The Art of Losing Yourself (8 page)

C
ARMEN

I brushed my teeth, willing the irritation that had gathered over the course of dinner to go away. It refused. Somehow, my husband got my acerbic sister to smile. She told him she hated football. He laughed, and then they spent the rest of dinner swapping hitchhiking stories. I had to remind myself that he dealt with teenagers every day. He knew how to communicate with them. Even the surly ones.

I spit in the sink, rinsed my mouth, and padded into the bedroom. Ben sat on the edge of the bed fiddling with his phone. My own showed two more missed calls from Natalie. I’d have to remember to call her tomorrow. For now, I pulled back the comforter and slid in between the sheets. Ben and I should probably talk about Gracie. At least more than the spurts of conversation we’d had in between dinner preparation and dinner cleanup. But I wasn’t in the mood. And besides, the clock on my nightstand read 8:30, an hour and a half past my bedtime. Early to bed, early to rise—a by-product of my occupation. “Could you shut off the light on your way out?”

Without looking up from his phone, Ben stood, shut off the light, and instead of leaving, sat on the bed, leaning against his side of the headboard, stretching his legs in front of him.

He usually watched football on Thursday nights. “You’re staying?”

“I’m not going to watch TV alone downstairs with Gracie.”

And there it was. His aggravation had come out to play. “She’s my sister.”

“She’s seventeen.”

“What did you want me to do, Ben? Leave her at The Treasure Chest?”

He sighed. “It’s been a long day, Carmen. I don’t want to argue about this.”

Of course not. Conflict-avoidant Ben. He never wanted to argue about anything. Well, too late. I was itching for an argument. “I’m sorry for inconveniencing you tonight with family obligations. But it just so happens, I didn’t have the best day either.”

I turned onto my side and blinked into the darkness. The longer I waited,
the more I seethed. Was he really not going to say anything? If I turned around right now, would he be back to his phone—adjusting his fantasy football roster or watching video clips on ESPN? The very thought, and the likelihood of the possibility, left me feeling horrendously alone.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said.

The softness of his voice reminded me of that Proverb my father often quoted when I was a child—“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” Only it didn’t turn away my wrath so much as increase my irritation.

“Are you upset about Gracie?” Ben asked.

Gracie. My mom. Her inability to quit drinking. The run-down state of the motel I grew up loving. My sister’s unshakable accusation. Waiting for the social worker to call with news that our wait was finally over. The sense of obligation that had risen throughout the course of the night. All of it gnawed at me. “I think she should stay here longer than a few days.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean my mom’s off the wagon and Gracie needs some stability in her life. We could enroll her at Bay Breeze.”

“What about her father?”

“She doesn’t want to stay with her father. It’s why she ran away in the first place.”

I braced myself for more questions. Some commentary or pushback. Surely he had all three to offer. Instead, he gave me nothing. Silence. As much as I wanted him to agree without qualms, I knew this was a lot to ask. So I waited while Ben processed. And the longer I waited, the more I wanted to convince him that this was a good idea. That Gracie needed me. But I kept quiet, until finally, Ben let out a resigned sigh. “If you feel like it’s something you have to do.”

“I do.” I rolled onto my back and curled my arm over the top of my head, thinking about the postcard Deputy Ernst had showed me. Of all the places Gracie could have gone, why the motel? What did the place mean to her? “My dad wants to sell The Treasure Chest.”

Ben looked down at me.

I wanted him to object. To cry foul. To hate the idea as much as I hated it.

“You knew it couldn’t sit like that forever.”

“Yes, but I didn’t think that meant we had to sell it.”

“What did you think it meant?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we could fix it up and get it running again.”

“Carmen.” He gave me this look, like my suggestion was nonsense.

“What?”

“I have a job. You have a job. We have a house. And now a teenager to take care of. When would we ever have the time to fix up a motel?”

In my recurring nightmare, I forgot how to swim. Water crashed around me, rising higher as I thrashed and gulped and sputtered.
Help! Somebody help!
But nobody ever did. A whole host of people stood on dry ground, smiling at me as I flailed.

“Well done,” their smiles seemed to say. “You’re doing great.”

The water rose over my chin.

Cold water filled my lungs.

With a sharp intake of breath, my eyelids snapped open. Ben stared at me through the dark, his face stretched with alarm. I sat up, trying to gain my bearings. I wasn’t drowning. I was in bed. It had been a dream. One I’d had before, only this was the first time I’d woken Ben up with it.

“Were you having a nightmare?” he asked.

