You know, she wasn't always crazy.

They tell you that these things come with warnings, like the 'drink responsibly' reminders that in their microscopic font undermine the urgency of their exhortation: letters like ants marching along glossy adhesive labels and willing themselves into invisibility; like the inscrutable black text on the side of the noxious-colored mouthwash that advises you not to swallow; like the carton of cigarettes that now, after languid smoke has interred a new lung-scarred population, advertise their lethality with the candor of their brand-name (but cigarettes smolder and ashtrays empty just as they ever did).  

I have been told by staunch, grim-faced medical professionals with wide hands and heraldic voices that there were precedents to our pain--subtle but distinguishable, that I, in insulating myself against truth--its inconvenience, its brutality--had chosen to ignore. They look at me with eyes in which practiced pitiless reign. They're just patients, the eyes say; they deserve nothing but an explanation.

The explanation they provide, in voices that ring hollow and words devoid of empathy, is that the fact, the illness, is always there: not a burgeoning seed but a latent disease, the agreeable tenant in the remote corridors of the brain, a docile predator in wait of opportunity. Encoded in genetics, in twisting strands of DNA, our suffering is not divine wrath, a warranted punishment, but the cursed, deadly heirloom of our predecessors--life and death given by the same unknowing hand. With this knowledge, we are deprived of our ability to lay blame: to fall to our knees clenching our fists and cursing fate, mourning our loss, renouncing God. The loss of sanity is not a tragic misfortune akin to a strike of lightning or a crashing plane--it is not, in the regular sense, the luck of the draw. Borne into us, we can't complain when so many aren't born at all.


Alison I met in college when I was young, cutting myself shaving with a juvenile regularity, drinking too much, studying too little, a smart skinny kid whose home had become a nest of pizza boxes and whose parents had assumed the irrelevance of tinny voices emanating from a telephone receiver--disembodied, disregarded. She was an eighteen year old whose already tiny dormroom had shrunk with the additions of bookshelves, whose walls, branded with pencil graffitti, disappeared behind printed spines of varying thickness, proclaiming famous names and famous titles that I, in my preoccupation with other lesser things (video games, televised sports, science fairs, dirty magazines), had never ventured to read. We were unalike and were it not for chance--and I insist now, in spite of myself, that chance has been our undoing--I would never have met her, my wife; we would have gone on crossing paths and looking askance, floating in our parallel worlds, spinning in our prescribed, inexorable directions without intersection; our eyes might meet for a brief moment, in the way that wandering glances do, before discomfort rifed them apart and lowered our heads: shame-faced, red-cheeked. If it weren't for chance, I, too, might be a doctor somewhere, wandering in and out of blank-walled corridors, a man for whom death would become the paradox  of an undeniable, oppressing reality and mundane workplace occurrence; a man that, in the necessary cruelty of self-preservation, could treat death with an objective detachment, even permit myself the delusion that death was a condition from which I had been exempted, that in my gift, the college-cultivated, technologically-assisted ability to retrieve, maintain, and preserve life, I had been given a reprieve from the essential, inevitable tragedy of the human experience.

Like a B-grade romantic comedy, I met Alison in the library, where I had retreated to both begin and finish a procrastinated assignment that configured largely into my grade for that semester. An essentially ambitious person, I had, perhaps seeking solace from the internal pressure of that ambition, the omnipresent, overhanging cloud of self-doubt and potentially unattainable goals, surrounded myself with people interested only in subverting the stuffy oppressiveness of academia, of holding fast to the receding tide of youth by ingesting anything, everything and  rousing authoritative reproach: living life for each fleeting, drunken moment. But while I could deceive myself for a period that, I like them, could dismiss my future and adulthood as too unfathomable, too distant to bear any significant to the present, the years rife with possibility and excitement, I unfailingly awoke from my deluded drunken could and reverted back to my old ambitious concern, scurrying to the library in a whirlwind of worry and self-contempt.

There, browsing bleary-eyed through dim shelves, a finger trailing over the spines like a child dragging a branch across the posts of a picket fence, I proceeded through the decimal system in my quiet, self-imposed frenzy. When I found the title--I forget what it was now, in addition to the assignment--I grabbed it with triumphant, greedy fingers, yanking it towards me, and in my hysteria dropped it. It clattered in a flurry of pages to the carpeted floor. A hand--one that I would later, on a February evening, dress in a diamond ring, the $900 dollar token of my love--handed it back to me.

Our wedding day, before a gray-faced priest  n a high-ceilinged church, took place after four years of being together, after our graduation, our farewell to student life and all its antics, its insulating absurdity. We were adults now, with degrees to prove it. I traded beer for coffee, a dorm for a modest, two-bedroom apartment, a stint flipping hamburgers for a starting job with a pharmaceutical company to hold us over until I went to med school. Alison, with an English degree, started in substitute teaching. We got married that June in a small church before gray solemn priest and a smiling congregation of friends and family. I was twenty-two.

