“How did they find me?” I asked in as steady a voice as possible.
“I understand you activated the emergency call option on your phone. You are very lucky you did. This could easily have ended another way.”
Lucky. Was that really the right word? Every part of me hurt at the moment and I knew when the physical pain finally passed, I would still be left with the gaping wound that couldn’t be touched. I glanced at the nurse and asked, “Did you find my phone?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, no, it must have been left behind at your home.”
Home. “When can I leave?” I asked.
They glanced at each other as the doctor closed his clipboard and he stepped even closer to my bedside. “Not yet. As I said, we do need to run some more tests here. Once we confirm you are out of danger, you’ll be moved to a recovery room so you can rest a bit and then we can talk about what happens next.”
What happened next was a three-day visit to the hospital’s psychiatric ward, where I experienced repeat lab work, counseling sessions, and a new antidepressant prescription. I’d been given access to a telephone and dutifully called my mother to let her know I was okay but would be off the grid for a short while. In the version I told her, I was just tired and needed a little self-care. I think she suspected there was more to my short stay than what I’d shared, but she didn’t press. When she mentioned coming to visit me soon, I demurred as politely as possible, telling her I needed to focus on me for a while.
As I was about to depart the psychiatric floor, a nurse stopped me and said my assigned psychiatrist, Dr. Huber, wanted to speak to me briefly. I dutifully followed her into the office, willing to do anything so I could finally leave and check the phone message that had plagued me for days now. Dr. Huber, a heavyset woman who looked like she accomplished the brutal chop of her hair all on her own, without a mirror, smiled and invited me to have a seat.
“So being honest, I’m not so sure you’re really ready to go home, but since you claim you don’t have a desire to self-harm and it’s been 72 hours, we don’t really have a means to force you to stay. What I can do is try to ensure you have as many tools as possible to get through this grief and transition period.”
She handed me a business card and explained the address and phone number on it were for a grief support group. Apparently, if you put multiple grieving mothers in a room, it would somehow be better than if I were to just sit in a room alone. I had no interest. I doubted it was any better for a pair of lobster to boil in a pot together than separately. Shared misery sounded like misery squared. I nodded, though, and pretended the concept interested me, then shook her hand and made my way toward the exit. Outside, I walked to the nearest trashcan and dropped the card into it before entering my waiting taxi.
I knew I hadn’t completely hoodwinked her. I wasn’t feeling resilient and hopeful at all when I was finally released, but it was also true that I wasn’t an immediate threat to myself or anyone else. Whatever resolution I’d felt the night I sat down with that bottle of pills, had faded momentarily in my need to understand what had happened with my phone. If I delayed taking any further action for a while, it would be okay, I reasoned. I had the rest of my life to die after all.
18
My home was a museum of The Life That Wasn’t Anymore. As I hesitantly entered the familiar back door we’d always favored over the front, I felt like a trespasser. If part of the old me had died with Charlie, the rest of whatever had once been Nell had departed on the night of the overdose. Ignoring the fossils of days’ old dirty dishes stacked on the counter, a pair of discarded blue medical gloves I stepped over in the living room, and the unkempt child’s bed I’d almost died in, my focus was singular. As I shook the linens and crouched beside the bed to peer underneath, I fought the rising anxiety. It had to be there somewhere. Finally, as I kicked through the pile of clothes on the floor, my toe met the solid, reassuring form of my phone.
Unsurprisingly, the battery was dead. I plugged it into a charger and then waited for the screen to turn on and refresh. My heart pounded, but it was as close to exhilaration as I’d felt in the previous month. Finally, the old familiar Apple icon flashed and it was ready. I tapped the message app and then, without any grand countdown, tapped on Charlie’s name.
Mom call 911 now. It’s not time yet. Please…
I stared at it, as a symphony of cicadas buzzed in my ears. I hadn’t imagined it. Sitting down on the bed, I tried to process what was happening and how to react. It would have taken a tremendous leap of faith to believe Charlie had actually sent me that message, and I was completely out of faith. That isn’t to say I didn’t try, though.
