In the Distance There Is Light Read online

  I can’t ask those questions of Dolores, whose life has been left in ruins just as much as mine. Besides, Ian told me how Dolores coped after Angela died following her long, draining illness. Dolores started another art gallery and became one of the biggest gallerists in Chicago in the process. She worked and worked, lost herself in the details of opening up a new venue, ignoring all the rest. Whereas I can’t even begin to think about work. The pieces I write are long and inquisitive, requiring days of research—just me behind my laptop, in my office in the apartment Ian and I lived in.

  An apartment Ian bought with his inheritance after Angela died. I don’t even know what’s going to happen to the home I once knew.

  Dolores looks at me again, and I’m glad, because her glance takes my mind off the apartment problem, and off the prospect of having to find a new place to live, and adjusting to life on my own, with no one waking up beside me in the morning.

  “Why don’t you stay here tonight? There’s plenty of room,” she says.

  I guess Dolores is not keen on being home alone either. I’d be doing her a favor by staying here, and perhaps this favor—however small—will make me feel something other than the crater of loss expanding in my chest. I nod. “Okay.”

  “Good,” she says with the firm tone her voice gets when she agrees with something wholeheartedly. “More brandy? It will help you sleep.”

  This reminds me that I didn’t bring my sleeping pills. Just in case Dolores doesn’t have any, I hold out my glass to her.

  * * *

  As though the decision to stay at Dolores’ house tricked my brain into relaxing—though I’m sure the brandy is more to blame than anything else—I sink into the couch, my limbs going loose. I let Dolores talk, nodding and humming when I think it’s required. She doesn’t ask me any questions, probably sensing that I don’t feel much like engaging in conversation, that my brain is too blasted with grief to make an effort. I’m just relieved that I’m not sitting alone in Jeremy’s apartment, waiting for an appropriate time to take a pill, go to bed, and lie in the dark for the most agonizing minutes of my day, until sleep takes away my consciousness. I really shouldn’t go anywhere without my sleeping pills.

  Sufficiently emboldened by the alcohol in my blood, when Dolores doesn’t speak for a while, I ask, “Do you have Ambien?”

  She quirks up her eyebrows, then shakes her head. “Have you been taking it for a full week?” There’s no accusation in her voice, yet I feel put on the spot.

  “Yes.”

  “Perfectly understandable, but you’ll want to get off that as soon as possible. After Angela died, it took me forever to shake the habit. It’s so easy to just pop a pill, until you forget how to go to sleep without them.” She sighs. “I’ve hardly slept since Ian…” A pause. I know how hard it is to say the word. “But at least I know I’m not relying on pills.”

  “That’s very noble of you, but I’m going to need something. Those couple of hours per night are all I have to not let myself be consumed by this. I need the respite.”

  “I get it, but you can’t take a pill forever.”

  “I don’t intend to, but anything is better than tossing and turning in bed, with no one beside me, realizing over and over again that I’ll never—” My voice breaks. “—see him again.”

  “This is all I have.” She holds up the half-empty bottle of brandy.

  “Then I guess I’ll go home.” Home? What a joke. “I mean back to Jeremy’s.”

  “It’s late and you’re exhausted. Why don’t you stay and give it a try? You can sleep in my bedroom and watch TV. I’ll take the guest room.”

  I remember the tiny favor I wanted to do for Dolores. We’re in this together, after all. Just me and her. “Okay.” Ian always refused to have a television in our bedroom, claiming it interfered with the quality of sleep. Now he’s no longer here, I’m not so bothered with the quality as much as with the quantity of my sleep. “I’ll let Jeremy know that I’m here.”

  Chapter Four

  I wake up with the television still blaring. I switch it off, afraid that I’ve kept Dolores awake in the room next door. Am I really in her bed? What was I thinking taking her up on her offer? Chasing her out of her own bed? The thought is so jarring that any remaining inclination toward sleep flees me. When I swallow, I have a bad taste in my mouth. From the back of my head, a painful pulse makes its way forward. Great, a brandy hangover in the middle of the night. I sit up, knowing I won’t be able to sleep any time soon. As always when I wake after drinking too much, my heart hammers frantically, reminding me that, unlike Ian, I’m still alive.

