Illusions Complete Series (87 page)

To my delight, a woman answered the door. She was about 55, and had the same cheekbones and blue eyes as Rachael. I had to assume that this was Rachael’s mother.

“Uh, Mrs. Smyth?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Who’s asking?”

“My name is Ryan. Ryan Gallagher. I, uh, went to school, Harvard, with your daughter, Rachael.”

The suspicious look on her face melted, and was replaced by a look of inescapable sadness. She looked down at the ground in front of her, and, when she lifted her head, there were tears in the corner of her eyes. “Rachael. I haven’t heard her name mentioned in many a year.” Then she looked at me and gestured with her hands to come in. “Come in, come in.”

I felt relief flood through me, then I waved John on. I had explained to him, before I got out of the car, that I would call him when I needed him to come back.

I walked into the tiny brownstone that was decorated modernly. Modern art on the walls that was truly magnificent – cubist in detail, contrasting colors and gorgeous lighting. The huge windows streamed sunlight that illuminated the entire room. There was an enormous Ficus tree that was growing in a pot, and various tropical plants that were in other pots that were evidently hand-crafted. There was a bird in a cage that was singing. Iris would’ve digged this place – she loved birds and she loved modernism.

Thinking of Iris, I smiled. God, I really did love that woman, and there was something about being here that made me realize it anew.

“Uh, have a seat. Have a seat,” the woman said, gesturing towards the blue couch with multiple colored pillows.

I sat down.

“Could I get you some tea or wine or anything?”

Wine. It was around noon. I wondered if drinking wine in the middle of the day was something that this woman often did. “Yes, please. Whatever you’re drinking.”

At that, she went into the kitchen and I heard her pour two glasses of wine. “Here,” she said. “I hope you like red.”

“I surely do.”

She sipped her wine and looked at me quizzically. I knew that I had to come clean, but, where to start?

“Um, I. Is your husband around?” I asked, then immediately felt that was the wrong question to start with . She might think that a) I’m hitting on her or b) I’m an intruder who was trying to determine if she was alone, so that I could rob her.

But, she appeared to think neither of these things. “No. I mean, my husband doesn’t live here with me anymore. After Rachael…well, couples can do one of two things  when they lose a child. They can either grow stronger or fall apart. We fell apart.”

I nodded my head. “Yes, I understand that. I, uh, lost a child as well.”

Her face softened as she covered one of my hands with hers. “Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that. May I ask what happened?”

“SIDS,” I said.

She nodded. “That must be so difficult. It’s bad enough to lose a child when she’s just 20, and on the verge of the rest of her life. But to lose an infant, who never got to experience life at all…that’s just not fair.”

I nodded, feeling the familiar feeling of devastation, grief and loss. Being with this woman was cathartic, I was finding, as I suddenly realized that I had never really processed my emotions about Mia’s death. It was something that so devastating that I covered it up. I was a man, and men weren’t supposed to fall apart when they lose their child. They’re supposed to be strong and carry on and help the mother through. After all, it was the mother who was supposed to feel the emotions and depression from losing a child, not the father.

Yet I did feel the devastation. I just buried it, like I had so many other things in my life.

“Yes, yes, it was probably the worst thing to happen in my life,” I said, honestly.

She nodded. “Let me show you something,” she said. “Follow me.”

I followed her up the stairs of her brownstone, and she opened up the door to a room. There, in that room, was a young girl’s bed. The curtains were pink and filmy, and there was a desk against the wall that had various pencils and pens lying across it. On the wall, there were various medals – cross country medals, and other awards that Rachael had won in writing competitions. There were pictures everywhere – pictures of Rachael’s cross country team, and pictures of Rachael and others in various places. Some were her and her friends on a ski trip, others of her at various parties. There was even a picture of her when she was around 12 years old – an old school picture that was blown up and put in a frame. Her blue eyes stared out, and her smile was full of metal braces.

