Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (35 page)

The cinephile in me feels a rush of genetic pride—my DNA is there—but I keep it to myself. “Dr. Knight shouldn’t have put you through that.”

“I volunteered. And it’s not like I’m used to being foremost on your mind anyway.”

“That’s not true, you know. Though I can certainly see why you’d—”

Willa lets her head drop, and even though she’s looking at the floor again, I can tell she is smiling. “You think I’m still holding a grudge because you abandoned me?” She is being glib, obnoxious. In a nasty, ironic kind of way.

I am not smiling. “I think you’d still be very angry.”

“Nah. I was never angry at you,” she says. “I was precocious. I mean, not totally. I did denial, but I skipped anger and moved right on through to acceptance. Drove Mom and the shrink crazy.”

The whole talking-to-the-floor thing is driving me crazy, but I don’t know that I’m in a position to complain or nag. I’m not sure what I’m in a position to do. So I make a polite request.

“Would you mind terribly if we sat up for this conversation?”

Willa giggles, and as she throws herself back into the deep cushions of the loveseat, her hand comes up to cover her mouth again.

“Why do you do that?” I ask seriously.

“What?”

“Cover your mouth when you laugh.”

She blushes and looks away.

“Willa?”

She shrugs but stays silent.

“I’d understand if you were angry.”

“At you?” she asks, as if it were the most ludicrous question ever posed.

“Yes. At me.”

“All of a sudden you know who the hell I am and you think that gives you the right to start analyzing my childhood? Awfully presumptuous, don’t you think?”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t be sorry! Look, Greyson, I had a fucking excellent childhood. You leaving—probably way better than if you had stayed.”

Sucker-punched. I am unprepared for the pain and loss of breath.

“I mean, you don’t, you know—you shouldn’t feel guilty. I was like the happiest goddamned kid in the world.”

“Oh. That’s good. I’m glad things worked out.”

“You and Mom never would have stayed together. You would have had one of those horrific Hollywood divorces. It would have been a disaster.”

“You’re probably right.”

“I had a better childhood than most of my friends,” she says, starting in on her thumb again. “When their parents were in the middle of heinous divorces and custody battles and moving to shitty little houses south of Olympic, my parents were blissed-out newlyweds.” She lets her hands fall to the edges of the couch cushions, holding on as if she’s afraid it might take off any minute. “Our family never had to deal with exes or child support or alternate weekends. I’m lucky. I have an amazing family. Amazing parents.” She lingers on the word “amazing” to make her point. “So, no, I’m not angry. How could I be angry?”

And there it is—the feeling that I’m seated across from a woman who’s telling me she’s found someone else. But I want her to be happy, so I smile encouragingly.

I see the blood flow back into her paper-white hands when she finally lets go of the cushion she’s been gripping. I see her chest fall as she exhales the useless air in her lungs. I see her give in to the urge to bite the skin on her thumb again.

“Gee whiz, I never thought of it that way before. Boy, it certainly does relieve me of that crushing guilt and overwhelming regret I carry with me like a rotting albatross. I’m sure I’ll sleep much better tonight.”

She rolls her eyes. “God, everyone always assumes … I mean, what’s to understand? You were sick. You couldn’t help it. I’ve spent my whole life being told not to take it personally. So I didn’t. Now everyone is acting like I should.”

She looks up at me and shrugs. “Sorry I don’t hate you. Besides,” she says, examining her cuticle, “Mom had enough anger for both of us.” She is a terrible actress but has clearly had enough therapy to believe her version of the story—her bullshit. Because how could it be true?

I want to reach out and touch her—just her hand, a sleeve—but the voltage running through her, the stored current is so powerful (I can almost hear the hum), I have no doubt I would get burned, and I am still recovering from the last jolt that shook my system. I blink hard several times, hoping this will clear the fog in my head. Instead, when it clears, I’m left watching me play out a scene from
The Deer Hunter
. Seated at a table between Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken, I am holding a loaded gun to my head. And inside the chamber are all the wrong things I could say right now. All the possibilities for killing my chances with her are contained in that gun, and it’s only a matter of time before one of them shoots out my mouth.