  I switch on the bedside lamp and cast my glance over Dolores’ room. On the wall opposite the bed there’s a picture of her and Angela in front of the Eiffel Tower. It was always just a fact of life that I would never meet Ian’s biological mother, but now, for the first time, it hurts that I never shook Angela’s hand and examined her face for similarities with her son. In the picture, Dolores has her arm wrapped around Angela’s shoulder, clasping tightly, towering over her.

  I met Ian’s father for the first time the day before the funeral. A man with a voice so booming I searched for the amplifier he carried around with him. Robert, who insisted I call him Bob and certainly not Sir, is the only one left of the family he started with Angela thirty-five years ago. When he walked up to me, I believed I’d made a trip into the future and was clasping eyes on an older, surviving version of Ian—I believed that all the Ambien and Xanax I’d been taking was playing a trick on me. Bob was all Ian with his gangly limbs, easy smile and dark, full eyebrows. Seeing him, and the resemblance with Ian, only intensified my loss.

  When he left Chicago a day after the funeral, I was relieved to see him go, but also sad. There goes the very last of Ian, I thought when I hugged him good-bye. This is the last time I’ll see those eyes and that hint of a smile that always played on his lips, even when he had no intention of smiling at all.

  I crash back into the pillows with a loud sigh. Dolores may have rules about sleeping pills, but I can’t afford that luxury. Without a couple of hours of being out of it every night, I’d be even less of a person during the day. I’m of half a mind to just get up, get dressed and go back to Jeremy’s. To swallow a pill and wait for it to deliver relief. But despite my mind being wide awake, my body doesn’t have the energy.

  I think of Dolores sleeping in the guest room, where Ian and I always stayed on the rare occasions that we spent the night. Perhaps that’s why she offered her bed, a space not tainted with Ian’s memory. Then my mind drifts to his former bedroom and I’m overcome with an urge to explore.

  I tip-toe on the wooden floorboards, but can’t avoid them creaking underneath my step as I head to Ian’s room. When I turn the door handle, my pulse picks up speed, as though I’m expecting to find him there, as intact as his teenage belongings.

  Of course, the room is empty.

  I switch on the lamp on his desk, hoping it still works. It does, casting the room into an eerie sort of light. Before all of this happened, I would never have pegged myself for someone who speaks to deceased loved ones, but here, in Ian’s room, I suddenly feel compelled to say something to him. To invoke his spirit. To, just one last time, feel the way I did when I was with him. Secure; more myself than I ever was before I met him; like I could do anything. I try to speak, but no words come out. Deflated, I head over to the bookshelf that is still lined with books. It’s too dark to read the titles on the spines, but I let my finger slide over them, concluding that all objects in this room have recently been dusted.

  I pick up a trophy and try to make out what it was for. When he first showed me his old bedroom, he would have certainly told me, but I don’t remember.

  Then I hear footsteps approaching.

  “Can’t sleep?” A whisper comes from behind me. I turn and see Dolores in the doorway.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “No,” she says.

  Through the darkness, I fe
el her glance land on the trophy I’m holding.

  “Why did you keep this room as his?” Nighttime takes away some of my inhibitions.

  Dolores shrugs. “He stayed here often when Angela was sick. After she died, I could never bring myself to make it into something else. Now I’m glad I didn’t.”

  She looks different in the low light of the desk lamp, stripped of her daytime armor of fancy suits, meticulous hairdo and makeup. Dolores looks more vulnerable than I’ve ever seen her. More vulnerable than at the funeral, where she did cry, but not ostentatiously, and always held her chin up. Her eyes are red-rimmed enough for me to notice, in the feeble light, that she’s been crying. At this time of night, there’s no room for armor, and I see Dolores’ pain to its full extent for the first time.

