Page 243 of What We Burn

I don’t know what to do.

I always know what to fucking do.

Fuck!

“Holden.” Sage holds out a hand for me to help her up.

Thank God. Something useful.

I help her out of the tub and peel off her wet clothes, wrapping her in a robe for warmth. The moment she’s dry, she’s crouching on the floor beside them, her hand on Milo’s knee, thumb tracing slow circles.

All I can do is stand there, looking at them and feeling useless.

How do I even fix this?

My mind races.

“We need help,” I say.

I don’t wait for agreement. I grab my phone and step out onto the landing, half wet and still breathing open-mouthed to clear the steam from my lungs. I stare at the screen for a long moment, because what I’m about to do feels like pulling a fire alarm—necessary and irreversible.

I dial.

It rings four times. Five. I’m expecting voicemail when the line clicks.

“Holden Cross?” Gloria’s voice is sharp and fully awake despite the hour. “My son had better be breathing.”

“He is. But . . . he needs you, Gloria. I don’t . . . Something happened.”

Silence. Then a rustle of movement.

“How bad?” she asks.

“Bad. He went out tonight and—did something extreme. And now he’s crashed. Hard. He’s flipping between babbling nonsense and being nonresponsive. We’ve got him on the bathroom floor right now. But he isn’t talking anymore and he can’t support his own weight. I don’t want to call an ambulance, but he needs help.”

“I’ll be there in forty minutes,” she says in a rush. Then she hangs up without saying goodbye.

I stare at my phone. “I didn’t give you the address.”

It takes Gloria thirty-one minutes. In that time we manage to get Milo out of the bathroom and into his room—made easier by the fact he has two mattresses smashed together on his floor.

“Where is he?” Gloria doesn’t ring the bell. She doesn’t knock. I hear nothing from the street, but thirty-one minutes after hanging up, she’s inside my house and she’s calling out.

“Up here,” I call from his open doorway. My voice catches a little, but I steady it.

Fuck. We can’t lose him.

She rushes up the stairs and when she steps onto the landing, her eyes are wide and worried. She’s in her nightgown, a flannel number with red poppies, and over it a woolen coat. She smells like eucalyptus and lavender. Her dark hair is pinned around curlers, a scarf tied over her head. Her bare feet are shoved into battered Birkenstocks. She breezes past me, planting a flat hand on my chest as she pushes into the room.

“Oh, my baby,” she says, and the tenderness in it is so raw, so completely at odds with everything I know about this woman—the shock collars, the suspicious garden beds—that it hits me like a fist.

“Mom?” The first word he’s said since we got him out of the tub.

She’s at his side in a blink, sliding onto the mattress and pulling the blanket tight around his shivering body.

“Shh,” she murmurs, brushing his wet hair from his face. “It’s all right. I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.” She gathers his head into her lap, cradling him with both hands, and starts humming—not a song, exactly, just a low note, some private animal frequency.

Milo shudders so hard it vibrates Gloria’s thighs. He clutches at her coat, burying his face in flannel, and all at once the grief breaks open. He sobs loud, wracking, ugly. The sound is not Milo. It’s the kid he used to be, the one who survived by outshouting the future. Gloria rocks him, brushing his hair with her fingers, thumb tracing small patterns into his scalp.