Diana Vale: #2 - Cold Rain
Disclaimer:
This part of the story considers what could be termed sensitive topics. Such things as depression, and even what it is like to have Suicidal Thoughts.
If you need help, I encourage you to please seek help. Call a hotline in your area, speak to a friend, speak to a family member, or to a loved one. Let them know if you are safe, or not safe. Please remember YOU are not alone. PLEASE DO NOT BELIEVE THE LIES A DEPRESSIVE MIND SPEAKS.
(In the United States you can call or text 988 for help.)
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Part Two
“…sorry.”
That was the word. Diana would hear it for the rest of her life. One small, soft, ordinary word, spoken in a tired voice in a white hospital corridor at two in the morning. The kind of word people say when they bump into you on the subway.
Sorry.
The doctor kept talking. Diana could see her lips moving. Words came out of them. Internal injuries. Everything we could. He never woke up. He didn’t suffer. None of what the doctor said was retained for long. It was as if the words were falling on glass and sliding off. She stood in the middle of the corridor in her champagne-gold shoes, the shoes he had given her one week ago tonight, and looked at the doctor’s moving mouth, and felt nothing at all. Nothing. As if someone had reached inside her and switched off every light.
Then Ruth Hayes made a sound.
It was not a scream. It was lower than that, and worse. A long, broken, terrible sound, from somewhere deep in the chest, the sound of a mother who has carried a child and raised a child and watched him walk out the door that morning, a mother expecting to be able to see her son again, and has just been told he is not coming back. Walt caught her before she hit the floor. He held her against his enormous chest, rocking, his own face gray and wet and twisted, and made no sound at all.
And the sound Ruth made switched the lights back on.
Diana’s knees went. She sank down the white wall until she was sitting on the cold linoleum floor of the corridor, in her fancy four-thousand-dollar dress from the Paris fitting. And the sound that came out of her then was not one she had ever heard herself make.
She was sobbing. Great, tearing, gasping sobs that shook her whole body and would not stop, that bent her over her own knees with both hands pressed against her mouth. She said his name. Over and over. Elliot. Elliot. Elliot. As if, if she only said it loudly enough, he would hear her through those swinging doors, and come out, and kneel down on the floor beside her the way he had on the night they met, and ask her if she was hurt.
Ruth came to her. Somehow she pulled free of Walt and came across the corridor and got down on the floor beside her, and the two of them held onto each other there on the cold linoleum, Elliot’s mother and the woman he had been going to marry, and cried until there was nothing left in either of them.
Later, much later, when the tears had finally burned themselves out and left her hollow and shaking, Diana simply sat there, looking at the ring, while the world went on happening around her: nurses, a chaplain, a social worker with a clipboard, a police officer who wanted to explain about the logging truck. She looked at the ring and turned it, around and around, and thought, from somewhere very far away, that she had worn it for exactly eight days.
They let her see him, just before dawn.
There would never be an interview about this night. She would never tell the world what she saw. She would not share how he looked with fans, or those simply interested. She would only say, years later, to close family and friends, that he looked like himself. That there was sawdust, still, in the cuff of his flannel shirt. That she sat beside him and held his big, rough, callused hand, which was cold, and cried into it until she could hardly breathe, and told him about the fitting in Paris, and how terrible the dress had been, and how she had been thinking about him, his proposal, and yes, even cheeseburgers the whole time.
At some point, Ruth came in and sat down on the other side of the bed, and took his other hand, and the two of them sat there together without saying a word until the sun came up gray over Lake Champlain.
They buried him on the farm, a week later, in the snow.
There was a small family cemetery on the hill behind the barn, under three old maple trees, with a low stone wall around it and the graves of five generations of Hayeses. His grandmother was there. The one who had made the quilt, and worn the ring for sixty-one years. They dug his grave beside hers, Walt and Elliot’s four brothers, by hand, through the frozen ground, because Walt would not let anybody else do it. It took them two days.
