Finding Bliss

by Dina Silver

  “Do you live at home?” he asked.

  “I’m starting law school, just moved into my apartment today actually, but I feel terrible about leaving her.” And I did. The guilt of having left her alone all summer was tearing me up, and the thought of doing it again, combined with the image in my brain of her huddled on the garage floor was almost too much to bear. “What if she skips her medication, or refuses to take it? She has no one to look after her.”

  “If she stops taking her meds, well, then she’ll have to live with her paranoia and delusions. There isn’t much we or you can do to force her unless she becomes a danger to herself or to others.”

  I massaged my forehead and sighed. “I just don’t know what I should do. I really don’t think I can live with myself if I abandon her at a time like this. I don’t feel right about leaving her alone again.”

  The doctor took his glasses off, placed them on his desk, and lowered his chin. “You want to know the truth?” he asked me.

  “Please.”

  “I’ve dealt with many cases like your mother. Some much better; some much worse.” He paused, struggling for the right words. “Your mom is like the Titanic: if you stay with the ship, you’ll go down, too. Those people who clung to the boat ultimately perished. You need to get yourself on a lifeboat and get as far away as you can,” he said. “I’m not telling you to desert her completely, but once you save yourself, you’ll be able to care for her better than you could now.”

  I nodded with instant clarity, then hugged him and thanked him for giving me some perspective. As he spoke, I knew he was right. Though I didn’t like thinking of my mother as the Titanic, I knew that neither of us had a chance at a better future if I shelved my goals to stay home with her.

  I drove back to my new apartment and began the process of moving in. I placed my soap dish on the bathroom sink. I unwrapped and hung my new shower curtain. I folded my sweaters and T-shirts and put them neatly away on the shelves in the closet. When I got around to unpacking the last of my duffel bags, I found Tyler’s note.

  Meet me at the lake at midnight.

  I smiled. I didn’t care if he’d taken advantage of me because, for once in my life, I’d felt like the luckiest girl in the world. I’d enjoyed every last minute of it, and given the chance would’ve done it all over again. How can you be taken advantage of if you’re a willing participant? I neatly folded the note and placed it in my sock drawer before cleaning up the rest of my stuff. Once I was done, I hung the “Find Your Bliss” mini-pillow on my door handle and wept.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I spent that first week sorting out my class schedule, buying my books, stocking my cabinets with snack food, worrying about my mother, and jumping at the phone every time it rang, hoping it was Tyler. My time in Lake Geneva already seemed like a distant memory or a story I’d read in a novel years ago.

  Ten days after admitting my mom to the hospital, I picked her up and took her home. She stared silently out the window for most of the drive and made sure I watched as she walked in the house and threw her medication in the trash.

  “I tell you I’m being drugged, and you turn me over to people who give me more drugs,” she hissed as she lit a cigarette.

  I walked over to her and embraced her. “I love you, Mom. Please call me if you need anything, okay? Please,” I said, then got into my lifeboat and headed back to my new apartment.

  I woke up the next morning exhausted. My concern for my mother, coupled with a rented mattress, was no recipe for a good night’s sleep. I walked to a nearby convenience store to pick up some toilet paper, dish soap, and a few other things I needed. When I got back, I rearranged the furniture, scrubbed the countertops, vacuumed the floor, and Windexed every surface that wasn’t covered in fabric. Once I was finished, I grabbed my cell phone and sat on the floor with my back against my borrowed bed. Tyler was back at Notre Dame already, and likely up to his kneepads in practices and agent negotiations, but I was itching to bask in his attention again if only for a second. I stared at the phone, trying to formulate the perfect sentiment when it hit me. Not too sappy, not too needy, just letting him know that I was thinking about him. He said he would call me, but he hadn’t. I just wanted to connect with him.

  I’m staring at you, I texted.

  Two hours later, as I was getting into bed, he texted me back.

  I know, and I still like it.

