I cannot believe it has almost been a year since Adam came back into my life—when he phoned me during the Guilford reunion, and I grabbed Chum and took off for Atlanta, driving into the night.  Pure impulsive action. It had felt like jumping fully clothed into a cold pool on a scorching day.

Unplanned and problematic, yet utterly right.

How could I have been so wrong?

Dad has invited me down to Vilano Beach for the day, so earlier I loaded up my dear dog and crate and hit the road. Interstate 295 to US1, then directly east through Palm Valley which drops me onto A1A.

I turn my Subaru right to head south, a snug shoreline drive, familiar to me from childhood trips and, now, adulthood ones to see my father. My dad, Henry Plumb.  Who has promised me that his lady friend will not be around today.  Blanche is at a city Bunko tournament, God help us.  She had wanted Dad to be part of her group, but he declined with good sense. I keep imagining her table-hopping at the National Guard Armory, trying to fix everyone’s daughter up with her son Jimmy.  This fact alone lifted my spirits when I spoke to Dad this morning. Blanche, with her over-the-top enthusiasm for goofy pastimes, her non-stop chatter, would be blessedly absent from my day.

That news was so welcome because I needed to talk to my father. Alone.  To hear his opinion. Or rather to receive his blessing on what I’m going to do.

About Adam.

Because I’ve been going round and round in my head about this problem which blindsided me. Because of my own choices.  My failure to see to what was right in front of me.

The person he really is.

It should have been obvious to me, the whole time.  The falling down house, electricity flickering on and off, the unopened mail.  The smell of dogs, though there were no dogs to be found. His wide-open time, acres of it, just for me. No responsibilities or commitments—I should have questioned him about his job, asked about his PTO, instead of crowing about my own.

But I was in some kind of dream—truly, it seemed a dream come true at the time.  One hundred percent of Adam’s focus on me, on us.  A miracle for Nancy Plumb.  Who would have thought that, after all this time, there would be a man to come along and give you everything you ever wanted?

And not just any man, but the one who got away.  Then came back.  Just for me.

And now it seems, I may be all he has.

Certainly, Adam has no job; the Christian-based playground company let him go for a number of reasons, mainly failing to show for one too many client meetings, according to Adam’s father.

Adam’s father.  He’s another odd part of this sad story.  Maybe my interaction with Jeremiah Ainsley is what has finally made me want…well, hunger to see my own father, in person.  To know that he would not forsake me.  That Henry Plumb loves his daughter unconditionally no matter what she might do, or be.  Or become.

“Let me give you some advice, Nancy,” Adam’s father had said that day, after my misguided morning in one ER, followed by hours in another, ending in Adam’s admittance to the correct mental health unit.  Jeremiah rested his chin on his palms, elbows propped on knees. “Cut your losses now.”

I remember I was…how should I say it…gob-smacked.  Gutted.  That a father could calmly tell his son’s girlfriend to abandon him. I just sat there, blinking dry eyes, stung.  I hadn’t yet cried.  The tears came later and, save for pauses for work and meals, haven’t really stopped.

“He’s just like his mother.  It’s hopeless.” Mr. Ainsley’s own eyes were as dry as mine.  “Cannot stay on the medication.  Or will not.” He sighed, shook his head.  “I don’t know which it is, but I do know this:  refusal to take the meds long-term is pathological.”  He tapped his forehead. A physician walked by, blonde ponytail swinging.  Mr. Ainsley’s eyes followed her before tracking back to me.

“Look, Mr. Ainsley,” I started to say, voice hoarse.  From screaming, I guess.

“Call me Jerry.”

“Could you tell me how this happened? Or why…when did it start?” I felt like I was stuttering, though my words were clear enough.

He groaned, leaned back on the sagging navy couch.  “Well, let’s see.  First, there was my wife, Adam’s mother.  Patricia, Patty her name was.  Rambled around the country like nothing you’ve ever seen.  Full-on mania every second of the day, which she was in one of those spells.”

