[2014] Looking for Leon

by Shirley Benton

  I must have looked suitably horrified, because he instantly changed tack.

  “Oh, don’t mind me and my warped sense of so-called humour. It’s just my way of getting through this. How about we start by me telling you how I’m thinking? Let’s face it, I could pop off at any minute, so time is of the essence.”

  He looked exhausted before he even got into it. He took a long, shaky breath.

  “My first reaction is: total mortification. I’m mortified that you’re seeing me like this.” I opened my mouth to refute his words, but he held his hands up. “No. Don’t tell me I’m looking really well. I’m clearly not. I’m in a wheelchair. I’ve lost three stone in three weeks. I’ve already got the pallor of a dead person, with the chalky skin and the black bags under my eyes. And now I feel like a woman for saying something so totally girly like that – and here was I, thinking I was mortified before!”

  I had to laugh as a blush coloured his face. “Well hey, that’s one way to get rid of the pallor issue,” I said. “Every cloud and all that . . .”

  “Yep. But let’s be honest – I’m not the person you met a few weeks ago. And I didn’t want you to meet this new person. Can you understand why? Or do I have to embarrass myself any further?”

  “I understand.” And I totally did. He thought my illusion of the Leon I’d met had been shattered. He was worried now that I was looking at him as a sick and dying person, and I’d no longer be attracted to him the way I was in Vegas.

  “Phew. That’s good, because I think I’ve reached my redness-in-the-face quota for one day. But, now that you’re here, I have to admit that it’s pretty nice . . . you have no idea, none whatsoever, of how the thoughts of you kept me going in the worst of times . . . but I was too afraid to let you become anything more than a thought. After we were separated in the fire alarm, I was so sick from the drink as soon as I went outside and air hit me – and that was when I realised that no matter how much I wanted to, there was no way I was able to stay on my feet any longer, still less spend any more time with you even if we had met up again. I went back to my room in the Tropicana hotel and spent the night being sick. Maybe the fire alarm was a blessing – I would have been so embarrassed if you’d seen me in that condition. So you can understand that thereality of having you here, seeing me like this, wasn’t one I could even consider. But now, it’s done, you’ve seen me in my infirm state, and I’m still alive. That’s a big achievement for me, these days.”

  “So, you don’t regret your mom bringing me here?”

  “No. I would never, ever have asked you here – but now that you’re here, I know that she did the right thing. Thank God for the people who know us better than we know ourselves, sometimes.”

  As soon as he finished his sentence, Leon’s face contorted in pain.

  “What’s up?” I said. “Can I get you anything?”

  He waved his hand, and closed his eyes. “It’ll pass.”

  I felt like time stood still as I sat there watching him struggling with the pain. My overriding feeling was one of complete uselessness as I watched the battle waged between him and the disease.

  “Can you get me some water?”

  “Sure.” I bounced out of my seat, glad to be able to do something constructive. And, if I’m totally honest, I was glad to move away from his pain too. I just didn’t know how to handle it.

  It seemed I wasn’t the only one. I walked into the kitchen to find Bridget face down on the kitchen table, crying her eyes out. Liam sat beside her, murmuring incomprehensible words of comfort, but looking like he’d prefer to join in. There wasn’t a sandwich in sight. I tried to make myself scarce as I tiptoed to the sink to get the water, but Bridget and Liam were so immersed in their grief for what could have been, and what was to come, that they didn’t even look up as I scuttled past them. Truth be told, I was half hoping they’d pull up a chair for me as I returned to Leon with the water, dreading the second when I’d have to resume watching this beautiful man die before my eyes.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  “So, have you forgiven yourself?”

  He caught me completely unawares. I walked back with his glass of water, expecting him to be slumped in the chair and exhausted. Instead, he was sitting upright, looking alert, and ready for answers. I didn’t need to ask him to clarify his question. I knew exactly what he was referring to.

  “I thought I had. But no. I haven’t.”

  “Andie.” He shook his head. “If I could get out of this chair and kick your butt, I would. What happened? After all our talk in Vegas, I really thought you were going to try to move on . . .”

