Stay Gone, page 8
I never knew that ghosts could be haunted.
I’m in a sort of exile—purgatory, perhaps?—and I can’t see or hear anything going on. I can’t haunt those I’ve left behind, I can only imagine what’s happening in my wake. I have to hope that things played out as I intended, as I did my best to orchestrate.
At times, I’m consumed by thoughts of the past, and memories of all I’ve done wrong. There’s a lot of time, here in my eternal present, since I don’t have a body, or anyone to interact with. I’m a floating head, but not even a head. I’m a wisp, with consciousness.
It’s not as bad as it sounds. Well, sometimes it’s as bad as it sounds—here in my present, reliving my past, imagining other people’s futures.
Sometimes I can enjoy the reliving, and the imagining. I’ve known joy, and can visualize it for my children. Other times, I get stuck in a loop, like a marathon of reruns of all my mistakes.
None were intentional, or at least, none were conscious. I only learned they were mistakes through the outcome, and the aftermath. I thought I was making the best choices as it was all going on, and even now, in hindsight, I don’t know what the right choices would have been, what would have guaranteed that I’d have happy, well-adjusted, successful children who actually love one another, and love themselves, and love me. Parenting is trial and error, unfortunately.
In my defense, I did have exceedingly hard choices to make.
If I’m honest, Thomas was the great love of my life. I don’t mean that in any perverse sense. I mean that he was the male who made me feel special, and loved. Intellectually, I knew Alfred loved me very much, but so often, it could only be intellectual; he couldn’t do much to show me. He didn’t do much, period, outside of work, which, I suppose, was a way he showed me. He left me incredibly well-off.
Did I rely on Thomas too much? Maybe. Did he manipulate me? Probably. But did he love me? Absolutely. Of that I have no doubt.
So when he expressed remorse for leaving like he did and said that he wanted to take care of me, I didn’t hesitate. I knew my boy. I knew when he was sincere, and when he wasn’t. And that was a giant load of shit.
So why did I say yes to him becoming my caregiver? Because I wanted to see how it would play out. Because I wanted him to live in our home again, and have a chance to experience true remorse. I wanted him to watch me die, and regret what he’d done.
I don’t mean that cruelly. It’s not that I wanted regret to eat at him forever. Really, I was trying to facilitate the opposite. By taking care of me in my final days, by creating the conditions for a come-to-Jesus moment and a genuine reconciliation, he’d be spared a much more terrible regret later. I fully believed that would happen, that our bond was too strong for any other outcome.
Was it a mistake? Possibly. But if you don’t make mistakes in life, you’re not trying hard enough.
It was a very peculiar night, with Thomas’s faux-penance and Rae and Simon showing up and her claiming that she’d known about Simon’s other children and Thomas going on about how Simon was innocent until proven guilty. (Hadn’t he just been proven guilty? There were court documents from two different women. One, I could understand, maybe, but two?) Rae was so upset about the plan for me to stop treatment, and I was moved, I truly was. She wasn’t ready to let me go. But I couldn’t help thinking that she was actually more upset by the idea that Thomas would be the one taking care of me, that he’d usurped the role she didn’t even want.
Oh, sure, she made me soups. She came over every day. But she didn’t enjoy my company, and I didn’t enjoy hers. I’d always wanted it to be different, assumed that I’d be closer with my daughter than my son, because I’d have so much to teach her about womanhood. Only it wasn’t different. It was precisely the same: We were a million missed connections. Illness doesn’t change the essential dynamics of a family (I think a social worker on the oncology unit shared that profundity). What finally changed for me was that I accepted this was the relationship we had.
I was never at my best in her presence. I complained and I kvetched in a way that I never did with Thomas. He wouldn’t have put up with it, for one thing, and for another, he would have gotten me to laugh, even at myself. I like to think that Rae wasn’t at her best, either, that alone with Simon or with a friend she could be relaxed and talkative. Funny? It was hard to imagine. But happy. I like to imagine that.
