Since She's Been Gone, page 16
“Well, you snagged a great guy,” she told me. “I tried to set him up with my girlfriend, but he said he wasn’t ready. I don’t think he’s been with anyone but you since Sarah’s mom died.”
Thankfully, at that moment, the birthday boy’s parents carried a large, blazing cake into the yard, and I was able to excuse myself from the conversation, which felt more like an interrogation.
After everyone sang happy birthday, Sarah walked over to me and sat down with a slice of cake, while Eddie talked with a few dads.
She chatted about the bouncy house, and I felt so much joy sitting with her talking—the kind of thing I had ached to do with my mom for as long as I could remember.
But then what happened when I was pregnant crept into my consciousness. And I thought about how if Eddie knew the truth, how I’d been restricting food and lost the pregnancy, he might not have asked me to come to the party in the first place, how he might not want me to be in Sarah’s life at all.
That’s the problem with secrets. They don’t stay in small corners. They permeate the air, smoldering until they engulf everything like a Malibu fire.
“Wanna bite?” Sarah asked me, moving her piece of cake in front of me.
I wanted a bite. I wanted to be normal. I wanted to believe I could be who she needed me to be at that moment, but I was too scared, too overwhelmed.
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s your slice. You should eat it.”
“Why don’t you get a piece?” she asked me.
“I’m full from lunch,” I lied.
A few months later, I lied again at another one of her school functions when she offered me some of her food. My fears about whether I’d measure up as a mom hadn’t dissipated. They’d only intensified.
But there was something else brewing underneath the fear. Something deeper. Something I struggled to get my arms around at the time—a feeling of worthlessness. I didn’t deserve to be anyone’s mother. Not after my ED-related miscarriage.
“Are you coming over for dinner?” Sarah asks me over the phone, pulling me out of my memory.
I guess Eddie didn’t tell her that I left for New York. Maybe he didn’t want to have to lie about why I’m here.
“I can’t tonight,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh,” she says, sounding disappointed.
“But I promise I will again soon,” I tell her, wishing I could reach through the phone and hug her.
“Okay,” she says. “Bye.”
“Bye,” I say.
Eddie gets back on the phone. “Paul just texted me that he’s still waiting for you to eat lunch. It’s almost two o’clock in New York.”
“I’ve been immersed,” I explain.
“What’s going on?” he asks.
“I can’t get into it right now,” I say.
“Are you okay?” he says, now sounding worried.
“I’m fine, but I’m about to meet my mom’s old roommate from New York,” I say, standing in the lobby of an art deco-style building on the Upper West Side. Esther Hermes’s building, which I Googled after leaving Alexander Valentine’s gallery in Chelsea.
“Her college roommate?” Eddie asks.
“They lived together off campus …” I hedge, leaving out how they really met. “I’ll call you when I get to Paul’s.”
“Okay, I’m waiting, and so is he,” he says. “One other thing …”
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
“I love you too,” I say. “Both of you.”
After we hang up, I think about how I’d give anything to be at his place—going over Sarah’s spelling words with her, all of us eating dinner together, instead of where I am right now.
“Excuse me,” a doorman dressed in a navy blue uniform with gold buttons says. He points to a Cell Phone Free Zone sign on his desk.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m off now. Will you please ring the Hermes residence?”
“And you are?” he asks.
“Irene Mayer’s daughter,” I say, hoping Esther still remembers my mom.
He dials an old-fashioned black phone on the reception desk, lets her know I’m here, hangs up, and says, “You can go up now.”
“Thank you,” I say, letting out a sigh of relief. Guess Esther remembers Mom. “What floor?”
“The penthouse.”
I step inside the elevator and press the PH button, which I estimate is the eighteenth floor since the last numbered button on the panel is seventeen. I ride up to the top, and when the door opens, and I step out, I realize I’m standing in the middle of a kitchen.
A woman around my age, several decades too young to be Esther, is holding a bruiser of a baby boy spilling out of her arms.
“You’re not Esther,” I say.
“I’m her daughter,” she says.
“Her daughter?”
“Yes, I’m Claire, and this is Louis, her grandson,” she says, motioning to the baby boy. “My mom died last year.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Thank you,” she says.
“My mom died too, when I was fifteen.”
“I know,” she says. “I’m sorry. It must’ve been so hard to lose her at that age.”
“You knew my mom?” I ask her, confused.
“I didn’t know her, but I knew of her,” Claire responds. Louis starts getting fussy in her arms. “Do you mind if we talk in the living room? All of his toys are there,” she says.
“Okay,” I say, following her into a massive living room with breathtaking, cinematic views of Central Park and baby toys littered all over the floor.
She picks up a clear teething ring filled with liquid from a pile of toys and hands it to Louis, who sticks it in his mouth and starts sucking on it.
“Please take a seat,” she tells me, motioning to a long cream couch as she sits down with Louis on her lap.
I sit down next to them, taking in the majestic views. “This is a beautiful apartment,” I say.
“Thanks, it was my mom’s. I moved in with her after she got sick with MS so that I could help her, and stayed after she died,” she says.
