Living on the Fault Line by Susan Lago

     The day Lila hit the deer was the day she finally understood that Tessa’s problems were not her fault.  Sometimes, she thought, events converge in such a way that muscle and bone meet half a ton of metal hurtling through space.  “I hit a deer,” she told Sam, calling from the side of the road in the October dusk.  Or rather, she could have said, a deer hit her.  “It wasn’t your fault,” said Sam.  “It was an accident.” 

     Not her fault.  This time, she was absolved.

     Lila didn’t enjoy feeling guilty, although Sam said she did.  He said she wallowed in it.  “Tessa’s issues are not your fault,” he said, “or mine.”  But Lila knew better.  They were her fault.  Who else’s would they be?  Certainly not Tessa’s.  At thirteen, she was scarcely formed.  Not child, not adult, but some amorphous amalgam of the two. 

     Sumita, the therapist Tessa had been seeing for over a year, said Tessa had problems expressing herself.  That she held all her feelings in and could only find release through pain.  She was not suicidal, Sumita explained, her voice barely above a breath.  Tessa’s talk of death and the scars on her arms and legs were expressions of her anger.  “At me?” Lila asked.  Sumita smiled and shook her head.  “It’s not that simple,” she exhaled.  Lila wanted to shake her, the baggy cardigan balsa wood frame of her, until she told her why her daughter was this way.  In the car on the way home from her appointment, Tessa screamed at Lila that when she was eighteen she was moving out, throwing away her meds, taking back her own life.  “Get away from me, you idiot,” she growled at Sam who greeted them at the door.  Ten minutes later Lila climbed the stairs and opened the door to Tessa’s bedroom.  She was under the covers asleep.  It was seven o’clock.

     Brain chemistry, said Dr. Chu, her psychiatrist.  The misfiring of neurotransmitters.  The imbalance of serotonin.  At their hospital intake session six months ago, Dr. Chu questioned Lila and Sam closely about their respective family histories.  Any history of depression, suicide, eccentric relatives?  My mother was rather negative, Lila explained.  Dr. Chu nodded for her to go on, pen poised above her notepad.  So Lila explained how her mother had warned her never to trust anyone outside of family, how she forswore deodorant because she had read somewhere that the chemicals seeped into your skin and made you crazy, and how she warned Lila that men only wanted one thing, but refused to tell her what it was until she was old enough to understand (which evidently she never was).  Lila pictured her child-self opening her mother’s bedroom door when she got home from school, the dusty air that smelled of unwashed hair, the no-answer when she whispered her name.  “Ever hospitalized?” asked Dr. Chu.  Lila shook her head.  “Did she take any medication?”  Her mother who would never even swallow an aspirin.  “No,” she said, but Dr. Chu was bent over her pad.  Sam dredged up a great-uncle who wore his pajamas and carried an umbrella when he went into town, but Dr. Chu didn’t even write that one down.  Then she asked to speak with Tessa alone. 

     When she called them back in fifteen minutes later, Lila’s hands were shaking so much she had to press them down flat on her lap.  Sam leaned back in the leather chair, one ankle resting on the opposite knee.  So focused was Lila on the white skin between the top of his sock and the bottom of his jeans, she didn’t hear what the doctor said until Sam said, “Bipolar disorder?  Are you sure?”  Tessa was deep deep in the crook of the armchair, hiding behind her hair.  “What?” Lila said.  “What?”  But Dr. Chu was sure. She brushed aside their wingbeat of shock and handed Lila prescriptions for Lamictal and Zyprexa, a mood stabilizer and an anti-psychotic. 

     “Don’t worry right now about the side effects,” she said in answer to Lila’s question, “Let’s just get her stabilized.”  And then Lila and Sam were on the other side of her door.  The receptionist scheduled another appointment for two weeks hence.  At home Tessa showed Lila the palm of her hand where she had picked a dime-sized hole with the fingernails of her other hand.  Lila dabbed at the blood and washed her stigmata with soap and water.  She gave Tessa the two pills and tried not to hover over her to see if she suddenly broke out in a rash or vomited blood or felt faint. 