Jeremiah’s voice was mellifluous. I had a vague memory of him singing during church and youth group, during those high school years. He rubbed at his eyes.  “Except when she was sleeping.  And when she would finally conk out, it lasted for days.”

That sounded familiar.  Adam had started sleeping more and more.  I noticed on the weekends we were together that his sack time was growing by leaps and bounds, culminating in that morning, when he wouldn’t wake up.  Until I shook him over and over.

And screamed at the top of my voice.

“Then, well…then there was Adam.  It didn’t show up in him until college.  I’ll give him this, the boy fought that demon tooth and nail.  Was determined that he would not be like his mother.” Mr. Ainsley scratched his unshaven face; there was at least three days growth there, I was betting. “Poor Patty, God bless her, but she was a terrible mother.”

There was a hitch in my breath, and Mr. Ainsley looked at me. I cleared my throat.  It did no good. “She was sick,” I croaked out.

“Yes, very sick.  Just like Adam,” he said, voice lilting above our heads in a strange melody. “Manic depression is a devil of an illness.”

“But treatable.” I knew a little bit about bipolarism from planning a consensus conference several years ago.  I edited some of the grant request documents, and the needs assessment was clear and well-written, understandable. “Medications have improved, control is better, I thought.”

Jeremiah, Jerry, gave me a tiny grin.  Maybe it was just because he’d just used the word “devil” that I thought I saw a touch of the same in his expression.  “It depends.”

“Depends?”

“Nancy, back in the day when I was determined to fix my family, I read a lot, learned a lot, did research like you wouldn’t believe on this sumbitch disease.  I thought we could beat it.  I thought I could beat it by finding the right doctors.  Insisting on the best medicine.”

“But you couldn’t?”

Mr. Ainsley shook his head. “Hell no.  The strain of this gut puncher that my wife and son have is of the…what do they call it?” He held up his fingers, crooked them into quotation marks.  “The acute variety.”

I stared at him. “Still…”

“Still, nothing.  And to make matters worse, not only is the illness severe, but there is that stubborn streak that complicated every single thing in my wife’s life until the day she died.  And she darn sure passed that onto Adam.” Mr. Ainsley clenched his fists.  I noticed his hands were a chubbier version of his son’s.

“You mean non-compliance?” I swallowed, throat thick.  “With medications.”

A memory of full pill bottles in Adam’s medicine cabinet charges into my mind, followed by thoughts of his long-lost mother.  Why had he not told me she was dead?  I realized that he’d never mentioned her at all.  While we’d discussed my mother plenty of times.  Joyful discussions, I remembered then, adding new sorrow to the day’s harvest of sadness. Sorrow over my short-sidedness, my carelessness.  Not paying attention to what was right in front of me.

In North Carolina a year ago, when Adam had called me out of the blue, I stood there in the cold while his handsome face on my phone warmed the palm of my hand.  He had told me why he failed to show up at my mother’s bedside back in 2014.  Why he had not replied to any of her subsequent Facebook messages.

“I had a problem back then,” he told me.  “Ups and downs.  I kind of bottomed out for some reason at that time, ended up having to get on medication.”  Adam’s voice was husky but perfectly clear.  I imagined tears lurked beneath his words, and I couldn’t bear for him to cry over something that happened so long ago.  Behavior for which there was a logical explanation.  Finally.

“It’s okay,” I rushed in with reassurance, perhaps too quickly.  Maybe I should have queried him more, dug deeper about duration or symptoms, while there was still distance between us.  Before the hormones of contact bound us and botched my brain circuitry. “Honestly, it’s fine.  I know about the blues.”

But it turned out I knew nothing about the blues, or their opposite.  The wild-eyed rodeo of what Adam called his “ups and downs.”

Bottoming out.