I pushed a tangle of curls from my eyes and nodded.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I set my hand on the space of bed between us. Back in college, I had a psych professor who spent an entire lecture talking about muscle memory and how practice didn’t make perfect, it made permanent. According to research, muscle memory was one of the hardest things to undo. I wanted to tell Ben what plagued me in the night. I didn’t want to shut him out. But after years of curling in on myself, practicing this posture of survival, I wasn’t sure I knew how to unfold anymore. And before I could say anything anyway, the clock struck two and the alarm on my cell phone began buzzing.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You can go back to sleep.”

After I finished getting ready, I stopped in front of the closed door of Gracie’s new bedroom. It had become an odd sort of ritual—staring into this dark, empty room, wondering if it would always remain dark and empty. The first night Ben and I moved in, furniture yet to be delivered, we sat in here shoulder
to shoulder, sharing a root beer, dreaming about what color we would paint the walls—pink or blue? I guessed blue. Ben was adamant on pink. We had talked late into the night, giggling over ridiculous names we would never use, wondering if the baby would have Ben’s double-jointed thumbs or my curly hair. I had been struck then by two things. My husband was glowing with paternal joy and I couldn’t wait to have his baby. Two weeks later, I had my first miscarriage.

We painted the walls cream.

My sister turned over in bed.

I took a step back.

The room was no longer empty. It was full of anger.

C
ARMEN

Like always, I was one of the first to arrive at the station. I shuffled into the break room to start a pot of coffee, turned on the lights to the studio, and prepared to predict the future. That’s what weather forecasting was, after all. A task made especially difficult by a fickle atmosphere.

My job left no room for error. The information I gathered had to be absolutely accurate. The slightest misinterpretation of the weather’s initial conditions could quickly lead to giant inaccuracies in the forecast—ones we’d hear about from unhappy viewers later. I was meticulous about checking radars, satellites, automatic weather stations, and every other bit of relevant data supplied by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration supercomputer in Maryland.

Usually, I spent the first hour nursing my second cup of coffee while poring over the data. By the time I moved on from data collecting to data analyzing, my producer’s heels would
click-click-click
into the studio. This morning, however, she arrived seconds after I settled into my station. The sound of her caught me off guard.

“You’re here early,” I said.

“Yes, well, we need to talk.”

I braced myself for her strategizing. How can we get more viewers? What aren’t we doing that our competitor is doing? She usually snapped her fingers when she asked these types of questions, like the sharp sound would elicit better, faster answers. Instead, Nancy called me into her office.

The request was every bit as odd as her early arrival. The two oddities combined had my heartbeat accelerating. My mind scrambled about for an explanation as I followed her through the studio and eased into one of her office chairs.

Nancy sat down behind her desk. “I assume you know what this is about.”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“The video.”

“What video?”

Nancy swiveled her computer monitor so it faced me. A YouTube video came to life of a little boy waving at the camera. And then,
crunch!
The sound of metal hitting metal. The little boy spun toward the noise. The image jostled, then refocused. My stomach dropped to the floor. It was my car—in the Toys R Us parking lot. Reversing, then slamming into a sign. The shot of my profile was crystal clear. And positively deranged.

I blanched. So far, 15,753 views.

“One of our viewers posted that to our station’s Facebook page yesterday, wanting to know if the woman in the video was Carmen Hart from Channel Three News. It’s being shared all over social media. Unless you have a doppelganger, it’s definitely you behind the wheel. What I don’t understand is why. What would cause you to do something so out of character?”

My pulse thrummed wildly in my ears. My mouth hung open, desert dry. I couldn’t answer Nancy and I couldn’t look away from the screen. The number of hits had already grown by seven, and it was three in the morning.

Nancy waited for an unusually long time. When it became apparent that I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—answer, she waved her hand in the air as if to shoo the question aside. “I don’t know what caused you to behave in such a manner, but you are a public figure. You represent our station.”

This was Nancy’s credo. It had been ever since they hired me several years ago.

“I spoke with our executive producer about how best to handle the situation. We both agreed it wise for you to take some time off.”

“What?”

“You have a lot of PTO, Carmen. I don’t even remember the last time you called in sick. Some time off would be good for you. Maybe you and Ben can take a vacation. Get away for a few weeks. Relax or regroup or whatever you need to do to come back well rested.”

“A few weeks? But—but I don’t need a few weeks.”

“It’s not a request.” Nancy folded her hands over the top of her desk. “We need to let this storm pass, and we believe it’s best if you’re off the air while it does.”

She continued talking.

I processed snippets of her monologue here and there. Something about
lying low. Letting the station handle things. The weekend meteorologist ready and willing to fill in while I was away. At some point, the sound in my ears turned to ringing. I couldn’t stop staring at the frozen YouTube video on Nancy’s computer screen.

The hits continued to climb.