     “So she got this from my side of the family?” Lila asked Sam later as they lay side-by-side in bed fully clothed.  My fault, she was thinking.  My bad genes.  Sam didn’t answer.  From down the hall they could hear Tessa.  She was singing in the shower.

     Maureen, the nutritionist at the eating disorder clinic they visited twice a month, said Tessa’s problems were society’s fault for ramming images of waifs wrapped in expensive fabrics down the throats of growing girls.  She counseled Tessa on healthy eating and reprimanded Lila for indulging her erratic tastes.  But what was she to do for the six weeks over the summer before eighth grade, when Tessa ate nothing but fruit?  Of course, Lila ran to the supermarket every day to buy the freshest she could find.   Then, the week before school started in September, Tessa refused the fruit, ate only carbohydrates – cereal without milk, Special K snack bites, whole bags of tortilla chips.  Somewhere between the fruit and the carbs she stopped drinking water.  When Lila reminded her that water had no calories Tessa said, “So,” a word that from her mouth was irrefutable and final. 

     When the leaves began to turn, Tessa stopped eating altogether.  Lila prepared what were once her favorite foods – Chicken Marsala, lasagna, macaroni and cheese – hoping the smells would entice her.  But Tessa refused to come to dinner.  “At least make her sit at the table with the family at meal times,” advised Maureen.  At their last meal together, Tessa made fun of the way Sam chewed, imitating the sounds he made until he pushed his chair back and left the table.  Then she took a bite of her meatloaf, chewed for several minutes, swallowed, then announced she was finished and may she be excused. After she left, Lila was alone with three full plates and two empty chairs.  Now she and Sam let Tessa watch TV while they ate.

     As Lila waited for the tow truck, she averted her eyes from the dying deer.  Her legs were still moving, trying to run from the pain.  Lila heard the sound of her breathing, frighteningly human.  But then the police office was there, a solid male presence.  “It wasn’t your fault,” he said.  “The deer are in rut.  They’re running all over the place.  Believe me, you’re not the first person to hit one on this road today.”  He got a crow bar from his car and unbent the crumpled front end from where it pressed into the tire.  How did he know how to do that? Lila wondered.  Were men born with the knowledge of how to fix things and the brute strength to do it?  “You can cancel the tow truck,” he said when he was finished.  “I think you’ll make it home.  “What about the deer?” Lila asked.  “Don’t worry about Bambi,” he said.  “She’s sleeping.”  And he was right.  Lila no longer heard her breathing or the scrape of her panicked legs brushing through the dry leaves on the side of the road.  Tufts of her fur stuck to Lila’s smashed bumper in several places.

     Lila’s mother-in-law, Birdie, had called to say that her neighbor’s friend recommended that Lila take Tessa to their psychiatrist.  It seemed that this friend had a daughter who tried to commit suicide in her early teens, who had been extraordinarily smart, but not very social and so on and so on.  “This doctor really turned the girl around,” Birdie told Lila.  “Now she’s at Stanford and engaged to a premed student.”  Her tone of voice suggested that if only Lila followed this advice, then this bright future would be Tessa’s.  “I’ve already made the appointment,” Birdie said and there was no room for discussion.  “It’s the best you can do.  After all, this doctor has written a book and was interviewed on Eyewitness News.”

     How furious Tessa would be when she found out, Lila thought.  Tessa didn’t do well with change.  And although she hated the Dr. Chu  (“fat, ugly, mean”) she wouldn’t want to go to someone else.  Tessa didn’t do well with meeting new people.

     The new doctor’s name was Dr. Gordon.  Dr. David Gordon.  A man.  Tessa didn’t do well with men.  Lila put off telling her until the night before the appointment.  Then she and Sam hunkered down and braced for the storm.

