My Stories

Stories of suicide and priest abuse, really? you wonder. How heartbreaking. How depressing, you might say. But, wait. Inside such tales shine the brightest of silver linings: resilience and survival and, in the best of cases, some sort of justice.

Writing and life are about paying attention and making connections: to and with the world, to and with others, to and with self.

Here you will find works-in-progress, hard stories of tragic loss and reckoning, of secrets undisclosed–and discovered, after the fact.

Where to begin?

Isn’t that always the question? For writers, artists, anyone who creates anything? I think of Twyla Tharpe’s brilliant book, The Creative Habit. She walks into a white room. And the dance begins.

Here’s one place, with my recent article published in The Daily Beast (appropriate title) July 18, 2021:

A Widow’s Hunt for the Priest Who Preyed on Her Husband

Where to begin? “You have too much material,” one of my Bennington MFA mentors once told me. “Good and bad,” he said. “A problem I wish I had, but what to do with it all?” This last of these questions, probably not his but my own.

Here’s an article about my quest for truth, published July 29, 2021, in VT Digger; this includes a podcast interview with me produced by journalist, David Goodman, for Vermont Conversation:

Vermont Conversation: A widow’s quest for truth

Where to begin?

Here, I begin, closer to the conclusion, which ends with a harrowing truth as well as a family’s reckoning.

And yet, the telling is its own beginning:

Two years ago, I set out on a mission, pestered by a hunch, in search of a probable truth and possible contributing cause of my late husband’s suicide. The brief background story here–to be detailed later–is that Peter took his own life by drowning in the Huntington Gorge when our four children were four and three years, and 19 and 2 months old.

On this mission, secret to all but a best friend and my partner, I journeyed first to the scene of the crime: Archbishop Stepinac Catholic High School in White Plains, New York. There, the principal–also a fellow alum of my late husband, class of ’79, a Father Thomas Collins–hid from me. I reached a second dead end, literally, upon my arrival at the Hampton address of Peter’s alleged perpetrator, a Father Donald T. Malone, where I learned from knocking on neighbors’ doors that he lies buried in a simple pine box.

It didn’t end there. Upon my return home to the Village of Stowe, I wrote a long, scathing letter to Father Collins and cc’d all the Stepinac faculty and alumni I could find. A few days after sending mine, I received this email response:

Subject line: Complaint against Fr. Malone
Date: August 22, 2017, 3:26 PM
Sender: Edward T. Mechmann
cc: Sr. Eileen Clifford
Camille Biros (legal counsel hired along with Kenneth Feinberg by Cardinal Dolan to negotiate priest abuse settlements through the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program of the Archdiocese of New York)

Dear Ms. Grosvenor — I am the Safe Environment Coordinator for the Archdiocese of New York.  As such, I oversee the child protection programs of the Archdiocese. I was forwarded your recent letter to Fr. Thomas Collins.

First of all, on behalf of the Archdiocese, please permit me to express my deep regret and sorrow that your husband was abused by one of our priests.

I stop here. Stunned. Step up and away from my desk, hands raised, heart in my throat. What?

The sexual abuse of children and the ways in which these crimes and sins were addressed in the past have caused enormous pain, anger, and confusion. It has also led to awful tragedies like the death of your husband. No mere apology can rectify the harm that was done, but I hope that you will accept it in the spirit of profound sorrow in which it is offered.

Wait. Let me back up… that your husband was abused by one of our priests. I saw this coming, didn’t I? I sought this truth out. But now that it’s here, in writing, a fact, I’m overcome with a tingling of nerves and tightening of the chest that resembles shock. I gain enough composure to keep reading the letter.

Last year, in establishing the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program of the Archdiocese, Cardinal Dolan said “The program we are establishing today will, please God, help bring a measure of peace and healing to those who have suffered abuse by a member of the clergy of this archdiocese… As this Year of Mercy nears its conclusion, it is only appropriate that we take this opportunity to follow Pope Francis and once again ask forgiveness for whatever mistakes may have been made in the past by those representing the Church, even by us bishops, and continue to seek reconciliation with those who have been harmed and feel alienated from the Church.”

It isn’t clear from your letter to Fr. Collins whether you have already filed a claim with the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program. If not, I urge you to do so as soon as possible. You can find all the information you need at the IRCP website (https://www.nyarchdiocese-ircpsettlementprogram.com/) and you can begin the claim process by following the link to “register for Phase II of the program”. Ms. Camille Biros of the IRCP is already aware of your complaint, and can send you all the necessary materials to process your claim, once you formally register.

We will also have our Victim Assistance Coordinator, Sr. Eileen Clifford, contact you to see if there is anything we can do to help you. Sr. Eileen is out of the office until the end of August, so you will be hearing from her soon after she returns. Sr. Eileen is being copied on this email, in case you would like to contact her directly.

I am also available in case you would like to speak to me about your complaint. My contact information is below, and you should feel free to reach out to me by phone or email if you would like to speak to me.

Again, please accept my deepest sympathy for the loss of your husband and the suffering that you and your children have experienced. I assure you that you are in our prayers.

Prayers, deep regret and sorrow don’t quite cut it. My husband, the father of four children, is dead.

Sincerely in Christ,
Edward T. Mechmann, Esq.
Director of Safe Environment
Archdiocese of New York
1011 First Avenue
New York, NY 10022
646-794-2807

“Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” (1 Cor. 10:31)

An message in the email chain from James P. McCabe, Esq., (@archny.org), most likely included by accident read:

Thanks Ed.  Very nice letter.  I think she has filed. I sent you the filing earlier today password “mccabe1”. I am CC’ing John Cahill who was in this mornings email string. 
Thanks for getting right on this. 
Jim

Sent from my iPhone

Here’s the full story, published in The Daily Beast, Sunday, July 18, 2021, as published in BishopAccountabiity.org:

A Widow’s Hunt for the Priest Who Preyed on Her Husband

Here’s a sampling from the draft of Tell, my memoir-in-process. This section, one of the kaleidoscopic facets in my endless quest:

Tuesday, June 14, 1994
Bolton Valley, VT—
Early Morning

At daybreak, it’s back. It’s enormous, this interior fiend, its murk eclipsing all light. And not long after sunrise, my lips and yours, the unspeakable and the unspoken, will meet one last time. You’ll lean toward my chest to kiss our infant’s forehead as the Father Ouellet’s voice on the tape returns. You may find techniques or ways to find some resolution. Above all, be gentle with yourself. You have been created as a good person. Your behavior can never make you bad. It is the behavior that is bad, not you that is bad. Have a genuine love for yourself, a respect for yourself and, if ever you lose those… 

I see your circles, darker than ever. “Peter, you don’t look so great, how come? I thought I saw you sleeping last night?”

            “Yes, I slept pretty well. I feel better. Much better.”

            My confidence outweighs the concerns because I want to believe you’re okay. Call me naïve, willful. But you’re convincing, you—Peter, my husband, the guy who’s done all this with me: the wild times in Manhattan, the move to Croton-on-Hudson, the engagement on the slopes of Sugarbush and Vermont wedding, our big move first to the condo in Essex, then here to the top of a mountain where we’ve birthed four babies. Strange this thing called hope, or maybe it’s faith. Or maybe neither, rather those tricks the mind plays on the heart to fool us into trusting that things will turn out just as we want them to. In this moment, I’m unsure.

This moment holds one constant that will remain: my love for this man as sure, pure as that for the  2-month-old I cradle against the bare skin of my chest between the open buttons of my nightgown. I rock gently back and forth to keep baby Hunter from fussing, attempting to soothe my own helplessness.

            “Try to alleviate any possible stress,” your mother had told me, was it just yesterday, when she and Peter Senior came to pick up our four-year-old Alex and his sister, Olivia, just three this April. You knew they’d driven up from Rhode Island. But they haven’t seen their son yet because you were at your Burlington Free Press office downtown. I’ll wonder for years in the wake of it all why they never went directly to you, their son, knowing so much more than I, realizing the imminent danger.

            “Remember, your parents are here to help now,” I say.

            “I gotta go, I gotta go,” you say. “I’ve got an early morning meeting.”

            We stand at the top of the stairs.

            You lean over to kiss the top of Hunter’s soft head.

            “Hey, Rickey,” you say to our black mutt lying on the dining-room rug.

Ricker—the dog you’ve come to love, the one you named after this mountain we live on—perks his ears. He, too, trusts your devotion, trusts at day’s end you’ll return.

            You look at me. A snapshot frozen in time. I see a peculiar sadness.

“I have an important, early-morning meeting,” my husband will tell me.

And I will stand at the top of the stairs, watching him descend as I hold Hunter up, yet again, against my milk-hardened breast, skin exposed by the open flap of my white, cotton nightgown. I won’t be able to scrutinize the marks until later that afternoon, where—just above The Burlington Free Press logo on the letterhead—Peter will scratch his ballpoint pen in circles to get the ink flowing. Where, he will begin to write, careful in his usual fashion to mark the date at the top of the page:

7:15 A.M. 6/14/94

You will be okay without me.  

I hold high hopes full of big plans for this day, Flag Day. Alex and Olivia will be returning from my in-laws to our mountain chalet. I will firm up that appointment with the therapist. By breast-feedings, snacks, diaper changes, swings, and naps, I’ll make it through—and maybe even get to catch my favorite soap, Days of Our Lives.

The Catholic priest gets one more cameo. Imagine yourself on a very quiet shore. You are alone.  You see and hear the waves of water…you feel the warmth of the sun…the gentle breeze against your skin. You are at peace. 

Having donned his best suit and the red necktie with the trains on it, last year’s Father’s Day gift from his babies—the fifteen paid, stamped bills tucked inside his leather briefcase never to be mailed, the khakis in the Gap bag on the back seat of the Subaru never to be returned—Peter has big plans, too. 

This ends this tape. 

But for the living is only the beginning.

[page break]

Monday, January 5, 1987
Woodstock Towers, Tudor City
42^nd Street, NEW YORK, NY —
Early Morning

The alarm sounds. In seconds, I spin my legs to slide out of my Murphy bed, flip the covers back into place, lift the end of the bed up and into the wall, then close the white double doors. I rub my hands in that was easy amusement. Now what to wear?

Never a morning person, it’s strange. This morning I’m on overdrive, a little nervous for some reason and feeling myself caring way too much about this breakfast meeting. No kissing yet, but we’ve sure laughed a lot and gotten a little crazy together this past month at those holiday parties. We watched this year’s Christmas tree lighting from the window of one of Sports Illustrated’s ad agencies. We went to see the premier of Little Shop of Horrors with our beers in brown-paper bags and attended, with front row seats, Saturday Night Live—and the after party. This guy’s got cool connections. We even talked to Dana Carvey at the last one. That “Church Chat” skit gets me every time. I smile as I walk into the bathroom to brush my teeth.

