CHAPTER SEVEN Mike
Iclosed my laptop after a long day and looked around the room for my running shorts.
I hadn’t rented an apartment yet and was staying at a hotel across the street from Lake Union in downtown Seattle.
I could’ve gone into our offices located nearby but I’d become protective of my work-from-home lifestyle.
Since Jennifer moved to San Francisco, I’d stopped seeing people.
An occasional beer with Brandt, frequent jogs around the lake, and worrying about Mom, occupied my time now.
I’d hesitated renting my own place since Mom’s health was deteriorating.
No need to lock myself into anything until I handled Mom’s affairs which could end up forcing me to stay in Idaho Falls for months.
Her impending death wasn’t a secret to anyone who knew her, but I hoped she’d hang on.
Mom embraced her mortality and somehow managed to present a cheerful and optimistic air to her friends.
She spent more time keeping me and her friends spirit’s uplifted than we deserved, but that was how my mother lived.
I called her three times a day and had hired a nurse to check in on her once a day at our family home in Idaho Falls, a home I’d be selling one of these days after she passed.
“I’d love for you to keep the house,” she’d said.
“It’d be easier to pop in on you after I transition when I know where you’ll be,” she’d added, not joking in the least.
“I think I’ll pass on the hauntings, Mom,” I’d replied.
Mom wasn’t well and I was heading home at the end of the week.
I planned to work remotely from there and spend her final days by her side.
I’d hoped my mother would make it through the summer but her health was declining rapidly.
After speaking with her doctor, Marie, I knew it was time to return to the town and the house I grew up in.
* * *
“I’m not ready,” I admitted, looking around the small room.
The therapist’s office was exactly as I imagined one would be.
She sat in a chair in the center of the room with her diplomas on the wall behind her, and I was on a smallish sofa directly in front of her.
“There are days when I think I am and then BAM, I freak out like a four year old at the thought of my mother being gone.” My hands were in a battle in my lap as I poured out my heart to a shrink Brandt had recommended and hounded me to see for days.
“Imagining a world without our parents is difficult, Mike,” she said. “We wonder if we have everything we need from them.”
“My dad is dead too,” I stated, making sure she knew I was almost completely parentless.
Beverly Clinton scribbled on her notepad and hummed.
“I’m an only child and not even thirty yet,” I added for impact.
She glanced up at me. “Grandparents?” she inquired.
“One. A grandfather that no longer recognizes me. He doesn’t know that his daughter, my mother, is dying. It’s all a bit overwhelming,” I admitted.
“Yes,” she agreed. “You have many reasons to be overwhelmed. Do you feel strong enough to get through this on your own?”
Her question went right to the heart of why I’d called her in the first place.
I’d had pain like none other eleven years ago when Dad died, followed by unimaginable agony after Cooper drowned a year later.
Now I was recently divorced, my grandfather had Alzheimer’s, and my mother was on death’s door thanks to a brutal form of cancer.
“I’m not sure,” I whispered.
She raised an eyebrow in concern.
I lifted a hand and waved her off. “Oh, no. Nothing like that. I’m not suicidal if you’re wondering. I just feel bogged down right now.”
“How about close friends?” she asked.
“One. A buddy of mine. Here in Seattle. Plus a coupla friends from work that I rarely see because I’ve worked remotely the past three years,” I stated. “My best friend Cooper died ten years ago.”
Psychologist Beverly Clinton placed her pen and notepad on a side table and stared at me intently. She studied me while I returned her stare and wondered what I’d said. “That is an unusual amount of death, Mike,” she declared, stating the obvious.
I nodded.
She was right. At three hundred bucks an hour she should be. “Cooper? A male friend, correct?” she inquired.
I nodded again.
“Tell me about him.”
I stared at my hands still clashing in my lap and wondered what one said about their best friend who’d been dead for ten years without sounding pathetic.
I mean, it had been a decade and we were just teenagers back then.
“I still miss him. I miss him very much,” I whispered.
“I need him right now to tell you the truth.”
“You need him? Why do you say that, Mike?” she asked, leaning forward and touching my leg gently. I noticed she had tears forming in her eyes. Therapists aren’t supposed to cry while their patients are struggling to keep it together, right?
“He would’ve helped me get through Mom’s illness like he helped me when my father died. He’d know what to say and he’d make me feel safe.”
