Painless

by Derek Ciccone

  Looking back, he was always surprised Kelly stuck with him after the shoulder injury crashed his stock. At the time, he was convinced it was out of love and loyalty. They married six months after graduation on the lavish Klein estate in a haughty suburb of Pittsburgh, in spite of her father’s threats.

  Billy agreed to join the family business. He would do anything to make Kelly happy, including putting his dreams on hold for her. His job title was Director of Public Relations, but to this day he still couldn’t articulate exactly what he did. They attended social functions, took expensive vacations, and led the expected life of a Klein. He thought things were fine. Every married couple has their problems and of course it can’t always be hot and heavy.

  But he now saw how the many small cracks were pieces of a bigger fault line. The biggest sign was that his neurotically image-conscience wife didn’t even put up a fight when he told her he planned to leave his job at Klein’s Beer to pursue the writing career he had put off for her. A job suited for the court jester, and certainly not worthy of a prince in the Klein Kingdom.

  In return, he couldn’t protest when she went to work for the campaign of Senator Oliver LaRoche. It was the first thing in as long as he could remember that she seemed excited about. He wondered whether, when she met LaRoche, she opened with the line, “You’re Senator LaRoche, aren’t you? Oh my God, of course you are. Can I be more pathetic?”

  Billy could rationalize losing Kelly to LaRoche, a man who ran his campaign under the slogan of “Family Values,” which was too laughable to even laugh about. He was a blue chip stock. But it’s the other part of the story that ripped his insides out. The part where his soul was taken from him. The part that sometimes made him wonder if he should’ve pulled that trigger. He didn’t want to think about that part anymore, so he forced the thoughts from his mind.

  So once again Billy Harper would try to ease the pain by vicariously living through a fictional character. He put on his Elmo suit and headed for Carolyn’s party.

  Chapter 12

  Billy moved toward the large party tent. The day remained cool, but the heat was dizzying inside the heavy Elmo costume, and he hadn’t even applied the head yet.

  According to Chuck, the party was going to be modest compared to many of the over-the-top shindigs in their neighborhood, but would still be extravagant enough so the Whitcombs wouldn’t be sent to the social leper colony.

  The theme was natural science and was coordinated with the New Canaan Nature Center. Carolyn initially wanted a princess party, but Chuck nixed it. Then she negotiated a hockey party, which gained Dad’s support, but was vetoed by Mom. Aunt Dana came up with the compromise plan of natural science, and since she was paying for it, natural science it was.

  When Billy arrived at the tent, he was met by his towering yellow partner in crime—Big Bird. The beak came off, revealing Chuck.

  “We’re really in the dog house, aren’t we, eh?” he said with a grin.

  “Tell me about it,” Billy said, itching his body like he had a bad case of poison ivy.

  “You make any good new memories last night?” Chuck asked, his grin turning sly.

  “Just re-living bad ones,” Billy popped Chuck’s enthusiasm balloon.

  Under the tent, cafeteria-style tables were waiting for the children, a triangular birthday hat marking each place. The rest of the essentials were all there—cups, plates, napkins, and candles—all had an animal theme.

  As noon approached, boatloads of children began arriving with their pageant parents. Many attempted to dress in theme. Some wore cowboy hats, some wore safari outfits, while others wore science lab coats. It appeared the natural science theme had caused confusion. Like high school, they mingled in cliques. As did the parents.

  The big adult topic of discussion was the execution of the Iranian hostages, but it didn’t seem to dampen anyone’s mood. Chuck began to point out the rich and the richer to Billy. He told Billy of one party last summer where the family set up amusement rides, including a roller coaster in their backyard. Another hired a famous pop star to perform.

  The highlight of the party was a live animal show, where professionals from the nature center showed off unique birds, fuzzy mammals, and scaly reptiles. Carolyn almost started a riot when, upon viewing a particularly unattractive lizard, she shouted, “Dragon!” Like shouting fire in a theater, the four-year-olds scattered in panic. Eventually order was restored, and the live animal show continued for about an hour. A scavenger hunt killed another hour.