Peter’s pretty impressed, too, I bet, with all the athletes I’ve interviewed in the last few months: Mets pitcher, Dwight Gooden, AKA Dr. K, and golfer, Ben Crenshaw in Florida; Kareem Abdul Jabbar in his Los Angeles locker room; Alan Trammell, who hit two home runs to win Detroit the World Series; and, most recently, the Bears star running back, Walter Payton. He invited me into his home, showed me how to handle a gun in his indoor shooting range, and made his signature cocktail, “The Sweetness.”

“What a hip life,” I say aloud to Heathcliff as I smile and walk from bathroom to kitchenette to make coffee on one of the two electric burners in my miniature geometric espresso pot. In response, my fluffy kitty weaves through my legs, his long white-and-black fur tickling my ankles as I search inside the closet for something simple but professional-looking, my black skirt and gray crew-neck sweater. Heathie, as I call him—named after the hunk of the moors in Wuthering Heights not the cartoon character—senses my excitement. Whenever I describe him to people, I say he looks like a Holstein cow. He seems to like living up here, seven stories above 42^nd Street, looking out the Tudor-style, lead-framed window panes. We’ve both become oblivious to the constant sirens and horns below and occasional homeless person in the park threatening in a crazy tone and high volume at four in the morning to blow up the nearby United Nations building. I love my peek of the East River and the convenience of walking to work.

            Mascara or no mascara? It’s the only make-up I wear, really, and only to dress up. Today, yes, or so I would assume looking back, remembering those crush-like feelings already tingling inside me. The details are a little fuzzy. The emotions clear to this day.  

I’m sure I gave Heathie his breakfast and made sure he had water, that I’ll empty the litter from his box down the garbage shoot when I get home this evening. After sprinkling fish food in the jumbo tank that creates a divider between the Murphy bedroom and living room of this one-room studio, I probably gave myself one of those up-and-down checks in the full-length mirror on the closet door, slipped into my black flats—always flats—grabbed my tan wool “producer coat” as Peter will come to call it because of its large raccoon-fur lapel, slung my briefcase over my shoulder, and headed out, double-locking and deadbolting the door.

            “Morning, Hank,” I’d have said to the doorman behind the long wooden counter upon emerging from the elevator and sliding across the polished marble floor of the lobby. That’s the first name that pops into my head, anyway, and could be right. Or not. I did love those doormen and do wish my crowded memory’s held onto their names.

            “Have a good day, miss,” said Hank or whatever the name of the doorman on duty was that day and would say.

            Recalling the morning in present-tense, I turn left into the cold January wind toward First Avenue. In these temps, I’ll take as many indoor and underground passageways as possible, starting at the east entrance to Grand Central. I dodge intent commuters and absorb the majesty of this space before taking the escalators to the Met Life building, coming out on 45^th, then zig-zagging my way across Fifth Avenue.

The world disappears for a second in the steam from the subway grates and chestnut carts as I release an audible sigh and duck into the Rockefeller Concourse at 48^th.

I’m ten minutes ahead of schedule, a miracle for me, so I grab a table by the window to watch the hard-core, early-morning skaters. They’re talented, I think, remembering my figure-skating days back in middle school. Every Saturday one of the parents in our car pool, often my dad, would drive us from Slingerlands to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for our lessons. I giggle at the thought of having mastered the bunny hop in my little black velvet skirt with the hand-embroidered flowers. Smells of coffee brewing and fresh baked goods abound as underground pedestrian commuters stream by.

This Manhattan commotion enlivens me as I sit, legs crossed, arms folded at my chest, chin up. Being given this advertising sales presentation for Sports Illustrated is a big deal. My new business cards no longer read “Advertising Copywriter” but now say “Writer, Producer, Director.” Life feels good. Good and electrifying, just the way I like it. All I need—despite my Smith education and advice from fellow feminist alums, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem—is the right man to come along to share a future.

[page break]

Tuesday, June 14, 1994
BOLTON VALLEY, VT —
Early Morning

“Call me when you get to work, okay?” I call down the stairs after him.

            I hear only the creak of the last few steps, the shuffle in the mudroom as Peter slides into his black wingtip shoes, and the sound of the front door closing behind him.

I walk to the picture window in the living room to watch the red taillights of Peter’s black Subaru station wagon as he brakes at the bottom of Thacher Road. His car makes that turn at the Black Bear Inn onto the Mountain Access Road and disappears. I look to the trees. Why are the buds up here taking extra-long this year to bloom? Not to mention, it’s been so rainy this month, which—coupled with the last bit of run-off from a snowy winter—instead of the babbling is causing this constant rushing sound of mad rivers and brooks. They should have subsided somewhat by now. It’s mid-June. June. I sway by the window as I lean my nose down toward my chest to nuzzle Hunter’s soft head. “We’re almost to the three-month mark little guy,” I whisper, “when you’ll start sleeping through the night.” I think about how Peter lay awake last night or this morning, around midnight or so, how he was just lying there staring at the ceiling, worried about work. That dumb job. I never should have encouraged him to take it.

“Stop,” I say. Stop the worrying, Jen. Remember, replace fear with faith. When you asked him if he’d slept at all, he said, “yes,” earlier in the night anyway.

            Earlier in the night, whenever that may have been. I don’t remember seeing him asleep. But who am I to say? Half the time I don’t know what time it is, up all hours, every three or so, having to breastfeed Hunter. Almost like clockwork. Plus, Luke still wakes in the night on occasion for comforting. And Olivia’s been having some strange nightmares lately. So when I’m out, I am out, that’s for sure. I only wake to a baby’s hunger cry or frightened child’s mommy call on the baby monitor on our bedside table.

Ah, this too shall pass. All the times I’ve recited this ancient proverb it’s come true. This, and all in good time. We’ve made it so far. We have this beautiful fourth baby and the warmth of summer ahead. No more five-foot-long icicle daggers hanging from these eves. No more pots on the kitchen floor to catch the leaks from the ice backup. No more wood to carry up two flights of stairs to the stove. I can still picture Peter propping that tall ladder out on the deck by the sliding glass doors to climb up onto our steep roof, wielding an axe to chop the ice away. It was a hard winter.

            I sense Hunter’s asleep from the peaceful rhythm of his breath and slow rise-and-fall on my chest so I walk back through the dining room toward our bedroom to lay him in his bassinette. Memories of last winter follow me. The worst of it was when I got up in middle of the night to go to the bathroom, Hunter’s head inside my belly pushing on my bladder. In my pregnant haze, I rinsed my hands and turned off the faucet. I forgot to leave it dripping. We woke up to no water. Again, the pipes leading to our house, buried too close to the surface under the road, had frozen.

            But we’ve conquered those wintertime challenges, my running monologue or is it some kind of rationalization, continues. We always do, Peter and I. We’re both a bit fearless to a fault sometimes. Look where we live? On top of a mountain. “Are you guys crazy?” friends and family asked when we bought this place. To enter, you had to climb up what we called the Stairway to Heaven, multiple flights and levels that criss-crossed the front of the house. It’s not even been a year since we hired those carpenters to insert the pre-built interior stairs and tile guys to finish the mudroom floor. The sheetrock needs more taping, sanding, and then painting, but so what? For our first four years living here, to do laundry, I had to go out the dining-room sliders onto the deck, zig-zag down all the steps to go into the door below—now our mudroom entrance to the house—to the unfinished basement, then walk along planks above the dirt floor to get to the washer and dryer—and, yes, even in the middle of winter. The nearest grocery is a 40-minute drive up and down the steep, winding incline of our Access Road. It’s a whole day’s excursion by the time I dress all the kids and pack them in the mini-van, drive to the store, shop, load the groceries and children and babies back in the van, drive back up the hill, then unload all the bags of food along with the midgets, as I call them, and carry them all up multiple flights of stairs.

This reminds me, since Peter’s parents dropped the van off for its tire change, I don’t have a car today. Good excuse for me to just stay home. Nothing’s pressing today, plus I’ve only got two of our four here, how easy. The rain has finally stopped, it’s mid-60s, and looks like a good day to play outside and do some yard cleanup—in the mud, I should say. Summer arrives late at this elevation. Sure beats snowsuits, anyway. That would take me at least an hour to get them all dressed to go out and play in the snow. When Hunter wakes up, I’ll strap him in the snuggly and push his big brother on the swings. Who needs a gym, I joke to self, exhausted just thinking about this lifestyle as Luke, still in his fuzzy blue footsie jammies, crawls his way down the stairs from the upstairs loft. He’s halfway down, moving backwards as I’ve taught him to avoid tumbling, as I come out of Peter’s and my bedroom.

“Hey buddy! You hungry?”

This reminds me how well Peter ate last night. He’s definitely getting better.

I’m in overthinking mode—a common state for me most of the time—rewinding the details of the last day and minutes up to the time he left this morning. I did tell him that I called the Community Health Plan office yesterday after talking to his mother. It’s just a matter of waiting for that darn referral, I explained. I’m still waiting. But this is nothing compared to my scary, bloody water-breaking episode and emergency C-section two months ago. Right? Hunter is alive and well. The only thing bothering our lives now is this new job Peter took in March at The Burlington Free Press.

I scoop Luke up into my arms and start swinging him back and forth.        

            “It’s only a job, right Lukie? That’s what I keep telling Daddy. If you need to quit, then quit.”

            I kiss Luke on the cheek. He giggles and snorts as I nuzzle my nose into his neck.

Our love, I’m sure of it, the one that’s “solely ours”—as Peter had written in that first of the three joint journals we’ve kept together—will help us through.

[page break]

Monday, January 5, 1987
Rockefeller Center, NEW YORK, NY —
Early Morning

Peter approaches the table with that knock-out smile and those long, golden curls. Even when he’s dressed up in a suit and tie, his demeanor says casual. He’s magnetic, somehow, such energy. Plus, as I’ve told my closest friends, I want curly-headed kids someday. As usual, my thoughts hit fast-forward. I’m known for getting ahead of myself—most of the time. 

            “Hey,” he says, and stretches his arm out toward me as I rise from the chair. I can feel my face redden as he hands me a single red rose.

            “What’s this about?” I ask, revealing shock in my voice.

            “It’s for you.”

            “Is this what you do for all your potential clients?” I say, fishing, of course.

            “Nope, you’re special. There’s something more here,” he says. “But I don’t want it to get in the way of doing business together. Broadway Video is one of the best production houses in Manhattan. It’s owned by Lauren Michaels. Did you know that? One of my connections along with my dad to Saturday Night Live. We have awesome studios and editors. And offer Oreos, Cokes, lots of free snacks while you’re working.”

            I’m thinking how cute this guy is—and young. I’m remembering the other guy I met New Year’s Eve at the midnight run in Central Park who’s called a couple of times for a date. He’s more my age, has a mustache, lives in Jersey. Peter’s four years younger and lives in a brownstone on the Upper West Side.

            “I’m really too old for you,” I say. My clock is ticking, as they say. And I seriously want to have kids someday—and lots of them.”

            Peter laughs. “No problem. Can we get to know each other better in the meantime? Like, how ‘bout starting tonight after work?”

            “You mean, with an estimate and proposal?” I say.

