I will have to tell Evan we’ve failed yet again when he comes home. I wash my hands and face with freezing water. As I scour my cheeks with a towel, I hear piano music in the living room. I’m supposed to be alone, and Evan should have locked the door on his way to the bus.
When I approach my piano, the bench stands vacant and nothing looks altered. The complete score for Les Miserables lays open at the song On My Own, just as I’d left it. I glare at the box on the mantle without knowing why, then walk to the kitchen, take the long knife that Evan uses for bell peppers, and prowl through every room in our house. Twenty minutes later I am sure the house is empty.
I put the knife back, change into jeans and a sweatshirt and, tackle the yard where I mulch the flower beds, mow the lawn, detach the hoses, and winterize the garden. When Evan arrives, he asks why I look so tired and I tell him that, once again, we’re not pregnant. I cry harder than usual that night and he puts his arms around me so I can fall asleep. When he drifts, I am left wide awake, my mind still echoing with the memory of a ghost piano player.
I can’t tell Evan about the piano. Word would get back to my dad and then I’d have to fight the medication war again.
I’ve lost that fight before.
***
I was fourteen years old when enough became enough. Mom used to say “Patricia will grow out of it,” or “She’s just going through a phase.” But my teenage depression was more than the regular dollop of angst on top of hormones. I’d moved from the front row to the back of all my classes. My teachers melted with dismay at my crashing homework scores. On weekends, I confined my days to my room and hardly said or ate a morsel at the mandatory family dinners.
Daddy put his foot down. I needed professional help, he said. Mom cried. After a heated discussion in the laundry room—for some reason they thought the sound of the dryer would mask raised voices—my parents announced I’d see a doctor.
Mom drove me there and told me in a really quiet voice that she’d wanted to see a counselor, but Daddy had refused to let me see a “quack.” So instead, I told Dr. Raymond Thatcher, that, yes, I did sometimes think about killing myself and, no, I’d never tried or planned anything.
He wrote a prescription in loopy blue ink. Mom drove straight to Bartell’s and walked out, teary-eyed, with a white paper bag. She wouldn’t let me look inside. At home she served Daddy his dinner with the rest of us, and when she brought out dessert, she put the paper bag on his plate, but gave herself, Meggie, and me a slice of apple pie.
Daddy pulled a little orange bottle with a white cap out of the bag. I let him tell me I needed to take half a purple pill every morning with breakfast. I was too frightened to want any pie.
I stopped crying in the showers after gym and regained place of most attentive student. Sometimes I wonder if the antidepressants were the reason I managed to get Jason Haselman, the super cute president of the musical theater club, to take me to Senior Prom.
Now that so many years have passed and I’ve taught piano to several teenagers, I think I was a pretty normal fourteen-year-old girl, just more imaginative and dramatic than my father at that age.
Whatever the case, those purple pills made high school more fun. Of course, if I’d done crack, it might have felt that way, too.
By the time I was studying piano performance in college, that orange cup with the white child-proof lid was like my right hand.
Necessity does not breed affection, however. The meds kept a fuzziness around my brain that never lifted, not even on Saturdays when I slept in. But I didn’t want to revisit the misery of fourteen years old: lonely, horny, identity-confused, and acne-speckled.
And now, I have enough agony with our would-be pregnancy to deal with. I can’t tell Evan about the ghost piano. Daddy would hear about it, and I’d find myself back in a doctor’s office learning how to take a different colored pill.
***
“Do you want to see a fertility counselor?” Evan asks me the next morning.
I’m making a note to get paint swatches for the kitchen from Home Depot. I look up, my head still full of lemon yellows and Caribbean blues.
He asks again and I say yes so quickly we’re both surprised. Anything is better than pills.
The counselor is a nice woman named Ruby with smooth blonde hair and lips that make sympathetic “oh” and “hmm” sounds while she listens. She tells Evan to leave the room and then asks me one hundred questions about my life and whether I want a baby. Then she has me leave and she talks to Evan for a much longer time. When she invites us both back, she recommends we take several evenings a week to stay home and build intimacy. I raise my eyebrow at Evan and that is the end of our session.
On the way home, Evan says, “She thought you were still working. I told her you left your job six months ago.”
I shrug.
“She said you seemed preoccupied, and you weren’t getting enough mental rest. Any kind of stress, if there’s enough of it, can impair conception.”
“No job stress for this one!” I say a little too cheerfully.
Evan makes a “humph” sound and doesn’t speak again till we get home. He comes around the car to open the door for me. I take his hand and for a moment we’re catapulted back in time, standing under blooming cherry trees, ensconced by old brick buildings. We’re the students who fell in love during their senior year of college and the world supports our hopes and dreams.
***
There’s nothing in existence that makes you feel more like a damned soul than insomnia.
I wake just moments after Evan falls asleep. He waits till I stop fidgeting and when I finally doze, he relaxes into his own dreams. Before thirty minutes have passed, I rise to full alertness and pass an agonizing hour or two before the sounds begin. They always begin.
