Page 18 of The Love Thief

CHAPTER TWELVE One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

In an instant, I was back at the bottom of the pit. No fiancé. No wedding. No best friend. Nothing but broken dreams.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I had made the appointment two weeks after we got engaged.

Watching the TV program Say Yes to the Dress was my guilty pleasure, and often Carly and I would watch at the same time, texting our snarky comments back and forth as the various small-town girls with small-town budgets and wealthy Bridezillas with unlimited budgets (drooling over fifteen-thousand-dollar Pnina gowns) all suffered dramatically over whether or not they would ever find the perfect dress.

Corny, I know, but also fun. Now, it was just one more reminder of what a first-class loser I had become.

Mom, Auntie, Carly, and I had planned a girls’ trip to New York to shop for my dress at Kleinfeld, the ultimate paradise for wedding gowns.

I know Mom had canceled the flights and the hotel, but I had never thought to cancel the appointment at Kleinfeld itself.

I crawled back into bed, texted back to the store that the wedding was off, and cried until I couldn’t breathe.

Just the night before, I had felt hope for the first time in forever, and now, once again, the rug felt as though it had been pulled out from under me.

The ceiling spiraled above my head. Even closing my eyes didn’t help.

In fact, it made it worse. My fragile world of hope had toppled in an instant.

Damn phone. Damn dress. Damn Barry! The blood drained to my feet, pulling me down with a heaviness I couldn’t seem to offload.

Sighing deeply, I lay back down on the bed and didn’t even bother to rate my renewed off-the-charts misery level.

An hour later, I pulled back the drapes and saw it was going to be a beautiful, sunny, and cloudless day when I would have welcomed a heavy, dark gray sky to match my mood.

I pulled on my clothes, didn’t bother to brush my hair, stuffed a pants pocket full of tissues, and headed out the door to get my caffeine fix.

“Holly, who died?” Deepak asked when I walked into the bookstore. I started crying again, and he led me to his big recliner chair, sat me down, handed me his handkerchief, and then said he would be right back with my masala chai.

I felt stupid and embarrassed for sobbing, loudly, I might add, with someone I barely knew, and yet he knew me well enough to identify the pain I walked in with.

Deepak handed me the steaming mug of chai and sat down on the small stool next to me, and said, in the most loving and gentle voice, “Cry as much and as long as you need to. It is just us here. It’s a safe place.”

After a few sips, I calmed down enough to speak coherently. I explained to him that no one had physically perished but that all of my lifelong dreams had died recently, and that this morning I had been reminded again of all I’d lost and that I felt like I would rather be dead.

He looked at me and said, “I understand. I felt that way myself many times the first few years after my wife died. I know it does no good to be told that it will get better.” He paused for a moment, then added, “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

I had googled my new friend, Deepak Kumar, Ph.D.

, and discovered he was a former professor of counseling psychology at the University of Michigan.

I had already spent enough time with him to feel that I was in a “safe place,” plus I knew that he was a good, and even professional, listener.

I wanted to tell him everything, and yet I felt ashamed and scared that talking would lead to more ugly crying. What if he had customers walking in?

Deepak sat quietly next to me. He seemed comfortable in the silence.

I didn’t feel any pressure coming from him.

Finally, I took a deep breath. “All I ever wanted was the white picket fence,” I said.

“A normal life with a loving husband and a few kids, a golden retriever, living in a good neighborhood, where I could be a stay-at-home mom, making life beautiful for my family. I thought I was finally on my way to having my dream turn into reality when it all blew up. The man of my dreams crushed my heart, murdered my soul, and I nearly died. In the blink of an eye, my lifelong dreams were blasted into a million, billion, zillion bits,” I somehow managed to whisper.

I took another sip of my chai, blew my nose, and continued: “Now I’m lost. He broke my heart, stole my money, cheated on me with my best friend, and ruined my business. I’m essentially homeless now, and I no longer want to live, and even if I did want to live, I have nothing to live for.”

Deepak looked at me with the sweetest eyes and gently said, “Tell me more.”

“I never knew my father,” I said somewhat dramatically.

