Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [31]
“I forbid you to tell anyone about this.”
I was taken aback. Forbid? We had been married for twenty-five years. Never once had I heard him utter a word like that. Forbid?
“If we let people know about this, no one will ever let her forget it,” he said. “It will put a terrible stigma on her. When she gets out, she will have to put this behind her. It will be impossible if people know where she has been.”
“But, Marvin, they said …” The people in the hospital had been hinting that Lori was sicker even than we knew.
“I don't care what they said.”
“How are we going to keep a secret like that? She may be in here for a while.” In truth, neither of us knew how long she'd be there.
“I thought of that. From now on, the story is that Lori has gone back to Boston to study. It's a logical thing to have happen.”
It didn't make any sense to me. “We still have her apartment. Her roommate knows …”
He wouldn't budge.
“I can't keep this inside. You know I'm no good at keeping secrets. I have to talk about it with someone. I need to talk.”
“We'll talk about it together,” he said.
And that was that.
The deception made everything ten times worse for me. I needed to talk, to vent, to get sympathy and support from my friends. Instead, I could confide in no one. What was worse, I was lying to them. I hated lying to my friends. I hated pretending everything was all right when it wasn't.
I began to see how marriages could break up. The strain was more than we had ever experienced. We were still friends. We still enjoyed each other's company. But our traditional roles were jarred. I had always been the wife and mother. He was the breadwinner. He was precise and methodical, the kind of man a family could lean on.
But this was different.
One evening leaving the hospital, we held hands and looked at each other.
“Is everything going to be all right?” I asked.
“I don't know,” he said.
It was a terrible moment. I had never heard him say “I don't know” before. He had always been so positive and take-charge. He always thought everything was going to come out all right. I had never heard him express any doubt. How could he say he didn't know? I needed him to know.
For all those years I had depended on Marvin. Now, suddenly he was helpless. Helpless in the face of something dreadful happening to the little girl he adored. Helpless in the face of something he couldn't manipulate. He couldn't buy it. He couldn't pull strings and make it go away. He couldn't make it all better.
Lori's illness was something over which he had no power. He felt impotent. And so he did everything he could to deny what was happening. He made up ridiculous stories. He threw himself even more into his work.
I never thought he was making up excuses to travel away from home. Traveling was part of every management consultant's job. And as one of the senior people, he was forever having to spend days and nights at the firm's head office in Chicago. Still, I was brutally angry with him for going away and leaving me alone. “You're never here when I need you,” I thought. It was unfair of me, I realized, but I thought it all the same. I couldn't help myself. When I returned to an empty house at night after visiting Lori, it was the loneliest I had ever been. Marvin called every night, and we talked. Even though he was tired, and had worked a long day, we talked as long as I needed to. He was very loving and caring, but he was seven hundred fifty miles away, and I was alone.
When he came home, we talked endlessly. He blamed himself, and I didn't argue.
I was thinking the same thing. He had been too demanding. He had been too hard on her. While she was growing up, he had been away from home too much. He had been insensitive to her needs. When she had been under pressure, wanted to switch schools, why hadn't he let her?
Through long, sleepless nights, he tortured himself. “It's all my fault,” he said.
And I didn't say no.
Unlike Marvin, though, I didn't blame myself.
I thought I was a wonderful mother. I was working now, and doing