There’s a loneliness in her voice. She’s not wearing a wedding ring and hasn’t mentioned anything about Louis’s father or having a partner.
“What brings you to New York?” she asks me.
“I’m trying to learn more about my mom,” I say. “May I ask how you knew about her?”
“Sobriety was a big part of my mom’s life, so she talked about Irene a lot, who she always said was the one responsible for helping her get sober.”
“Really?” I say.
“Your mom must’ve mentioned how they detoxed together at Bell,” she says.
I don’t tell her I just learned this fact less than half an hour ago.
“Mom said Irene was admitted first and further along in the detox process,” Claire continues. “After Mom arrived and started going through withdrawal hell, ready to give up, Irene was the one there cheering her on, telling her it would get better, and it did. My mom told me she would’ve never gotten sober without your mom’s help.”
“Did your mom ever mention anything about a guy my mom was seeing while they were at the halfway house together after Bell? Because I just spoke with Alexander Valentine, the former clinical director there, and he said your mom wasn’t a fan of his,” I say.
“My mom never said anything disparaging about Irene. She was her hero. Everything my mom achieved in her adult life, from graduating from college to getting married to having a family to dedicating her life to philanthropy, she attributed to her sobriety, and your mom was always at the heart of that.”
My mom, a flawed hero, apparently had redemptive qualities.
“Even after Irene left the halfway house, my mom said she still regularly visited her there to support her sobriety efforts.”
I’m struggling to absorb what Claire is telling me. Why did Esther tell Claire about her past, but Mom never told me about hers? Was it because I was a teenager? Did she think I might not be able to handle it? It could’ve served as a cautionary tale at a time when kids experiment, had she been honest with me.
And why didn’t Dad ever mention it? I was twenty-eight years old when he died. There was no reason by that time that I shouldn’t have known.
Is it possible he didn’t know? He must’ve. She never ever drank, volunteered for D.A.R.E., and dedicated her career to helping other addicts.
Maybe he didn’t tell me because he was trying to preserve my memory of her, of who I thought she was. But that doesn’t make sense, because if he did know, he was obviously okay with who she was, including her past. He married her and had a family despite her history of addiction.
Maybe he kept it from me for a different reason, something related to her death. Something to do with the Cadells that might’ve compromised me …
“May I ask when your mom first spoke to you about all of this?” I ask Claire.
“In high school, before the congressional hearing in 1997,” she says. “It was hard to avoid.”
“Congressional hearing?” I repeat.
Her eyebrows raise. “You didn’t know about it?”
I shake my head.
“It was the only topic of conversation in our house for months. Mom and Dad fought about it all the time,” she says.
“What was the hearing about?” I ask.
“Congress asked patients who had gone through the first opioid detox program at Bell in the seventies, the one our moms were in, to testify in a hearing against TriCPharma. The Feds were trying to establish that the company knew from the start that their drugs were dangerous and addictive. The hearing wasn’t compulsory. There were no subpoenas, so it was up to former patients if they wanted to testify, and my dad really didn’t want my mom to. He’d heard rumors about the Cadells and was worried about potential retribution. But my mom wanted to anyway. Their drugs stole years of her life and destroyed her youth. She was a fourteen-year-old equestrian phenom headed for the Olympics and got in a riding accident, after which a doctor prescribed her the first generation of TriCPharma ‘pain’ drugs. She didn’t get on a horse again until a decade later.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Thanks,” she says. “Mom and Dad argued a lot about her testifying. She kept saying it would be confidential, how they’d already given interviews about TriCPharma drugs to the head of the research department at Bell Hospital back in the seventies, and how there had never been any problems. But Dad said this was different, that there were always leaks with congressional hearings, and if the Cadells ever found out that she testified, it could not only compromise her but also put our entire family at risk. One night they had a huge fight about it, and he asked her, ‘Don’t we matter?’ After that, I guess something shifted because she decided not to go through with it.”
A chill runs through me, thinking about the same exact fight that Mom and Dad had. It would have been at about the same time too.
“Irene testified though—”
She did?
“—and when she was killed shortly after, there was no doubt in my dad’s mind that it wasn’t a random hit-and-run accident. He was convinced it was because of a leak from the hearing, even though the testimonies were sealed. My mom was wrecked. She kept saying, ‘It should’ve been me.’ She said your mom was the bravest woman she knew.”
“Do you know where this hearing took place?” I ask.
“At the Capitol. Your mom stayed in New York at a hotel near us. The night before she was supposed to take a train to DC, she met my mom. After they got together, I remember my mom coming home distraught. I wasn’t sure if she was worried about Irene going through with it, or if she felt guilty that she wasn’t testifying herself, or both. I had just started high school, and it felt like this dark cloud was hanging over my freshman year.”
Wait a minute. The only trip mom took by herself in 1997 before she died was to go to her supposed NYU Tisch reunion. After the trip, she returned home with a bruised body, claiming she had been mugged by a cyclist that had crashed into her on his bike before grabbing her purse and warning me to stay away from New York.
