Illusions Complete Series (91 page)

I continued to pound on the door, and there wasn’t an answer.

“Mom! Sue’s in her room and she’s not answering!” I actually didn’t think that there was a problem. I just thought that she was being stubborn.

So, my mother got into the act. She started pounding on the door as well. “Sue, get out of that room. Breakfast is ready!”

She finally kicked in the door.

Sue was lying on the bed, her head and her arm draped over the side. Her breathing was extremely slow and uneven. Her face was white as a sheet. My mother rushed over to her, and grabbed her wrist. “Call 911,” she said to me. “Now!”

I rushed down the hall and grabbed the phone with shaking hands.

“911 what’s your emergency?”

“My sister. Something’s wrong with her.”

“Ok. We’re going to send somebody over there right away.”

I ran back into the room. My mother was hunched over my sister, not really knowing what to do. We hadn’t yet learned how to perform CPR or mouth to mouth resuscitation, so we were both pretty helpless about what to do in this situation.

“Is she ok? Is she going to be ok?”

My mother was shaking her head. She was holding a plastic container that held my sister’s depression medicine in her hand. It was empty. I remembered that this was a new bottle, so she apparently took the entire bottle in one sitting.

I walked over to where they were, and put my head close to my sister’s mouth. She was hardly breathing. She breathed once, then her next breath came several seconds later.

Then my mother was crying hysterically. I had no idea what to do. I had never seen my mother cry like that, and I was more alarmed by her reaction than anything else.

She’s going to be ok. She has to be ok. My sister has to be ok.
I suddenly remembered all the fights that we had. All the times that I made her angry or she did the same with me. “Please, make it through. Please. If you do, I’ll do anything that you ask me to. I’ll clean your room every single day for the rest of your life. I’ll even do your laundry. If you wake up, I’ll do absolutely anything you want.”

The ambulance was soon there, and my sister was loaded on a stretcher. I followed along closely behind her. “Can I go with her in the ambulance?” I asked.

“No, I’m sorry. Medical personnel only.”

I nodded my head. “Ok. Thank you.”

I went back into the house. My mother was still in Sue’s room, clutching one of Sue’s stuffed animals. A one-eyed bear named Paddington, after my sister’s favorite childhood tale. She was still crying.

“Mom, she’s going to be ok,” I said, although I wasn’t entirely convinced that this was true myself. “She’s going to be ok.”

She just shook her head, the tears coming down her face. She was mute, though.

Then she wasn’t. She started wailing. “Oh, oh, oh. What happened? What happened? Why? Why? Why?”

I was terrified of seeing my mother like this, and terrified that my sister would die. I touched her arm sleeve. “When dad comes home, we’ll go to the hospital to see her,” I said. My mother didn’t drive, then or now. My dad was at work, and wouldn’t be home for several hours.

My mother kept crying and wailing. “What went wrong? What did we do wrong?”

I didn’t understand myself what went wrong. I had no idea then about chemical imbalances and clinical depression. I only thought that people were depressed and sad because of things that happened to them. To my knowledge, nothing had ever happened to my sister to make her want to do something like this.

My father finally arrived home several hours later. By that time, my mother had finally stopped wailing, and now was sitting in a chair, her hands of the arms of the chair. She wasn’t saying a word. I was kneeling down on the floor in front of her, my head in her lap.

I ran to my father. “Dad, you have to take us to the hospital. It’s Sue. She’s hurt.”

“What do you mean, hurt? What happened?”

“She’s sick.” I didn’t know how to explain any of it to him. “She’s sick.”

“Sick?”

I nodded my head. My mother was still in shock, as she stared straight ahead at something unknown, while putting a death-grip on the arms of the chair.

My father managed to get my mother out of her chair, and the three of us drove in silence to the hospital. We went to the waiting room, after my father talked to the receptionist about who we were. A few minutes later, a doctor came out to inform us about my sister.

“She’s resting comfortably. She’s going to be transferred to the psych ward for evaluation.”

