Chapter 18 Ben #2
“That’s smart. It can be so hard to focus in the heat of the moment.
” She paused, and I swear I could hear her mulling over what she wanted to say next.
“So, I was thinking that maybe I don’t call or text you for the next few days.
I’m sure you’ll have a lot to process one way or the other, and I don’t want to stress you out by making you feel like you need to get right back to me or dive into things you might not be ready to.
Just…know that I’m here, whenever you want to talk or to hang out when you get home. ”
“How are you this fucking considerate?”
She laughed. “I could say the same thing to you. It’s part of why I like you so much. You know, aside from your self-deprecation, cooking skills, and the fact that you look like the living amalgamation of every wet dream I’ve ever had.”
“You’re not so bad yourself,” I said.
“What? With this orange hair of mine?”
I sighed. “My mother really needs to apologize for that one.”
“No way. I’m just kidding. Your mother has more than made up for it with all the times she’s told me how incredibly wonderful I am in literally every other way. Tell your parents I said hi?”
“I will. What are you up to today?”
We talked for another half an hour, her telling me about the orders she needed to get to the post office and the graphic designs she planned for her next wildlife calendar series before filling me in on all the latest Jones Family Drama.
Jacob would be home from Somalia in a few weeks.
Charlie hated one of his new college professors.
Megan and Stacey were thinking of moving apartments so they could get a puppy.
Anabel had a new boyfriend. Ella tried to enlist my help with scaring the kid if he hurt her baby sister at any point in the future.
I was pretty sure she was joking, but I still told her I wasn’t going to be complicit in the harassment of a minor. She called me a spoilsport.
Jane’s article would be published soon, and her editor at the NYT sounded like he was salivating over it. I made a mental note to warn my lawyer about it. He’d either be pissed or super behind this. Either way, I didn’t regret my decision to be her source.
I’d heard so much about these people over the past several weeks that I felt like I knew them.
I wanted to know them. I wanted to immerse myself in one of the loud, boisterous gatherings that Ella had talked about.
I thought about calling her back after we hung up and inviting myself over for Jacob’s coming home party, but decided against it.
I shouldn’t make plans, not knowing what my mental state would be like by then.
And that day should be about him. They didn’t need me coming in and distracting away from everything he’d accomplished.
Maybe down the road I could ask Ella to plan a big dinner party with her family so I could meet them in a more relaxed, natural way.
I realized that I was thinking about us in the long term and cut myself off, hard. I couldn’t go there right now. I couldn’t get those expectations up. First, I needed to have these tests done. Then, I needed to process the results. My own mental and physical health had to be my priority.
I felt selfish for placing myself above everyone else, still, even after all the times that Brian had told me I needed to, that it was okay to be my own number one.
Part of the reason I was in this position in the first place was because I’d pretended to be okay for so long.
Big tough men didn’t get depressed. Big tough men didn’t get sad.
They didn’t have anxiety. Especially not big tough famous men. Because public image was king.
Sometimes I wished I could go back in time and shake my younger self.
I spent the rest of the ride listening to the episodes of Stuff You Missed in History Class that my publicist recommended.
In between each, I made phone calls. I chatted with my parents during their layover in Chicago, checked on how the puppies were behaving for Jack, and then called Brian.
Together, we formulated a game plan for the coming days.
I felt better when we hung up. Like I might actually get through this without completely shutting down or reverting back to my darkest days of depression.
The fact that he promised to clear his schedule and jump on a plane if I needed him to had a lot to do with it.
It reminded me, again, that I wasn’t alone in this, that I had support, people like him and my parents and Ella and Jack that would be there for me.
Traffic picked up as I neared the city but didn’t slow to a slog until I turned onto Route One just outside of Boston. Who puts a two-lane road with traffic lights leading straight into a city?
Because of the delay, I barely got to the airport in time.
Mom called when they deplaned, and I pulled up to the curb just as they stepped out of the terminal.
She wore a floral scarf over her hair and huge sunglasses, ala Jackie Kennedy, no doubt worried she might be recognized.
It could happen; she was the face of the charity.
If anything, the getup only made her more conspicuous.
People waiting nearby turned to look at her, their gazes tracking her movements, wondering who hid behind the disguise.
She wheeled her luggage straight to the Jeep and all but dove into the front seat, leaving Dad to put their things in the way back.
“Nice shades, Mom.”
She lowered her glasses and looked at me. “Bond, Klara Bond.”
I smiled and leaned over to hug her, glad to see this glimpse of humor returning.
“I missed you so much, Benny,” she said, squeezing me hard.
“I missed you too, Mom.”
She turned and peered into the backseat. “No Ella?” She looked disappointed.
I shook my head. “She didn’t want to impose. And I didn’t want to put her through this with us.”
Mom nodded. “I understand.”
The rear door opened and Dad folded his large frame into the backseat. He buckled himself in and then reached forward to clasp my shoulder. “Hi, son.”
“Hey, Dad.”
“We should go before someone sees you,” Mom said. “I can’t believe you didn’t put a hat on.”
Let the mothering begin.
I grinned as I pulled away from the pickup zone. “Thanks for coming out on such short notice.”
“Of course,” Dad said.
“Did you guys sleep on the planes at all?”
“A little,” he answered.
Mom made a disgruntled sound. “He slept the entire flight from Hawaii to LA.”
“I’m guessing you didn’t?”
