Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [120]
I’d been determined to have Mom get me released from this loony bin that very day . . . but if even Mom thought I needed to be here . . . I must still be pretty shaky, I thought.
Dr. James had, of course, met Vince the night I went off wandering, and he allowed me a visit with Vince a few days later. He was my only other visitor the whole time I was there.
“How did you find me that night?” I asked him.
Vince sighed and then he smiled. I took that as a good sign. Vince was completely transparent. He couldn’t conceal his feelings any more than a leopard can hide his spots. “I drove around the neighborhood for three hours,” he said. “We were all just beside ourselves. Then it came to me to call Lily. I called her from a phone booth and we prayed. I got back in the car and about twenty minutes later I saw the lights on in that big white house, and . . . I can’t really explain it, but I knew that’s where I’d find you.”
“That’s unbelievable,” I said.
“I would’ve thought so too a couple of years ago,” Vince said. “But now it’s not so unbelievable.”
“And why is that?” I asked.
“It’s a big subject,” Vince said. “But it all comes down to faith. Once you get a little glimmer of how powerful faith really is, a lot of things that used to be impossible to imagine seem perfectly natural.”
“And you learned that from Lily?”
“Lily showed me where to look,” Vince said.
It was the first time I’d thought about Lily for a few months, but I remembered those few words she had said to me that had spoken so much—not just for their content, but for some intangible echo of truth that reverberated around them. That doesn’t sound like love . . .
It was another night of staring at the ceiling with my mind churning like a geyser pool. That word “faith” pricked at my thoughts. I’d had faith in Cary. I’d had faith in love. I’d had faith in marriage. To put your faith in something, I thought, was like taking all of your worldly possessions, as well as your body, mind, and soul, and putting them on the roulette table. That’s what I’d done and I’d gone bust. From now on, I thought, I was keeping my faith to myself. Except, who was “myself”? If I were going to put my faith in myself, I was really in a sorry situation. There were times when I felt all that was left of me was that muddy white nightgown pinned to a laundry line and whipping in the breeze.
I’d put my faith in Cary to the extent that I had lost the ability to think for myself. I had let him think my thoughts for me, and I had struggled mightily to learn how to think his thoughts. I did that to save him the trouble of having to constantly instruct me on the science of thinking Cary Grant thoughts with a Dyan Cannon mind.
And I had come to believe my inability to do this was a terrible shortcoming.
Now Vince and Artis were putting their faith in Lily . . . but who was Lily? Vince had said Lily had told him “where to look.” I wondered what he meant by that. But was putting one’s faith in Lily any better than putting one’s faith in Cary?
I was so used to serving that without a master I felt like a vagabond roaming alone in the dark. Who would I now serve? On my worst nights, I desperately wanted to be back serving Cary once again. But at the same time I was bitterly angry at my fallen idol, and in that anger came a certain kind of energy. Anger is a powerful thing. It had given little, petite me the strength to thwart three monstrous linebackers. Anger, I thought, kept Elsie alive all those years. Anger could blow up the world.
But something told me that I didn’t want to let anger be my life force.
The problem was, I couldn’t see any alternative.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Breakthrough
I began to settle into the daily routine of the hospital. Morning shower. Make the bed. Breakfast of fake scrambled eggs, a pleasant bacon-like substance, limp toast, and Tang—I ate like I’d been in a famine. A session with the doctor. Lunch. A group session. Arts and crafts. Quiet time. Dinner and television and then back