by Claire Adams
“Because you in a tight, little white nurse’s dress sounds amazing.”
“Since when have you ever seen a real nurse in a tight, white dress?” She laughed at me. “The nurses at Paradise Peak wear baggy and comfortable scrubs.”
“Cassidy, just give a guy his fantasies, please,” I said.
“I’m sure you have plenty of fantasies already and don’t really need me to add to them.”
It was probably time that we changed the subject, since I felt my body as it started to get hard thinking about Cassidy in a nurse’s uniform. I didn’t care if the nurses now didn’t wear those outfits anymore; I was going to keep the fantasy in my head and come back to it later that evening when I was alone in my bed.
“Dinner time, kids,” Cassidy’s mother said as she opened the sliding door.
“What was your mom’s name again?” I asked.
“Katherine, and my dad goes by Bob, but it’s really Robert.”
“Okay, I’ll try to remember,” I murmured as we walked into the house.
It smelled delicious, and I was hungrier than I could remember being in a long time. I had always eaten well in my life, but there wasn’t anything greater than a home-cooked meal. Especially a mother’s home-cooked meal.
Katherine at pulled a beautiful turkey out of the oven, and she already had about six side dishes on the table. There was no way the four of us would come close to eating all the food that she had prepared, but I sure as hell was going to give it a try.
“Katherine, this dinner smells amazing. Is there anything I can help with?”
“You can cut the turkey if you’d like. Bob hates doing it, but I make him do it every year.”
I didn’t know how to cut a turkey, but I certainly didn’t want to look like a rich, spoiled kid in front of Cassidy. Every grown man should at least know how to cut a turkey, or so I thought to myself as I grabbed the giant knife that Katherine handed me.
Cassidy stayed with me in the kitchen while her mother made her way to the other room to wait for us to serve the cut up turkey. Slowly, I let the knife saw into the side of the turkey and it returned me a large chunk of white meat. This didn’t seem all that hard after all. I just needed to saw down each side of the cooked bird and put the pieces of turkey onto the platter that was set out.
Cassidy seemed amused as she watched me cut through the first few pieces of meat. Her smile was brilliantly white and her giggles just as distracting to me as I tried to look professional in my turkey-cutting skills.
Even though I was technically a vegan, I didn’t have moral obligations that kept me from eating meat, or cutting it up for that matter. I really just couldn’t do it because I hadn’t ever seen someone cut a turkey before, and I had no frame of reference for where to start with the process.
“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” she finally asked me.
“I know what I’m doing. Just slice the meat off of the bone.”
“There’s a little more to it than that. You’ve got to make the pieces small enough that people can actually eat them. If you leave just large pieces, we will likely need to turn into barbarians and eat that meat with our hands.”
“I’m good with my hands.” I laughed as I held up a disproportionally sized slice of turkey.
“You can show me sometime,” she teased me.
I really couldn’t tell if she was serious or totally joking, but I was hard at just the possibility. Somewhere down the road could be after I got out of treatment. That would work great and made the most sense. But I suspected after treatment, Cassidy wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. She probably had guys hitting on her every round of patients that came through the doors.
By the time I reached the middle of the bird, I was basically just pulling off pieces of the meat and putting it on the place. So, basically there were giant, thick slices of turkey and shredded pieces of turkey. Neither of them looked all that appealing. There was certainly a skill to cutting a turkey that I hadn’t perfected yet.
As dinner got started, each of us sat on one side of the table. Cassidy was directly across from me, Katherine to my right, and Bob to my left. The night seemed to be shaping up to be really amazing. I felt like they actually liked me and couldn’t wait to learn more about them.
“So, young man, what are your intentions with my daughter?” Bob asked me before we had even said grace.
“Bob, give the man a break. He’s just a friend,” Katherine spoke up.
“Daddy, he’s really just a friend.”
“Okay, okay, but there will be no hanky-panky going on in my house. Are you two clear on that?”
Bob looked directly at me as he asked the question, but Cassidy was the one who actually ended up answering him. It was a good thing she was prepared to answer him because I could hardly move. I tried to think of something appropriate to respond with, and all that kept running through my head were sarcastic remarks.
“Dad, we aren’t friends in that way!” Cassidy said with enthusiasm.
“Bob, let’s just have a nice Christmas dinner, please,” Katherine added.
So far, I was pretty sure that Katherine liked me and Bob hated my guts. One of two didn’t seem like that bad of a job considering I was new at the whole meeting the parents thing.
We made it through grace and I took to eating and letting the family talk. I really enjoyed just sitting and listening to their conversation. It was like being a member of their family, without actually being a member.
I didn’t want to refuse the meal that had taken so much time and effort, so for that one night I gave up my vegan eating ways and just enjoyed dinner with Cassidy and her family. It wasn’t going to kill me to have a little meat.
Cassidy was respectful and funny with her parents. She was at ease around them, and that was weird for me to see. I couldn’t remember feeling at ease around my own father. Yet, I very clearly remembered how comfortable my mother had made me. Perhaps since Cassidy had both her mother and her father, things were just better between everyone.