  “I shouldn’t have taken your bed,” I mumble. “It’s what you’re familiar with.”

  “It’s hardly the bed.” Dolores makes a sniffling sound. She’s crying again. All this falling apart we’ve done, our nerves raw and exposed, all this fragility, I’m so sick of it already, and it’s only been a week.

  At the funeral, my own mother howled louder than anyone else and I hated her for it. She was louder than me even, because I’d managed to wrap myself in a thick coat of stoicism, helped by a double dosage of Xanax.

  “He was like a son to me,” I heard her say to Dolores at the reception afterwards. I was too numb to be angry.

  “What have you got there? Is that his wrestling trophy?” Dolores asks and takes a few steps toward me.

  I give it to her; she examines it, surprising me with her eyesight though, of course, as his mother, she probably remembers what he won it for. She’s just looking at the faded gold plate for show. Just going through the motions as we’ve been doing since we found out about his death. About the truck that didn’t even touch him, but whose passage knocked him off balance enough to make him land headfirst on the curb, crack his skull, and die instantly.

  “At least he didn’t suffer,” the police officer said, wanting to offer consolation.

  “He only ever won one trophy. He wasn’t that big on competition, but he was proud of it nonetheless.” Dolores puts the trophy back. “We should go back to sleep.”

  I nod and wait for Dolores to exit the room. She doesn’t. She just steadies herself, putting a hand against the bookcase. “Would you mind sharing my bed?” she asks, her voice so low and trembly, it instantly connects with that constant, throbbing ache in my gut—the knot that has kept me from eating a solid meal for days.

  Again, I nod, as though her request is perfectly normal. In this moment, it is.

  * * *

  Dolores and I watch television in bed until our eyes are so bleary, it becomes impossible for them to remain open. I must have dozed off for a minute, because the next time my eyes flutter open, she has switched off the television and the room is bathed in darkness.

  “Night,” I mumble and turn on my side, leaving the biggest possible gap the width of her bed allows between us.

  “Night, Sophie,” Dolores says, and the mere fact of someone wishing me good night, simply saying a few words, is enough to make me sink into the mattress a little more deeply, a little more determined to actually sleep.

  At first, I drift in and out, because the air is different in this room, and the light from the street lamps cuts through the sliver in between the curtains at an angle I’m not used to. But there’s someone breathing next to me and it makes me feel like I’m not the only person left alive on this earth.

  I listen to Dolores’ soft inhales and exhales, to how the sheets shift when she does. And right before I nod off into real, deep sleep, before my mind starts tuning out and my subconscious takes over, Dolores shuffles closer and lightly drapes an arm over me.

  Chapter Five

  When I first open my eyes, I don’t know where I am. Then I realize I’m not alone. For the briefest of moments, I think it’s Ian gently breathing in and out beside me, still lost to the delicious oblivion of sleep. It was all just a really bad dream. When I turn around, I see Dolores’ face. Then it comes back to me. Her tears in Ian’s old bedroom. Dolores showing me her softer side, as she stood there with her robe tightly wrapped around her, and then when she let it fall to the floor before she crawled into bed with me, baring the shorts and tank top I had never expected her to sleep in.

  I remember the arm she gently laid on top of me, the comfort it offered and I grabbed with both hands. I remember that feeling of someone loving me enough to do that for me, to shove aside any possible awkwardness and just, out of sheer need, embrace me. I am still loved, was one of the last thoughts that flitted through my mind before I fell asleep, too exhausted to be astounded by my ability to do so unmedicated.

  Dolores is lying on her back. While it’s utterly strange to wake up next to her, the sensation of strangeness is washed out by the comfort of not being alone. I have to face the same dreadful realization every morning—every single time succumbing to a flicker of hope, just before waking, that none of this actually happened—that Ian is dead. That I will never see the love of my life again in the flesh. I try not to stir. I don’t want to wake her. God knows how long she lay with her arm wrapped around me, waiting for me to doze off, unable to do so herself.