Deepak sat motionless, waiting for me to continue and for this detail to make sense. Obviously, drama wasn’t going to get me out of telling him the whole truth. I took a deep breath, collecting myself.

“I never knew my dad,” I explained weakly.

“For thirty-eight years, I have pretended it was okay to grow up in a single-mom household, but secretly I wanted the perfect, intact family that all my friends seemed to have. I wanted a dad. By the time I was seven, I had begun concocting an imaginary family with my dollhouse and dedicated my entire life to creating the ultimate life and home for them, believing that my desire would make it so.”

In a flow of snot and tears, I witnessed myself convey the whole dreadful saga as it poured out of me, oozing between the slits of Deepak’s old recliner and landing with a plop on the floor.

“Let’s be honest,” I said after sniffling some more.

“All I ever wanted was to be the center of somebody’s universe.

More than anything, I wanted a loving husband and adorable kids.

I truly thought that when Barry and I got together, my prayers had been answered, and my ‘real’ life was about to begin.

“Geez, even my fantasy of being kissed beneath the fireworks came true with him! He really had me fooled. He not only told me he loved me but he actually showed me through so many loving acts. I fell for all of it. The worst part is that I now feel tortured by what I can never ‘un-know and un-see’ in him. I don’t know how to stop obsessing over and missing the Barry I thought I knew and the love and life I had.

I thought I would enjoy it for the rest of my life. ”

When I came up for air, we just sat quietly together for a minute. I felt lightheaded and buzzing as if I was out of my body, and at the same time, it felt like I had massive amounts of adrenaline running through me.

“Thank you for trusting me and sharing your pain with me,” Deepak said.

He drew slightly closer. “You don’t know it yet, but you are going to have a life that will make all of this pain worthwhile, and someday you will look back and think to yourself, ‘Thank God I experienced this suffering.’ But, of course, right now, you can’t imagine that.

You are grieving a loss of unfathomable betrayal, the loss of all of your biggest dreams, and the trauma of almost losing your life.

Your heart, your soul, and your physical body need intensive care now.

It needs self-love, self-care, and support as you embark on your healing journey. ”

He was right. I was knee-deep in the grieving process and much of what he had said made sense, although it was still unimaginable that I would ever find this was all worthwhile.

I mean, Honestly. How much can a woman take?

Then I remembered Deepak had a story, too, one that was arguably sadder than mine.

I suddenly felt less alone, so I dared to ask him.

“If it’s not too personal, can you tell me how you got through the loss of your wife?”

Deepak was quiet for a few moments, and then he looked at me.

“I had the white picket fence, but we faced incredible obstacles to get there. Nancy was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Minnesota girl. I was a dark-skinned immigrant with a funny name from a faraway place. She was a senior, and I was a graduate student when we met at Michigan. We literally bumped into each other walking through the Quad, and I caught her as she was about to fall.” He smiled as he remembered.

“One of the books she dropped was Autobiography of a Yogi .

I picked it up and handed it to her. I told her I had just finished reading it, and that started a conversation that lasted for five hours at the student union.

“We had read many of the same books and shared the same sense of humor and taste in movies, including an obsession with Monty Python. I never for a moment thought she would be interested in me, but luckily for me, she was. During that time, my parents had been actively consulting with matchmakers back home to seek a suitable wife for me. On my weekly telephone calls with them, they would always ask when I was coming back for a visit so they could arrange the meetings. I didn’t dare tell them about Nancy.

Nancy’s parents came to Ann Arbor for a visit and arranged for us to go out to dinner.

“Her parents were polite, and her father asked me very specific questions about ‘my future’ and when I planned to go home to India. It was obvious I was not what they had planned for their darling daughter. I tried to be as friendly and vague as possible. Nancy and I were so well matched that we really believed we were soulmates. We were madly, happily in love, and we were sure we had been together many lifetimes.”

Lifetimes. The notion jumped out at me again as I concentrated on what Deepak was saying.

Was there more than one? Didn’t Auntie Geeta quote Mary Oliver in her going away letter to me, saying we only had this one life to live?

Or maybe we had specific lessons in this one life that we had yet to live out.