A letter to my husband - 2.5

Last week I caught Anne and Babe in the bathroom doing crack;  I no longer knew who she was. I grounded her; she ran away.

She called from a motel near Venice Beach; she was going to kill herself.

I took the next flight; it was a race against time and all the things we loved about her.

I found her at 11 p.m, sprawled across the floor, vomit pooled around her, a half-drunk bottle of scotch, a broken wine bottle and an open bottle of Valium next to her.

The ambulance siren sliced through the darkness as I sat next to her.

At the hospital, the doctors said, "She knew what she was doing, we don't know if she'll make it. No promises."

Our family's too fractured, you must return. I can't forgive you, but I need you back.

She was the symptom-bearer of all that went wrong in our marriage.  That is why she ended up this way.

Being the only child after Michael left for college was difficult for her.

A cold silence chilled  the house, it cooled her heart, it stilled her very soul.

Living at home was a little death for her.

She walked on eggshells, kept her head low down and walked with a slouch, on tiptoes, so as not to disturb the fragile unbalance of the marriage.

The chill in our marriage very nearly killed her, there was no love left for her between the vitriol between us.

As she lay there, unconscious. I stared at her. It was as if she stared back, silently, a recrimination.

Her blank, icy silence spoke volumes from her eyes.

At the hospital, they kept telling me, 'No promises.'

Unconscious for nearly a day.

The doctors wondered where she'd learned that so much alcohol so fast with so many Valium was a sure-fire recipe for death. 

We never drank nor took pills. Where'd she get this?

She was very close, they'd said.

The social worker asked about the marriage; what could I tell her.

It was broken before it began; what we never knew hurt us.

I was with her when the doctors put the breathing tube in.

I was holding her hand, hoping she'd wake up.

I spoke to her, cooed and loved her like a tiny baby, kissed her cheek and patted her hand. 

The image of her laying there like the living death she was became too much for me; I, too, wanted to die, if she did not live.

Yet I never quite gave up hope.  I wanted her to know how much I tried, how much I should have tried, how much I could have done, have yet to do. How much I want to prove to her I love her.

After a day, she did awake.

Her stomach hurt, she said. The doctors gave her something for the pain caused when they pumped her stomach.

She didn't feel hung over; she didn't feel drugged from the pills, she said.

She didn't remember breaking the wine bottle; she didn't remember taking the Tylenol, an added precaution, in her recipe for death.

She didn't remember falling to the floor, vomiting.

We shouldn't have left her alone so often after you left.

You need to come home, at least for a while.

Drew, I'm taking the summer off from work, to be with her. She's 17, you need to be with her, too.

We need to repair the family; it was those years of unspoken anger, things we said, ways we'd pulled her into our arguments.

She told me she didn't want to live without both parents living together.

It was too close, the doctors said, to be an accident. She knew what she was doing.

The social worker said we need family counseling; this time, the social worker said, was a practice run. Next time, Anne could succeed.

Anne said she didn't really want to die, but to teach us that to ignore her pain is wrong.

She wants, more than anything, for us to be the family we were when she was young.

Perfect. Happy. Smiling. Loving.

We were always broken; yet we always smiled through our discontent.

It's the same mistake we always made, yet we know no other.

This is fiction.

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A letter to my husband - 1; A letter to my husband - 1.5; A letter to my husband - 2;  A letter to my husband - 2.6;

A letter to my husband - 2.7;

A letter to my husband -3;