At that, my mother started crying anew. But now her cry was soft, and she had a wadded up Kleenex that was at her disposal. My father’s arm was around her protectively.

My sister stayed in the hospital for a week, and we went to see her every day. She seemed to be getting better. “I’ m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for doing that. I just didn’t see any way out.”

Out of what?
I didn’t understand. Our lives with our parents was never perfect, by any stretch of the imagination. There was never enough money for much of anything, and our father was pretty remote. But there wasn’t anything that was so bad that dying became preferable to living.

And so it went, for the rest of my life. As I grew older, I became aware of the phenomenon of clinical depression. That sometimes people are just born with a chemical imbalance in their brain that needs to be normalized with meds. I also learned that normalizing anything of the sort was tricky, at best. It was difficult trying to find just the right drugs to work with my sister’s brain chemistry, in just the right dose. It was also difficult for a person to stay normal, even once the right combination of drugs are found, because the drugs often stop working. Then it was back to the drawing board.

So my life became a series of incidents that happened much like the first suicide attempt. She slashed her wrists in the bathtub and almost bled to death before we found her. She took other overdoses of prescription drugs. And she went into the hospital more times than I could count. Her hospitalizations were mainly for depression, but she had her episodes of mania as well. Fortunately, her mania was not as bad as Alexis’ mania. It was more non-stop talking and not sleeping, and she would clean her room well into the night. Considering she was the type of person who literally never cleaned her room – she let her laundry pile up for weeks, in trash bags strewn around her room, and magazines and books were piled up everywhere – her cleaning sprees were not entirely unwelcome. She was never hospitalized for mania, but she often was for depression.

So, I understood Alexis. I got where she was coming from, so I naturally had sympathy for her and was drawn to her. She couldn’t help any of it. She struggled, just like my sister always did. But she had privilege and money, where my sister never did. Even now, Alexis had Ryan to take care of her. My sister never had even that. My sister was now in her mid-thirties, and she had never lived a day in a home that was not my parents’. And I knew that she probably would never leave home. When my parents passed, I would be expected to take her in. I knew that.

I hoped that Ryan realized that as well.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Ryan

Once again, Iris was missing. Although I had a good idea where she was. I figured that the first place that I should look would be her parents’ house. That was always where she went when something bad happened. Except for after she was raped, but that was an exception. Besides, she had Dalilah. Iris would never do anything that would jeopardize the life of our daughter, so I knew that she would end up someplace safe.

I got to her parents’ townhouse and rang the doorbell.

Her mother answered the door. “Hi, Ryan. Come on in.”

“Mom!” Iris was calling. “Who’s there?”

“Iris!” I called to her. “It’s me.”

At that, Iris came bounding down the stairs so fast that she literally fell down them. She slid down the bottom three steps and landed on her rear.

“Iris! Are you ok?” I asked her, going over to where she was laying on stairs. She was grimacing and holding her elbow.

“Yes, yes.” The she got to her feet and wrapped her arms around me. I did the same with her. I couldn’t believe that she was in my arms again. It felt like the longest time since I was able to experience having her in my arms.

“Iris, Iris, beautiful Iris. I love you. I love you so much. I know that this sounds strange, but I missed you these past few weeks. Really missed you.”

She was crying softly into my shoulder. “Oh my god. I thought that I’d lost you. I was sure of it. I can’t believe that you’re here.”

“I am here, Iris, and I’m here for good,” I said, as I put my hands in her hair and tousled it affectionately. I continued. “I’ve come to realize something over these past few weeks. And that is that you just never know when you’re going to breathe your last. So, I can’t have regrets about who I was. It does no good unless you use the regrets as a catalyst to become a better person. And that’s what I’m going to do.” As I said the words, I thought of Nick. My homecoming and seeing Nick for the first time in a long time did not go the way that I had planned. I wanted to come and see him and make my apologies to him. Unfortunately, I let my temper get in the way of this, and I ended up berating him for losing track of Iris. I would have to rectify that when I got back to talk to him again that evening.

“So, we’re going home?” Iris asked me.