I felt a lump in my throat. It was what I did with Mia’s room. I never did touch a single thing in that room until Iris and I moved into a different house. I never told Iris this, but cleaning out Mia’s room, which I had to do because we were making the move to the new house, was probably the single hardest thing that I’ve had to face. I cried like a baby when I put her dresses and shoes into a box that was headed for storage, and her little stuffed animals that went with them. Everything that belonged to Mia was put into a special hermetically sealed storage, and it ripped my heart out to do it. I was depressed for several days after that, not wanting to talk to or see anybody.

But Iris never knew any of this, because she was recovering from what Andrew had done to her at the time, and there was no way that I would dump more grief onto her lap. So, I never said a word to her about my feelings about cleaning out Mia’s room.

I suddenly felt myself crying when I was looking in at Rachael’s room. The woman put her arm around me. “It’s hard, isn’t it? I somehow think that maybe you did the same thing with your little girl’s room.”

“Yes, yes, I did. I did. I had to clean out her room, though, because I was moving to a new place, and that was so difficult.” Somehow, my visit to Mrs. Smyth was taking a different turn. It was helping me access my feelings, really access my feelings, about losing Mia. “God, that was so unfair, what happened to Mia. So unfair. She never even got to take her first step. She never got to lose a tooth, and find a quarter under her pillow, or sit on Santa’s lap. She never got to have that first crush or first dance or first anything. It was so cruel. Fate was so cruel.”

I was really sobbing, now, but I knew that I had to get it together. This visit wasn’t about me, and it was never meant to be. It was about making peace with the past and giving Rachael’s family a sense of closure.

Yet, I apparently needed closure as well.

Mrs. Smyth put her arms around me, and I could feel her crying as well. I hugged her tightly, my head buried in her shoulder, as the tears fell uncontrollably. I could never access my devastation about all that was taken from Mia when she died the way that she did. I knew that it was unfair, yet I went along and processed it as I did everything else that was bad in my life – it was something that was simply too painful to really examine, so I didn’t. I couldn’t really open that door of grief, because it might have been the last straw.

Yet, here I was, with this woman I barely knew, accessing how I was feeling about Mia, and feeling the weight of her death slowly being lifted off of my shoulders with every tear that I shed. I clung to this woman tightly, as if she was literally going to save my life.

And, looking back, perhaps she did just that, in her way.

In her quiet way, maybe she did save my life. 

∞

Later on that evening, after both of us poured out our endless well of tears, I was finally ready to tell Mrs. Smyth why I came to visit her in the first place.

“Uh, Mrs. Smyth,” I said.

“Oh, I haven’t gotten around to addressing this ‘Mrs. Smyth’ business. Please call me Pamela.”

“Ok, Pamela. I, uh, there was a reason why I came to visit you. I mean, I did come to visit you because I knew your daughter. But, there’s something else.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I, uh, I was responsible for her death.”

She barely reacted to this. “In what way, Ryan?”

“She, uh, went to the party with me. I was her companion for the evening, and I should’ve also been her protector. But, I wasn’t that at all. I, uh, had a serious drug problem. I went into the bathroom and got high, and then I not only ignored Rachael’s pleas to go home, but I encouraged her to drink even more. If it weren’t for me, your daughter would still be alive.”

Pamela looked sad, but she shook her head. “You can’t blame yourself. I somehow knew that you were here because you blamed yourself for what happened, but you need to stop doing that.” She paused for a long time, looking pensively at her drink. “The truth is, Ryan, was that my daughter was an alcoholic and was bent on destruction. What happened at that party would’ve happened, sooner or later, to her. She was hospitalized several times for acute alcohol poisoning when she was in high school. I almost didn’t let her go away to school, because I wanted to have her in my sights at all times. But, that wasn’t realistic, so I let her enroll at Harvard. So, you might have thought that you were somehow ruining a pristine girl, and that you somehow forced her to drink so much that she died, but you need to stop thinking that. It was inevitable.”

“I don’t understand. She acted like she didn’t drink at all. She also acted like it was her very first party.”

