Best Kept Secret: A Novel

The emergency room at the University of Washington Hospital was a surprisingly busy place the late-January night I won the stare-down with that bottle of pills. It took almost an hour for a nurse to get to us, and when she finally did, Jess ended up answering most of her questions. It had been several hours since I’d taken a drink, but I was still pretty looped. The nurse gave me a dose of something called Librium, which she told Jess would help calm my anxiety. I told her I was pretty confident I’d need more than a single dose.

“Someone will be here to take her up to the fourth floor soon,” the nurse said, ignoring my comment. “You can wait with her here, but you can’t go upstairs.”

“They’re coming to take me away, ha ha,” I murmured. “To the funny farm, where life is beautiful all the time . . .”

“Shh,” Jess said. She pushed my hair back from my face. Her blue eyes shone. When she blinked, a plump, perfectly formed tear rolled down her cheek. As the intern arrived to wheel me to the psych ward, Jess cupped my face in her hands and kissed my forehead. “Please, Cadence. Please. Get better.”

“Okay,” I said, closing my eyes. I didn’t know how that was possible. My drinking was out of control. Martin took Charlie. Sorrow spiraled into my bones like a thousand tiny metal screws. It was agonizing. Any movement made me want to cry out. Save me, please. Please, please, make this pain go away.

Once upstairs, I lay on the gurney in a hallway because the room they said was open was still being cleaned after the last patient had used it. What happened to that patient? I wondered. Did she get well? Do crazy people suddenly become sane? Am I crazy?

A tall, adolescent-looking doctor came to stand next to me, a clipboard in hand. “Hello, Cadence. I’m Dr. Wright.”

“You barely look old enough to drink,” I said. Though I had begun to sober up, I was still rummy and slurring my words. “Are you sure you’re a doctor?”

“I’m a third-year psychiatric resident. So yes, I’m a doctor. I’m going to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right with you.”

“Fine.” I felt deflated. Empty. My entire body was numb. Who cares if this man was a child. What difference does it make? It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Charlie is gone.

“Okay, great. Can you tell me why you’re here?”

“I drank too much.”

“What’s ‘too much’?”

“A couple of bottles of wine a day.”

“How long have you been drinking that heavily?”

“Heavily?” I felt vaguely stupid for repeating the word, but my thoughts were clouded. I was having a difficult time getting my brain to function the way I wanted it to. “About a year, I think.”

“And before that? How much did you drink?”

I sighed. “I’m not sure. It sort of snuck up on me.”

“Snuck up?”

“Well, yes. It’s not like I sat down one night and decided that downing two bottles of wine was a brilliant idea.”

The corners of his mouth turned up the slightest bit, as though he wasn’t sure if it was proper etiquette to find a psychiatric patient’s sarcasm amusing. “Why don’t you tell me how it started, then?”

I rolled my head to the side and stared at the wall. It wasn’t hard to remember the beginning, when sipping a glass of wine seemed an innocent enough thing to do.

“It was about two years ago,” I told the doctor, closing my eyes. “Right after my husband moved out. I couldn’t sleep. A friend of mine suggested that a glass of red wine before bed would help relax me.” I pictured those words escaping Susanne’s red lips. “She said it was good for my heart, too.”

“I see,” Dr. Wright said. “When did it develop into more than a single glass?”

“I don’t really know.”

“So, let me get this straight,” he said. “You’ve been drinking heavily on a daily basis for two years, then, not one?”

“No.” I sighed again. I didn’t want to talk anymore, but felt compelled to make sure I didn’t come off sounding like a bigger lush than I appeared. “I wasn’t drinking every day until the last year or so. But it all started two years ago with a couple of glasses a week. Only when I couldn’t sleep.”

I tried to pinpoint the moment I crossed over from wanting a drink to needing one, but couldn’t come up with it. My descent was more of a gradual, subtle spiral. I didn’t even feel myself falling while it happened. At first, one glass was all it took. One drink shaved just enough of the edge off my tension for me to function. When one stopped working, I’d pour just a splash or two more, until one glass turned into two. Then three. By the time I realized how bad it was, I couldn’t stop. How could I explain to this doctor what led me to this point when I barely understood it myself?

“Why do you think you drink?” he asked.

