Escape Points (14 page)

“Does Matthew have assets?” I asked. “What is Matthew’s income?”

The trustee said questioning was over.

“I am trying to establish that he has an alias,” I said. My heart was pounding in my chest.

For goodness sake, he has a new name, doesn’t give the right address—isn’t that wrong?

The trustee stood up and I shook his hand, thanking him for his help in collecting past child support. He told me it cannot ever be
discharged, that he will owe it forever.
And he will likely pay none of it,
I thought.

“Pick a place on the map and we will go there together,” he wrote in a card to Colin one year with a picture of a map of the world.

It was all I could do not to circle Illinois and say, here, this is where they live, this is where you can send the check, this was where their lives are, this is where they eat and sleep, study, laugh, and cry. I wanted to add a P.S.: “We don’t do much world traveling these days, paying for tuition; food; the mortgage; phone, gas, electric, and medical bills and all. Send the check.”

I wanted him to hold up his responsibility because I did not want to spend my money and energy chasing him down. Anyone who has gone through a lengthy divorce and tried to collect on a deadbeat parent knows the physical, financial, and emotional toll such pursuit requires. If he was living in Amsterdam, I could not garnish his wages. If he was without a regular paycheck no matter where he was living, I could not demand a portion of zero. I was out hundreds of thousands of dollars for the boys’ future. And he knew it. He could slide away.

It was and it wasn’t about the money. It was about being a parent, one who took to heart the ties to his children. I could not excuse the choice to escape. I could not hide from the realization that having a parent deny you would make your heart shatter and the shards would remain.

“Call me on my cell phone,” he wrote to Colin. “I pick up messages periodically.”

If it wasn’t so cruel, I could laugh. What he needed to do was beg for their forgiveness. “I am sorry” is what he needed to write first, not suggest a vacation. “I am sorry I missed it all,” was the card he needed to send. “What can I do to make it up to you?” is what he should have written. “I was wrong.”

A few weeks later my friend Lillian suggested I write on a piece of paper how much child support he owed the boys, light it on fire, and burn it in the fireplace.

“Let it go,” she said. “Give it to the universe.”

I felt a little silly, but I did it. In just a few seconds, the yellow piece of paper ignited and transformed into ashes in the living room fireplace. There, I gave it to the universe. Now it was smoke.

What I wanted to say to my former husband was this: Promise to be a father. Let them decide to allow you back in. I could have explained to him that none of the boys wanted to see him right now. That they wanted to be in control of the event if and when they saw him. That they would no longer be passive and let him do what he wanted to them. They would call the shots. I should have told him Weldon’s fantasy was to go with me to this hearing this afternoon to beat him up.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I told Weldon.

I could have said Brendan fantasized about how he could pummel him to the ground and make his father cry, that he was big enough now to hurt him, that he was much stronger than his father ever was. I could have said Colin told me he wondered if his dad ever loved him. And that he forgot what he looked like. When I asked him if he wanted to look at old pictures of him, he always said no.

I wanted to tell him that this act of legally disavowing himself from any past, present, or future child support hurt them immensely. It hurt them on a tangible, practical level, and it hurt them emotionally that their father would think this public act to dissolve his responsibility for any of their needs was OK. I wanted to tell him that he could not take back the harm he caused and he could not pretend it didn’t happen; it was not OK to assume forgiveness, that everything was excellent, no one was a victim. Forgiveness needed to be earned.

I could have told him that one year when he sent Weldon a birthday card with a photo of himself on it, Weldon tore it into many pieces. I wanted to tell my ex-husband that when he called perhaps once a year and left a message in the middle of the day when obviously no one was going to be home, the boys became infuriated when I suggested someone call him back. And then they turned on me. And that the anger and the fury were palpable in our house for
days. It was harder and harder for them to pretend to his family that their father had not abandoned them.

“Stop asking,” Brendan said to me. “We don’t want to hear about him.”

“I am sick of talking about him, never say his name again,” Weldon said.

I wanted to tell him they are all good sons. They are smart, loving, and more than any parent could ever dream. I wanted to tell him that Colin is so shaped by his loss that the reason he wants everyone to like him is because his own father does not. I wanted to shout at him that Weldon and Brendan can’t trust many people because their own father ran away from them, their needs, and even the sound of their laughter.

I could have tried to say all of it, but I said nothing. It would not have mattered much anyway. There had been too much talk and now too much silence. Nothing was changing. The boys didn’t really forget. They harbored the injury; maybe it stayed there forever, maybe they only learned where to compartmentalize it and stop blaming themselves or me for what their father had done.