So there we all were, sitting at the table and eating delivered Chinese food—I picked at the rice—and Thomas told Rae more about his plan. “We need to stop feeding the cancer,” he said. “So no more milk. No meat. A plant-based diet is the way to go. I’m going to make her lots of shakes, with different nutrients and supplements.”
He sounded so enthusiastic that I started to doubt what I’d heard earlier. Maybe his remorse was genuine. He was sorry we’d missed those years, and he wanted to make it up to me. He wanted me to live.
Rae was eating little and saying even less. Simon, on the other hand, had a voracious appetite and was correspondingly gung-ho about Thomas’s plan. He asked Thomas a bunch of questions, and said things like, “That’s really cool, man. You really know what you’re talking about.”
Their mutual support and admiration society was so transparent that I could only smile. Thomas had let Simon off the hook, and now Simon was repaying the favor. Rae and I watched the two of them carry the dinner, though our moods were wildly divergent. Rae was glum, while I felt buoyant. Thomas was going to live with me. If he hadn’t truly forgiven me yet, he would. He wouldn’t be able to resist. I’d have my son back, fully, and if it was only for a short time before I left the earth, that was fine; if his cockamamie supplements actually worked, so much the better.
The next day, Thomas’s friend Ben came over to the house with a trunk full of groceries. Powders, and pills, and supplements, oh my!
“It’s so good to meet you,” Ben said. He had a shy smile and seemed very deferential to Thomas.
“Likewise,” I told him. I wanted to say I’d heard so much about him, but it wasn’t exactly true. All I’d gathered was that Thomas trusted Ben implicitly, and that Ben was the one minding the store while Thomas looked after me.
I was installed on the fainting couch, which had become my default home. My strength really was waning by this point. I hoped that whatever was in those bags could help restore it, even temporarily, so that I could be up for a full game of pinochle. I squinted at Ben. My memory had always been excellent, and I felt sure I’d seen him before. “What’s your last name again?”
“It’s Hwang.” Pronounced “Wang.” That was a pretty unforgettable name, especially for someone who looked like him—with features that were almost entirely white, with a splash of Asian.
“You grew up around here, right?” I asked him. It was one of the few morsels Thomas had dropped.
“In Medford,” Thomas called from the kitchen where he putting away the food. “Small world, huh?”
“We knew some of the same people. We even went to the same chat rooms,” Ben said. He laughed. “Seems so retro, huh? Chat rooms. But they were the precursors to social media. People need to gather. If they can’t do it in person, they find a way.”
I smiled at Ben. I wanted to like him. From reading between the lines, I understood that Ben helped Thomas when Thomas had nothing. Now Thomas had his own company and a beautiful penthouse in Nob Hill. Given that Thomas had zero business experience and had never exhibited much of a work ethic, I had to believe that was largely due to Ben.
As I forced myself to drink a strange but not entirely unpleasant green concoction that Thomas had made in the Vitamix, I got to observe the two of them. Thomas was just so loose, so comfortable, in the light of Ben’s obvious admiration. It was quickly apparent that Thomas had never done any research into homeopathic remedies for cancer; Ben had done it all, right down to the shopping. Ben laughed too loud and too hard at Thomas’s every joke; Ben’s eyes were trained on Thomas with an avidity that I found startling but Thomas obviously felt at home with it. That was the thing: These two men were utterly at home with one another. They were the ones with private jokes, and I was a spectator. I suddenly, viscerally, knew how Rae must have felt all those years, watching me with Thomas.
I’d never intentionally excluded her. But you know how there are just certain people in the world that you truly get, and others where it always feels like work? Well, Thomas was the former, and Rae the latter, and those differences only grew more pronounced after Alfred’s death.
I tried to give both of the children emotional support, which was much easier with Thomas than Rae. She was just so unreachable and yet so breakable, like a piece of china that you only take out of the cabinet on special occasions. She’d never been much for physical affection or for talking, and what other language can you speak to a child in, other than verbal and nonverbal? Sonar?