Peter laughs again as I realize the accidental innuendo in those words.

“I mean—for work, ha ha,” I say, “for my SI video production, that is.”

            We’re both smiling now, and another one of those good feelings flows through me.

[page break]

Tuesday, June 14, 1994
BOLTON VALLEY, VT —
Mid-morning

What a breeze, this two-baby thing. Luke is wheeling around our wraparound deck, paddling his feet from inside his red-and-yellow plastic bubble car that looks like something out of the Jetsons. This time, I made sure to lock the gate at the top of the stairs. No more runaways in those wheely walkers—too many near-death stair experiences. That is one of my worst problems, trying to do too much at one time, cramming my mind with too many thoughts and then forgetting something, like the bread in the toaster—I’m notorious for burning toast—and shutting the gates at the tops of stairways. Luke still has a scar on his cheek, healing, thank God, from my recent forgetfulness to shut the gate at the end of this deck. This house has a lot of stairs, I rationalize. But my heart aches at the thought of these tumbles. There’s no a good excuse, I know. Pay better attention, Jen. The sight of Hunter sitting perfectly content, cuddled in his go-seat calms the scolding voice inside my head. He’s gurgling a little, unable to cause any trouble at this young age. We’re still waiting for his first smile. He’ll have Peter’s big grin, I just know it.

            I’ve cracked the sliding glass doors to the dining room, careful not to wander too far from earshot to the phone. Peter should be calling me, as I asked, begged him to, any minute now.

Images of the scene of us on this deck two days ago keep flashing through my head.

“We have options here,” I said. “C’mon, Petie, think about it, as soon as Hunter’s a few months older, we could launch our own advertising agency easily with the creative and sales experience we’ve brought here to Vermont.” Just before that, I’d suggested he ask for his old job back. I could physically sense his stress level heighten right after he’d hung up the phone with Cece, his former boss at the job he’d adored: WPTZ-TV.

“I don’t have a job to give you, Peter. You’re position’s filled,” she’d said.

Peter’s disappointment scared me. It’s all a little scary since he took that darn job at The Burlington Free Press. They lured him there. Granted, the money is a lot better. But, still.

“This job stress is killing you. Just quit,” I said, just yesterday, for the millionth time, it seems, in the past five days or so. “It isn’t worth it.” 

As if on cue, that hungry baby sound had pierced the tense second of silence and thickening summer air. Beckoned by Hunter’s cry, I turned from Peter. Preoccupied—drowning in some newfound neediness, the helplessness—I headed toward the sliding door and walked face first into the closed screen. 

“Shit!” I said, under my breath, as I rubbed my nose, fumbled with the plastic latch, and slid the door hard to the left.

“Good, Jen, get angry,” he said.

Luke goes wheeling by me. Hunter starts to fuss. And I’m back in the present moment. It’s close to lunchtime for these two, then naps—a bit of mommy time to herself. I haven’t even called MaryLou and Peter to see how Alex and Olivia are doing over at their condo in Shelburne. No need to. I know they’re getting nice and spoiled with all sorts of treats and probably getting ready for one of Grandpa’s special trips to the toy store. I wonder if they’ve checked in with their son at work to see how he’s feeling.

Why hasn’t Peter called yet?

[page break]

If found, please return to:

Peter Fatovich
115 W. 87^th St., Apt. #2
New York, NY 10024   (212) 496-0160
OR
Jenny Grosvenor
320 E. 42^nd St., Apt. #701
New York, NY 10017   (212) 682-0455

These instructions I inscribed on the inside cover of the leather-bound journal Peter bought for us to keep jointly, the first of three that would be filled with entries—the good, the bad, the love, the “tough” relationship stuff, as Peter called it—documenting our lives together from March of 1987 through December of 1993.

On the first page, on the day he presented this journal and his idea of passing it back and forth to keep together, knowing my love for writing and wanting to enhance our level of communication, Peter wrote:

March 1987

Jenny,

A place for us to make notes and share thoughts about the relationship that is solely ours!
With love,
Peter

On the next page, mine, “our” first entry:

Tuesday, March 3, 1987
Spring toast morning in Vermont
Tucker Hill Inn, WAITSFIELD, VT —

Sunlight and champagne, a nice close to five enlightening days together. We have grown—together. On skis, tennis courts, in hot tubs, pubs, by candlelight and moonlight, under the stars and covers. We have moved closer and closer, opening each other’s eyes not only to each other but to others and a life that is wonderful, special, ours. It’s as if we can do anything together…

            I have never felt so radiant for so many days, months at a time. The weather is smiling on us, too. Everyone seems to smile at us (or with us or about us).

            We have met many nice people here at the Inn—only in passing but worthy of impression and more shared memories.

We’ve had our scary time, too. We both love the Vermont countryside and way of life so much that it makes us anxious about each other and what the future holds. By holding each other and talking (about chickens and elephants and fun bags and jokes…just a joke) we fill those intense moments with laughter.

And know there’s more to come.

(That is, if Peter can keep those daisies out of his hair!)

After midnight…

Early morning upon return to Manhattan

So, Peter, you have reached your apartment by now. My hot bath did not come close in comfort to your body holding mine. I am drinking water and trying to drown out the traffic sounds outside my 42^nd Street window.  I think of that inscription I wrote in Madame Bovary, …when in love…, March 1987, and recall how we said that to each other without saying it so many times over and over in the past five days. I feel the pain of separation as I prepare for solitary sleep. I find peace in knowing we will be together soon.

P.S. I flossed tonight!

[page break]

Tuesday, June 14, 1994
Huntington Gorge
RICHMOND, VT —

Investigating Officer Robert Kissinger

While on routine patrol in the town of Richmond, Chief John J. O’Hara advised that we should drive by the gorge to check on the parking along Dugway Road.

There were two vehicles parked at the main gorge. I went to check on the black pickup at the north end bearing Connecticut Registration 958CMN, belonging to Michael and Susan Costa. Chief John J. O’Hara went to check on the other vehicle, a ’91 black Subaru Legacy station wagon bearing Vermont Registration ARW132, at the south end of the main gorge.

Chief O’Hara advised me that is was abandoned and that it might be a possible suicide. I walked over to this location and Chief O’Hara pointed out through the driver’s side window that the keys were still in the ignition and the possible suicide note on the passenger’s front seat along with a tie and sport jacket on the passenger side floor board. The driver’s side seat appeared to be wet as it was darker in color than the other seats.

From the driver’s side window, it was possible to read the writing on the note. It read as follows:

          “         7:15 am     6/14/94

          WORK STRESS CAN REALLY GET TO YOU

          FAMILY, JENNY, ALEX, OLIVIA, LUKE + HUNTER,

            I REALLY DO LOVE YOU.  YOU WILL BE O.K.

            WITHOUT ME.

            PLEASE HELP TAKE CARE OF MY KIDS.

            WENT TO SEE AUNT JUDY + TONY.

                              LOVE ALWAYS TO MY RABBIT

                                    PETER”

We then called Vermont State Police in Williston to see if they had any detectives available to assist us. They did. Det. Sgt. Dane Shortsleeves would be enroute.

[page break]

In the second entry in our first joint journal—the reddish-brown, leather-bound one with the gold stripe—Peter writes:

Tuesday, March 10, 1987, 6:00 pm
Journal Entry
First Week Back from Vacation
Lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House, NEW YORK, NY —

Jenny, I am so glad you were able to be my little vacation visitor. It’s funny, when I threw out the idea back in January when we were making business deals and hardly knew each other, I got this really strong feeling that I knew it would happen—I think you did too? Oh—the power of positive thinking!

            We shared, learned, and did so much this past week. I have many vivid memories, which I will take pleasure in recalling often. They started when I saw your smile grow when we caught sight of each other at the Burlington airport and didn’t stop until I closed my eyes while thinking of you when I returned home.

            I loved so many things we did and said last week that I could fill up this book writing about them. I really love the way other people look at us—they can tell how happy we are together. We look, we laugh, and smile—and it makes others smile too—that’s nice. I also love being your mountain man—and you my silly, silly, silly, silly Rabbit, too!

            We also shared many emotions, which can be really tricky things. We were able to look on the positive side of some tough situations, which is really important.

                        …… you look inside your heart
and I’ll look inside mine……

The last time I looked, the Jenny and Petie show was on. It’s a great new show. You probably get it because the signal is very strong.

The show is about two young, very good-looking people who bring out the best in each other. Together, they grow emotionally, physically, spiritually, and mentally. But they are so cool about it. The thing they have going will endure because it’s right! The networks love it, and it’s sure to be a big hit in syndication.

I also love this book. I think about you so much and I like having a place to talk to you when I can’t be with you.

I think all the time we spend together is quality time—regardless of location.

I do have one worry—if we have such intense conversations in a chair lift, what will we talk about when we are in a plane at 20,000 feet?

I CAN’T WAIT –
Petie
xx

[page break]

Tuesday, June 14, 1994
Huntington Gorge
RICHMOND, VT —

Investigating Officer Robert Kissinger

By this time, the owners of Connecticut Registration 958CMN had returned to their vehicle. Chief O’Hara and I spoke to the couple (Mr. & Mrs. Costa) to see if they had seen anyone else. They advised that they had come up to do some fishing and are staying at Bolton Valley Resort. They had been fishing the Huntington River since 0930 hrs, starting at the south end of the main gorge and finished just north of the Paquette farm. They had not seen anyone and thought it was funny with the car parked there. The station wagon had been there prior to their arrival.

At approximately 1125, Ron Rodjenski, the Town administrator arrived on the scene. He was advised of the incident and volunteered to walk the gorge area to see if he could find anyone.

[The montage continues from here…]

Here’s a slightly fictionalized version of my late husband’s last day of life:

Going, Going…

It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.
Toni Morrison, Sula ~entry written by Janey in the first of the couple’s three joint journals, April 1987

He never dreamed it would come back.  

He’d beaten it, recreated himself, made a whole new life here in Vermont.  Far from his childhood, the Westchester neighborhood, the Catholic priests.  But now, as he twists the Q-tips, one in each ear, staring himself down in the mirror, his wife, two months postpartum, watches, knowing something’s different, seeing the mixed masking of fear and surprise in his eyes.  An absence of hope.  He glances at her silhouette in the doorway, her white cotton nightgown transparent as a moth’s wing, backlit by the morning sun, reveals the outline of her body beneath.  This, her nursing gown, with its ruffled sleeves and bottom, the lace collar and string of tiny pearl buttons down the front, Janey will later lend to a friend for her pregnancies, then need it returned in a panic of remembrance for keepsake.  At this moment, the edges of her milk-engorged breasts emerge between the undone buttons. She’s just finished feeding baby Jackson.  But only for that second does this vision stop his thinking.  His gaze returns to the mirror.  Mike reaches toward his neck, grabs and yanks tight his tie, and is taunted yet again by his square, clenched jaw.  

I can’t believe this.  This can’t be happening to me.  It wasn’t supposed to come back.  Ever again. 