  The party culminated with a barbecue under the big tent. The princess—wearing what she termed her “birthday dress” that she wore with sneakers and a fashionable bandage on her temple—then energetically opened an endless stream of gifts.

  Billy momentarily looked away from the sadistic shredding of wrapping paper and noticed an over-dressed, leggy brunette prancing toward the party like she paid for it. Actually, she did. The long curls bouncing off her shoulders, along with her breezy attitude, made her seem younger than her thirty-five years. Her Manhattan-chic look included a stylish skirt, heels, and expensive Louis Vuitton handbag. Behind her, Dana dragged a shiny red bicycle with a large ribbon on it.

  Billy met her halfway. She greeted him with, “There’s nothing hotter than a man in an Elmo costume.”

  “Thanks for finding me a place I could afford,” he shot back with a playful grin.

  “When Ain’t No Senator’s Daughter publishes, then this place will be referred to as your guest house,” Dana replied with her trademark enthusiasm. “And when the movie rights sell, then you’ll own a castle like that woman who wrote Harry Potter!”

  “I thought the writer was supposed to be the out there one and the agent was the realist with the business head?”

  “Why lower expectations? It’s going to be huge. A couple of publishers have already read it. They loved it.”

  “Is it true you’ve never sold a book?”

  “Don’t listen to the haters, Billy, it only takes one.”

  “So that’s a no?”

  “I never represented you before. No matter how good of an agent I am, I needed talent to sell. Now I got the talent.”

  An off-key chorus of “Happy Birthday” in the distance directed Billy’s attention back toward the party. Beth stood to the side and took pictures of Carolyn, who hammed it up for the camera.

  “So how are you and Beth getting along?” Dana asked, holding back a smile as if it were a sneeze.

  “How could anyone not get along with Beth? She’s so easygoing. It’s been nothing but a pleasure,” he deadpanned.

  “What do you expect from twins? We’re both twenty-five, you know.”

  “Are you also anal, neurotic, generally uptight, and possibly insane?”

  “No, just twenty-five,” Dana said with an easy laugh, but her look then turned serious. “But do you know why she’s like that?”

  “I’ve heard bits and pieces. She’s adopted, acquired some nasty abandonment issues, and then got dumped by the Boulangers.”

  “She doesn’t just have abandonment issues, Billy,” Dana said. A wind picked up and she pushed her long locks out of her face. “She is the Abandoned Child.”

  Chapter 13

  Dana moved in like she was going to tell him a secret, even though nobody was within fifty yards of them.

  “She wasn’t adopted through a traditional agency. My mother was picking up my father at the Greenwich train station on Christmas Day, almost twenty-one years ago. But what she found was a four-year-old girl wandering aimlessly along the train platform and crying.”

  Billy gazed at the party in the distance. If what Dana said was true, then Beth was the same age as Carolyn when she was abandoned.

  “My parents waited with Beth for her parents or guardian to show,” Dana continued. “Hours went by—nothing. So they brought her home. I was a freshman in high school at the time, and my friends and I went around Greenwich putting up flyers. Hours turned into days, and by the
time we figured out nobody was coming for her, Mom and I had fallen in love with her. Everybody in the family was against keeping her, but my father could never say no to me, I was his little princess.”

  Billy wasn’t surprised people like the Boulangers didn’t have to go through the proper channels to adopt the girl. He saw it firsthand with the Kleins, who never went through systems or waited in lines. But he remained skeptical of the story. “These people just ditched their kid at the train station and there were no witnesses?”

  “None that we found. Beth was in therapy and hypnosis for years. For the most part, she could recall general emotions she felt, but not specifics like names or places. The majority opinion is the experience was so traumatic that she displaced the memories to a deep place where they could never be retrieved.