That’s the million-dollar question, I wanted to say. If I knew why, I wouldn’t be here.

“I don’t know,” I said instead. “I can’t stop. I wake up every morning and tell myself I won’t drink. And then I do. Something is wrong with me.” I’m nuts. That’s what’s wrong. I’m completely out of my mind. My grandmother was crazy, and so am I. Tears seeped out of the corners of my eyes and trickled into my ears. I didn’t bother to wipe them away.

“Is alcohol all you had tonight? Did you take anything else?”

I shook my head. I heard him scribbling. Jess already told the nurse in the emergency room about the bottle of pills, so I’m sure Dr. Doogie already knew. “I thought about it, though.”

“Thought about what?”

“Taking pills.”

“What kind?”

“The kind I wouldn’t wake up from.”

More scribbling. “Is there any chance you might be pregnant?”

“None.”

“What about sexually transmitted diseases? Have you engaged in unsafe sex practices?”

God. How humiliating. I already feel like I’ve been put through a meat grinder. What’s next, a pap smear? This child doctor has probably seen fewer vaginas than me.

“I haven’t engaged in any kind of sex practices.” I couldn’t remember the last time Martin and I made love before the divorce. The thought of getting to know another man well enough to let him see me naked was too exhausting to fathom. For the most part, my body seemed to have forgotten what desire felt like.

“We’ll run some tests on the blood samples you gave downstairs, just in case.”

“Okay.” I didn’t care. Whatever. Let him think I’m a drunk slut. In his mind, the two probably go hand in hand.

“Do you still want to harm yourself ?” he asked.

My throat swelled at the kindness in his voice, but still, he didn’t get it. I felt no real desire for death. No part of me said, Now suicide, there’s a good idea. I longed only for an absence of anguish, an end to self-loathing. Death seemed the only viable method of reaching this goal. At that point, it seemed reasonable. I only wanted the pain to end. Just stop, most people would say. You hate drinking. Just make the decision and stop. If it were that easy, I would have done it.

“No, I don’t want to hurt myself,” I told him. “But can you fix me?”

He gave me an accommodating smile. “Let’s help you fix yourself. “ He fed me a pill he said would help me sleep. I swallowed it greedily. Anything for oblivion.

The next day, I woke up more hungover than usual. It took me a minute or two to realize where I was.

Oh, right.

Wine, pills, hospital.

Charlie.

Gone.

Each word was a sledgehammer to my chest. I felt disoriented from the medication they had given me in the middle of the night, which I vaguely remembered the nurse telling me would prevent a heart attack or convulsions due to alcohol withdrawal. I rolled out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. I didn’t recognize the person in the mirror. My hair was a rat’s nest. I was swollen and disheveled. My eyes were empty.

“This is not me,” I whispered again, as I had in Jess’s car. “This is not who I am.” Who was I, then? If not Martin’s wife or Charlie’s mother? Was there anything left about me worth saving?

I began to sob, a kind of heart-racking, body-bending hysterics I’d rarely given in to before. I cried for my son, for what I’d put him through. I cried for myself, for being so inept that I couldn’t get myself to stop drinking. I was an idiot—a weak, immoral creature. I wept for the humiliation of getting caught. How can I face this? How can I function in a world where I allowed this to happen? What will people say? How will I survive it? What kind of person am I?

And then, the two-by-four to my head: What have I done to my son?

At this point a nurse came into my room and told me breakfast was being served down the hall. After a few more shuddering breaths, I clamped the sobs down as best I could, wiped my eyes with a tissue, and splashed cold water on my face. I didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t hungry but I went anyway. I moved as though someone had poured cement into every cell of my body. I went through the rote motions of putting on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt Jess had packed, brushing my teeth, and stepping into the hall. Other patients moved with the same laborious effort I felt. There were about ten of us and we sat at rectangular tables in a small cafeteria, not speaking. I stared at the dry lump of scrambled eggs and limp, greasy bacon in front of me. My stomach was tied in too many knots to eat. I sipped at a cup of pale coffee. It tasted like watered-down dirt. I drank it anyway.

“You new?” a woman sitting across from me finally asked. Her hair was stringy and gray, matted flat on one side of her head.

I nodded.

“You a drunk?”

