by Eve Morton
And love me, he wanted to scream but he became silent. Love me.
“It’s okay,” he said instead. “Keep them.”
“Yes?”
“Yeah. When you put it as your inheritance, to throw them out feels callous. Just because it’s the right choice logically doesn’t always mean it’s the right choice emotionally. It’s hard letting go.”
“I want to let go.”
“I know,” Eric said. “But it will take a while.”
“It will, yes, yes, I know this logically too.”
Eric wanted to say and I’ll be here waiting until you realize you are not alone but he knew that wasn’t quite true. He didn’t know where he’d be in the next couple months. Maybe he would move back to Toronto like a dream he had in the back of his mind, which seemed more like an act of contrition than romance; he wanted to go back so he could undo what he’d once done.
Even if he could move beyond his failed marriage and career, it was still far more likely that he would go back to Cameron in Waterloo. He would have dreams, but then he’d wake up. Like Cosmin would go back to keeping his father’s journals and going on with life as it normally was. A storm was a storm. It shook things up, but after the storm, people and situations always went back to normal.
Eric tried not to be hurt. He tried to see the good in all of it instead. So when Cosmin kissed him, it was like a vital reminder. You got to have this. One dream fulfilled. Considering how much he’d failed in his life, he really should chalk this up as a success.
The kiss turned into making out and then faded away again. Traffic outside became evident. The house was warm again. Life was normal again.
“Do you want any help with the journals? Like putting them into your car? How is your car?” Eric rose to look out his bedroom window. The angle of the sedan still made it seem adrift in the enclave, but it was there. Not nicked or hit. “It’s fine.”
“Thank goodness.” Cosmin stood beside him by the window. He seemed to stare past the vehicle and into the driveway of the house, as if recreating the scene with Maurice. He gave Eric one last squeeze before he turned away.
“I think I’ll wait on loading them up, though. The house isn’t going anywhere.”
“Right. Sure. But you should go back to Toronto.”
Cosmin nodded with a small smile, as if grateful for the easy exit. “And you to Ottawa. Do you need a car?”
“My parents’ car has been in the garage the entire time. So I won’t have to haul out a hair dryer or anything to leave. I’ll be okay.”
“Good. That’s good.”
Eric smiled. He was so good at smiling even when it hurt. He thought of how second nature it had been to take Christopher around, tell him all these things about the show and being an actor, and not let the pain of his cancelled show rise up to the surface in a petulant way, like it had for Jeff. At least not enough to mar Christopher’s memory. His own inadequacy felt like it was always rising to the surface now, like he was always smiling through his pain. Eric suddenly wanted to be that better person again, like he’d been for Christopher, only this time for Cosmin. When he stepped forward to hug him goodbye, he made sure to keep smiling.
“I had fun,” he said into the hug. “This was such a lovely little emergency.”
“It was. Thank you for all of your help.”
“You too.”
Cosmin didn’t ask what he had helped with; he merely gestured to the bedroom door. The two of them walked down the stairs and to the front porch, where Eric had been when all of this had started. The radio was on and playing the oldie Christmas songs he loved. Though he turned it down, he still caught a glimmer of a weather report between the crooning. “Our tempest has passed,” the announcer said. Most roads were open, and apparently Ottawa had not been hit at all.
“Whatever happened to that part?” Cosmin asked.
“What part?”
“Ferdinand. The one I helped you practise. Did you get it? I think I was gone back to teaching before I found out.”
“You were,” Eric said. His smile almost broke, but he was strong. He carried on. “The audition itself was after that Thanksgiving break. And no, I never got it. Still became an actor, though, so that’s something.”
“Yeah, I suppose it is,” Cosmin said. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas.”
Eric stayed in the enclosed porch as Cosmin slipped out the door. He kept his hand raised in a wave and a smile on his face until he was sure Cosmin was out of the subdivision. It felt like forever with all the sliding and turning around he had to do, but eventually he was gone.
