In the Distance There Is Light (2 page)

So here I stand, in Jeremy’s starkly decorated apartment, alone. My eyes fall on a picture of Ian and me, a silly polaroid we took at Jeremy’s fortieth birthday party a few years ago. Ian’s cheeks are filled with air, like little balloons of flesh, his eyes bulging, and it makes me think of how hard it was to find a suitable picture for his obituary. Whenever a camera came near him, he would start goofing around. In the end, we used one I snapped of him when he was unaware of it. Ian staring into the distance, ruminating on something, his expression peaceful nonetheless.

“Get a grip,” I whisper to myself. I hate this version of me, this beaten down, tearful, whiny woman I’ve become. Even though I know I’m
allowed
this devastation, this weakness—Alex called it vulnerability the other day—I can’t identify with it. Every time I believe I’ve run out of tears, new ones show up, as though I haven’t already been crying for a week. An endless supply of tears.

I head back to the couch and drink more of the wine Jeremy poured before he left—we’ve made a good dent in his stash. Then my cell phone beeps. Convinced it’s Jeremy, texting me from a taxi, I sigh, but smile a little as well. Jeremy is exactly the kind of friend you need when something like this happens—something I can’t wrap my head around, let alone accept. Because he’s a bubble of a man, always ready to burst, to come up with an out-of-the-box plan, even though, of course, Ian dying has taken away some of his spontaneity and quick wit. The other day, I begged him to make me laugh, to tell me one of his outrageous stories I’ve heard so many times, but when he did, he couldn’t put the right inflections in his voice to make it funny.

The message is not from Jeremy, but from my mother, asking how I’m holding up. Well-intentioned, I’m sure, but even now I can’t read any words from my mother without hearing a persistent passive-aggressive ring to them. She probably thinks I haven’t called her enough, haven’t relied on her enough during these dire times. What am I even supposed to reply to that?

Knowing my mother, she’s probably walking around the house, thinking of ways for this tragedy to bring us closer together. But some things are just beyond repair, like our relationship. I can’t deal with this right now, although no matter how much my mother annoys me, at least it makes for a change from this relentless blackness that has wrapped itself around every thought I’ve had since Ian died. I don’t reply.

I push my phone away and grab the remote control. Maybe Netflix will bring solace. As soon as I press the button, I know it won’t, because how can it? How can televised drama possibly take my mind off the horror of real life? How can a sitcom ever make me smile again? Oh, fuck. I really shouldn’t be alone. The loss weighs too heavy on me, the pain is too much for me to shoulder alone in Jeremy’s living room. I reach for my phone again and call the person who reminds me of Ian the most, who knows him the best, whose loss is comparable to mine.

I call Dolores.

Chapter Three

“Come over,” Dolores said. “Come right now.” Her voice is still in my head when I’m already in the taxi. She’s not his biological mother, yet she’s all I have left of him. I’ll never see the brown of his eyes in hers, never recognize that hand gesture with which he flopped his hair back. “You really shouldn’t be alone right now.” I could only agree. When I met Ian six years ago, he’d just put himself together again after losing his mother to lung cancer. Dolores has done this bereavement thing once before when she lost Angela. Not that I believe you can become better at losing loved ones.

Dolores’ house is in the Gold Coast and I’ve always loved visiting there. It’s where Ian grew up and his old bedroom is still reasonably intact. Even after Angela passed away, Dolores refused to vacate the four-bedroom property, even though it’s way too big for just her.

“Oh, Sophie,” she says when I arrive, and spreads her arms wide. Not having been raised in a very tactile family myself, it took me some time to get used to this family of huggers. Dolores was always throwing an arm around Ian, mussing his hair about, expressing her motherly love in one physical way or another. Now, she draws me into a tight embrace, and her arms wrap firmly around my neck. Instantly, my cheeks go wet with tears again. It’s being here, in this house, where I always only visited with Ian, that does me in again. “I know nothing makes sense at all right now, honey,” she whispers in my ear. “I know it feels like nothing ever will again.”

When we break from the hug, I try to straighten my spine, but it’s as though my shoulders have been set into a permanent slump.

Dolores ushers me in, pours me brandy, and sits me down. “What was Jeremy thinking? Leaving you alone like that?”

“I wanted him to go out. We’ve been cooped up together for days now. It’s not healthy. Besides, he had a work thing.”

“Right. I’m sure I’ll read all about it in this weekend’s
Post
.” Dolores says. “It will be such a delight.” Dolores and Jeremy have a peculiar kind of relationship. She’s fond of him, but she can’t fathom his chosen profession of, in her words, “ridiculing Chicago’s finest in his silly gossip column.”

I ignore Dolores’ comment and say, “I’m beginning to feel like a burden on everyone. It’s been a week, and I’m only at the beginning of this while my friends are ready to pick up their lives again.”

“You’re always welcome here. You know that, don’t you?” She looks at me over the rim of her wide-bellied glass. “And you’re a burden to no one.”

I nod. Dolores stares at me, as though she wants to say something else but doesn’t quite know how. If this were Jeremy, or any of my other friends, looking at me like that, I would give them an annoyed “What?” but this is Ian’s mother and there is a certain distance between us.

“After Angela died, I briefly saw someone. A therapist. She was good, even though talking to a stranger about my feelings isn’t really my thing. I could give you her number, if you like,” she says.

“It’s not really my thing either,” I’m quick to reply. Although I’ve never actually tried it.

“As long as you know the option is there,” Dolores says. “That there are professionals who can help.”

