Mad Max: Unintended Consequences (7 page)

With my mind churning over my middle-of-the-night conversation, I lay in bed in the predawn darkness. One by one, I thought about the problems as I understood them. I formulated a series of baby steps to save my daughter. If one worked, I could go back to New York. When dawn was little more than a fingernail of light, I rose, took a quick shower, and went downstairs.

I was in bed less than four hours and asleep perhaps one. I'd have dark circles under my brown eyes, but I couldn't worry about them. Besides, worry produces wrinkles.

While the coffee brewed, I rooted through the kitchen desk for the list of psychiatrists Merry got at the therapy center. Three were affiliated with VCU and one with County: All were accessible. It was too early to call, so I puttered around the kitchen. I set breakfast on the table. The kids wouldn't be down for at least an hour and who knew when or if Merry would show up.

I carried my first cup of coffee out to the patio. Time to call Raney, who was a dawn riser like me.

Raney picked up on the second ring. After the usual round of pleasantries, Raney got to the point. “You talked with Merry, or you wouldn't be calling me before the garbage trucks finish their morning deliveries.”

A New Yorker's joke: Garbage trucks made deliveries rather than pick-ups because piles of trash were stacked on curbs some place in the city every day. I was so homesick. Birds chirping in the backyard seemed insipid to someone who'd grown accustomed to the hubbub of a big city.

“I did. Didn't do a bit of good.” By habit, I gave Raney the blow-by-blow of what happened. “You can scratch off one of the halves.”

“Tough love, huh?”

“I didn't actually threaten to leave, but I told her she has to behave like she did before the accident.” I sipped more coffee.

“The result was?”

“A freaking failure. She's as obtuse as the proverbial brick wall.”

A cacophony of horns violated the quiet-zone ordinance where Raney lived. She must have the sliding glass door open onto Park Avenue.

“I'm a crutch, but leaving could damage Merry more than I can live with. I gnawed that bone all night. All I came away with was the urgent need to get her into therapy.” I stared at the bottom of my cup and flip-flopped my way back into the kitchen for a refill.

“I agree. So your next step is a psychiatrist?”

“I have a list in my hot little hand. I'll start calling at nine.”

“Call between seven and eight. Psychiatrists see their first patient at nine. The earlier you call, the more likely they'll answer the phone.”

“Good idea.”

“What about commitment?”

“I don't know how to go about it.”

“The psychiatrist will.”

“Merry promised she'd go if I find her another plastic surgeon.”

I reminded Raney about Merry's obsession over her face.

“Do you think she'll remember?”

“Doesn't matter. I will. Whip can deal with the plastic surgeon. I'm more worried about what's going on inside her head.”

“All the plastic surgery in the world won't help if she continues drinking too much and downing pills like M&M's.”

“Let me know what happens.”

“Thanks. I'll call you soon. Hugs to the rest of the Great Dames.”

Footsteps padded down the stairs. I turned. Emilie rubbed sleep from her eyes. She was getting up earlier and earlier. I suspected she was sleeping as little as I was.

“I heard you fighting with Mom last night.”

“I tried to be quiet, but she kept yelling.”

Emilie shook her head. “You were both so miserable, I couldn't tune you out.”

“I'm sorry, dear child.”

Once again, Emilie slipped into a space that excluded me, yet I understood what she meant.

“Mom needs you to help her, not argue with her.”

“She needs more help than I can give her.” I held up the coffeepot.

“She needs her mommy, just like I do.” Emilie stirred cream into the brew in her cup.

Merry needed her “mommy”? I hadn't thought of it that way. I treated my daughter like an adult. Maybe, just maybe, Emilie was right. Maybe I needed to go back to being Merry's mother. Except, Merry, too, often told me how I sucked in that role.

“I mean, she needs someone to understand her. Can't you back off and not poke her all the time?”

“Is that what you think I'm doing?”

“Isn't it?”

I did poke. Well, poking wasn't working. I'd try being nicer to my poor, lost daughter.

“Treat her like you do Alex and me. You don't poke us. You aren't critical with us all the time.”

“You're still children. You need guidance, not poking. Support, not criticism.”

“In a way, Mom is more like a child than I am. She needs the same thing I do.”

“Got the message. Help me stay on track, okay?”

Emilie put her cup down and gave me a bear hug. She nodded against my chest.

I hit paydirt on the second call when Dr. David Silberman answered. I told him everything I could think of about Merry and asked for his help. As luck would have it, he had a slot open on Mondays and Thursdays at ten when Mad Max's Taxi Service was available.

