CHAPTER 41
LIFE REALIZATION #18: I NEED A FRIEND WHO LIKES TO WALK IN OTHER PEOPLE’S SHOES
I’d tried to move my Wednesday appointment up, but Hannah wasn’t in the office. A family emergency. By Tuesday night, I couldn’t wait any longer. Deanna became my stand-in therapist. I hadn’t spoken to Grant because I wanted to do it right. I needed someone to tell me I’d analyzed this appropriately, because even though I was beginning to trust myself, I was new at it. And now, I had people in my life to talk things out with. I wasn’t entirely alone.
So, in her warm kitchen, late in the evening, when she was still recovering from the long ride two days before and needed sleep for the long workday ahead, Deanna listened.
The first time the doorbell rang, Deanna had to remind me that it was Halloween, but William was taking care of the trick-or-treaters as we hid in the kitchen.
My phone buzzed with a text. My mother. If you don’t call me, I’m coming to you, it said. Empty threat. I would not call her. The last time we’d talked, she’d told me how horrible I was for not seeing Chad.
I confessed everything to Deanna. My brother, my parents, Chad, my own denial of it all. When I told her about making an accidental appointment with Elaine, she spit her tea out onto the table. She smiled as I told her how therapeutic our final conversation had been and then silently let me babble on and on, refilling cups, nodding, and hugging me about a dozen times.
I waited for condemnation, judgment, but none came.
“Why aren’t you telling me to stay away from your brother?”
She held on to my hand and squeezed, empathy and tears in her eyes. “You act like you want me to.”
I swallowed.
“Do you know why I wanted us to be friends?” she asked.
“Because ... I was building a business and you wanted the B and B and—”
She shook her head. “That was part of it. You inspired me to do things I hadn’t done before, but it was more than that. I haven’t been through exactly what you have, but I know what it’s like to push people away while actively needing them. I lost my parents, and that was hard, but I also ...” She dropped my hand and repeatedly smoothed the tabletop as if trying to flatten a wrinkle in the wood. “Ten years ago, William and I lost our twin babies.”
My gut seized and then sank like I’d swallowed lead. I’d never even wondered why William and Deanna didn’t have kids. I didn’t have them, didn’t want them, so it had never occurred to me to question why these amazing people weren’t parents.
“I was five months pregnant when we went to my OB, and she could only find one heartbeat.” She inhaled. “And then ...” She looked away from me, the past clinging to the lines of her face, making her frown, but it was so much more than a frown. It was the embodiment of pain, a transformation of her whole body, like she was someone else. “And then there were no heartbeats,” she whispered.
That tiny, tear-filled whisper shattered my heart. Tore at my expectations. Shredded my walls.
I didn’t pat her. I didn’t reach for her hand. I grabbed her—and held on.
She, like me, was broken. I wasn’t the only one with a past.
I would be a better friend.
She pulled back. “I haven’t told you because I don’t talk about it.” She looked me full in my face. “I can’t talk about it. But I know what it’s like to lose something you want so badly it tears you apart. I know what it’s like to put the pieces of yourself back together and try to move on. But you’re never the same. The cracks show. The glue shows. That experience taught me that you have to wallow in someone’s dark places to fully understand why they make the decisions they do. Life isn’t black and white. It’s all mixed.” She smiled and then grabbed my hand. “I think my hurt saw yours.”
I stared at her for several seconds, our eyes traversing the common ground that connected us. And I realized how selfish I’d been. Even when I thought I wasn’t being selfish, even when I actively tried not to be, I’d missed something. I’d missed this.
It wasn’t about me.
It was about us, all of us.
We held out our arms at the same time. We walked into an embrace, two women with common pain. The bond we had stabilized our glued pieces.
“Pen, you are good enough,” she whispered.
The black tar that had been holding me down, keeping me from flying, dissolved. Deanna and everything that made Deanna who she was gave me strength. I, too, would find my strength in weakness.
“I’m going to tell him,” I said. “How I feel.”
She shook her head. “When you’re ready.”
“There is one thing I need to do first.” Now wasn’t the time to tell her about Brandon’s journal. “And I need to convince Grant to take time away from work and stop going to the doctor for these routine RT scans.”
She straightened, and her voice rose. “RT scan? You mean CT scan? Grant got a CT scan? Why?”
“It’s a routine part of his physical,” I reassured her. It felt nice to tell someone else that everything was fine, that something medical was not the worst thing to ever happen to a person.
She stood, glanced around the room as if looking for something. “A CT scan isn’t routine. They do a CT scan when something is wrong.” Her tone caused a murmur of dread in my stomach.
“Then I must be misremembering. Maybe he said something else because he told me it was routine.” I was holding on to that word, saying it over and over again: “routine.” Nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary. Everything was fine, and I wasn’t going to let Deanna’s understandable concern for her brother get me worked up.
I closed my eyes and breathed. Those feelings of anxiety were my old fears flaring up again. Everything was fine.
When I opened my eyes, Deanna was looking at me. “I’m sure you’re right,” she said, calmer. “I’ll call him later.”
I left Deanna’s, and as soon as I got back home, I raced upstairs. It hadn’t been a week, but I pulled my little box away from the corner and tossed the lid onto my bedroom floor.
My fingertips traced the leather binding of Brandon’s journal.
So many years had gone by, and I was going to hear his voice again. A part of me didn’t want to do it, afraid I’d find something that would shatter my brother’s memory, but I had to, needed to. If this was even part of what was holding me back, I was going to. Emboldened by Deanna’s friendship and Grant’s “I love you,” I loosened the leather binding and opened the first page.
My name was at the top, followed by a comma. I fanned the pages. The journal was completely empty, several pages having been ripped out at the beginning, leaving little jagged paper triangles in the crease of the book. Brandon’s diary wasn’t a diary, at least not anymore. It was a note to me. I flipped back to the first page and read the four lines.
Sister,
YOU WILL BE OKAY. I WANT YOU TO BE OKAY. IT’S OKAY TO BE OKAY.
I love you,
Brandon
I touched the letters, each one written in all caps by a fifteen-year-old boy who was wiser than his years and who loved his sister, a little girl who had flopped across his legs and cried about how nothing was okay and never would be again.
I was on a proverbial cliff made up of my past and all the decisions I’d made along the way. I’d spent my life afraid to jump, scared to live without Brandon, like being happy would be betraying him somehow. But all this time, I’d been betraying him by not living.
I held my breath, then let it go.
For the first time in a very, very long time, I was ready to tell someone else I loved him. I was ready to jump, and I prayed I would fly.