Sunday 9/26/99

Marlys came to church with me this morning. First time since before Christmas. She wore the blue dress and sat on the aisle so she could get out if she needed to, and she didn't need to. Joanne saw her from across the room and cried right through the first hymn. Pastor Lund shook her hand at the door and didn't make a thing of it. Good man.

Tonight we sat out back after supper, the two lawn chairs, iced tea, first evening all summer it's been under a hundred. A light went over, slow, steady, no blink. She pointed. "Satellite," she said. I said, "Yep." Then a jet from Luke, blinking. "Jet," she said.

After a while she said, "I still know what happened to me, Frank. The medicine doesn't change that." I said I know you do. I said I still don't know what happened to you, and I don't think I ever will, and I'm still here. She said, "I know you are." We sat there till the mosquitoes came.

That's where we are. I don't know if it's an ending. I don't think this kind of thing has one.

The counter says over seventeen thousand of you have been by. Most of you were looking for something else. Thank you for staying anyway.

Friday 9/24/99

NASA lost the Mars spaceship yesterday, the new one, right when it got there. They don't know why yet. Two years ago Marlys would have had something to say about that. Something up there not wanting to be looked at. This time she saw it on the news and said, "Oh, that's a shame, all those people's work," and went on folding towels.

I don't know if that's the medicine, or the counseling, or just that she's tired. I'm not going to take it apart to see how it works. My father used to say, if it runs, don't open it up on a Friday.

Here's the real news. This afternoon she was out in the backyard in the daytime, in her garden gloves and my old straw hat, putting lettuce and chard and radishes in the raised bed, the way she does every fall. She hasn't planted a fall garden since 1996. I watched her from the kitchen window for a long time and she never once looked up.

Saturday 9/18/99

Tuesday she went back to her group in Mesa for the first time since Sedona. I drove, like always. This time I didn't wait in the truck. Norma waved me in from the porch.

Marlys told them about the doctor and the pills and the counselor. She said it right out. I held my breath. One fellow, new, I didn't know him, said that's how they get you, they drug you so you forget. It got quiet. Then the trucker, the one with the big arms, said very softly, "I've been on something for my nerves since 1994, and I haven't forgot a thing." And the young mother said, "Me too." And Norma got up from her chair and went over and hugged Marlys for a long time.

On the way home Marlys said, "I thought they'd think I quit." I said you didn't quit anything. You went to the doctor. She said, "Well. Don't get used to being right."

Sunday 9/12/99

Two and a half weeks on the medicine. Dr. Hale says it can take four to six to really tell. So far it's made her a little queasy in the mornings, and tired in the afternoons. She takes it with toast. I bought a lot of bread.

Friday night she slept six hours without waking up. I know because I didn't sleep, I lay there counting. I don't know if it's the pill. It's too early, the doctor says. I'll take it either way.

I got some e-mail this month I want to answer here, once. A couple of you wrote to say I'm helping "them" cover it up by letting my wife be put on drugs. I read every word. Here's my answer. My wife was in bed with the curtains shut for eight months. She stopped seeing her friends. She stopped holding our granddaughter. Whatever happened in 1997, that part was happening in 1999, in my house, and it has a name, and it can be treated. I'm not covering anything up. I'm opening the curtains.

Sunday 9/5/99

Labor Day weekend. 108. Kristin called and talked to her mother for forty minutes. Forty. I timed it from the other room like a fool.

Thursday was the first counseling appointment. Dr. Ruiz, a psychologist, a woman about our age with an office in a little building off Camelback with a fountain out front. Marlys wanted a woman. She still won't see Dr. Ansel. I don't push it. One door at a time.

I sat in the waiting room for fifty minutes with a two-year-old copy of Arizona Highways. When Marlys came out her eyes were red, but she was standing up straight. In the truck she said, "She didn't say I was crazy." I asked what she did say. Marlys said, "She didn't say I wasn't taken, either. She said we'd start with sleep, and with me, and we'd leave the rest on the table for now." Then she said, "She has a nice way. You'd like her. She's very practical."

Coming from Marlys, about somebody I haven't met, that's a compliment to both of us.

Friday 8/27/99

Yesterday she went to Dr. Hale. I drove. I waited. She went in by herself.

He talked with her a long time, almost an hour, which I've never known him to do. He asked her the questions off the list I copied out of the library pamphlet in July, the same ones: sleep, appetite, crying, friends, the things she used to love. She said yes to all of them. He said it sounds like she's been depressed for a long time and it's no wonder, and that it's treatable, and he wrote her a prescription for Zoloft and gave her the name of a counselor, a woman, and she said she'd go.

He didn't say one word about the lights. She told me that in the parking lot like it was the most surprising thing that happened all day. "He didn't even ask, Frank."

I got the prescription filled at the drugstore on the way home. I stood at the counter while the young fellow counted out the pills and I thought, twenty-nine months. That's how long it took to get from our backyard to this counter. I paid and said thank you and went out and sat in the truck and couldn't start it for a minute.

