Novel: The Plan ( A Continuation of The Doctor's Life)

  

     After the death of my baby sister, and the suicide of my mother, my life became the basket into which my father placed all his eggs.

Reflecting back, it was both the catalyst and the means for my interest and career in psychiatry. By age ten I was living more like a room-mate in the house than a child. It was unspoken, but I was aware I was responsible for my needs and myself. Whether it was breakfast and getting to school on time, or making sure I had clean clothes.  My father paid the bills, but we drifted by each other like fog. It wasn't that he didn't love me. He just didn't know what to do with me. He loved me very much. He was so proud of me when I graduated from college you would have thought it was him up there in that cap and gown.  He passed away the very next year of cancer. I think he felt like his job was finally done.

I didn't find out until college what actually happened in the house the day my sister died.

Sometimes, I wish I never had.

The Cerellis' had a bunch of kids. Big happy Italian family. My Mom used to call them a litter, although not to Mrs. Cerelli's face, I don't suppose.

They say confession is good for your soul. 

Well...it may be. But it certainly wasn't for Mr. and Mrs. Cerelli's marriage. The summer after mother hanged herself, their marriage imploded. The only blessing was that my Father died never knowing the awful truth. For that thoughtfulness, I, silently, thank them both.

I wish I could have been that lucky.

I used to play with Anthony Cerelli when I was a kid. He was one of my best friends. We would play soldiers or drag a tent into our backyard and sleep out under the stars. Tony was a few years older than me, and he showed me my first torn and tattered pin-up girl ripped from the pages of one of his old man's Playboy magazines he kept stashed in the basement. I was so young and so naive, I actually remember saying wide-eyed "Isn't she cold with just that on?" It was a comment that made my friend pass the Coca-Cola we were drinking right through his nose as he snorted and laughed, ruffling my hair like I was a small puppy. Tony was the big brother I never had and always wanted.

The summer after my mother's suicide the Cerelli's disappeared. My Dad said they had divorced, and the kids had been parcelled out like so many unwanted kittens to various aunts and uncles in the family. It was shocking to me.  I think I processed the whole business by rationalizing that their family was Italian, and therefore, they must just do things differently than we do. I never saw Anthony Cerelli again, until our paths crossed that year in college.

Even after 15 years, I recognized my childhood playmate's face. Striding over to the long oak table in the Great Hall Study where he sat, dark curly head bent over his books, I clapped a friendly hand on his shoulder. When he looked up and saw my face his own clouded angrily and his chiselled Roman face turned granite. "Fuck you and your whoring mother" he spat, then as though he had been mentally rehearsing for that moment for every year since his family was torn apart; he tore into me with the details:
  
Why my sister was dead.
Why my mother committed suicide.  
Why his parents (devout Catholics) divorced and had to move.
Why they were no longer welcome in the Parrish.  
How he lost everything that was safe, true, and stable in his life in one horrible afternoon.

And in that very moment...so did I.

He got up and walked away without looking back at me, and although I saw him walking from campus to campus from time to time, we never spoke again.

I don't think it would have solved anything for either of us.

By then, we were both badly damaged human beings.