     Tessa, Lila knew, was beautiful.  This was not Lila’s fault.  Tessa did not inherit her features from me, Lila often thought, gazing at her daughter.  While Lila had dark hair and her father’s hooded brown eyes, Tessa had hair like poured honey, wide blue eyes, and the translucent skin of a china doll.  Before she starved herself, she had been developing a woman’s shape – curving hips and sloping belly, small breasts like two scoops of fresh cream.  Now she more closely resembled the little girl she had so recently been.  Flat-chested, she curved in on herself when she stood as if trying to fold into a tiny shape that no one would notice.  But she was still beautiful and people stopped Lila in the street to tell her so.  Tessa never responded or even looked up to acknowledge she heard the compliment.  So Lila would thank the person and watch them edge away, embarrassed and awkward and not sure why.  Perhaps she was deaf? she could see them wondering, or autistic?  Sometimes Lila lost her patience:  “Why didn’t you say thank you?” she snapped then.  “I don’t have to answer if I don’t want to.”  Turning her head, refusing to look at Lila.  Tessa’s profile was perfect and heartbreaking in its perfection.

     Lila first suspected something was wrong sometime in the middle of Tessa’s seventh grade year.  Always a light sleeper, Tessa started complaining of not being able to sleep at all.  Occasionally, in the middle of the night, Lila heard the sound of Tessa’s feet padding on the carpet as she ran laps around her room.  Once in a while, she was already up when Lila stumbled into the kitchen, sitting at the table copying out vocabulary words in girly script, page after page of loose-leaf binder paper:  ethereal, radical, outrageous, caustic. 

     Typical teenage girl moodiness, Lila had thought then.  Raging hormones.  Sam insisted the Internet was to blame with its over-stimulation, instant and constant contact with faceless “friends,” exposure to high and low entertainment without regard for appropriateness or quality.  So he limited Tessa’s computer time and urged her to read books instead.  But she hadn’t the attention span or patience to finish a book.  The tantrums increased in intensity and frequency.  At school, her friendships fell away one by one – a fight with one girl with whom she had been friends since preschool, a disagreement over an instant message with another.  Two others paired up and left Tessa out in the cold.  Sam and Lila’s friends with pubescent daughters assured them that during the middle school years, girls were dramatic and self-destructive – they developed weird food obsessions, and fell in and out of friendships like some people change clothes.  And for a long time, Lila assured herself that this was the case with Tessa.  She’ll grow out of it, she told herself.  But Tessa didn't.  Some mornings she refused to get out of bed and go to school. Sometimes, too, Tessa’s eyes looked haunted.  Not the eyes you’d expect to see in a child’s face.

     Last month, when Tessa got out of the hospital, Lila thought she would have been better.  Tessa blamed her mother for putting her there, but Lila had no choice.  She explained this to Tessa, how she wanted her daughter to finish eighth grade and go on to high school. But Lila still felt that the hospital was her fault. 

     When Tessa had refused to go out to dinner for her birthday she should have listened.  But her mother-in-law had insisted – “You give in to her too easily.”  They went to Tessa’s favorite restaurant and she ordered the Garden Salad with no dressing.  “That’s all you’re having?” Birdie asked Tessa.  Tessa picked up a pale green leaf and chewed it slowly without answering.  “That’s all she’s having?” she asked Lila and Sam.  Lila shrugged.  “Honey, you’re going to waste away to nothing,” her father-in-law said to Tessa.  “Here have a bite of my steak,” and he held his fork in front of Tessa’s face, an offering.  The meat dripped juice onto her salad and she pushed the bowl away and didn’t answer.  Stone girl.  Birdie rescued the moment with newsy talk of distant relatives. Tessa stared at her plate, hair hiding her face while the meal faltered around her.