The whole town came. Hundreds of people, in the snow, in dark coats and work boots, filling the hayfield behind the barn where the wedding was supposed to have been. Farmers and mechanics and the man who ran the hardware store. People Elliot had built things for. People he had fixed things for. Doris came from Brooklyn, on a bus, in her one good black dress. And the whole of the special effects crew from New York came, a dozen of them, in a borrowed van, and stood together at the back in a tight, silent knot.
And there were the chairs.
That was Walt’s idea. He went up to the woodshop in Brooklyn, the week before, with two of his sons and a truck. And they brought back every finished chair Elliot had ever restored that he had not yet sold. Forty-one of them. Bentwood chairs and ladder-backs and Windsors and rockers, old chairs, broken chairs, chairs from junk shops and attics and dumpsters, every one of them saved and mended and made beautiful by his hands. Walt set them out in the snow, in rows, on the hill beside the grave. And the oldest people in the crowd, and the youngest, sat in them during the service, while snow drifted down onto their shoulders.
Diana sat in the Thonet chair. The one from the shoot. The one from the roof where he had proposed to her.
She did not hear the service. She did not hear the minister, or the hymns, or the eulogies. She sat in the snow in Elliot’s chair with her hands folded in her lap, and Ruth on one side of her and her own mother, down from Scranton, on the other, and looked at the plain pine box that Walt and his sons had built, and could not make it mean anything. The tears ran down her face the whole time, silently, steadily, falling onto her black coat and into the snow.
There were photographers, of course. Somebody had tipped them off. They stood out on the road beyond the farm gate with their long lenses, a dozen of them, stamping their feet in the snow. Walt Hayes went down the hill after the service, alone, and stood in front of the gate with his arms folded, enormous and silent and gray, and looked at them. He did not say one word. After a while, they got back into their cars and left.
The photographs ran anyway. One of them was everywhere the next morning. A tall, dark-haired woman in a black coat, sitting alone in an old wooden chair in the snow, beside a grave, with her face turned up to the falling flakes and her eyes closed.
DIANA’S HEARTBREAK, said the headline. Underneath, in smaller letters: Grieving Supermodel Still Stunning at Lumberjack Fiancé’s Funeral.
Diana never saw it. Ruth burned every newspaper that discussed it.
She did not go back to her apartment.
She could not. It was full of things. Her things, beautiful things, the life of Diana Vale: the gowns, the photographs, the awards, the enormous windows over Central Park, the sixty-four pairs of shoes standing in their perfect rows on the curved beechwood rack he had built. And there were photographers outside it, around the clock, a whole cluster of them on the sidewalk, smoking and drinking coffee and waiting for her to come out so they could see what grief looked like on the most beautiful face in the world.
So she went to the woodshop.
Nobody knew about it. That was the thing. In a year, the press had never once followed them there. It was just an old brick building on the Red Hook waterfront, at the end of a cobbled street of warehouses, and nobody looked twice at it. Diana let herself in with the key he had given her, the one on the little wooden key ring he had carved in the shape of a chair. She climbed the stairs. She opened the door.
And it was all exactly as he had left it.
That was what nearly broke her, that first night. Not the grave. Not the hospital. This. His coffee mug, on the workbench, with a dry brown ring in the bottom. A pencil behind the clamp where he always tucked it. A strip of beechwood bent around a form, half-finished, waiting for him to come back and take it off. A note in his square handwriting, stuck to the wall with a tack: Ask Di re: chairs for wedding. 120? 150? Too many? The smell of sawdust and linseed oil and coffee. The smell of him.
She sat down on the old green couch by the windows, the couch where she had planned to spend that evening with a pizza a lifetime ago. She pulled his old denim jacket off the hook by the door, the faded one, soft as flannel, with paint and stain and varnish spattered all down the front, and put it on. It still smelled like him.
She did not take it off for three months.
The weeks went by. She could not have said how many. They were not really weeks. They were just long gray blurs of daylight and darkness, one after another, like a train going past.
