Let Me Whisper in Your Ear by Mary Jane Clark Page A

thinking about it.”
    â€œWell, if you do that, I’ll pull the good doctor aside and thank him for all the inside dope he’s unknowingly provided on who was going to die next. Though he doesn’t know it, he’s really helped my career.”

30
    R ICKY P OTENZA DID not feel the cold as he paced up and down the Central Park West block outside Gwyneth Gilpatric’s apartment building. He was not sure if he was going to be able to get past the doorman, but he had a plan.
    He’d been waiting for this night for a long time—thirty years, really. Actually planning the specifics over the last year since reading in the hospital last January about Gwyneth’s annual New Year’s Eve party. He remembered it very clearly. Sitting with the other chain-smokers at Rockland Psychiatric Center, flipping the pages of People magazine. Reading about the schmaltzy party KEY News star Gwyneth Gilpatric threw each year for the rich and famous. Haunted by the smiling image of the woman who stared back at him from the glossy pages. Gwyneth Gilpatric, the woman who had changed his life forever.
    Of course, he had been seeing her on television for years. There had been lots of time to watch television at the mental hospitals. And when he was home in between hospitalizations, television was his main pastime. He made it a point to watch Hourglass every week.
    It galled Ricky to hear his mother rave about Gwyneth. She thought Gwyneth Gilpatric was so wonderful, a Jersey girl made good. “Gwyneth grew up in neighboring Fort Lee, you know,” his mother repeatedly told him. If she only knew.
    Ricky listened silently to his mother’s enthusiastic admiration, listened silently and fumed. It wasn’t fair. Gwyneth, a national figure, feted and awarded, while poor Tommy lay rotting in the mud.
    But now they had found Tommy. He saw it on TV, though his mother had been quick to snap off the set. She didn’t want him to relive all that, she said. Didn’t she know that he had been reliving it all again and again, day after day, for the last three decades? Reliving it in his head, but never bringing himself to talk about it.
    Everyone had tried to get him to talk. His worried parents, the suspicious police, and, over the years, the concerned doctors. They thought he was traumatized simply by the disappearance of his best friend. If they knew that Ricky had been part of his best friend Tommy’s death they would not have treated him so well.
    By the time the Cruzes realized that their son was missing the morning after Tommy was killed at Palisades Park, Ricky was home safe in his own bed, pretending to be asleep. He feigned ignorance when his mother broke the news to him that Tommy was missing, swore that he hadn’t seen his buddy since they parted company at dinnertime the night before. But as his parents and the police continued to question him over the days that followed, Ricky began to shut down. Silence was his defense.
    We all have a breaking point. That’s what the doctor told Ricky’s parents. Ricky has met his breaking point. You must not push him.
    So they had not pushed. They’d followed the doctor’s orders, gently trying to get the increasingly brooding, introverted Ricky interested in things again. They encouraged him to go out and play with the other kids, to get involved in sports or clubs at school. They tried to get him to audition for the school plays, hoping to find something that would bring him outside himself. Nothing worked.
    Adolescence and the hormonal changes that went with it made things worse. Ricky grew more angry and violent. The acting out grew more angry and violent as well. One day after school, he climbed on the roof of the Potenzas’ three-story brick home and hurled the family’s cat to the ground below. That night he took his father’s razor blades to his wrists.
    There followed the first of a lifetime’s worth of stays in various