Painless (6 page)

Chapter 10

They were similar to the scars on Carolyn’s arms.

And Billy discerned that mother and daughter’s scars came from the same dark place. They were the work of self-mutilation.

“
That’s
what you blame yourself for. You think because you cut yourself, she did that to her tongue.”

Beth tried to hide her arms, but there was no place to put them. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did Carolyn ever see you cut yourself?”

“Of course not.”

“Then I don’t know what you’re worried about.”

Beth sat back down and stared blankly across the loft. “I felt pain and hurt myself in a cry for help. Carolyn also harms herself. You do the math.”

“The only thing that girl knows is love. That’s your legacy to her. And as far as pain…” he laughed to himself, “She dropped a bookcase on her head and didn’t even flinch. I’m not sure she knows what pain is.”

“The fact is, my self-destructive behavior, whether intentional or not, has done damage to my daughter.” She peered at the stream of empty beer bottles. “I just can’t have any more self-destructive behavior around her.”

“Are you throwing me out?”

Beth remained silent, seemingly mulling it over.

“Are you?” his voice elevated.

Beth picked one of the bottles and repeated her mantra, “This doesn’t cure pain. In fact, after a while it doesn’t even numb it anymore.”

Billy stared at the suddenly vulnerable woman and surprisingly felt a bond with her—a bond of pain. “So how did you heal it?”

She fidgeted in her seat. “Numbing it didn’t work and hurting myself didn’t work. Then the Healing Angel of Pain arrived to save me.”

 “The Healing Angel of Pain?”

“When Carolyn was eight-months-old, well before we could expect her to talk; I was changing her on a table in our tiny apartment up in Albany. Chuck was away and there were no witnesses, so I can’t prove it. But I sneezed and Carolyn looked up at me with those big hazel eyes of hers and said as clear as day, ‘God bless you, Mommy.’ She never spoke again for a long time, but the message was clear: God did bless me. He sent Carolyn to heal my pain.”

“Was there a virgin birth involved also?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Will it affect whether you throw me out or not?”

“I will do anything it takes to protect my daughter.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Beth calmly reached beside her chair and picked a plastic three-ring binder that Billy recognized. She opened it up on her lap, acting as if Billy wasn’t there. She slowly flipped pages, causing Billy to fume.

“I was reading through one of your manuscripts while I was waiting for you to wake. Dana told me you wrote this great political thriller. So I was surprised you also write children’s books.”

Billy lunged at her, snapping at the manuscript, but Beth pulled it back toward her chest and cradled her arms around it.

“Give me that! It’s none of your business!”

“Writers are always so temperamental,” she teased. “I just wanted to compliment you. I loved it—
The Adventures of Peanut Butter & Jelly
—Carolyn would love it also. Do you do the illustrations yourself?”

The Adventures of Peanut Butter & Jelly
is the story of two five-year-old girls who would be confronted by a life issue—the first story was about dealing with a bully—then would solve the problem in adorably creative ways, always ending in a life lesson. The two girls were twins. Jelly was the extroverted protector of the sweet and shy Peanut Butter. The illustrations were drawn to the scale of how a child would see the world—oversized buildings, cars, and adults. At the end of each story, the girls would come together with satisfaction and repeat their mantra, “Always stick together.”

“It’s a hobby of mine—now give it back!” Billy made another fruitless attempt to grab the manuscript. “Just because your hobby is to cut yourself doesn’t mean I’m going to steal your knife set.”

Beth continued to casually flip through the pages. “You know what my theory is, Billy?”

“I’ll leave if you want, but I don’t have to take this shit!”

“Dana told me a lot of the great writers she’s met are filled with pain. They channel it through the characters and live vicariously through them. It’s like creating life. I think you created Peanut Butter and Jelly to be your healing angels of pain.”

Billy began walking around the room gathering his belongings. “I guess you’ve gone back to drinking.”

“Truth hurts, huh? Nobody knows that better than I do.”

Billy pounced at her, this time wrestling away the manuscript. He shoved it in a duffel bag and exclaimed, “I’ll be out of here, and out of your life, in five minutes!”

“I really think Carolyn would like
Peanut Butter & Jelly
. She’s had trouble with a couple neighborhood bullies; I think she would take great solace in your stories.”

Billy ignored her, continuing to shove items into his bag.

“Not only would she like it, but I think she would really like for
you
to read it to her. My angel adores you, Billy Harper, and she’s never been wrong about anyone before.”

Billy stopped in his tracks, confused. “So you’re
not
kicking me out?”

“You can stay, but on two conditions. One, the drinking stops. And second…”

Beth reached under the chair and pulled out what looked like a reddish-orange rug, or perhaps a fur coat for a giant. She tossed it to Billy.

She addressed his confusion, “It’s an Elmo costume. The guy we hired just cancelled on me. You’ve been hired.”

He watched Beth descend the stairs of the loft and maneuver through a sea of unpacked boxes toward the front door, shouting instructions, “The party begins at noon. You need to be under the tent by eleven-thirty for preparation. It’s up to you.”

