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“Do you see them?”
“No. Not for a long time, now.”
A memory drifted in, of Kate’s sixteenth birthday. It was her last one before my dad moved out, and my mom had made a spaghetti casserole. My mom was a terrible cook, and Kate didn’t eat much under the best of circumstances. But somehow, that night the food was edible, the grocery store birthday cake studded with frosting flowers made Kate smile, my mom and Kate didn’t fight, and my dad didn’t get wasted until after dinner, when Kate had gone out with her friends.
It was a good night. I was fourteen, and I remembered sneaking down to the kitchen in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, and eating another piece of cake, enjoying the cloying sweetness of those frosting roses only because it had tasted so good the first time around, when we were all kind of acting like a family.
“Why?” Theo’s voice, soft at my ear, brought me back to the present.
“My dad’s a drunk.” It came out bitter and hard. As if I were in any position to judge. “I can’t be around him, now. Before, well…after they got divorced he didn’t really want much to do with me or Kate. He wasn’t nasty about it, just disinterested. He had a whole new model to break in. A second go-round. And his wife, Dana, she’s…let’s just say she could do a whole lot better than my dad and it’s depressing as hell to watch.”
Theo put a palm on my stomach and I concentrated on the heat from his fingers, imagined it seeping into me, reaching all the way inside, like he could imprint himself on me permanently.
“My mom.” I sighed. “She’s a real sweet lady. My dad’s drinking…it’s what ruined their marriage, ruined their relationship. So when I started with the drugs and all…fuck, man, it wrecked her to see me like that. She came to visit me the first time I went to rehab. And she was a fucking mess—worried for me, and wanting to help. But really, she should have been mad at me, you know? She should’ve been furious. I needed her to be furious. But she was just sad, and scared, and then I didn’t stay clean long, and I didn’t want to worry her worse, so I stayed away.”
The image of my mom’s face—hopeful and tentative and, ultimately, disappointed—haunted me.
“I stayed clean for about four months after I was in rehab the second time, so I went to see her. It was Christmas, and she had this sad little fucking tree, I remember. She’d just broken up with her boyfriend and she was sad, and my sister was sad. The whole thing was so epically fucking sad, I couldn’t take it.”
I left her apartment at 10 P.M., with a snow-streaked windshield and gray slush on the median, and I drove to the nearest bar. I got trashed and scored in the bathroom and made my way back home in time to pass out on the couch. When I woke up in the morning, the lights on that pathetic tree were gleaming with desperate cheer, and my mom was sitting in the chair staring at me. I followed her gaze to my arm, where my sleeve was still rolled up and the fresh track mark was clear. And I felt the despair of failure compounded by having a witness to it.
“After that, I just kind of…didn’t go back. It was too hard, and I didn’t want to keep getting her hopes up only to disappoint her again.”
“And now?” Theo asked.
“Now? Fuck, I dunno. This is the longest I’ve stayed clean, but…I can’t risk it. Not yet. Not when I know what it does to her.”
What I couldn’t bring myself to say out loud was that I had the superstitious conviction that if I let myself reach out to my mom and Kate, I would somehow jinx myself back to the needle. I could front all I wanted that I was protecting them, but the bottom line was that I didn’t feel strong enough yet. I didn’t trust myself enough yet.
* * *
—
We spent the next few days working on music. I played Theo the songs I’d written for Rhys, and he was enthusiastic about them. He loved what I’d written, and he asked questions that made them better, made suggestions that had me going back in to fiddle with them.
We finished the song we’d started writing together at his apartment, too, and I woke up to find Theo lying on his stomach next to me, propped on his elbows and writing in his notebook. I ghosted a hand down the gorgeous curve of his spine and he shivered, but his face remained stuck in the notebook.
I kissed the base of his spine, then kissed my way up to his neck and heard his breath catch.