This trip must’ve been when she went to DC to testify in front of Congress about her opioid addiction. Maybe she wasn’t hit by a cyclist who mugged her. Maybe the Cadells roughed her up beforehand to try to scare her into not testifying.
“One of the senators that sat on the committee hearing still works on the hill—Senator Lyon from West Virginia,” Claire says. “My parents donated a lot of money to politicians, but after Irene died, they stopped. Last year, before my mom passed, she mentioned that she’d heard the president might unseal the testimonies from the hearing. She wanted me to hear her hero, Irene, testify, and when it didn’t happen, she tried tracking down Dr. Siegel. He was the researcher at Bell in charge of their detox unit. She was hoping to find the interviews he did with them back in the day so that I could hear your mom speak. But almost fifty years had passed, and he was long gone. Nobody at the hospital knew where the interviews were either.”
Louis starts getting fussy again in Claire’s arms. “I need to get his bottle,” she says, handing him over to me without any warning and leaving me alone with him in the living room. I awkwardly take him in my arms and try bouncing him on my lap to calm him. But it doesn’t work, and he starts to cry.
She quickly returns with a bottle of milk and a slice of chocolate cake that she lays down on the coffee table.
“It was his birthday a couple of days ago, and I have leftovers from the party. Can I offer you a piece?”
“No, I better go,” I say. She takes Louis from my arms and puts the bottle in his mouth. “Thank you for speaking with me,” I say.
“It’s the least I could do,” she says. “I’m not sure I’d be here if it weren’t for your mom.”
“May I use your bathroom before I leave?” I ask.
“Of course,” she says, pointing to a door outside the living room.
When I step inside the bathroom, I stare at myself in the mirror, reeling over everything I’ve just learned, especially Mom’s decision to testify in front of Congress, implicating the Cadells in her opioid addiction, a decision that may have ultimately ripped our family apart.
I can’t understand why she did it. Why didn’t she take Dad’s concerns seriously, as Esther did with her husband? Mom was an intelligent woman who must’ve known the risks it posed, not just to her but also to Dad and me. They fought about it. If she had listened to him, she likely never would’ve had to disappear, and I wouldn’t be here right now.
While it was nice to hear Claire talk about how much Mom helped Esther, what about me? I was Mom’s daughter. Why didn’t I matter enough for her to make a different choice that might’ve kept our family intact?
In the end, she chose a path that may have been responsible for irreparably altering the course of my life. And now it seems, twenty-six years later, my life has been turned upside down again because of this decision she made decades ago.
I feel the heat in my chest returning. My anger bubbling over. Not just at her but at the hand I’ve been dealt.
Why couldn’t I have had Esther Hermes as my mother, who was honest with her daughter about her struggles with addiction, the one who decided her family’s safety mattered more than testifying in front of Congress? Why am I the daughter left tasked to solve the impossible riddle of what happened to my mom to get my life back?
According to Jay, the Cadells never let past vendettas go, which means they’ve been trying to find her for twenty-six years and won’t stop until they do.
That last thought stops me, because I realize something.
If the Cadells have been searching for Mom since she disappeared twenty-six years ago, I would’ve noticed someone following me long before now, wanting to see if I’ve been in contact with her through the years.
But I didn’t until last week after my car was broken into when I was with Sarah, which means their pursuit of her is new. So why now? Why are they after her now?
Maybe it has to do with what Claire mentioned about the rumor that the president might unseal Mom’s congressional testimony along with the others. But that doesn’t make sense, because even if she’s alive, it’s not in her power to stop the president from unsealing it.
Maybe there’s something in it. Something she disclosed that they’re nervous about her coming forward with if she’s still alive and her testimony is released to the public. I have to find out what she said in it.
I pull out my cell phone and text Eddie:
My mom’s roommate’s daughter asked me to stay to eat.
Texting Paul now to let him know.
Eddie immediately texts me back: Thanks for the update. Love you.
I text Paul the same lie and tell him to eat lunch without me if he hasn’t already.
I then splash cold water on my face and exit the bathroom. Claire is standing in the hallway in front of the elevator with Louis.
“I know how happy my mom would be about our meeting,” she says. “I’m so glad I had the chance to meet you.”
“Me too,” I say.
The elevator arrives at the penthouse. I step inside, we say our goodbyes, and I ride downstairs to the lobby.
When I leave the building, I do something I’m not proud of. Something I know will not only worry both Eddie and Paul, but something they’d also be dead against me doing. I turn off my cell phone so they can’t track me, and hail the first taxi I see.
“Where ya headed?” a driver with thick black eyebrows asks me.
“Penn Station,” I say.
CHAPTER
42
September 2000
IT WAS THE fall of 2000 when Dad dropped me off at college for the first time.
I decided on UCLA not only because it was both of my parents’ graduate school alma maters. It also allowed me to stay close to my eating disorder recovery community in Los Angeles, and to Dad, who I constantly worried about.
I felt incredibly guilty for moving out of the house and leaving him. A few years had passed since Mom died, and he had never gone on any dates or expressed interest in doing so.
