I opened my eyes and saw her smile.
“That was nice,” she replied. “I was hoping you’d kiss me tonight.”
“You were?”
Gen nodded and closed her eyes as I leaned over to kiss her again. The thousand-pound weight on my shoulders began to disintegrate. How could a simple kiss do such an amazing thing?
Gen’s eyes opened, and as I glanced into them, I wondered if this was really happening. I still held her hand in mine, and I looked down as I rubbed it. I wanted to say something, but no words could convey how I felt.
“So, what’s that in your hand?” Gen asked me.
“Oh, yeah. Here. I got you a little something.”
When I gave it to her and told her my reason for getting it, she laughed at me. “I don’t need anything to remember this night by. You think I’ll forget so easily?” she said.
I took Gen’s hand again and, without thinking, kissed it. She seemed pleasantly amused by my spontaneity. “It’s just—I just want to thank you for bringing me up here,” I said. “And for listening to me. I’ve probably talked way too much tonight.”
“You talk too much?” She laughed.
“I usually don’t talk much at all.”
“So then what’s making you? The view? The incredible candy bar?”
“I guess it’s just you. The way you listen to everything I say. The way you never have a negative comment about anything. I don’t know. I feel I can tell you almost anything.”
“You do?”
“Sure.”
Genevie held my hand in both of hers. “Then tell me this,” she said softly. “What really made you quit school? Seems like it had to be something pretty big.”
“Listen, I really don’t want to think about the past. Not tonight. Not now. I don’t want to ruin an incredible evening.”
“But you said you could tell me anything.”
“Almost anything,” I replied. “And yes, I feel I can. When the time is right, I will.”
“You promise?”
I thought about it. It was so much more serious than she realized. “How about I promise to take you on a cruise the next time we go out?” I asked her.
“You can take me on that cruise, but it doesn’t have to be the next time we go out.”
“Why not?”
“Those don’t go out every night, do they?”
“No, you have to plan ahead for them—” I saw what she was saying, and once again I admired her directness. “Well then, maybe the next time we go out, we can actually have more than a Twix bar.”
“Sounds good. You can pick the place.”
We stood to walk toward the elevator, still holding hands, still looking out over the glittering lights. We could see everything for miles around us. But what would it be like if Genevie saw miles deep inside my heart? If she saw the secrets I carried there?
Maybe there would be a right time to let her see.
Maybe.
November 22
Dear Amy,
Thanksgiving approaches, and somehow I can actually say I have many things to be thankful for. I feel guilty writing that, guilty for finally feeling good about my life. But someone has shown me so many reasons to give thanks. And I do.
I know all my words, my apologies, have been years in coming. I hope it’s not too late to express them now. I hope for so many things, realizing that many of them won’t ever happen. That they can’t happen.
I just hope your family will understand and accept my apologies one day. Is it too much to hope that they might even forgive me?
Sheridan
eight
“You gotta be kidding me.”
I looked over at Erik and laughed. We had just spent the last hour in my car blasting a variety of CDs as we sped above the speed limit from our apartment to my parents’ house in St. Charles for Thanksgiving dinner. Erik had told me his parents were visiting relatives out of state for Thanksgiving, and he didn’t want to go, so I had invited him over to my house. I hadn’t told Erik what to expect. His surprise was amusing.
“Kinda small, isn’t it?” I referred to my parents’ house.
Erik’s mouth was hanging open. “It’s humongous. Are your parents loaded or something?”
“Is humongous a word?” I asked.
Erik cursed in astonishment.
“I know that’s not a word,” I said.
I drove up the sweeping circle driveway and parked on the side in front of the three-car garage. “I guess you can say my parents are well-off,” I answered him.
As we walked toward the two-story, brick house—Erik called it a mansion—I thought of the word I had spoken: well-off. It depends on who you ask. Yes, we were well-off. And yes, we had problems just like every family had.
The familiar steps up to the porch, the massive door leading to the entryway, the marble floor and the hovering chandelier inside—I rarely even noticed all of these things. But Erik continued to gape. He had never asked me about my family, so I had never told him. It had never been a big deal to me that I came from a wealthy family. It didn’t always feel like an advantage.
Seeing Erik’s eye-opener took me back to childhood. I had forgotten the sort of burden I carried around with me during those years.
Have you ever been in a class where one kid was, in Erik’s appropriate word, loaded? Ever been friends with a kid who always seemed to pay for everyone else, who always had parties at his house, who always had the nicest clothes and even nicer toys? I was that kid, that friend.
I was the one born into a family with a father who had inherited millions and made even more in his surgical practice, and with a mother who grew up with old money herself. No one ever used the word multimillionaire in our house when I was growing up. I didn’t even know what the word meant for a long time, and when I finally realized what it did mean, I thought nothing of it. It’s hard to appreciate money when your family has so much of it. Come to think of it, it’s hard to appreciate many things when you grow up in that sort of environment.
