love.
By day, my psyche busied itself with grotesque solutions to my mother’s ongoing drama, but by night, it turned its substantial wrath on me. Fraud. Liar. Fool. The voices in my head were relentless. Over the next two years, they grew louder and louder until they became unstoppable revenants that intruded daily, most aggressively in the predawn hours, when my defenses were at their weakest. I resorted to drinking goblets of red wine to help me fall asleep. But I couldn’t suppress the voices. Each night I would awaken with a start at exactly two o’clock. For an hour, sometimes more, I would lie expectantly, waiting for the endless loop of berating thoughts to end; they didn’t stop until dawn inched around the sides of the bedroom shades.
This scene played out night after night with Jack just one foot away from me, sleeping with the peace of the dead. Sometimes I considered waking him up, thinking he might understand and would be able to talk me out of my torment, but he was already confounded and exhausted by my unhappiness. He’d been watching me unravel for months now and was doing his best to support me. He took me for runs on the beach and tirelessly researched articles about exercise as a cure for depression. One of us needed to sleep. I let Jack be.
Everyone close to me knew I was suffering.
“Just tell me what to do,” Jack said. “Whatever you need, I’ll do it.”
“I’ve been there, darling,” my father said. “You’re resilient. You’ll get through this.”
“Let’s call my therapist,” Margot said. “She’ll help.”
“Don’t listen to the voices at night,” Kyra told me over the phone. “They act like they have answers but they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“Drugs,” Malabar said. “Powerful ones. We need to treat this thing with a sledgehammer.”
But I also found my depression tedious—tedious to live through, tedious to explain, tedious to be around. I was bored by my own relentless loop and felt sure I was boring everyone around me. I had brought this on myself, after all, having made a series of decisions that landed me where I was: in the wrong city, pursuing the wrong career, and, quite possibly—the hardest thing of all to contemplate—married to the wrong man. What had Jack done to deserve being saddled with this depleted version of me?
I began to loathe living in San Diego with its nonstop sunny days and perfectly fit inhabitants. I missed the messy velocity of New York City and had started to imagine pursuing a career in the literary world. On my bedside table, old political journals had been replaced by current issues of the Paris Review and Granta. Would Jack possibly consider a life together back east? My husband was happy in San Diego; he loved his job, our home, and his routine. Reluctantly, Jack told me he’d be willing to move, but we both knew that no part of him wanted to leave. Besides, neither of us could say with any optimism that this was where his sacrifice would end.
“I couldn’t bear to leave everything I love and then end up without you too,” he said.
* * *
In late November of 1992, just over two years into my marriage to Jack, Lily’s heart gave out. She had a heart attack at a restaurant and died on the way to the hospital. Ben delivered the news to Jack matter-of-factly, who told me in a similar manner. I couldn’t fathom the concept of being without a mother. It was as unimaginable to me as waking up without the sun. But Jack did not fall apart. He did not cry at the news. Instead, he got through the evening in a high-functioning daze, purchasing airline tickets to Boston through United miles, making an extensive packing list, and calling other family members, delivering the news, and attending to their feelings.
Before the sun set over the Pacific, Malabar telephoned. I hesitated for a moment, wondering if it was my job to tell her about Lily’s death. Then the words spilled out.
“I already know, Rennie,” she said. “Ben called me first.”
I wondered if it was true that Ben had called my mother before he’d contacted either Jack or his sister. Perhaps Malabar simply needed to believe this. She went on to tell me that she’d decided against attending Lily’s funeral. Had she actually contemplated going?
In the next room, I watched Jack pace in quiet grief. On the phone, my mother’s voice was measured, but beneath the