It occurs to me, my odds of succeeding with Willa were probably better when I didn’t recognize her. That may have been awkward, but this—this is a bloody mess.

I have had a setback. If the depression does not resolve on its own, I will have to undergo more ECT. But it may just be drug related—a bad reaction. It’s really too soon to tell. No one who has been depressed has ever used the phrase “too soon to tell” when describing what it feels like. “Too much,” “too hard,” “too painful to go on.” Yes. But never “too soon to tell.” That is doctor bullshit.

Knight has changed my medication. He says the new drug might “sloooow” me down for a little while. I don’t like the sound of this.

“How slow?”

“Don’t know,” he says.

“How long before it works?”

“Not sure,” he says.

“Who the hell put you in charge?”

“I ask myself that question every day,” he mumbles to himself. He writes the prescription and hands it through the window to the duty nurse.

Before I swallow the first tiny, benign-looking pill, I think about calling Willa. But we do not have that kind of relationship. Certainly not yet. I would not even know what to say if her roommate answered and asked who was calling. I lie in bed until the days run together. And then when the haze finally begins to clear, when I can speak in full sentences again—albeit with a residual slur—and remain conscious for more than a few hours at a time, I venture into the dayroom.

“Boo!” Not a single one of my muscles moves. Not a twitch. “Wow,” Willa says. Coming around from behind me, she holds her palm in front of my mouth. “Checkin’ for signs of life,” she says. “Yep, still breathing.”

“Sorry,” I say. I want to think of a joke but nothing comes to mind. Perhaps because at the moment I don’t have one. It’s still only been a few days since I’ve been back in circulation and I am nowhere near “normal.” I wish I could will away the dullness but it won’t budge.

She takes a closer look at me and lets her backpack fall to the floor. “Jesus, you really look like shit,” she says quietly and sits down next to me.

“Candyman.” I smile weakly. She reaches over and touches the baggy material of the sweatshirt covering my arm. Her touch is so light I barely feel it through the heavy cotton. But the gesture is everything. It is empathy. Exactly what I want and precisely what I do not deserve. The truth is, I have no idea what I deserve.

“You don’t have to do anything,” she says. “I have a surprise for you.”

Unzipping her backpack, she takes out a small pink photo album. The spine is cracked with age. She opens it up and on the first page is a picture of me sitting on the edge of a hospital bed next to an exhausted, annoyed-looking woman. I am holding a newborn wrapped in a hospital-issue blanket. “That’s me,” I slur, surprised.

“Bingo,” she says. “And I’m the baby. And that’s Mom.”

“Mom?”

“Ellen.”

Ellen
, I think. And I feel a rush of warmth and comfort and loss and regret all at the same time. “Ellen.”

She shows me more photos. Birthday parties and family get-togethers and one of the girl when she was three or four asleep in my arms in a big unmade king-size bed.

And little by little the memories that have scattered come together and begin to shuffle like a deck of cards, arranging and rearranging themselves until every once in a while I see one and am momentarily struck by the depth of its meaning. And when I remember, it is not just a fuzzy fragment but a full-body experience. Short-lived but complete. As if I were there. As if then was now.

I touch the photo and the sounds of the hospital recede. I close my eyes and hear my daughter’s small, quick footsteps crossing the hardwood floor to my room. She struggles with the doorknob. She is barely three and it doesn’t turn easily. She pushes open the door and uses my sheets as a tether to help pull herself onto my bed. She does all this with her eyes only half open.

She has always preferred to sleep naked. Ellen wrangles her into a Pull-Up at bedtime but it’s pointless. In the morning, wet or dry, we always find her bare-assed. Now her small body is soft and warm. I curl myself around her and think sleeping with her is like sleeping with a puppy.

But now I am awake. The soft-glow numbers on the titanium Hammacher Schlemmer clock that sits on my dresser tells me it’s 2:37
A.M
. Willa has been climbing into bed with me more and more frequently lately. Ellen, who’s been known to sleep through earthquakes, never realizes it until morning. Then she gets mad at me—says I am encouraging bad sleep habits.

