Crazy Love You, page 30
A recent royalty payment, which included my cut of the sales of that Fatboy mask, had left me flush again. There was money, and with the new contract I was about to sign, in addition to the movie rights to the series that just sold to a major studio, there would be money for the foreseeable future. I would use that money to rebuild my life, yes, but also to right some wrongs—and not just my wrongs. Because in The Hollows it was not enough to atone for your own sins. The land demanded more.
The church would serve as a memorial to all the men who died in mining accidents in The Hollows. There would be a plaque that recounted the history of the industry and what it has meant to our region—for better and for worse. There would be photographs on the walls, as well as a book containing the names of the dead.
“I think it’s very healing,” the therapist said. “To honor Priss in this way.”
“She deserves it,” I said.
Dr. Sanchez is the only therapist I have ever had who did not demand that I denounce Priss, pretend that she was some figment of my imagination, that she never existed. Don’t get me wrong. Dr. Sanchez didn’t believe that Priss was a real entity, a haunting, a ghost that almost destroyed me—she thinks Priss was a product of my pill-addled psyche, an archetype for my rage, a symbol of all my repressed anger toward my murderous mother. In other words, she believed that Priss was real to me—and that I had to deal with her as I would deal with any other person in my life. Part of recovering from addiction is to make amends to those you have wronged, and to forgive those who have wronged you. There can be no more holding on to the past. Love lets go.
I finished my session and went back to my room, where I took a shower and put on a pair of jeans, a blue-and-white-checked shirt that Megan had bought me. I was meeting her in the cafeteria for lunch. She’d had her doctor’s appointment today, and I was looking forward to going with her to the next one. So far, she’d had to go to her checkups alone—which I hated. But I had a lifetime to make amends, and I planned to do so.
Don’t let her turn you into one of those millennium nerds, Ian. One of those neutered, so sensitive, stay-at-home-dad types. Her voice was still with me, sarcastic, knowing. But I was going to let Megan turn me into whatever she wanted me to be. At least I wouldn’t be an addict and an asshole.
• • •
Megan was waiting for me when I arrived in the cafeteria, smiling brightly. I kissed her, sat down next to her.
“How’d it go?”
She kept on smiling, slid a piece of paper over to me. I flipped it over and saw a grainy sonogram image. A little peanut, floating in space. I stared at the perfect profile—round cheeks and upturned nose. The little hands were clasped together.
“The sonogram was today?” I said.
I felt surprisingly sad, left out. It was something I’d fantasized about, that moment when, through one of the miracles of modern medicine, I could see our baby on a screen. I should have been there to hold Meg’s hand, to wipe away her joyful tears. Megan’s smile faded a little as she realized what I was thinking.
“Oh,” she said. She put her hands on top of mine. “I’m sorry. I should have waited. You’re right.”
“No,” I said. “No. It’s okay. I’m happy.”
“The face,” I said. I held up the sonogram image again, looked at it closely. “I can see you.”
“I thought so, too! I wouldn’t let them tell me if it was a boy or a girl,” she said. Her excitement, her joy, was contagious. Whatever sadness I’d felt, faded. It was okay. It was just one moment; I’d be there for all the others. Lucky for me.
• • •
I don’t know who pushed Megan onto the tracks that night, but it wasn’t me. It couldn’t have been me. That Fatboy mask; there are tens of thousands of them floating around New York. And a certain element has taken to using them in the commission of crimes. This fact has saved me. The police have not charged me. Megan will not believe that it was me. But Binky and Julia . . . they despise and fear me. They are not sure who or what I am, what I am capable of doing. They only know I have their daughter in my clutches, and so they keep me close. You should see the way Julia looks at me when she thinks I’m not watching.
I know you, Megan said. I look into your face and I see pain, yes. But I only see goodness beneath that. You are not Fatboy. You are Ian, my baby’s father.
Thank God for her, really. I would not, could not survive this without her. It was Megan who forced me to face down my haunting demons. It was my love for her that forced me to swim the river. What would have become of me on the other side? I shudder to think.
Sitting now in the sunny cafeteria, she chatted happily about the house. The plans were done. The baby was healthy in spite of the two bad falls Megan took. She’d been worried about that, she admitted now. But it was okay. Of course it was. And she’d been to see Joy Martin, who showed her some preliminary plans for the restored church and graveyard. She’d visited my mother, brought her some new clothes, as I’d requested.
“You know,” she said. She took a sip of soup. “I know you never thought you’d be back in The Hollows. But I love it. It’s so strange, but it feels like home to me.”
I tried to ignore that tickle of fear that traveled down my gullet to my belly. Megan had picked up a big piece of chocolate pie from the case, and I took it from her tray and shoveled it into my mouth. I ate half of it in two bites. I had put on weight in here, nearly ten pounds. You had to have something, didn’t you?
“I guess it is home,” I said.
There must have been an unintended dark note in my tone, because I felt her go quiet in that way she has. I kept eating.
“Are you going to be okay here?” she asked when the pie was gone.
