Four strokes couldn't kill Reese McHenry, one of the state's best singers, but they stalled her career

The Second Wife
with Horizontal Hold and Lud
Saturday, Nov. 7, 9:30 p.m., $7
The Pinhook
117 W. Main St., Durham
919-667-1100
www.thepinhook.com

Reese McHenry could not speak.

But the message she conveyed to her husband, Justin, on a November morning in 2008, was very clear: She was not going to the hospital.

For the last 24 hours, the usually boisterous McHenry had kept quiet in the couple’s Durham home. She’d occupied herself, she thinks, with painting or writing another number for the Dirty Little Heaters, the proudly bellicose garage-rock trio she’d led with her masterful soul-singing roar for the better part of a decade.

Justin remembers that they’d gotten in an argument at the start of the weekend, which wasn’t so rare at the time for the couple after two years of marriage. He wrote off her silence in the name of their spat. He didn’t know she couldn’t speak.

Reese, meanwhile, attributed her silence to stress, of which there was plenty of late. In a crashing economy, their mortgage payment hung above their home like a specter. And in a week, she would release her first seven-inch single since an earlier version of the Dirty Little Heaters dissolved in an acrimonious split. When a friend called Saturday evening, she could see the words in her mind but could only manage to repeat “umm,” as though her speech had been stuck forever on Pause.

“That’s all I could get out. It was so frustrating. My friend eventually said, ‘Dude, I don’t know what’s going on with you. I’m just going to let you go,’” McHenry remembers with a smirk. “She thought I was just being weird.”

The next morning, though, the phone rang again. This time, it was Mimi McLaughlin, another local musician who doubles as a physician’s assistant in internal medicine, likely calling to talk about the upcoming concert. Again, when Reese tried to speak, she could only mutter. She considered hanging up before she could get caught.

“Reese is not at a loss for words very often, and I couldn’t get her to give me a full sentence,” McLaughlin says. “I told her to put Justin on the phone, and I told him he needed to take her to the emergency room right away. He just said, ‘She won’t go.’”

Reese, then 36, never went to the hospital that morning, but McLaughlin became the first person to correctly diagnose her. Eight months later, an MRI revealed exactly what had happened: She’d had a large stroke on Friday night that had left a dead spot on her brain and temporarily stripped her of the ability to speak. In fact, before a neurologist told her so in July of the next year, she had already suffered at least three additional miniature strokes. They alternately caused her to lose her vision, her legs to swell and turn purple, and her neck to crackle as the blood began to flow again.

McHenry had suffered weak spells since at least 2005, when she sometimes had to sit down while playing rock shows. But she attributed that to over-exertion and poor nutrition, not the warning signs of a stroke.

“The neurologist said, ‘How’s your left leg been since your stroke?’ He kept talking, but I just kept staring at my sister-in-law,” McHenry says, the pace of her speech nervously quickening with the memory. “I eventually said, ‘Are you saying I’ve had a stroke?’ He said, ‘No, I’m saying you’ve had four strokes.’”

McHenry’s life changed in an instant: On the way home, she stopped smoking. When she got there, she called her band to cancel a tour that was set to start the next day. And five months later, she entered a six-year series of a half-dozen surgeries to correct atrial fibrillation and mitigate congestive heart failure. The procedures zapped the erratic, errant cells in her heart, installed a pacemaker and performed a gastric bypasssteps necessary to ensure she’d live, but with no guarantee she’d ever hit the road or step on a stage with her band again.

“I would sit on my couch and have this stone-cold fear that I would die at any time. When you’re right there, it’s terrifying,” she says. “My whole body would go cold, because it could happen at any time.”

But it didn’t. Instead, McHenry’s near-death experience turned into near slavish devotion to her health, where the person once too hidebound to see a doctor now solicits her physicians’ advice on diet-and-exercise options. And at the age of 42, she is embarking on a crusade to build her music career in a major way.

Tourist, her incredible and flinty new album released under the umbrella name The Second Wife, is only the second full-length record she’s ever issued. She hopes it is the beginning of a prolific streak. She is sitting on an album cut with Spider Bags leader Dan McGee and an archive of 50 finished songs, a notebook of countless ideas and a half-completed rock opera about Michael Peterson, the Durham novelist convicted in 2003 of killing his second wife. McHenry awaits only funding, a label and time; now, it seems, there is plenty.