Here was where I should've seen the signs, the indications, the anomalies that a perceptive, loving husband should recognize and be attuned to; here was where her lapses of heavy, introspective silence should have seem weighted with a grave significance than I attributed to them. Alison was a quiet woman, though not exactly shy and certainly not unfriendly; she had a greater capacity for delving thought than I ever did, and when, in the midst of a casual conversation, she withdrew suddenly into a private, internal world from which I was excluded, I thought that she had merely been seized by some striking thought, a notion that she, with her books, her literary bent, her inclination towards deep contemplation and cerebral matters, could grasp and was beholden to. And when I came home from work to find her sitting alone at the small kitchen table with her hands splayed out before her, haloed in the ghostly, draining light of the overhead fixture, talking softly to  herself, staring at her hands where a diamond glinted and a flash of gold recalled the oath I had took to protect her, to love and to hold her, I thought nothing of it; that she was reciting a memorized verse that had resurfaced from the mental drudge of domesticity, that had emerged somehow from the dusty depths of forgotten things. Nor when consciousness suddenly returned to me inexplicably, ebbing through the nonsensical surreality of dreams to retrieve me from those hazy panoramas, where in the darkness I would feel the convulsions of weeping, of silent, stifled sadness beside me, I would not give pause to the notion lingering darkly n the back of my head. Abounding in concern, in vicarious sorrow, I would try to comfort her, to coax from her the reason for her tears. I was not disturbed when she couldn't provide me with one. It was what women do; abject to emotions, compelled by things that have no name, sensitive to what we could not see, or understand, or feel; it was not for me to question or probe what I could not comprehend.

She got pregnant in the fall of that year, after five months of marriage, and we were overjoyed. In a hospital whose austere exterior and looming size suggested something in between a storage warehouse and a medieval fortress, I led my wife and our swelling secret, our tiny creation, through vinyl-tiled hallways and bright sterile lights, past nurses stations buzzing with the exchange of gossip and rooms where muted TVS afforded glimpses into scripted, soundless worlds. We held hands in humming elevators, looking towards the ceiling as if to see through the grid-work of acoustic tile to the floors indicated on the glowing buttons. We passed doctors walking with brisk importance in their squeaking sneakers, eyes severe over surgical masks and lab coats billowing out behind them. Glass casings over ubiquitous fire-extinguishers caught and warped the ghosts of our reflections as we passed, feeling rootless and alien in this elaborate edifice of the medical profession, pedestrians infiltrating and disrupting the pristine order of this life-saving apparatus, intruders in this city of sick and shamen. We reached the necessary wing--a relief to be leaving the complex corridors of death-tending and death-thwarting--where we met duplicates of ourselves, a small population of the young and expecting, couples for whom death had dwindled to abstraction and irrelevance in the prospect of child-rearing.

Then I sat beside Alison as they pressed instruments to her stomach--how strange that these cold, calculating objects can detect, with their mechanical insentience, a blooming, fragile life--and showed us pulsing gray images, strange, interior terrain, and revealed to our curious eyes the shape, that blossoming promise, of our nascent child. We were very happy.

Our baby grew, I made more money, we put a bid on a house with four-bedrooms and an adjoining garage. We stood in a yard padded by thick grass and shaded by trees, envisioned where the swing-set would be, saw ourselves thick-waisted and selfless, devoted parents of charming children with grass-stained jeans and bottomless reserves of energy. We contemplated getting a puppy.

But there were moments still, and they were growing more frequent, but in my happiness I did not notice them or see them for what they were--what I am told they were. I came home once from work, feeling very much the expectant father, jingling my keys and walking into our apartment with a big smile of the Honey-I'm-home variety, looking for Alison, looking for my wife. She was in the kitchen, kneeling on the cold linoleum. Her arms enfolded her swollen stomach, the corporal coffer of our child; her mouth was open, the jaw working in a silent scream; her eyes were narrowed through tears that fell with a plaintive rapidity, rolling down her cheeks and traveling down the beveled line of her chin. Around her, shattered like shrapnel, pieces of broken china littered  the floor, unswept, untended. The sight of them, of these bone-white shards, was astonishing. They seemed portents of disaster, despite being not the precarious objects of an imminent misfortune but the testament of a catastrophe that had occurred prior, in my absence; but looking at them, at this scene, at my wife hunched desolately in this paltry domestic wreckage, I felt the shock and blood-chill as if it had been me who had sent fragile dishware clattering to the unyielding kitchen floor, as if it were my ears that had been greeted by the explosions of jagged sound, of ruin and waste and routine blunderingly interrupted. I helped her to her feet, held her until the tears stopped and swept the shards away in silence.