I’d always been able to communicate with Thomas. He was a rascal, of course—mischievous until his father died, and incorrigible after. Twelve is a terrible age to lose a parent. He was flooded with hormones and grief at the same time. He went a little crazy, and I understood. So I bailed him out of some messes. It wasn’t his fault. He was very bright, and had poor impulse control, and no father.
But he had me, completely. I doted on him. We played pinochle and talked for hours. He was a good boy with a penchant for drugs and sex. But don’t all teenage boys share those?
Rae was an unhappy child, and she became an unhappy teenager. When I tried to invite her into the circle, to do things with her and Thomas, she either said no or glowered silently. Here’s how it seemed: She didn’t really want me; she just didn’t want Thomas to have me. Because when I did try to connect with just her, to have mother-daughter days, she barely spoke, she almost never smiled. It was like she was merely enduring. We’d go home and Thomas would chatter and she’d stay nearby with a hurt look on her face. Then she cloistered in her room. I probably should have tried harder and paid her more individual attention, and God forgive me for saying it, but she was just so boring. I worked so hard for every crumb out of her mouth, and they were all stale.
Yet there I was, what felt like a hundred years later, excluded from Thomas and Ben’s private world, without any clear way in, and I became tongue-tied, unsure of myself. I began to feel resentment, to shut down, to withdraw into myself. And all within the span of an hour! A radical clarity overtook me: This was what Thomas and I had done to Rae.
I’d always assumed Rae was just an inaccessible person; it never occurred to me that I’d molded her into one. My understanding of her magnified tenfold in that instant, and my compassion surged. I would need to make amends.
In the meantime, though, I was on the outs, seeing Thomas and Ben interacting like brothers, except that one was clearly bent on incest. Thomas seemed oblivious to Ben’s feelings, but I knew he couldn’t have been. It was too apparent, and Thomas had always been very aware of everyone’s desires and intentions and how to use those to his best interest. That was Thomas’s true genius, and it was at work in front of me. Otherwise, how could Ben be holding down the fort every day at Piping Hot (oh, that name) and still be the one toting groceries to my house and seem grateful for the privilege?
Thomas and Ben went into the sunroom, ostensibly to talk business, and the easy camaraderie fell away quickly. I could hear their raised voices but not the words. Actually, it was only Ben’s voice I heard, the agitation unmistakable. When Ben left, he said good-bye without looking at me. He was clearly upset, but Thomas gave no outward sign of having been engaged in a confrontation. He always had a high tolerance for conflict.
If I were Thomas, I would have proceeded with extreme caution when it came to Ben, since Ben seemed to have the business in his hand like a snow globe, but cautious wasn’t really Thomas’s style. Since Thomas didn’t seem to want to talk to me about anything to do with Ben or the business, I kept my advice to myself.
For the next week, Thomas was extremely solicitous in a way that reeked of either manipulation or remorse. It was hard for me to decipher. I was feeling weaker, and my bone pain was getting worse. Advil wasn’t enough anymore, and the hospice nurses were pushing codeine now. I thought about resisting, as I had my whole life when it came to medication, but what was the point really?
Even with Thomas around all the time (especially because Thomas was around), I found myself yearning for Rae. It was a comfort to sit in straightforward silence, not to have to question her motives. She was my child, and she wanted me to live. How very refreshing!
Since being the third wheel to Thomas and Ben, I also felt a greater identification than ever before. I wanted to express my sympathy and my sorrow for her, and to apologize for having played such a key role in her torment. But it was so very hard to find the words. How do you begin to express that kind of regret? I wanted to grow closer to her, though I had no idea how to make that happen. Additionally, she’d started bringing Simon with her frequently, like some sort of buffer. Against me, or Thomas, or both?
Maybe she thought that if I spent more time with Simon, I’d begin to like him, or at least grow used to him, like a weed that you start to mistake for grass. Fat chance. Rae had had a hard life, and she deserved better than this man who ran around knocking up women, plural. I hadn’t protected her well enough when she was younger, and I intended to find some way to rectify that now.
When Rae was younger, our neighborhood bordered some woods (since eradicated to make room for further development, and local parents were thrilled that their teenagers could no longer party under the tree cover). Rae liked to take walks through those woods by herself. I never worried. It was daylight, and our neighborhood was a safe one.
