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Lynchy: Do you plan on giving them back?
Kavanagh: I guess.
Lynchy: You’re really fucked up, Kavanagh.
Kavanagh: I know.
Lynchy: I’m on my way.
“Johnny Kavanagh took your brothers?” I gaped at my boyfriend. “Where? When? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’s your mam?”
Joey shrugged but didn’t respond.
“Darren?”
Another shrug.
“So, it’s left to you to clean up the mess and pick up the pieces.” It wasn’t a question. More of a resigned statement. “Again.”
“I know I’ve been letting you down,” he explained, tearing at his forearms with his nails as his attention flicked from me to the commotion behind us. “And you’re pissed with me, but I was sort of hoping you might give me a spin over there to collect them.” Shrugging helplessly, he added, “I don’t have anyone else to ask.”
My heart cracked in my chest.
“Yeah, I’ll take you,” I replied, repressing the very strong urge I had to close the space between us and take him in my arms.
But I couldn’t. Because it wouldn’t change anything. Because in the end, I would end up as the injured party. That wasn’t to say that I had given up on him. It simply meant that I had boundaries now.
94
I Believe in You
JOEY
Molloy turned the heater on full blast in her car on the way to the Kavanaghs’ house and I was glad. I was so fucking cold; I couldn’t get warm. It was in my bones. When she retrieved a hoodie from the back seat and instructed me to put it on, I did as she asked without argument.
The song “When You’re Gone” by Molloy’s favorite band, The Cranberries, was drifting from the car stereo, but I couldn’t focus on the lyrics. Because I wanted to talk to her. Wanted to find the words she needed from me, but they didn’t exist in my brain anymore.
I felt very little these days, but every single emotion I did feel was evoked from, directed at, and aimed toward her. I loved her, and no number of drugs could change that. Neither could the depression that was eating me from the inside out. Because it had to be depression, right? Wanting to die wasn’t something an eighteen-year-old fantasized about.
“You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?” Molloy asked, breaking the silence that had built up between us.
My brain was too hazy, my heart too checked out, to understand or interpret her words. Instead, I reached into the pocket of my overalls and extracted my wallet. “I have your money,” I told her, splitting my wage packet in half. “Here.”
“That’s not my money, Joe,” she replied sadly, refusing to take the cash just like last week. “That’s your money.”
“No,” I muttered, tossing the cash into the glove compartment of her car before I could do something reckless with it. “It’s the baby’s money.”
Because we both knew that I would. If I didn’t get it away from me, I wouldn’t have it to give her.
“I’m not your mother,” she told me, keeping her attention trained on the road ahead of us as she drove down a narrow country lane. “I don’t want you for your money.”
“I’m sorry about missing the scan,” I heard myself tell her for what had to be the hundredth time. “I’m sorry for all of it.”
“I know, Joe,” she replied with a small sniffle, still avoiding looking at me. “I know.”