It did occur to me that her reaction to a common household misstep was unnatural, or unhealthy--that women don't collapse in fits of uncontrollable tears for the sake of broken china. Nor did it occur to me that perhaps Alison hadn't dropped the dishes in transit to the cabinets, but that she had thrown them, for her own unfathomable reasons, at the inviting expanse of wall across from the frigerator, where a silken, billowing  thread attested to the silent handiwork of spiders, spinning their webs in the hours after dark, building their woven empires in the course of a night. I did not think of it. I had no reason to.

Seven pounds, a girl, with a pink wrinkled face squinted shut against the harsh light, the ceaseless tumult of the physical world: a vast unforgiving space with no mothering flesh, no soft breathing walls to insulate her against it. A nurse handed to Alison (sweaty and stiff with pain, but beaming) a baby-girl wrapped in blankets like a gift. A week later we took her home, not to our apartment but to the house the movers had furnished in a tempest of physical labor and frenzied activity; all the rooms were still towering mazes of boxes, our lives stowed in cardboard and in wait of unpacking, except for the nursery--in which everything, a shining crib, a congregation of toys and teddy-bears, stood in seeming anticipation of the young arrival.

They've ascribed a name to her condition and tried to console me--friends, the few that I still have now, after all of this--in saying that it was not uncommon: reporting revealing percentages, frightening statistics, numbers that should comfort with their suggestion of a multitude of similar suffering. It is not just he own sorry defect, her own hapless genetic failings, but a human ailment, a universal blight. I am to see that I'm not alone. Humans, people, for all our innovations and advances, for all our incontested reign over this world, for all our versatility (thrown out of paradise and making do with genius and genocide), are just as susceptible to tragedy as any earth-bound creature. My Alison may have read entire libraries, but what books, what poems could protect her from the chemistry of her own body? What knowledge is powerful enough to correct encoded flaws?

Her condition was not unique, and neither were her actions, but that does not make them forgivable (I never forgave her as I never condemned her). It does not diminish public contempt or sooth a neighbor's horror. The legions of similar people with similar problems, similar sins, cannot undo what has been done, and it is ours to atone for, ours to explain. Oh, we have our meager excuses, our paltry claims to sympathy; her case was compounded by other factors, other illnesses encompassed in what doctors term as 'instability'. With their language they transform my wife, my quiet thinker, to a forsaken structure with a faulty foundation, a stripped sorry house awaiting the wrecking ball like the sick awaiting God. But God wasn't there.

***

We give ourselves little credit in matters of prescience, foreknowledge, even premonition; we are quick to dismiss the practices and platitudes that color our history. With the ascension of technology and the exaltation of reason, of tangible fact and palpable evidence, we grow embarrassed to think that our predecessors, even our childhood selves, were one so shamelessly given to visceral awareness and indefinable hunches. What moves us, what reaches us through the bulwarks of our skepticism, persists through the density of our meandering thoughts, to reach the receptor of feelings and sensations that ring true--that sensitive areas abject to the knowledge which has no grounding in logic or plausibility--we dismiss as fraudulent and meritless. We are loath to grant credence to that which we can't dissect and analyze, deconstruct into palatable components of fact and postulate before discarding the feeble strains of sentient understanding that we regard as extraneous, muddlesome, frivolous. When we feel, as in the cloying damp that we have come to recognize as the adjunct of a gathering storm, an inexplicable certainty of imminent and inevitable disaster, we shake our heads in reproof, branding our fears unwarranted, our suspicions silly.

When I retrieved my house-key from the drudgery of lint and crumpled receipts at the bottom of my suit-pocket, the textured metal with its new shape and size still unfamiliar to my grasping fingers, I became aware of a constriction in my chest, a tightness in my throat, that I could not write off as a belated reaction to the change in weather. It was November now, my child was a month old, and the air was touched with a mild, bitter chill that served as a gentle reminder of the things to come in later months--the December where I would celebrate Christmas in my first house with my first child, experience an array of new things that would consummate my status as a father and perhaps serve as new fixtures in my  life, establish traditions that would see me with a comforting regularity, an anodyne routine, through the traumas of change and aging.

I hesitated only momentarily, forbidding the indulgence of these unwarranted fears, before unlocking my front door and entering my house. I flung my jacket over the back of the recliner and turning on the sitting room light. There was a depth of silence, pregnant, taut, that felt dense with secrets, stifled shouts; the kind of silence that gathers like dust in the absence of people, thick and stale, inviting a flurry of movement and disruption to unsettle it, displace it to remote corridors and behind closed doors where it can lie in wait, contained, innocuous, . But I did not call Alison's name; I did not play the part of the cheerfully weary husband towards which I had been so inclined in the past months; I stood there, in the doorway, studying my sitting room, with its thick new carpet and homey humble furniture, its watercolor prints, the scales of light drifting grayly over the plaster ceiling.