The more I watched and listened, though, the more I started to feel like Bob was just a nicer version of my own father. He was still really cranky and wanted to do things his own way, but he listened to his wife and daughter, who always seemed to have something to tell him. He was a rough man, but gentle with the women in his life. I imagine my father would have been a lot like Bob if my mother had lived.
From what I remembered of my mother and father’s relationship, my mother had guided most of the decisions in the house. Even up until the day she died, my mother had been in charge.
It was my mother who taught us boys how to be nice, although we seemed to have forgotten that lesson after she passed away. It was my mother who had shown me leniency when I was a naughty child; she had given me love when I didn’t think I needed it. My mother had been the one true thing in my life, and as I sat there watching Cassidy’s family interact, I felt myself getting misty eyed.
If my mother hadn’t died, I could have had a family Christmas similar to the one I was at. If my mother hadn’t died, I wouldn’t have run to drugs and alcohol to numb my life away.
“Where’s the restroom?” I asked as I pushed my chair out and stood up quickly.
“Don’t the hall, first door on the right,” Katherine said.
I couldn’t even reply with a thank you, as I hurried off and out of the room before they all saw the tears in my eyes. Crying wasn’t my thing. I didn’t like to cry. Most of my life, I hadn’t really understood the reason so many people cried. But as I slammed the bathroom door behind me, I felt tears as they rolled down my face. I was definitely crying.
My hand grabbed onto my chest as it tightened and I tried to pull in a deep breath. I wanted a deep breath. My body needed to calm down, and Jarrod wasn’t anywhere to be seen. My whole life, I had longed to have a loving family like Cassidy had, and there I was, sitting right in the middle of the most perfect Christmas dinner ever.
&nb
sp; The tricky thing about anxiety is that the more you want a panic attack to stop, the more it will tighten in your chest. I had just recently started to have panic attacks and barely knew what they were, let alone how to stop them. I desperately wished Jarrod was there so he could calm me down.
But this was part of being on leave. I looked at myself in the mirror and watched my lungs expand as I took a deep breath. The mirror was actually very helpful because it counteracted my brain that was telling me I couldn’t breathe. As I watched my body take in a deep breath and let it out again, I felt myself calming.
Again and again, I took in as much air as I could in an effort to push past the panic that was in my mind and prove that my body really had control.
“You know what to do,” I told myself in the mirror. “Deep breaths. Don’t think about anything else. Just breathe.”
I replayed the words that Jarrod had said to me as he calmed me down. I knew what to do. I hadn’t done it on my own before, but I really did know what to do. As I finally regained control over my breathing, I looked at myself and felt pride in what I had accomplished. I had actually taken back control over my fears, and even in the midst of a very emotional moment, I was all right.
There was a knock on the door.
“Everything okay?” I heard Cassidy whisper at the door.
“I’m okay. Just give me a minute.”
“Did you have a panic attack?”
I flung the door opened and pulled her into the bathroom. She couldn’t have just guessed that I had a panic attack. How did she know?
“Was I loud? Did your family hear?”
“No, I just remembered you had one at work. Is there anything I can get you?”
“Just give me a minute, and I’ll come back out. I’m really sorry for ruining the night. I was just so overwhelmed by your perfect family.”
Cassidy started to laugh. God, I loved to watch her laugh. Her whole face lit up with joy and I honestly felt like the room got brighter when the joy exploded from her like that. I knew her family wasn’t perfect; no family really is perfect. But her family was much better than mine and seemed perfect enough to me.
“Perfect? My father just left the table to go watch sports and my mom is grumbling under her breath while she does the dishes. No one’s family is perfect, Erik.”
“Thanks,” I said as I gave her a hug.
She hugged me back and then slipped out of the bathroom to give me a few moments to pull myself back together. It was funny how I had hugged her and hadn’t actually thought about anything else except what a nice person she was.
Cassidy was a nice person, and I had taken advantage of that by flirting with her and kissing her. She didn’t deserve to have some patient all up on her like that. I felt badly for how I had behaved; it was my addict personality. I always wanted more. If someone gave me one minute of their time, I wanted five. If I had one piece of candy, I wanted ten. If a beautiful woman who worked at my treatment facility was nice to me, I wanted to sleep with her. It was a rotten way of thinking and something I had to work on.
Chapter Fifteen
Cassidy
“Are you ready for Miracle on 34th Street?” I asked Erik when he finally joined us in the living room. “This is one of my all-time favorite movies.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“What?” my mother asked as she turned and looked at Erik like he was from a different planet. “What do you mean?”
Erik looked embarrassed, and my mother certainly wasn’t making things any easier. I didn’t know all that much about his childhood, but it hadn’t sounded like it was the best. I did my best to rescue him from my mother’s sympathetic clutches, but she was one of the biggest fans of Christmas and every holiday movie out there. It was going to be really hard for her to wrap her brain around the fact that Erik hadn’t even heard of the movie before.
“Mom, it’s okay. We’re watching it right now. After tonight, he will have seen it.”
