The parents of Peter Stimovich and Pamela Stokes joined together in a class action suit against the state, the governor (again), and Walpole Penitentiary for releasing Evandro Arujo.
Campbell Rawson was, quite miraculously, according to doctors, unaffected by the overdose of hydroclorophyl administered by Gerry Glynn. He should have had permanent brain damage, but instead he woke with a headache and nothing more.
His mother, Danielle, sent me a Christmas card with a rambling thank-you note inside and an assurance that any time I passed through Reading I was welcome to a hot meal and friendship at the Rawson household.
Grace and Mae returned from a safe house in Upstate New York two days after Gerry’s death. Grace resecured her position at Beth Israel and called me the day I was released from the hospital.
It was one of those uncomfortable conversations in which polite reserve replaces intimacy and as it stumbled toward a close, I asked her if she’d like to meet for a drink sometime.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea, Patrick.”
“Ever?” I asked.
A long, unpopped bubble of a pause followed and was an answer in and of itself, and then she said:
“I’ll always care for you.”
“But.”
“But my daughter comes first, and I can’t risk exposing her to your life again.”
A pit opened and yawned and extended from my throat to my stomach.
“Can I talk to her? Say ’bye?”
“I don’t think that would be a healthy thing. For either of you.” Her voice cracked and her quick inhalation was a wet hiss. “Sometimes it’s better to let things fade.”
I closed my eyes and placed my head against the phone for a moment.
“Grace, I—”
“I have to go, Patrick. Take care of yourself. I mean that. Don’t let that job destroy you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
“I promise, Grace. I—”
“’Bye, Patrick.”
“’Bye.”
Angie left the day after Phil’s funeral.
“He died,” she said, “because he loved us too much and we didn’t love him enough.”
“How do you figure?” I stared into an open grave cut through hard, frozen earth.
“It wasn’t his fight, but he fought it anyway. For us, And we didn’t love him enough to keep him out of it.”
“I don’t know if it’s that simple.”
“It is,” she assured me and dropped flowers in the grave onto his coffin.
Mail has piled up in my apartment—bills, solicitations from supermarket tabloids and local TV and radio talk shows. Talk, talk, talk, I find myself thinking, talk all you want and it won’t change the fact that Glynn existed. And so many others like him still do.
The only thing I’ve pulled from the pile is a postcard from Angie.
It arrived two weeks ago from Rome. Birds flap their wings over the Vatican.
Patrick,
Gorgeous here. What do you think the guys in this building are deciding about my life and my body these days? Men keep pinching our butts over here and I’m going to clock one soon, start an international incident, I just know it. Going to Tuscany tomorrow. Then, who knows? Renee says Hi. Says don’t worry about the beard, she always thought you’d look hot with one. My sister—I swear. Take care.
Miss you,
Ange
Miss you.
On the advice of friends, I consulted a psychiatrist during the first week in December.
After an hour, he told me I was suffering from clinical depression.
“I know that,” I said.
He leaned forward. “And how are we going to help you with that?”
I glanced at the door behind him, a closet, I assumed.
“You got Grace or Mae Cole back there?” I said.
He actually turned his head to check. “No, but—”
“How about Angie?”
“Patrick—”
“Can you resurrect Phil or make the last few months not have happened?”
“No.”
“Then you can’t help me, Doctor.”
I wrote him a check.
“But, Patrick, you’re deeply depressed and you need—”
“I need my friends, Doctor. I’m sorry, but you’re a stranger. Your advice may be great, but it’s still a stranger’s advice, and I don’t take advice from strangers. Something my mother taught me.”
“Still, you need—”
“I need Angie, Doctor. That simple. I know I’m depressed, but I can’t change it right now, and I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s natural. Like autumn. You go through what I went through, and you’d be nuts not to be depressed. Right?”
He nodded.
“Thank you for your time, Doctor.”
Christmas Eve
7:30 p.m.
So here I sit.
On my porch, three days after someone shot a priest in a convenience store, waiting for my life to begin again.
My crazy landlord, Stanis, actually invited me in for Christmas dinner tomorrow, but I declined, said I’d made other plans.
I might go to Richie and Sherilynn’s. Or Devin’s. He and Oscar invited me to join their bachelor’s Christmas. Microwaved turkey dinners and generous portions of Jack Daniel’s. Sure sounds tempting, but…
I’ve been alone on Christmas before. Several times. But never like this. I never felt it before, this dire loneliness, the hollowing despair of it.
“You can love more than one person at the same time,” Phil said once. “Humans are messy.”
I definitely was.
Alone on the porch, I loved Angie and Grace and Mae and Phil and Kara Rider and Jason and Diandra Warren, Danielle and Campbell Rawson. I loved them all and missed them all.
And felt all the more lonely.
Phil was dead. I knew that, but I couldn’t accept it enough not to want—desperately—that he wasn’t.
I could see us climbing out windows in our respective homes as children and meeting on the avenue, running up it together as we laughed at the ease of our escapes and headed through the bitter night to rap on Angie’s window and pull her into our desperado pack.
And then the three of us took off, lost to the night.
I have no idea what we used to do on half our midnight jaunts, what we used to talk about as we made our way through the dark cement jungle of our neighborhood.
I only know that it was enough.
Miss you, she’d written.
Miss you, too.
Miss you more than the severed nerves in my hand.