The door slammed.

Chapter 11

With Beth’s stinging words planted like a chip in his brain, Billy found a half-eaten box of cereal and ventured up a steep set of stairs to the deck atop the cottage. The roof-deck was originally built because it was the coolest place to gather on summer days prior to the invention of air conditioning, back when the cottage was used to store blocks of ice. But there was no need for cooling this day.

For the fourth birthday party of Princess Carolyn Whitcomb of New Canaan, the temperature fell to the high sixties and a cool breeze introduced the first hint of autumn. It was a good thing, Billy figured, because the Elmo costume was going to be hot.

The dry cereal mixed with his sandpaper tongue was a bad combination, so he returned to the cottage seeking something to lubricate the cereal. All he found was one bottle of beer remaining from last night, along with Carolyn’s strawberry milk, leftover from yesterday’s lunch. He thought about pouring the beer over his cereal, college style. But Beth was right; the numbing effect of alcohol had a short shelf life, and for Billy, it had already run its course. So he grabbed the bottle of strawberry milk, thinking,
I could use some help from the Healing Angel of Pain
.

He returned to the deck and looked out over the extensive grounds. The morning was calm, but would soon be infiltrated by a small army of four-year-olds. He noticed Beth under the tent making last minute alterations. He couldn’t shake her words.
I don’t know the exact cause of your pain
. She might not have known, but he was well aware of its source and origin.

She walked into his English lit class at Ohio State. It was his major, while she attended because it was a required course. Billy was supposed to be feeling like the BMOC, since he was the highly recruited quarterback phenom from Johnstown, PA. The list of great quarterbacks originating from Western Pennsylvania read like a who’s who of legends—Marino, Montana, and Namath, to name a few—and he was expected to reach the same rarified air. But he struggled with the adjustment to college life. He went from being the big fish in the small pond, to just another quarterback on the depth chart at a school with fifty thousand nameless students. Going home was no cure, either. He wasn’t looked upon favorably in Johnstown after bypassing the local schools to cross the border into Ohio. And his parents were as big of a disaster as ever. He was homesick for the home he never had.

Kelly Klein was the striking daughter of Gordon Klein, the beer billionaire, whose Pittsburgh brewery helped keep the local economy chugging. Kelly’s reason for attending Ohio State was simple: she didn’t have a choice. Her father was a proud alum who happened to be the school’s biggest donor. Even with Billy’s football exploits, the idea of dating the likes of Kelly Klein was too far-fetched to grasp at the time.

That’s why he was surprised, maybe shocked, when she plopped down next to him in class, and he actually noticed a tinge of nervousness in her voice when she asked, “You’re Billy Harper, aren’t you?” Then she seemed to become unhinged by nerves, and stammered, “Oh my God, of course you are. Can I be any more pathetic?”

She informed him that she’d once met him at a scholar/athlete dinner funded by her father, at which Billy was honored. This was news to Billy. He figured he would have remembered meeting her...like for the rest of his life. When she revealed a high school crush on him that included secretly attending all his games, he almost slid off his chair onto the classroom floor.

He was mesmerized by her tantalizing eyes. The short plaid skirt she wore didn’t hurt either. But he didn’t see the hardened inside until he was already trapped in her web. Billy realized now that their relationship was a calculated move on her part. She bought a stock low, betting on its high ceiling.

The stock rose up the charts later that fall, when due to an injury, Billy Harper became the starting quarterback. He led a comeback against Michigan that was still talked about fifteen years later, and followed that up by winning the Rose Bowl MVP in a romp of USC. A
Sports Illustrated
cover followed, and agents lined up to help him spend the inevitable millions he would get in the NFL. Suddenly he was the big time fish in the big time pond with the big time girlfriend.

But Billy felt like a fraud. Football was just a means to an end for him. He wanted to be the next John Updike, not the next John Elway, but his football scholarship was his way to escape a life of working in the mill like his father. Ohio State didn’t share his passion for writing and academics. Before his sophomore year, they asked him in a wink-wink polite way to cut back on his class load. When Billy refused, they demanded. When that didn’t work, they threatened. Billy then turned it back on them—he quit.

It turned into a national hot-button issue. Billy looked like the symbol of academic integrity in an arena where the
college
part was too often missing in
college football
. Ohio State looked like the Evil Empire that preferred winning football games to education. Kelly clung closer, despite her father forbidding her to see him. Ohio State eventually backed down.

Billy returned to the field with much fanfare, along with his heavy class load. But in the second game of the year he tore his throwing shoulder so badly it needed three surgeries to fix it. He went through the vigorous rehab program to return to the field, but knew he’d never have the arm to ever be the starter again. So he gladly finished out his career under the radar as the fourth string quarterback, keeping his scholarship. People would tilt their heads when they spoke about it, as if he suffered some sort of tragedy. But he was at peace, as football was finally where it had always been for him anyway—in the rear-view mirror.

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.