  He’d just sent me the message, so I knew he was sitting somewhere with his phone nearby. I needed to hear his voice and have him whisper in my ear again. I had told myself repeatedly that he didn’t take advantage of me, not because I couldn’t live with the fact that he did or didn’t, but because I wanted so badly to believe that he cared for me like I cared for him. He’d consumed nearly all my free thoughts for the last ten days, and I wanted to know if I’d affected him the same way. I thought about calling Grace first, to get her opinion on whether I should call him, but then I remembered that I wasn’t in fourth grade and dialed his number. It was almost midnight.

  “Hello,” he answered on the fourth ring.

  “Hey, it’s Chloe.”

  “Hey, beautiful.” He sounded worn-out.

  I had no agenda when I dialed. I hadn’t planned on asking about Sadie or questioning why he hadn’t called me, although I would have loved some insight into both. I simply wanted to hear his voice.

  “Well, I just wanted to give you a quick call. I moved into my new place and was thinking about you, and, well, that’s it. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course I don’t mind,” he assured me.

  “I had such a great time with you this summer.” Commence verbal diarrhea. “And since I’m not the strong, silent type, I just wanted to let you know that I’ve been thinking about you a lot and would love for us to try and stay in touch. I know it’s hard and both of our schedules are going to be crazy—”

  “Yeah, of course,” he interjected. “I just don’t know anything right now. The season is just starting, and I’m training like a dog, but I like hearing from you.”

  I nodded slightly as he spoke. “Of course, yeah, I totally understand. Good luck with everything, and hopefully you won’t mind me pestering you on occasion with a text here or there.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Great,” I chirped. “Sorry I woke you, and I guess I’ll see you around.”

  “I hope so,” he said.

  We ended the call, and I crawled into bed frustrated and mortified. His tone was warm, but his words were cool. I was surprised by how much I needed to hear his voice, and by how disappointing it was. I was furious with myself for hanging my hopes on him like every other swooning cheerleader out there. I replayed every tender moment we’d shared at the lake over and over in my head, trying to determine where things had gone wrong between us, but I came up short. I wanted to cry like a baby, but I didn’t. I was determined to hold my head high and take it for what it was regardless of how deep my feelings were. I wasn’t the first girl to fall for Tyler Reed, and I wouldn’t be the last. He was on the path to superstardom, revered by decades of Notre Dame football fans who no doubt believed that Tyler and his teammates routinely broke bread with Jesus Christ himself. Tyler needed to focus on his game and his career and not be distracted by late-night phone calls and relationship drama. It made perfect sense that he would want nothing to do with my problematic mother and me. That he should be surrounded by people of superior caliber and free of exposure to “unsavory elements.”

  Anything else would be delusional.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A week later, classes were in full swing, and I had a grueling schedule that left me with little time for anything other than reading court cases and attending lectures. I had classes in constitutional law, civil procedures, criminal law, and an elective in divorce law. My mind was full, and I was thrilled to have my focus back where it belonged.

  A guy by the name of Cameron Sparks lived across the hall from me. He was also an overwhelme
d law student, and we quickly became close friends and study partners. Cam was from Miami. He was nice-looking, stood about three inches taller than me at five foot eleven, and insisted on wearing flip-flops regardless of the season. Cam was unlike me in just about every way. Laid-back, unaffected by self-imposed pressure, and not easily distracted by obsessions over college quarterbacks or delusional parents. Anytime I had one of my weekly panic attacks—brought on by a phone call from my mother, coupled with the amount of studying I had looming over me—he knew just how to rein me in and keep me grounded. More often than not, his remedy included guacamole and margaritas.

  One Friday night in October, I got a text from Tyler around eleven o’clock. It was the first one he’d sent me in a month. Cam and I were sprawled out on the floor of my apartment studying when Tyler’s name flashed across my phone.

  “Everything okay?” he asked when my eyes widened.

  “Yeah, fine, I just got a text from a guy…this guy I know.”

  Cam elevated his left eyebrow. “A boyfriend-guy?”

  I shook my head. “No, just a guy I hooked up with this summer, but definitely not a boyfriend-guy,” I said and smiled.