I made the appointment and picked up my rollerblades. I needed to move, and move a lot, to work off my anxiety. Between Whip's squishiness on what to do about his wife and Merry's decline into drugs and booze, I was barely holding it together. The more I exercised, the better off I'd be. I needed a better sense of balance to keep my promise to Emilie about not poking her mother.

Merry denied promising to go into therapy. I told her I wouldn't do a thing about her face until we found out what was going on inside her head. Call it blackmail. Call it coercion.

Merry argued and yelled the night before the first appointment, calling me any variety of names. She was creative in the way she put words together. I kept at her until I wore her down.

Two weeks later, I sat in the waiting room and mulled over an incident from the previous week.

On Wednesday afternoon, I read in my room after my Pilates workout. Emilie was home with a cold, and Merry was holed up in her bedroom. No early warning siren sounded before a battle erupted in the hallway outside my closed door.

“Why do you always shut me out?”

“I don't shut you out.”

“You do. You never ask about me, about what I'm doing. You don't care.”

“I do.”

“Why can't you just be my mother? Why are you such a bitch?”

An open palm met a cheek.

“Don't call me a bitch! I'm your mother. I deserve respect.”

“Not when you don't act like my mother. Why can't you just go to the swim league awards dinner? You always went in the past.” Emilie's voice was thick, the result of her cold and I suspected also of choking tears. “Or are you going to spend the day drunk again?”

“I won't go. Have your grandmother take you.”

“I hate you!” Emilie slammed the door to her room. Merry's door followed a second later.

I'd first heard the “I hate you” accusation right after Norm died. I couldn't let Emilie think she hated her mother. Maybe I could help her understand before things got any worse.

I set my book on the bedspread and went to Emilie's door. I tapped and opened it before she could tell me to go away. She lay face down on her bed, sobbing into her pillow. I sat on the edge and pulled her into my arms.

“I hate her! She's so mean. She hates me too.” Emilie's pain poured out with each fresh batch of tears.

“I don't think you hate your mother, Em. You don't like how she treats you, do you?”

“Oh, Grams, she slapped me. She's never slapped me before. Don't you hate her?”

Emilie only called me Grams in moments of extreme duress. I considered her question.

Her sobs quieted.

“No, I don't. I don't like her right now, but I haven't stopped loving her. It's hard to explain, but she's my daughter. I can't turn my back on her.”

Emilie snuffled against my T-shirt. I reached for a tissue and handed it to her. She blew a juicy amount into the first one. Two more followed. Her sobs subsided to little more than hiccups.

“Do you know how to help her?”

“Haven't a clue. She's going to a doctor who might be able to, though.”

“A shrink?” Emilie sat up and wiped her face. “Do you think it'll work?”

Merry's fingerprints were vivid on Emilie's cheek. My anger rose. If Merry stood in front of me, God help me, I'd slap her as hard as she struck her daughter.

“Let's hope.” I left my granddaughter to rest.

For the remainder of the day, I worried over the mess we were in. The longer I was around Merry, the more I wanted to get away from her. I wanted to take the kids to New York permanently. Being in this household did none of us any good. I wondered what Whip was thinking about.

Now, half an hour into the fourth session with Dr. Silberman, raised voices came through the door. Rather, Merry's voice came through. I didn't hear Dr. Silberman's. A couple of heavy thumps inside his office preceded Merry flinging the door open.

“You're a fucking quack.”

Merry tried to slam the door, but Dr. Silberman caught it. “Sit down, Merry. I want to talk with Mrs. Davies.”

That didn't bode well. I shot a look of pity at my daughter and went into the office. Dr. Silberman set a table back on its legs. A clock and box of tissues were on the floor.

“I have bad news, Mrs. Davies.”

Dr. Silberman sat behind his desk and steepled his fingers, looking exactly like Sigmund Freud. “Merry won't work with me. She's hostile and antagonistic, as well as delusional. She doesn't see anything wrong in her behavior.”

Merry maintained everything was normal at home. She was running the house, doing the errands, everything. She couldn't understand why I was still getting in her way. I should leave. She was very involved with her children's lives, until Dr. Silberman asked some questions. Then she flew into a rage. She denied feeling angry and said she was taking Ambien to help her sleep and Zoloft for depression. No, she wasn't taking any other drugs.

“Merry said you're interfering in her life, but when I asked if she wanted you to leave, she became agitated. That's when she overturned the table and stalked out.”

“Will it help if she sticks with therapy?”

“At this time? No. Merry's uncooperative. Until she asks for help, this is a waste of your money and my time.”