Bob and I walked to the elevator; my ex-husband was standing inside, the red arrow signaling it was going down. Bob started to get in.

“Bob, you have to be kidding me,” I said. Bob stepped back out.

“That’s a lot of energy to spend, Michele,” my former husband said, holding his wheeled black duffel bag by the long handle.

“Use your energy to write a check for tuition,” I said.

The door closed. Bob and I went to lunch at Italian Village just east of the federal building. Upstairs next to our booth was a long center table of eighty Chinese men of middle age—we counted. All were wearing ID tags, all eating the same lunch of spaghetti and meatballs, and later all eating the same naked scoops of vanilla ice cream. I read in the paper the next day that thousands of delegates from Lions Club International were in Chicago for a convention; they must have been Lions.

I had a chicken salad with apples and pine nuts. It tasted like rubberized air. I couldn’t smell, I couldn’t feel, I couldn’t taste. I was numb, but the hearing was over. Hopefully I wouldn’t have to go to court for him for another twelve years.

“The poor guy,” Bob said over lunch. “He’s fifty years old, can’t rent an apartment, can’t rent a car, can’t get a credit card, can’t even get a hotel room.”

I didn’t pity him; his choices had created all of this mess. And his choices hurt the boys. He couldn’t hurt me anymore, and I was not scared of him. Maybe I never could protect the boys from his brand of hurt.

Last summer Colin and I were going for a walk after dinner.

“If Dad doesn’t call me today, I won’t love him anymore,” he said. “Maybe he will call tomorrow.”

I felt as if the air had left my lungs. Of course he didn’t call that day or the next. Or the next. It was another year and a half before Colin would stop waiting for him to call. When I asked Colin if he wanted to see his father after he sent me an e-mail that he was in town, Colin said no. He later told me that with Weldon by his side, he called his dad on his cell phone and left him a message that he never wanted to see him again, that he should leave all of the boys alone.

When he told me the story later that night, I tried not to offer judgment or to say anything bad about his dad. “How did you have his number?” I asked.

“It’s the same cell number he always had. It’s one of those numbers burned in you that you never forget,” Colin said. “His message uses his new name and says he is filled with light or something like that. Do you want to hear it?”

I declined.

“I told him it has nothing to do with you and to stop blaming you. It is him who left us,” Colin said.

I spent the rest of the summer writing a book about the trends in storytelling in journalism and getting Weldon ready for his first year of college. Weldon didn’t want the blue and white striped washcloths
tied with blue ribbon from the back-to-campus section from Target. But I bought them anyway. He said he liked the Buddha plaque I bought on sale for his desk in his room, but he left it in the family room at home when he packed the boxes, and filled the contractor bags with what seemed like everything else he owned. My sister Maureen knitted him an enormous afghan in red and white stripes, University of Wisconsin’s colors. He wanted that.

We loaded the white Buick Rendezvous to the roof with a black futon Paul gave him, a side table, desk lamp, suitcases, and the matching plates and cups in red. I moved him—OK, he did the actual moving—into his dorm room in Smith Hall, fifth floor. I filled his refrigerator, neatly arranged his clothes on the shelves in the open closet he shared with his roommate, and made his bed with three comforters, all in matching blues. I bought him a sisal rug with red trim and put the towels on his shelves. He wouldn’t let me get more pillows for the futon.

Weldon was a recruited walk-on for the University of Wisconsin–Madison wrestling team and was red shirted, meaning he would practice with the team but not compete. Wrestle-offs for the 149-pound spot were weeks away. Starting immediately he would be going to practice and weight lifting three to five hours a day in the new wrestling room at Crandall Stadium. This was the school he wanted, this was the team he wanted, Big Ten, Division I; he was exactly where he wanted to be.

He had to say no to the private university he would have liked to attend because it was far too expensive per year in tuition and fees. He liked the coach, loved the campus when he had an overnight stay in the spring, but it would be impossible for me to swing it. I thought the head wrestling coach would be the next Powell in his life, and I loved the thought of that. So I felt more than a little guilty about having finances be the main reason he wouldn’t go there, but I couldn’t incur that much debt for one son for one year of college. I had a conversation with the financial aid office staff, and they demanded to see Weldon’s father’s tax returns. I tried to explain that was impossible.

“At this university we consider it both parents’ responsibility for tuition,” the financial aid officer explained.

Weldon’s high school dean wrote a letter to the financial aid office saying she had never met the father, he had nothing to do with the boys, he was not involved. My neighbor, who knew the boys well and happened to be a psychiatrist, wrote a letter to the financial aid office and reiterated that I was the only parent involved. Nothing helped.