Sometimes they’re small enough to be ignored, but then they grow louder. The ghost piano player has been joined by a harmonica crooning on my roof. I always get up to investigate. So far, I have never found anything, but I know that if I ignore them and one night they’re real, someone else would notice and wonder why I hadn’t done anything. Thus, to hide my mental disease, I pursue it like a mad woman who doesn’t know the difference. I know the box on the mantle makes all of these nocturnal sounds, but I can’t explain it or offer any reasons why it waited eighteen months to do so.
Nineteen months after our wedding, the answer to my old question about the box’s giver appears in an envelope striped with the blue and red border of international mail. We finish our spaghetti and read the letter. Evan’s Aunt Iris, who lives in Tuscany with her partner Daryl, sends us her love. Aunt Iris relates gossip about her retirement community’s escapades, an account of her trip to Florence, and an old church where she lit a candle for our future baby. She promises to send cannoli pastry shells in time for Christmas and closes with:
Has Patricia enjoyed the box I sent you? In case my note bears repeating, remind her that she must never open it.
Hugs and Kisses,
Auntie Iris
“Is that the box we have on the mantle?” Evan asks as he crumples the envelope and moves to toward the recycle bin.
“Don’t!” I snatch the precious return address from his hands. “I want to write a thank you. I didn’t know she was the one who gave it.”
Evan ruffles my hair and turns to the bills. His eyes puff pink with fatigue and I want to help him. He looks up from Comcast, meets my gaze and says, “Honey, what do you think about hiring some help around the house?”
At first I think he’s joking. I scrutinize the spotless kitchen. “Yes, it doesn’t look like I can keep up with everything, does it?” I’m sarcastic, but Evan misinterprets. He doesn’t see my battle to find things to do from the minute he leaves for work till the century later when he returns.
“I thought if you had help around the house, it would free you up to—”
“To do what
?” My cheeks flame and I grab the porcelain lip of the sink to keep from swaying. “I need to stay busy or I’ll go nuts.”
Evan frowns. “I’m worried about you. You’re eating less and getting bags under your eyes.”
“I am?” The insomnia must be leaving signs. “Maybe I should go back to Diva.”
“Why don’t we hire cleaning help for a few weeks, just to test it out? I’ll contact them. They’ll manage the house and the yard and you can enjoy yourself.”
I can hardly breathe as I hiss, “What exactly does ‘enjoy’ myself mean?”
Evan sets down the checkbook. His throat makes the swallowing motion that means he’s upset. “Read a book, take a nap, calm down and then—”
“Is this all about getting pregnant?” I burst into tears, grab a dinner plate, and shatter it on the kitchen floor.
***
The shards are still there when the Maid Brigade arrives early the next morning. Evan lets them in before he kisses me goodbye as I lie in bed, unmoving. I wait for him to leave, and then pull pen and paper from my bedside drawer.
Dear Aunt Iris,
Thank you for the lovely green box. It holds a place of honor in our living room. Is there a story behind this?
Your original note must have been lost in our move to the new house. Why must the box not be opened? Is there something special about it?
Do you have an email address? Mine is
[email protected] Keep in touch,
Patricia
I curse the international mail after I’ve dropped my letter at the post office. It could take weeks before I hear a reply. When I return, the maids are dusting every horizontal surface in the house with gray feather plumes. There aren’t more than three of them, but they’re all chattering and laughing in such a rapid exchange, my head spins the moment I walk in. I glance at the mantle. The box is gone.
One of the girls, the youngest of the trio, is holding it, dusting the embellished designs on its surface. As she continues to handle it, I hear a faint scuffling that gradually sharpens to a scratch, like a cat vandalizing the door when it wants to be let in.
The maid notices me and smiles. She puts the box back and the trapped animal noise increases. I venture a glance at the others, but no one else seems to hear it.
I cloister myself in a corner of my bedroom with my iPod.
***
Evan tells me over dinner that his sister, Lynn, will come to visit me the next day. She’s taking time off work to care for her two-month-old baby, and although Evan doesn’t say it, I know he’s talked her into this visit.
That night, after he falls asleep, the scratching thing inside the box starts up again.
I shake my bottle of Prozac and it sounds like a maraca. The rhythm soothes me. I set the bottle down but I still hear the maraca echoing. It’s coming from the bathtub. I can hear it clearly because Evan likes to sleep with our bedroom door open and the bathroom is right across the hall.
I sneak out, approach the tub, and crawl in. The knees of my silk pajamas stick to the wet bathtub. Evan took a shower before dinner and the tub hasn’t dried yet. It sounds like someone turned the drainpipe into a little speaker system. A South American dance party is jiving right under my bathtub, and I hate salsa music more than just about anything.
Evan stumbles through the door and flips up the toilet lid. I freeze. He’ll think I’m nuts. I can’t conjure any explanation he’ll accept for my actions, and now it’s too late to announce I’m here. He finishes. I’m grateful he’s too groggy to be observant. The wood floor squeaks as he stops in the doorway to our bedroom. “Patricia?”
Shit. He’s seen the empty bed. He flicks on the hall light. He is shambling toward the kitchen now and his footsteps sound like he’s waking up.
I run back to bed and yank the covers up to my chin. A minute later he’s standing in our doorway again, gawking and blinking. He calls my name like he’s not sure I’m really there.