“We’re not going home, because we don’t yet have a home. But I’m going to change this as soon as I can. I’m going to get us another house that is ours. A house that I know that we both will love. And then we’re going to live in it. Live happily ever after in it, without anybody taking this away from us.”

“Oh, thank god.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Iris

Ryan is here! He’s finally here! And, for the first time since he was shot, really, I believe that we’re going to make it. Not broken, just bent. And I couldn’t be happier in this world. He loves me. He still loves me. I decided to let this revelation marinate some in my head. Ryan loves me. Hopefully he never stopped loving me. No matter what had happened in our lives, we always manage to find a way back to each other, and this time was no different.

I suddenly wanted him in a way that I had never before wanted him. It was frustrating not really being able to act on this, as Dalilah was still there in her playpen and my mother was there, as well. Besides, Tad’s room was so tiny, and the bed was a small full-size. Therefore, there really wasn’t any romantic place for us to get naked and explore each other’s bodies.

He kissed me gently and passionately, right there on the stairs. The world faded away as we kissed like this for what seemed like forever. I was captivated and mesmerized by him. I suddenly remembered exactly how much I loved him. I was feeling so far away from him, so disconnected. Now I was feeling connected to him again, for the first time since before he was shot. And this was a feeling unlike any other that I had ever experienced.

He loves me. He still loves me.
I looked up at him and felt tears coming to my eyes.

“Are you ok?” Ryan asked me upon seeing my eyes fill up with tears.

“I’m more than ok,” I replied. “I thought when you took off like that…I thought that I would lose you completely. That if you didn’t leave me for another woman, you might just leave me for some other reason. I couldn’t take that, Ryan. Please don’t put me through that again. I mean, I know that I put you through it, and maybe this is karma for how I treated you. But, please believe me – I love you, and I don’t want to lose you. Ever. So, let me in. You have to tell me when you’re going away, because you know how much I worry about you otherwise.

“I know,” Ryan said. “honey, I know. I’ve been beating myself up for my behavior with others, and I really should have been doing the same about my behavior towards you. I love you more than I thought that I could ever love anybody. I only wish that I had a way to express to you the things that I’ve been feeling and the darkness that was consuming me these past few weeks. The things that I’ve done in my life have not been pretty, to say the least. I’ve lived my entire life in self-destruct mode, it seemed, at least until I met you. While I’m not entirely self-destructive right now, but the impulse is still there. And I’ve had to live with the things that I’ve done. I can try to make amends for them, but I still have to live with them.”

“Whatever you’ve done, it isn’t you now. It isn’t who you are.”

“Don’t kid yourself. I struggle every day to not succumb to my demons. It’s an internal struggle for the most part. But this shooting has just made it worse. It’s opened up the dam of black emotions of who I am and who I was, and I’ve been trying to repair that dam. I’m still not entirely there, but I feel like I’m enough on the firm path towards healing that I want your love again. If that makes any sense at all.”

“I think I know what you’re saying. You’ve gone through a period of self-loathing because of your past. And you’ve just begin the process of coming to terms with the person that you were and getting some closure on that. You’ll have more of an open heart because of this process. Am I close?”

His look of love was back, and I sighed. It had been so long since he had given me that look.

“I love you, you know that? You know me so well. Inside and out. You seem to understand me and exactly how I’m feeling. I would beg for your forgiveness for how I’ve been acting, and that’s what I need to do. But somehow I have the feeling that you’ve already forgiven me. That you understand why I did what I did. And I love you so much for that, I can’t even express it.”

Just then, Dalilah started calling for Ryan. “Daddy! Daddy! Come here!”

Ryan smiled and made his way up the stairs to retrieve our daughter. He came back down with Dalilah in his arms. She was clutching him closely, her legs wiggling excitedly. “Daddy here! Daddy here!”

“What do you say we pack up yours and Dalilah’s things and head back to Nick’s? I know that it’s not quite home, but hopefully Sheila can watch Dalilah for a little bit while you and I make up for some lost time.”