Janey will convince herself that he truly believed this—but much, much later—and also that, in his deepest intestinal pools, for the years they were building a life together, a piece of him churned with that slightest possibility of its return.  That first breakdown was years ago.  So long ago, he can’t remember.  So long ago, he stops himself from remembering to the point of denying such an incident ever happened to him.  So long ago, his wife of six years, now the mother of his four babies, never knew it existed.  That was another lifetime.  Far away from here, miles and miles below this mountaintop.  No house, no wife, no babies.  He was barely conscious at the time, anyway, wandering the streets of Manhattan, unshaven, in the same clothes for days.  Or so she would be told. 

Seven years it’s been, at least.  He got better, his recovery quickened when he met that rising, twenty-something writer-producer at Sports Illustrated Magazine, a superstar in his eyes, blind to whatever the psychosis in his consuming love.  And now she’s his wife.  And now he is better.  He has to be.  She, his Janey, his Rabbit, as he calls her, can’t know.  She couldn’t begin to understand.  Besides, his colleague, Sandy, said she lost sleep the same night he did earlier this week, too, after the meeting with Mark, after that new boss yelled at both of them.  Sandy even told him—as he relayed the story to Janey the next weekend as the couple paced their deck discussing his extreme work stress—that this was the first time she’s ever lost sleep over a job.  So, good, he thought, that’s all it is.  Normal job stress.  No big deal.  Roll with it.  If you want to make God laugh, his dad always said, tell Him your plans for the future.  But something’s telling Mike, though he prays it to be, that this is no joke.  And she’s beginning to catch on.  That was Wednesday.  Five days ago. 

I’ve had sleepless nights ever since. 

And now, evening falls.  Again.  And, somehow this Burlington advertising guy with the big smile and wallet loaded with photos of his adorable babies has made it through a few sales calls and home.  He doesn’t tell Janey that he spent most of the afternoon sitting on a bench in front of the mall on the Church Street Marketplace.  Tonight on the drive up their mountain road, winding up the thousand feet of vertical toward their small chalet, Father Maurice Ouellet’s words on the stress management tape couldn’t penetrate Mike’s body to calm his blistering anxiety.  Inhale, exhale, inhale deeply, now exhale our as far as you can go.  See projected before you a large blank movie screen.  It is white.  Project the number 3 in a large numeral three times on the screen, and now the number 2 on the screen, the number 1, three times on the screen…As I count backwards from 25, you will feel your body start to relax…19, 18, 17, 16, going deeper and deeper…11, 10, going deeper still, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…  And, still, the sweat oozed from his palms, the grip of his hands tightening, as if wringing out the steering wheel.  As he approached the S-curve with its steep incline and precipices, he couldn’t fend off the thinking.  Tighten up the muscles in your scalp, let it go.  Tighten your forehead, let it go.  Tighten the left eye, all the little muscles in your eye, let go.  Tighten the other eye, let go.  Tighten all the muscles in your neck, let go.  Now your head feels heavier than your body.  You can feel its weight. Tighten, tighten, tighten your left shoulder, real tight, real tight, let go…

I could end it right now, right here.

Father Ouellett’s voice talks him up the last stretch of road.  Let go…tighten everything…let go…into your stomach, pull the muscles uptight right inside your stomach, let go…into the small of your back, tighten, tighten, let go…down into your buttocks, tighten the muscles, let go…your right thigh, the calf of your right leg, knot it up, tight, tight, now let go, your right foot… Mike taps the breaks to slow his black Subaru, to turn left  onto the Thatcher Hill loop that leads to the little chalet where his wife and babies await.  Be aware of your brain as the source of your mind, where you keep all your worries and anxieties…be aware, and now just let your brain relax, let all the anxieties slip away at this time, let them slip way for this time, let you mind relax, relax, relax, let you mind be peaceful… Mike pulls into their gravel driveway, jams the stick shift into Park and ranks up on the emergency break and sits, listening.  Imagine yourself on a very quiet shore.  You are sitting on a log on the beach.  There is sand all about you.  You are alone.  You see and hear the waves of the water coming against the shore.  You feel the warmth of the sun on your body, you feel the gentle breeze cool against your skin.  As you look out over the water, you see the blue sky and the color of the water.  You are at peace.  Remain there for a moment of time just by yourself quietly. 

In this moment, Mike knows he must climb out of his car and walk up the stone steps with the birch-tree railing he had constructed himself last summer.  He slips out of his loafers, sets his briefcase on the freshly laid mudroom tile, walks past the play area Janey has created for the babies, the bucket of blocks, the makeshift cardboard-box house, the child’ swing he had recently hung from the exposed beam. You are the only person like you…you have been created unique in all the world.  You are of worth…your body and spirit have value…at this point you feel no pain, no discomfort.  At any time that you wish in the future, you may recall this moment and feel as you do in this moment.  Father Ouellette’s advice follows him up the stairs to the first floor.  When feelings of anxiety arise and last for more than a day or two or three, it is wise for us to talk to others we trust, if I can’t handle anxiety myself, it is better for me to face head-on what it is that is causing the anxiety, again I stress the need for physical exercise. 

Janey, her brother and his girlfriend are chatting as Mike enters the kitchen. 

I don’t want to talk about it. 

The tape continues in his head.  There are times in our life when events and our lives seem to control us.

“Look, John and Sarah have come over to help so that we can relax and go for a walk.”  She greets him with the eagerness of a puppy dog. 

Find someone who understands what you are undergoing.  Find someone who is kind.

“Your parents were here earlier,” she continues.  “They drove up from Rhode Island and came by to get Will and Eliza to bring to the Shelburne condo for the night for a sleepover with Grandpa and Gigi, you know, so that things around here might be a little less hectic.”

They know.  They’re all catching on.  He’s getting it now.  Sure, he’ll do the walk.  He has no appetite.

“Try the bread, sourdough,” Janey says upon return, once they’ve said their thanks and goodbyes to the relief team.  “I baked it this afternoon in our new bread machine. It’s yummy.  Our little Ben loves it.” 

She’s babbling now, sensing in this husband of hers extreme distraction and an uncharacteristic need for silence.

We are not meant to live our lives alone. 

“Here, you take Jackson,” she says, whose sleepy head has fallen from her breast, his body full and content.  “I’ll clean up.”

Mike moves to the living room and pretends to have dozed off with his head resting against the wing of the Ethan Allen chair.  Two-month-old Jackson, their “Final Four” as he’ll later be called, settles into sleep coiled on daddy’s shoulder.  Mike keeps his eyes closed, feigning the sleep he craves, its total lack for the last three nights feeding what she can’t know, can’t see, this terrible thing, this demon who’s come back and keeps growing inside.  Sometimes it is a fearful thing to approach another and entrust to them what is our own secret we all have a sense of privacy all of us feel that others will not think well of us if we admit to feelings of inadequacy or difficulties It is absolutely important to entrust that problem to someone find someone who is trained and can find a solution secondly find someone who is kind.  In sharing with a kind person how you feel many times it will dispel the feelings you have. 

Janey could never have begun in that moment to understand, and won’t, not until she reads about it in books much later, about the flashes of pain in the back of his eyes, the constant ache in his legs, the surges of anxiety as if his body’s being pierced with a million toothpicks, and the desperate, repetitive, circular thinking.  She’s commented on his frequent trips to the barber, and keeps reminding him how much she loved those long, golden curls that first attracted her to him, boyish, somewhat artsy, and stylish for the eighties.  She’s never seen his hair clipped so close and has no idea in this stretch of time the meaning behind the constant haircuts, that his scalp itches because his mind won’t stop thinking about it, the voices rising now more than subsiding, rote in their telling, it’s the only way it can be.  We may find techniques or ways to find some resolution… above all, regardless of our feelings, we are never alone….. Above all be gentle with yourself. You have been created as a good person.  Your behavior can never make you bad.  It is the behavior that is bad, not you that is bad.  Have a genuine love for yourself, a respect for yourself and, if ever you lose those, go and find a friend.  This ends this tape.

His mind keeps hitting rewind, wrapping around and around itself.  Over and over again.  But, not now, not at this point, go to a trusted friend, no.  He can’t let her catch on. 

She’ll try to stop me.  It’s too late.

The tips of Mike’s well-manicured fingers tingle as they rub the soft terrycloth along Jackson’s arched back, so tiny, his entire body seems to tuck itself within his father’s palm.  Mike hears the patter of his third-born, Ben’s hands and knees coming around the corner, the sound of the wheels as he pushes a wooden bus filled with peg people, a relic from mommy’s childhood.

“Daddy, look!” 

“Shhh,” Janey says.  “Daddy and Jackson are sleeping.  C’mon with me.  Bath time.” 

Mike’s gut contracts, then releases with an audible exhale.  Tighten, let go…

“Four kids is a lot,” he had admitted on the walk up and around the steep gravel road, the mountain loop, earlier this evening.  “How could we afford not to,” had been his answer when she’d asked if they should have another one.  But that was two years—and babies—ago. 

Mike tastes her breath in the air, smells her skin lotion, can feel the swoosh, as she descends close-by to scoop Ben up off the floor.  He can picture it behind closed lids in his dark, crowded mind, her arm under the toddler’s diapered bottom.  He listens to her footsteps into the bathroom, the squeak as she turns the faucet handle, the water as it pours, from the trunk of that white, rubber elephant protecting the protruding spout, then giggles of excitement coming from that pudgy face.  Everything about Ben is round in a happy, beautiful sort of way.  His blond head, his bright-red cheeks, his huge, blue eyes—angelic looks that betray his feisty nature. 

This can’t be happening to me again.  I don’t want to hurt anyone. 

How long has he been here sitting in this chair, detached from this limp, heavy body?   The sound of Ben’s tiny voice causes his mouth to curve, the inkling of a smile forming at the edges of his lips. The little man’s melody wafts from kitchen now, as Ben babbles his little-boy noises, that happy-go-lucky nonsense. 

“There you go,” Janey says. 

Even though Ben’s almost two, she’ll slip him into the high chair for safe keeping and set a couple of Vanilla Wafers or pile of Cheerios on the tray to keep him occupied while the water fills the tub.  This father of four hears her footsteps, again, now into the bathroom, kitty-corner from the kitchen, just off the dining room, adjacent to the living room where he sits, next to the blue Vermont Castings woodstove, eyes still closed, images racing inside his forehead.  She’s strong. He saw it yesterday when she got frustrated, pacing in the bright morning light across the deck, the June air warmer than usual, especially for this mountaintop elevation.  He remembers trying, somehow, to help her get it, this anxiety he kept calling job stress.  But it was beyond that, really.

“Quit,” she said, as if it were that simple. 

Oh, Rabbit, it’s so much bigger than a job, he wanted to say, words that will resurface, repeating themselves a cappella within her cortex for years to come.

