We were determined that regardless of how we really felt, everyone around Mara would make an attempt to act positive once she started coming around.  Now that her fever was under control, and her breathing was better (for the time being) because of the tracheotomy, we felt she was finally stabilized and ready to move forward.  By this time, she had spent a good week or longer in ICU.  Whether it was simply due to my utterly hopeless mental state, or simply because I had learned the hard way that life could always get worse, I tried to prepare myself for the next disaster.  There had to be one coming; there always was.

In the meantime, I was forcing myself to continue through life day by day.  When I came home around midnight the evening Mara attempted suicide, my mother was still awake.  She did not come out and ask me how Mara was doing, or why she'd left in an ambulance.  She didn't ask me the next day either.  In fact, she never asked; she never said a word about anything.  Instead, about ten days later I came home to find she had left.  Plenty of her belongings were left behind, but my mother had moved out as she'd promised Mara.  In fact, in her suicide note to me, Mara had specifically asked that I make sure my mother lived up to that promise.  I hadn't intended to, but she made that decision for me.  I haven't spoken to my mother since.

Mara's mother had been staying at a nearby Residence Inn, and now she checked out of there and moved into my mother's old room for the time being.  I didn't care - I was rarely home.  If I wasn't at work (where I'd be six days a week, for a total of sixty hours) or at the hospital, I was getting drunk, spending time with the friends who could tolerate my presence considering what I was going through, or leaning on a woman who I had started feeling more than friendship for.  She didn't have a real understanding of the nature of my marriage of convenience, and that always made me feel worse even when I was trying to feel better.  It just seemed way too complicated to explain, so during those periods when the relationship was more than friendship, I played it off as if we were sneaking around behind Mara's back, when in fact she was the one who had demanded I find companionship elsewhere.  During the time Mara was in the hospital, though, it was all she or anyone else could do to keep me from killing myself or someone else.  How I got through this time without a complete nervous breakdown in beyond me.  Instead I survived, and beat myself up with guilt for doing so whenever I get a chance.

To top it off, financially we were in a horrible mess.  The only way I was able to continue paying the minimum payments on all of our credit cards was to apply for new ones, or take cash advances from those which offered them.  Whenever possible I'd pay for meals or clothes or anything else for friends, charging the purchases and getting some cash back to help pay the other bills.  Mara and I had talked about bankruptcy a number of times, but we'd never thrown in the towel and done it, and now I couldn't face that nightmare while I was busy with this one.  So I tried to ignore the problem, and when I couldn't I'd drink it away.

Back at the hospital, as Mara spent more time awake each day, doctors were confronted with a new riddle: her immobility.  She seemed barely able to move anything on her own except her head and neck.  This was when they discovered (don't ask me how) that during the "gastric lavage" - a fancy term for pumping somebody's stomach - Mara must have had a rare reaction to the paralytic drug she was given.  I can't recall all the details, but I know they now expected her to require quite a bit of physical therapy before she'd be able to use her arms and legs properly again.  Walking was going to be difficult, but would eventually come back.  In addition, her muscle tone was worse than ever simply from being bedridden so long.

We didn't tell Mara any of these specifics.  Instead, we simply told her that she'd get her strength back over time.  At least she was talking and communicating.  Not surprisingly, she was very unhappy that she woke up at all, much less in a hospital ICU with an IV and a tracheotomy.  She seemed particularly bitter that I hadn't somehow stopped her relatives from saving her.  In fact, I think she suspected I'd told them to come to Texas in the first placed.  And, as usual, she cursed her terrible luck (from her point of view).  When we were alone, she would rattle off a number of other recent times she had considered killing herself.  "Why did I have to choose the one day my mother and sister came to rescue me."  Mara didn't view it as a sign that she was meant to live.  To her, it was a sign that she had been cursed.

Obviously, this suicide attempt was not one to be referred to as a "cry for help."

(watch for the next chapter in this series in the next few days)