Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [126]
Mostly, it worked out pretty well. Cary and I were always polite with each other and did our best to put Jennifer’s best interests first.
“What’s the matter, Mommy?” Jennifer asked as we basked by the fire.
“Why do you ask, honey?”
“Because you had to give back some of the groceries today.”
“I’ve just run a little low on cash, baby. That’s all.”
Damn. Maybe the role as the swamp creature’s love interest wasn’t so bad after all.
Jennifer gave me a hug, then slid off the couch and went into her bedroom. She came out a moment later.
“Here, Mommy, I want you to have this. It will help.” She handed me the old cigar box in which she kept the money she earned from doing odd jobs around the house—the money she was saving to buy a horse. No mother in the world has to be told how high up in my throat that launched my heart.
“Thank you so much for offering this, sweetheart. But that’s yours. We’ll be fine. I promise.”
We hugged each other and I walked her into her bedroom and tucked her into bed. Back in the living room, I opened the cigar box. It contained a hundred and seventy-five dollars and forty-two cents.
That’s all we had to our names.
I started to feel shaky in a way that I hadn’t for a long time. I was beginning to feel that old stomach-twisting anxiety again. I was terrified of falling back into its jaws, and just as terrified of facing it as I was of numbing it. My mind was a hive of angry bees, and it buzzed with a miasma of worst-case-scenario thoughts. Lose the house, hit the skids, nobody loves me . . .
A familiar pressure built up in me, and I felt like an overinflated balloon that could burst at any second. I didn’t think I could take it another minute, and I urgently needed to let the pressure out. But I knew that the usual chemical options were nothing more than a Band-Aid, and when I started to sweat, they wouldn’t stick. There had to be another valve through which I could release this mess of indigestible and unbearable feelings.
For some reason, I reached for my notepad. I decided I would write a business letter to the customer service department of the universe. It would begin: Dear Universe, I am writing to complain of the miserable circumstances here on the planet Earth and in particular to point out my own personal unhappiness . . .
I took the pad and went out to the beach. I sat down on a fat log I’d hauled down from Big Sur.
I wrote: Dear Universe, . . .
And then I put my pen down. I felt the darkness—not the darkness of the night, but the darkness in my soul—swirling around me, funneling around me like a tornado.
I looked up to the heavens and started to shout. All was anguish, from the hair on my head to the marrow in my bones.
“Does anyone care?” I screamed. “Is anyone listening? If anything or anyone is up there or out there, I need to know it! I’ve got a mess here. A big mess. And I am trying to climb my way out but I need some help! DO YOU HEAR ME? I need help, damn it, and I need help now!”
I thought of that day when as a seven-year-old I’d shouted at God and then suddenly fell down hard on my behind. And I halfway expected to be knocked off the log. In fact, I would have welcomed it. But nothing. I felt completely lost. And alone.
I sat back, truly drained, emptied out. But then something began to swell up in me like an incoming tide. And in the silence of the night, I heard:
Today is Liberation Day, and everything is going my way.
Where did that come from? I wondered. The fact was, nothing was going my way. But deep, deep inside me, in a place I had never visited before, I was led to be still, very still. Then I heard these words and I wrote them down:
Today is Liberation Day,
And everything is going my way,
Right here right now,
please listen to what I have to say
I’m gonna stand up, kneel down, roll over,
kiss the ground and pray
Thank you, Love, for bringing to me
the answer to a lifetime prayer
Heaven isn’t tomorrow . . . or yesterday,
or him or her or them out there
or ice cream
It’s here right now, inside of me
And that blinkin’ message has