I flashed her a strange look and gave my head a quick shake. She smiled, showing me a crooked row of yellowed teeth. “Ha. Takes one to know one.”

I shuddered inside, my stomach clenching even tighter in on itself. I am not her. I am not her.

After breakfast I moved into another room, where other patients sat staring at an older console television which didn’t appear to be on. I sat in a corner by the windows at a table strewn with stacks of paper. Upon further investigation, I realized they were all photocopied pages from artistic coloring books. Not Scooby-Doo or Strawberry Shortcake, but rather intricate prints of animals and other scenes from nature. A mountain backdropped by a thin-striped sunset, a lionfish etched with a wild zigzag pattern. I selected a drawing of a leopard, picked up a colored pencil, and began to fill in the spots. I placed all my focus on the pencil to the page. I didn’t look up when another person sat down and tried to talk to me. I couldn’t respond. I was busy coloring. I filled in each exquisitely tiny space of the leopard, shading each detail as delicately as possible. When I was done with that picture, I picked up another. And then another when I was done with that. As long as I was coloring, I didn’t think about anything else.

I couldn’t allow myself to think about Charlie for more than half a breath. The hurt was too great, the guilt too debilitating. My heart, my brain, my body couldn’t process it. I tried not to think about what he was feeling. It was too much to endure, imagining him crying for me, wanting to know where I was. I considered calling him, but the simple thought of his sweet voice in my ear brought on another onslaught of uncontrollable tears. I wouldn’t be able to hold it together while I talked to him. I didn’t want to scare him with my hysteria. I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t getting well.

Moment by moment, I lost myself in the pressure of the pencil on the paper and the careful selection of which shade would best suit the picture I had in front of me. Then the thought of him would come again—Charlie, gone— and my heart instantly shattered. There is a place beyond grief, a place where pain hardens into paralysis. This was where I dwelled.

When I finished with the fifth picture several hours later, I sat back. This is what I’ve been reduced to, I thought. A nut job on a psych ward, coloring away like a child. Like my life depended on it.

Maybe it did.

I didn’t go to lunch, but when the nurse came to get me, she insisted I follow her to the head psychiatrist’s office. “He’s expecting you,” she said.

I entered a small, windowless room where the doctor was waiting. He was older, white-haired, and solid. He reminded me of Marcus Welby, M.D. After my encounter with the child doctor from the night before, I found his appearance comforting.

“Hello, Cadence,” he said. “I’m Dr. Fisher. Please, have a seat.”

I did as he asked, dropping into the hard, plastic chair on the opposite side of his desk. I wrapped my arms tightly across my upper body, rubbing my hands up and down the outside of my biceps.

“I understand you had a rough night.”

I shrugged. I was still numb. I still felt like I didn’t have the right to breathe. I stared at the floor.

“We’re here to help you, Cadence. We have you on medications that will keep your alcohol withdrawal to a minimum. It can be very dangerous. Much of the reason you felt compelled to drink was physical. The craving was like an ache, wasn’t it? A deep, burning ache?”

I dropped my arms to hang loose at my sides and slowly raised my eyes to look at him. “Yes. In the last six months or so, especially. When I tried to stop, my heart felt like it would explode right out of my chest. It was like my body would break wide open or turn inside out if I didn’t give it what it wanted.”

He nodded. “It was good that you did, then, to some extent. At least last night. People go into cardiac arrest from withdrawal every day. We’ll help you get through the physical part of things safely. Then we can figure out the right treatment recommendations for you outside of the hospital.”

“What kind of treatment?”

“For alcoholism.”

It was the first time someone used that word in reference to me. I didn’t feel up to arguing with him. I didn’t feel up to anything. I felt as though the real me was floating near the ceiling, watching this strange conversation unfold. Like all of this was happening to another person.

“I can’t just get what I need here?” I inquired.

He smiled and pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “You won’t be here more than a couple of weeks for detox. We just get you stabilized. Treatment requires more time than that.”

“How much time?” My voice was flat. I had no strength to fight him.

“In-patient programs are typically twenty-eight days. I’m going to recommend that for you.” He glanced at a file lying in front of him on his desk. “I’m also going to put you on an antidepressant regimen.”

“Why?”