In Adam’s hospital room, I stood there ponderous as cement, while Jeremiah leaned in from the other side, hovering over his son’s head.  Adam’s eyes were closed, eyelashes still as I’d ever seen them.  I heard the beep of the heart monitor behind me, providing proof of life, but I didn’t look at it. I would need a forklift to pivot.

Jeremiah sniffed the air, “Smell that?” he asked. I didn’t know what to answer, wasn’t even sure I’d heard him right.

“Wha?” My mouth felt glued in place too.

“That scent, like metal?”  Jeremiah inhaled with a deep whistle.  “And sweat?  Reminds me of my wife.” He swallowed hard.

Adam’s greasy hair was matted on one side, and his father repositioned a lock of it.  He patted him on the head, and the tender gesture surprised me.  Of course he loves his son, I scolded myself, but, to be honest, I didn’t believe it.

How can you love someone you’ve given up on?

Adam kept on sleeping, hollows dark as charcoal under his eyes, exhausted by the last epic high brought down by an incredible low.  Flattened by depression.

Adam Ainsley’s own brain had worn him down to nothing.

Thinking back now, as I do ever since I fled Atlanta that September Saturday, I reframe everything that happened with us.  I see it, as they say, in a new light.  That of cold reality.

How Adam’s enthusiasm, his pure joy at seeing me, was, in retrospect, the start of a manic phase.  The delight, the twinkle in his green eyes, the energy of cooking and talking—and, yes, let me just say it, the sex—were chemical fireworks.

Which breaks my heart.  That the magic of us, physical and emotional, was mania.

Again, I ask myself, how could I not have grasped what was really going on?

Because, it occurs to me now, speeding down AIA past the trusty Gate Station, that I had been a bit manic too.  The fireworks were not one-sided. At the time, it felt like being a kid again, no worries, all play.  One night during a cold snap, we left Adam’s sprinklers on, creating ice caves in the trees the next morning.  I had always wanted to do that as a child, but Mom wouldn’t allow it, said it would kill her plants. I had whispered this to Adam, and he sprang out of bed, threw on a coat, grabbed my hand.  He pulled me out the front door, directing me toward some rusty sprinklers in a heap behind a hedge.

“Hook ‘em to a hose,” Adam shouted, his voice warbling with joy.  “This is gonna be great!”

The ice did end up killing a small magnolia in his yard.  A few weeks later, I noticed the next-door neighbor examining the tree, shaking his head.  I waved at him, but he didn’t wave back.  I thought it was odd at the time, when Cabbagetown was supposed to be such a friendly neighborhood, why nobody said hello to us, why no one ever knocked on Adam’s door to invite him to one of the spring block parties I’d seen populating the streets.

Turns out that there had been an incident a couple of years ago.  The same neighbor who’d grimaced at the magnolia—John was his name—told me about it while we waited for the ambulance to arrive.  Adam, off his meds probably, had started a sort of dog kennel in his backyard.  He took in strays, adopted rescue mutts.  At first the neighbors didn’t mind, admired his efforts, but then things got worse.

“It just got out of control—he kept bringing in more and more dogs,” John told me, as the rescue unit pulled up, lights flashing, siren off. “The barking, the smells. We had to call in animal control eventually.” He shook his head.  “Poor guy, I think it embarrassed him.  He stayed out of sight after that.” John looked at me.  “Until you showed up.”  He gave me a kind smile then, offered to type his cell number into my phone while I led the EMTs into the house.  John wanted me to call with updates on Adam.

Turns out Cabbagetown is a kind place after all. But I don’t think I can ever go back there.  It hurts to even think about it.

I keep remembering what Jeremiah Ainsley told me, on the phone the weekend Adam was admitted.  I was back in Jacksonville, sitting on Fairfax’s bed when my cell buzzed with a 225 area code. Louisiana.  Adam’s father, calling with an update.

I held up a finger, my code to Fair to “pause that thought,” and swiped the green accept icon.  Without any pleasantries, Jeremiah launched right into the story of his son’s care.

“They’re going to start some antipsychotics on him, though they’ve tried those before.”