“No. The new meds I’m on give me insomnia.”
Well, that was a revelation. “What meds?”
“Antidepressants.”
I guess we were jumping right into this then. “My SSRI gave me pretty bad insomnia when I first got on it.”
I saw her turn and look at me out of the corner of my eye. “You’re on antidepressants too?”
“Yup, have been for a while. But can we pause this conversation until we get to the hotel? I need help navigating out of this maze,” I said, handing her my phone.
She pulled up the map app and punched in the hotel’s address. We were quiet the rest of the ride, other than her instructions of “turn left here” or “there’s a merge up ahead, and you need to be in the right lane”.
You could tell how old the city was just from all the twists and turns we took to get to our destination. Nothing ran in a straight line here. The roads were so narrow that they couldn’t have been widened much since the days when horses and carriages had been their main source of traffic.
“Well, we survived, and that’s all that matters,” Dad said when I parked.
There had been a few close calls there. Boston drivers were fucking scary.
Mom gave him A Look. She wasn’t a fan of car-related jokes, for obvious reasons.
“Sorry, you know what I meant,” he said.
I pulled on a hat and sunglasses before getting out of the Jeep. Mom and Dad checked us in. I’d booked the rooms under Dad’s name to be safe.
I hid in a dark corner of the lobby while they spoke to the desk clerk and tried to make myself look smaller than I was. It didn’t work. A bellhop spotted me almost immediately, doing a double-take as he walked toward the door. He turned, midstride, and beelined straight toward me.
“Hey, man,” he said, extending a hand. “I’m a huge fan.”
I plastered a smile on my face and shook his hand. “Thanks.”
“I follow you on Twitter.”
I nodded. This could go one of two ways. He either agreed with me, or he didn’t. I stood there, stressing out as I waited for the other shoe to drop. Being so removed from recognition for so long had made me rusty at this. I was more nervous than normal – something I really didn’t need right now.
I should have stayed in the fucking Jeep.
“Thank you for all the stuff you link,” the guy said. “We were gonna put our boys in the local peewee league, but after reading all of those articles about brain injuries, we put them in baseball instead.”
Well, shit. “You’re welcome.”
He nodded and then looked around the lobby. “You park in the garage underneath the hotel?”
“Yeah.”
“In the back corner of it, there’s an elevator no one uses because it’s so damn far away from everything. Takes you right up to all the floors, though. If you’re trying to fly under the radar, you might want to stick to that from now on. It’s way down that hallway,” he said, pointing.
“Thanks. I will.”
“No problem, man. Keep up the good work.”
“Will do.”
Dad came over a minute later, eyeing the retreating form of the bellhop. “What was that about?”
“He told me the articles I linked on Twitter kept him and his partner from putting their boys into peewee.”
“That’s amazing, Benny,” Mom said, joining us. “It makes me so happy whenever someone tells us we’ve made a difference.”
“It’s a pretty good feeling,” I said.
Together, we walked toward the back elevator. I kept my head down and hunched my shoulders, but I’d learned early on that a guy my size draws eyes no matter if he’s famous or not. Still, the few people we passed moved along without comment, and I hoped they didn’t recognize me or Mom.
We settled into our neighboring rooms upstairs.
Mom and Dad showered after their long day of travel while I unpacked my stuff and looked through the menus of the nearby restaurants.
I texted Ella to tell her we’d made it safely, and she sent me a smiling emoji in response.
I wanted to call her. I wanted to see her.
I was nervous about talking to my parents.
My feelings about tomorrow were even bigger than that, almost unquantifiable. Was it so wrong for me to want to lean on Ella just a little? To let her distract me from all of this?
In the end, I decided against calling or FaceTiming her. Instead, I gathered my courage and went to my parents’ room and knocked on their door.
“So, about those meds,” I said to Mom after Dad let me in.
“I’ve been on them since the day after Zach, Molly, and Micah’s funerals,” she answered.
I nodded, thinking back. Try as I might, I couldn’t pinpoint behavior changes or signs that might have told me she was struggling. Not ones that couldn’t be chalked up to grief or anger. Then again, I’d kept so busy ignoring my own feelings that I might have been blind to everyone else’s.
I sat down on the couch in their suite. “I got on mine seven months ago, after nearly having a mental break.”
Dad tucked into the chair across from me. “What happened?”
“Did something trigger it?” Mom asked.
I shook my head, turning to her as she sat on the other side of the couch. “Nothing really triggered it. It was more like rock bottom of the downward spiral I’d been on since the accident.”
Mom’s expression crumpled. “I’m so sorry we didn’t know.”
I shook my head. “Don’t be. It’s not your fault. I hid it pretty well.”
Dad leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Is that why you came out here?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I had to get away from home. Everywhere I went reminded me of them. I felt like I couldn’t move forward or deal with my grief when I was crippled by it just by passing our old high school, or the courts where we played basketball with our friends, or the movie theatre he used to work at. ”
“I understand,” Mom said, her voice quiet. “But I wish you had told us.”
I sighed. “I didn’t really know how to talk about my emotions. We haven’t been great about that, as a family.”
She frowned. “That’s not fair.”
“Klara, it is,” Dad said. “When we’re happy, sure, but not when we’re mad, or sad. I bottle everything up. You get distant. And the boys learned that from us.”
Mom sat back and let out a heavy breath. “How do we fix it?”
Dad shrugged. “Simple. We start being honest with each other.”