  “I did try, but in completely the wrong way . . . I tried to help someone else with a problem they had, and it went totally, totally wrong . . . oh, Leon, I’ve made such a huge mess of everything.”

  Then I shut up, realising how whiney I must sound to someone who had a hell of a lot more to worry about than I did.

  “Well, come on. You can’t leave it at that.”

  “You don’t want to hear it . . .”

  “Look, I haven’t much time left, madam, as you well know. Don’t make me wait for information.”

  “But . . .”

  “No. You can’t argue with that. It’s a dying person’s prerogative to press home their advantage when needs be – you just know it’ll work – evil, yes, I know, but tough. Spit it out.”

  I took a few seconds to try to formulate the best way to tell the man I’d told the whole world I was in love with about how I’d tried to solve the problems of a guy I actually was in love with while really trying to solve my own. It was a tricky one.

  As I told him how I’d gone to such great pains to get through to Colm and help him through what was eating him up, I tried so hard to keep any feeling for Colm absolutely out of my words.

  “You’re crazy about him.” It wasn’t even a question.

  Of course he must have seen Colm and me together at the Leon Line-up and the reward dinner. He wouldn’t have known who Colm was at the time, but had he now joined the dots? I cringed at the thought. How awful for him.

  There was nothing I could say.

  “But that’s neither here nor there,” he went on. “You’re still running away from your past, Andie. When are you going to deal with it?”

  I shook my head. “I just don’t know.”

  “I do. You’re not. You’re going to put the rest of your life on hold while this thing eats you up. You’ll waste all the potential you have to really get where you want to be in life, because you’re so busy dragging around a sack of shit with you and it’s slowing you down. We’ve been through this before. It’s weeks later, and you’ve done nothing about it.”

  “Hey, where has the Leon I knew gone to?”

  “I gave you a sympathetic ear in Vegas, and then gave you my advice on the situation. Clearly, my advice meant nothing to you, as you haven’t acted on it. So I’m sure you can guess what kind of message that gives me . . . you mustn’t have respected my opinion much.”

  “That’s not true! I thought the world of you . . . I still do . . .”

  “Please, Andie. Don’t say things like that – they’re not true. You know, since I first saw you on TV looking for me, I’ve done a lot of thinking about what it was about me, about us, that made you go on this hunt. Yes, we got on great, we really clicked, we had something special – but was that enough for you to go on a global hunt for me? Or were you doing it for another reason? And the more I thought about it, the clearer it became that this was never about me. It was about you, and how I made you feel about your problem. Well, this time next week, Andie, I probably won’t be here. So you’d better work out pretty damn fast how to be at peace with yourself. Nobody can save you from yourself only you.” He looked up at a clock on the wall. “Thanks for coming. It was good to see you again . . . and to get some closure.”

  He was kicking me out. It felt like a physical blow.

  “Leon, please . . .”

 
“My mom will sort out your transport back to Vegas. Take care, Andie, and thanks for coming to say goodbye. I wish you well – and I hope you get your closure, too.”

  With great difficulty, he manoeuvred his wheelchair so that he turned his back to me. Of course, I could have undone all of his hard work in two seconds by simply walking around the wheelchair and making him face me, but we both knew I wouldn’t do that.

  “Thank you, Leon.”

  “You’ve nothing to thank me for. Whatever I did to try to help you didn’t work. You should go now.”

  I nodded, but of course, he couldn’t see that. He was too busy staring straight ahead into the depths of the garden, steadfastly avoiding looking at me. His disappointment in me, his disapproval of my ability to waste opportunities when there were none left to him, seeped from him.

  He was right. It was time for me to go.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  That was the last time I ever saw Leon. After Leon’s dismissal of me, Liam kindly dropped me to a train station to get a train to the airport. I scribbled my mobile number on a piece of paper and handed it to him before I bade him goodbye, asking him if he’d be kind enough to keep me updated on how Leon was. He nodded, and then tried to press several hundred dollars into my hand to cover my expenses. After a lengthy discussion, I eventually convinced him that I wasn’t willing to take a single dollar of it, but the sentiment alone meant a lot to me.

