The other
night my son three-year-old son Noah was afraid to go to sleep. Earlier that
evening we’d watched Mickey
and the Beanstalk and Noah
was worried that a giant was going to come and eat him.
Which of course, was a lie. Not the part about the giants,
but about being safe? If I was honest I’d tell Noah that there are all sorts of
dangers out there, and we never know when something terrible could happen. But he’s too young to learn
such a lesson, and anyway, he’ll eventually figure that out on his own.
We all do. One memory that stands out for me is when Ronald
Reagan was shot. I was ten years old. I came home from school and settled down
in front of the television, but my cartoons were interrupted by a breaking news
bulletin.
I didn’t understand. Why would somebody shoot the
president? Why would he kill his press secretary? That was what the newscaster
had said, that James Brady, Ronald Reagan’s press secretary, was dead. He
wasn’t, but now, over thirty years later, Brady’s 8/4/14 death has been ruled a
homicide.
John Hinckley Jr. most likely won’t be charged.
Over thirty years ago, the jury decided he was insane. He’d
done it to get the attention of Jodie Foster, after all, and I guess that
didn’t work out too well for him. It didn’t work out too well for James Brady
either, because he suffered from the effects of the shooting for the rest of
his life.
And in those thirty years plus years, and despite Brady’s
efforts to advocate for gun control, our tolerance towards gun violence has
only widened. I hate to say it, but compared to the shootings of recent years,
John Hinckley Jr.’s assassination attempt is pretty tame. But James Brady
believed that we should do something about our hypothetical fears, fears which
had been proven real to him.
And sometimes, even the fears we can’t explain, control us.
So we have to make a change, which is what happened to my brother-in-law, Jack.
“I’m moving,” he told me. “I’m cutting my losses, selling
my condo, and getting the hell out.”
He actually had many reasons for wanting to move, despite
the fact that he’d been in his condo for little over a year, but his urgency
had to do with one thing and one thing only.
His bathroom ghost.
“It had gone away for a while,” he told me, as we prepared
his mom’s birthday dinner. Everyone else was safely out of ear shot, so he
could confide in me without worry that others would overhear and call him
crazy.
“But it came back?” I asked, as I poured vinaigrette onto
the kale salad. By “it” I meant the mysterious white powdery substance that
seemed to magically accumulate in large clumps on his sink and mirror, the
puddles of water on the floor (when no water had been running) and the eerie
sound of footsteps when no one was around.
“Yeah, ever since I called that plumber, and he told me it
was just hard water deposits, it all somehow stopped.”
“But that doesn’t explain the footsteps,” I tell him.
“I know.” Jack sighed as he stirred the sauce for the
pasta, and his face flushed from the heat of the stove.
I looked over my shoulder, checking to make sure that no
family member, most especially Monty, was nearby. There’s no way he’d turn down
the opportunity to mock his little brother about this. “What happened?” I asked
in a low voice.
Jack kept his voice low too. “I came home late, after a
busy night at the restaurant. I was so tired that when I got out of my car, I
tripped and banged up my knee. I limped all the way up to my condo, and when I
got inside I stumbled toward the bathroom and used the sink to wash off my knee
before I even turned on the lights. But when I happened to look up into the
mirror, I saw this dark figure standing behind me.”
I shivered at the thought. “Was anyone actually there?”
“Of course not!” He turned off the stove and placed the
sauce pan onto a hot pad. “I was alone. So I told myself I’d imagined it, and
then I finished cleaning my knee, took some Advil, and went to bed.”
“Okay…”
“But,” he continued, “the next morning I got up, and for
the first time in months, there was the same powdery white stuff all over my
bathroom.” Jack forcefully waved his wooden spoon at me. “And I’m sorry, but
there’s no way it’s hard water deposits. Hard water does not accumulate into
little clumps overnight.”
“So that’s it? You’re moving?”
“Are you telling me I shouldn’t move? That I should “deal”
with something that I don’t understand, with something that scares me? I can move, Lucy, so I’m going to. Maybe my
fear seems silly and irrational, but it’s real to me, and I’m not going to put
up with it any longer.”
“Hey, I get it. I wouldn’t want to a spooky bathroom
either.”
He squinted. “Are you making fun of me?”
I sighed. “No. I’m being serious. There are already too
many things in this world to be afraid of. Your bathroom shouldn’t be one of
them. So if you can do something about it, you ought to.”
I only wish that more fears, both real and pretend, could
be so easily abated.
****
Attention! The Next Breath, which is the followup story to The Holdout is coming soon, but you can read these books in either order. Read on for the book description, and view the cover and book trailer!
I kiss him, choosing
love over honesty, which is a choice nobody should ever have to make…
Robin loves sweet, responsible Nick, with his penchant for
Beethoven and Ben Folds Five. But she also still loves her college boyfriend
Jed, an irreverent playwright plagued with cystic fibrosis. Now Robin is
struggling to reveal her secrets and confront her past, as she finally performs
in the play that Jed wrote for her, eleven years ago. Will Robin have the
strength to keep her promise and stay true to her heart?
Alternating between present-day scenes, college flashbacks,
and segments from Jed’s play, this tear-jerking yet uplifting tale illustrates
how life is finite but love is infinite, and the road to recovery begins with the
next breath.
The Next Breath