“I feel like I’m lucky to be here. Maybe we are all lucky to be here. But I absolutely want to see everything in the world,” she says, her voice faintly breaking. “When I was thinking about that, how I’ve been given a second chance to do what I want to do, I was thinking about how I wish I had a job where I could travel. And then I realized I do: I’m a musician.”

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The year had not been a good one for Reese and Justin McHenry.

They’d been renting in Durham more or less since they met, but in early 2007, the bank approved the young couple for a $300,000 home loan. Reese was a long-term temporary employee at Duke University, and he was working a property maintenance job at Chapel Hill’s Southern Village, making construction repairs and landscaping fixes as needed. The two knew enough about their income to recognize that $300,000 was an outlandish home price. They even suspected that the idea of owning a home was untenable, especially if someone lost a job. The home could vanish as quickly as it had appeared.

“They approved these two assholes for $300,000,” Reese says, laughing ruefully. “For a while, Justin and I thought, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to give us this house. That’s hilarious, right?’ We started crunching the numbers and freaking out.”

But the loan officer, Lucy, reassured them and told them to trust the experts. Though their mortgage payment of about $1,200 would effectively double their rent, the bank knew what was best: Why would the bank lend them money, after all, without expecting to get it back? Beneath bobbing brown curls, Reese answers with a sheepish grin and a sigh that says she now knows better.

“We were the subprime people, trying to start our family,” she says. “And then I got sick and lost my job. And then we lost the house.”

McHenry had long joked that her heart danced like a jazz band. She would often tell Justin to check her pulsenot because she was worried about it, but because its runaway rhythm simply made her laugh. But it became less of a punch line. “I’ve always had a hard time feeling her heartbeat, especially at her wrist,” says Justin. “But when I could catch it, it did seem weird. But I didn’t take things seriously enough, especially with all the stress and how we weren’t getting along that well. I thought that was it.” As their worries mounted, so did McHenry’s symptoms, helping to shape a cycle that almost killed her. Near the start of the summer of 2009, six months after her first stroke but before she knew to call it that, McHenry wasn’t well. Her ankles and stomach bulged with edema, and she felt tired. While working at the Duke University switchboard, two days short of the completion of a 90-day probationary period, she began throwing up. She left work and spent the night heaving, with Justin at her side in an attempt to comfort her. The next morning, her physician diagnosed that jazz band in her chest as atrial fibrillation and prescribed a legion of medicines. When McHenry returned to work, she learned she’d been firedat least in part, she saysfor missing desk duties because she’d been sick. Suddenly, she was dealing with the worry of home ownership on a single income and the woozy feeling of her new medicines. During the next month, the strokes seemed to arrive one after another until, at last, the diagnosis came. McHenry’s shows diminished to a trickle. She quit the part-time job she’d found at a nearby gym, where she worked with kids. She and Justin sold their Durham home to avoid foreclosure and rented a nearby duplex. And they gave up on their sporadic dream of having children. She couldn’t afford it, financially or physically. There were days where her chief ambition became as simple as waiting until Justin came home from work to help her to the bathroom or to make her a meal, because she didn’t think she could walk that far. Some days, the hope was simply to stay out of congestive heart failure. Whenever it happened, she would taste something metallic. Her body would begin to feel heavy, as if saddled with weights. She would start to cough up pink liquid and, most often, head to the hospitalmisery, she says. “For a while, I tried not to think about what my life had been like. Wishing that it were different was making me crazy,” she says. “My goals got really small. My whole world got really small.” The center of that world became Justin, whom she calls a saint. He didn’t miss work or get sick, she says, and he didn’t complain about his multiplied domestic duties. The energy of their earlier stresses suddenly went to her survival. A Cary native, Justin met Reese when she walked into the gas station at which he worked in his 20s. She was visiting the family of friends who had helped raise her during her difficult childhood, and she was immediately attracted to the tall fellow who looked like John Lennon. She subsequently got a second job at the same Exxon, and they bonded at the counter over classic rock CDs he’d bring into work. She made him laugh, and though he wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, he soon realized he was in love. When she launched the Dirty Little Heaters a few years later as a delirious drum-guitar-and-soul duo, she introduced him to the music scene that had always been in his backyard. Reese labels Justin her rock, but he starts to cry and even apologize when he talks about the turmoil of the last six years. His wife was dying. “Every month, we were down in the ERher heart, the fluids in her lungs, basically drowning in her own fluids with pulmonary edema. When things are bad, I put my head down and barrel through. That’s my personality. It’s only afterward that I realize the totality of everything,” he says. “I don’t want to say [death] was a constant thought, but it was always an underlying thought. You don’t want to think about it, but it’s there.” Justin could often track Reese’s health by whether or not she was writing songs, something she’d done rather compulsively since she was a teenager. During the worst days, though, she didn’t have the energy to entertain the option. But she would record voice memos of lyrical fragments and melodic ideas into her cellphone, setting them aside until she could grab a guitar. In 2010 and 2011, she was in the hospital about as much as she was out of it, a consequence of the atrial fibrillation and congestive heart failure that had gone undiagnosed for decades. Pulmonary edema plagued her even while sitting still, as did severe exhaustion. If she scheduled a show, there was a strong chance she would cancel; if she actually played, she’d be so tired on the drive home that she would forget how to shift gears or navigate. More than once, Justin left home late at night to pick her up when she knew driving wasn’t safe. Rock ‘n’ roll dreams seemed to be the least of her worries. But not long after doctors installed her pacemaker in 2011, she slowly returned to music in earnest. Recent years had yielded ample emotional fodder. Doubling over with laughter, she calls that the silver lining of her sickness. “I’ve got a lot of stuff, a lot of feelings about things that have happened and being sick,” she says, managing a smile. “I try to shroud songs about other people with other words. But the songs that are about me being sick are not fun, not funny. They’re pretty cut-and-dry.” Justin began to realize that writing songs wasn’t just Reese’s life’s work; it was her life. “I very gradually figured out that is what she wants to do. Everyone wants to make money and be successful and be famous, but that’s not her primary reason. It’s what she’s built to do,” says Justin. “As long as she could physically do it, she was writing songs.”

