The Life I Now Live (17 page)

From: Secret Admirer

To: Patrick Wheldon

Subject: RE: Childhood

Maybe, but I’m starting to wonder if I can do this. I’m kinda nervous… what if I’m doing the wrong thing? What if you regret this? What if I do? What if life isn’t meant to be as beautiful as our dreams?

From: Patrick Wheldon

To: Secret Admirer

Subject: RE: Childhood

I can’t fall in love with you before we meet. I just can’t give you that. I’m up for meeting, but if you’re looking for a husband, you’re looking in the wrong store. I’m not for sale. Not yet at least. And when I am for sale, if I am, I will be a used and tattered heart, not a brand new one.

From: Secret Admirer

To: Patrick Wheldon

Subject: RE: Childhood

Okay.

She never sent an email after that. Neither did I. The “okay” distracted me the rest of the day. I even called the cops thinking my car was stolen. When they arrived they were pretty frustrated when I realized I rode my skateboard to work, not my car. 

Finally, I caved and wrote her an email, asking her to meet in person, but I erased it. I don’t know. My heart wanted to leap into an adventure, but I couldn’t give half of myself to someone. That’s not me. I’m all in, or all out. Completely understood Matt on that one. I didn’t want to give her any false hopes, so I let it go, deleted all of her emails, and skated home remembering when I was sixteen and made girls sit in the backseat of my car so Dolly, my board, could ride in the front seat. Hilariously ironic. I decided to name my new board Folly. Seemed fitting.

Ch. 25 | Heidi

Took all I had, but I finally convinced Andy to go to the doctor. We parked in front of the hospital and he freaked out. Thankfully I drove. Otherwise he would’ve sped off. His hands quivered as I forced him out of the car. With Riley on my hip, I steadied Andy with my other hand. His pupils were tiny and he could barely walk to the entrance. Every step we’d take, he’d turn real fast, jerking his head, eyes darting all over the place, and ask me where we were.

We reached the entrance and he said it again.

“This is a hospital, Andy.”

“It’s a spy camp,” he screamed, then charged off into the parking lot.

I jogged after him. Riley laughed. If only it were funny.

I found him hunched over by a row of bushes. “Andy, it’s cold and I need to take Riley inside to change her. Please come inside. This isn’t a spy camp. It’s a hospital. You’re not well.”

“They’re going to kill me if I go in there.”

“Please come. You need to come. If they try to kill you at least we’ll die together.”

He limped to the door. I signed in and gave them his information. When I turned around he was gone.

A woman screamed. “Gun. Gun. Get down.” Everyone in the room fell to the ground. Papers flew across desks and chairs toppled over. I panicked. He was right. Someone was going to kill us. And all this time I didn’t believe him.

I covered Riley’s ears and knelt on the ground with the rest of the waiting room. Then I looked up and saw him pointing a gun at everyone in the room.

Andy.

With a gun.

“Come near me and I’ll shoot.” He sounded drunk, but he couldn’t have been. “I swear I will.”

I stood and left Riley on the floor. “Andy.”

A swarm of cops fled in and tackled him, pinning him to the ground. I ran to them. “No, no, he’s my husband. They need to check him out. He isn’t feeling well. Something’s wrong.”

They ignored me and took him away.

One of the cops stayed behind, “Mind coming with me, ma’am?”

I followed him through the wide eyes and toppled chairs, picked Riley back up, and hid my tears in her neck. My life was supposed to be filled with afternoon tea and cookies, late nights staring at the moon, and sunrises on the bay. Not this. Not anything close to this nightmare.

Andy was taken to jail, but after realizing he wasclearly unwell, they took him to a secluded room in a psych ward and strapped him to a bed. The doctor came out and ushered me back to his office. Riley and I sat in front of the desk. The chill in the air made me shiver. 

He clasped his hands on top of a folder and cleared his throat. “This is a rare disease. Extremely rare. I can’t know for sure until we run some tests, but he’s showing all the signs and symptoms.”

“What is it?” I said.