I had just wiped my eyes with a Kleenex, but I could feel them welling up again.  The word “psychotic” scared me so much, I said it out loud. Fairfax stretched her leg over to me so her toes touched mine.

Mr. Ainsley sighed.  “It’s all part of the same song and dance. Maybe it will work this time.  I don’t know.  Still, he’s got to take the meds once he’s out, lithium included, but he never does. For long.”

I swallowed hard, willing my voice not to tremble. “How is he…I mean, is he alert?  Is he talking?”

“You mean, did he ask about you?” There was that ‘devil’ in his words again.  It bugged me. That a guy with such a mellow melodic voice could be so direct, snide even.  Where was that tenderness I’d witnessed beside his son’s bed?

“No, that’s not what I meant at all,” I replied.  “I just want to know if your son is getting better!” My voice rose at the end with a shrillness that brought Fairfax close to me, her palm to my forearm.  She gently gripped me, and I felt stronger. “That’s all, Jeremiah.  Is he better than yesterday?”

“Jerry, please. Not really.” His voice came through the phone in a whoosh, sucking the air out of my gut. I pitched forward, and only Fairfax kept me from falling off the bed.  She braced me with a hug, while Adam’s father continued.  “Listen, Nancy, I’m going to tell you what I told you in the hospital.  It’s what I would tell my own daughter, if I had one.”  He paused.

I could hear the air whistling through his nostrils. A wheeze in my own lungs seemed to answer back.

“Let him go.” He coughed, then sniffed a few times.  Could he be crying too?  “You are only going to have a heap of troubles with my boy.  I eventually had to cut his mother loose. I couldn’t keep up with her anymore.”

Let him go.

The words, though no surprise, still chilled me.  He’d said as much to me in the hospital.  I wondered if Jeremiah advised everyone to let go, cut your losses, give up on a loved one, because it sure didn’t sound like something a former youth minister should be saying!

And if his father gave up on Adam, how could I do the same thing? Adam had no one else in his life, as far as I could tell.

And then, as I mulled over Jeremiah’s warning in the following weeks (usually at three a.m., wide awake, heart thumping like a wild creature), his words came to absolve me in a way. If Adam’s own father had forsaken him, if he could not be saved, wouldn’t it be the wisest choice for me to do the same thing?

Who would condemn me for saving myself from a heap of sadness?

Because I was not Adam’s family.  I was not married to him.  I was just a girlfriend. Merely a fling who could cut her losses and go back to the life she had before Double A had reappeared.

Because I am too old to change, I tell myself.  This kind of illness, the “lost cause” kind, is too much to take on.  Maybe if I were twenty-eight instead of forty-eight, I could handle a relationship that was one fourth romance, three-fourths caretaker.  It might even have been worth it back then, the effort, the custodial quality of it. I was malleable in my twenties, I wouldn’t have known the allure of my own self-sufficiency.  I would have adapted, learned how to appreciate the sparkling moments, as long as they weren’t too sparking, the quiet, sleepy times, as long as they weren’t too sleepy.  I would have kept one eye on his meds, the other on his moods.  Maybe, with time and trust and dependable dosages, there could have even been a child.  A son or a daughter that I would cherish.

And worry about as well.  Watching this child with the same hawk-like caution for signs of the family illness.

I shake my head now to clear it of these erstwhile thoughts, these “what might have beens.” At some point, I have parked my car in Dad’s driveway, though the last part of the trip was a blur.  I have been so deep in my thoughts, it is only when my father taps on the windshield that I see him there.

“Hi, Nance!” he chortles.

No surprise, I give him my go-to response of late:  tears.  Dad’s eyes crinkle with worry, and he helps me out of the car, arm around my waist.  “You know what always cheers you up?”

“What?” I sniffle, while pointing to the backseat and Chum in his crate.  Dad moves to that side of the car, opens the door to lift Chum out to freedom.  “Lemonade!” he announces.