  “The only tangible memories she had were that she came from ‘the place with the big buildings,’ which we confirmed when we found a train ticket in her pocket from Grand Central in New York. And the other was Nathan.”

  “Nathan?”

  “She claimed to have a brother named Nathan, who Beth described as having some sort of disfigurement. She remembers the other children mockingly calling him E.T. after the alien in the popular movie of the time. She thought their trip to New York had something to do with going to see a doctor for Nathan.”

  “How many doctors could have treated a disfigured child named Nathan around Christmas time? Did you check every doctor in New York?”

  The exhausted look on Dana’s face said this was not a new line of questioning. “Of course we did, and found nothing. The consensus of those with the fancy degrees was that Nathan was an imaginary friend that Beth made up to deal with the trauma. That she created his disfigurement and lack of acceptance, to play out the parallels of her actual existence. In other words, they didn’t believe there was a doctor.”

  A great imagination, just like her daughter. I’m not gonna apologize for having a great imagination. On the surface it made sense. Imaginary friends were a common way for children to escape and reveal inner thoughts. Billy had his own imaginary friend as a child. But he could tell Dana wasn’t buying it.

  “Even if Nathan is a figment of her imagination, which I doubt,” she said, “her recollection of the emotions from that day were too vivid, especially the way she talked about the scared look on her parents’ faces. A child always remembers the first time they see their parents truly scared.”

  “Yet she doesn’t remember anything her parents said to her? No names, no description, no mention of where they were sending her? Just that they were scared?” It was still a little hard for Billy to believe.

  Dana sighed. “Pretty much, except I guess there was some obscure law back then that a child had to be five-years-old to ride the train without supervision, because the only thing she remembered her mother telling her when she put her on that train was that she was four years old, but if anyone on the train asks, to tell them she is five.”

  The recollection seemed to hit Dana like a tractor-trailer, her words now struggling to maneuver past the suddenly rugged terrain in the back of her throat. “That’s the only way we knew she was four years old. We created a birthday for her on Valentine’s Day because she brought us so much love. What kind of mother could have done such a thing to her child?”

  “I often wished for a train that would take me away from my family. But in this case, the rich family rescued the abandoned girl. Sounds like a great rags to riches story. So how did it go so wrong?”

  “My mom, who Beth called Mrs. B, would do anything for her. My father was always at the office and my brothers were off spreading their sense of entitlement. So it was just the three of us during my high school years. The Three Musketeers.

  “My freshman year at Boston College, Beth and Mom were playing in the park—one of their favorite games was for Beth and Mom to chase each other’s shadows. They would run around for hours like school children.”

  Dana’s face sunk. It was strange to see the normally carefree woman so stricken with angst. Billy put his red Elmo arm around her. It felt unwanted and awkward.

  “I always told her to slow down—she wasn’t a spring chicken anymore,” her voice trembled. “I got the call at school from one of my brothers. He was so cold when he delivered the news of her heart attack. He actually told me I shouldn’t come home until the funeral so that I could concentrate on my midterms.” A tear rolled down her perfectly made-up cheek and she angrily wiped it away, as if she refused to admit the past still got to her.

  “Beth was lucky she ran into Mrs. B at the train station. She could’ve ended up with some lunatic,” Billy tried to console.

  “Trust me, after my mother died, Beth ended up with a whole bunch of lunatics. I was off in college and my father remarried some plastic bimbo who couldn’t wait to get rid of her. They blamed Beth for everything, including my mother’s death. Beth did what any kid would do, she rebelled. She was only eight when Mom died, and by the time she got to high school she was a mess—the nose ring, purple hair, you name it. If it even resembled rebellion she would do it.”

  Billy couldn’t visualize the ultra-conservative woman with purple hair. He viewed Beth in the distance and noticed she was actually smiling. She was snapping photos of a pack of energetic four-year-olds, who were hamming it up for the camera like a bunch of red carpet divas.

