I'll See You Again Part 9

Extreme stress does odd things to the mind.

I have no factual explanation for the temporary amnesia that kicked in right after the accident. Every time I woke up, I had forgotten what happened. More specifically, I didn't know that the accident had occurred or that my children weren't coming home.

One morning I got out of bed, stumbled out of my room, and found Jeannine sleeping in the hallway.

"Why are you here?" I asked, bewildered.

"I slept here," she said.

"Where are the girls?" I asked, looking around at their empty rooms.

"Jackie ..."

"Oh, that's right. The girls are on a camping trip." I felt slightly dazed. The girls would be home soon, right? Sure they would. This morning, maybe this afternoon. But why was Jeannine here? And if she needed to sleep over, why had she stayed on the floor outside my room?

In movies, amnesia is the basis for charming entertainment-like a perky Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates waking up in Hawaii each morning, unable to remember that Adam Sandler has been wooing her. My amnesia wasn't quite so endearing and n.o.body would sail off happily into the sunset at the end. Whenever I fell asleep, my brain reset, knocking me back to the Sunday morning of the accident. Whether I jerked awake from a midday nap or got up from a fitful night's sleep, I would wander around, asking for my daughters. Sometimes I drifted into the street, as if looking for them. I'd go to the kitchen and start making lunch for them or find treats to put in their backpacks. My unconscious apparently wanted to keep repeating the day until I got it right. But, unlike a character in a movie, I could never get it right. I couldn't alter the ending.

Did I know what had happened and just refused to believe it? Even in retrospect, I can't begin to explain the tricks my mind played. I wanted so deeply and desperately to change that day that my brain wouldn't hold on to the truth. My subconscious self simply refused to accept the reality.

My friends, including Jeannine, tried to drag me back to reality. They kept newspapers in the house from the day of the accident, which they showed me repeatedly. Since two people would usually sleep over each night-curled up on the couch or outside my bedroom door-my friends had written instructions, explaining what to do when I looked at them blankly and couldn't remember anything. They all came to understand that the story of what happened to Emma, Alyson, and Katie would get written on the blackboard of my mind, then erased just as fast.

One morning, about two weeks after the accident, my friend Tara was in the house when I woke up. Then eight months pregnant but still sleeping over to be there for me, she had braced herself for the ritual of nudging me into the present. As kindly as possible, she told me why the girls weren't there, and as usual, I remained slightly hazy. She patiently read me the newspaper account. I listened. She read it again. But I wasn't the only one listening. As she described the tragedy for the second time, Warren's frustration suddenly boiled over. Struggling with his own torment and grief, he found my denial, however subconscious, too much to bear.

"Enough!" he yelled. "I don't want to listen to this anymore!"

"Why are you yelling?" I asked him, bewildered.

"Jackie, snap out of it! The girls aren't here!" he shouted.

"What do you mean?"

"Jackie, there was an accident. You know that."

"What accident?" I gazed at him, my expression blank and uncomprehending.

"The girls are not here. The girls are dead!" Warren shouted.

"Why would you say something like that?" I asked, my voice trembling.

"Because it's true."

"How can you say that?"

"It's the truth, Jackie. Look at the paper. Read it again. They're dead." He threw the frayed newspaper on the table and slammed out of the room.

I'd like to say that his fury snapped me out of the amnesia. But it didn't. Trying to speak rationally to a person who has become thoroughly removed from reality does no good. For weeks, we continued the same dance.

Warren continued to suffer from my unhinged state, and so did my friends. "Imagine how horrible it is to tell your friend that her children have pa.s.sed," my dear friend Jeannine said months later, after I'd begun to comprehend what I'd put them through. "Now imagine how horrible it is to have to tell her that a hundred times."

I still feel guilty that I added to others' anguish, but the memory loss wasn't willful. Denial may be a survival mechanism that kicks in when events are more than we can bear, an evolutionary tic that guarantees we go on despite overwhelming circ.u.mstances. Doctors had also prescribed heavy drugs for me to help with depression, anxiety, and sleeplessness, and the combination of Xanax, Ambien, clonazepam, and a few others might have caused a chemical disconnect.

Warren didn't typically have to face my confusion in the morning because I regularly woke up before dawn, while he was still sleeping, to go running. For years, I had been part of a running group of five or six moms who met most mornings before the sun rose to exercise. We'd start texting each other at about 4:30 a.m.-who's in, who's out. "Was up all night with crying baby, so too tired to run," an apologetic text might read. Or "Count me in! Got some sleep." Those early-morning beeps on my phone made me smile and gave me a sense of belonging.

Once the group gathered, we'd take off for six miles, chatting and sharing stories all the way. A kaffeeklatsch on steroids, we ran fast and gossiped endlessly. Even with a stop at the local deli afterward for actual coffee, I'd be home by 6:15 a.m., heart beating and endorphins soaring. It had long been my favorite way to start a day.