“Do you think she'll ever function normally?”

“I don't know.”

A door slammed on my hopes of going back home for good. “What if I left?”

“It would do irreparable harm. More, it would put the children in jeopardy. If you left, I think she'd spin completely out of control. Are you planning to return to New York?”

“I want to, but I can't abandon Alex and Em. Or Merry.”

Dr. Silberman rose and shook my hand. “I'm sorry.”

“Would it be possible to get her into a rehab center to get her off the drugs and booze?”

“It would have to be a voluntary commitment. She could check herself out.”

“Could Whip commit her?”

“Involuntarily? No. She's not a threat to herself or anyone else.”

Merry sat stiff and defiant, arms crossed under her breasts, when I returned to the waiting room. I walked past her and headed out to the car. We made the short ride home in strained silence. Merry took off upstairs; I took off for the patio.

I hadn't been in the kitchen more than ten minutes fixing lunch when I was subjected to a stealth waist hug. Emilie.

“What brought this on?”

“You're all pinky orange again.”

“That means exactly what?”

“You've decided to stay.”

“For a little longer.”

“No, you're going to stay.”

With that, Emilie squeezed me again and danced out of the room, spinning her way down the hallway toward the front door.

At least one of us was happy with the decision.

Twenty four hours after the debacle at Dr. Silberman's, Whip called to say he'd be home the next day. “I'm going to stop at the office on the way from the airport.”

“See you after you unwind. Be home for dinner.”

I knew the transition from a man's world on a construction site to domesticity could be disconcerting. When I came back from New York, I had to come down from a high of being with my friends. I was never certain what I'd find.

I was in the kitchen, deep in thought, when Whip appeared at my side. He leaned over and kissed my cheek. “Where's Merry?”

I wiped up a spill on the stove. “Upstairs. Napping.”

“She been out of the house by herself?”

I shook my head and rinsed the sponge.

“Still sleeping all the time?”

“Yes.”

Whip took the stairs two at a time, only to return within a few minutes, thunder in his eyes. “She's taking a shower and will be down for dinner.”

“She's been like this every afternoon since you left.”

“My fault. I shouldn't have gone.”

“You're right. You shouldn't have gone, but you did. Now, we have to deal with it. Merry's sinking deeper into booze and drugs every day.”

“Crap. Johnny and I tied one on last night in camp, but I don't get drunk as a daily habit. Got to get her sobered up. Just don't know how.”

“Me neither.” I'd told Whip about my bargain with Merry, shrink for a plastic surgeon, when he called home. I'd told him to think about committing her too. “Even though the shrink was a dismal failure, maybe a new surgeon will be the magic decoder ring.”

“Get on it in the morning.” Whip scrubbed his fists through his messed-up hair.

“Any thoughts about residential rehab?”

“Can't do it.”

“Can't or won't?” I thrust my jaw out. “What
can
you do?”

Dinner was strained. Merry had washed her hair and tried to look presentable but began drinking even before we sat down. Emilie picked at her food and answered in monosyllables; Alex wolfed his food like a starving peasant. I filled some of the silence with polite, if desultory, conversation. Merry drank. Whip looked mad and scared.

Whip called Dr. Rosenberg, Merry's first plastic surgeon, about her obsession over her looks and asked for a referral for a second opinion.

After much searching and getting nowhere, Dr. Rosenberg found a renowned plastic surgeon who accepted a one year teaching fellowship at Chaminade. That hospital wasn't as convenient as VCU, but it claimed this doctor's credentials were impeccable.

“Mr. Pugh, Dr. Hunter will see you now.”

Whip tossed aside a month-old copy of
National Geographic
, and we followed the nurse down a long corridor to a private office toward the back of the clinic. Whip had talked me into going with him to meet the surgeon. I'd agreed to stay through what I hoped would be the final stages of Merry's recovery: her facial reconstruction. If I was going to be responsible for transportation, I wanted to know what to expect.

“Dr. Hunter.”

“Mr. Pugh.” Dr. Andrew Hunter leaned over his desk to shake Whip's hand.

“And you are?”

“Mrs. Davies, Merry's mother.” I, too, shook the doctor's hand. It was soft and damp.

“I don't need you here.” Dr. Hunter sat behind his desk.

“I asked her.” Whip crossed his arms across his chest.

“Suit yourself.” Hunter held out his hand.

“I brought Merry's records.”

The doctor took the large manila envelope, which he set in the exact center of his empty desk. He leaned forward on his elbows.

