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“On the surface, no. It isn’t. But deep down, it is. If I had dealt with my shit years ago, I mean, truly dealt with it, I wouldn’t be here now. I wouldn’t be hooked to a methadone drip. I wouldn’t have just crushed my wife. But I didn’t. And so here I am, and I did.”
My father’s face is pained, and he tries to reason with me, but he loves me. He’s trying to shield me.
“I need you to take care of Alexander Holdings,” I tell him. “Can you do that? Can you work with Peter and figure something out? I’m obviously not in the right frame of mind for it right now.”
“Of course,” he says quickly. “That’s not a problem. I’m more worried about you than the business…”
“Don’t be,” I tell him abruptly. “I’m going to handle it.”
“You and Mila have both been through so much,” he finally answers. “Mila has too. She thought they had killed you. She’s hurting too, son.”
God, that hurts. It stabs me deep in the heart and the knife twists round and round.
“It’s better that I hurt her this one last time than to keep hurting her forever,” I manage to say.
“You’re wrong,” he says.
“You don’t get it,” I tell him sharply. “If I’d admitted to myself years ago that I was an addict, I could’ve learned to deal with it. With the issues that made me use. Instead, I just stopped using, and I pretended that it wasn’t an issue. It was. And it is. And here I am.”
“Pax. You stopped using. That was what you were supposed to do,” my father says. “You did the right thing. Sometimes, people have latent issues that rear their heads later. You didn’t know. You had no way of knowing that you had other things to deal with. But what… what exactly do you feel you didn’t deal with?”
I can’t answer.
I can’t tell him that after all of those hours of therapy, I still feel at fault for my mother’s death. That I can’t understand the fact that I was a kid and I was just trying to protect my mother. My head knows it, but my heart… my heart isn’t listening. And my heart is what drives the addiction.
So I don’t answer him. I close my eyes instead.
After a long time, my father’s voice is quiet.
“There are a lot of people who love you, son. All of us stand behind you. You’re not alone.”
He leaves. I hear the door close, and I open my eyes.
I am alone.
I’m in a hospital room alone, and I chose this.
It’s a hell of my own making.
* * *
I spend a week in the hospital recuperating. They do the surgery on my knee, and I’m up and doing PT the very next day. I refuse any kind of pain medication, and the pain is excruciating.
I push through it.
It reminds me that I’m alive. It’s punishing. I deserve it.
After I’m released, I go straight to a rehab facility. My father arranged it, and Roger drives me.
“Thank you for saving my wife,” I tell him, because this is the first time I’ve seen him since everything happened. “We owe our lives to you. It’s a debt that I can never repay.”
Roger dismisses it. “Anyone would’ve done the same,” he tells me. “You’re a good man, sir. Just like your grandfather. It’s my honor to help.”
“Please drive my wife wherever she needs to go, ok?” I ask him as he pulls up to the facility. “Look out for her. Will you do that?”
“Of course, sir. Again, it’s my honor. I’ll watch out for her like you would yourself… right up until you come home.”
I don’t tell him that I’m not coming home.