  I returned to the MGM after I touched down in Vegas, not knowing what else to do with myself. I couldn’t face another flight, especially a transatlantic one, after what I’d just found out. Nicole was on the reception desk when I arrived. I tried to book in again, only to find that there was no record of me having checked out despite me leaving a note saying I wanted to do just that. Not only that, but Nicole informed me that Philippe had “found” the key to my room, which she said I must have lost, on the floor near Reception and had left it in an envelope for me to collect. She asked no questions and acted as if we’d just had a perfectly rational conversation instead of one full of glaring inconsistencies. I could only conclude that Philippe had kept the option of my room open in the hope that Bridget would catch up with me and I would need a place to stay if a meeting with Leon was to take place in Vegas – although why Philippe would do that for me after how I’d refused to listen to him, I didn’t know. I asked Nicole for a pen, paper and an envelope, wrote a grovelling apology to Philippe for my behaviour mingled with copious references to how appreciative I was of him, and asked her to pass it on to him.

  The shops in the MGM were thankfully still open, so I did a quick tour around the hotel and bought the things I’d need to keep me going now that my luggage was Dublin-bound without me. I fell into a coma-esque sleep as soon as I entered my room, a sleep that kept me sheltered from the world for a good fourteen hours. When I awoke, I saw a missed call on my mobile from a number I didn’t recognise. I’d obviously slept through the call in my exhaustion. I dialled the number for voicemail. Bridget had left a message, saying that Leon had passed away in his sleep during the night.

  For the first few seconds, I felt a glorious numbness, and I thought I would be okay. All the way back from Arizona, I had tried to make myself accept the fact that Leon was going to die, and soon. Admittedly, it had happened sooner than I expected, but at least his pain was over.

  Those few seconds passed fast, and were soon obliterated by a yawning chasm of time that I felt I was never, ever going to escape from for the rest of my life. Facts started to hit me in the face, coming so fast and so hard that it felt like a tennis-ball machine had been given drugs and aimed right in my direction. You went to see Leon, and he died right afterwards. Pow! He was in good form when he first saw you, but you upset him so much that he couldn’t bear to look at you. Bam! You didn’t do what you promised him you would do – and he was rightly disgusted with you for it. Boom! My head was like an episode of Batman. And then, just to completely finish me off, another tennis ball hit me just when I thought the machine had been turned off. And Colm doesn’t want anything to do with you either. Bang! He still hadn’t contacted me. Maybe he would when word got out about Leon’s death, just to do the honourable thing, but that wouldn’t be good enough. It shouldn’t take a death for him to get in contact.

  I dialled Bridget’s landline number. Liam answered with a grunt that might have been “Hello”.

  “Liam, it’s Andie. I’m so sorry. How . . . I mean, he seemed okay when I was there . . . did he take a turn after I left?”

  “No, he was in great form all evening,” Liam said slowly – which was how I knew what he was saying at all. “Your visit must have buoyed his spirits. I hadn’t seen him that content in a long time. He spent a few hours on his laptop, then watched some TV with us before he went to bed. Then Bridget went to check on him in the middle of the night, as she always does, and . . . he was gone.” He cleared his throat. “It seemed that he hadn’t been in any distress. He just slipped away.”

  I had no idea what to say when Liam finished speaking. “How is Bridget?” was all I could think of.

  “She’s in a bad way, but happy that he went peacefully at the same time. The doctor gave her something to help her sleep.” He paused. “She’s so grateful to you. If you hadn’t come to see Leon with her, he would have gone to his grave unhappy.”

  “It’s me who should be grateful, Liam.” And I was. Not only for Leon’s love, but also for Liam’s words.

  “Andie . . . have you seen the news today?”

  “The news? No.” For a few seconds, I couldn’t for the life of me work out why Liam was bothered asking me such a question at a time like this. But then my preoccupied brain kicked into gear just as Liam spoke again.