“Because depression and alcoholism go hand in hand. People drink too much as a way to medicate their emotional pain. Some people overspend, some people smoke or eat or work seventy hours a week. You drank. Different behaviors, the same compulsion.” He gave me a kind smile. “People who drink just have a harder time hiding the results.”

His answer struck me mute. It was as though I was no longer human, but instead a mass of diagnostic labels: suicidal, depressive, alcoholic. I’d only ever been labeled as driven, goal-oriented, or successful. The discordance between these two descriptions was far too broad to comprehend them as both being part of who I was. It made me feel crazier than I suspected I already was.

“In the meantime,” he went on, “you’ll follow the daily routine here. You’ll rest, and let your body start to heal.”

What about my heart? I wanted to ask. Can you heal that, too?

“You also should call CPS,” he said.

“CPS?” I repeated dumbly.

“Child Protective Services.”

“I know what it is, I just don’t know why you think I need to call them.” My stomach threatened to heave its bitter liquid contents.

He paused to flip through what I assumed was my file, running the tip of his index finger up and down the pages until he found what he was looking for. “Ah, here it is. You told the intake physician that you left Charlie alone in the house one night to go purchase more alcohol?”

I’d said that out loud? I didn’t remember the words leaving my mouth. I nodded once, tightly pressing my lips together to keep from crying.

“That’s something we’re required to report. But I think you should do it.”

I shook my head in a brisk motion. “I can’t.”

He leaned forward and set the file down, resting his forearms on his desk. “You can. And you should. It’s better if you self-report.”

“Better how?” I couldn’t fathom making this call. I couldn’t fathom that any of this was happening at all.

“In case anything legal comes up, your calling is taking responsibility for the action.”

“What do you mean, legal?” I asked, my blood pressure rising.

“Let’s not worry about that now.” He reached for the phone on his desk and punched in a number before handing me the receiver. “Here, I’ll sit with you while you do it, okay?”

I put the phone to my ear and waited for someone to answer. When the operator directed me to the right department, I held the receiver back toward the doctor. “I can’t do this.”

He nodded and gently pushed the phone back at me. “Yes, you can.”

I took a deep breath and spoke to the voice saying “Hello? Can I help you?” on the other end of the line.

“My name is Cadence Sutter,” I began shakily, “and I need to . . . I want to let you know . . .” I looked at the doctor and he nodded encouragingly.

“You want to let me know what?” the man on the other end of the phone asked.

“I left my son alone in our house in the middle of the night so I could go buy wine.” The words came out in a rush, tripping over one another.

“And how old is your son?”

I squeezed my eyes shut and a few tears made their way down my cheeks. “He’s five.” A sob tore at my chest. “Oh God, he’s only five.”

The caseworker took down the details of the night I left Charlie and I cried while he told me the incident would become a part of my permanent record.

I stumbled my way numbly through the next week. I talked to as few people as possible, choosing instead to sit alone at the table in what I learned was called the community room. I colored through my days. I spoke when spoken to, answered Dr. Fisher’s questions in low, monosyllabic phrases. I took the pills the nurses gave me. The pills made me sleepy, so I slept. A lot. It was the easiest way to pass the days. Every time I woke, I slowly rose into the consciousness of where I was and what I’d done. It instantly felt like a huge boulder was sitting on my chest.

Wine, pills, hospital.

Charlie.

Gone.

When I thought about my son, my breathing became shallow and sharp. My insides hemorrhaged despair—it oozed through my body like hot, black tar. I found escape from this thought only through coloring, the focus on the pencil to the page. It was the only thing I could do.

“Your son will love these,” a nurse said one afternoon as she looked over my shoulder at the picture I was working on.

My throat suddenly closed and my eyes blurred. I shook my head. I wasn’t coloring these for him. I could barely allow myself to even think about him. I couldn’t. It hurt too much. I knew he was okay; he was with his father. Still, anxiety swarmed through my flesh like a regiment of fire ants. I would have done anything to exterminate how I felt.

Another patient chose that moment to snap the television on in the other corner of the room. Clifford the Big Red Dog flashed onto the screen. The sight of the cartoon Charlie loved was too much for me. The sobs took over again.

This is how my time in the hospital was spent. Coloring and crying. Crying and coloring. Besides sleeping, it was all I could do. I lost track of what day it was. I didn’t care. I hurt my son. I lost him. Nothing mattered but getting out of here and making everything right.

