The Better Liar(96)

I’d never see her again. She’d trapped me in my life, like an insect under a glass. I’d be in New Mexico until I died.

I love you, Leslie. I love you. It entered my head again. I couldn’t get it out all the way to the hospital.





EPILOGUE


    Robin


The phone Leslie had bought me rattled in the cupholder beside me. Music poured over my face from the rental car’s speakers, thick as sunlight, obscuring the ringtone. I glanced down, expecting to see her number, but it was Nancy calling me, over and over. When I stopped at a red light, I saw my name on the screen.

Robin, I’ve got, her message began, then was cut off as the notification ended.

I didn’t open it. There was a voicemail too. That one I held to my ear.

“Robin,” she said. “I just wanted to call and check in with you. I don’t…”

She went on, but I started the message over again.

“Robin. I just wanted to…”

There were no calls from Leslie. I had cut us free of each other. That was how I had paid for her happiness. A piece of myself thrown into the hole of my death. Hadn’t I always done what she was afraid to ask for?


Robin, I’ve got



    I put the phone in my shirt pocket, where it buzzed against my chest, as if Nancy were speaking into the chamber of my rib cage, lips pressed up against my skin.


Robin, I’ve got



I’d never hear that name again. Nancy was the last one who would say it. I wanted to feel her saying it as long as possible.

At a Shell station in Arizona, I pulled over and went into the minimart with a hundred-dollar bill. “Can you break it?” I asked the guy at the counter.

He was tall and brown, wearing a ball cap and sucking on a piece of licorice. “Just barely,” he said around the licorice. “You don’t have anything else?”

I shook my head. “Can I put forty toward the gas?”

“Buy something else,” he said. “I can’t be giving you everything in the register. Grab some snacks. You on a road trip?”

“Sort of,” I said, lifting a case of Poland Spring from the stack beside the counter and heaving it into his arms. “I’m moving to LA.”

“LA, huh?” he called as I disappeared into the aisles. There was nobody else in the minimart, and I felt his eyes on my back as I snatched up pretzels, sunglasses, a bouquet of fake roses. “You going to be in a movie?”

I nodded, coming back toward him and dropping my loot on the counter. “I hope so. My dad left me some money in his will to get started. A hundred thousand dollars. Can you believe it?”

He whistled, ringing up the pretzels. “Lucky. What’s your name, so I know you when I see it?”

“Alice,” I told him. The man behind the counter smiled and handed me my change and filled my arms with water and flowers. Against my chest, my phone went on singing, tapping out my eulogy.





       To Jean and Janet

   for teaching me

   the world is wide.





AUTHOR’S NOTE


I am not a mother. But, like a lot of women, I’ve spent a significant portion of my life thinking about whether I would like to be one—or whether I should be one. I’m anxious, a worrier. I don’t like to gamble. I’m afraid of pain. I researched all the ways it could go wrong. I imagined the children I might have or not have, the ways my body could change. The Better Liar is a nightmare, full of wild shadows and exaggerations, but at the center of it is a real fear: that if I had a baby, I might not feel what I am supposed to feel, and I might be too afraid to tell anyone.

One in seven women experience significant depression, anxiety, intrusive repetitive thoughts, panic, or posttraumatic stress during pregnancy or postpartum.*1 Because intrusive thoughts and anxiety often center around fears of hurting the baby, it can be difficult for people to tell their partners, family members, or doctors about these thoughts. Some even worry their baby will be taken away. You can imagine how many people go on suffering from postpartum depression—an incredibly common experience—because it can be so difficult to get help.

People of color, especially, are blocked from navigating the healthcare system because they are so frequently ignored or disbelieved about their pain.*2 In the United States, Black women are two to three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women,*3 and in New York City, where I live, they are twelve times more likely.*4 Not even eminence or wealth protects against this racist failure of care. Shalon Irving, an epidemiologist at the CDC, died from complications of high blood pressure after multiple postpartum appointments where she explained, “There is something wrong, I know my body. I don’t feel well,” and was told, “If there’s no clots, there’s nothing wrong.”*5

    I don’t say this to scare people. I say it to provoke reflection on how we regard parents who struggle, parents who suffer—and on which parents get more competent care, and why. We owe these parents greater empathy and support.

I want to stress that while it is crucial for people experiencing postpartum depression to receive care, I don’t believe it’s something that can or should be forced on anyone. What Robin does to Leslie in this book is extremely dangerous in the United States because we have conscripted police officers into mental-health-care work, and that is not their primary training. When you involve the police in an intervention for someone with mental health struggles without their consent, especially a person of color, you risk their life*6—and, less seriously, you risk incurring thousands of dollars in hospital bills they may be unable to pay.