All the emotion left his face like an Etch A Sketch. He was hollow, like when he’d read the divorce papers. Hollow he could do, though. It was that crashing feeling of having no future—like when Billy told him he didn’t want to move in together—that he was trying to avoid. Hollow merely meant that you had to fill the space with something else. Hollow was activity. Hollow was home.
Eric moved all the presents from under the tree to the trunk of his parents’ car. He made himself some snacks for the road trip in order to get to his sister’s place on time. He tore back the bed sheets in the guest room; did a load of laundry; and made himself another mug of coffee to stave off sadness. When there was nothing left to do, he called the lawyer. He verified who he was, who Christopher Ren was, and the lawyer agreed to send over papers as soon as he could.
“Take your time,” Eric said. “It’s almost Christmas.”
Chapter Fifteen
Cosmin’s phone rang the moment he stepped into his condo. He set down the groceries he’d purchased in a mad rush—Christmas Eve shoppers combined with ice storm survivors making up for lost time like himself did not make for a pleasant experience—and noticed the call was coming from Sherry. He checked the date to be sure it was actually Christmas Eve before he picked up.
“Hi, Sherry. Am I late? Did we say Christmas Eve or Christmas Day for our drink? I fear that I may not have everything if it’s today, and with the stores the way they are.”
“No, no.” Sherry sighed. Cosmin knew from the tone of her voice—defeated yet apologetic—that something had gone on with her daughter before she even explained. “Cassidy’s in the hospital right now. I—I don’t think it’s a good idea to have a drink.”
Cosmin stifled down all of his questions. He knew exactly what was going on, and so he became a sympathetic ear as Sherry got him up to speed on the latest development. Years ago, Sherry’s daughter had been taken to the hospital for a heart condition, along with her electrolytes being too low. Sherry had tried to brush it off as a minor issue, and while she’d not outright lied about the medical status, she’d obfuscated the cause: Cassidy was anorexic.
Ever since starting high school, Cassidy had been losing weight and hiding the loss under oversized sweaters. Cosmin had noticed it, but since he almost never saw Cassidy outside of photos on Sherry’s desk in the office, he didn’t comment on the weight loss. Teenage years were full of fluctuations and strange growth spurts. She’d surely grow out of whatever was going on.
It was only with Cassidy’s hospitalization that Cosmin had reached out and gone out on a limb by buying Sherry a book on the history of anorexia nervosa. Cosmin figured he could pass it off as a possible show topic if the book didn’t go well. Instead, Sherry had burst into tears, hugged Cosmin, and told him the entire ordeal. This was the true start of their friendship, especially as Cassidy would gain weight, then relapse, and then gain weight again.
Cosmin had been with Julian for one of the worst relapses. Anorexia wasn’t his specialty, but he worked in pediatric wards where they often had too-skinny girls just like Cassidy with low heart rates and electrolytes. Julian understood it as a physiological illness as much as he understood it as a psychological one, and he’d recommended the best doctors in the city for both Cass
idy and Sherry.
While at first Sherry had worked hard to keep Cassidy’s diagnosis under wraps, lest her daughter be marked with it her entire life, she eventually became more public about it. She wrote articles for magazines about her daughter’s struggle with mental illness and often volunteered at fundraisers for a rehab clinic for eating disorders. But the nitty-gritty of Cassidy’s treatment was always kept between herself and Cosmin.
Not even Hal, her husband for twenty-five years, knew the minutiae of each hospital stay, how many pounds Cassidy lost over a holiday weekend, or the nuisances of getting liquid meals forced down a gastrointestinal tube. It’s not that Hal didn’t care—quite the contrary—but he was the one making Cassidy smile in the hospital; he brought her games and VHS tapes; he distracted her from the realities of treatment, like he distracted Sherry, and so she needed to tell someone something, and that was where Cosmin came in.