“Both parents are responsible for tuition,” the woman said, when I called to ask if the letters were received. With three sons, I had eleven more tuition years to go. I had to be smart. Weldon was happy with the choice he made. Paul offered to help me with tuition. Working at the university afforded me portable tuition—40 percent—which I desperately needed.

In the summer after seventh grade, Weldon had been to a wrestling camp at University of Wisconsin, stayed in the dorm on the lake, sharing a room with a thick-necked boy who unpacked a case of orange Crush and bags of pork rinds and Cheetos when I dropped Weldon off with his duffel bag.

Just as I did those years before, I knew he would make it; I had faith in him. I could cross him off my daily worry list. He would be fine.

T
he first week of December in 2007 I told my three teenage sons that in three weeks I would be having surgery. I didn’t say what for. Not one of them asked any questions. Not one.

The year before was the breast cancer. Here we go again.

I got through that just fine, always wearing my happy, strong face in my sons’ presence. “Cured” is what Dr. Dowlat called me, and though I would take medication for at least five more years as instructed, I was going to be fine, 98 percent chance of fine. Which is pretty close to fine. I was not going to die. Not from that anyway.

All the psychology and child development textbooks will confirm this as normal: My three boys were not empathetic or interested when I introduced a new surgery to the calendar. Altruism is not so common in that age range. However, you would have thought they would be just a teensy bit curious. After all, I had been the only parent in the house for twelve years, since Colin was one year old. Their father had been estranged from them for three years at that point.

Weldon was eighteen and a freshman at UW living in a dorm room with a young man who was a musician and who routinely stole his protein bars. The good news was the roommate went home almost every weekend. But during the week, the roommate’s friends stayed over in the closet-sized room with the predictable bunk beds; the friends slept on the floor or in chairs. It was not ideal. Save the free bagels in the lobby of the dorm, it would have been miserable.

Brendan was a junior in high school, sixteen, spending his home hours in his man cave in the basement—two TVs, an Xbox, futon, couch, bed with too many mismatched pillows, and a refrigerator around the corner. I moved Colin and Brendan to separate bedrooms when Brendan was ten because I could not survive their shouts and threats to each other—over everything from muddy shoes to pushups to chicken wings—every night before they fell asleep and every morning when they woke up to fight about toothpaste. It was calmer when each son had his own room.

Colin was thirteen and an eighth grader with Justin Bieber hair he tended to religiously. He rode his bike to school and back—with one friend balancing on the handlebars and another standing on the pegs attached to the back wheels. Of course no one wore a helmet.

How would they know if they didn’t ask? It could have been plastic surgery—though I do not believe in it for cosmetic reasons only. I prefer to think I am loved for my mind. I do not lie about my age because I think denying how old you are somehow negates your right to be on the planet. I want to be here and I want each minute I have been here to count, to mean something. Do not erase me, nor the lines on my face or the freckles on my arms.

They didn’t ask. I could be having a toe amputated or an organ removed. No one asked.

At dinner more than a week later, Colin did.

“I’m having my ovaries out,” I said without emotion or explanation.

Brendan looked mortified. “Gross! You still have those?”

I didn’t tell them my doctor thought I had ovarian cancer. I didn’t tell them that I was terrified I was going to die. I just kept chewing.

Getting to this point involved a tedious list of unwelcome discoveries—ultrasound to elevated CA-125 test to another elevated CA-125 count on a second test—all leading to the conclusion that I had either benign cysts or ovarian cancer. The nickname for ovarian cancer is the silent killer. As if you would prefer a loud killer.

I am going to die. I didn’t die from the breast cancer, but now I am going to die from ovarian cancer. I dodged the first bullet, but not this one; this one is going to get me. This is no cancer lite. It’s a death sentence. No one survives. The breast cancer was a dry run. This will do it. This is the real stuff. My children will not have a parent. My children will be orphans. Mothers die.

In my pre-op appointment in her office, Dr. Lauren Streicher said she would go in laproscopically, “disconnect the left ovary”—that was the term she used. I envisioned it as complicated as unplugging the cable to the TV in the basement—remove it, seal it in a plastic baggie, and if it was clearly benign, then the procedure was over.

If the mass was suspicious, a pathologist on call would do a frozen section and Dr. Streicher would have an answer in thirty to forty minutes as to whether or not it was cancer.

Frozen section. Now I am picturing egg rolls, pizza, and spanakopita in the grocery store aisles with the frosted glass doors that open slowly.

If it was cancer
.

If it was cancer, she was just going to remove all of it—everything. I pictured my abdomen like an empty shoebox.

“It will take one to one and a half hours tops if there is no cancer. If there is cancer, maybe two hours,” Dr. Streicher said, deliberate and poised.