She slept on the couch, when she was able to sleep at all. She ate when someone made her. She did not wash her hair. It grew wild and tangled and dull, and she twisted it up into a careless knot on top of her head and stopped thinking about it. Sometimes, when the gray winter light came slanting in through the tall woodshop windows, a few strands of it caught the light and glinted copper, the way Elliot used to say it did. Like a good piece of cherry wood, he used to tell her, running a strand through his fingers. When the sun hits it right. She would see it in the dark windowpane sometimes, that copper glint, and have to look away.
She did not wear makeup. She did not look in mirrors. When she caught sight of herself by accident, in the window or the dark screen of her phone, she did not recognize the woman there. A thin, pale stranger with shadows under her eyes that looked like bruises and hollows in her cheeks like a burned-out building. Nobody would have put that face on a billboard.
And Diana did not care.
The phones rang constantly. She let them. Her agent. Her publicist. Magazines. Talk shows. Lawyers. Her mother, every day. Ruth, every few days. Doris, once, leaving a gruff message on the voicemail that said only, “Honey, it’s Doris. I got a cheeseburger here with your name on it. Any time. Day or night.”
After six weeks, Diana's agent, Margot Steele, came to the woodshop in person.
Nobody knew how she had found it. Margot simply knew things. She stood in the doorway in her black coat and her sunglasses, looking at the sawdust and the chairs and the pale, wild-haired woman on the couch in a paint-spattered denim jacket, and her face did something Diana had never seen it do before. It softened.
Then it hardened again, because Margot was Margot.
“Darling,” she said, sitting down on a wooden chair, very carefully, as though it might bite her. “I am so sorry. I truly am. He seemed… lovely.” A pause. “But you have four contracts. You have obligations. And there is a campaign. A fragrance. Enormous. The biggest of your career so far. It was signed in September. The shoot is next week.” Another pause. “I think it might help. To work. To get back to yourself. To be Diana Vale again.”
Diana looked at her for a long time.
“What’s the fragrance called?” she said finally. Her voice was hoarse. She had not used it in days.
Margot hesitated, for just a fraction of a second. “Rain,” she said.
Her heart said not to, but Diana went anyway. She did not know why. Maybe because Margot was right, and she did not know who she was anymore, and some small, desperate part of her hoped that if she put the gown back on, and the shoes, and stood in front of the lights, Diana Vale would come back. And then she would know what to do.
It was a studio in Manhattan. A different photographer, and different crew. They wanted her to wear a gown, a cold, bland-looking silver this time, with a dull shimmer. They put her makeup on for three hours, covering the shadows, filling in the hollows, until the stranger in the mirror looked almost like the billboards again. Then they sat her down on a chair, a modern chair, all chrome and glass, beneath a rain rig.
And they turned on the water.
It was cold. Of course it was cold. City water, straight off the main, about forty degrees.
The first drops hit her face, and she flinched. Then it came down harder, soft and glittering in the hot white lights, and the photographer started murmuring the way they always did. Beautiful. Yes. The rain. Feel the rain. And Diana tipped her face up into it, the way she had a thousand times. She closed her eyes.
And she saw him.
Up on the ladder above the rig, in the dark, in his soaked gray thermal shirt and his tool belt. Looking down at her. Seeing her. Reading her face like a book and knowing, just knowing, how she felt.
She opened her eyes. There was no one on the ladder. There was only the rig, and the cold water falling, and the lights, and thirty strangers watching her in silence.
And Diana Vale began to sob.
It was like being back at the hospital that night on the floor of the hospital corridor. Huge, wrenching, animal sobs that came up from the bottom of her and bent her double on the chrome chair with her face in her hands, while the cold water poured down over her head and her shoulders and ran the three hours of careful makeup down her face in long black streaks.
The photographer stopped shooting. Nobody moved.
After a long time, she stood up. She stepped out from under the rain. She walked, dripping, in her silver gown and her bare feet, straight past the photographer and the stylists and the executive from the fragrance company and Margot Steele, out through the studio doors, into the elevator, down eleven floors, and out onto the sidewalk on Spring Street in the middle of a freezing January afternoon.