Monday 8/23/99

Last night, Sunday, a week after Sedona, she came and stood in the doorway of the computer room and said, "Call Dr. Hale in the morning. Tell him I'll come in." Then she went back to bed.

I called at 8:01. Thursday at 10:30.

Thursday 8/19/99

Sedona, part two. The part that mattered.

Saturday night there was a dinner in the ballroom, round tables of eight, chicken or fish. We sat with Norma's group and a woman from Tucson named Delphine, maybe sixty-five, silver hair in a braid down her back. She told the table she'd had her own experiences since she was a girl in the 1940s. And then, over the coffee, she told us she'd been a psychiatric nurse for thirty years before she retired.

She got Marlys talking. I don't know how. Nobody's been able to get Marlys talking since spring. And after a while Delphine put her hand flat on the tablecloth next to Marlys's hand and said this, and I wrote it down on a napkin after so I'd get it right:

"Honey, I know what happened to me. And I also take a pill every morning for my depression, and I have for eleven years. One doesn't cancel out the other. You can have been taken and still be sick. Getting well doesn't mean it wasn't real. It means you get to live with it instead of under it."

Marlys cried. Not the bad kind. I went and found Delphine afterward by the elevators and tried to thank her and couldn't get it out, and she patted my arm and said, "I know, dear. I was married to a skeptic for thirty-eight years. He was a good one too."

I have said the same thing to my wife a hundred ways for two years. It never took. It had to come from inside, from somebody who'd been where she's been. I'm not too proud to say so.

Tuesday 8/17/99

Back from Sedona. Here's part one.

A resort hotel in the red rocks, a ballroom with a stage and a slide projector, and about three hundred people. Tables in the hallway selling books, videotapes, T-shirts, crystals, and one fellow selling a little box with a meter on it for $149 that he said can detect implants. I've made better-looking gadgets out of scrap on a slow Friday. I promised Marlys I wouldn't laugh at anybody and I didn't. I bit the inside of my cheek.

A man showed slides of the lights over Phoenix, from people's home videos. I saw my own lights up there on the screen, the ten o'clock ones, and it gave me a turn. A panel of experiencers talked, one at a time, and I'll tell you what I noticed. About half the people in that room were there because something happened to them they couldn't explain and nobody at home would listen. The other half were selling something to the first half. I felt for the first half. I sat in a folding chair in the back and watched my wife sit up front with her friends and take notes, and she looked more alive than she has since Christmas.

Friday night a bunch of us drove out of town to a dark field for a "skywatch." No city lights up there, and it was the meteor shower, the one in August. Streaks every minute or two. A man with a video camera got excited at every one of them. Marlys finally said to him, nice as pie, "Those are meteors, sir." Then she leaned over and whispered to me, "I know what a meteor is, Frank." I laughed out loud in the dark. So did she.

Monday 8/9/99

Packing for Sedona. We leave Friday morning. I booked us a motel down the road from the hotel because the hotel wanted $160 a night, which for a room you sleep in is highway robbery.

Marlys made me promise, sitting on the edge of the bed with the suitcase open, that I wouldn't laugh at anybody up there. I said I haven't laughed at you in twenty-six years. She raised her eyebrow. I said all right, I have, but never about this. Then she looked at the shorts I'd packed and said, "You're not wearing those," and she laughed. At me. First time in I don't know how long. I'm wearing the shorts.

Sunday 7/25/99

I went back to the library, where I go when I don't know what to do. The lady at the desk knows me by now. I told her I wanted something on depression, and she brought me a pamphlet and two books and didn't ask a single question, God bless her.

The pamphlet had a list. Trouble sleeping. Not enjoying the things you used to. Pulling away from friends and family. Crying a lot. Trouble thinking, forgetting things. Tired all the time. Feeling hopeless. I sat at the library table and went down it with a pencil like a checklist on a work order. Marlys has every single one. Every one.

Here's the thing I figured out. The lights, I can't do anything about. I can't prove it and I can't disprove it and I've quit trying. But this, this list, this has a name. Things that have a name have a procedure. I copied the list out on a piece of paper and folded it up and put it in my wallet next to the psychiatrist's card with the tape on it.

Sunday 7/11/99

First big monsoon storm of the summer came through Friday night. Wall of dust first, then the wind, then the rain sideways and the lightning so close the thunder shook the dishes. Power went out for two hours. Two years ago that would have put Marlys in the hall closet. Friday she sat at the kitchen table by candlelight filling out the registration form for Sedona. She didn't even look out the window. She said, "Is it $95 each or $95 for both of us?" Each.

She's making lists. She's calling Norma. She asked me what I think she should wear. She hasn't asked me that since Kristin's wedding. I don't know what to think about the fact that the thing that gets her out of bed is a UFO conference. I've decided I'm not going to think about it. I'm going to be glad she's out of bed.