Darlene Eaves would end up testifying three times, in spite of MEG agents’ predictions that chances of trials were slim. Each time she was subpoenaed over the course of three years, she’d call Ryan, wringing her voice like a rag over the kitchen sink. “This is getting ridiculous,” she’d say. “I feel like the state owns me. When will it stop?” With blue eye shadow and dusty-rose lipstick applied thick, as if she’d emerged from the 1980s, Eaves was otherwise an innocuous woman, a smoker and a drinker, a truck-stop waitress type, but not a serious addict. She appeared to have gotten her life together enough, calling Ryan for advice on mundane legal issues such as landlord-tenant disputes and personal injury casework. But she also worried about testifying in front of an audience. The deal was not worth dying for.
In childhood, I’d often dream of death. I’d wake from nightmares, traverse the empty hallway to my parents’ room, where I’d wake my dad. We’d walk together in the dark toward the kitchen cupboard, from which my dad would produce Children’s Triaminic Syrup—the “orange medicine.” Twisting open the childproof cap, he’d pour a generous dose into a cereal spoon perfectly sized for my mouth, opened wide like a baby bird’s beak. The sticky goodness of antihistamines would lull me drowsy enough to sleep in my own bed, where I’d crash hard and dream I could fly.
I would never raise lonely or anxious children, or so I believed, but I worried I was raising instead a generation of addicts. Every time I got my oxy fix, my babies did too. Nursing on demand, they’d go slack in my arms. Inhale: their eyes opened. Exhale: their irises rolled back under the steady pump of their eyelashes. Other mothers said, “My baby just quit one day, cold turkey.” Mine pleaded for milk. They’d unhook zippers and buttons, break sewing thread, unknot scarves like magicians, pulling my nipple from my clothing like a coin from behind the ear. Weaning was never easy for us.
I could blame only myself. I’d soothed every child’s fuss with a shot of milk. We co-slept and co-bathed, starting with Irie, my nipple in her mouth like a stent or an IV needle, a second umbilical cord that kept us connected. She was perfectly Gerber Baby–plump. But into her late elementary and tween years, she remained so, eating voraciously, third and fourth helpings, tranquilized only by the ability to suckle and nosh. A bowl of sherbet or a smoothie doused in whipped cream melted in her mouth like the hush-hush cadence of our breastfeeding. Perhaps Mama McNally and I passed on to our children the same intolerance for discomfort and pain.
From early on, mixed messages cross-wired inside my brain. My midwife encouraged on-demand feeding, but family members said I overindulged. “Crying is good for babies,” or so they’d say, but mine preferred the pistil of my skin to a pacifier or lungs full of air. Spare the NUK, spoil the child. Worse yet: lay a foundation for lifelong cravings. My babies rarely cried longer than ten seconds—the time it took me to produce my breast. I wondered what kinds of formidable pleasure-seekers I’d created. Leo and Fern were fiends for chocolate, and one summer at Bay Beach Amusement Park, when Irie spilled ice cream, she sobbed until her ears blushed, as if she needed the fix. We soothed her with the promise of an extra ticket for the Zippin Pippin. “I just love to eat, Mom,” she’d say. “I can’t help it.”
One of Ryan’s newest clients at this time was a mother with no previous criminal record, charged with smuggling marijuana to her son in prison. I could relate. I probably would do anything to make my daughter happy, at the risk of overindulgence. “All these moms are enablers,” Ryan would chide, and I wondered, sometimes, if he meant me too, mothers being the trees from which any bad apple falls.
I recall fondly my own father’s medicine closet, which housed free trials, boxed up and shipped to their private practice, Mental Health Consultants, thanks to the marketing efforts of pharmaceutical companies. My dad stockpiled medicine against the nuclear threat of depression and despair. I sought solace by opening the medicine closet and sniffing the nest egg of tonics and cures. It smelled of licorice, aspirin powder, and spirit tinctures. The room was cool and dry, and I liked to hide there, basking in the pleasure of aromatic content. I never took any.
Depression at our house was governed by a godlike force. Although we shared genetics, my full brother, Christopher, became more truly and wholly possessed by what the poet Jane Kenyon calls the “unholy ghost.” In high school, the counselor pulled me from Spanish class and drove me home because of rumors my brother was plotting a carbon monoxide suicide. Maybe she believed we could save him. Shortly thereafter he overdosed on a cocktail of prescription meds and ended up in the psychiatric ward at St. Elizabeth Hospital. Doctors healed him temporarily.
Just as I entered graduate school, my third in a line of therapists diagnosed my mental illness—what I perceived to be general purposelessness—as bipolar II disorder. At my lowest, I’d be ravaged by night terrors. From the time we married in 2001 until my first pregnancy, starting in 2003, I’d wake to the sensation of tarantulas crawling up my neck or bats catching in my hair—dozens of dreams about nocturnal creatures. I’d claw and scream for upward of sixty seconds, once even breaking my pajama straps like some pathetic version of the Incredible Hulk.
After two troubled years in my fine arts program, bored of my mood stabilizer, depression workbook assignments, and weekly visits to a phlebotomist to test my valproic acid levels, I healed myself by getting pregnant instead. With children, sleep became a dream. I floated downstream on a human-size leaf. But if I couldn’t endlessly gestate, then what was plan B? I was
