October 2007
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While I Lay Here Floating, (Love Allison)

by Anne Sorbie



My body convulses when I see the ghost man’s shadow; it lingers at the end of my hospital bed.  I remember his
narrowed eyes, his smell, his weight, his hard hands.  

I close my eyes and decide I’m dreaming; the ghost man is dead.

Machines record my blood pressure and pulse while my body slowly recalls the art of self-control.  My nurses, who
say it’s been weeks since I arrived, are tired of changing me.  Occasionally, they transfer me to a wheelchair so that a
large orderly can submerge my withered body in bath water that floats the stems of my pear-drop breasts.  

I’m comforted by the liquid warmth.  It reminds me of Reagan, and the way she always stands at the edge of the pool,
no matter how long I’m submerged.  Recently, she’s been the one holding her breath, waiting for me to surface.  I
now understand why.

My eyes spring water when I open them.  The ghost man is still there.  I scream as loud as I can, and I wonder why I
never did that when his shadow had flesh.



This is Supposed to be a Story About Me

by Anne Sorbie

This is supposed to be a story about me – Derek Warren – Boston marathon hopeful.  Instead, no matter how many
times I go over it in my head, my story always curls around the one about my wife – Allison.  So I’ll start at the point in
my life, when I was forced to confront the event that sapped more energy than a twenty-two point six mile race.  Allison’
s story, at least my telling of it, begins on a gorgeous day in July when we, she our kids, and I, should have spent the
evening enjoying the shade of the tall willow in our garden.  But that night turned out to be a bust.  So instead, I’ll start
with my initial visit to a local shrink, and with the first dream session, which replayed itself nightly for three, long,
months.  It went something like this –

I resent my wife.

Why?

She’s ruined our lives.

Our?

Mine, my kids.

How?

She’s been hospitalized and now I have to take a chunk of time off work.

Why is that?

Because there’s no one else to look after the kids, make sure they do their school stuff, or take them to their
extracurricular things like dance and diving and hockey and music, etcetera.

What I meant was, why has she been hospitalized?

Oh, she fell and banged her head in the bathroom – banged it against the side of the tub.

I see.  And is that why she is unable to care for her children?

Yeah.

Derek, my file, your wife Allison’s case file, indicates that she is suffering from advanced alcoholism.  That is why she
is in the hospital and unable to care for your children.

So as you can tell, I have trouble with a story that starts when Alli’s drinking got out of control.  And as for me and my
story it wasn’t that the shrink was hard to get to, hard to take, or unsympathetic.  That’s not the case at all.  Dr. Haad
lived in the same community we did, and I could walk to her home office along a short stretch of Eighteenth Avenue.  
She was pleasant enough, well spoken, educated at Oxford, and very easy to look at.  She even went to the hospital to
help Alli.  She, Carolyn as she insisted I called her, was a good listener, and like my personal trainer, refused to let
me get away with anything except a full-out effort.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not completely stupid.  I knew that Alli had problems; I just thought she’d have to dry out.  It
took Carolyn a while, but she helped me to understand that Alli was ill.  She educated me and yes, it was like going
back to school.  I had to leave my job and instead of working for money, I started working for my family – every day.  
And let me tell you, it was like suffering through the bullshit of everything you are trained to ignore.  Every day.  Three
times a week I got to focus on me, the other times, I focus on the kids and on Alli.  The mad highs and lows were
worse than hitting the wall: tunnel vision, waning energy, and tears, yeah, as in crying.  What could be worse?  I’ll tell
you what’s worse, the fact that I, we, can’t just leave the crap behind.  That’s right.  It, call it whatever you want, the junk
in your trunk, the elephant in the room, the pile of shit in our family’s family room, as my daughter Linda calls it.  
Bottom line is – Alli’s disease will be with us, for the rest of our lives.

Let me back up.  Until that first meeting with Carolyn, what I didn’t acknowledge or talk about, well, it just didn’t exist.  
Basically, I thought I was doing my wife and my family a favour by ignoring and covering up the fact that the mother of
my kids was an alcoholic.  I suppose I could blame my propensity for covering up on my wasp upbringing, white
Anglo-Saxon protestant, the same way that my sister-in-law, Reagan, thinks she suffers from Catholic guilt, whatever
that is.  Regardless of the churches we both went to, Reagan and I are a bit the same, despite the fact she thinks I
should have done something sooner.  She doesn’t want to talk to me much, but Reagan and me, we blame certain
things we do and think as adults on what we were exposed to as kids.  Carolyn helped me put that in words.  Some
people might call what we were exposed to, religion, but I think the word is overrated.  What we were exposed to was
just a way of life.  Whether or not we bought-in was completely up to us.

Some nights, like tonight, when I’m in bed – our bed that Alli’s not in – I look at the digital alarm clock.  And when it
says something like, 3:19 a.m., that’s when I resent my wife the most.  Don’t get me wrong, I also love her, but until
she crashed against the bathtub, we were happy not dealing with her problem.  We had it handled, especially after
Reagan arranged for the weekly yard crew.  

Life was life.  I was mid-career and up for a management position.  I was keeping it together at work, but my bosses
knew that I had a rocky home life.  Whenever I took Alli to a company function, something happened.  She argued and
fought with people, she passed out in the women’s washroom, she fell down a flight of stairs leading to a dance floor
and broke her wrist, she berated the bartenders who cut her off, and at the last golf tournament, she nearly drowned
in the fountain outside the clubhouse.  She fell in while trying to make her way to the car, in the dark, ahead of me.  
Funny… and not.  