Later, I have stopped my crying, and my father and I are sitting at his kitchen table, a new one, I notice.  Blanche must have gotten rid of the round glass café one, substituting this rectangular wooden farm table.  It’s too big for the tiny nook, but I say nothing.

Dad continues talking, his voice calms me as always. “Okay, now I understand,” he says.  “Adam’s father, I do remember him from the church, the one your mother loved so much.  Well, poor guy, he’s exhausted by it all, I imagine.  It’s been years of this, wife and child, yet he’s still there with Adam.”

I want to pipe up and contradict, to say, but his father is telling everyone to let go, to cut him loose, to give up.  Or, at least, he’s telling me that. In any case, I want to ask my own father, how could a parent be like that? But I don’t.  I continue to sip the lemonade Dad has served me, rehydrating myself for more tears to come, I’m sure.

My father tips his head to one side, lips working on a thought.  Finally, he says, “You know, Nancy, it takes guts to make a deep connection with someone.”

I blink at Henry Plumb. This statement is so unlike anything I’ve ever heard my father say, that I sputter out a weak “What?” dribbling lemonade in the process.

My father opens his mouth, forming an “o.” With an exhale of air, he says, “What I mean is, it is far easier to hole up and give up, especially after a loss.”  He grabs his glasses from the nearby kitchen counter and places them on his nose.  He looks at me for a good five seconds, then continues, “Which is what you’re experiencing now.  Loss.”

I clear my throat because more tears have gathered there.  Because my father has hit upon some kind of truth that my limbic system, with its heightened response lately, has acknowledged.  “Dad,” I finally eek out.  “No one’s died. He’s sick, that’s all.  He’s not going to die.”

But you thought he was going to die.  You thought he was dead already that morning. He didn’t move, even when you shook him.  Then, you screamed, and his eyes popped open.

Tears spring back into my eyes, and Dad covers my hand with his own.  He says gently, “I mean, the truth you were living this year has died.  Or, let’s just say, what you thought was the truth, is gone.”

He’s right.  The joy I felt with Adam, the solid miracle of it, the click of being with the right person at the right time.  Reclaiming the past at the perfect time in the present. It’s all gone. Mania, chemicals, kismet.  Innocence.  Whatever you want to call it.  It has died.

I nod.

My father continues. “And you have to make your peace with that.”

“I can’t, Dad!” The salt is flowing now.  My face is drenched.  My father grabs a roll of paper towels, places it on the table.  I tear off a rectangle and mop my face. “I can’t move this forward, I can’t handle that kind of responsibility.  He’s so sick, I don’t think he has insurance. The whole thing’s a mess, Medicaid, antipsychotics. He was in the fetal position, Dad! I don’t want to see him like that!  I can’t do it!” I find I’m gasping out the words.

The awful, unspeakable truth, not of Adam.  Of me.

“Hey, Nancy girl.” Dad’s eyes peer over his glasses, using a term of affection I haven’t heard in a while. The lenses in his round tortoiseshell frames are so clean, they glow and dapple in the sunlight.  “No one’s saying you have to do anything at all.”

“Huh?” I sniffle, and he gives me that familiar half-smile. The one that makes his crows-feet into deep grooves with love for his family. An expression I think he absorbed from Ruth during their decades-long marriage.

A longing for my mother hits me with such an ache, I hunch forward and almost knock over my lemonade.

“You’re okay.” Dad reaches out to me, cups my chin.  “Or you will be.  No matter what you decide to do, which includes doing nothing right now. Sitting tight.”

I inhale deep into my ribs; it feels like I’ve scooped out my insides.  When I exhale, my breath is loamy as a summer shower.

My father’s words are exactly what I needed to hear, I realize.

“I miss Mom,” I say. It’s the rawest, most truthful thing I’m feeling.  I always miss her, of course, but my experience with Adam has punched up her absence.  She would know what to do.  She could advise me on how to move forward.  She loved him when he was a boy, but she loved me more. Her only child.  I know she would tell me the right way to handle this situation, to minimize his hurt.

