I clicked off the phone and took the escalator down to where she was. When she saw me, her eyes ran over my figure. “Shit, you're skinnier then I am.”

“I haven't had much of an appetite lately,” I said as we joined the crowd piling into the elevators. “But I have been taking care of myself in other ways.”

“Such as?”

“I've been working out a lot. I may be unemployed, on the verge of bankruptcy and married to a masochistic nutcase, but I do have defined abs and that's got to count for something.”

Allie laughed as our fellow elevator passengers struggled to put more distance between themselves and us.

At the restaurant Allie gave our name to the hostess who escorted us to our table. She sighed and looked down at the square from the wall of glass adjacent to our seats. “I love this place—the view totally rocks.”

“Mmm, of course, the way my life has been going there'll probably be an earthquake momentarily and we'll plunge to our deaths amongst shards of glass.”

Allie shook her head in sympathy. “So I guess things are not well on the home front.”

“Things on the home front are never well. They're always sick and twisted. Tad's business is having problems and his partners think he's embezzled some money or something. He's a mess over the whole thing and he's scared to death I'm going to leave him.”

“Are you?”

I diverted my eyes and shrugged indecisively. “I have no immediate plans to do so. Before I came out tonight we got into it. He said he was so afraid of losing me he wasn't sure if he could take it. He even threatened suicide again.”

Allie shook her head in bewilderment. “What do you say to something like that?”

“Well, I'm on Paxil, so I told him that if he must do it he should at least have the courtesy to do it in the kitchen where it'll be easy to clean up.”

Allie smiled and looked up at the ceiling. “I don't know how you do it, April. If I were you I'd be losing it about now, and here you are cracking jokes.”

I shrugged again. Tad had been threatening suicide about once a week since our little hospital visit. At first the threats had scared me to death, but after a while the novelty wore off and I had sort of become reconciled to the idea that on any given day I might walk in to find my husband dead on the floor. I wasn't happy about it, but in order to survive you have to take the horrors of life in stride. Just ask my grandmother.

“So how about you?” Allie pushed. “You say you've been working out…have you been doing anything else for yourself?”

“Well, I've been making one hell of a lot of bumper stickers.”

“I still can't believe you did that.”

“That makes two of us. But it ended up being cheaper than giving everyone a refund, and since they all agreed to take the same sticker…”

“Bugs are people, too?”

“Bugs have rights, too,” I corrected. “Anyway, it's done. And they agreed to accept the calendars as Tad made them, man-made structures and all.”

Allie narrowed her eyes. “And what has Tad done?”

I smiled. I appreciated that Allie was bitter on my behalf. After all, the stuff with the Temple of the Earth Goddess was not my mess to clean up. But it was clear to me that the other problems Tad was dealing with took priority over my mother's grievances. Embezzlement—that could actually go hand in hand with jail time. I could end up being married to a convict. Wow, life just got better and better. The waitress came by and took our orders before I had a chance to answer Allie's somewhat rhetorical question. I waited to see if she was going to push the issue more, but instead she casually unfolded her napkin into her nap and ran her fingers through her hair.

“So any luck on the job hunt?”

I shook my head. The job hunt had been dismal. All the jobs I was qualified for that paid a halfway decent wage required that I work during the morning hours when I was to be in the language program, and although I often considered giving up on the whole French thing, I couldn't quite get myself to do it. Caleb was paying for my summer classes, but whether or not I did well in them was entirely up to me. I liked the idea that in at least one aspect of my life I was in control of my own success or failure.

“So you haven't found anything at all?” Allie pressed.

“Nope, I'm just a big loser.”

Allie grinned from ear to ear. “Good.”

“Good?” I sat back in my chair. “Why? Does my sad excuse for a life make you feel better about your own, or is there another reason that you are reveling in my misery?”

Allie rolled her eyes. “And they say
Caleb's
a drama queen. I'm glad you're unemployed because I've found you the perfect job.”

I lifted a bottle of olive oil off the table and held it threateningly. “If you even start to suggest that I return to Dawson's this oil goes right onto that BCBG shirt of yours.”

Allie reached forward and guided my hand and the olive oil back to the table. “I wasn't going to say the
D
word. I was out on a date last night and I ran into Artsy. You remember him, right?”

I nodded enthusiastically. Artsy was the brother of one of Allie's ex-boyfriends. His name was Arnold but Allie and I called him Artsy because he had a gallery in New Mexico.

“Well, he's back in town and guess what? He's opened a gallery here and according to him he's been raking in the dough. He's looking for a part-time salesperson, preferably an attractive woman who has some training in art history.”

I practically jumped out of my seat. “Are you kidding! Why didn't you call and tell me immediately? He could have already given the job to someone else!”

Allie put up a hand to stop me. “Chill, I already told him you were looking and he said he would love to meet with you. He has an opening on Friday at one if you have time. Of course, you might have to miss your soap opera.”

“Ha. Ha. Oh my God, Allie, do you really think he'll hire me? What should I wear? I was thinking of getting my hair cut short. Should I do that before or after the interview?”

“You must have a few decent outfits that you haven't sold to Crossroads yet.”

“A few,” I said. I had taken to selling my things to consignment stores in order to pay the bills.

“And my hair?”

Allie toyed with her own hair as she considered mine. “You don't want to risk a bad cut before the interview, so I'd hold off.” She smiled and leaned forward. “April, you're a shoo-in.”

I clapped my hands together and laughed. I hadn't been this excited about something since…well, for a very long time. Maybe I could manage to have a little happiness in my life after all.

 

That Friday I waited for Tad to go to work and then spent the entire morning preparing for the interview. I had settled on a William B button-down with three-quarter-length sleeves and a teal Theory skirt. I finished the outfit with a Hermès scarf that Caleb had gotten me for my birthday last year.

I hadn't told Tad about any of it. I was too excited about the opportunity, and I was afraid that if I told him he'd just look at me as if I was reciting the grocery list and then turn back to whatever was playing on the Discovery Channel. Or worse, he would ask me if my getting a new job was the first step toward leaving him.

I shook my head and checked my reflection one more time. I refused to think about any of that now. I had an interview at an art gallery and I wasn't going to screw up my eyeliner by crying.