It hadn’t been easy the past six years since that first crying session in a soundproof booth, but Cassidy had been getting better—at least Cosmin had thought so. Cassidy was twenty now; she’d spent the past six years of her life in and out of outpatient care. She was sometimes prone to passing out, and she seemed to lose and gain the same critical ten pounds, but she’d never been hospitalized like the first time.
And definitely not over Christmas.
“Oh, Sherry. I’m so sorry. Let me—”
“No. Don’t.” Sherry took in a shuddered breath on the other line. “I don’t want to cry about this anymore.”
“I understand. But it’s perfectly fine if you do.”
“I know that. It’s just... The goddamn ice storm.”
Cosmin didn’t even bother to refrigerate the groceries he’d just purchased. He took his cell phone to the couch and listened intently as Sherry explained what had gone on in the Allan household the past four days. Cassidy had been great, in spite of the dreaded holiday weight gain she always worried about, which was made even worse through constant magazine and online articles bringing it up.
Still, Sherry and Hal had always gotten through the holidays because they’d let Cassidy do a lot of the meal planning and be involved in the food preparation. It fed her obsession just enough that she felt in control, but they didn’t sign over all the meal making to Cassidy so that they wouldn’t be eating salads and apples and black coffee and nothing but. The ice storm had halted these plans, however, especially for her trips to the gym.
“I know it’s ridiculous,” Sherry said, her breath still ragged, “utterly ridiculous to let your anorexic fitness-obsessed daughter go to the gym. Especially when she’s already ninety-five pounds soaking wet. But if we don’t let her go, then she’ll resort to running and that’s high impact and her knees—the last time—”
“Yes, I remember. Osteopenia.” Cosmin guided Sherry to focus on the present, not the past diagnosis of Cassidy’s bone mass deteriorating from not enough estrogen in her system. Though she was young, her body’s hormones had shut down, and in turn, prematurely aged her bone mass. “What happened during the storm?”
“Cassidy couldn’t go to the gym. Even the streetcars were shut down. The sidewalks were impossible to walk on for more than two feet. This is the most determined human I have ever met—and my God, it does her so well in school—but when she turns that determination on herself, she just self-destructs.”
Cassidy couldn’t get outside, couldn’t go for a run, or have any type of exercise, so she’d gone back to restricting her calorie intake. When her mother made them a giant breakfast the second day of the ice storm, just to use up some of the food in the fridge, Cassidy had freaked out. She’d locked herself in her room and paced the floor by way of exercise. Then she started to throw up—something she rarely did, Cosmin knew, so this must have been a serious relapse.
These were the most destructive behaviours; not just for the fact that they destroyed the enamel on her teeth or made her bones porous, but the secretive nature of them.
Though Julian had never studied this academically, he understood the illness so much better than most people, and through Cosmin’s own reading and seeing Cassidy grow up, he now understood it, too. Cassidy was like a drug addict, in a way, hoarding her own secret way to change her world through changing her body. And this week she had fallen off the wagon. By the time Hal and Sherry noticed that Cassidy’s behaviours were back, she had lost too much weight and easily passed out. They took her to the emergency room, and the on-call doctor took one look at her past history and admitted her.
“She’ll be okay, Sherry,” Cosmin said. “The doctors at North York are the best.”
“No, you don’t understand. She’s back at SickKids. This isn’t an outpatient type of visit again, like the kind she was doing at North York with Doctor Leonard. They were so covered in ice anyway, and too far away. So we went to SickKids.”
Cosmin swallowed. He pictured Julian in his doctor’s jacket, standing with one of the chemo kids he’d treated, the same image from his father’s morbid journals. Cosmin hadn’t seen Julian since their break-up. He was sure he was still working at SickKids, probably even over Christmas. Julian’s workaholic streak was one of the main reasons their relationship lasted as long as it did. There was never any time to fight.
“I just don’t think it’ll be a good idea to come over,” Sherry said. “And have a drink. Hal and I—”
Cosmin cut in before he could dwell too much in memories and before Sherry could finish. “I think a drink is exactly what you and Hal need right now. I’m coming over. And bringing as much pie as I possibly can.”