“Can you tell me how long he has been acting strange?”

“About a year, but he has a good reason for it.”

“You don’t understand, miss. He’s dying.”

“He seems fine. Just a little mentally unstable. I think it’s stress. He had this job and everything starte—”

“No. This is a symptom of a bigger problem. I think Andy has Fatal Familial Insomnia. It’s a rare condition. The simplest way I can explain it is that his body carries a gene. One day these people wake up and their lives change. It starts out with paranoia, strange phobias. This may last a few months until the panic attacks and hallucinations become more serious. Eventually the patient experiences a severe case of insomnia. It may appear as though he’s sleeping, maybe even sleep walking, but he’s never really asleep. Not in a deep sleep, that is. It’s a very serious and progressive disease. I’m afraid he is at the tail end of it, if my diagnosis is correct.”

“I don’t understand. He had this court case. People were upset with him. The fears were real. Some of them at least.”

“He will die very soon.” He fiddled with his folder, pushed around papers. “I’m sorry to tell you this. I know it’s hard. His body will continue to fail him. His speech may change. These patients, they somewhat resemble dementia patients. Eventually they die. It’s something you need to be aware of, however, because it may affect you again. Although it’s not contagious, it is genetic.” He looked at Riley. “At this time we have no cure or prevention. If your daughter carries this gene, she will inevitably experience the same thing.”

I pinched my nose and held back tears. One person can only take so much before they lose all hope. 

“It generally hits people between twenty-five and fifty years old,” he said. “Although each case is unique.”

“Nothing can be done? I don’t understand. I’ve never heard of this. What is it doing to him? Is it like cancer?”

“It’s a prion disorder which affects the nervous system.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s a genetic mutation. The patient loses his ability to sleep and this degenerates the body and leads to death.”

I stared at him. Blinking. Wondering. Waiting for an end to the nightmare that had become my life, but he only stared back, in silence, conveying to me the truth of my reality, the truth that all things, whether or not we want them to happen or not, will happen the way they are meant to. Life goes on. Hills of happiness and valleys of despair. It’s all there. And I wasn’t sure I could do it anymore.

Sometimes I could handle the hard truth, the realities that made the average person want to crawl into a hole and die. For the last year I handled Andy’s disappearances and odd secrets, wondering whether he was crazy or really being chased and followed by some gang related to a bank scandal. It made sense. He really testified in court. He really had people bothering him. They even put graffiti on our house one day. For so long he allowed himself to fall victim to anxiety over the court case and it messed with his mind and made him believe people were out to get him. And sometimes I believed him. Brief moments here and there, I believed him. Really thought some insane people were after us. I saw black cars in front of my house all the time. Weird stuff. Men following me. Maybe it was all in my head, because apparently a lot of it was all in Andy’s head.

But all this time, all these days without him, he was dying. His body degenerating by the second, without him knowing. The poor thing suffered and didn’t even know what was going on. He believed whatever truths the hallucinations played in his mind. All the while, I was falling in love with another man.

I hated myself for it. One-hundred percent hated myself for it.

Ch. 26 | Patrick

You ever notice how single life is so different from “taken” life? When you’re heart is set on someone else you go to the grocery store and ignore all the other girls. You see a container of orange juice and think of breakfast with your girl. You see apples and think of the time you sat under the apple tree. Everything reminds you of that person. And if it doesn’t, you find a way to make it remind you of her. Then, you’re single. And everything you see makes you feel like crap, so much that you desperately want to start new memories with a new person, just to erase the others. Before other girls were invisible, but now I walked through the grocery store and saw every curve of every woman. From the petite blonde near the potatoes to the tall brunette by the cereal. Suddenly every woman became a potential eraser of past memories.

I couldn’t bring myself to meet my secret admirer girl. Maybe because of the pressure. She said from day one that we would be great together, soul-mates with unfathomable passion. That’s asking for failure. It sets up too much tension and takes away everything natural about falling in love. So, when I saw the cute little redhead standing by the bottled water, I asked her to go on a date with me.