Page 76 of Since She's Been Gone

I stop listening and immediately start wading through the crowd, trying to get closer to the stage where Senator Lyon—the only remaining member of Congress who Claire said was on the committee hearing that Mom testified in—is standing with a half dozen of his colleagues. For the first time in days, luck is on my side. He’s the person who I came to DC to try and meet with.

The senator from Hawaii finishes speaking, and I hear some applause. I’m about halfway to the stage when I see the senators being directed off by security guards.

By the time I finally reach the podium, they’re all off to the side, taking questions from reporters. There’s a mousy-looking woman with glasses and frizzy brown hair dressed in a gray suit next to senator Lyon.

After the senators finish speaking with the reporters, the guards usher them back to the Capitol building, which is taped off. The mousy-looking woman stays back, next to the reporters, texting on her phone.

“Excuse me,” I say, approaching her. “Do you work for Senator Lyon? I saw you standing next to him.”

She looks up from her phone. “Yes,” she says, pushing up her glasses to the top of the bridge of her nose.

“I have a question for him. Is there any way I can speak with him?”

“Any constituent question needs to be directed to his website—”

“It’s not a constituent question,” I interrupt. “It’s about a congressional hearing that my late mom testified in. Senator Lyon is the only remaining member of Congress that participated in it. I’m trying to find out what she said.”

I’m near tears. The day has caught up with me. First, learning Mom was an addict, then learning she chose to testify over our family’s safety, and now realizing if I don’t solve this riddle, I may never get my life back.

“The transcript might be available online,” she tells me.

“It hasn’t been unsealed yet,” I explain.

“What hearing was it?” she asks.

“The TriCPharma hearing in 1997,” I say.

Her eyes go wide. “I’m sorry,” she nervously says and quickly walks away.

CHAPTER44

July 2010

IHAD MAINTAINED MYrecovery for over a decade through various support groups and one-on-one therapy. Don’t get me wrong, there were many times when ED thoughts still floated through my mind, but I had a support system in place and ways to address them.

I hadn’t relapsed once, not even when Dad was diagnosed with lung cancer the year prior. Thankfully, he was in remission after undergoing surgery and several rounds of chemotherapy.

Jay and I had recently gotten engaged and moved in together. We had graduated with our doctorates a couple of years before and had both gone into private practice.

He was at a conference out of state, and I was in the middle of a workday, writing patient notes, when I got a call that Dad was at the hospital again. He had collapsed at work, and an ambulance had taken him there.

I immediately left my office and went to Cedars Sinai Hospital, where he was admitted. As I anxiously rode the elevator up to his room, I wondered what was going on.

As soon as he saw me, he smiled. “Aren’t you supposed to be working? You playing hooky to be with your old man?” he joked.

“What’s wrong?” I said, sitting next to him on his hospital bed.

“The damn lung. It’s giving me problems again. They ran some scans. I’m waiting to hear back.”

Just at that moment, a doctor walked in with a grave look on his face.

“This is my daughter,” Dad said proudly to the guy.

“Nice to meet you,” the doctor said to me before turning back to dad. “I need to speak with you privately.”

“Anything you have to say to me, you can say in front of my daughter,” Dad told him.

The doctor took a breath in. “We got the results of your scans. I’m sorry, but the cancer has returned.”

---