I got lost once as a kid when I was eight years old. Dad and I were at the Florida State Fair in Tampa, wandering around Cracker Country—a living history museum on the fairgrounds. One second he was beside me. The next he was gone. I walked around the Okahumpka Train Depot with this growing sense of dread, calling my father’s name. It had been a terrible feeling. It must have been for him too, because when he found me, he pulled me into such a crushing hug that I could barely breathe.

Now, as I drove up and down the coast of Escambia Bay on an eleven-mile stretch of scenic highway, my phone blowing up with text messages from Natalie, I felt that same way. Everything was falling apart. There was an incriminating video of me spreading like the flu. I’d been suspended from work. Dad wanted to sell The Treasure Chest. And I had a hostile houseguest. My car coasted past the oaks and magnolias surrounding the bridge over Bayou Texar, along giant bluffs that served as the highest point along Florida’s coastline. But the vantage point brought no clarity. All I could see was that video. It played on repeat in my mind’s eye until the sun rose over the horizon and the needle on my gas gauge dipped toward
E
.

Yesterday I’d foolishly thought God had given me a break with the nice store manager. Somehow that break had turned into a giant disaster: my mental breakdown caught on video for all to see. What would happen if someone from our adoption agency saw it? The very thought spun my emotions into an F5 tornado. A very ugly part of myself had gone public and I couldn’t hide it. I wasn’t put-together Carmen Hart, beloved weather girl on Channel Three News. I wasn’t Coach Hart’s pretty, smiling wife who hosted team dinners and chatted with the booster club. I was the deranged woman ramming into a sign for expectant mothers.

I felt lost, in desperate need of something familiar.

Playing cards with Aunt Ingrid seemed like a good idea, so instead of
driving home I headed to Pine Ridge, where I made my way to my aunt’s room on the second floor. I spotted Rayanna stepping into the hallway with a bundle of sheets in her arms. She was my favorite of Aunt Ingrid’s nurses—a hefty African American woman with hair cut short against her scalp, a pair of gold studs I wasn’t sure ever left her earlobes, and a pronounced gap between her front teeth. Whenever she laughed, she reminded me of that song from Mary Poppins, the one Uncle Albert sang when he floated to the ceiling.
“Some people laugh through their teeth, goodness sakes. Hissing and fizzing like snakes.”

While it wasn’t at all attractive to Mary’s way of thinking, I found it endearing. Usually whenever she saw me coming, Rayanna’s face would split into a large grin. Today, however, that grin did not come.

My sense of dread expanded. Rayanna had probably seen the video.

“Hey, girl.” She shifted the bundle of sheets from one arm to the other. “You’re here earlier than usual. No work today?”

“No work today.” Or tomorrow. Or the next. What in the world was I going to do with myself? I held up a deck of cards. “Do you think Ingrid’s up for a game?”

Rayanna frowned. “She’s having a pretty rough morning.”

I’d ask what triggered it, but nobody seemed to know the answer. Aunt Ingrid’s brain had become as unpredictable as the weather. Her old self might show up from time to time, but at the end of the day, she was more lost than I was.

As if on cue, the unmistakable sound of Aunt Ingrid’s yells filled the hallway.

Rayanna hurried after the shouting. I hurried after her, past the small entryway and living area, into my aunt’s bedroom, where she huddled over a bowl of red Jell-O like it was the sole life raft in a chaotic sea.

A girl dressed in scrubs, who couldn’t be much older than Gracie, tried consoling her.

“You stay away from my Jell-O, do you understand? I want you to stay away from it!”

The girl looked at Rayanna with wide eyes. “I thought she was finished, but the second I tried taking her tray she started freaking out.”

Aunt Ingrid picked up her spoon and threw it. Actually threw it at the girl.

I watched the scene unfold with a sick feeling in my gut.

Rayanna moved into action, murmuring words of assurance while waving the young girl out of the room, asking her to get a new spoon. She left gladly.

“You don’t have to worry one bit, Miss Ingrid. Nobody is going to take your Jell-O.”

Slowly, Ingrid became less hysterical.

The girl poked her head in just long enough to hand me the new utensil, then left before anything else could be thrown at her.

I took a step toward Aunt Ingrid, holding out the spoon.

She looked at it like I was trying to give her a snake.

“Go on now, Ingrid. You can’t eat Jell-O without a spoon,” Rayanna said.

“Are you going to take my Jell-O too?” she asked me.

I shook my head. “I promise I won’t.”

Ingrid straightened her shirt, which had gone askew in the battle, and took my offering. “Not all things are worth saving, you know. But some are worth every ounce of fight you can throw at them.” With all the dignity in the world, she took a few small bites of her dessert. “You just have to know the difference.”