I didn't plan to start running so quickly after the accident, but it seemed the most natural thing in the world. Friends and family packed our house for days after the funeral, but I was disoriented and had stopped eating. Wandering through our living room on Sunday night, I noticed my friend Bernadette. In her mid-thirties but with the looks and energy of a teenage rock star, Bernadette was one of the linchpins of the running group. She had married early and had four children, the two younger ones in the same grades as Alyson and Katie.

I knew the next day was Monday, but what did I do on Mondays now, in this post-accident world? What could connect me to the person I had been just a week ago?

I tapped Bernadette on the shoulder. "I'm going running tomorrow, right?" I asked her, completely out of the blue.

"Sure you are," Bernadette said without hesitation. She smiled at me, as if she'd never thought I'd do anything else. "But Jackie, if you're going to run, you have to eat."

I had no taste for food and couldn't imagine how I would ever swallow anything. A tightness perpetually clutched at my throat. Nothing tempted me, and I'd lost several pounds in the week since the accident. For some people, that might be good news, but I'd been slim to start with and didn't have a lot of reserves. Bernadette immediately made a new rule: If I wanted to go running, I had to gulp down three cans of Ensure. In coming weeks, that simple rule might have saved my life. It was the only thing that got me to ingest any calories at all.

My friends knew that I'd battled bulimia from the time I was a teenager. Trying to cure the condition, I'd met with specialists in eating disorders and tried various healthy eating regimens. I'd had individual counseling and gone to group therapy sessions. But combating the disorder was a difficult challenge, and finding a remedy proved elusive.

"If you know it's a problem, why don't you just stop?" Warren asked me once, when we were dating. However bewildered he felt, he remained supportive and had come over to New Jersey to drive me to a doctor's appointment.

"I don't know," I said. "It's not that easy." Why don't overweight people stop eating cookies? Why don't diabetics stay away from candy? I've heard about people who pay thousands of dollars for a week at a weight-loss spa, then sneak out at night for a pepperoni pizza. Our short-term impulse controls and long-term goals don't always match up.

The bulimia stopped during my pregnancies but kept coming back. I never let the girls know about the problem and hid from them when I threw up after binges. n.o.body has quite figured out what really causes bulimia, but it's generally understood that feelings of inadequacy definitely play a part. So does a desire to please people and keep your life under tight control.

After the accident, my subconscious must have finally accepted that however much I monitored what I ate, life would spiral in its own direction. I could never control what really mattered. In fact, trying to control anything now seemed pointless. The bulimia disappeared and never resurfaced.

Members of our running group usually drove to Bernadette's house in the early morning to start the run from there. But now they changed the plan to make it easier for me. I set my alarm for 4:30 a.m., and whichever friend had stayed over at our house groggily got up, helped me find running clothes, and walked me outside to the street corner. The group gathered there around me-and we took off.

Some mornings I kept pace with the group and joined the conversation. Other times I bolted ahead by myself, going so fast that n.o.body could keep up, as if I wanted to outrun my own pain, leave the past behind and go to a different, distant place.

When the worst has happened, how do you go on? Sometimes all you can do is put one foot in front of the other-quite literally. Running was a bit of normalcy I could hang on to when everything else had become tangled and twisted. I had run before the accident and now I was running again. Tying on sneakers and going into the cool morning air was something I had always done without the girls at my side, so, unlike most of my activities, it wasn't haunted by memories.

Coming home from the run at 6:15 a.m. used to be ideal. After getting the day off to an exhilarating start, I had plenty of time to wake the girls, make them breakfast, and pack their lunches.

Now I came home to unbearable silence.

The quiet in the house hit me like a sledgehammer every single morning, after every single run. Instead of excited chatter bouncing off the walls with my three girls dashing around getting ready for the day, I faced only silence. The noiselessness had an almost palpable presence-a looming, gloomy headstone marking all the words that weren't being uttered, the laughs not laughed, the footsteps not landing on the floor.

In the silent house, I looked at the clock and felt myself sinking even lower. What did I have to do all day? The hours ahead stretched endlessly. After the girls were born, I had quit my office job and become a full-time mom. I had worried about losing a bit of my ident.i.ty, but being a mother gave me a sense of purpose. Now, without my girls, I had no purpose, no reason for being.

As I floundered, Warren tried to stay strong, talking to lawyers and handling all the tangled legal and financial problems. I had always wanted him to go to church with us and now he was attending ma.s.s twice a day. I had wanted him to exercise and now he was running and riding his bike a lot. He walked the dog. One day he bounded into the kitchen where I was sitting and I looked up and felt that flush of adoration, like when we were first together.

How great to experience that again. But it didn't last long. With the girls ripped from me, my heart had been torn out-and how could I care about anyone if I had no heart? I couldn't say "I love you." If Warren tried to hug me, I stood there limply until the embrace ended. I had turned to cold stone, which probably isn't what any man wants in a wife.