Margot caught up with her at the curb. She was out of breath. She had lost her sunglasses.
“Diana. Darling. Please. Come back inside. You’ll freeze.”
Diana turned around. Her face was a ruin of tears and black streaks and cold. People on the sidewalk were stopping. Staring. Pulling out their phones.
“I’m done, Margot,” she said. Her voice breaking. “I can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to be looked at. I don’t want to be Diana Vale. I don’t want any of it.” She took a shaking breath. “The only person who ever really saw me is dead. And I don’t want anybody else to look.”
The statement went out that evening. Two short sentences. Diana Vale has retired from modeling, effective immediately. She asks for privacy at this time.
The whole world went mad with it. For weeks, it was everywhere. Every magazine, every talk show, every newspaper on Earth. WHERE IS DIANA? THE FACE THAT WALKED AWAY. People wept on the evening news. People held candlelight vigils outside her apartment building on Central Park West, which she had not set foot in for two months.
She never saw any of it. She was back in the woodshop by then, on the green couch, in Elliot’s denim jacket, with the phone turned off and the curtains closed, listening to the rain on the windows.
Winter set in.
It was a hard one that year. Gray and wet and endless, the kind of New York winter that never quite commits to snow, but just rains, cold and steady and miserable, for weeks on end. The harbor outside the woodshop windows turned the color of slate. The Statue of Liberty disappeared into the fog for days at a time. And Diana sat on the green couch, in the denim jacket, and listened to the rain.
The worst part was the nights.
During the day, she could almost manage. She could sit. She could stare at the harbor. She could sometimes, if she tried very hard, force down a piece of toast. But at night, when the woodshop was dark and the only sound was the rain on the windows and the old radiator ticking, the thoughts came. The same ones, over and over, around and around, like a dog chasing its tail.
If I just hadn’t gone to Paris.
She had tried to get out of that fitting. But she had not tried hard enough. If she had stayed in New York that weekend, Elliot would have stayed too. He would not have driven north that Friday. He would not have been on that curve above the river, on that ice, at that minute, when that logging truck came around the bend.
Tell your mother I want the ring story told at the wedding. That was the last real thing she had said to him. Some little thing about a ring, and a wedding that was never going to happen. Not I love you. He had said that. She had said see you Monday. As if there would be a Monday. As if there was always going to be a Monday.
She went over and over it. Every word. Every choice. Every tiny turning in the road that might have changed something. And every night, at the end of all of it, she arrived at the same place, cold and certain as the rain.
It should have been her.
She was the one who was alone before. She was the one who had spent two years eating takeout on the floor of an empty apartment, talking to nobody. He was the one with the farm, the family, the four brothers, all the chairs, and the whole town that willingly came out in the snow. He was the one who saw people. Who fixed things. Who made the world a little bit better every single day, one broken chair at a time.
The world needed Elliot Hayes so much more than it had ever needed Diana Vale.
Diana was on the verge of becoming catatonic. She had stopped sleeping almost entirely, had stopped going outside, barely ate, even then only occasionally.
She still had the grief counselor’s card that a kind nurse had pressed into her hand at the hospital in Burlington. It sat on the workbench, propped against Elliot’s coffee mug, where she had put it that first night. Diana didn't want to even pick it up.
People tried to help her. People tried so hard. She knew that. But when you are grieving to that degree, when your world has seemingly come to an end, it's hard to care. It's hard to accept help you don't really even want. She would remember their efforts, and feel worse. She felt ashamed when she felt anything at all.
