The Book of Regrets

They’ll want to hear about the drugs.

And the affairs.

Probably even the stealing.

How much entertainment? How many regrets?

More than she could count.

The burning lights ignited. The audience cheered and whooped and raised their fists like a frenzied mob at a Middle Ages execution. Baying for blood. Her blood.

Or perhaps her competitor’s, disgraced NBA star Kyle Richmond. He sat at the small desk on the other side of the stage, the host’s couch between them. Kyle smiled broadly, but his eyes were wide and the veins on his neck were protruding like a hangman’s rope.

Candice breathed deeply, held the stale studio air in her lungs for two heartbeats, and slowly exhaled. She smiled, more naturally than Kyle, she hoped. But she couldn’t stop her right leg from shaking. She was used to the scrutiny, the accusing eyes, the thunderous applause. But it had been a while. And everything was different now.

The host, Johnny Wonder, burst onto the stage. He was in his late thirties, wore an impeccably tailored navy suit and had a luxurious head of dark hair, kissed by a winsome touch of gray. Candice had never met him, but she’d seen the game show - a kind of grotesque perversion of This is Your Life.

“We have a very special double header tonight,” Johnny announced to the rapt audience. “Our first two contestants have both been at the absolute top of their game. Literally for one.”

A laugh from the hyenas as Johnny motioned to Kyle.

“But they both threw it all away. Sex, drugs, cars, booze, mansions . . .” Johnny wiped his brow in an exaggerated pantomime. “Whoa,” he gasped. “We’ll be here all night if I read the whole rap sheet!”

The audience jeered.

Kyle’s grimace and eyes grew so wide, he looked like a mummified king, the skin stretched paper thin across his cheeks, his teeth showing all the way to the molars. Candice felt a pang of sympathy for him. He was a sports star, not a studio performer. He’d be happy enough, though, when he won the twenty thousand dollar prize. Candice wasn’t here for the money. She wasn’t even going to try.

“Welcome to The Book of Regrets!” Johnny roared.

The crowd roared with him.

“Let’s meet our first contestant, former NBA superstar, Kyle Richmond.” He walked over to Kyle’s desk and leaned against the giant Kyle, his arm on his shoulder like Kyle was a bar holding him up. “Welcome to the show,” Johnny said.

“Thanks for having me, Johnny,” Kyle said like a grateful schoolboy at a junior high dance.

Candice winced. It was excruciating to witness the moment a man hit rock-bottom. But to have it broadcast across America; that was a particularly viscous form of cruelty.

“You grew up in a poor neighborhood and used basketball as your ticket to freedom. Three-time NBA champion, two-time NBA MVP, five-time NBA All-Star.”

Candice watched images of Kyle’s life splash across the monitors in front of them, knowing they’d fill the TV audience’s screens when the show went to air.

Johnny paused and stared dramatically at the crowd. He lowered his voice. “After your retirement, though, life came crashing down around you. Multiple arrests for cocaine possession, photographed with escorts on your wedding anniversary, crashed your Ferrari, blew your fortune on boats, houses and cars. Ended up bankrupt. The man who once had everything now has nothing at all.”

The paparazzi shots of Kyle’s indiscretions danced wickedly across the monitors.

Candice watched the crowd. Faces full of malice, envy and smug satisfaction. Eyes that said Kyle deserved his downfall. Savage grins that celebrated his demise.

Kyle had finally stopped smiling. He stared at his hands and Candice thought he might cry.

“What will you do if you win the twenty thousand?” Johnny said.

Kyle drew his shoulders back and looked Johnny in the eyes. “I want to go to night school. Get my life back on track.”

Johnny nodded and patted Kyle’s shoulder. “Good for you, Kyle. Good for for you.” He sashayed over to Candice.

She took a deep breath and smiled. Forced her hand down on her shaking leg.

“Candice Cook,” Johnny said. “Or Candy C as you’re better known.”

Candice nodded and braced herself. “Hello, Johnny.”

“You were a nineties ‘It Girl’. Model, singer, actress. You had legions of adoring fans, Candy Girls, all across the world. Everyone wanted to be, or be seen with, Candy C.”

The monitors that had catalogued Kyle’s rise and fall now did the same for Candice’s life. She refused to watch them. Refused to be dragged back down. She couldn’t lose her resolve tonight. This was too important. She swallowed hard and kept her eyes on the audience, every member now transfixed by the unimaginable glamor of her life once lived.

“Then in the early two thousands, it all began to unravel.” Johnny turned to the crowd. “It’s a familiar story, folks. Drugs, sex, booze. DUI after DUI. Inexplicable shoplifting.” He shook his head. “I mean, why does someone who has it all try to steal clothes from a discount store?” He looked at Candice as though he were her therapist. “A desperate cry for help, perhaps?”

Candice’s heart was thumping so hard, she could feel it in her stomach. She clenched her jaw and gave Johnny a tight-lipped smile. She wasn’t going to give any of them the satisfaction of seeing her break.

Johnny skipped back to the middle of the stage and turned to the audience. “Let’s get the show started. You know the rules. The contestants will take turns to write down a regret and read it out to you. You’ll have sixty seconds at the end of each round to cast your vote for whoever’s regret has moved you most.”