“Of course,” I said. I wiped the cream and chocolate from my mouth. “It’s what you want. It’s what you both want.”
She nodded, but she didn’t look as happy as she had when she arrived.
“Yes,” she said. “It is.”
• • •
What did she want? Eloise had asked on her first visit to New Reflections. And I told her because there was no one else to tell. A mild look of surprise softened her features, then disappeared into its usual gentle neutrality.
And you’re going to give that to her?
What choice do I have? I had asked. She didn’t have an answer, and she knew it.
You said that we were all connected, I went on. That we are all points of light on an infinite web.
Yes.
Well, some of us are more connected than others.
More silence from Eloise.
Me and Priss. We can’t be apart; it won’t work.
Chapter Thirty-five
By the time I was released from rehab a week later, No Paine Construction had already cleared the new home site and had started laying in the foundation. Megan had brought me pictures. The new house was set back from the land where the old one had been. And a circular driveway would be laid where my childhood home had been. I was trying to see it all as a fresh start, one in which I’d torn down the past and started anew. I was surprised by the speed of the builders, but I guess I shouldn’t have been.
When things are right, they’re right, Megan said. And she sounded so sure of herself that I had no choice but to believe her.
I was jittery and nervous as I packed my things. I didn’t have much, which gave me some clarity about my mother’s situation. In a place like this, you need next to nothing. I wasn’t as happy as I had imagined I’d be, graduating rehab. I was starting to understand why my mother had chosen her institutional existence. It was easy, once you got the hang of it; you made no decisions—not even about what to eat or when. I wished I was more excited to be going home. Of course, the place we were renting off the square wasn’t really home.
“Don’t be concerned if you’re not giddy with relief,” Dr. Sanchez had warned me earlier that day. “There’s a long road ahead of you, and you’re smart enough to know that. Just keep your life small right now. Focus on Megan and the baby, your work. Stay home, cook. Do things you haven’t done before.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s exactly my plan.”
There had been a small party that morning with my various counselors and some other patients, who looked at me with expressions ranging from envy to terror. Lots of awkward hugs and averted eyes. Everyone was on their own trip there; some of us would make it and some wouldn’t. I wasn’t totally sure in which group I would fall.
And then that was it. I walked out the front door.
Megan picked me up in the Scout. I could tell that she was nervous, she was chattering away. After we’d driven a mile or so, I put my hand on her arm.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s going to be okay.”
She pulled the car over to the side of the road and started to cry, just these big, body-racking sobs. I held her, buried my face in her hair.
We’d never talked about the night of the fire. We’d talked about everything else, our relationship, what she wanted, what I wanted. We’d talked about the baby, about parenthood and everything we dreamed of and feared about it. But those last few days before I wound up in rehab, and everyone wanted to blame everything that happened on my addictions—we’d never talked about that. It kind of felt like talking about someone who wasn’t here anymore, the Ian who was addicted to pills and hallucinating big chunks of his life.
We just sat there like that, on the side of the road. The trees were gold, orange, and brown, falling leaves dancing across the road.
“That day in the park?” she said finally. She wiped her eyes.
“Yeah.” I’d always been afraid to ask her about it, what I’d said to her that made her look so shocked and afraid. I honestly didn’t know.
“It wasn’t you.”
“No,” I said. “I was totally screwed up, taking a bunch of different pills. I was someone else all together.”
In rehab, we learned about separating the real person from the drugs, how when you’re dealing with an addict, it’s really the substance that’s doing the talking. It’s like a possession—the booze or the drugs or whatever has snaked its way in and taken hold of the addict, is holding him in its grasp. Or a haunting. Always felt like a bit of a cop-out to me. But what did I know?
She shook her head. That pink diamond glittered on her hand, catching the sun. I noticed, for the first time during her pregnancy, dark circles under eyes.
“That’s not what I mean.”
She ran a hand through her hair. I wondered, not for the first time, why she would stay with me, why she loved me. I thought about what Binky said, how they’d unwittingly raised her to be a fixer and a caretaker. Was that why she stayed? Because I fulfilled some deep need within her that she didn’t even know she had?
“I mean, it didn’t even look like you. Your voice. It was different.”
I reached for her hands and held them, but I didn’t know what to say. I had made a promise to myself to always treat her tenderly, to always take care of her. I was going to do that, whatever the reason she’d chosen to stay with me. I was going to be a better man. I kept saying this over and over to myself, like a prayer.
“You said, ‘You belong to us now. Try to leave me and I’ll kill you both.’ ”
I blew out a breath, as if I’d been punched in the gut. “I’m sorry. I’d never hurt you. You know that.”
“I do know that,” she said. “It wasn’t you. But it wasn’t the pills either.”
She’d figured it out. I could see that look on her face—the trepidation and doubt when you’ve discovered that the answer to a question doesn’t make sense in the real world.
“When you called me later, it was you. I heard your real voice and I could feel how frightened and alone you were. I didn’t understand what was happening to you, but I came to get you. I took the train to The Hollows and a cab from the station. But when I got to the house, you weren’t there. So I went inside to wait.”