One Saturday afternoon in March when she was newly fourteen, Rae took off walking, and an hour later, I received the call every parent dreads. There was a four-lane boulevard on the other side of the woods and Rae had run into traffic and been struck by a car. She was in surgery to repair the internal bleeding in her abdomen.
Thomas was just as panicked as I was. I would have expected concern, but this was utter terror. We rushed to the hospital, where the wait seemed interminable to us both. When we were finally able to see Rae in the recovery room, Thomas and I clutched each other in relief. He came through the door with me and Rae began screaming: “He did this, he did this, get him out of here!” I couldn’t recall when, if ever, I’d heard her raise her voice.
I didn’t know what to do. I wound up hustling Thomas out because obviously, Rae was in no condition to handle that type of upset. She wasn’t in her right mind, and it was no time to challenge her fallacies. “I’m just so glad you’re alive,” I told her. “The surgery was a success, but it’s important to stay calm.”
She didn’t want to stay calm. She wanted to talk to me and to the police. I’d never seen her in such a voluble state. I’d heard head traumas could cause personality changes, but the doctors said that her injuries were concentrated in her abdomen and pelvis, and had been repaired fully. There would be no lasting injuries, no permanent damage. Rae was a tremendously lucky girl.
“I didn’t just run out into traffic,” Rae said. “I was chased.”
She said that she’d been on the main trail so she was relatively easy to find. It was unmarked but she knew the path well, as did anyone who lived as close as we did. And by anyone, she meant Thomas.
She heard rapidly approaching footsteps behind her and when she glanced back, she knew, instantly, that the figure in the ski mask, wielding a large knife—a cleaver, to be more precise—was Thomas.
“It wasn’t Thomas,” I told her. “He was with me.”
Rae gave me a look so scathing, so seething with hatred, that I once again had to doubt the doctors’ conclusion that there had been no head injury. This wasn’t my daughter. “You’re lying for him.”
There was nothing I could say. It was the truth.
The police thought Rae’s version of events was preposterous. I tried to fight for her, insisting that there had to have been a man, a stranger, who had been similar in appearance to Thomas. I told them about the peeping Tom a few months before, but they didn’t believe me. They thought I was just trying to help Rae save face. “A guy was looking in your daughter’s window, and you never called the police?” I was so embarrassed. Why hadn’t I done more? I’d been derelict of duty, but I wasn’t lying. Yet the police wouldn’t hear it.
They pointed out that it had been broad daylight and none of the other drivers had seen anyone in a ski mask wielding a knife. If they had, there would obviously have been 911 calls, in a neighborhood like ours. The police had found no supporting evidence in the woods, either. So with no witnesses or forensics to back up her story, it seemed to them to be just that: a story. “I’d keep her away from horror movies,” one of the officers told me with a nasty smile. I wanted to smack the grin off his face.
One of the things that made the officers most suspicious was that Rae kept insisting it wasn’t a stranger, that it had to be her brother. “I know what I saw,” she said over and over. But Thomas had been with me during that time period. We’d been playing pinochle.
Under the strain of police questioning, I admitted that yes, Rae wasn’t the most stable. She had been in therapy for years; she was bullied at school; she was a deeply unhappy girl with a lot of resentment toward her brother (whatever the sibling version of an Oedipal complex was, she had it). The more I talked, the more convinced I became of the police’s theory—that it had all been a figment of Rae’s imagination. Yes, there had been a peeping Tom, but would a boy with a crush chase Rae into traffic while wearing a ski mask and brandishing a knife? It was absurd. It was, in a word, delusional.
Now I saw that was the most convenient belief for me to adopt, since it let me off the hook for not calling the police about the peeping Tom. Rae had never known about the boy. I hadn’t wanted to frighten her unnecessarily, when she was already so prone to frights. I felt that I’d taken care of the problem by locking the shed and upgrading the locks on our windows and doors. When I’d confronted the boy that night, he’d been more scared than I was. I was confident that we’d never hear from him again.