  “There’s been another development.”

  I didn’t like Liam’s tone. This was bad. “Yes?” I could hear the nerves in my voice in that one-syllable word.

  “The word is out here that our Leon is . . . was . . . your Leon.”

  “What? How?” I hadn’t told a soul what I’d found out about Leon.

  “From what we’ve pieced together, someone recognised my wife with you in the airport and identified her.”

  I shoved the phone closer to my ear as I strained to decipher his words. “Bridget has a very high-profile job in a government department. She’s often called on to do interviews on TV while representing her department.” In contrast to Liam’s mumbling voice, Bridget’s was crystal clear, and I could easily see a woman as confident as her speaking articulately on behalf of the government. “The person who recognised her must have known who you were too, and contacted someone in the media about it.”

  The face of the barman who was eavesdropping on my conversation with Bridget instantly flashed into my mind.

  “She got a call from someone late last night, some journalist, asking her why her son had been hiding away from you. Not asking if he was the right Leon – they just assumed, hoping they’d catch her off the hop. She said she hadn’t a clue what they were talking about and hung up, but it wasn’t enough to throw the journalist off track. There’s a big write-up in one of the papers today about how they’ve found the right Leon at last – and the story is even bigger now because Leon’s mother happens to be a public figure.”

  “Oh, good Lord.”

  “Yes. Of course, all of this was before he . . .” Liam couldn’t bring himself to say ‘died’.

  I was glad. I wouldn’t have been able to hold it together if I heard that word again.

  “Do they know about . . . ?”

  “The media? Not yet. It won’t be long before they do, though. Some of them have just set up camp outside our house to try to interview Leon. They’ll soon work out what’s happened with all the comings and goings here.”

  Oh my God. This was so much worse than I could ever have imagined. “Liam, I’m so sorry to have dragged you into this mess of a situation.”

  There was a pause, but he eventually said, “Sure how could you ha
ve known things would work out this way?”

  “I’m sure you and Bridget never want to see me again . . .”

  “Don’t be daft. We actually want to ask you to come back down here again today. The funeral will be on Sunday, and Bridget wants as many of Leon’s friends and family around as possible between now and then.”

  “Liam, I wouldn’t dream of imposing myself on you at a time like this.”

  “You’d be helping.” He lowered his voice. “Bridget needs everyone to rally around her now. She has it in her head that she wants you here because of what you meant to Leon, and she’s always like a hen with an egg if her plans don’t work out. You don’t have to stay here if you’re not comfortable with that – I’ll pay for a hotel for you, and your travel expenses, of course . . . but just having you around the house tomorrow would help her. It’d help me too – I’ll only have to listen to her if she doesn’t get her way.” He forced a chuckle out.

  “If I’d be helping, Liam, then of course I’ll come – but I won’t hear of you paying for anything. I’ll go now and sort out a flight and hotel online, and I’ll ring you back with the details.”

  Thirty minutes of laptop-pottering later, I’d booked a flight to Phoenix that would leave in three hours’ time, a hotel to stay in that night and the following night and a hire car to get me from the hotel to Leon’s house. I rang Liam back to let him know I’d be at their house the next day at midday. I just couldn’t face going around to Leon’s house tonight – it was too soon. By tomorrow, I’d surely have pulled myself together a bit more.

  Once I’d sorted everything out and had nothing immediate to focus my mind on, the sense of loss devastated me. I turned on the TV, dreading what I would see but powerless to stop myself. Sure enough, on the LVTV ticker was: ‘Mysterious Leon believed to be government minister’s son.’ That ticker was about to go on fire very soon when the parasites found out the rest of the story.

  At a loss for anything else to do to kill the time until my flight, I packed my carry-on bag and left the hotel to go to the airport early. Guilt would eat me up unless I kept moving and tried to keep myself busy. Although Liam’s words had helped, I couldn’t stop feeling in the wrong for keeping Leon alive longer than he should have been, then breaking his heart and killing him. By anyone’s standards, I had really knocked the ball out of the park this time.