I was eating lunch alone in my classroom—I generally try to avoid the teacher’s lounge and the ubiquity of its gossip hens. With a turkey sandwich in hand, I sat in front of the computer, listlessly clicking through websites, when I randomly began to think about Jessica, a woman with whom I had a tumultuous relationship in 20s.

I have difficulty believing intimacy simply vanishes from our thoughts and memories once we’ve moved on to other relationships, so I have a tendency to keep loose tabs on my exes, either through social media or, in some cases, spotty correspondence. Of course, some would rather not have anything to do with me—some for good reason—and that is also fine, as long I know they are well.

With Jess, however, she disappeared completely from my life, and I never heard from Jess again. I found this strange so I ran an Internet search on her name.

I nearly choked when the results came up seconds later and knew that I wouldn’t be finishing my lunch.

The first search result was a link to Jess’ obituary.

###

After finishing college, with few prospects for teaching positions on the East Coast, I moved to Las Vegas where I taught high school for a year. The experience unfolded as one might expect the experience to unfold for a 23 year-old man living in a place that celebrates its tireless debauchery. I met Jess toward the end of my stay in Sin City, at a time when I was beginning to realize the importance of “last call.”

One night, after taking a tough and ill-advised $500 hit at a blackjack table—a gambler, I am not—I retreated to a bar around the corner from my apartment in North Las Vegas to lick my wounds beside my friend, Brad. While lamenting a fiscal fuck-up that would leave me eating grilled cheese until my next paycheck, I spotted a striking brunette sitting alone across the bar.

“Look at her,” I said to Brad. “She is stunning.”

A gay man, Brad gave her a cursory glance. “Pretty,” he said. “You should buy her a drink.”

“Why would a girl like that be interested in me?”

“Stop it, Mr. Self-Deprecating,” Brad said. “Besides, how much more can you lose tonight?”

Brad was right. While a smarter man may have seen the shit-show at the blackjack table as an ominous harbinger, I went ahead and asked the bartender to buy her a drink on me. Hours later, Jess and I left the windowless bar and were greeted by an orange desert sun climbing the horizon. Squinting and unsteady, we decided to skip the breakfast and went back to my apartment instead.

Jess never left.

###

After a year of teaching in Vegas, I took the first ticket out of town and accepted a teaching position in New Hampshire. A native Californian who had never been east of the Mississippi River, Jess decided to pack her things, leave her family in Vegas and move with me. We had known each other less than a month and were still in throes of our honeymoon-stage—lightness and levity and lots of sex.

In retrospect, there were warning flags that a less impetuous person would’ve picked up. For example, Jess had difficulty holding down a job. In the two months we’d known each other, she had blown through three retail jobs. She would get hired and quickly stop showing up for her shifts, either sleeping through them or blatantly blowing them off. She would also drink deep into the nights, until daylight; apparently, the first all-nighter with me was not an anomaly.

Somewhere in the New Mexico desert, however, I started to notice the cracks in the foundation. We started to fight viciously as soon as our U-Haul truck hit I-20, and the fights didn’t stop during the three-day drive. One night, on Jess’ birthday, we stopped at a motel off the interstate in Oklahoma, and Jess went out for cigarettes and disappeared until 4 a.m., arriving at our room drunk and disheveled, pounding on the door.

By the time we arrived in New Hampshire, I sensed I had made a grave mistake but hoped against all hope that the tension would resolve itself once we settled into our new apartment. The tension was never resolved, and it would be another two years until Jess would finally move out.

###

Before Jess, I knew little about manic depression, other than the fact that Kurt Cobain succumbed to it. While I suffered from my own bouts with generalized depression and anxiety, I didn’t truly understand the concept of being “manic” until I met Jess. I didn’t understand how someone could lack the capacity to wake up for work one day then get up the next day with an unflappable exuberance for life, a seemingly infinite well of optimism about the future.

In New Hampshire, like Vegas, Jess couldn’t hold a job. Personable and pretty, she had no problems interviewing—if she showed up for the interview—and she would land jobs in retail or food service. But shortly after being hired, she would start sleeping through her shifts, or she would be too drunk to go to work. She would then go through prolonged periods of unemployment, staying in bed with the shades drawn until sundown. At night, she would be out at the local bars, befriending men who would buy her drinks; some nights she would not make it home until I was fast asleep, if she made it home at all.

