At a loss, my mom forwarded the emails to Harris and cc’d me, asking him why he couldn’t just get out of their lives. He, of course, had a very simple explanation that completely evaded the issue: “I tried to get her attention and it worked too well and now we are here.” This was his explanation. He was just trying to “get her attention.” I mean, what the fuck.
Our correspondence continued like this for a while. I asked, “Can you just stop talking to her?” I reiterated that she and her entire family had been very clear that they didn’t want him in their lives for a dozen reasons.
My mom was more direct. “Stop contacting her in any manner. It sounds to me like their next step is to hire a lawyer to keep you away from her and that means lots of trouble for you. They cannot be any clearer about wanting you out of their lives. Please hear them! Enough Harris!”
Harris said this was like a movie where people were trying to trick him into being crazy and that it had all been blown way out of proportion. “If people are trying to make you sound crazy,” my mom asked, “why are you making it easy for them to think that about you?”
He couldn’t accept that he might be at fault, that he’d finally pushed it too far, and the game was over. It was a sobering moment for all of us. All of us except Harris.
• • •
Back in Houston, Mike and I bought a tiny, one-hundred-year-old bungalow in a charming neighborhood, right across the street from a big park that was always packed with children. It was all very picture-perfect. I continued to displace my anxiety about drug addiction and impending motherhood on an obsessive online search for the perfect nursery wallpaper. The internet is full of wallpaper, so the task was all-consuming for many weeks, and I welcomed the distraction. It was as if my subconscious decided that if I could just find the right wallpaper, everything would be okay.
Harris flew home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, as usual. We mainly overate and watched the stack of DVDs he’d been sent to screen before awards season. He was consumed with writing a pilot for NBC (that ultimately got rejected) about the relationship between this lovable, twenty-eight-year-old burnout who loves Phish and lives in his parents’ basement and his brilliant fourteen-year-old brother who invented and made millions off Cone Tips, the chocolatey bottom of a Drumstick ice-cream cone, which was one of Harris’s favorite things to eat since childhood. He was notably stressed, low-grade grumpy, and furiously finger-pecking away on his laptop around the clock.
From the time he told me he had a problem with pills in March 2013 to the time he checked into rehab for the first time in February 2014, there was so much going on in my life that it was hard to fully comprehend what was happening in his. In the span of one year, I had gotten engaged, married, and pregnant. I changed my legal identity from Wittels to Wachs. We bought and moved into our first home. I had a doctor’s appointment at least once a week. I had to put together a baby registry. And what I knew—what I believed—was that Harris was busy with work, in therapy, and trying to stay sober.
08 Two Months
Visiting the cemetery isn’t a natural urge, but the day before your birthday I force myself to go. It’s the first time I’ve been here since the funeral. It’s also April 19, the two-month anniversary of your death. The grass hasn’t even taken root. With tear-streaked cheeks I sit there for a while, in front of your temporary gravesite marker, then walk around to meet your neighbors. I’m particularly drawn to the ones who died young. The tragedies. I come back and sit a while longer but soon become weirded out by all the roly polies crawling around in the grass. There are just so many. It’s like that scene in Lost Boys with the maggots in the Chinese food. You loved that movie. I wonder how you feel about roly polies.
For the duration of my life, I will wonder how you feel about all sorts of things.
Like:
Doesn’t Bob Durst remind you of Dad a little bit?
Do you think the guy from The Staircase killed his wife?
Did you ever make that pasta dish that Jon Favreau made Scarlett Johansson in Chef? The recipe was listed online.
How fucked-up is it that they didn’t just choose one Bachelorette? Bullshit.
What does that guy on Facebook that we both know do for work? Like, how does he live in the world?
Do you think when people say they will pray for you that they actually pray for you or is it just a figure of speech?
Before taking off, I play you all of Iris’s latest videos.
Like the one of her wiping her own nose on command.
And the one of her chasing the dog around the house naked.
And the one of her listening to a record for the first time: George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass.
I would be lying right here beside you by now if it weren’t for her.
09 Before
January 2014
On January 21, 2014, at 12:17 p.m., I gave birth to a magical creature from the Universe of All of My Hopes and Dreams. A daughter: Iris Phoebe. I felt a tugging and a pulling and then the relief of that piercing cry as the doctor raised her high above the blue C-section curtain like Simba from The Lion King. “The Circle of Life” could have underscored the entire scene. It was the closest I’d ever come to some sort of spiritual nirvana. A catharsis. Mike gasped loudly and exploded into tears