  “You like hook-up guy though, don’t cha? And you want him to be boyfriend-guy, I can tell. Neighbor-guy knows all,” he said, patting himself on the shoulder.

  I laughed. “I was crushing on him pretty hard over the summer, but he couldn’t be more wrong for me.”

  “You’ve read the text five times. What does it say?”

  “It says neighbor-guy needs to mind his own business.”

  “That’s oddly coincidental,” Cam said.

  I lifted my phone from the floor and read the text aloud. “It says, I miss you and the lake,” I told Cam.

  “Skinny-dipping? Sounds serious.”

  “Well, it’s not,” I said.

  I crossed my legs, placed the phone facedown next to me, and proceeded to tell Cam every detail about Tyler and our summer at the lake. I loved chatting about it, and we both welcomed a break from reading family law contracts. Cam laughed when I concluded my story and told him that Tyler was a football player at Notre Dame.

  “What’s so hilarious?” I asked and smacked him on the leg.

  “Nothing,” he said, trying not to smile. “Why aren’t you still together?”

  “Because we’re not.”

  “Not many girls would let go of a Notre Dame quarterback.” He said the school in a very la-di-da manner.

  “I’m not many girls,” I said, smacking him again, then laughed along with him. “Fine, he dumped me. Sort of. It didn’t work out.” I admitted.

  “He sounds like a real shit,” Cam concluded.

  “He’s just got issues, but he’s not a bad guy. His parents are a little screwy.”

  “Whose aren’t?”

  “Amen.”

  I tried not to think about Tyler too often, but distance hadn’t done much to lessen my affection for him. “It’s fine, really,” I said. Although anytime Tyler’s name was brought up, it was hard for me to concentrate on anything else. Images of him emerging from a swimming pool dripping wet could easily erase three chapters of divorce law readings from my memory in mere seconds. I’d done what little I could to make peace with what transpired between Tyler and me, but his text catapulted him back to the front of my mind.

  “Are you going to text him back?” he asked. “Something equally profound, like I miss you and cake, maybe? You could start a rhyming thread.”

  “Can we please just get back to work?”

  When Cam was in the bathroom around one in the morning, I texted Tyler back.

  Miss you too, I typed, and bit my lip before hitting send.

  Cam came out of the bathroom and called me out. “I took an extra-long piss so that you could text him back and think you were getting away with something.”

  “I have nothing to hide from you, I just told you the entire story.”

  “Did you secretly text him while I peed?”

  I smiled. “Yeah.”

  Cam was funny and honest and adorable and naturally brilliant. My whole life I’d gotten great grades because I worked my ass off to get them. Cam was one of those people who’d sleep through class and still get an A on the final exam.

  By the time December rolled around, we were inseparable.

  A week before winter break, I was studying for finals when he knocked on my door. I opened it to find him standing there with a Dominos pizza box and a six-pack of Corona.

  “Hola!” he shouted, pushing past me. “When is the last time you made your bed?” he asked as he threw himself on top of it.

  “You’re under strict orders to leave me alone for the next three days,” I said, hands on hips.

  He opened the box to tempt me.

  “Ooh, stuffed crust.” I drooled and sprang toward the pizza.

  “It’s just a quick carb break, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”

  Cam joined me on the floor where I was sprawled out with my books, and we ate and drank well past the point where I should’ve stopped. “See, now I’m useless. There’s no way I’m going to pick up those books again.”

  “Good, come out with me, then.”

  “Just because your brain functions on another level, does not mean everyone else’s does. I have to study.”

  “Come on, it’ll be fun. You’ve been locked up in here for a week, and I know your test isn’t for two more days,” he said with a mischievous grin.

  “Okay, fine, but only because you’re cute,” I said, and he was. Cam was twenty-two years old, but looked like he was seventeen. Zac Efron on the outside, and Bill Gates on the inside. He was a passionate thinker, always spewing ideas and theories that would undoubtedly change the world one day. Law school was unlike college in that I spent my time with a much smaller incestuous group of people. And every first-year female at Northwestern was head over heels for Cam Sparks, except for me. Because as much as I hated to admit it, I was still pining for his polar opposite.