“Honey?” I feign a yawn.
“Were you in bed this whole time?”
I yawn again, as if I don’t quite hear him, and Evan swallows the bait. He snuggles up to me, and soon he’s asleep with the stubble of his chin pressed gently into the back of my neck. I envy him frequently for this ease in entering the dreamlands.
The familiar scuffling returns a third time. I can neither dream nor run. I’m running out of options.
***
Lynn finally arrives with a mewing baby slung across her chest, and I make my first mistake by plunging into silent contemplation on what’s broken about my anatomy. She regales me with stories about baby Stefan’s eating and sleeping and pooping habits. I have to bite my tongue twice to make sure I don’t say that being kept awake by a cute little crying baby who you can hold, feed, and kiss seems like bliss in comparison with my nighttime noises.
Lynn leaves, promising to invite me over when things are less crazy, and then I’m alone in the spotless house once more. The house gives me this holier-than-thou smile; it no longer needs me to keep it clean. I try playing piano, but the maracas in the bathtub and the animal clawing in the box just get louder.
I take my bottle of pills from the bedroom and sit in front of my computer. I do a few searches using the brand name plus words like “cold turkey” and “withdrawal.” I don’t know why I think now is a good time to get off my antidepressant meds, but it feels like something I can control. As I scan doctors’ warnings about weaning off the drug, I hear Raymond Thatcher’s voice reading them to me.
The general precautions catch my attention. Possible severe lung defects in babies when drug is passed on in breast milk. I want to scream and I want to laugh. Finally, an excuse to be rid of these. I’ve probably outgrown the prescription by now, anyway, and if I start crying in the shower again, I can always pretend I lost my bottle and get a new one.
I stand over the toilet, staring at the sunken purple pills and I press the handle. The water forces them into the sewer where no father can convince his daughter to take them. Then I’m crying and apologizing to my prescription bottle and I’m afraid because I don’t want to feel fourteen again, but I promise myself I’m willing to do and be anything to have a baby.
***
I’m wearing the embroidered satin robe from my bridal shower when Evan comes home. He smiles at the candles on the dinner table. He enjoys his cream of broccoli soup with his favorite crusty olive bread and kisses me more than normal. He doesn’t even notice that I don’t take my dose after dinner. We watch a romantic comedy with my feet in his lap. I feel powerful and even possibly maternal, but I remind myself this is only wishful thinking. We make love. I drift asleep in perfect faith that I will dream a blessed dream, but I wake up, like clockwork, in the world of the damned.
If my insomnia on the antidepressants was bad, this is like insomnia after being pushed off a cliff. I wake up hyperventilating. Evan must be miles deep into his sleep cycle, because I sit straight up and gasp, but he only moans and rolls over.
The house is going crazy. It’s as if all the other times I’d heard the box’s noises came through a muffled door. Now the door’s flung open and my ears are ringing.
Children whisper under the floorboards. Twice before, I’ve heard someone knock on our front door, but when I got up to answer, I found only my outdoor cat, Tabitha, who loves to sleep on our welcome mat, annoyed for her interrupted beauty sleep. But tonight, someone is pounding on the door like hell is on his heels. I trip down the hall and fling the door open.
Nothing but Tabitha, who hisses. I close the door and lean against it, panting. The mantle light shines like an alien tractor beam. It’s illuminating the box as if it’s a museum artifact. As I walk closer, my breathing slows.
For a moment the house hangs totally still. I lift the box from the mantle. It feels full of heavy liquid. I place it back on the mantle and the light above me goes out all by
itself.
Then, a new sound: I hear my mother call my name, as if her voice is trapped right inside the green box.
***
Evan notices my pills have vanished from beside my dinner plate on the second night. Without a word, he leaves the table, comes back from our bedroom and asks, “Darling, where are your meds?”
I shrug.
“Did you lose them?”
I shake my head and smile.
“Have you stopped taking them?” He says this gravely, as if I’ve just said I want a divorce.
I think, “Our baby should be healthy,” but I say, “I’m cutting down my dose.”
Evan sighs, relieved. “I was afraid you were cutting off, cold turkey. That can cause weird side effects, you know.”
“Do you know the effects of antidepressants on a pregnancy?”
He takes my hand. “I wouldn’t make you cope without them, so I didn’t mention it. The risks aren’t extremely high.”
I shake my head. “You always loved me more than our future children.”
“Is that a crime, if they don’t exist yet?”
“This house is a shrine; and I’m the captive priestess to the child who doesn’t exist.” I’m surprised by the bitterness in my voice.
Evan fidgets with his thumb under his chin. “So what do you want to do?”
I almost say, “Let me open the box and everything will be fine,” but it doesn’t logically follow. I don’t even know where those words came from, because I wasn’t thinking about the box a second ago.
I go to bed, wake up an hour later, and check my email as if I already know what waits for me.
My dear niece,
I know it is hard to understand, but this box has been in the family for generations. That is the part I know for sure; the rest if just tradition. Now that you’re a member of the family this is what you need to know:
It descends from the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean and it is an honor to have it in your house.