Broken Read online

  There was a story there, one he wasn’t telling. One I had no right, perhaps, to hear. “And?”

  He ran a hand through his hair and shifted on the bench, all part of the ritual I’d grown used to seeing when I dug too deep. Most of the time it was enough to get me to back off and change the subject. These times weren’t about analysis, after all, not about pushing buttons.

  “Never mind,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “Eddie was a year younger than me. He was the smart one, I guess you could say.” Joe laughed.

  “And you were the pretty one?”

  I liked the fact he knew when I was teasing, and he took it. “You got it.”

  “So, what happened?” I thought I could guess.

  Joe leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands linked. The gravel seemed suddenly to have captured his interest quite thoroughly. “She got pregnant.”

  “Oh?” I hadn’t expected that answer.

  He turned his face toward me. “Yeah.”

  It took me a second to understand. “Oh. Oh!”

  Joe nodded. “More like, ‘oh, fuck.’”

  “What happened?”

  “She had an abortion. I had to borrow the money from my dad to pay for it. He told me I was a disappointing bastard, and he was right. Eddie never knew about it. By then he was sick. He had leukemia. Anyway, he…died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Joe,” I said softly and waited until he looked at me. “I’m still sorry.”

  I might have reached for him, but we didn’t touch. We never touched. He nodded slightly.

  “Thanks.” He got up, the story told, our time spent. “Oh, I almost forgot.”

  Joe pulled a tissue-wrapped package from his inside suit pocket. He held it out on the palm of his hand. “Happy birthday.”

  I was already reaching for it with the automatic response most people make when an object’s offered. At his words, though, I hesitated. The package tipped from his hand and missed mine, hitting the ground, where I bent to pick it up with a hasty apology.

  “You didn’t have to get me something.” I blushed. Hard. “I hope it didn’t break.”

  “I think it’s okay. Open it.”

  I did. It was a small hand-dipped candle from a local boutique. A pale purple, it smelled distinctively of lavender.

  “How did you know?” I asked, lifting the candle and sniffing it.

  “You told me.” Joe sounded surprised, as if my question made no sense. “You said it was your favorite scent.”

  “I did?” I wrapped the candle back in the tissue and held it close to me. “Really? It is, actually.”

  Joe smiled. “I thought you did. Anyway. Happy birthday, Sadie.”

  “Thank you.” I reached into my bag and pulled out the gift I’d decided not to give him, and gave it to him anyway. It was a book, the latest hardcover thriller from a well-known author. “Surprise. I hope you don’t already have it.”

  He didn’t. We beamed at each other until our smiles said too much and we had to look away. Joe took a few steps back before turning and heading off down the path. I stared after him, the faint scent of lavender surrounding me.

  Much is said about brilliance. Less attention is paid to those who live next to it. Spouses, children, assistants…if anyone thinks of us at all, it’s generally to remark upon how lucky we are to bask in the light of genius.

  In the first years of our life together, I basked in Adam’s brilliance. At parties, I was proud to introduce myself as Adam Danning’s wife, to accept compliments on his behalf. I was often asked if I, too, was a poet.

  “No,” Adam always said proudly. “My Sadie is a doctor.”

  Not once did anyone seem surprised I wasn’t also a literary whiz, but I always enjoyed that moment of expectation in their eyes while they waited to see if I was. I never wished for the sort of creative brilliance Adam had, nor envied it of him. There wasn’t room in our house for another Adam. We’d have been like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, colander helmets and all, prepared to battle.

  Sylvia Plath gassed herself. Ernest Hemingway shot off his face. Richard Brautigan apparently grew tired of trout fishing and also took the way of the gun.

  Does madness bring creativity? Or does creativity cause madness? Can an artist create without the ups so high and the downs so low? As a psychologist, I felt I should know the answers. I should be able to understand my brilliant, talented husband. Yet, I didn’t.

  The mood swings baffled me. When I needed to work, I went to my desk. I read. I studied. I accomplished my goals steadfastly, each in a row so tidy I could literally check them off on a list.

  Adam disappeared into his office for hours and hours to emerge with bleary eyes, cursing and moaning, saying he was unable to write. He sometimes wept and threw dishes against the wall, only to laugh himself hoarse an hour later at inane television programs. My lack of comprehension about his creative impulses infuriated him.

  We clashed. We fought. We made brilliant, creative, genius love that sometimes left us both weeping.

  I knew him, but I didn’t understand him.

  I learned to ignore his moods as unrelated to me or anything I’d done, and to leave him alone when he was mopish. I read his poems when they were published, as they all were, to increasing popularity and acclaim. I went with him to parties where sycophants fawned on him and fed us champagne and caviar, where placards with his face and the cover of his books stared at us from across the room.

  I loved Adam and he loved me, and we made a life that was full of ups and downs—but it worked. I studied. He created. He pulled me along and I was not his anchor, for Adam wouldn’t be anchored. I was, instead, his ballast. Something to keep him from bouncing quite so high or diving quite so low.

  His first book tour didn’t land him on Oprah or The Tonight Show. His publisher booked him at colleges and bookstores where he appeared in his leather jacket and earring and read his poems to rapt audiences of suburban housewives and English majors. There was talk of his being considered as Pennsylvania’s next Poet Laureate, a possibility that might have been pulled from the thin air of his publisher’s hopefulness but had Adam floating on that high for weeks.

  Then he hit a tree and woke up in a hospital bed, and everything was gone. If he’d written anything since then, I didn’t know about it. I was afraid to suggest it. Writing to Adam had been as necessary as breathing or eating or fucking. He couldn’t do any of those things on his own any longer. Maybe he couldn’t write, either. Writing had been Adam’s addiction. His high. There was no mistaking the fact he suffered from its lack, but he wouldn’t talk to me about it.

  Much like the shoemaker’s children who went barefoot, the husband of the psychologist went without therapy. Adam was adamant he didn’t need it, wouldn’t have it.

  “If I didn’t need it before, when I was half out of my fucking head, I don’t need it now,” he said. “I’m a quadriplegic, Sadie, not crazy.”

  I didn’t bother to explain that I don’t deal with “crazy” people, and neither do my colleagues. Adam had made up his mind. His accident hadn’t made him any less stubborn.

  So we focused on the chair, the hourly medical care, the minutiae of evacuating his bladder and bowels and caring for a body that could no longer protect itself even from its own weight. We labored under the pretense that nothing had changed when everything had, and I understood him, but I no longer knew him.

  Adam had always been brighter. Stronger. I’d been content to circle him the way the earth revolves around the sun, dependent on him to lead me.

  What happens when the weaker becomes the stronger? When my independence became a choice no longer, but a necessity if we were both going to survive? The places we’d built for ourselves no longer fit. Like poor Honey, we were trapped in the past, stuck developmentally, locked into habits that had served us in the past but weren’t allowing us to grow.

  Once, it had be