When I went upstairs and found her, I did not cry. I did not scream. I did not tremble, or collapse. I picked her up and she was warm. I held her to my chest, my hand on her heavy helpless head, supporting what the fragile fabric of undeveloped muscle could not support. I held the motionless body in my arms, in the fuzzy cave of blankets. The small features emerged as if from clay in the ruddy round pinknesss of her face. Her eyes were closed, deep blue, her mother's blue, behind the fragile curtain of lace-thin skin, fine short lashes. Small, salient traces of Alison threaded through the soft formless face.

My child was dead; my wife was gone; I did not know where she was.On the deep-stained wood of the dresser, small white pills--I did not recognize them: they were either something she had been prescribed without my knowledge or not prescribed at all--were strewn, as if a bottle had been dumped there amid a frenzy, a crazed need for whatever comfort the medication promised. The drawers were thrown open, gutted, clothing spilling out like colorful intestines. In the bathroom the faucet was running on full-blast. I felt it with my hand: ice-cold.

The baby was on our bed, which had been stripped bare, lying in the cocoon of her blankets with one fleece hem across her face. I lifted her, felt her slack, feather weight, and peered into the unresponsive face. Yes: my child was dead, my wife was gone, no stretch of the imagination or deductive cunning was necessary for me to see where these two facts, these two simple observations that had such drastic, unfathomable consequences, intersected in an explanation.

Wrapped in my arms, her face against my neck, I carried her downstairs and out through the sliding glass-doors that led to the backyard. The ground was soft beneath my feet from recent rain, the grass slick, touched with the faint gold of impending winter. The wind was picking up, the clouds gathering, darkening overhead; a storm; more rain before the dropping temperatures turned it to snow, encased the yard and veiled the trees in the white substance, that stuff of dreams and Christmas, that my child would never know.

My head down, I walked towards the dense line of pine-trees that delineated where our carefully landscaped property gave way to the forest my neighbors walked their dogs in and where Alison would go occasionally to jog when the sun was setting: her shadow stretched thin, a splash of pale violet trailing in her footsteps. A wind, thick with the smell of accrued moisture, of approaching rain, knifed through the trees, set their branches whipping like flailing arms. Beneath the gale they bent and craned like old men--or else believers prostrating at the feet of something greater than themselves. I held my daughter close beneath the canopy of needles that writhed and whispered, conferring, criticizing. I walked further into the patterns of shadow, proceeding with the graceless noise of a man firmly rooted to his creature comforts, his household amenities, alien to this quiet world of stealth and starvation. I stopped at what I designated as the right spot; an area of dark, rich earth set apart from the trees whose resilient roots would complicate the task at hand. It was a space that seemed quiet, strangely isolated from this unseen, encompassing world of earthen things, of life subsisting on sun and rain: external, elemental forces that in my insulated walls seemed dream-like, or else embellishments. I saw them not as the essential foundations of life but the trifling mannerisms, the arbitrary behaviors of the natural world in which I was only partially involved, and that, observed through double-paned windows, had all the reality, all the consequence of the epochal blizzards and tempestuous storms that Hollywood contrived to renew the fear that comfort had nullified, to lend us an appreciation for how far we had come from the days of wood-cabins and fire-building, of disease and disaster.


I laid her in my lap and dug with my hands.

When the storm broke I lifted her again, holding her in my arms, beginning to cry, because in my hysteria I did not realize that rain was no greater an indignity than what I had envisioned--an unmarked grave in a shallow hole that was not so much a burial as a fraying man's attempt at concealing truth and tragedy beneath a layer of earth. When the storm broke, when water gathered brown and thick with sediment, and my delusions dissolved with dirt encrusted in the palms of my hands, I lifted my dead child and got to my feet. I  walked back in the rain and wet to where my wife's car pulled into the driveway and emitted the white-clad, dark-haired shape that was the mother and murderer of our daughter.

***

When I pulled you into my arms, you trembled and laid your head against my collar. You did not ask where I had been, why my shirt was soaked and stuck to my shoulders, why when I held your face my hands smelled of soil and brushed a streak of earth across your cheek. You smiled, eyes bright, and touched where the tears had mixed with rain.

You said, "it's alright."

I shook my head because there were no words to tell you it wasn't. There were no words to tell you anything true.

You said, "don't worry. It wasn't a big mess. I cleaned the bedroom. The pills were expensive but I told Doctor Hubbard what had happened and he promised to fill the prescription. Oh, sweetie, it wasn't a big mess."

I opened my mouth to say "I love you"--but what I said was "Elizabeth".

You looked a question at me. You said, "who?"

I told you.

"But honey," you said, "we never had a daughter."