I’d later confirm what I suspected: I was far from the only man to ever buy her a beer and take her back to his place.

After a year and a half of nightly arguments and paying the rent alone, I coldly ordered Jess to move out of the apartment. She was 3,000 miles from her nearest relative, alone on the East Coast, and in true asshole form, I told her to pack her shit and leave. To this day, my insensitivity to her situation astounds and embarrasses me, and when I read her obituary five years later, my greatest regret was that I never properly apologized for it.

Jess moved in with one of her male friends from the bar, a punk rock kid who lived in the attic of a house his brother rented with his wife. As soon as Jess’s stuff was out of the apartment, she began to appear at the door on weekend nights on her way home from the bars. We would sit at the kitchen table and drink boxed wine before slipping into bed for sloppy drunken sex. Jess still didn’t have a job, and I never bothered to ask her how she was affording to live. Slowly, she began to work her way back into the apartment and into my life—as if she never left.

###

I was teaching summer school to adolescents indignant to be spending their vacation in a sweltering classroom with Catcher in the Rye—they weren’t picking up on the situational irony—when a phone call from the Concord police came through to the classroom. The officer told me there was an incident at my apartment and they needed me there immediately. My students got their wish, and I dismissed the class early.

When I arrived at my apartment, two cruisers were parked in front, and fresh-faced police officer got out and greeted me. “There is a young woman named Jessica in the apartment, and she has locked herself in the bathroom,” the officer said. “The neighbors called us after she was hanging out the window, clearly intoxicated, yelling profanities at them. Is Jessica your girlfriend?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Does she live with you?” he asked.

“That’s complicated, too.”

Finally, I went into the apartment, and another officer was standing outside the closed bathroom door, trying to talk to Jess. He informed me that Jess said she swallowed half a bottle of aspirin, and they had to call an ambulance. They were trying to talk her out of the bathroom, but if she continued to refuse, they were going to break down the door. I asked him to let me try talking to her first.

“Jess, what’s wrong?” I asked through the door. “Open up.”

“Too drunk,” she slurred. “Too sleepy to open.”

When the police broke down the door, Jess was huddled in a fetal position inside the claw foot bathtub. I sat beside her, holding her head until the ambulance arrived. Jess was rushed to the emergency room where she had her stomach pumped. She was held for the night, administered a psychological exam the next morning and remarkably released in the afternoon with a list of phone numbers for rehab facilities in the area.

That night, Jess and I ordered a pizza and spent the evening in the bedroom, listening to music and calling the numbers on the list, hoping to find her a bed at a rehab. Finally, a facility in Nashua called with an opening, and we scheduled an in-take appointment for Jess first thing in the morning. It was the last night Jess and I would spend in the same bed.

I drove Jess, frightened and reluctant, to the rehab with her one suitcase, the suitcase she used for her trips home to visit her family in Vegas. As I said goodbye, Jess shook, her eyes wide with the look of a scared little girl.

On the ride home, alone in the car, I cried. To this day, it still feels like it was all somehow my fault.

###

Jess didn’t immediately and completely vanish from my life. We kept letters while she was in rehab, where she explained her diagnosis to me, but once out of rehab and attending AA meetings, she was told to stay away from the people in her life who might trigger a relapse.

Translation: me.

After the incident with the police, my landlord made it clear that at the end of the month I would be persona non grata at the apartment, and I moved in with a friend in Manchester. Other than the occasional phone call, I didn’t hear much from Jess. We were living in different towns, and Jess was working the Twelve Steps in AA—although I still wonder if the drinking was the root of Jess’ problems or her erroneous way of self-medicating.

Shortly after Jess left my life, I met my wife. The last I’d heard, Jess was sober and had moved back to Las Vegas to be close to her family. That was until I stumbled upon her obituary that day during lunch.

I’ll likely never know exactly how Jess died, and I am not if I want to know. I have my theories, of course, but they are exactly that: theories. The fact is that Jess has left this world, and while she was here, something monstrous had a hold of her.

“You’re really nice,” Jess said to me the night I bought her that first beer at the bar in Las Vegas.

“I’m really not,” I said, laughing.

Jess paused and pursed her lips. “Me neither,” she said. “But I really want to be.”

“What Happened in Vegas: Living with a Manic Ex”

Nathan Graziano

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