  Dana fought back tears, contrasting from the festive party in the distance. “The rebellion continued to escalate and that’s when the self-mutilation started. My father tried to put her into an asylum. If it weren’t for me talking him out of it, she might be in some sanitarium wearing a straightjacket. Then ironically, my father had a stroke. We were forced to put him in a nursing home, which became the perfect opportunity for the others to cut Beth out of the family. Beverly and I paid for her college. But the drinking got bad. Thank God Chuck came along…”

  As Dana’s voice trailed off, Billy noticed Chuck working the crowd in his Big Bird suit. Beth was at his side, giving off the appearance of contented motherhood. “She’s no barrel of laughs, but she seems like she got it together,” Billy commented.

  “For the most part she has,” Dana said, “but the past is always lurking under the surface. I recently caught her searching for her birth parents. She said it was to learn her medical history for Carolyn’s sake, in case her fevers were related to what her brother had. But I know it’s about her making peace with the abandonment.”

  Billy knew all too well about trying to make peace with the past. And when it came to a separation of a parent and child, he doubted such a thing was possible.

  Chapter 14

  Billy persuaded Dana to rejoin the party. Children’s laughter could be one of the world’s great medicines and he suspected Dana could use some.

  As if using radar, Carolyn spotted their approach and made a mad dash toward them. “Aunt Dana! Aunt Dana!”

  Dana picked up the little girl. “How is my beautiful niece?”

  “I’m foe!”

  “You’re almost as old as me.”

  “How old are you, Aunt Dana?”

  Her breezy laugh returned. “I’m forever twenty-nine.”

  Carolyn looked at her with wonderment. “Wow, twenty-nine is really old.”

  “I used to think so,” Dana said, her tears in the rear-view mirror. “So are you going to come visit me soon?”

  “Will I get to ride the train?”

  “That’s the best part,” Dana said cheerfully, before turning serious. “Let me see that tongue, sweetie.”

  Carolyn proudly stuck it out, exposing the jagged black stitches. Dana cringed, but forced a comforting look. “Why did you do that?”

  Carolyn was smart and likely realized the “having fun” answer led to further inquiry. She shrugged with contrived sadness, and replied, “It wasn’t my smartest move.”

  “No it wasn’t, sweetie, no it wasn’t,” Dana said as she set the girl down.

  Carolyn then spotte
d the bike and began hopping up and down like she had to go the bathroom “Is that for me?”

  “It sure is.”

  Her mouth dropped open, forming an O, and her big saucer eyes expanded. “That’s a big girl bike!”

  “A big girl bike for a big girl!”

  Beth appeared out of nowhere, approaching her older sister. They seemed like they were backwards. Beth’s motherly aura made her seem like the thirty-five-year-old, while the aging-like-a-fine-wine Dana could’ve passed for twenty-five.

  They embraced. “Thank you so much for helping us with the party. She loved it,” Beth said, her eyes welling with tears.

  “Hey, it saved me a trip to Chuck E. Cheese,” Dana deflected.

  “I don’t know how we can ever re-pay you. This meant so much to Carolyn.”

  They hugged again. “You know I’d do anything for her—I love that kid.”

  “But you’ve done so much beyond…”

  Dana cut her off. “I can only buy so many pairs of shoes.”

  As usual, they were heeled, leather, and expensive. Beth’s work boots were full of mud from the scavenger hunt. The contrast was as sharp as a blade.

  “Mom—Aunt Dana got me a big girl bike,” Carolyn exploded.

  “I know. What do you say, Carolyn?”

  “I say let’s ride bikes!”

  Beth’s head tilted in disappointment. Carolyn picked up on the error of her ways. “I say thank you, Aunt Dana?”

  “Much better,” her mother said.

  “So are you having fun at your party?” Dana asked the girl.

  “Oh my gosh, we…” She thrust into a long tangent about animals, dragons, scavenger hunts, and strawberry milk. Then her cute cheeks drooped. “I just wish my dad was here.”