Free What I Had Before I Had You by Sarah Cornwell Page A

Daniel’s skis on top of his own and showing him how to take the curves, or leaning over Carrie’s shoulder and pointing at whales surfacing in some tropical bay. So many years of his lemon-and-coffee scent, his neat-freakery, his three forgetful trips back inside before each workday. It didn’t occur to me that I could lose those things, or even that they were things I’d mind losing.
    When I met Sam, we were both twenty-six. He was a sous-chef at a restaurant out of my price range and I was, momentarily, a vegan. I tasted butter in my mashed potatoes, and he came out of the kitchen to apologize, bowing over me and my date, standing his fingertips on the edge of the table. It was his sincerity that caught me. In later years, we would make mashed potatoes yellow with butter and laugh that we met thanks to one of my briefest enthusiasms. No matter how steady and stable I am, with my pills and my set bedtime and my one-glass-of-wine rule, I will always be given to enthusiasms. I know to examine them for source and relevance, and Sam used to help me do that. My enthusiasm for keeping chickens, for instance, we examined and agreed would be reasonable and educational for the kids. My enthusiasm for wooden boat building we examined, found expensive and unlikely, and mutually discarded. Though I would have come to that conclusion on my own.
    I think now that Sam liked being the sane one, the supporter, that maybe it was why we worked for so long. My mild and occasional unsteadiness, my monthly check-ins with my psychiatrist—these things made him feel whole. There are times when my disorder gets wise to the chemicals I’m feeding it, and shape-shifts, resurges, bubbles up. I feel that heating-up feeling, a disproportionate joy, or a sour downward slide, and if I don’t recognize it myself, Sam sees it in the patterns of my behavior, and I go to my psychiatrist for an adjustment of my meds. I don’t always go gently, but I go. It can take a few weeks to figure out the new dosage or the new drug, and during those weeks, I am my own prisoner. I give Sam my credit cards and do my best to be honest with him about my thoughts. In some ways, Sam has been my mood chart; now I will have to work harder for such self-knowledge. Maybe I will keep a written chart again, like my mother’s.
    The kids never picked up on my shifting moods until last time, and then it was only Daniel who understood. Carrie construed my sudden temper entirely as response to her cutting a half-day of school with her friends. She didn’t even use the time well; she went to someone’s basement and watched TV. I let her misinterpret me. I probably should have been angrier, anyway.
    But Daniel seemed to know. For a week I slept only for minutes at a time. I spent the nights reading fat paperbacks that had belonged to my mother, some with her inane marginalia ( Shocking! How sad. Delightful ). I wonder if she came back to these moments when she needed a kick, as I did now. One night Daniel tripped sleepy-headed from his room to curl against me in my armchair in the yellow lamp glow. “You can’t sleep,” he said.
    “No.”
    We made cookies and did a thousand-piece puzzle. We met each night like this, furtive as burglars, and neither of us mentioned it to Sam or Carrie. I faced the mornings feeling charged, absent my counterweights. At work, I reorganized our administrative systems so well and so lustily that the vice principal ordered early voting for employee of the month and stuck a star sticker to my shirt.
    When I picked Daniel up from the babysitter’s house, he watched me. “Did you eat Froot Loops?” he asked me accusingly. This was our question for inexplicable happiness, an old family joke.
    We drove to the park instead of home and lay eating Swedish Fish from my purse and watching the sun move through the layering leaves, until some tattooed, shirtless young hippies passed close by and I was struck friendly. We learned to play their drums and that