Round one began with Kyle. The stage was bathed in darkness except for the inquisitor’s spotlight on his hulking frame. He wrote with reluctant penmanship, as though the words had to be torn from his heart. Perhaps his number one regret was appearing on this show, Candice thought.

An alarm blared. The lights went up. “Pen down!” the crowd yelled in unison, coaxed by the signs that told them when to clap, cheer and chant.

“Tell us your first regret, Kyle,” Johnny said.

Kyle sucked in a lungful of air. He nodded repeatedly as if willing himself to go on. “I regret . . .”, he said in a faltering voice, “ . . . saying yes to cocaine that very first time. If I would have just said no, maybe I could have saved myself and my family so much pain.” Kyle dropped his chin to his chest, unable to meet anyone’s eye.

The audience loved it.

Johnny nodded and hummed. “Well said, Kyle. Over to you now, Candice. Will you also start with the drugs? Or is it another indulgence that lies heavy on your heart?”

Candice barely heard him. She was aware of the lights going down and the spotlight zoning in on her. She was aware of the cool leather cover of the black notebook on her desk. The crisp paper. The orderly lines ready to receive her disordered life. The heavy pen in her hand and the blot of ink that began to pool as she rested it on the page.

She was aware of it all, but she wasn’t there. She was standing in a supermarket fourteen years earlier, agitated, strung out on a mix of prescription drugs and booze, unsure exactly of what she'd come to buy. Cigarettes, maybe. She could feel the other customers’ eyes on her, the pointing fingers, the whispers and callous giggles.

And then her little boy rounded the aisle with a tub of ice cream in his arms, hugging it like a teddy bear. “It’s so hot, Mom,” he said. “Can we pleeeeease get ice cream?”

Her muscles tensed to aching point. Her brain felt like it was pressing against the inside of her skull. She waved him away with one hand and placed the other on her forehead. “No. We have to get out of here.”

“Pleeeeease.”

A blinding flash of light. A searing pain above her eye. “I’ve already said no, Hunter! How many times do I have to say the same thing before you get it?!”

Her six-year-old son backed away, cowering in fear. His bottom lip trembled and his eyes filled with tears.

Stunned shoppers froze and stared.

But she didn’t stop.

“It’s a hundred degrees outside. How do you think we’re going to get the ice-cream from here to the hotel without it melting? You need to think, Hunter. Use your brains!”

Hunter ducked back around the top of the aisle and out of sight.

Candice’s shoulders slumped. She closed her eyes.

When she opened them, a teardrop had stained the page. She wrote one simple sentence, and as the ink flowed through the pen and left its indelible mark on the paper, it was like poison draining from her body: I regret humiliating my son at the supermarket when he was just a boy.

The crowd sat in stunned silence after she read her line. A tear ran down her cheek, but she held her head high. “I’m sorry, Hunter,’ she said to the camera. “Sorry for it all.”

ONE MONTH LATER

Candice had put all her hopes in Hunter’s girlfriend, Mia. But would she be able to convince him? Could Mia make herself heard over the deafening soundtrack of Candice’s neglect? Could she undo all that had been done?

Of course not. But Mia could give Candice the start she needed. The first step on the bridge of reconciliation.

Candice sat on the edge of the couch with her knees together, her right leg shaking. Her phone was in easy reach on her glass coffee table. She flicked her gaze between the television and her cell. One celebrated her transgressions, the other promised redemption.

Johnny Wonder filled the screen, then Kyle, then the paparazzi shots, then Candice and the images of her own downfall. Candice watched herself writing as the audience leaned forward with mouths slightly open, tongues running over lips in delightful anticipation of her self-flagellation. When she looked up and read her regret to the camera, her eyes were filled with tears.

Candice’s chest felt like it was going to simultaneously explode and implode with every onscreen moment. The steady drumbeat in her head vibrated through her bones as she watched herself lay bare her deepest regrets on national television. Each of them about the way she’d treated Hunter. Each of them incidental moments that meant nothing to the world and everything to her son. She watched her surprise win, Johnny’s reluctant acceptance of her victory, and Kyle’s devastation.

Then it ended. And her phone remained silent. Mia had failed.

No, Candice had failed. Those three regrets represented only a sliver of her mistreatment. Of course it wasn’t going to be enough.

Candice felt the air being sucked out of her lungs, her blood turning to lead in her veins. A shuddering sob doubled her over, hot tears streaming down her cheeks.

The phone rang.

She sprang back up.

It was him. Hunter was calling her for the first time in two years.

Candice cleared her throat and wiped her eyes. “Hello, Hunter,” she said softly.

There was a moment of silence. Then his voice, that mellow, guarded voice that was his alone. “What’d you do with the twenty grand?”

Candice let out a short bark of relieved laughter. “I gave it to Kyle.”

“Well, that was stupid.”

She smiled through her tears. She’d missed him so much. “I’m sorry, Hunter. Sorry for everything I did, and everything I didn’t do. Please let me back in.”

Candice closed her eyes and waited for her son to respond.