Her husband says to himself, “She’s gone”.
He looks searchingly into her eyes. She stares at and through him, absent. His heart sinks at her relapse into this thousand-yard stare. A terrible sign. For weeks he has seen the return of concerning symptoms. She irritably brushes off his attempts to warn her, confront her.
“I’m fine.”
For the last seven days, with deep unease, he has noted her paucity of speech, flattened expression, aura of brooding. He notes that the daily tasks she usually enjoys lay undone. He suddenly realizes that the planters of herbs on the pier that she has tended so lovingly are dying from lack of water. She has stopped making or eating their meals. He has rarely felt so helpless.
Now she lies curled on her side on the sea berth, as she has been for the last two days now, getting up only to pee and drink water.
“Get up, move around,” he begs. “You’ll feel better.”
She shakes her head minutely and rolls over, away from him, breaking their brief eye contact.
He sighs, frustrated, sad and not just a little frightened. This time is as bad as any he can remember. He loves her more than anything, but he is also a practical man. A realist. He sighs and returns to repairing their boat’s engine. They live aboard, and this task is essential.
She tilts her head to look after him, sees his bowed shoulders and glum expression as he turns away. She feels a pang. She hates herself. She struggles once again against the weight, the burden, the leaden fog, to find and feel her love for him. It beckons to her from underneath the vast mass of her brain blight. She thinks with self-loathing of his pain, of the partnership responsibilities that she has abandoned bit by bit. He’s quietly assumed each as she diminishes, disappears. Over the past few weeks, she’s wound down, sunk, and now lays inert. She thinks of his pleading tone and her heart contracts painfully. She wants to get up. She screams inwardly at herself:
“Shake this off!”
The damaged defender part of her stirs, wrestles, rises. With effort, she sits up. It’s like moving through wet concrete. Her limbs feel enormously heavy. Her mouth is filled with the poison taste of dread. Her gray matter shoots a new burst of bad neurochemicals into her consciousness. It doesn’t want her to escape. She harbors a monster that must be contained at any cost. It’s ancient and cycles through appalling chimerical shapes.
Small Paula lets go, submits, lets herself fall back. She plummets into a troubled sleep.
And her dreams? They feature the nightmarish ghosts who haunt her from the real. Her subconscious long ago decided to yank her down when her inner brain chatter raises these specters once again. The onslaught of memory is unpredictable. Often, she doesn’t detect the prodrome until it is too late and Pandora’s box is flung fully open. Then she shrieks at the sky. Rage engulfs her and she can feel her berserker-self rising, aflame and strong, dangerous and destructive.
Her brain, preferring immobilization to the fury that in the past has led her to burn her good life down, flings her down hard. Old shames, wounds and brutalities, some witnessed, some experienced, are buried dungeon deep (but never quite forgotten). Rather than letting her revisit this deeply sequestered morass, her brain dumbs her down. Blankets her in dense gray fog, heavy and poisonous as vaporous mercury. Its metallic taste floods her. Awful. But better than the alternative. This is the bargain that was struck years ago, so long ago and deep inside her that she can’t remember how or with whom the deal was sealed. Was she even asked consent?
When it finally breaks, some weeks later, helped along by a noisome, hateful witch’s brew of pharmaceuticals, the waning of the moon, plus her own intermittent frantic struggles, she emerges. She’s weak and depleted.
She looks around as if seeing the familiar interior of their sailboat home for the first time. The companionway stairs to the cockpit have been disconnected and set aside to allow her husband access to the engine compartment. Shakily, she gets up from the sea berth and enters the master sleep compartment. She climbs atop the mattress, stands. She unlatches and pushes open the forward hatch set in the ceiling overhead. She sticks her head and torso up through the small rectangle into the Florida afternoon. She blinks at the brilliant sunshine. She takes slow deep breaths. She realizes with a sneaking sense of relief that she can once again register the tangy smell of the sea air. It’s both salty and sweet.
She feels the faint stirrings of hunger, absent for so long that her jeans hang loose on her hips. She climbs back down into the cabin. Standing on the teak and holly cabin sole, her naked feet newly sense its cool surface and its sturdiness. She sees her husband’s legs and bare feet protruding from the engine compartment. He’s positioned on his back, head and torso hidden. He’s lying next to and almost underneath the old Yanmar diesel. She hears him ratcheting a bracket. She kneels and touches his leg gently. He starts and bangs his head on the bulkhead interior.
“Ouch!”
He extracts himself from under the engine carefully and looks at her, his face taut. His hair is disheveled, and he has a smear of grease on one cheek. It gives him an endearing rakish look. She smiles at him wanly. Uncertain and doubtful, he asks,
“How are you?”
“I’m okay.” Her voice is a croak, rusty from lack of use.
They share a look, wordless. He asks,
“Are you hungry? Do you want to walk around?”
She looks at this man, the finest she has ever known. Love, regret, gratitude, flood her.
“Walk, I think.”
He instantly abandons his task, hurriedly washes his hands. He replaces and secures the companionway steps. He watches over her and takes her elbow as she climbs up and then shakily disembarks to the pier. She sighs deeply and turns her face up to the sun. She can feel his large rough hand in hers. She squeezes it, relishing its warmth. Touch, taste, scent, feeling are all returning. The dense metallic cloud is receding. She can see the marina more clearly each minute, stripped of the gray overlay that has covered all she sees for weeks. She feels a peeping hope begin to peck at her constricted heart. Her chest loosens infinitesimally.
The husband searches her face, hoping to see a bit of his wife, absent for so long. He thinks he detects a trace of warmth flickering deep in her irises. Cautious, tentative, he thinks. He hopes. Maybe it will be okay. In a silence both intimate and freighted, they walk hand-in-hand up the pier to the boatyard together. They pass a tricolor heron perched on the lines of a catamaran.
The tiny blue, white and rust-colored bird croaks and takes flight. The wife watches it fly up and away. She thinks of Persephone, Lazarus, the phoenix. She starts to feel her heart beat regularly again. Each throb feels a tiny bit stronger than the last. Impulsively, she stops to hug her husband, who is still guarded and wary.
“I’m coming back. I’m so sorry. Thank you for watching over me.”
“I miss you,” he murmurs huskily.
As they explore the salty river’s edge, she is muttering inwardly to herself. It’s the phrase a grizzled old police sergeant taught her when she treated him for a broken nose, long ago, in another life.
“Knocked down seven, get up eight, doc.”
She feels a hot rush of determination rekindle. A real smile unexpectedly shapes her lips. Her mate is staring at a shrimp boat, idling down the channel, returning from sea. A raucous cloud of seagulls screech, wheel, and dive to retrieve scraps from the shrimp-smeared deck. The boat, Eight Ladies, smells strongly of fish, an odor they have learned over the years to enjoy, as it means a successful catch for the Ladies. She squeezes her mate’s hand again. She wonders if she can ever make up to her husband the loss of weeks of their life together, yet again. Doubts if she can atone for everything he has suffered. She vows to do her best. She tries not to hate her own brain for subjecting her man and herself to bad times like this last one. She shrugs, helplessly. Like her, it’s probably doing the best it can.
Paula Lyons, MD
2/14/25