Pamela sighed. “Yes, she always pulled the innocent act with people. She never wanted to admit that she had a problem, so she always acted like she didn’t know the first thing about drinking and partying. But, trust me, she did know. She had been drinking since she was 12. Her father got her into it. Please, Ryan, please stop feeling that you were responsible for what happened to her. You’re not responsible. She was. She was, dammit.”

Her words gave me absolution, in a way, but I didn’t feel exactly redeemed. “I appreciate the words, Pamela. I’ve been carrying around this guilt for all these years, although I haven’t exactly acknowledged it to anybody. Except for you, right now. I’m not sure that I feel any less responsible for what happened now then before I met you. So, I still want to apologize for what happened. I, I, I was different then. So different. I was bent on destruction myself. So bent on destruction. Rachael seemed to be a victim of my casualness in how I treated people and life in general.”

“I understand that. I know that you’ve known a great deal of pain. You carry it around with you, and it’s evident in everything about you. It’s in your eyes, in your stance, in your words. You need to have a lighter load. I hope that my words can give that to you. Whatever it is that has happened in your life that has given you this heavy heart is something that you probably need to come to terms with. But you don’t need the death of my daughter on your conscience as well. I hope that I can unburden you about this. I loved my daughter very much. But she had her father’s genetics, unfortunately. Brilliant, but a complete alcoholic. Always was.”

Then she took another sip of her wine and stared pensively out the window. “I lied to you, when you came in. Sort of. I mean, my husband isn’t here, that’s true. But the reason why he’s not here is because he’s homeless. He’s one of those guys who hold signs up in the street, begging for excess change. That would’ve been Rachael’s fate if she would’ve lived. I can almost guarantee it.”

At that, I felt immense sadness and regret. Sadness and regret that I would soon be leaving this lovely, and lonely, woman. This woman whose lamentations rival my own. She was one of those people who Thoreau spoke of when he said that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. To tell the truth, I exemplified that quote as well. Quiet desperation. There were bright spots in my life, of course, and Iris and Dalilah had much to do with that. But, inwardly, there was a quiet desperation that was always there, buried beneath the smiles and jokes I told. I tapped into this while I sat there that day with Pamela, whose pain mirrored my own.

And, somehow, that day, I started the process of truly healing.

I stayed the night in the guest bedroom upstairs, and, the next day, I gave Pamela a hug goodbye. “Thank you,” I said to her. “You can’t know how much you’ve helped me.”

“I’m glad. I see you. I see that you’re really a good person. Your pain runs deep, and I see that, too. You don’t deserve to live with that dark cloud above your head. You need to let the past go. You can’t change it. But it can change you, and not for the better. So, please, let it go. Rachael, Mia, everything that has led to the desperation in your eyes – let it go. Move forward. Regrets serve no purpose in this world. Remember that.”

I nodded, then felt the cathartic tears well up in my eyes again. I was ready to return to my beautiful wife and my beautiful daughter. I was ready to own up to my crappy way that I treated the one person who has had my back virtually my entire life. The shooting was the catalyst for all of this, and I started to think that facing death the way that I did at Andrew’s hands was the best thing that ever happened to me.

I was ready, but there was one thing that I needed to do before I could face my wife, daughter and best friend with the open heart that I truly needed to let all of them in again.

Chapter Eighteen

Iris

Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.
I mean, I had a feeling that Nick was feeling this way. But why did he have to articulate it? Why did he have to say it out loud? As if I didn’t have enough to deal with, now I had to deal with the fact that the man that I’m attracted to, who also happens to be my husband’s best friend, was telling me that he was falling in love with me.

And I was still living under his roof.

“Nick, why do have to do this to me?”

“I’m sorry, Iris. I just can’t stop  thinking about you. I wish that I felt differently, believe me. I mean, I can’t do this to Ryan, but I can’t keep it in any longer.”

“Well, it can’t happen. Ryan is still my husband. I know that it doesn’t seem that way right now, and it certainly doesn’t feel that way to me, but he’s my husband and your best friend. So, please, get back to the office, so that we’re not around each other so damned much, and give me and Dalilah some space.”