I try to picture Dolores pouring her heart out to a shrink. I don’t see it; she’s really not the type. Though she is not stingy with affection, she has a certain aura of untouchableness about her. It’s not coldness, more a way of being on guard, perhaps because of what life has thrown at her already. I remember how intimidated I was by her when we first met. Ian hadn’t helped by listing all his mother’s accomplishments. He adored her, always claiming that he was still making up for being such a nuisance to both his mothers during puberty.

“From the day I turned thirteen until past my sixteenth birthday, I didn’t want to be raised by two women,” he said. “I wanted a man and a woman, or just a man or a woman, but decidedly
not
two women.” Dolores has never talked to me about that period in Ian’s life. I’ve only ever seen them be warm and loving toward each other—the exact opposite of how I am with my own parents.

I nod again, then drink from the brandy. My throat burns as I swallow, and I’m glad some sort of physical sensation is breaking through the numbness. I want to ask her so badly
: how did you cope when Angela died?
That first week, what did you do? And afterward, that first year, and the rest of your life… where did you find the will to go on?
But these are words that won’t make it past my lips. Not now, and possibly not ever.

I can’t ask those questions of Dolores, whose life has been left in ruins just as much as mine. Besides, Ian told me how Dolores coped after Angela died following her long, draining illness. Dolores started another art gallery and became one of the biggest gallerists in Chicago in the process. She worked and worked, lost herself in the details of opening up a new venue, ignoring all the rest. Whereas I can’t even begin to think about work. The pieces I write are long and inquisitive, requiring days of research—just me behind my laptop, in my office in the apartment Ian and I lived in.

An apartment Ian bought with his inheritance after Angela died. I don’t even know what’s going to happen to the home I once knew.

Dolores looks at me again, and I’m glad, because her glance takes my mind off the apartment problem, and off the prospect of having to find a new place to live, and adjusting to life on my own, with no one waking up beside me in the morning.

“Why don’t you stay here tonight? There’s plenty of room,” she says.

I guess Dolores is not keen on being home alone either. I’d be doing her a favor by staying here, and perhaps this favor—however small—will make me feel something other than the crater of loss expanding in my chest. I nod. “Okay.”

“Good,” she says with the firm tone her voice gets when she agrees with something wholeheartedly. “More brandy? It will help you sleep.”

This reminds me that I didn’t bring my sleeping pills. Just in case Dolores doesn’t have any, I hold out my glass to her.

* * *

As though the decision to stay at Dolores’ house tricked my brain into relaxing—though I’m sure the brandy is more to blame than anything else—I sink into the couch, my limbs going loose. I let Dolores talk, nodding and humming when I think it’s required. She doesn’t ask me any questions, probably sensing that I don’t feel much like engaging in conversation, that my brain is too blasted with grief to make an effort. I’m just relieved that I’m not sitting alone in Jeremy’s apartment, waiting for an appropriate time to take a pill, go to bed, and lie in the dark for the most agonizing minutes of my day, until sleep takes away my consciousness. I really shouldn’t go anywhere without my sleeping pills.

Sufficiently emboldened by the alcohol in my blood, when Dolores doesn’t speak for a while, I ask, “Do you have Ambien?”

She quirks up her eyebrows, then shakes her head. “Have you been taking it for a full week?” There’s no accusation in her voice, yet I feel put on the spot.

“Yes.”

“Perfectly understandable, but you’ll want to get off that as soon as possible. After Angela died, it took me forever to shake the habit. It’s so easy to just pop a pill, until you forget how to go to sleep without them.” She sighs. “I’ve hardly slept since Ian…” A pause. I know how hard it is to say the word. “But at least I know I’m not relying on pills.”

“That’s very noble of you, but I’m going to need something. Those couple of hours per night are all I have to not let myself be consumed by this. I need the respite.”

“I get it, but you can’t take a pill forever.”

“I don’t intend to, but anything is better than tossing and turning in bed, with no one beside me, realizing over and over again that I’ll never—” My voice breaks. “—see him again.”

“This is all I have.” She holds up the half-empty bottle of brandy.

“Then I guess I’ll go home.”
Home?
What a joke. “I mean back to Jeremy’s.”

“It’s late and you’re exhausted. Why don’t you stay and give it a try? You can sleep in my bedroom and watch TV. I’ll take the guest room.”

I remember the tiny favor I wanted to do for Dolores. We’re in this together, after all. Just me and her. “Okay.” Ian always refused to have a television in our bedroom, claiming it interfered with the quality of sleep. Now he’s no longer here, I’m not so bothered with the quality as much as with the quantity of my sleep. “I’ll let Jeremy know that I’m here.”

Chapter Four

I wake up with the television still blaring. I switch it off, afraid that I’ve kept Dolores awake in the room next door. Am I really in her bed? What was I thinking taking her up on her offer? Chasing her out of her own bed? The thought is so jarring that any remaining inclination toward sleep flees me. When I swallow, I have a bad taste in my mouth. From the back of my head, a painful pulse makes its way forward. Great, a brandy hangover in the middle of the night. I sit up, knowing I won’t be able to sleep any time soon. As always when I wake after drinking too much, my heart hammers frantically, reminding me that, unlike Ian, I’m still alive.

I switch on the bedside lamp and cast my glance over Dolores’ room. On the wall opposite the bed there’s a picture of her and Angela in front of the Eiffel Tower. It was always just a fact of life that I would never meet Ian’s biological mother, but now, for the first time, it hurts that I never shook Angela’s hand and examined her face for similarities with her son. In the picture, Dolores has her arm wrapped around Angela’s shoulder, clasping tightly, towering over her.