  Her tears last night connected me to her in a way I haven’t experienced before. In this dizzying, infuriating grief, we are equals. We are alike. We can understand each other the way no one else can. While grief is surely universal and people like Jeremy can easily empathize with my loss, they can never feel the true extent of it. And while I knew Ian in a different capacity than his mother, our love for him ran equally deep. I didn’t just love Ian; I adored him. Not just because he was my partner, but because he saved me from myself, and from the person I would have become without him.

  “Hey,” Dolores’ voice croaks.

  That cold fist that has been clenched around my heart for the past week, loosens a tad at the sound of her voice. “Morning,” I say, mustering a small smile, surprised that my lips can still curl upward.

  “Did you manage to get some sleep?” she asks.

  “I did. Thank you.”

  “No need to thank me.” She stretches her arms above her head. “Have you been eating? I’ll make us some breakfast.” Dolores sits up and throws the covers off. She’s not one for lounging in bed, then. Or perhaps she’s no longer able to ignore the awkwardness of this situation. She doesn’t even wait for my reply, but heads into the ensuite bathroom without another word.

  * * *

  “Have you gone home?” Dolores asks when she presents me with a plate of scrambled eggs.

  The smell of food makes me hungry, but it’s as though the loss has settled in my stomach and there’s no room for anything else.

  “No. Jeremy’s gone by a few times to pick up some clean clothes and things I forgot, but I just—” I was at home when I first got a phone call from the police, asking me whether I was Ian Holloway’s emergency contact, what my relationship was to him, and where I was. I was at home when the police rang the bell and I buzzed them in, seized by fear, because they’d asked me to stay put, and what else could that mean but the absolute worst?

  It was at home that I crashed to my knees as they gave me the news, saying that he’d died instantly—that he hadn’t suffered.

  Our home where we lived together for five years, but which was, on paper, solely his. I paid him a token amount of rent, enough so that I could feel independent, but nowhere near the amount a place like his would usually rent for. Our home, where every single thing reminds me of him, and of how he’ll never set foot in it again.

  “Look, Sophie, I know your situation. I want you to know the place is yours. That’s what he would have wanted. I’m sure of that.” Dolores sits down opposite me at the kitchen table. The eggs on her plate don’t seem piled nearly as high as mine. “The thought just hit me last night. On top of everything else, I wouldn’t want you to feel homeless as well.”
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br />   “I can’t go back yet.” I’m not sure I ever will, I add in my head, not wanting to insult Dolores’ generosity—or perhaps it’s just charity.

  “We can go together when you’re ready,” Dolores offers, her eyes on me again the way they were last night.

  I nod, thinking that it feels like ages ago that I walked into Dolores’ house, although it was only late last night. Time has slowed, just for me, to make sure I feel every pinch of agony of Ian’s death.

  Dolores clears her throat. “Why don’t you stay here for a bit? That way you’re not cramping Jeremy’s style and, truth be told, I could do with the company.”

  I glance at her, while I play with the eggs on my plate. The idea is appealing.

  “There’s plenty of room for both of us. I won’t be here all the time. I plan to go back to work after the weekend. I need it. It helps me.”

  “I think I might like that.” Maybe what I need is a mother, someone who’ll take care of me like one, no questions asked.

  “I’m glad.” Dolores’ voice is lower than before. “I’ll be the first to admit I’m rather set in my ways after having lived alone for years, but I think we’ll get along nicely.” She offers a slow smile, and in it, I see all the reasons to stay. Comfort. Companionship. Shared grief. Homeliness. Jeremy offers some of that as well, but his companionship, I expect, will soon be coming with a sort of light relief I’m not ready to handle.

  Jeremy has been my best friend ever since I started freelancing for The Chicago Morning Post seven years ago, and while he excels at conversation, wit, and flamboyant suits, he’s lighter than air. He floats through life, from party to party, from man to man, as though there’s no tomorrow. A quality I’ve always greatly admired him for, but which gets under my skin now.