I never flaunted the fact that my father had money—or that he was a well-known surgeon. I always thought that was a boring profession. As a kid pushed to excel in my musical pursuits, I once wanted to be a concert pianist. The older I became, though, the more my interests shifted. At one point I wanted to be a rock star, living in squalor and trying to find gigs to support myself. Later, during my high school years, I seriously thought about being a composer, specializing in electronic arrangements, perhaps a composer of movie music.
All of this sounded romantic to me. To my dad, it sounded ludicrous. And to my mother, the music lover in our family—she could only go so far in supporting dreams that appeared preposterous to my father.
It seemed like my sister, Kiersten, was the lone child my father could be proud of. Only three years older than me, she was doing what she had always wanted to do: practicing law. I, on the other hand, had messed up royally, dropped out of school and now… gave piano lessons while finishing up my senior year. Hmm. You make the comparison. Imagine how my father felt.
Over the past few years, when I was struggling to support myself independently of my parents, I had been surprised to learn just how comfortable my “normal” life had been when I was growing up. I never had a summer job. Most of my summers were spent playing or going on family vacations or doing whatever I wanted. I had lots of time on my hands and plenty of weekly “allowance” to spend. I see this now as one of the biggest sources of my troubles.
Still, I couldn’t blame my parents for the mistakes I had made. The only thing I could accuse them of was bailing me out of trouble and then trying to forget there was ever any trouble in the first place. During my most difficult years—especially the year after I quit college—my busy and well-to-do parents didn’t know how to treat me or how to help me deal with my mistakes. So they more or less acted as if nothing had happened and continued to indulge me. In a way, I wish they hadn’t. Money can solve a lot of problems, but not
when your biggest problem happens to be a guilty conscience.
I guess I might have turned out worse, though, if I had grown up in poverty or with abusive parents. So I tried not to harbor ill feelings. As I said, my mistakes were mine and mine alone. My parents had certainly never forced me to go to parties, to befriend the people I did, to go down the dangerous path I was determined to take. They helped me get out of trouble and made it a little easier for me to run from my problems. At the same time, I was perfectly capable of running all by myself.
“Anybody home?” I called out in our echoing front foyer.
Pearl D’Arby bustled into the foyer, greeted both of us, then took our coats. As she walked away, I told Erik she was our housekeeper.
“Your housekeeper? Like they have on the Brady Bunch or something like that?”
I laughed again and couldn’t think of anything witty to say before my mother swept into the foyer. As she made pleasant small talk with my roommate, I found myself surprised at how elegant my mother looked. That happened whenever I looked at her through the eyes of one of my friends. Still trim and classy looking, with a recent haircut that made her look maybe ten years younger than she was, Helen Blake had always been a sort of Christie Brinkley of mothers. When I was younger, guys would always comment on how great she looked—not in a leering way, but with a “your mother’s actually good-looking!” gasp of astonishment.
“I’m glad you finally made it home,” Mom told me with a small peck on my cheek. “Dinner will be in half an hour. Be sure to compliment Pearl on the meal; she’s been in a tizzy about it all morning.”
“Pearl does a lot of our cooking too,” I told Erik, which prompted another look of astonishment.
“While we’re waiting on dinner, you could show Erik around the house,” my mom prompted.
I threw Erik a questioning look. “Want the grand tour?”
“Sure,” he answered, his enthusiasm unusually high.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
“He’s in his office. Say hi to him. We were just talking to your sister.”
“They’re with Henry’s family?”
“As usual,” Mom replied.
Kiersten and her husband, Henry, usually spent Thanksgiving with his side of the family and Christmas with us.
I showed Erik around the house, from the upstairs bedrooms to the ground-level office where my dad sat behind his large desk playing on his computer. He was tall like me, with gray-white hair I knew I had helped to color. He wore a burgundy sweater vest with a crisply ironed, button-down shirt underneath. He spoke a few words to us and I knew that was all he had to say, so we moved on.
Erik loved the basement entertainment room, which had a built-in, wide-screen television in the wall and a stereo system with surround sound that played DVD movies. I had watched a lot of those in the past few years while I was living here. “This is incredible,” he exclaimed, looking all around him.
We also had a game room in the basement, as well as another kitchen and three bedrooms.
“It’s fun to watch movies down here,” I told him. “We’ll have to watch a couple tonight.” I showed Erik what the DVD system sounded like as I played a snippet from a movie. “My parents just bought this one,” I told him. “It’s a great movie.”
We stayed downstairs until my mom called us up for dinner. As I walked up the carpeted stairs and felt my stomach rumble at the aroma of the Thanksgiving dinner, I couldn’t help wishing Genevie was here as well.