Like a scene, the twister in The Wizard of Oz, the moving pictures of his wife running the bath and Ben sitting in the high-chair pushing a handful of Cheerios through the lips of that round face swirl into a single image.  He smells the moist June breeze through the open slider, sees the dining room table, remembers how he still jokingly refers to it as “Joe,” this table of gatherings, the slew of birthdays, family dinners, and evening card games with the mountain neighbors, bought with the inheritance from his dead uncle.  But that money is gone.  That’s why he took this new job.  They offered him more money.  A lot.  He knew he shouldn’t make that move, his gut kept telling him, worse place to work in Burlington.  Cut.  Stop.  The scene replays itself, the two of them, Janey and Mike, in matching yellow terrycloth robes sitting at this funky pseudo-antique table, the first proud purchase of two silly newlyweds.  My silly Rabbit, he thinks, missing those courting days, the crazy ski weekends where, despite the five-hour drive back to a busy work week in Manhattan, they always ended up downtown at the Chicken Bone for apres-ski beers. 

Jackson squirms on his shoulder as this movie continues, of those two “hot shits” as his friend used to say, who had the balls to chuck it and make the move from the Big Apple to small-town Vermont, their own version of Diane Keaton’s Baby Boom.  From the blue condominium complex in the Brickyard to, “hey why not live in a ski resort, go all the way?” Why not, they asked themselves, sitting at a table named “Joe,” inside the first-ever home purchase, married, happy with their new jobs, champagne glasses raised to the self-timed camera set to flash.

Flash.  And another.  And another.  So many pictures.  All those we can do anything, Mikie, why not’s… and now I can only ask, Why?

Why does he keep cutting that once long, curly hair he knows she loves?  Why can’t he feel the joy behind that trademark smile as huge as it used to be, as huge as he now must force it to be, all teeth? He’s sees it, and little has changed except for the rounding of her baby-producing body, sees her long, brown hair, intense hazel eyes, lips pursed as if about to project her signature bursts of laughter.  Pinch me, he’d thought then.  He and his fiancé together had done what many could never conceive possible, left secure jobs in Manhattan to start a new life in Vermont.  He had conquered more than that. Not only leaving the City, but recovery from what his parents, his sister, and his best friend from as far back as Catholic boys’ school, Billy, called the “dark days.” This phrase will emerge only once in her presence, at the party following that wild Sugarbush wedding, words she belittles then as a benign inside joke between old friends.  He recalls the momentary, moonlit cast of concern on her face, feels the crinkle in his own brow as he sits here now in this chair.  “A toast to the newlyweds,” Billy always knew how to lighten the mood. 

How has this closest friend, my conspirator, kept it inside and seemed so cool all these years?

That phrase, “the dark days,” will haunt Janey in the immediate aftermath, and resurface during her own murky times, in those days when she will hate him for what he’s done, on and off, over and over, fighting it, fearing it, trying to forget it, forego it, forgive it, this thing that has a life of its own, let it go… for decades to come. 

How can he begin to explain now what consumed him way back then, weeks before he met her, his plummet toward not even he knows where—how or…why?  Nobody really believed the breakdown, anyway.  And then they blinked it away.  Gone.  You’re fine.  No need to tell her at that point.  Not once he met her.  He had fallen again, yes, but this time in love.  “The Mikie and Janey Show,” he’d called it.  Endorphins can do that, her therapist will explain, eventually.  Love, that oxytocin, coupled with all those workouts together, the racquet ball games, cross-country skiing in Central Park, then hitting the slopes of Sugarbush each weekend, his biking, her running…he didn’t need that medication anymore.  That psychiatrist who said he needed those pills was wrong. 

He stopped taking the pills.  And he was fine.

The screech of the twisting faucet stops the thinking.  Off.  The tub must be full.  As the rushing sound of the water turns in a second to silence, he recalls the heavy rains earlier this week, knows the Huntington River will be raging harder, faster now.  Prime time.  He smells the warm air again, imagines the last bit of snow melt streaming down the mountains into the brooks and potholes below, into the rivers, then churning through the deep chasms of the Gorge. 

The breathing of his newborn synchs with the beat of his heart. 

If only…I had kept my old job, the job that got me here in the first place. 

The job in advertising sales at the TV station, good ol’ WPTZ, played out as everything he’d hoped it might be.  He knew its affiliation with NBC, where his dad had worked during his childhood and into young adulthood, made his dad proud. He sees, in a flash on the back of those closed lids, the building, the office, that first interview with Karen when she offered him the position, the woman who would become his crazy boss, but in such a loving way.  The woman his wife will sit with years later, over lunch after they’ve bumped into each other at a rock concert.  And years later, they’ll be seeking each others’ forgiveness and still trying to sort it all out, make some sort of sense, or find peace amidst it all.  He remembers that got-the-job-baby phone call to Janey, his “Rabbit,” his wife-to-be, how proud he was to share the news, as if it was yesterday.  He still had hopes then of becoming a weatherman, of being on camera, becoming famous someday.  Just like David Letterman, his dad’s boss for all those years.  But that dream is gone.  Too late. 

If only I could have gotten that job back, if Karen had just said, yes, on the phone yesterday. 

But, no, Karen said, sorry, somebody else has that job now.  It’s not there to give.  She can’t give it back.  Can’t go back.  Can’t stay at the new job, at The Burlington Free Press…it’s a horrible place, and he knew that, everyone on the streets knows it, and he feared it.  But with the salary increase and Larry’s convincing pursuit, and Janey’s go for it, he took the offer anyway. Yet another why not?  Yes, he could handle anything…

The echo of Ben’s laughter and splashing breaks this dark reverie.  Mike pictures Janey kneeling there next to the tub as he himself in one of his favorite daddy duties has done many times, hears her sweet voice as she hands Ben something.  “Here you go, big boy, isn’t this fun?  Just you tonight…you get the tub all to yourself for once.” 

Right.  This reminds him.  Will and Eliza, still little enough to fit in the tub with Ben, are probably bathing at his parents’ Vermont condominium just a half hour or so away, having been taken out for ice cream or some kind of treat, as always.  This reminds him that his parents are here, in Vermont.  Janey told him how they had come here to this home on the mountain earlier today to pick up their firstborn grandchild, Willi Babba, as his mother calls him, along with his three-year-old sister whom his dad calls, “Princess.”  Soon, his parents, just like his sister recently did, will be moving here permanently from Westchester, the house in Crestwood, that place where he grew up, where it all happened, the priests, the train, Tony.  Moving here. 

They know it all.  Too much.

He knows that his parents know what those in his past life know, all the denial, what they don’t want to be happening to this son, brother, friend.  Deep down they know because his father rescued him the first episode, tracked him down that day, walking the streets of Manhattan, on his way to the 86^th Street station with every intention of jumping in front of a subway train. 

That’s what they told me, anyway. 

This is the story that Janey will hear later.  Billy, his roommate, best buddy, will live to tell of how he pulled back the covers that morning in the brownstone on 86^th Street.  “Get up, Mike,” he’ll recall saying.  “You gotta go to work.”  But Mike just lay there, in the same clothes from the day before, unshaven. Catatonic, that’s how Billy used to describe it and will again to Janey as they stand in front of the Fifth Avenue Marriott, years from now, following a lunch at Bryant Park Café where the two of them will keep comparing memory notes, asking each other, how did it happen, really, and in all the years since, how did we each in our own separate ways survive?  Why? Why? Why? 

Jackson’s tiny back rises with a deep inhale, arching slightly, then recedes, the sweet-smelling breath fluttering between the tiniest of lips, his newborn practicing the sigh. Mike slides his hand upward, cupping it, gently rubbing the back of this velvet-smooth head. He feels his own skin slide along this soft cheek of his third son.

Smooth, good, I haven’t stopped shaving. 

Yet.  But he feels it coming.  The sense of inertia, the paralysis.  It’s creeping in on him, only a matter of evaporating time. 

Will I be able to get out of bed in the morning? 

Mike’s sees the circles darkening around his eyes.  Darkening like his thoughts, circling like his mind.  She sees them, too. 

Bigger than me, that’s what Janey said she told your mother, was it yesterday?  Billy had used those same words over the phone, too big for me to handle, when he called your dad about the first breakdown, in a place so far from here, so long ago. 

Mike knows he’s been losing weight, and that it’s starting to show, the bagginess of his suits, the belt buckled at its tightest notch.  This is killing him.  He can’t go there again.  He prides himself on being Mr. Positive, life of the party, best salesman in Burlington.  Loves showing off the pictures of his wife and kids.  But everyone’s starting to catch on.  John-boy, as Janey calls him, his brother-in-law, bumped into him, never in town, but there he was, right there on Church Street, as if a phantom.  John saw it, for sure, this vacant look.  Instead of the usual all smiles, Mike couldn’t fake it in time.  This man, close to him as if his own brother caught him, just sitting there on that bench in front of the mall in the middle of the bustling marketplace in the middle of the afternoon, all dressed up, everything going for him, immobilized, paralyzed, slumped and staring at nothing. 

“Hey, Mike!”  His voice, so cheery.  Quick, snap out of it, he told himself, but too late.  He could see the fret in his brother-in-law’s face. And he’ll tell his sister, Mike’s wife, of this chance meeting.  But not for a while from now.

He rubs nose against his sleeping infant’s scalp.  As Jackson lets out a little puff, Mike breathes him in, hoping for some kind of rebirth of his own. As his newborn’s chest moves up and down, again, father’s and son’s heartbeats harmonize.    

Stop thinking. 

Amidst these soft sounds of what seems a lullaby, a placid scene, hidden within, his brain waves, those neurotransmitters, the term Janey will come to know all too well, keep firing more rapidly.  He sits in this chair craving, praying in his own way for peace of some sort, any sort.  His overactive mind summons last night’s phone call from his own sister.  She worried about him.  She’s catching on, too, even more, because she knows his secret, has also lived through those “dark days.”  And then there’s Susie, the colleague at the new job, the only one he likes, the one who convinced him to come work with her at the Free Press in the first place, told him last week what she told Jim: “He’s looking green around the edges.”  She’s concerned.  Now he is, too.  Jim Carter, the publisher himself, never the warm and fuzzy type, insisted Mike take a walk with him, just the two of them. 

Embarrassing.  This can’t be what people think of me.  They can’t know.

His dad will be so disappointed, too, he can feel it.  His dad was such a success back in the day, directing all those shows, Saturday Night Live, Late Night with David Letterman, and, every year when he was in high school, those Orange Bowl parades. Look at all he’s done, and with no college degree.  In those early dating days of the “Janey and Mikie Show,” he sure impressed her, too, SNL, front-row seats and an invite to the exclusive after-party, all on the second date.  Brown-bag beers for the first date, the film opening of Little Shop of Horrors.  The City.  Our City.  He remembers now how she awed him too with her raccoon-collar “producer coat,” as he called it, her job at Sports Illustrated, his writer-producer client turned girlfriend, flying all over the country to interview famous athletes, hanging out at the estate of Walter Payton, in the L.A. locker room or Karrem Abdul-Jabbar.  “Wallll-ter Payyy-ton!” one of her students will yelp years later as she sits propped on the table in the front of the college classroom telling these stories.  “You knew Walter Payton?”   