Sherry laughed, which turned into sobs. Cosmin stayed on the line until she’d righted herself. “This hasn’t happened in years. In years. I thought she was getting better. Not fully, but—”
“I know, Sherry. But it’s Christmas. Things are hard for everyone this time of year.”
“Sure. I guess. Hal told me once that missing persons reports always go up around this time period. I suppose, in a way, she is our missing girl, slowly disappearing.”
“Hey.” Cosmin needed to say something to get Sherry’s mind back on track, to prevent her from spiralling once again, but he wasn’t exactly sure if he could. Not because he didn’t have a million quotations or small stories saved in his index memory for something like this, but because he wasn’t sure if he knew anything—or anyone—at all anymore. A heavy feeling had sat in his stomach ever since he’d driven away from Eric, ever since he’d confessed to not throwing out his father’s journals. He’d tried to keep himself busy by cleaning his place and getting food, but his activity accomplished very little. And when his friend needed him the most, he wanted to be powerful again, but he merely felt contrite. A Chicken Soup for the Soul story, rather than a Seneca letter. “It’ll be okay, Sherry. It’ll always be okay.”
Contrite or not, it seemed to be enough. “Thank you. See you soon, Cosmin.”
* * *
Sherry’s and Hal’s faces were marked by shadow when he arrived. Hal tried to be his boisterous self and greeted Cosmin with a tight handshake and a clap on the back, a leftover relic from his time as a police detective in the Toronto force, but the moment Cosmin sat in their living room, the façade began to crumble. Their motions were jerky and distracted; not even a drink from the large bottle of cognac that Cosmin brought could loosen Hal’s stiff shoulders. Sherry’s attention was split between the phone on an end table, the door, and the Christmas tree that was decorated in white lights and gold bulbs.
Cassidy’s first Christmas bear ornament hung front and centre. Even Cosmin’s gaze fixated on the sentimental object in morose silence before he gestured to what he’d brought them both for a small celebration. He held up a paper bag filled with three different types of pie from the diner near his condo.
“I’m not sure what type was your favourite, so I got all three,” Cosmin said. “We need something to help smooth
the cognac over, anyway.”
“Probably setting a bad example,” Hal said, though he peered in to examine just what three flavours were there. He nodded as he examined the apple, blueberry, and pecan. The smell of cinnamon and pastry was overwhelming and even Sherry seemed affected.
“Not a bad example all,” Cosmin said. “I think pie is more important than ever before.”
“I should probably attempt an adult dinner, at least,” Sherry said half-heartedly. After slicing a piece of each pie for everyone, and setting it all up on the coffee table, she went back to the fridge and pulled out some pre-cut vegetables. She added them to a platter with a dollop of hummus and brought that into the living room. From the way her eyes seemed to fill again, Cosmin knew that Cassidy had been the one to cut the vegetables. No doubt as a safe food she could munch on without feeling as if she’d go over her caloric limit, whatever that was this time around.
“Five hundred,” Sherry said after a few bites of pie. “That was her new limit.”
Cosmin nodded, his silent query now answered, while Hal made a face. Sherry didn’t bother to explain, and soon enough, Sherry was waxing poetic about how many calories were probably in each slice of pie, and how they were the last ones who needed it. “And yet, here we are. What a waste.”
“Not a waste,” Cosmin said. “It’s merely reality.”
“I fucking hate this reality. Sorry.” Sherry gasped and held her lips together. “I never get to swear. So you’ll forgive me.”
Hal and Cosmin both nodded. Hal made a joke that he was the one who did the swearing, and so he was also going to eat the excess as well. “No time like the present.”
“Speaking of presents,” Cosmin said, seizing the opportunity, however forced. “Will you be seeing Cassidy tomorrow?”
Sherry exchanged a look with Hal. Hal took a drink before he answered. “She said she doesn’t want to see us right now. I think she’s ashamed this happened again.”