My answer prompted more questions. Typical for therapy, I imagined. “Cooper would make you feel safe?” she asked. She had green eyes just like my mothers. In fact, I just noticed my therapist looked a lot like Mom.
“Yes. He had this way of sorta knowing what I needed. I was the bigger one physically but he made me feel safe. I never told him that,” I stated casually. “I should have told him.”
“You don’t think Cooper knew this?” she asked.
“I’m sure he didn’t. He always depended on me, so I guess he wouldn’t have known how much I needed him.”
“You needed him? Tell me what you mean by that, Mike.”
“He was just that person. My person,” I mumbled, staring into space as I reminisced about him. I refocused on her and smiled weakly. “He just got me, I guess.”
“There are no other people you can turn to?” she asked.
“No one like him,” I admitted. “We understood each other. You know what I mean?”
She nodded and sat back in her chair.
“We completed each other’s sentences, counted on one another; stuff like that.”
“You loved him?”
Warm tears filled my eyes so I looked out the window of her small office and into a courtyard of small shrubs with an old concrete bird feeder that had seen better days. A robin landed on the worn edge, probably searching for fresh water.
“I still do,” I admitted in a soft voice. “I always have.”
“As a friend?” she questioned. I slowly nodded up and down as tears etched down my face. And then she surprised me by scooting forward again, but this time reaching for my hand. No wonder Brandt liked her. She was caring and real. I hadn’t expected that. “And perhaps as more than a friend?”
The robin gave us one more disgruntled look then flew off. My tears spoke the words I couldn’t voice. I turned back to her and nodded two more times before I bent over and began to weep.
Ms. Clinton allowed me to cry and then compose myself. When I sat back, she had Kleenex waiting for me and gently smiled at me. “Why are you here, Mike?”
I inhaled deeply and decided that I needed to unburden myself once and for all.
“I had the chance to tell him but I didn’t,” I began.
“He told me he loved me in the . . . you know . . . the forever sorta way. He left me a note after he told me and I never got the chance to tell him that I felt exactly the same way about him.”
“What did the note say?” she asked.
“It said he’d understand if I couldn’t love him that way. He’d be okay with my decision. We kissed the night before. I held him as he confessed how he’d felt for me. He admitted he was in love with me.”
“And, you?”
“I couldn’t admit it. I wanted to but I couldn’t,” I said. “His note was to protect me, to protect our friendship. He wanted to make sure that I knew he would be fine with whatever I wanted.”
“Why didn’t you admit your feelings when he did?” she asked.
“Fear,” I quickly responded. “I had a girlfriend then, and I was confused about my feelings for him.”
“That’s natural. You both were what, seventeen? Eighteen?”
“We’d just turned eighteen. We shared the same birthday,” I said.
“But you already knew that Cooper was gay, correct?”
I nodded.
“He understood that you were not?”
“Yes, but we were close. We hugged and stuff like that.”
She gazed at me thoughtfully before proceeding. “But something happened that night? The two of you took things to a different level?”
I picked at the bottom edge of my T-shirt, hesitating to explain what had happened. “He asked if I would kiss him. You know, guy stuff, teasing and shit like that. I think he wanted to see if I would be grossed out if we kissed.”
“And were you?”
“Actually, no. I let him slide under my arm afterward and we fell asleep holding each other. That was the last time I saw him alive.”
“What do you wish you could have done differently, Mike?” she asked.
She held her hand up in pause. “Hang on a second. Let me rephrase that question.” She pursed her lips and looked past me, deep in thought.
“Here’s a better question for you instead,” she began.
“Let’s imagine that Cooper hadn’t died and you were able to see him later that day. What would you have told him then?”
She knew what she was asking and I had to finally admit the truth to someone. “I probably wouldn’t have told him. At least not right away,” I confessed.
“He died and you never had the chance, so now you’ve spent ten years wondering why that matters? Does that sound correct?”
“Sort of,” I admitted. “I’ve wondered my entire life what would’ve happened had I admitted I felt the same way about him.”
“Have you ever been with a man, Mike?” The question came out of left field.
“I have not.”
“Why is that?”
I knew what the answer to that question was. Hell, I’d married a woman because of the answer to her question. “Because he’d never be Cooper.”