That was the life.  Our life.

And it could be again.  If only… He had tried to convince her just a few weeks ago to get started writing that television show he wanted to call Champ.  In a moment of what Janey will realize later to have been mania, he’s sure-beyond-sure that the two of them could create their own Vermont-hit version of Barney the Dinosaur.  Too busy with babies, she said, but just for now. 

She doesn’t get it.  Now is all there is. 

The nows turning to then, turning all the somedays to never.  He can’t wait.  Another way out, crushed. 

Yet, just yesterday, pacing the deck, she gave me another option.

“Quit, Mikie,” she said to him, as she keeps saying to him, in the waning hourglass days, over and over at this point, just as she’ll profess years later to her writing students as the best way out of feeling blocked.  But this time, in what could be her final days with Mike, it’s “Quit” with the idea of starting an ad agency. 

But it’s too late now.  I’m too tired, too weak, too numb.  If only I could sleep.

Eyes still closed, he hears more splashing, Ben’s giggle, a vrrrmmm, vrrrmmm, as he pushes the toy boats. One sure thing, Janey is sitting there on that small stool next to the tub, smiling, her thinking as innocent as his almost-two-year-old’s.  He feels safe in his thoughts.  She can’t read minds.  He doesn’t mean to be cunning, or does he? 

It’s come back.  This is truth.  The only true thing.  I have little time. 

He visualizes his escape.  The plan begins with the steep, winding mountain road from this home past the little white house and log cabin at the bottom, past Chuck’s store, the fire station, that miniature, brown house, the combination post office and town hall with the make-shift handicap ramp.  This plot continues along the flats, the long stretch past Ray’s Auto Body, the salt barn, the big lot full of trailers for sale where he’ll glance in his rearview mirror one last time at the sign, “Welcome to the Town of Bolton,” then take that left just before the Jonesville store, the bridge over the river, round the sharp bend at the barn with the American flag painted on it, then left onto the Dugway Road, feel the sudden switch to dirt under the tires, smell the cool darkness in the air, hear that rushing sound as he enters the tunnel of tall, over-arching pines. 

He hears another splash, then dripping, and imagines Janey rubbing a soft, wet washcloth down his Benji’s small back, soothing herself into thinking, seeing, hearing, speaking only what she wants and needs to know is real, that her husband and Jackson are at peace together in the chair in the next room.  That her husband will be okay.  That everything will work out, somehow, the unfolding of the years ahead, of raising children and growing old together in the mountains of Vermont.  That was, this is the plan. 

Janey will do anything for him.  Just like he would do anything for his mother in those days when she would drink too much, the vodka all day long, the inconsolable crying.  Old movies now, tiring, those scenes of the young boy he once was hiding the bottles, of his dad being away, gone for months sometimes, out on an aircraft carrier stints with NBC.  But he doesn’t feel any blame.  His mom couldn’t help it.  And his dad loved his work, a great guy, was and forever will be.  “Hi ya,” he will say repeatedly for decades to come to his son’s children as they grow into adults living on their own, Grandpa’s words peppering spirits, pouring through their cell phones in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., oh, the places they’ll go, and his pure love masking the slightest possible hint of if only… 

I love him, I love them all. 

“Bath time’s almost up, buddy.”

Mike’s heart grapplings return, as he sits here, the present intermingling with mini-reels of himself as the child helping his mom into the bath to sober up, feel better, helping her wash her hair, a family secret he had easily shared with his wife, just as Janey had cried in his arms about her parents’ divorce, her own childhood heartbreaks. 

I could tell her anything.  Or could I?

No, not the priest stuff.   Not now.  Not ever.  Not with her, not with his parents, not anyone, except Billy, because it happened to him, too.  You both were prey, but made a pact.  And Father Pete, yes, Janey will suspect much, much later that he, too—the priest who counseled them pre-wedding and led them at the front of the alter in their vows—was part of it all.  

That can never come out.  No coming out…

Mike hears happiness in that high-pitched voice.  “All clean.”  A laugh.  “Time to get out.”

Too distant now.  The sound of love. 

Not the sharp voice of jealousy he used to hear in those early courting days when Janey mentioned his mother, when she couldn’t understand why a mother and son talked on the phone so much and for hours, or why her husband sent her, his mother, red roses every year on his birthday. 

Those days are far gone.  He needs to be gone. 

His parents will be over tomorrow, wanting to help him, stop him.  And then his wife will try to help him.  Stop him.  She’s already tried to make that appointment with the psychologist. Some complication with the health-care system, getting the referral, has postponed it a day.  One more day, and then he will be okay.  Janey believes this, that he will do what his mother told her he must do.

“He needs to get to a doctor and get medication.”

He doesn’t, and will never know how Janey cried at that moment.  “What are you talking about?”

His going will make it all better, make everyone okay.  He can only be a burden to her now, like this monkey clasping, gripped to his back, the one he can’t shake off.  The one he thought… like Tony and Aunt Judy.  Janey won’t even know who Tony is.  The all-caps of the handwriting will throw her off.  Reading those letters, Tony, she’ll mistakenly and wishfully think, he’s gone to New York.  She won’t get it.  Won’t be able to go there.  Only into shock at first.  And, for now, he can’t go there, totally…yet…either.   He never told her.  Never talked to her about the day that high-school friend left the family home in Crestwood, walked down the hill to the commuter station, and jumped in front of a train.  No one ever talked about, nor ever admitted that Aunt Judy killed herself, either.  Everyone called her death an accident, said that it happened because she was depressed, drank too much, fell, and hit her head on the coffee table.  An accident.  But aren’t they all?  Her nephew knows.  He knows here, now, more than ever just how she felt. 

I know.

“Out you go,” she says.  How she loves being a mom, Mike thinks, and can picture just the way she slips her hands under Ben’s pudgy armpits and lifts his wet body over the edge of the tub and onto the bath mat. “Ooooh, yes, so clean, such a big boy.”  He pictures her twirling the towel around the shiny skin of that small, spotless body, tousling with its top edges Ben’s towhead.  Even the wrapping of the towel offers sound in its soft squeeze of a hug.  And then he hears Janey’s footsteps as she walks across the dining room, stops.  He keeps his eyes closed, but can feel hers on him and Jackson’s feather-light body on the edge of his shoulder as it continues to rise and fall ever so slowly and slightly beneath his hand.

Janey will remember this as one of the last scenes.  She will look across another living room years from now, the children grown and gone to college and jobs, scattered in cities across the country, far from Vermont.  She will stare at same chair, amazed at the transitions it has survived—from when she, herself, was small, from her hometown of Slingerlands, New York, to the Green Mountains, then to Arizona, then Florida, then back to Vermont.  She will remember this chair as if it were the only piece of furniture in the room at that moment.  Not the blue ceramic Vermont castings woodstove, not the couch worn from its moves from his parents’ house to his City apartment, to the Vermont condo, and now here.  The baby swing in front of the big picture window will be long gone, along with the Johnny Jump-up hanging in the doorway between the living and dining rooms, and that table from Uncle Joe, and the other chair given to them by his Nana when they last visited her in Hoboken, all left behind along with those amazing sunsets and loving evenings together at the end of each day.  In the end, days, weeks, years and years later, she will hold tight in her mind this image of her husband and Jackson, of how comfortable he always seemed with a sleeping baby on his chest, immersed in that golden swirling pattern of the Ethan Allen winged-back chair. 

Mike holds still, momentarily, until the sound of her footsteps recede once again, back across the dining room, around the table named Joe.  He remembers sitting there last night for hours beneath the dimmed chandelier, the rest of the house dark, silent except for the whisper of his family sleeping—Janey in their bedroom on that same floor, curled up on her side of what had been her great-grandmother’s bird’s-eye maple, four-poster, Jackson in the corner of their bedroom in his bassinet, Benji in his crib in the room at the top of the stairs with his bottle tossed to one corner by now and the other crib set up and ready for when Jackson gets a bit older and stops nursing so frequently, and Willi and Ellie in the room next to Ben’s, secured by bed railings, hugging their favorite stuffed animals, that darn purple dinosaur and Raggedy Ann.  As yet another sleepless night for Mike wore on, the faint breathing of his wife and four little ones became heavy, the air thick and oppressive.  He had to take care of business, write those checks for the fifteen bills due this month, stamp them, get them ready for tomorrow.

“Here we go….” Mike feels her arms swathe Ben’s towel-wrapped body as she carries him up the steep stairs built into the far corner of the dining room.  It’s as if he can feel the floor move as they reach the top, the squish of wall-to-wall carpeting, as she emerges into the loft above.  He pictures the scattered toys, Ben dropping the damp towel as Janey walks over to the built-in desk with overhead cabinet that he converted into a diaper-changing station.

“Get over here, you,” she says, knowing the imminent need for diapering before a bit more playtime and then storytime begins.  She is lowering Ben onto his back, now, Mike can sense it. He knows those careful motions by heart, the ones he’s done many times with each of his four babies, his hand guiding the head so it doesn’t bump the wooden edge.  Ben’s outgrowing that area, but Jackson has time…  And he remembers with a blink and, again, the shadow of a smile, those potty training days, and how Will and Eliza no longer need diapering in this space. 

This reminds Mike, again, that the older two of his four children are at his parents’, nearby.

It’s back.  Again.  And the panic.  My parents are in Vermont.  This can’t be happening.  Not now.

“Now, into your pjs, cutie…,” Janey’s voice again, through the open air, from above and across the loft railing. 

Here, in this loft, Janey will later recall, an interaction with Mike she would never fully comprehend, why her husband, usually Mr. Cool, had became enraged that day not too long ago, how it had started to come out, in that second she showed him those newly purchased pairs of underwear—Will’s first.  They were briefs in bright colors purchase at J.C. Penneys, adorable, she had called them.  So proud she was, for Will to be beyond diapers, such a big boy, proud beyond any of her past corporate accomplishments, for the first time in her life having succeeded at potty training, to be part of this transition in your eldest’s life, and her purchase of little-boy underwear.  “Why did you buy those?”  Mike’s hot air burst her elation.  Little did she know the excruciating reminder that had been for him.  It had brought it all back.  And, again, like the passing comment about “the dark days,” he had laughed it away.  And soon they were both laughing, Mike having succeeded in pushing it back down.  And keeping it there.  Gone.  Until now.  Again, he thought he had beat it.  Fooled himself into forgetting Father Malone, being one of “his boys,” the secrets of Archbishop Stepinac Catholic High.

“Hold on, buster,” she says.  Mike hears a wild giggle, a toddler’s yapping, and wishes he could join the two of them in a pretend game of catch-me, that adorable son and the woman he loves, the woman he married, the woman who has saved him all these years. 

The woman who will doubt me and all of this, and forever wonder, wasn’t love enough? 