Her mother came down from Scranton on the bus in February and stayed three days, sleeping in a chair in the woodshop because there was nowhere else to sleep. She brought pierogies in a cooler, and Diana’s old quilt from her childhood bed, and cleaned the whole woodshop from top to bottom, and sat with her on the green couch in the evenings and held her hand and did not say very much. Diana managed, somehow, for three days, to be all right. To eat the pierogies. To smile. To say she was getting better. Her mother had worked in a school cafeteria for thirty years and could spot a child pretending not to be hungry from across a crowded room. She did not believe a word of it. But Diana would not let her stay. And at the end of the third day, her mother went home, crying on the bus all the way to Pennsylvania.
Ruth called. Every week, on Sunday evenings, the way Elliot always had. At first, Diana answered. They would sit on the phone for a long time, two hundred and fifty miles apart, saying almost nothing, just breathing. Sometimes Ruth told her small things. That Walt had finished the barn roof alone, the shingles still in the back of the wrecked truck. That one of the heifers had calved, and Molly had named it Elliot, even though it was a girl. That the snow on the hill behind the barn had melted, and then come back.
“Come up to the farm, honey,” Ruth said, every time. “Come stay with us for a while. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to talk. Just come.”
And Diana could not. She could not walk into that farmhouse kitchen. The memories of the good times with Elliot were too much. Remembering him, the good times they shared, hurt more than she could bear. She remembered Ruth laughing so hard at something that Elliot said she nearly dropped a roast. She remembered sleeping under his grandmother’s quilt and how wonderful and warm and safe she had felt. The barn where the calf was born. Diana hurt so bad that she could not even look at those she loved and who loved her. She could not look at Ruth’s face, which had Elliot’s eyes in it, and bear Ruth’s grief on top of her own. No, her pain simply would not allow her to do any of that anymore.
In the middle of February, on one of those Sunday calls, she finally said it. The thing she had been thinking about for weeks.
“Ruth. The ring. Your mother’s ring.” She was turning it on her finger as she spoke, around and around. “I should give it back. It’s yours. It belongs to the family. I was never… we never…”
There was a long, terrible silence on the other end of the line.
“Diana,” said Ruth finally, her voice full of emotion. “You listen to me. My son put that ring on your finger. You were his. That makes you my daughter. And I love you as a daughter. You are family. You are still part of this family. That ring belongs to you. If you try to send it back, I will drive down to Brooklyn myself and put it back on you.”
Diana hung up. She did not mean to. Her hand just did it. And then she sat on the couch, staring at the phone, and could not make herself call back.
She did not answer the next Sunday. Or the one after that.
Doris came in March.
Diana heard someone climbing the stairs one evening, slowly, heavily, the steps creaking. She knew those footsteps from somewhere. She went to the woodshop door and looked through the little window in it. And there was Doris, from Gus’s diner, in her old wool coat and her waitress shoes, with her gray hair tied up in a kerchief against the rain, holding a white paper bag with grease spots soaking through it.
Doris knocked. Diana stood on the other side of the door and did not open it.
Doris knocked again. Waited. Then she said, through the door, in her gravelly voice, “Honey, I know you’re in there. I can hear the radiator. You don’t have to open up. I just brought you a cheeseburger. And some onion rings.” A pause. “He used to come in Tuesday nights, you know. Before you. By himself. He always got the onion rings. He used to tell me about his chairs.”
Diana pressed her forehead against the cold wooden door and closed her eyes.
“I’ll leave it on the step,” said Doris. “You eat it. You hear me? You eat something.”
The footsteps went slowly back down the stairs.
Diana watched from the window as Doris crossed the cobbled street in the rain below, a small, bent, stubborn figure under a black umbrella, until she turned the corner and was gone.
The paper bag sat on the step outside the door all night. In the morning, it was cold. Diana threw it away without opening it. And then she sat down on the floor of the woodshop, beside the garbage can, and stayed there for most of the day.
As will happen over time, the phone stopped ringing so often. People had their own lives. The magazines found new faces. The news found new stories. And the quiet that came in to fill the space was worse, somehow, than all the noise had been before the silence. It was a thick, gray, heavy quiet, like water closing over her head. It felt like drowning.
She thought, sometimes, sitting on the couch in the dark with the rain on the windows, that she was disappearing. A little more every day. Like a photograph left out in the sun.