     In the car on the way home, Tessa screamed and cried.  She broke out in hives and threw herself across the back seat sobbing.  They pulled into the driveway, the headlights slicing through the dark and Tessa ran for the house, pounded up the stairs.  Sam and Lila limped into the living room.  They could hear Tessa above them, the sound of drawers opening and closing, her bedroom door slammed, opened and slammed again.  Then she was standing in front of them, Lila’s pink Venus razor in her hand.  Tessa’s legs were dripping with blood where she’d scrapped the blade up and down against the skin.  Lila was screaming and Sam was grabbing paper towels to stop the bleeding.  “I don’t want to live,” Tessa said and the Venus dropped to the floor.  “We have to take her to the emergency room,” Lila said to Sam.  “No.  No hospital,” he said.  They argued back and forth for some time with Tessa between them like a wounded animal.  When Tessa bent to pick the razor up off the floor, Sam made a grab for it and she bit his hand.  Between them, they got her into the car and drove to the emergency room.  The next morning Tessa was admitted to Jackson Memorial Health Center.

     In the middle of washing the dishes or putting away the groceries – ordinary chores – Lila sometimes thought back to her adolescence.  How apart she had felt from the other girls with their bouncy hair and the ease at which they glided across the terrazzo floors of the junior high.  Curled up with a book or walking through the woods with her dog, Lila was more comfortable alone.  She existed on the periphery of  her parents’ lives – their neighborhood cocktail parties, her mother’s studio in the garage where she threw odd-shaped pots while smoking brown Mores, her father’s office in town where he treated earaches and stomach ailments.  Vaguely Lila’s mother would remind her to do her homework and on weekends Lila helped her father in his garden.  But on the whole they had their lives and Lila had hers.  She didn’t recall them ever remarking on her solitude.  Probably they thought that was just her way.  She recorded her sorrows in her diary and cried into her dog’s patient and smelly fur.  Lila thought her thighs were fat and her hair too frizzy.  But eventually she grew up and left that awkward girl behind.  Thank god.  She tried to explain all this to Tessa.  “You don’t understand,” Tessa said.  And she was right.  Lila did not.

     Lila left the deer on the side of the road and drove home very slowly as if the car might fall apart beneath her.  She walked into the house and Sam took her in his arms.  Barely moving her eyes from the television where she was watching a rerun of Full House, Tessa asked her how she was going to get to see her doctors now.  She had Sumita tomorrow, Dr. Chu on Thursday, then Sumita again on Friday.  Sam told her not to worry, they’d rent a car.  As if her father hadn’t spoken, she asked Lila again.  Lila repeated his words and Tessa nodded.  Good.  Her routine would not be interrupted. 

     Lila called MetLife and spoke to a kind woman who first asked her if she was okay.  A rush of feeling behind her eyes.  I’m fine, Lila said, blinking.  She filled the woman in on the details:  the sudden flash of haunch.  The thump.  “It’s the season,” the woman said and told Lila the story about the time she hit a deer and a man in a pickup truck pulled over, picked up the deer, threw it in the back of his truck and drove away.  “I thought he was making sure I was all right, but I guess he just wanted the meat.  I can laugh about it now,” she said and she did.  She laughed and Lila laughed with her to be polite.

     Tessa’s reaction when Lila told her about Dr. Gordon was not good.  “You can’t make me,” she screamed.  She threatened to cut herself and then spent some time hunting for a razor, Lila trailing behind like a shadow.  But Tessa’s search was fruitless.  After the last time, Sam and Lila had hidden all the razors.  Now when Lila wanted to shave her legs, she slipped furtively into the garage and reached behind the old paint cans. Kneeling on the unyielding cement, she sometimes experienced a moment of vertigo – whose life is this, she wondered then.  Not mine.  This cannot be it, this parade of mental health experts, doctors, and medications.  Sometimes she thought she was going crazy, the voices she heard in her head:  Sumita, Dr. Chu, the well-meaning advice of her mother-in-law that was really thinly disguised blame.  Then, while pushing aside a half-empty can of Desert Blush, Lila would wonder why Tessa was so fixated on the razors, after all they had a kitchen full of knives and other implements, but Tessa’s search never seemed to take her there.  Lila didn’t know what she would do if she had to de-sharp the kitchen, too.  How would she cook?