He sees her in his mind doing what she loves to do, playing, pretending she can’t get a hold on Ben as she gets on her knees and chases him around the playroom above—the place she will sit, night after night, in the months to come, in a rocking chair she has positioned next to the changing table just outside the two children’s bedrooms, just right, so she can see Will and Eliza in the room to the right in their twin beds with safety railings, and then the two cribs in the room on the left, one holding Ben, the other Jackson.  She will read bedtime stories just loud enough for each to hear, and they will listen until their eyelids flutter shut.

 “The sun has set not long ago….” Her voice is calm, the words familiar, as she begins The Going to Bed Book, but is interrupted by Ben’s plea, “ba-ba.” 

“Ooookay,” she responds, in a darn-it tone, as Daddy knows, of hope that Ben had forgotten, that she had gotten away with no bottle tonight, that it’s a bad habit, one you both as parents didn’t feel like wrestling with, not now, not yet, not with his newborn baby brother in the mix.  “Here we go, you,” she says, her voice steady, hiding any ounce of disappointment. “Stay right here and I’ll be right back with your baba.” 

He listens to her footsteps, once again, down the stairs and into the kitchen.  He hears the fridge door open and close in the other room, and above him from the loft, a tapping sound, Ben with his hammer on the miniature tool-bench, no doubt. 

So much about this house, this life, has kept me alive this long.  Maybe it still can. 

Everything leading up to it was magical.  Falling in love, taking long bike rides, going for runs, weekends in Vermont with his Rabbit, that nickname he gave her skiing one day at Sugarbush when she went speeding by, laughing, and then caught an edge and did one of her classic tumbles.  “Silly Wabit,” he said, “Trix are for kids.” And it stuck.  He can see the white letters, WABET, on her first, green Vermont license plate.  He remembers feeling slight needles of anxiety that day, as he packed that diamond engagement ring into his parka pocket.  He could feel his own pulse, and she will remember seeing that vein protruding down the middle of his forehead.  But that was happy stress.  The ring, the reservation at the Round Barn Inn, the idea to ask her slopeside, and after the proposal, an après ski dinner at Tucker Hill.  That was his inn, and became their love place. 

He was her prince, then, ‘Jadran,’ Janey called him, a made-up name somehow connected to his Yugoslavian roots and what would be their honeymoon destination, with massages in Dubrovnik, dinners in Zadar with cousin Milo—how the Croation relatives loved the two American newlyweds.  He feels overcome in this instant, can see himself back in that room at the inn, standing on the double bed, chin lifted high, arms crossed over his muscular chest, with the quilt bedspread wrapped around his naked body like a royal cape. 

She called me ‘Pierre’, too.

Oh, how they would crack up after wild love-making over what they referred to as ‘Little Pierre.”  Sex was good.  Then.  Everything was good.  Then.  He was better, he was fine.  The future held daydreams of a trip to Paris.  Pierre, this is how he would sign his name in the journal he gave her—the first of three—the March they first met, after that first time away together in Vermont, at the Tucker Hill Inn.  That inscription, the relationship that was solely ours, words now imprinted inside his forehead he would repeat over and over.  He sees her face, reading the inside cover of that leather-bound book of pages yet to fill, her amazement that he would think of such a thing, such a gift.  She was a writer then, a passion she hopes to reawaken once the babies get older.  He remembers her bursting out, again, that loud, signature laughter, in surprise as they stilled their skis, shuffled close to each other for a kiss and, out popped the diamond he slipped on her finger right there on the side of Jester, her favorite sunny, cruiser trail.

Jester.  Is that what I’ve become?

Such bright memories, the snow melting beneath ski boots, the camera taken from his pocket, the pose for a random passerby, a flash, the darkness invisible.  White, pure nothingness, all light, as he imagines it will be…

“Now everybody goes below….” Her words float again from above and over the balcony, “… to take a bath in one big tub with soap all over—SCRUB SCRUB SCRUB….”  He can fabricate in his mind this miniature scene.  Ben in his footsie pajamas, sitting in her lap, sucking on his bottle.  Her chin resting atop his head.  The drying locks beginning to curl.  Her arm supporting his back.  The book held out in front of them.  “And when the moon is on the rise, the animals all exercise. And down once more, but not so fast, they’re on their way to bed at last.” 

He listens to the words he can recite in his sleep, the ones he’s read many nights.  This board book, Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny…  If only he could sleep.  He needs sleep.  Why can’t he be strong like he was, by her side, for every birth.  They hadn’t even unpacked the boxes piled in that upstairs loft, yet, when her water broke three weeks early for Will, their first baby.  He remembers how their premature excitement soon dissipated as they were told to leave the hospital and find bumpy roads to drive in hopes of inducing labor.  Nothing happened.  But they were in this together.  And so for three days, he stayed by Janey’s side.  For three nights, he slept beside her on a cot in the hospital room.  She was hooked up to all those tubes as they pumped her body with pitocin and, finally, went into labor.  She refused the C-section repeatedly. She was strong, yes, as always.  But stronger, he knows, because he was right there to see Will’s head as she was pushing, pushing, pushing…

Will she be okay without me?

Yes, she is so strong.  Just as she was when Will had to be in intensive care for a week after he was born.  And then when Ben was breach, and Mike stood by her again, squeezing her hand as the nurse midwife pushed hard in all directions on her pregnant belly, as she pleaded with the baby inside her, turn, please, turn.  And then when her water broke, early again, with Jackson, and again, she was strong, as the cold liquid seeping out from inside her covered the bedsheets in blood. 

How could I have been so strong then…and not now?

He had stayed strong for her then, nerves in tact, at once petrified and pumped by the danger, as he held the wheel steady in the middle of the night, in the pitch black except for their headlights, down off the mountain and along those single-lane roads knowing his pregnant wife sitting next to him in the passenger seat is wearing multiple pads to somehow contain her bleeding, for the forty-minute drive to the hospital.   John and Sarah had come over to the house to watch the other three, whose Easter baskets had been filled and hidden behind the curtains of the master bedroom slider. 

Mike opens one eye to check on this baby now sleeping on his shoulder—Jackson, two months later, sleeping so peacefully, right here, right now, healthy and fine.

He had been fine then.  Even amidst the chaos of the impending birth—or death—and post-trauma of the emergency C-section, he had remembered to bring Bove’s pasta to the hospital room for Janey’s first post-partum dinner, a ritual he had started and continued with each birth.  Bove’s, how many times in those courting days had he and Janey lingered over that red sauce loaded with huge chunks of garlic that tickled their nostrels, there in that diner-style booth in downtown Burlington before cozying up with to-go coffees in his maroon Saab, back to those pre-baby, pre-everything Manhattan working lives.

“The day is done.  They say good night, and somebody turns off the light.”  Her voice bounces and floats in whispers from the room above. He envisions her overhead, rocking.  She stops reading for a second, and he hears the stickiness as she turns the stiff cardboard to the last page.  “The moon is high, the sea is deep—they rock and rock.” Her voice lowers into the softest whisper, “…and rock to sleep.”  

He was better.  He was okay.  Healthy and happy as the years ticked by and he wore all four of his babies in Snugglies, even this littlest one now sleeping here, though only a few times and only just recently.  He remembers the hikes with the older three, the mountain aflame with autumn colors, one on his back in that bright-blue pack, one on Janey’s front in the snuggly, and Will, just old enough to make it up the service road on his own two little feet, with his beloved Ricker, the dog Janey called our fake black lab, the one she brought home from the pound, the one she let him name for this mountain, tennis ball in mouth, tagging along behind.  The one lying here at his feet now.

Mike pictures the Christmas-card moments, himself a master of the self-timer, posing there with Janey and Will the first year, and then with baby Eliza the second, all in those matching red-and-black Scandinavian sweaters.  Up Ricker Mountain, up to the rickety ladder of the old look-out tower to set up the camera on the weathered railing and pose, his big grin, with his wife and babies.  Before hiking back down, he’d always sit in that chairlift, closed for the season, babies in his lap, looking out at the Adirondack mountain range, and the whole world, his world, and everything in the distance.

“Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away.  If you run away, said his mother, I will fun after you, for you are my little bunny…” Janey has moved on to The Runaway Bunny.  He knows this story.  Ben must be getting sleepy.  It can’t be long now. 

“’If you become a tightrope walker and walk across the air….” Mike recalls the finest moments of those best days on the slopes, how excited he was just this past winter to take Will out for the first time, tethered on a bright-red harness, Daddy holding tight, teaching him how to ski.  Skiing was one of Mike’s saviors and he knew it.  Heading down the driveway from this house and onto the trail in full speed across that white surface, he could shake anything. 

If only it were winter now, maybe, if I could just strap on those skis…

Mike hears the pages flipping and knows she’s skipping pages, “’Shucks,’ said the bunny, ‘I might just as well stay where I am and be your little bunny.’”  And so he did.  ‘Have a carrot,’ said the mother bunny.”  The raspy voice of his Rabbit, the voice he once had to accustom himself to but now loves, ceases.

How can I stay? 

She rises from the rocking chair and lowers Ben into his crib.  A few minutes and she will come to lift Jackson from his shoulder.  And just in time. 

Jackson starts to fuss with hunger as she returns to the living room and walks over to the chair.  “Hey, you two.  Here, let me take him now.  Did you get some rest?”

I need to act calm. 

She is hopeful, keeps faith in the unseen, the unheard, the unspoken.  He senses some nervousness but is sure his inner thoughts are safe, contained, that she still believes everything will work out. He looks up at her with those hollow eyes and decides to test her.  “Maybe we should have named this one Mike.”  She doesn’t get it, he could tell by the wrinkling of her eyebrows, then responds,  “We agreed a long time ago that two Mikes—you and your father—is enough for one family,” she says, brushing it off, a good sign.  But, still, she knows more than he wants her to because she’s spoken with his mother.  She’s probably trying to downplay everything.

“Make sure everything’s calm when he comes home from work,” his mother had warned her.  Mike knows her well.  Knows she’s a bit confused, that she can’t quite get her arms around it, but that she’s a quick study, his Rabbit, and will have a solid plan by tomorrow. 

“I was only able to get the referral,” she tells him.  “But not to worry.  I’ll have an appointment with a psychotherapist for him by the afternoon.” 

He doesn’t want to go there. 

Janey’s mother, who started to scare him the day they began the wedding planning, a woman as controlling as they come, is now starting to have suspicions, too.  He saw it in her expression a few nights ago when he arrived late to Grandma’s house for dinner.  He had worked until nine the night before and had to miss joining the family at Will’s Circus Night at the Smilie Elementary School.  With this new job and stressful work schedule, Janey was starting to give up on evenings together as a family and had gone to her mother’s for dinner.  He drove home to the mountain that night only to find them gone.  If I could just be with them, my family, he had thought, still holding on….  So, he called and found they had gone to Grandm’s red house in Stowe, and so he drove back off the mountain and the thirty minutes to his mother-in-law’s.  Willi and Ellie loved it there, the porch swing and big sandbox in the side yard.  When he arrived, he could tell she was analyzing him, his mother-in-law, looking him up and down as usual, judging his state, sizing up the fact that something is terribly wrong. 

