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That was so unfair, I felt bad even thinking it. Mike took care of me the whole weekend from the second I showed up. Served me food, made me drinks. He unpacked my luggage for me, wouldn’t even let me make the bed in our room. But he was drinking the whole time. Literally the whole time. From the moment I got there to the night before we left. And Mike was not a good drunk. He was loud and borderline belligerent.

He was sober to drive me home. He never got behind the wheel, he was responsible about it. It was a vacation weekend. Everyone was drinking. He wasn’t doing anything that everyone else wasn’t doing. But I didn’t like it. It wore me out.

“I just think I need a vacation from my vacation,” I said, mostly to myself. “I’m just tired. And I don’t want to hang out with Phil.”

She sighed. “Well I can’t kick him out now,” she said, her voice low. “I already told him he could stay. I didn’t know you were gonna be so pissed.”

Phil sneezed from the other room. A growling man sneeze that was unnecessarily loud.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

I didn’t want to go to Mike’s.

It felt like leaving out of the exit I came in. The one that wasn’t the best choice, but it was the door I knew.

I had the strangest knee-jerk inclination to ask Chris if I could sleep in his guest room for a night instead.

Chris. I knew what it would be like at his place. Quiet. Reading. Woofarine. We’d make dinner or he’d get something for us from somewhere safe. We’d talk about books, or we wouldn’t talk at all and that would be okay too.

He wouldn’t make margaritas, running the blender when I was trying to finish my book and then get loud and grabby after he’d had a few.

I wanted to decompress. I wanted silence and calm.

But Chris wasn’t a choice now. He had been once, a million years ago after a concert. But not now.

So I got up and went to Mike’s.

20

CHRIS

I had another nightmare.

They’d been tapering off the last few months. The cloudy images of Mom on her deathbed, distended stomach, yellow eyes, skinny legs. They were awful and they made me sit up in the dark, gasping for air.

But this wasn’t that. This one was about Larissa.

I turned on the light and scooted against the headboard, still shaking. Woofarine was with me. It was one of my days to have him because I was off tomorrow, thank God. I grabbed him from the foot of the bed and held him against my chest, trying to ground myself. Putting my nose to his head, hoping some of her perfume was still in his fur.

In my dream, Larissa had eaten something with nuts in it. Her throat closed and I couldn’t find her EpiPen or mine. I was just running from room to room looking, knowing she was dying and my legs wouldn’t move fast enough and I couldn’t save her.

It was the same helpless feeling I had with Mom.

I was dealing with PTSD from the way Mom passed. The way I was blindsided by the circumstances around it, the survivor’s guilt I felt about it.

I went to therapy the first few months after. I attended a support group too. I had the skills to work on my grief and it was dulling with time. I was sleeping again. But now the anxiety had transferred. Now it was for Larissa instead.

I got up to splash cold water on my face. Turned on all the lights, tried to put space between the nightmare and reality. It didn’t help.

It was four thirty in the morning. I wanted to call her and make sure it was just a dream and not a vision. But why would I do that? How could I even explain that I worried so much about her lately in the course of my day-to-day life that she was starting to permeate my dreams?

It was the weekend at the lake that I really noticed it. Maybe because I’d never spent so much time with her? The constant unconscious impulse to see if she was okay or having a good time or if she needed something. And then I’d have to remind myself that it wasn’t my job to make sure she was okay or having a good time and that I should stop worrying about it. But I couldn’t turn the thoughts off. It felt like fighting an instinct. It was exhausting—and now I didn’t even get a break from it in my sleep.

I sat on the foot of my bed and scrubbed my hands over my face. Woofarine pawed at me and licked under my chin.

He’d found a petrified dead chipmunk yesterday and was eating it in the yard. I probably shouldn’t let him lick my face, but I appreciated the effort to make me feel better anyway.

To be concerned about a friend was normal, right? She had a bad allergy, one that put her in danger. It was natural to worry. And maybe I just felt a little responsible for her because I was the one who drove her up there and then when we got there Mike hadn’t cleaned out the pantry and I was still reeling from losing Mom and it made me hypervigilant.