The correct choice so I don’t end up being an asshole to him.  Isn’t that rich—all those times Fairfax called Adam Ainsley one, and I end up queen of the As?

“Of course you miss Mom.  I do too.” Dad’s landline rings, but he ignores it.  “Sales call, I’m sure.  Darn telemarketers.”  He sighs.  “Listen, let me say this, because it might help you: no one is perfect.”

“Well, duh, I know that.” I can’t help but grin.  It’s just a little one, but it’s a start.

Dad returns the smile, crow’s feet crinkling. “Okay, good.  So, no one is perfect, no relationship is perfect.  Even those that start off like magic will become ordinary in no time.  And those are the lucky ones.” He leans forward. “The rest face real hardship, and the older you are, the worse it gets, because there will be illness of some sort, I promise.”

My eyes widen.  It’s almost as if he’s been talking to Fairfax, for that is exactly what she’s been saying to me.  Most recently, yesterday. We were having coffee in her backyard instead of walking.  She hasn’t wanted to go for walks lately, her hip has been hurting her.  It was early morning and there was a cool breeze blowing in off the river.   She had limped over, placing two freshly filled mugs on the patio table.

“Courtesy of Max,” Fairfax had remarked, then gingerly sat down.  “He wanted to serve them himself, but I told him to scram.”  She shifted in the wicker chair, grimaced.  “You know,” she then said, “it’s not a matter of if someone is going to be sick, but when.”

Before the need for refills, we had been discussing Adam for the umpteenth time, so I quipped, “Yeah, but why sign on for that if you don’t have to?”  I had almost made up my mind that morning to cut him loose, as his father said.  Fairfax had suggested several times that I visit him—he was still in the hospital—but the thought filled me with equal parts revulsion and fear.  For him and for myself.

How could I face him when I had left him there? I’d abandoned him.

But, then again, how could I not?

My own thoughts came back to haunt me. The old realization about my mother not raising me to be a casual person, one for whom sex is a handshake.  How I couldn’t just be casual with Peter Redmond, when he obviously wanted more.

How Adam’s reappearance in my life had solved that problem for me, long buried emotions booting me into a no-holds-barred relationship.  Not casual, not even remotely, but deeply serious.  Intimate.

So how could I now reframe this intimacy as a bad dream, easily forgotten in the morning?

My father’s voice pulls me back to the present, the liquid citrus, his comforting words.  “It’s the way the story goes, Nancy.  Illness, long or short, or an accident, or worse.”  He shakes his head.  “Listen, I don’t want to be morbid, when my point is quite the opposite.”

I glance at him.  My dad, his logical wisdom still so there, even without the foil of my mother’s rapid fire intuition.

“Yes?” I ask.

He closes his eyes.  “How to say this…hmm.  Okay, there are often more answers to questions than we realize.  It’s not necessarily yes or no, black or white.  Yes, we are all going to die someday.  That’s a given.  But while we’re alive, there are surprises, unforeseen events, which open up options for us, show us other forks in the road.”

I squint at him, my father the sage. I have long proclaimed that life is best lived in the gray, and here he is now, serving me my own aphorism. “Like what?” I finally ask.

My father’s eyes open, there’s that twinkly smile again, the one that seems to be saving me today. “Well, you meeting Adam again, for one. I guess you could call me meeting Blanche an unforeseen event too.”

I nod in agreement. Yep, neither one of us saw either of those two coming.  I chuckle.

My father laughs too. “It certainly has kept things, um, interesting for both of us.”

“They’re both a little kooky,” I can’t help saying, and my chuckle turns into full-out laughter. It’s politically incorrect, both understatement and overstatement, but so true.

My father apparently agrees, because he throws his head back and howls with good humor. When he catches his breath, he says, “Goodness gracious, Nancy girl, who knows what the world will have in store for us next?”