How many nights now has it been?

“Why don’t you get into bed, see if you can sleep some more,” Janey says.  With a newborn in the crook of her arm, she goes back up the steep stairs to check on Ben and change Jackson’s diaper before breastfeeding him.  Jackson still hasn’t reached that three-month mark, still wakes in the night every three hours, sometimes less.  Mike knows how soundly Janey sleeps between feedings.  He has watched her for the past five nights with envy as he lay there, seeking the reprieve of sleep, unable to turn off his mind.  So close, he has been, to nudging her awake to tell her what’s really happening.  But then, she would stop him.  It can’t be.  Tonight, he will wait until that instant between breast-feedings when both are sound enough asleep.  Then, he’ll leave.

She sits in the chair in the corner of the room next to Jackson’s bassinet.  Mike takes off his clothes and leaves them nearby on the floor next to his side of the bed.  He glances over at the silhouette of mother and child in moonlight, then through the slider and out onto the back deck.  Future and past fuse in a shimmer of comfort he finds in the constancy of flowing streams and smell of moist woods.

He climbs beneath the patchwork quilt his sister made by hand for a recent wedding-anniversary gift.  That’s right, she called last night.  She knows.  And yet, he’s hedging his bets.  Not his sister, nor his parents will allow themselves to believe their worst fears.  He lies on his back, hands behind his head, staring at the wood-paneled ceiling.  The soft sucking sound of Jackson’s lips begins to slow.  He sees in his mind that small mouth opening and fuzzy head falling back from her breast, can hear the soft rustling of her white, cotton nightgown as she rises and gently lowers her sleeping baby into his bassinet.  She slides under the covers next to his body and looks over.  His eyes are open.  “Can I come under the wing?” she asks, then nuzzles her head into his armpit.   

He speaks the words, “Maybe I should just jump in the gorge,” words she can barely hear and can’t possibly bring herself to believe. 

“Mike, don’t be ridiculous.  You’re going to be okay.  It’s just a job.  We can fix this.”

Her eyes close to instant deep sleep.  If only he could find such relief.  In these final hours with those words spoken, she’ll soon find herself in that same boat on that same river of repudiation.  In the weeks to come, she’ll deny it a third time.  Discount these evil words as lunacy.  Her own.  For years afterward, she’ll betray herself into believing that this turning point in her life was a figment of her imagination, a scene she never lived, words she couldn’t possibly have heard, nothing he would have ever spoken.

He lies there just a while longer with her warm body against his, her head resting on his upper arm, elbow bent, forearm across her waist, studying the rhythm of her breathing, staring at the bassinet in the corner, at the line where the two walls meet.

Nothing about this make-shift chalet is square, which drives Janey’s architect father crazy, a man who made him crazy knowing the pain it was causing Janey after her parents divorce, the constant parade of young girlfriends.  Mike loves this house, its embodiment of something radical, the extremes, the fulfillment of that leave-the-city and live-on-a-mountain, ski-from-your-front-door dream.  If only it were winter now, not June.  If only he had his old job back.  If only he could turn back time, listen to those relaxation tapes Father Ed gave him, over and over, until they started working again and stopped this terrible, overbearing darkness. 

If only I could reach out. 

Nudge her.  Shake her up from under his wing.  Get her to listen, to hear the truth.  He’s flawed.  Tainted.  Living a lie.  What if she would wake up suddenly and get it.  She would grab him for sure.  But that thought alone causes fear to take hold.  She can’t make it stop.  She can’t stop him.  She’ll take away the car keys, refuse to let him leave the house.  Insist that she drive him herself to the psychologist appointment she’s determined to make in the morning.  She’s catching on.  It’s only a matter of time.  One day.  She needs one more day to figure it out.  But even if she did, he knows it would never work.  That he would stop taking the medication, just as he did the first time.  But he was better, he was fine.  Without medication.  He is fine.  loved by all.  “Mr. Everything.”  The life of the party.  The best salesman in Burlington.  The father of four adorable babies.  He has a beautiful wife.  This perfect, wonderful life.  If only he could convince himself of this reality.  There’s only one way to perfection now.

His wife in complete repose, he slips with stealth out from under the covers and into his jeans.  The house, the sheets, the air filtering through open windows and screens smell like summer and sleeping infants.  He pulls his t-shirt over his head, as he tiptoes down the stairs, feels the cool of the unfinished basement, continues across the carpet remnants, pushes the child’s swing hanging from the exposed beam.  At his sneakers by the door, he bends to one knee, then the other to tie them, before heading out into the darkness. 

He follows the route he has memorized night after night in his mind, the long, winding road down and onto the Bolton flats, over the Jonesville bridge and onto the Dugway Road, to that place where he partied in college—a favorite haunt of his and his buddies, and his beloved dog, Baileys.  How his mother loved that dog.  Baileys.  He remembers now how that lanky, golden mutt with the pointy noise would come home bloody after those dog fights up on the mountain, until Janey took him to the vet and had him fixed.  That made his mother crazy. And then Baileys went crazy and bit his sister and now he’s dead.  Maybe now, they can see each other again. He arrives with these thoughts, without remembering how he got here, this familiar place, this killing place as it has been called since the summer his college friend, Sally, was swept away. 

It has waited for me all these years. 

Mike pulls his black Subaru up along the guardrail.  He opens the car door to darkness and the sound of the gushing water. He has been here many times before.  He knows the way down the path through the low brush, past the rock where someone has piled smaller, round stones in some symbolic structure, a memorial of sorts.  He winds his way toward the hastening sound, the place in the journey where dirt turns to the smooth rock, a boulder that juts out and creates a ledge overlooking the waterfall.  

Janey will travel this same path regularly in the months to come, walk as close to that edge as possible before fear and four babies who need her hold her back. She will be on a beach in six months time, and decades later, a friend’s mouth will gape as he looks at a picture of her squatting in the in front of the surf, backdropped by bright blue water and skies, to help sun-bonneted baby Jackson stand.  Will is doing the splits to her right, Ben standing with protruding belly to her left, and Eliza to his left, knees bent, hands planted firmly in the white sand.  “That was shortly after it happened,” she will explain.

And sometime between then and now, now and then, Janey will find a cassette tape with the words, Stress Management/Relaxation/Fr. Maurice Ouellet, written neatly on its label in her husband’s signature all-caps print.  Imagine yourself on a very quiet shore.  You are sitting on a log on the beach.  There is sand all about you.  You are alone.  You see and hear the waves of the water coming against the shore.  You feel the warmth of the sun on your body, you feel the gentle breeze cool against your skin.  As you look out over the water, you see the blue sky and the color of the water.   

“Get out, get away, don’t worry about Will and Ellie and Ben and Jackson, they’ll be fine, take some time for yourself,” friends will say as they arrive like clockwork as scheduled to offer extra hands.  Janey will go there, here, and throw mementos over this edge—a pewter rabbit key chain, a scratched gold band she will wear around her neck for a few months before it chafes her chest with anger and weighs her down with grief—always aiming, aiming at that deadly spot where the water funnels through the narrowing, where that State Police Diver who had entered this place to retrieve a dead body became trapped a year ago, caught in the debris, pinned down and held under by the inescapable force of these waters, defying rescue ropes and all attempts to pull him out.  She, his Rabbit, at home with the babies, had watched this happening on the evening news, live, on the TV channel, Mike’s local network, WPTZ, the diver’s arm emerging from the white foam, waving desperately until it stopped and fell.  She couldn’t stop thinking about it, haunted by this television image for weeks, months afterward.  She kept talking to Mike about it, over and over and finally asked him to drive her here to this place one Sunday after church.  “I have to see it,” she told him. 

The Huntington Gorge.  Here it is, right before him, the powerful, churning, terrifying foam that can so easily take away his pain, so effortlessly sweep him away, free him from inner demons forever.  He sits on this smooth boulder, slides a bit closer to dangle his legs over the edge.  He is within seconds of escape.  But he can’t do it.  Can’t push himself that extra inch.  Something stops him.  Something outside himself.  Something that he can’t see out there in the real shadows and the mist.

“I need to see it,” she’ll tell Officer Cornell months later, about the pool down below.  And he’ll come by in the police car, as he did every week, and drive her there, walk her carefully, taking a safer route down into the potholes below. 

He thinks of his wife now, waking, panicking, calling his name into the cool, mountain air and across the darkness as she paces the deck. He hears his babies starting to cry, and then his dad, saying, “God is big,” his mother’s moan turning to a wail.  This will kill her.

I can’t hurt them.

As if beckoned by a stronger volition, he rises from the rock, turns back to the car, turns the keys in the ignition, turns the car around in the next driveway, and follows the path of the moon back up the sharp, winding hill to his dark, still home, to his sleeping wife and babies, to what—with this last lingering ounce of faith and glimmer of hope—will be all the years ahead.

He slips back into bed minutes before Jackson begins his hunger cry.  She stirs, flips back her side of the covers, and stumbles zombie-like toward the bassinet, her eyes barely open.  Careful to hold the back of his soft head, she lifts this fourth-born from the crib, settles into the rocking chair, pulls at the pearl buttons on the front of her nightgown, and guides the tiny lips to her nipple.   Hands behind his head, once again, Mike tilts his chin upwards and lifts his eyes to the ceiling.  By the time she looks over toward the bed, he’s closed them.  Insomnia his constant state, he can only pretend to be asleep as he listens to the chair’s soft creaking.  She rocks and rocks.  She is, at once, soothed by the sucking sensation and troubled by the tugging at her breast.  Love and fear intermingle.  She stares over at him, lying there.  He is finally sleeping.  He seems calmer tonight, she thinks.  He ate lots of dinner.  Tomorrow, she will make everything better.  Tomorrow, he will see a doctor.  He will get medication.  He will be okay.

You will be okay without me.

At daybreak, it’s back.  It’s enormous, this interior monster, its gloom obscuring all light.  And not long after sunrise, her lips and his, the unspeakable and the unspoken, will meet one last time.  “I have an important, early-morning meeting,” he’ll tell her. 

She will stand at the top of the stairs, watching him descend as she holds Jackson up against her milk-hardened breast, her skin exposed by the open flap of her white, cotton nightgown.  She won’t be able to scrutinize the marks until later that afternoon, where, just above The Burlington Free Press letterhead, he scratched his pen in circles to get the ink flowing, so he could write, there, moments before, at the top of the page, 7:15 A.M. 6/14/94. 

Janey has high hopes, big plans on this day, Flag Day.  Will and Eliza will be returning home from Grandpa and Gigi’s to this mountain chalet, she will firm up that appointment with the therapist, and by breast, snacks and naps, she will make it through the day, and maybe even get to catch her favorite soap, Days of Our Lives.

Donning his best suit and the red necktie with the trains on it, last year’s Father’s Day gift from his babies—the fifteen paid, stamped bills tucked inside his leather briefcase never to be mailed, the khakis in the Gap bag on the back seat of the Subaru never to be returned—Mike has big plans, too.