The sterile office contained the requisite framed diplomas and board certifications, along with a color photograph of a racing sloop on a bookshelf. The photo was like the one you got when you bought a frame. Very professional. Very impersonal. Very not-the-doctor's boat. Nothing in the office reflected his personality. No family pictures. No awards. Just medical texts. Maybe he hadn't fully settled in. He'd just arrived, after all.

We were as nervous as the night Whip asked me for Merry's hand. We both wanted something: He wanted his wife; I wanted my daughter. If Merry would go through the pain, we'd go through the wait.

“Dr. Rosenberg said you're one of the best around. I sure hope so, because we need you to help Merry.”

“I
am
the best.”

Whip raised an eyebrow, but the doctor wasn't looking at him.

Dr. Hunter opened the thick envelope. He shoved the color photographs aside, jammed the X-rays up on light boxes, and peered at them through half-glasses. He nodded, shook his head, and muttered as he poured over each in turn.

“Hmm, her zygomaticomaxillary complex was pulverized, the eye socket fractured, her nose crushed. Look here. She hit the steering wheel with incredible force. She should have been wearing her seat belt.”

“How do you know she wasn't?”

“She wouldn't need me if she'd been buckled in. The air bag didn't deploy either.” The doctor peered over the tops of his glasses. “I can tell from her injuries.”

Dr. Hunter talked through the changes in the X-rays in turn. By the time he reached the end of the tour, I knew nearly as much about Merry's skull as the surgeon did. I wished I knew as much about what was going on inside her brain.

“Can you help?”

“Of course. Don't get me wrong. Rosenberg's a good technician and did a decent enough job putting the bones back together. I'm an artist. I can bring her back to what she was or where she should be. Rosenberg can't.”

Where she should be? She should be Merry.

Dr. Hunter turned to the stack of color photographs.

“Rosenberg did a better job than I thought. What a mess! Where's the ‘after’ shot? Okay, not bad, but too many scars and her left eye's still all wrong. Do you have a recent photo from before the wreck?”

Whip pointed to the family portrait from last Christmas.

Dr. Hunter stared at Merry's smiling face. “Funny, I thought she'd be blonde.”

After getting assurances Dr. Hunter could reconstruct Merry's face, we agreed to bring her in. We shook hands. Whip waited until he was in the corridor to wipe his hand on his pant leg.

“To quote Alex, yuck.” I wiped my hand too.

“I hate men with clammy handshakes. Something vaguely amphibian about them.”

When Whip told Merry about his consultation with the plastic surgeon, she wanted to go the next day, but Dr. Hunter had no openings for more than two weeks.

“Doesn't he know how important this is to me?” She ranted and raged to no effect.

“He's busy.”

On the appointed day, Whip and I took Merry to Chaminade.

We weren't going to have a repeat of the fiasco with the psychiatrist. Whip would decide what work Merry was going to have done, and I would drive her to her appointments. If Merry rejected Dr. Hunter, we had no backup. It was Hunter or nothing. Nothing wasn't an option.

Merry swallowed a couple of extra pills in the car to settle her nerves. Even so, she fidgeted in the waiting room until Whip snapped, “For God's sake, sit still. They'll call you when it's your turn.”

“How can he keep me waiting?” In spite of the drugs, Merry became edgier by the second.

“Mrs. Pugh, Dr. Hunter was delayed in surgery. He'll see you now.” The nurse led the way.

“About goddamned time,” Merry grumbled.

Dr. Hunter stood behind his desk and smiled. “Merry, may I call you Merry?”

He didn't wait for an answer. He didn't acknowledge Whip or me. We didn't exist.

“Sit down. I'll go over your medical history with you first. Then I'll examine your face to see how much work I have left to do.”

Dr. Hunter held up the Christmas photo and said it would be the baseline so he'd know where to start. He showed Merry a series of pictures taken in the hospital right after she arrived. She'd never seen them.

“That can't be me!” Her face looked like hamburger.

“You've come a long way, but you're not where you want to be yet. You agree, don't you?” Dr. Hunter smiled at Merry.

Whip growled. When I asked a couple of questions, they fell to the floor unanswered and were kicked aside under the doctor's desk.

“I asked Mr. Pugh if you wanted your old face back or a new and improved one.”

Merry sat in silence. Emotions flittered across her face.

When she didn't respond, Whip did. “We want Merry's left eye to look normal. Fix her nose. Refinish the surface of her skin to take away the scars. I'll be happy when you're back to where you were before the accident.”

Dr. Hunter frowned. “Will that be enough for you, Merry?”