Look Closer

I leave the law school at a quarter after seven for my ten-mile round-trip run to Wicker Park—to the alley outside Viva Mediterránea—and back. I reach the alley in plenty of time, well before the appointed time of 8:00 p.m. for our text messages. I’m not near the times I used to post when I was younger, but I can run a six-minute mile in my sleep.

I stretch and listen to the partiers out on Viva’s patio. Look at the people in the condos across the alley, grilling out on their back porches or just having cocktails.

I never lived around here or in a neighborhood like this one. I never lived in the city. I never left Grace Park. My father took off not long after my mother died, when I made it clear that I no longer had a father. He moved down to St. Louis and joined up with a firm that handled asbestos litigation—suing any company that had any product that remotely used asbestos, representing people with alleged exposure to that asbestos who later developed mesothelioma. Madison County, Illinois, was a beacon for those “meso” cases, and it made the lawyers rich.

So Dad finally hit it big and had the validation he so dearly craved.

And I stayed in the house in Grace Park and commuted downtown to college. I guess I was unwilling to let the house go, its connection with Mom. So I never did what most young college or law students did, much less postgrad students, and live in the city.

In a neighborhood just like this one, in one of these condos.

Instead, I lived in a suburb, in a big house all by myself.

Not to mention those eighteen months at New Horizons. The nuthouse, if you want to be politically incorrect, a facility for struggling individuals, if you’re speaking in polite company.

It helped. Dr. McMorrow was a good therapist who listened more than she spoke. I was a basket case after my mother’s death, and I tried to continue my sophomore year of college but knew I couldn’t and checked myself in voluntarily. Dr. McMorrow—Anne; she wanted me to call her by her first name—challenged the guilt I felt, preached all those things that I now preach at Survivors of Suicide, about how we can’t control everything or everybody, and we have to acknowledge that fact.

But what really turned me around were these words, so simple and obvious: “Your mother wouldn’t want you to feel this way. She’d want you to go to college and have a good life. So what the hell are you waiting for?”

That’s when I realized it was time to go back to college. And then get a law degree. Anne was right. I was able to move on.

Not heal. But move on.

Move on but remember.

At eight, I put the SIM card into my green phone and power it up. I send this:

How is golf looking tomorrow?

Kind of an inside joke, pretending to be talking in code, when anyone who read through all our text messages would obviously see through the ruse. She replies promptly:

Anxious for it

Right, good. She replies again quickly:

Anxious to talk to you

That could mean a lot of things. It’s deliberately vague.

Everything ok?

She responds:

Thinking a lot about us. Better to talk in person

I respond quickly:

Good or bad?

Should I be worried?

30

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

So what the hell was that text message tonight? You’ve been thinking a lot about us, and better we talk in person? Are you going to break up with me, Lauren? Are we done?

I don’t know what I’ll do. The times we see each other each week, the twice a day we text, are the only things that matter in my life now.

Was it because of what I said last night about my father cheating on my mother? How I’d grown up hating infidelity more than just about anything in the world, and now I was doing it, too?

Oh, why did I have to open my mouth? This isn’t the same thing, Lauren. Vicky doesn’t love me anymore. I’m not proud of cheating, but this is different than what my father did to my mother! And your marriage isn’t real, either.

We aren’t cheating, not in that way. We aren’t!