As I’d done so many times in my adult past, I found myself lost in a momentary childhood memory. I was seven years old and my family had taken a vacation to Disneyland. After a long day of exploring the park, we’d retreated to the orange and goldenrod hued decor of our cheap Howard Johnson’s motel room. Dad had turned a baseball game on and I’d absent-mindedly started to fiddle with my loose front tooth. Suddenly, I’d felt a pop sensation and the tooth was ejected into my fingers. I’d wondered out loud how the tooth fairy would find me. Mom happily explained the tooth fairy was magic so she could find me anywhere. That night as I tried to fall asleep, I obsessed over the tiny, toilet paper wrapped piece of me that was under my pillow. The truth was I kind of didn’t believe in the tooth fairy. I kind of thought if I could stay awake long enough, I’d see my mom tiptoe over and swap the tooth out for a shiny quarter. I wasn’t certain, though. I wanted to believe in that kind of magic so badly. I willed myself into falling asleep quickly so I wouldn’t have to know the truth.
I mostly didn’t believe Charlie had sent the message. I guessed that someone had found his phone or perhaps this was some kind of hacking game. It could have been someone who knew me, who wanted to reach me and thought that using Charlie’s identity would be the easiest way to do that. It was also possible this was a complete stranger. I mostly didn’t believe the magic was true. Mostly.
Still, I was unable to resist doing what I did next.
Are you there Charlie?
When your heart stops beating, you have three to four minutes before your body tissues start to die. I remembered that nifty fact from my college biology class. Ten minutes? That’s a lifetime. An eternity. You don’t understand how long it is when you’re flipping television channels or waiting on a prescription. You don’t really know how long ten minutes really are until your heart stops beating, or you’re waiting for a return text from your dead child’s phone. After ten agonizing minutes without a response, anxiety gave way to anger.
How dare someone intrude in my life this way? How dare they use my dead child in whatever sick game they were playing? If this was a scam of some kind, I wasn’t sure what they hoped to accomplish. Usually, such things involved monetary rewards. I certainly didn’t have a lot of that to steal. Maybe this was an identity theft thing though, Charlie had his own social security number and it occurred to me scammers might target the identities of people who died. I realized I really needed a second pair of eyes and an unbiased mind to bounce this off. I needed Ben.
Grabbing my phone, I headed back into the living room where I paced as Ben’s phone rang again and again. Finally, on the fifth ring, he answered. He sounded both apprehensive and surprised, “Hello Nell, everything okay?”
“Yes, well no, well as okay as it can be. I need your help on something, actually,” I confessed.
“Anything. What can I do for you?”
“Let’s talk in person, it’s hard to explain over the phone.”
“Sure, do you want me to come by this afternoon?”
I thought about it, as my eyes scanned the mess I was standing in. “No, let’s meet for coffee, I can head down to Mabel’s if that works for you? Three o’clock?”
I made it to Mabel’s before Ben, and was seated by a familiar waitress. She smiled at me and said, “Haven't seen you for a while! Welcome
back!”
Here I was, a regular face, but no one knew my name or story. I relished the feeling of being an anonymous near-stranger. “Thanks, been busy. I’ll just have my usual latte.”
As I sat at my favorite corner table with my drink, I allowed myself to savor the normalcy of it all for just a moment. How often had I sat in this exact chair, drinking from this exact mug, as Charlie toiled safely just down the road at Ben’s farm? When I heard the bells over the door jingle, I looked up to see Ben walking toward me. He had that familiar, comfortable smile on his face, but his eyes were searching mine and I recognized the concern and sadness in them. I stood and hugged him and let him stand back and examine me. I knew what I looked like, I was showering again, and I’d brushed my hair, but my face had aged unnaturally.
“Nell, I’m so glad you called,” he said as he sat down.