Thanksgiving consisted of the four of us. I had grown used to this over the years. My mother’s side of the family lived in Maine, and we rarely saw them. My father’s side lived in the northern suburbs of Chicago, and we would usually get together for a big family meal only at Christmas and an occasional birthday. We always headed out to see my grandmother on Thanksgiving evenings, usually going to an aunt’s or uncle’s home as well. For the main meal, however, it was usually just our small family.
That’s why I had asked Erik to come. It would be easier having a guest to help relieve some of the tension that existed between my father and me.
My father, Jim Blake—professionally, he was Dr. James Blake—talked with Erik as if he were a potential business partner. “So, Erik, what’s your major?”
“Communications,” Erik replied between bites. He was wolfing down his food as though he had never eaten a meal like this in his life. Living off beer and bologna sandwiches will do that to you.
“And what are your plans for after college?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. I’d like to get into journalism.”
“Television or radio? Or newspapers?”
I knew what Erik was going to say next.
“I’m not really sure.”
My mother slipped into the conversation and began talking about a Barbara Walters special she had seen. My mother was the diplomat of our family, the peacemaker and interpreter for my father. My father saw everything in black and white; everything related to a plan and a purpose. He just couldn’t understand people who didn’t have a ten-point mission statement in their life.
This was one reason he couldn’t understand his own son.
“So how are the classes going these days?” my father asked me.
“Pretty good.”
“Sheridan spends most of his time buried in his books,” Erik offered.
Both my parents looked at Erik as if he had told them I had learned to fly.
“Really?” Mom said, looking at me and then meeting my father’s eyes.
“Oh, yeah,” said Erik. “I keep telling him he needs to lighten up, go out a little more and enjoy life.” Erik laughed as he stuffed himself full of more food. He didn’t realize what he had just said and what it had done.
It had blown my parents away. I knew this simply by their silent and stunned expressions.
“Still giving piano lessons?” Dad finally asked.
I nodded, wanting to stay clear of this subject. My father had always thought my music was a “waste of time” and that I should be “working and investing in my future.” The thing was—for a long time, music was my work and my future, and now it was my livelihood. Dad couldn’t understand that. Even when he grudgingly agreed to my music major, he kept pushing me to “be open to other options.”
“Any other job prospects come up?” he asked me.
Mom looked at him and gave him a squint of disapproval.
“No,” I replied. “But with school and everything, I haven’t really been looking.”
“I still think you should take that internship I’ve been telling you about with RG Associates. Rick in our church keeps reminding me about it.”
“Maybe after I graduate,” I told Dad.
“So have you met any pretty young girls?” my mom asked me with a bright and composed smile, more to get off the “work” subject than out of curiosity.
Erik looked over the table at me and smiled. He didn’t say anything.
“Actually, I did.”
My mom looked surprised. “And who might that be?”
“Her name is Genevie. She’s a Filipino girl I’ve been seeing some.”
“Genevie. That’s a pretty name.”
“You guys would like her.”
“You should have brought her for dinner,” Mom said.
“We’re just friends,” I said, not wanting my parents to think I was getting serious with another girl.
They had always disapproved of my last girlfriend, especially when I decided to follow her to Covenant College.
“Well, you need to come home more or at least call and tell me about these things,” Mom said.
“I was home just the other day,” I mentioned.
“Just for a quick bite to eat.”
“You need to at least let us know you’re staying out of trouble,” my dad blurted out.
Erik glanced over at me, and I could see the question in his dark eyes. I didn’t say anything, and I remained quiet for most of the res
t of the meal as my parents exchanged pleasantries with my roommate.
In the afternoon, Erik and I rented a couple of DVD movies and watched them downstairs. As Erik sat on the soft leather couch drifting off to a turkey-induced snooze, I slipped away and went to my bedroom. It was exactly the way I had left it months ago—minus the keyboard I had extracted from the corner a few weeks before and a few small items I had picked up when I dropped by to see my parents.
I looked outside to the sprawling back lawn. Snow was falling—the first of the year.
Memories followed.
Perhaps it was because I was back home, in a house I could at least consider my home—the same house where I had first been forced to confront my mistakes and failures and where I had been left alone to fend for myself. Or perhaps it was the photos that were still tacked up to the corkboard on a wall—dozens of smiling and happy friends I hadn’t spoken to in years. Maybe it was the assorted posters remaining on the walls, the trophies on my dresser. Even the framed pictures of my old girlfriend and me could be seen with one easy sweep of the room.
Why hadn’t I taken all of these reminders down?
Because you want to be reminded. You need to be reminded.
I saw the stack of musical composition books in the corner of the room. I could almost feel the dust that had collected on them. Years. Years since I had turned on my keyboard, since I had played it, since I had composed anything at all.
How many musical works had I created? Hundreds perhaps. Each one capturing a dream once held. Dreams that were now long forgotten.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself, a voice reprimanded. It’s Thanksgiving, and once again you’re in your room feeling sorry for yourself.
I grabbed the cordless phone in my room and dialed one of the few numbers I knew by heart.
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