Andrew Gross: Eyes Wide Open

The truth was, I’d come from a family of revolving divorces. My father, five-all with beautiful younger women. My mom, three. None of the marriages ever lasted more than a couple of years. In my family, whenever someone popped the question, it was more like code for saying that they wanted to split up.

“So then say it,” Kathy said. Her gaze turned serious. “For real this time.”

It was clear this wasn’t her usual horsing around. And the truth was, I’d always promised I’d make it up to her if we lasted twenty years.

So I put down my glass and pushed onto a knee. I took her hands in mine, in the way I had denied her those years before, and I fixed on those beautiful eyes and said, in a voice as true as I’d ever spoken: “If I had the chance to do it all over again-a hundred times, in a hundred different universes-I would. Each and every time. I’d spend my life with you all over again.”

Kathy gave me a look-not far from the one in the car twenty years ago-one that I thought at any second might turn into, Oh, pleeze, Jay, gimme a break.

Until I saw her little smile.

“Well, you have, ” she said, touching her glass against mine. “Taken care of me, Jay. All of us.”

I winked at her. “Now, can we eat?”

I think we both knew we would stay together from the first time we met. We were undergrads back at Cornell, and I had long, curly brown hair in those days and broad shoulders. Played midfield on the lacrosse team. We even went to the Final Four my junior year. Kathy was in veterinary science. I still kept my hair kind of long, but I’d added tortoiseshell glasses now, along with a slightly thicker waist. These days, it took a hundred sit-ups and a half hour on the treadmill every couple of days to keep me in some kind of shape.

“Yes.” She started to spoon out the salad. “Now we can eat.”

My cell phone sounded.

I groaned. I hadn’t even realized I’d had it on me. Habit, I guess. After twenty years of being on call, the ring of the phone intruding on a potential Cialis moment was the ultimate deflating sound.

Kathy sighed. “Probably the kids. You know how they like to bust a good mood.”

I looked at the screen. It wasn’t the kids at all.

“It’s Charlie.”

My brother. Eight years older. He and his wife, Gabby, both bipolar, each with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, lived in California as wards of the state, along with Evan, their twenty-one-year-old son. We helped out with their rent, pitched in financially when they got in over their heads. Which was often. They always seemed to need something. A call from them was rarely good news.

Kathy exhaled at me. “It’s our anniversary, Jay…”

My first thought was to let it go to voice mail, but I picked up.

“Hi, Charlie…, ” I answered, some irritation coming through.

It wasn’t him. It was Gabriella. “I’m sorry to bother you, Jay…,” she began, like she always began, in her gravelly, deep-throated voice and still-heavy Colombian accent. “Something terrible has happened here.” Her voice was shaky and distressed. “Evan is dead.”

“Dead? ” My eyes immediately shot wide, finding Kathy’s. Evan was their only child. He had always been troubled; he’d been diagnosed as bipolar as well. Out of school. Not working. In and out of trouble with the law. But dead? “ How? ”

“He jumped off the rock. In Morro Bay.” Then she choked back a sob, any attempt at control completely unraveling. “Evan is gone, Jay. He killed himself. My son is no more.”

I turned to Kathy, the bottom falling out of my stomach. “Evan’s dead.”

She looked back at me, tears forming immediately. “Oh my God, Jay, how…?”

“He killed himself. He jumped off a cliff.”

Like everything with Charlie and Gabriella-every monthly call on how they were, how Evan was doing, every veiled plea for money or to be bailed out-it spun your head.

Just a week ago we’d gotten a call that Evan was improving. That he was back on his meds. He was even thinking about going back to school. I brought my nephew’s cherub-like face to mind, freckles dotting his cheekbones. That smug Don’t worry, I got it all figured out smirk he always wore.

“Oh, Gabby, I’m so sorry. I thought he was doing well.”

“Well, you know we haven’t been telling you everything, Jay. It’s not so easy to have to talk about your son that way.”

“I know,” I said, bludgeoned. “I know.”

I was a surgeon. I dealt with life and death every day. But when it’s someone close to you, your own… everything changed. They’d never had jobs or money. Or even friends that I knew. They lived on welfare, totally under the radar. Evan was their only hope. The only thing good in their own failed lives.

Now that was gone…

When he was younger, my nephew had shown a lot of promise. His early report cards were always A’s. He was kind of a basketball whiz, his room lined with trophies. I remembered how brightly Charlie and Gabby spoke of him back then.

“How’s Charlie holding up?” I asked. “Let me talk with him.” Kathy inched closer and took my hand. I shook my head grimly.

“Your brother cannot come to the phone,” Gabriella said. “He’s a mess, Jay. He can’t stop crying. He’s blaming himself for the whole thing. He can’t even speak.”

Blame… My brother’s life was a monument to blame. I could think of a million reasons he might be feeling that.

Charlie was my half brother, from my dad’s first marriage. Eight years older than I was; I barely knew him growing up. He was raised in Miami, in the sixties, brilliant in many ways-a math whiz, early into quantum physics and Eastern religions-but just as wild. My dad’s marriage to his mother had only lasted a year and a half; then he made his way up to New York; started his business, a women’s apparel firm; and married my mom. He barely even acknowledged he already had a son.

Charlie was smoking pot by the time most kids were hiding beers. Then he went upward from there: speed, mushrooms, LSD. He grew his hair out, totaled his Corvette. A ranked junior in tennis, he flung his racket into the stands at the state high school championships and never went back. He always had this dream of becoming a big-time rock star. And he even produced a record once, in L.A.-the only real accomplishment in his life.

Then there were a lot of dark years…

First, when he was twenty-three, it was the Hartford House of the Living, where he spent three months after the cops picked him up on the streets raving that he was Jesus Christ.

Then the street scene in New Orleans, with this ragged band of drugged-out bikers and felons known as the STPs-the Stinky Toilet People-who slept on the floors in abandoned buildings, whacked out of their minds. Charlie once told me that you could wake up with a knife stuck in your chest if you simply rolled up against one of their girlfriends wrong.

And finally that commune up near Big Sur, where I’d heard about this cult of stoned-out musicians and drifters, several of whom were later convicted of a string of horrible murders, though Charlie always claimed he was hanging around there only for the chicks and the drugs.

For years, he bounced in and out of hospitals and jails. Schizophrenic and bipolar, he’d been on lithium for thirty years, not to mention his own private pharmacy of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers. He always battled with our father, right up to the day he died.

Ultimately, he did settle down. He met Gabriella in a recovery clinic back in Miami. Together, they moved out west and lived this quiet, codependent life in a coastal California town, granted disability by the state, just enough to squeak by.