“Me too, I’ve missed you. It’s been difficult, but I needed some time alone.”
He chuckled at that and reminded me, “I’m a man who understands the value of alone time.”
Of course, he did, he purposely chose to live in a rural area, on a large, very private property. He skipped most of the “society” event invitations he received. He was even known for not being present at his own exhibition debuts. He wasn’t antisocial; he took in a handful of students like Charlie and had a small circle of friends he’d visit, but at heart, Ben was most comfortable alone.
“I’m really glad you called, but you said there was something specific you needed help with?”
“Straight to the chase, as usual, I’ve always liked that about you. All right, I have a strange story to tell you and I need your opinion. First, though, I have to ask that you not fixate on how this came to happen. I can assure you I’m not thinking about doing anything like this in the future,” I lied before continuing truthfully, “but I’m sort of overwhelmed here by something that’s happened and I don’t trust my own instincts on this.”
He raised an eyebrow, and nodded. Taking a deep breath, I recounted what had happened the night of the overdose. He didn’t interrupt but did reach across the table and take my hand when I described laying down in Charlie’s bed, and my expectation I wouldn’t wake again. When I finally finished the entire story, he asked simply, “The phone, can I see it?”
I opened the message and handed it over. He glanced up as he scrolled through and I felt a moment of embarrassment. Then he looked back down again before passing it back. As he thoughtfully stroked his beard, he said, “I can see why you’re unsettled. Are you asking for my opinion on the authenticity of the text or do you want to hear how I’d handle it?”
“Both, I guess. I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around it all, I do know I can’t just ignore it,” I said.
“Well, as to the authenticity, no, I don’t really think Charlie sent this. I’m sorry, Nell. I think somehow someone has gotten ahold of his phone or phone number and I doubt they intended to play a cruel trick or anything, but they saw your messages and felt genuine concern. I don’t think that replying back anymore is a great idea because you’re just opening yourself up to possible heartache and maybe even fraud of some kind. I’d suggest having the number disconnected.”
I felt my stomach lurch at the suggestion. This tie, tenuous as it was, was really all that remained of Charlie. I could still hear his voice on his voicemail message. I could still reread all of our old texts, following the actual flow of the conversations. I could still send him messages.
“Thank you, Ben,” I said a little too stiffly, “I really do appreciate you taking the time to meet me.”
He shook his head gently and said, “Nell, I know you’re not happy with my opinion on this. Ultimately you can do whatever you want or need to do with this; I don’t know it all. I’ve also experienced loss first hand and I know how much a person wants to cling to some hope. I also know how desperate a person can feel when the grief is all-consuming. How a person can be pushed to the brink, where just surviving one more day sounds like too much to bear. I want you to know there’s another side, though. You do eventually pass through this part of it to that other side. You’re changed, but you find new things to live for. You eventually appreciate the gift of waking up in the morning again, I promise.”
I felt tears threaten at his words. Part of me yearned for that thing he described, but that part warred with the part of me that knew it could never apply to me. I didn’t want to hold out false hopes that would only be dashed in another Vicodin haze when it finally hit. I could not imagine a future where I was any form of normal again, and certainly not one where I was actually happy.
“I’m hearing you, truly. That’s the best I can promise right now, though, that I’ll keep trying to hear you,” I confessed before a thought occurred. “Your son, you hadn’t mentioned him before all of this. Do you want to tell me about him?”
Ben smiled, and it was striking because of how genuine the smile was. He wasn’t masking pain; he was actually happy to talk about his son.
“Ben, that was his name too. I actually fought against that. I wanted him to have his own identity, but his mother insisted and any man with an ounce of intelligence knows when it’s time to stop arguing with a pregnant woman.”
I chuckled at that and realized with a start it was the first time I’d felt anything close to a laugh since Charlie’s death. Feeling guilty about it, I forced the momentary slip back down, but Ben had noticed. He smiled again and then continued his story.