     Now as Tessa pawed through her mother’s make-up drawer, Lila wanted to reach out and lay her hand softly on her back, offer her comfort, but couldn’t bear the thought of Tessa flinching at her touch.  Helplessness zinged through the muscles of her legs, curled at the base of her spine.  After an hour Tessa gave up and said she was going to bed.  Lila sat outside her closed door until Sam got home.  Then he relieved her. Later, when the house no longer shuddered with Tessa’s fury, they tiptoed into their room where Lila drifted in and out of sleep until the alarm clock went off in the morning.  It was time to wake up and get Tessa ready for her appointment with Dr. Gordon.

     Since the hospital, Sam and Lila had no words for each other.  They did not speak of that day, or any of the other Tessa-filled days before or after.  They could not.  Day after day, Sam came home from work and headed for his den where he searched eBay for additions to his fossil collection.  Lila did laundry and vacuumed to fill the silence.  Sumita and Dr. Chu had never been able to unlock the riddle of their daughter’s antipathy toward her father.  Could it be because he was a loner like Tessa?  Even when Sam and Lila had been dating, he was content to watch a movie with her on TV instead of going to parties or out to dinner with friends.  Perhaps the distance between Sam and Tessa grew because he had been so frightened of her when she was a baby.  The wobbly-headedness and thin skin that could break apart under his big rough hands.  So he left her care up to Lila – the diapering, feeding, bathing.  By the time he recognized her, it was too late.  Tessa was Mommy’s girl.  Her little shadow.  She wanted nothing to do with Daddy and his loud laugh and clumsy jokes.  Around the time she turned against food, she turned against her father.  Raged at him for his inattention.  Or for taking Lila’s attention away from her.

     Lila pulled up in the rented car to the doors of the medical center where the new psychiatrist had an office.  Ironically, the medical center was in the same hospital where Tessa had been born.  And there was something about the wedge of sky balanced on the slab of the parking garage’s roof that brought her back to that blue June day.  Sam behind her, pushing Lila in the wheelchair through the hospital doors and out onto the street.  Lila, looking down at her new baby girl.  Tessa, tightly shut eyes, the impossibility of the tiny nose peeking from the edge of the blanket.  In Lila’s arms.  The nurse waited by her side while Sam went to get the car (“Oh my, she’s a sweet thing,” in a lilting Jamaican accent). 

     “Look, baby,” Lila had said, pointing at the trees, the cars, the hurrying past people.  “It’s the world.” 

     And as she pointed, as she urged her new baby to take notice, Lila pictured her Tessa’s life:  first party dress, first Halloween costume, getting ready for school, whispering in the ear of this week’s best friend, long legs kicking in her cheerleader uniform.  First boyfriend, first driving lesson, standing next to suitcases packed and ready to be shunted up the stairs to her dorm room.

     Now out of the corner of her eye, Lila saw a young girl running across the parking lot like a deer, long sandy hair blowing across her cheek.  The girl – she looked so much like Tessa – turned her head, laughing, and ran to catch up with two girls walking ahead of her.

     After a moment, Lila got out of the car and went around to open the door for Tessa.  “We’re here,” she said.

     “I don’t want to meet a new doctor.  They don’t know anything,” Tessa said.

     But she got out of the car, slowly, like an old woman.  Head down, limp yellow hair hiding her eyes.  At the far end of the parking lot, the girl had caught up with her friends.  Lila saw now she looked nothing like Tessa. 

     Lila reached to take hold of her girl’s hand, and to her immense relief, Tessa let her. 

	About the Author: Susan Lago is an adjunct professor of English at Montclair State University, where she tries to teach writing to freshman.  Her fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared in such publications as Verbsap, Writer’s Post Literary Journal, UnlikelyStories, Scrivener's Pen Literary Journal, Five Star Literary Stories, The Linnet's Wing, The Blotter Magazine and Word Riot. She holds an MA in English (concentration in writing) from William Paterson University.

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