I wrote it down carefully in my notebook.

One hour equals no cancer.

Two hours equals cancer.

I have been to many funerals of mothers—and fathers—and they are always horrific, even the ones where the husband is brave and
the bagpipes are playing. Especially those. My two brothers have lost their wives—Madonna had ovarian cancer, Bernadette a brain tumor. My friend Catherine died before her four children were grown, and they each sobbed fitfully at the funeral as her husband nearly collapsed at the podium of the church, thanking everyone for coming, in a robotic voice that sounded like a phone recording at the bank. Sue and I sat together in the neat pews. Cecilia and I drank wine at the lunch. Sometimes I think I see Catherine driving past me on the way to the grocery store in her van. And I think I need to call her. She is dead.

It’s no better when the fathers die, but at least with the fathers, there is some kind of hope; that is, if the mother can hold it together. The father dies and no one is thinking the family is completely doomed now, because the mother will hold it together. None of it is good, and the fathers do OK, but it’s a peculiar kind of horror when a mother dies; she is often the keeper of the secrets, the soft heart, the timepiece that regulates everyone else. The center of gravity. Everyone loses their footing without her, like quicksand.

Lying on the gurney, before I was wheeled into surgery, my sister Madeleine held one hand, my sister Maureen the other. Mary Pat stood at the end of the gurney.

It was 7:30 in the morning. Of course I had been up all night, the way you are when you are so nervous and when common sense will not land on you. You think if by sleeping you are saying it is normal, this is fine, let’s go about our everyday business, shall we? Lying down would be wrong; closing your eyes and surrendering would be unwise. No, you must stay up, stay awake, greet the sunrise, keep vigil soldier sharp over the madness. It is not just another day.

It would be over by 9:30
AM
. Either way. I wonder if I should renew my magazine subscriptions. The nurse took my glasses. I couldn’t see anything clearly.

Count down from 100.

99, 98, 97, 96.

When I woke up in recovery, I searched for the wall clock, frantically, squinting. There it was, a large white circle with black numerals big as my fist: 9:50
AM
. I had been in surgery more than two hours. More than two hours. More than two hours equals cancer.

I was going to die.

Maybe this was how it would be; isn’t this how it is for all of us?

I would go along, get on with my life, raise the boys, work, and never really know how it would end up, not at all conscious of the fine-print details on anything. Any degree of certainty was an illusion, self-deception at its worst. There always exists the chance that at any moment any one of us could be pirated by misfortune or someone’s capricious change of heart.

Cancer the size of a moth. A decision to walk through a different colored door. A right instead of a left. This flight instead of the next. At any time the cancer could come back. At any time, anything.

I started to cry, a convulsing, sobbing hurricane of tears. I wouldn’t see the boys graduate from college. I wouldn’t see them get married, have children. And I was so hoping their wives would like me. I wouldn’t get to go to Australia, Sweden, Thailand. I wouldn’t get to paint more, have a nice kitchen, write more books, love someone so much I could float.

I think as a mother—or father—the second you hold your squirming infant, with tiny hands and soft doll lips, it all stops being about you. You as first anyway. The airline staff need to remind you to put the oxygen mask on yourself first before you affix the mask to your child, because your instincts will not allow you that option.

You pay their tuitions first, you give them the window seat, the benefit of the doubt, the blanket when you are cold, the forgiveness you won’t give yourself. Because that is what mothers do. And doing that does not feel sacrificial or martyr-like; it feels normal. To not do that regularly, consistently, and before your first conscious breath of the day feels like a betrayal of who you have become, of who you have been miraculously granted to be.

It is only when you see and understand fully that the door may be closing forever that you wish maybe you had jumped out the window
once or twice for a stroll by yourself when the moon was full. It is then that you thrash helplessly in regrets and almosts and never got to’s. It is then that you become selfish and demanding and howling angry. It is then that quiet and accepting seems impossibly insane.

Maybe only two or three minutes later, Dr. Streicher, her head covered in a blue surgical cap, walked over to the bed, held my hand and said, “There is no cancer.”

I sniffled. “But it has been two hours . . . ”

“It all went very well. You have been in recovery for a while.”

When I fly—which is about once or twice a month for work—I play this game in my head when the plane is landing; it’s kind of morbid, really. The closer we get to the ground in the last few minutes of approach, I think,
if we crashed now, I would not live.
Descending faster, closer to the ground, the stripes on the runway below.
If we crashed now, I could survive.
Wheel touch is imminent.
If we crashed now, I would definitely live.
And then we land. Sometimes the passengers clap.