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“My mom never said anything disparaging about Irene. She was her hero. Everything my mom achieved in her adult life, from graduating from college to getting married to having a family to dedicating her life to philanthropy, she attributed to her sobriety, and your mom was always at the heart of that.”
My mom, a flawed hero, apparently had redemptive qualities.
“Even after Irene left the halfway house, my mom said she still regularly visited her there to support her sobriety efforts.”
I’m struggling to absorb what Claire is telling me. Why did Esther tell Claire about her past, but Mom never told me about hers? Was it because I was a teenager? Did she think I might not be able to handle it? It could’ve served as a cautionary tale at a time when kids experiment, had she been honest with me.
And why didn’t Dad ever mention it? I was twenty-eight years old when he died. There was no reason by that time that I shouldn’t have known.
Is it possible he didn’t know? He must’ve. She never ever drank, volunteered forD.A.R.E., and dedicated her career to helping other addicts.
Maybe he didn’t tell me because he was trying to preserve my memory of her, of who I thought she was. But that doesn’t make sense, because if he did know, he was obviously okay with who she was, including her past. He married her and had a family despite her history of addiction.
Maybe he kept it from me for a different reason, something related to her death. Something to do with the Cadells that might’ve compromised me …
“May I ask when your mom first spoke to you about all of this?” I ask Claire.
“In high school, before the congressional hearing in 1997,” she says. “It was hard to avoid.”
“Congressional hearing?” I repeat.
Her eyebrows raise. “You didn’t know about it?”
I shake my head.
“It was the only topic of conversation in our house for months. Mom and Dad fought about it all the time,” she says.
“What was the hearing about?” I ask.
“Congress asked patients who had gone through the first opioid detox program at Bell in the seventies, the one our moms were in, to testify in a hearing against TriCPharma. The Feds were trying to establish that the company knew from the start that their drugs were dangerous and addictive. The hearing wasn’t compulsory. There were no subpoenas, so it was up to former patients if they wanted to testify, and my dad really didn’t want my mom to. He’d heard rumors about the Cadells and was worried about potential retribution. But my mom wanted to anyway. Their drugs stole years of her life and destroyed her youth. She was a fourteen-year-old equestrian phenom headed for the Olympics and got in a riding accident, after which a doctor prescribed her the first generation of TriCPharma ‘pain’ drugs. She didn’t get on a horse again until a decade later.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Thanks,” she says. “Mom and Dad argued a lot about her testifying. She kept saying it would be confidential, how they’d already given interviews about TriCPharma drugs to the head of the research department at Bell Hospital back in the seventies, and how there had never been any problems.But Dad said this was different, that there were always leaks with congressional hearings, and if the Cadells ever found out that she testified, it could not only compromise her but also put our entire family at risk. One night they had a huge fight about it, and he asked her, ‘Don’t we matter?’ After that, I guess something shifted because she decided not to go through with it.”
A chill runs through me, thinking about the same exact fight that Mom and Dad had. It would have been at about the same time too.
“Irene testified though—”
She did?
“—and when she was killed shortly after, there was no doubt in my dad’s mind that it wasn’t a random hit-and-run accident. He was convinced it was because of a leak from the hearing, even though the testimonies were sealed. My mom was wrecked. She kept saying, ‘It should’ve been me.’ She said your mom was the bravest woman she knew.”
“Do you know where this hearing took place?” I ask.
“At the Capitol. Your mom stayed in New York at a hotel near us. The night before she was supposed to take a train to DC, she met my mom. After they got together, I remember my mom coming home distraught. I wasn’t sure if she was worried about Irene going through with it, or if she felt guilty that she wasn’t testifying herself, or both. I had just started high school, and it felt like this dark cloud was hanging over my freshman year.”
Wait a minute. The only trip mom took by herself in 1997 before she died was to go to her supposed NYU Tisch reunion. After the trip, she returned home with a bruised body, claiming she had been mugged by a cyclist that had crashed into her on his bike before grabbing her purse and warning me to stay away from New York.
This trip must’ve been when she went to DC to testify in front of Congress about her opioid addiction. Maybe shewasn’t hit by a cyclist who mugged her. Maybe the Cadells roughed her up beforehand to try to scare her into not testifying.
“One of the senators that sat on the committee hearing still works on the hill—Senator Lyon from West Virginia,” Claire says. “My parents donated a lot of money to politicians, but after Irene died, they stopped. Last year, before my mom passed, she mentioned that she’d heard the president might unseal the testimonies from the hearing. She wanted me to hear her hero, Irene, testify, and when it didn’t happen, she tried tracking down Dr. Siegel. He was the researcher at Bell in charge of their detox unit. She was hoping to find the interviews he did with them back in the day so that I could hear your mom speak. But almost fifty years had passed, and he was long gone. Nobody at the hospital knew where the interviews were either.”
Louis starts getting fussy again in Claire’s arms. “I need to get his bottle,” she says, handing him over to me without any warning and leaving me alone with him in the living room. I awkwardly take him in my arms and try bouncing him on my lap to calm him. But it doesn’t work, and he starts to cry.
She quickly returns with a bottle of milk and a slice of chocolate cake that she lays down on the coffee table.
“It was his birthday a couple of days ago, and I have leftovers from the party. Can I offer you a piece?”