She took a breath here, seemed to think about how to go on. I imagined her walking into the cold, dark house, calling my name.
“I walked around the house, saw all your stuff. Finally, I was so tired that I just lay down on your bed. I hadn’t slept. I hadn’t spoken to my parents since you saw my dad in Madison Square Park.”
She wore a deep frown. “I was mad at them. I know they were just scared, but they were bullying me, trying to get me to come back out to Long Island, and I just needed to think. So I hadn’t talked to them. They’d been calling. I didn’t imagine that they’d be worried enough to call the police.”
Poor Binky and Julia, such good parents and such good people. Some folks just don’t know when to stop parenting, though.
“So I guess I just drifted off. But when I woke up there was a little girl standing in the doorway.”
She sounded incredulous, and I imagined Priss standing there with that look on her face, that innocence, that sweetness.
“She was so pretty, and small, and she looked so afraid,” Meg said. “I thought I was dreaming. ‘Who are you?’ I asked. She said, ‘I’m Priss.’ But, of course, I already knew that. I recognized her from your books and all the old sketches you showed me from when you were younger. I wasn’t afraid. I should have been, but I wasn’t. ‘What do you want?’ I asked her.”
She stopped and sought out my eyes. “Does this sound crazy? Am I crazy?”
“No,” I said. “I know how it is with her.”
“She came nearer to me, and somehow she showed me things. I saw you—a younger you—setting fires, playing with her in the woods, making love to her. She was always different—first a child, then a teenager, then a woman. She grew with you. Then I saw you in the subway station. Except somehow it wasn’t you; it was her.”
She had a dreamy, faraway look as she spoke. I could see it all playing out before my eyes.
“She left the room, and I followed. Down the stairs, through the house, and into the kitchen.”
Megan went on.
“ ‘He belongs to me and to this place,’ she said. ‘He can’t leave. And neither can you.’
“But she was crying; she was so sad and so lonely, and I could feel that loneliness inside me. It was a million years old. And I realized then what she wanted. She just didn’t want to be alone anymore.
“ ‘It’s okay,’ I told her. ‘We’ll stay.’ ”
When I didn’t say anything, Meg kept going.
“She smiled at me and I moved toward her. I wanted to comfort her, to hold on to her. Somehow I was thinking about you, and my poor brother, and your sister, and our baby. There was something wide open in me, willing to take her in. She was just another lost thing.
“But I didn’t understand that she wasn’t really, physically there. And in that weird dream state, I didn’t see the cellar stairs behind her. And then I was falling and falling. And I don’t remember anything after that until you came to get me.”
The wind was picking up outside and a car sped past us, startling us both. Megan seemed to come back to herself, and then she started driving again. I knew where we were headed before she turned onto the back road, and then onto the long narrow path that led to the house.
As we pulled up the drive I saw that the house was gone. And farther along I saw the construction site, a bustle of activity, trucks parked and men wearing hard hats and carrying tools and two-by-fours. The foreman, a muscular young guy, gave Megan a wave and she waved back. He looked tan and healthy, smiled a little too broadly at my pretty wife. I shot a quick glance at myself in the sideview. I was pasty- and fatigued-looking. Maybe I could start working out again—sooner rather than later.
“I thought you would want to see it,” she said.
We both climbed out of the car, and I walked around to lean on the hood of the Scout. King of all I surveyed.
They’d cleared away some of the trees to set the house back farther on the property. I could see that they had filled in the old foundation and etched out the shape of the circular drive, scattered some grass seed.
“I didn’t want to talk about it while you were still in there,” she said. “I didn’t want to undermine what they were trying to do for you.”
I looked into those deep, dark eyes. She had it, too, whatever I had that left me open to Priss. Some darkness, or some deep intuition—whatever it was, there was a doorway in both of us. I didn’t think it could be closed.
“I know you have a drug problem, a bad one,” she said. “But I also know it was something more. I saw her. I felt her.”
What a relief it was to be known, to be understood, to be forgiven—to no longer be alone in this place. That, more than love, is what we all want, I think. That, I knew, was what Priss wanted.
“You made her a promise,” I said.
“So did I.”
I heard the Whispers then, and I saw Megan’s gaze dart toward the trees. She turned back to me.
“Want to take a walk?” I asked.
“Maybe you should go alone,” she said.
• • •
The house that wasn’t there really wasn’t there now. The old foundation had been cleared and the ground filled in with fresh black dirt. It looked like a grave, and I barely paused there on my way to the little church. Stay away from the places and people that got you into trouble before. I remembered that first night so long ago very clearly. I was sad and alone, angry at my mother for loving Ella so much that I felt left out. That’s what left me vulnerable to Priss. Just like my mother, whose grief opened the door for her.
Negative energy adheres to other negative energy. That’s what Eloise had said. My anger only grew and grew, turning to an ugly, violent rage. I was fuel for Priss’s fire, and she was fuel for mine. I kept waiting for her to drop into step beside me, but she didn’t.