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In the spring of 2012, three years after Reese’s strokes were finally diagnosed and less than a year after her pacemaker was installed, she and Justin left Durham. They settled into a small house on a wide plot of land between Pittsboro and Chapel Hill, an old farm where the roaming livestock has largely been replaced by rows of sleek solar panels.

Late in the afternoon, Reese climbs from the couch and walks toward the door. She calls Maggie, the affectionate 10-year-old gray dog that often kept her company during her sickness while Justin worked. Maggie bolts to the door and wags her tail, knowing what’s in store.

Reese turns right and heads toward a gravel driveway, moving up a slight hill that passes a series of barns. Her pace is measured but comfortable. Not so long ago, she couldn’t do this at all. Inside the house, a chair still sits halfway between the couch and the bathroom, a reminder of the days when that trek required rest. She and Maggie now walk at least three miles every day.

McHenry talks for the next half hour, explaining how Medicare, debt forgiveness and persistence have helped her and Justin mostly crawl out from beneath a $350,000 medical bill. She flaunts the decision to have gastric bypass surgery in May, which has already helped her drop 70 pounds and to begin exercising in earnest. And she extols the band that helped her cut Tourist, a wonderful album that mostly leaves behind the distorted fisticuffs of Dirty Little Heaters for turns through smoldering country balladry and slurred primitive rock. She was once a dead ringer for Janis Joplin, but she sounds a little like Joe Strummer and Lucinda Williams now, adding a hard-won versatility to her vocals. It’s as if she’s been waiting for this moment, fixing her life so she can focus on and finesse her reason for living.

“This is what I was born to do. This is what I do, and I accept that,” she says. “My gift is to write songs that are good enough for meand, I hope, good enough for other people, too.”

At the top of the hill, McHenry turns in every direction, explaining what’s through those woods or just beyond that pass.

Beneath the low, slate-colored sky, she grins the entire time. At last, she calls Maggie and makes one final turn for home.

Grayson Haver Currin is the managing+music editor of the INDY.