  “See, I knew you thought I was cute,” he said, pointing at me.

  “I tell you all the time, Cameron.”

  Cam had kissed me once during midterms. We’d been at the campus library for five hours, and then gone back to his apartment for some food and a quick break. It was late, maybe eleven o’clock, and I came out of his bathroom to find him leaning against the opposite wall waiting for me. He didn’t say a word, just pushed himself off the wall, grabbed the back of my neck, and kissed me. He tasted like spearmint, and I kissed him back and forgot where I was for a moment. When he was done, he stepped away from me in the tiny hallway and looked really happy with himself.

  “Sorry,” he said post-kiss.

  I hadn’t realized my hand was on my mouth, so I removed it and smiled. “It’s okay. Do you feel better now?” I teased.

  “You have no idea,” he said, and that was it. He’d never made another move.

  I’d thought about that kiss nearly every time I chewed a piece of gum—but I cherished my relationship with him and wasn’t keen on crossing that line. We were so great together that I never wanted to do anything that would threaten our thing. Our sweet, quirky, flirty, irreplaceable friendship thing.

  “Speaking of people who think you’re cute, why don’t we go knock on Amanda’s door and bring her with us to the bar? That way you can get laid and leave me out of it.”

  He smiled and crossed his arms. “Look at you talking shit. I like it,” he said. “Amanda has blue-cheese breath, and I have no interest in hearing about how many problems her parents are having with their building permits on Long Island.”

  Cam’s parents were both schoolteachers in Florida and had struggled through years of tax cuts and union strikes. They had retired with barely enough to care for themselves by the time Cam went to college at Duke. While he was there, he started an environmentally friendly online T-shirt business called Green Tees, which netted him $8,000 a month after he branched out to several ot
her universities. He targeted campus events and fraternity parties and printed their logos and slogans on organic cotton shirts with water-based inks. He sold the business to Adidas his senior year and made enough money to pay off his student loans, cover his law school tuition, give him a nice nest egg to crack open one day, and send his parents on a Caribbean cruise for two weeks.

  “Fine, let me grab my coat,” I said.

  Cam and I walked over to Bar Louie, had a few more beers, and each ordered a burger and fries.

  “Have you decided whether you’re going home for the holidays?” I asked him.

  He shook his head.

  “You’re welcome to come with me to my friend Grace’s house if you stay in town,” I told him.

  I’d spent every Christmas since high school at the Reynolds’ house. Sometimes my mother would join us; sometimes not. Ever since law school had started, I’d driven home on Sundays to bring Mom dinner. Some nights we would sit in silence and watch TV for a couple hours; other nights we would eat dinner as soon as I arrived and then she’d ask me to leave so that she could organize her closet. I never quite knew what I was in for when I’d arrive at her house. There were times she made me feel like an unwanted intruder. While other times she presented me with a new sweater and asked me to curl her hair. If she was acting nervous, I’d simply drop off some food and magazines, take a quick turn around the house—snuffing out any cigarettes she’d left burning in various rooms, kiss her on the head, and leave. It was always unpredictable, never easy.

  “I’m going to drop a gift off for my mom, and then head over to the Reynolds’ house around noon on Christmas day. It would be great to have you with me,” I said. Cam knew enough about my mom’s situation not to be surprised that I wasn’t spending the day by her side exchanging gifts and decorating gingerbread cookies.

  “Thanks. I’ll let you know,” he said.

  By the time the dust had settled after finals week, my apartment was strewn with crap. Loose pages of printed cases and statutes. Empty pizza boxes and cans of Red Bull. Piles of laundry and damp bathing suits growing toxic mold. The mess was embarrassing, but I was relieved just to have survived my exams. Christmas day I spent the entire morning cleaning my apartment and clearing my mind. I had known that law school was going to be a challenge, but I hadn’t realized it would nearly kill me. Cam knocked on my door just as I was about to drag the last bag of garbage to the chute.