But I like it. It is my favorite time to spend time with her. I can give her what she wants—be the daddy she wants. No phone calls to return or meetings to go to. No reasons to tell her to be quiet or leave me alone. At 2:37
A.M
. I am Willa’s hero. So I run my hand lightly over her impossibly soft skin—her back and perfectly round butt—and I hold both of her tiny feet in one hand. And I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to do this before it isn’t okay anymore. I assume Ellen will tell me. I assume she knows these things.

Willa. Ellen. A world in two words.

“Show me more,” is all I can manage.

She turns the page. My stomach seizes but I don’t know why. There is a broad expanse of green lawn, a big oak tree, and a tire swing. I am pushing Willa on the tire swing. Her head is thrown back, her long blonde hair falls almost to the ground. She is six, maybe seven.

“That’s the house on—”

“Sand Dune Road.”

“You remember the name of the street, but three weeks ago you didn’t know who I was?” she asks.

“Things come back in bits and pieces.”

I look at the picture again and can’t help associating that house with the beginning of the end. Even though I know I’m probably telling myself another lie. But it felt that way. Every time I turned onto our new street, I felt mocked.

The house we bought was a block north of Sunset in a very nice but not overly ostentatious part of Brentwood. It had a swimming pool and a huge backyard. The school district was excellent. The drive into the office was fifteen minutes instead of forty-five. It made perfect sense. And I hated Ellen for making me buy it. For making me give up our little place in Malibu where we went to sleep every night with the waves breaking outside our bedroom window.

I knew it wasn’t really her fault. If we’d stayed, Willa would have turned into just another beautiful surfer girl who hardly ever went to school, spent most of the day getting stoned, and ended up working at the Fred Segal in the Malibu Cross Creek Mall. No, there was really no other way. But the street name. I couldn’t help experiencing it as a not-so-subtle “Fuck you.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Ellen screeched, exhausted from finally getting me to admit what it was I was pissed off about.

“Sand Dune Road?” I yelled back.

We were standing in the street in front of the house, watching Willa play on the picture-perfect tire swing. I looked up and down the perfectly manicured, perfectly flat, perfectly green street. “Why don’t they just call it Constant Painful Reminder?”

“Oh grow the fuck up, Greyson,” Ellen said. “Not everything is about you. We’re doing this for her.”

She was right. But I never stopped missing the beach. And then Willa started having nightmares. There’d been a robbery on our block. So I installed an alarm system. But still, Willa didn’t sleep through the night. She missed Shadow, the enormous German shepherd technically our neighbor’s dog but really the unofficial mayor and the only security system we ever needed on Beechwood Shore Drive, the little cul-de-sac we lived on in Malibu.

Willa was sure there were men hiding in the bushes outside her bedroom windows. I wasn’t sleeping much then—couldn’t sleep—and so I’d stay up watching old movies. Willa would wake up from a nightmare at two or three in the morning and come find me and climb up into my lap and watch with me.

“Remember when I was scared of the robbers?” she asks. I remember. After four or five nights without sleep, I would be seeing shadows, hearing noises. I would be convinced our house was being cased. I kept thinking there were men outside coming to get me.

“We went to the lumberyard and bought planks,” I say, wishing this was not coming back to me so clearly.

“And you boarded up all the windows in my room,” she says wistfully.

And now I remember. That was also around the same time I had my office swept for bugs. And when I started buying the guns.

“You made me feel safe.” Willa is lost in her completely bogus memory. “Really safe. Mom thought you were nuts, but I thought I had the perfect dad.”

I look up at Willa and try to smile. “Sweetheart, I
was
nuts.”

“But I don’t—you were fine when I was little. I remember. Everything. Vacations and holidays and—” She turns the pages of the photo album and points to a picture. Ellen, Willa, and me smiling, tan, vacationing on St. Barts. Less than a year before I left.

“Look,” she says. Her voice is beginning to shake. “I remember you like this. Before.”

My throat tightens.

“What?” she asks.

But I don’t know what to say or how to say it.

“What?” she asks again, anxiously, impatiently.

I point a shaky finger at the man who looks like me. “
That
is not before. It just looks like it.” Willa examines the photo, searching for clues.