Ben Jr. was his oldest son. He’d come into the world screaming defiantly, and the defiance never really left. As a young boy, his daredevil streak was further antagonized by his naturally rebellious nature.
“If there’s a bone to break, he broke it,” Ben explained. “We were constantly trying to get him down out of trees, out of rough surf, away from the road’s edge. It seemed like no matter what sort of natural consequences he had, he’d be back out there doing whatever the fool thing was again as soon as he healed.”
Thinking about Charlie’s inheritance of Narek’s artistic ability, I was curious about Ben’s experience with his own son. When I asked, he threw his head back and laughed.
“The boy couldn’t draw a straight line. Seriously, he was a horrible artist. He had his own gifts, though; he was a talented musician. We’d gotten him into guitar lessons in the hopes he’d maybe turn to safer, indoor hobbies, but he soon graduated himself to the electric guitar and throughout high school played in a punk band. The clubs they played at were rowdy, tough places. He might have been safer outside.”
Somehow, they’d managed to get him through his high school years and he eventually went off to UCLA. He scraped by his first semester with a 1.5 GPA and when Ben found out, he’d been furious. “It wasn’t cheap, not even back then. But the bigger issue was I felt like he was Peter Panning it; he was the boy who refused to grow up. I couldn’t understand his party lifestyle, I knew he was using drugs, he was drinking too much, I doubted he was making it to class most days and it made me so angry. We had a huge fight over the phone one night, and I told him if he didn’t straighten up, the bank of Mom and Dad was officially closing. The worst thing you could ever do with Ben Jr., of course, was try to control him. His response was to use one of my own credit cards, without my knowledge, to buy a motorcycle.”
Ben had understandably been furious and after another loud argument over the phone, had told his son he was on his own financially. Two weeks of silence passed when Ben and his former wife got the dreaded late-night call about his son’s accident. Ben Jr. had been riding along a canyon road when the driver of an oncoming truck fell asleep at the wheel. Ben swerved to miss the oncoming vehicle and crashed over the guardrail. He’d been killed instantly.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry, Ben. Losing a child… well, it’s the worst pain imaginable,” I said, fighting the tears that threatened to overflow.
He closed his eyes for a moment and nodded, and then said, “It is. And in my case, it was compounded by
the guilt over how rocky our relationship had become. I would have given anything to take back that last fight. In the end, though, I learned to accept this wasn’t something I could change or influence. Ben was who he was, and along with that rebellious streak, he was brave and visionary, and he lived every moment of his life to the fullest. Two weeks of silence may be two weeks we can never have back, but it was a blip on the wild, colorful radar that was Ben’s life.”
After a few minutes of silence, I said, “I don’t know how you got there Ben, I’ll admit I hope to someday view my memories of Charlie through that kind of lens, but right now, I feel pretty positive I will never be anywhere near as healed as you.”
He nodded and grabbed my hand again. “I know it feels that way now, Nelly. I’ve had 32 years to come to terms with this, and there are still days when it’s harder than others. It does get better, though, and right now, when you have your lowest moments, I want you to focus on that promise. It does get better.”
Before we parted, I promised to carefully consider his advice and take his words of comfort to heart. We both understood I was lying, but he said goodbye gracefully.
19
Are you there? It’s me.
I called it my beautiful lie, and I lived for it every day. Each morning when I awakened, I felt momentarily content. For about fifteen seconds of the day, every day, I lived in a world that had not changed on April 12th. For that brief period of time, everything was exactly as it should be. Not that I was consciously thinking about Charlie, not usually anyway. This was fair; when he was alive, I didn’t wake up instantly thinking about him either after all. What happened was more subtle. I simply awoke feeling safe and whole. Then the cruel mistress of reality cracked her whip and everything would come back at once. The beautiful lie dissipated as the bedroom ceiling came into focus. It made me both crave and resent dawn’s first light.
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