The Secret

Chapter 3

Chapter 3Twenty-five minutes later I was seated at the kitchen table in the house where I grew up. I poured out the day’s events to my mother’s sympathetic ears and spilled more than a few tears in the process.

When I had finished my tale and my onslaught of her kleenex, I finally asked, “What should I do? What can I do?”

Mom leaned on the kitchen counter and peered out the window into the dwindling evening light. “Did I ever tell you,” she asked, “about Laura Kelly?”

“The name doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Laura and I had been best fiends even longer than you and Colleen. And like you two, we were rarely one without the other. We did everything together, starting in kindergarten and lasting all the way through senior high.”

“After graduation,” Mom continued, “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with myself, so I enrolled at a local community college until I could figure it out. Laura, on the other hand, knew exactly what she wanted to be: an architect. To that end, she decided on an out-of-state school that had a sterling reputation in that field.”

“Let me tell you,” Mom turned and smiled at me, “that last week before Laura’s departure, we threw ourselves one hell of a pity party. We’d been together for as long as we could remember, and it was difficult to imagine life without each other.”

“Laura had a tough time adjusting to campus life. The combination of homesickness and the increased workload had her on the ropes in a hurry. The stress was evident in her voice every time we talked on the phone and whenever she came home on break. She often confided in me how miserable she was, but she didn’t want to disappoint her parents by dropping out.”

“Nearly at the end of her freshman year, I got a call from Laura that was really weird. Weird and disturbing. We talked, as we usually did, for a couple of hours (my mother used to give me hell about the long distance bill). As always, our conversation wandered all over the map. Three or four times during our gabfest, Laura would interject something odd, something that seemed to make no sense in the context of our conversation. I thought I’d misheard her or something, but when I’d ask her to repeat herself, she grew annoyed. After a couple of more bizarre interludes, I finally asked her, ‘Laura, have you been smoking or drinking something?’“

“She said something rude and hung up. I was stunned. In all the time I’d known her, she’d never spoken to me like that. So, this was like a bolt out of the blue.”

“For the next few weeks, I wasn’t able to reach her and she never called me back.”

“Next thing I knew,” Mom went on, “she was home on summer break and I was rushing to her house to see her. Only, it turned out, I couldn’t see her. Laura’s mom answered the door and she seemed kind of apprehensive. When I asked to see Laura, Mrs. Kelly said she wanted to talk to me and asked if I minded taking a walk with her.”

“During the walk, Mrs. Kelly explained to me that Laura had suffered a breakdown while she was away at school. Her mom told me that Laura was undergoing therapy. Her doctor was trying her out on a medication that he hoped would help stabilize the chemical imbalance that was responsible for her erratic behavior.”

“Mrs. Kelly did her best to be encouraging, but I think that might have been for her own benefit as much as mine. She was clearly and understandably rattled and doing her best to hide it. Now that I have children of my own, I think back on what she must’ve been going through and it just breaks my heart.”

Mom was visibly moved as she recalled this terrible time in her life, “The upshot of my story is that I never did get my friend back. A few months after I talked with Mrs. Kelly, Laura called me. She was calm and rational, but politely distant, which hurt more than anything. She explained that she felt it best if she... ‘stayed to myself’... is how I think she put it. When I voiced my hurt that she was shutting me out of her life, she was apologetic, but firm. It was ‘for the best’, she said.”

“And that was it.” Anyone with ears could’ve heard the pain in Mom’s voice. “Just like that, I lost my best friend in the world. It seemed impossible. Like something out of ‘Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’ or those old folktales where wicked fairies replace a stolen child with a changeling.”

“For years after that, I held out hope that someday, when Laura got back on her feet again, she would contact me. I thought maybe we’d be able to resurrect our friendship. But, it never happened.”

“I later learned that Laura had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Apparently, it’s common for someone to carry this illness latently, only to have it triggered under duress. In Laura’s case, it was the strain of adjusting to college life and being on her own for the first time.”

“Jeez,” Mom gave me a forced smile, “even all these years later, it’s still hurts to recall it.”

I hugged Mom tightly. She stroked my hair and said quietly, “I don’t know enough to guess what’s going on with Colleen. I just pray that she’ll be okay.” Mom held my face in her hands and looked me in the eye. “I’ll say a prayer for you, too.” Taking one of my hands in hers, she gave it a gentle squeeze. “But... just in case, sweetie... you’d better brace yourself... for the worst.”

I tried to heed Mom’s advice, but I didn’t do a very good job of it. Over the next couple of weeks, I sent e-mail and left phone messages for Colleen every day. I even knocked on her apartment door a couple of times.

Her only response was a resounding silence.