People knew.  She used to call our receptionist when she couldn’t reach me.  So whenever she got mad, and did
something like throw the kids out of the house, everyone I worked with knew.  But about my job, I was marked as the
guy who always had to leave exactly on time to drive my kids to their after school stuff.  My leaving was tolerated
because people knew what I chose not to admit; my wife is an alcoholic.

About me, I haven’t given up on my running or training.  I always get some in while the kids are busy.  If I didn’t run, I
think I would have to be hospitalized myself.  And here’s the other thing I feel resentful about.  For the entire time that
Allison has been too sick to screw me, I’ve used running to take the edge off.  Not once have I turned to another
woman.  Running and the kids and work have made me so tired in the last year that as soon as my head touched the
pillow I cratered.  It’s during the middle of the nights, like I said earlier, that I feel resentful because that’s when I feel
like jerking off.  But if I do, whenever I try, I think about Alli and I go soft.  

She used to have the opposite effect on me.  And I don’t just say I love her in the ordinary sort of way.  Ever since we
met during a tour of the horse barns, the Wednesday of Stampede week in 1979, she has consumed me.  At the time,
all I knew was that she was the daughter of some company mucky-muck who, it was rumoured, flew to work by
chopper, every day from his ranch.  I was just one of the new hires that he’d invited to watch the rodeo from the in
field.  None of us actually got to meet him that day.  He made an appearance and left.  But his daughter stayed.  And I
watched, her instead of the bulls and broncs, all afternoon.  

Alli had watched me too.  By the time she took my hand and we ducked into an empty horse stall, she was lit.  
Everyman’s dream right?  I told Carolyn the details.  We had stand-up sex, Alli facing into the corner, me doing as she
demanded, holding her wrists and forcing her hands over her head.  I also told Carolyn that throughout our
relationship, Alli needed to feel some element of danger, or physical threat whenever we had sex.  But typically,
especially when she was drunk, these either made her freak out, or fail to climax.  I had no idea, until recently that our
bedroom scenarios were tied to the kind of trauma she suffered as a kid.  I haven’t been able to maintain an erection
or come, ever since.  So I continue to release my frustration through my feet.  I run until my legs and lungs refuse to go
any further.

I’ve been selfish, or so I thought, talking about me and being angry with Alli, but as Carolyn helped me realize, my
thoughts and feelings are linked to a kind of – self defense, which is likely not very different than the sort of self
preservation my wife has been practicing for years.  Four weeks after Alli was hospitalized, the nurses had to get
permission to restrain her.  Carolyn was called in, and when she arrived, Alli had been screaming for an hour and a
half.  The origins of her fit took days to discover.  We, Carolyn and I, still don’t know by who. What Carolyn was able to
figure out is that Alli was sexually abused.

I’ve relied on friends and family a lot since then, especially our parents, and I’ve held my wife, held her a lot.  And…
We’ve both cried.  Cried buckets.  I’m not always sure why we’re crying but it seems to help somehow.  I cry in the
middle of the night too.  Just like tonight, which is usually followed by me getting up and wandering.  I know where all
the creaks and groans are in the floor and I go around them so I don’t wake the kids.  If Linda doesn’t have her blue
leave me alone beads on her bedroom door handle, I open the door a crack and I always feel relieved when I see the
c-shape her body makes when it sleeps.  About Linda, I think it’s weird that she seems to be the most okay with our
family situation.  I mean she’s the oldest and a girl, and all that as Carolyn has pointed out, but since her first
meeting, she’s been handling Alli’s alcoholism better than me.  Carolyn says it’s because Linda already knew in her
heart that her mother was sick.   

After I close Linda’s door and stop in the hall for another cry, I move toward the twins’ room.  Just two nights ago, I
was completely surprised to see Stephen on his own bunk.  He’s been sleeping with his brother, Alex, for I don’t know
how long.  I had sat in the twins’ doorway until the light began to play on the tree outside their window.  About Stephen,
there was another thing I had to face in session with Carolyn, his rope ladder to the garden shed roof wasn’t just in
case of a fire.  The child psychologist’s report and his storyboard drawings about the way Alli used his hockey stick
after school were another source of anger and resentment for me.  I had been too busy to notice that the bruises on
the back of my son’s ten-year-old thighs were not just from his goalie pads.

Tonight when I think about that, mostly I’m angry with myself.  And I refuse to let crying be the only outcome.  I force
myself to look beyond the now, to visualize, the way I would at the start of a race.  I force myself to realize that it was
good that the child psychologist uncovered the after school, back-of-the-thigh, hockey stick bruises one month after
they’d started.  I hang on to the idea that Alli’s crash has signaled – some kind of possibility.  I hang on to the idea that
she can figure out what happened to her.  

About me, my story and Alli’s story are still intertwined.  And they’re not going to end here, they’re going to take another
shape, because she still consumes me.  And I have a hunch, the same way I do on race day.  If I know a bit about the
route ahead, the elevation gains and losses, whether or not certain miles are going to be tougher than others, I can
do what it takes to run the marathon.  Because what the experts say is true, finishing is 90% mental and the other
10% – it’s mental.  You just have to hope and pray that on race day, you have your shit together enough to make it to
the start.