My parents sat on the couch with one of them on either end of it. So, that only left the love seat for Erik and I to sit on. It was a cozy couch without a bunch of extra room, but it would certainly be hard to sit next to Erik and keep my hands to myself. He had just proven that he was tough and sensitive and that really got me.
When Kaitlin and I talked about the perfect guy, I always said I wanted a guy who was sensitive. I didn’t mean that he had to cry all the time and act like a baby. All I meant was that he could see something emotional and actually shed a tear. Or, that he would feel some sort of emotion when things called for it. Too many guys felt like they had to hide their emotions with a stern look. The guy I was looking for in my life would be able to actually show his emotions when the time called for it.
As the movie played, I totally forgot that Erik was sitting next to me because I was so engrossed. But as the ending scene started, I looked over at him to see what sort of emotion he had on his face. It was a scene that even made my father cry when everyone helps out Kris Kringle. But as I turned and looked for the expression on Erik’s face, I quickly realized that he wasn’t even awake.
His head was propped up on his hand, and he was fast asleep. I had no idea how long he had been sleeping, but certainly it was long enough that he was totally out of it. There went all my ideas that he might actually be a sensitive guy. It baffled me that he hadn’t seen the movie before, yet he still fell asleep in the middle of it. How was that even possible?
I tried my best not to react, but the more I thought about, it the angrier I got. He was in my home on Christmas Eve and our thing was to watch a movie together. He couldn’t even respect us enough to stay awake. My blood pressure continued to rise as the movie finished and he still didn’t wake up.
“Looks like he was worn out by the day,” my mother said kindly.
“Yep.”
“I’ll get some sheets and blankets for the couch. I’m really sorry the bedroom is such a mess. Your father started painting it and just hasn’t finished it yet.”
“I didn’t know we were having company,” my father responded loudly enough that Erik finally woke up.
He looked around the room to see if anyone had noticed he was asleep and noticed we were all staring at him. A very uncomfortable silence fell, and I just let it stay there for a little bit. If it had been up to me, I wouldn’t have talked to Erik at all and would have just left him to wonder where we had all gone when we got up and left the room. But it wasn’t up to me, and my mother soon started mothering him, since that was what she did best.
“Hi there. You look like you haven’t been sleeping well. Are you hungry for a snack at all before bed?”
“No, ma’am. I’m all right.”
“I’ll go grab you some sheets. You can sleep on this couch. Santa usually comes a little after midnight, so you’ll be able to get a good glimpse at him.”
My hands flung up to my face to cover my laughter as my mother went on and on about Santa Claus like he was real and he did visit our home. She had always been such a firm believer in Santa, and I had to admit I still liked the idea of him. My mother had made my childhood very wonderful around the holidays.
When my mom finally left the living room with my father behind her, I couldn’t hold the laughter in any longer and burst out. It was so fun to have Erik there with me. Growing up as an only child I often didn’t realize what my family did differently than others around Christmas. I could still remember very clearly the year I had questioned my mother when she talked about Santa Claus. I soon learned that Santa was real because if he wasn’t, that meant I didn’t get presents.
“You better believe in Santa or you’re going to be in trouble.” I giggled.
“I’m sorry I fell asleep during the movie. I think that panic attack totally wiped me out. I’m exhausted.”
He apologized. Now how am I supposed to stay mad at him? I couldn’t; I had to let it go. I had experienced a few panic attacks when I was going through treatment and even for
a few months afterward. They were exhausting. My body would get all tensed up, and then when I finally calmed down, all I wanted to do was sleep.
A lot of people ended up taking anti-anxiety medication to deal with their panic attacks, but I always believed it would be best for me to learn how to calm myself down. I didn’t want to rely on medication to get my body back in control. I had already spent so long using alcohol as my own personal anti-anxiety liquid. As much as possible, I avoided all medications. I didn’t even take Tylenol unless I really couldn’t stand my headache.
“It’s okay. I’m sure you’ll sleep well.”
“Cassidy, I really did have a great time tonight. It might not have seemed like it, but this is as close to a family Christmas I’ve had in a very long time. It was great.”
“Here you go, some blankets and sheets for you,” my mother said as she handed a very large stack of items to Erik. “Hopefully, you won’t get too cold.”
“I know; the weather here is freezing compared to San Francisco. I can’t wait to get home and jump in my nice warm pool.”
My eyes got larger than I thought physically possible as Erik spoke and totally blew his cover. He hadn’t remembered the story I told my mother, at all. He wasn’t supposed to be from California; he was supposed to be from New York. He certainly wasn’t supposed to have enough money for a home and a pool, otherwise why would he need a bed to sleep on for the night?
It took my mother a moment to register what was going on, and I saw the flash of recognition as it hit her. She held herself together very nicely and simply requested that I come and talk with her in five minutes.
I hated when she did that. Five minutes was her rule because she wanted to calm down and talk to my father before she yelled at me. Even though I was clearly an adult, I still felt like a naughty teenage now that I was caught in a lie.
“I’m sorry,” Erik winced.
“You had one lie to keep straight. Come on, man. I know you’ve had to tell worse lies to the ladies you slept with when you were smashed.”