It rained hard on the last night of March. Cold rain. The kind that does not fall so much as hammer, driving sideways off the harbor in the dark and rattling the tall woodshop windows in their old iron frames.
Diana was sitting in the Thonet chair.
Walt had brought it back. A week after the funeral, he had driven the whole way down from Vermont by himself in the farm truck, two hundred and fifty miles, carried the chair up three flights of stairs, set it down by the woodshop windows, and driven home again without coming in. Diana had not opened the door. He had left a note on the seat, in pencil, in big square careful letters, on the back of a feed store receipt.
He’d want you to have this one. — W.H.
She had not been able to sit in it for months. Tonight, for some reason, she had.
She sat there in the dark, in Elliot’s denim jacket, with her hands folded in her lap and her tangled hair falling out of its knot around her face, and watched the rain stream down the glass. The lights of the harbor were blurred and broken in it. Far off across the black water, the Statue of Liberty was only a faint green smudge in the storm.
It was sixteen months, almost to the week, since the night the pipe burst. Since a man in a soaked thermal shirt had come running across a wet studio floor and knelt beside her and said, Are you hurt? Since she had laughed for the first time in years.
She had not laughed since November. She was not sure she remembered how.
She was so tired. That was the thing she could never have explained to anyone, if anyone had asked, and no one was asking anymore. It was not sadness, exactly. She had been sad. This was past sad. This was a tiredness that went down into the bones, into the marrow, into the very bottom of her, a tiredness that no amount of sleep could ever touch.
Diana realized she was tired of waking up. Tired of being tired. She was tired of remembering, then forgetting for a moment, and then remembering it again. Every single time, it was like being hit by that same truck all over again. She was tired of the rain. Tired of the gray that was in her mind. Tired of carrying the weight of the gray every day, day after day, with nothing at the end of any of the days. Diana's grief had slid into a severe depression.
She thought about her mother, crying on the bus to Pennsylvania. She thought about Ruth, on the phone, saying, You are family. She thought about Doris, climbing those stairs with her bad knees and her greasy paper bag. That was all her fault. If she had not been like this..., well she reasoned, she should not be like this. She had hurt them. She had to pay.
And then the gray told her what it had been telling her for weeks, in its quiet, reasonable, patient voice. That they would be sad, for a while. But that they would get over it. That they would be better off, really, without having to worry about her anymore. That she was only a weight on all of them now. That she was not Diana Vale, the famous supermodel anymore, and she was not Elliot’s anymore, and she was not anything at all. Just a tired, empty, worthless woman in a borrowed jacket, in a borrowed room, in a borrowed chair.
It was a lie. But this is what grief and despair do to a person, when they go on long enough in the dark without anyone to stop them: grief and despair lie, and they lie convincingly in a voice that sounds very much like your own.
And that night, Diana came to believe and accept those lies.
She sat in the chair for a long time. The rain beat against the windows. The radiator ticked.
And somewhere in that long, cold hour, very quietly, the way you might decide to turn off a light, Diana came to the end of something.
She could not go on. She simply knew this. Not one more gray morning. Not one more night like this. She only wanted, so very badly, for it to stop hurting.
She stood up from Elliot’s chair.
She took off his denim jacket, slowly, and folded it, very carefully, the way he used to fold his flannel shirts, and laid it over the back of the Thonet chair. She took the garnet ring off her finger, and held it in her palm for a long time, and then set it down on top of the folded jacket, where Ruth would find it.
She stood in the middle of the dark woodshop, among his chairs, in the gray light coming in off the harbor through the rain. She had made up her mind. Just a quick step from somewhere high, and that would be it.
She turned toward the door.
And then, through the sound of the rain on the glass, she heard it.
So faint at first that she thought she had imagined it. A thin, high, tiny sound. Somewhere outside. Cutting through the storm like a needle.
Diana stopped.
It came again. Louder this time. Thin and shrill and desperate.
To Be Continued...
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