During my second week in the hospital, I finally brought myself to turn on my cell phone and check for messages. There were two from Jess, the first seeing how I was and the second to let me know that she had spoken to Charlie and he was doing fine with Martin. He missed me, but understood I was “sick” and in the hospital so the doctors could help me get well. The third was from a number I didn’t recognize. As soon as I heard the voice, though, I knew who it was: Martin’s divorce lawyer.

“Cadence? It’s Steven O’Reilly. Martin tells me he has some serious concerns about your ability to take care of Charlie. He told me you’ve been drinking and things got bad enough that he had to come remove Charlie from your home.”

My pulse began to ricochet through my veins. Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God.

“Martin has spoken to Child Protective Services and they’ve informed him you’re on record putting Charlie’s life in danger. He’s filing for full custody and I’ve submitted the necessary paperwork to grant Martin temporary guardianship while you’re incarcerated in the hospital. I certainly hope what Martin told me about what you’ve been doing is wrong, but if it’s not, you’re going to want to contact a lawyer at your earliest convenience.”

“No!” I howled. I threw the phone across the room and it smashed against the wall. I grabbed the sides of my face with my fingers. My nails raked my skin as I dropped to my knees on the cold linoleum. The pain I felt was bigger than my body, bigger than the entire room. It pressed down on me and threatened to smother my every breath. A nurse rushed into my room.

“What is it, Cadence?” she asked, trying to wrap her arm around my shoulder.

I jerked away from her touch and fell to the floor, shrieking, “No!” over and over again. He can’t take Charlie. I won’t let him. I’ll die first. My body longed to shed its skin and move on to being another person altogether. A person who didn’t get drunk in front of her son.

The nurse pressed the red button by the side of my bed and a moment later, there was a rush of bodies around me and I felt myself lifted by strong arms into my bed. Next came the sharp sting of a needle in my arm. It took less than a minute for the drug to take effect, and I drifted off into restless sleep, only to wake a few hours later to cry again. What have I done? What have I done? This phrase played over and over in my mind. Martin took Charlie. I’ve lost my child and I’m not going to get him back.

I sunk down into that hospital bed and stayed there for two days, pinned down by agony. I wept. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t deserve to have Charlie as my son. Not with what I’d done. Nurses checked on me every few hours and gave me the pills they said I needed to keep taking. I swallowed them, knowing they would let me sleep, the only kind of escape I had left. The nurses tried to lull me out of bed with promises of relief to be found in group therapy, yoga, and meditative walks. I shook my head and refused to budge. Finally, Dr. Fisher sat on the edge of my bed and set a warm hand on my shoulder.

“Cadence. You need to get up.”

“No.”

“If you don’t get up for you, get up for Charlie.”

I started to sob again at the sound of my son’s name. Picturing his face brought on a tangible sensation of razor blades sliding across my skin. “I can’t believe what I’ve done,” I cried. “How did I let things get this bad?”

He moved his hand up and down my arm in a soothing motion. “I know it’s hard. But if you don’t get out of bed, what are you going to teach your son?”

“My ex-husband took him,” I said, sobbing. “He’s not even mine anymore.”

“Of course he’s yours.”

I shook my head into the pillow. He didn’t know. How could he know? Had someone taken his son away? “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to do this anymore. I can’t. I just can’t. It hurts too much.”

“I know it hurts. But if you give up, if you decide to kill yourself, Charlie won’t have a mother at all. Not even a part-time one.”

I paused, my tears finally slowing. Dr. Fisher squatted down next to me, his next words whispered right into my ear.

“Do you know what else might happen to him?”

I shook my head, rubbing my wet face into the pillow, knowing I did not want to hear what he might have to say.

“It’s possible he’ll kill himself, too. Studies have shown us that a child whose parent commits suicide is twice as likely to commit suicide themselves. Do you want that, Cadence? Do you want Charlie to someday swallow pills or shoot himself in the head because you couldn’t find a way to step up and face your problems? Is this what you want to teach him to do when he can’t handle his?”

For the first time in two days, I made eye contact with another person. Dr. Fisher had a sweet, round face; his eyes were gentle. I must have looked like a train wreck.

“Is that true?” I asked.

He nodded.

I got out of bed.