Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir Read Online Free Page A

expression—and I could see the toll this intensely stressful new job was taking on him. Normally, I would have pulled him toward me and tried to make him smile, butinstead, in my obsession, I thrust his stethoscope at him. “My heart,” I said. “Something’s wrong with it.” As far as I was concerned, my diagnosis wasn’t a matter of choosing between panic attacks and heart problems; it was both.
    He placed an armful of papers down on the foyer table and listened to my heart. “It’s bad,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
    “Shhhh.”
    “It’s an arrhythmia.”
    “It’s not an arrhythmia.”
    “Then it’s a murmur.”
    “Shhhh,” he said, tracing the stethoscope around under my shirt. “It sounds fine.” He pulled the stethoscope out of his ears and placed it on top of the table.
    I picked it up and gave my heart a listen. It was fast. “I don’t know,” I said. “How much did you study hearts in medical school?”
    “Not that much.”
    “Then how do you know it’s normal?”
    “Because I know.”
    “That’s not very convincing.” I took the stethoscope back. “Maybe I should see a cardiologist.”
    “I’m telling you,” he said, his voice rising in exasperation, “your heart is fine.” He stood silently looking at me with that wide-eyed defiant stare he gave when he had nothing more to say.
    I knew what he was thinking—that this was nothing more than the worries of a hypochondriac—and I understood why he would see it that way. Maybe if I’d told him that my heart had felt out of control since I was eleven, he would have invited me to come sit with him, and we could have talked about it. But my past frightened Larry, and sometimes it frightened me to tell him about it. He knew a basic sketch of my childhood, my years of homelessness, but the details stayed tucked away. It was complicated, what to tell and what not to tell. Part of what I loved so much about Larry was his wholesomeness—his persistent boyishness (even as a chairman in his early forties, he was regularlymistaken for a student) and general lack of worldly experience—and how everything about him stood as an antidote to the darkness of the life I’d once known. In omitting the grit of my childhood, it was as if I were claiming some of Larry’s innocence as my own, as if together we could create a different story.
    And we did. We’d filled our first house, a small old Cape Cod, with dancing, with the scents of fresh flowers and roasting vegetables and sweet things baking, with pictures of us smiling the smiles of people in love. We held hands always—whether we were in the car, bobbing our heads to corny disco songs, or lying in bed, having random discussions about the interconnectedness of particles—even in the rare moments when we were arguing. Sometimes when Larry got called in to do trauma surgery in the middle of the night, I went with him. When I taught writing classes in the evening, he waited outside the door of my classroom just to carry my books the hundred feet to my car. We spent hours past midnight standing in our backyard and watching the sky through Larry’s telescope, then talked into the morning about the universe, old dreams, what our children might look like. There’s an old question meant to test your love: would you fight a bear to save this person? And with Larry, I never had any doubts. I would have braved any bear for him, and he would have done the same for me. And for a while in the beginning, as we were creating our new story, I forgot about my own. I let myself believe that ours was the only one.
    But palimpsests are problematic. No matter how many stories you put on top of the first story, the first one is always there, visible. And more than innocence, I wanted intimacy, which is difficult when you give your partner only sketches of yourself, when the person who loves you doesn’t want to know more. It’s not that Larry didn’t know me—he knew my character, my quirks, my joys; he