CHAPTER 9

At the support group meeting on Monday, I pick a seat next to Nari again.

“Hi,” she says this time. I’m surprised—she’s usually quiet, which is one reason why I like to sit next to her. Before, she’s only ever smiled at me.

But Sharon’s making some notes in a little book and checking her watch, which means the meeting hasn’t started yet and maybe Nari figures she has extra time.

I feel a light flutter at the base of my throat, but I swallow it down. “Hi,” I say.

“I’m Nari.” She smiles, tugging at the long black braid hooked over her amber shoulders. I’m trying to figure out what it is about her voice that makes me hope she’ll keep talking. It’s soft, like falling leaves. But there’s something else underneath it that isn’t so soft, that might have harder edges. Maple bark. Glittering frost. And that makes me think Nari is strong too.

“I guess you know that, actually.” She’s laughing now, rolling her eyes. “We say it every week, during introductions. You’re Claire.”

I laugh too. At first it feels strange to laugh in this room, but then it feels kind of okay. “Yeah, I’m Claire.”

Words bubble up inside. Suddenly I want to ask Nari all kinds of things, like who she’s here for and why she comes back and if it’s helping and even what she might do with pills she found in her brother’s Secret Pillow. But then Sharon clears her throat and her silver bracelets jingle as she clasps her hands and tells us it’s time to get started.

“Welcome,” Sharon says, like we’re at a fancy hotel and not a meeting for family members of people who, like Mom would say, “struggle with addiction,” and who maybe left, and made a big empty space wherever they used to be. But Sharon says it again: “Welcome. It’s good to have you all here.”

Sharon holds up a piece of paper. “Our opening reflection today comes from an article called ‘What We Can’t Control,’” she says. “Would anybody like to read?”

Nari raises her hand. “I will.”

Sharon has a bunch of short readings she likes to use. When Dad first brought me to the support group, she encouraged me to borrow some, but I said, “No, thanks.” She hasn’t asked again.

Nari leans over the paper and takes a deep breath. When she starts reading, her voice is clear and strong.

“Isn’t it easy to want to control everything that happens? It seems like if we can only say or do the right things, life will work out the way we hope. But then, what do we do when nothing seems to be going according to plan?”

Nari pauses for a second. Smiles. Then keeps reading.

“It’s especially easy for our plans to fall apart where other people are concerned. We want the people we love to behave just so. Maybe we even think it’s possible to change how they act, by force of will.”

I look over at Anna, biting her nails. Next to her, Caleb jiggles his leg up and down, his hand gripping his knee so tightly it looks like it might hurt. Marcus sits with his chin in his hands, his dark eyes tired.

“Even though our wishes for these people come from a good place—because we care about them and want the best for them—trying to help control their actions ends up being difficult for everyone.”

This is the kind of thing I hear from the support group that doesn’t make sense. If we aren’t trying to help the people we’re here for, what’s the point of coming?

“The only actions we can possibly control are our own. And we can’t find peace until we let go of trying to control someone else.”

Nari stops, then puts the paper down.

“Thanks, Nari, for that reading,” Sharon says. “Let’s sit with it. Take a moment to think about those words. They aren’t easy, are they?”

A couple of chairs down, I hear someone mutter, “Definitely not.” Which is exactly what I’m thinking. Doesn’t Andy need somebody to help him control his actions?

Silence fills the room and I do what Sharon says. I sit with it. The words burrow under my skin and itch.

Then Marcus clears his throat. “I get it, but I don’t,” he says. “It just seems like if my dad really cared about me at all, he’d stop drinking. Like it wouldn’t be that hard. But he hasn’t stopped. So then, why doesn’t he care about me? Like, what am I supposed to do to make that happen?” Anger burns in his voice, and underneath it’s like a paper cut: sharp and painful.

Nobody answers. Marcus’s questions hang in the air. “My dad always wants to watch the sports channel,” he says. “And even though he drinks when he does it, I watch it too. I don’t even like football or basketball, even though now I know all the stupid rules because I’ve watched so many times, waiting for him to talk to me. He can probably tell I don’t like the games that much, though. Maybe if I liked them more, he would like me more.”

I watch Sharon watch Marcus, her eyes full and warm and reaching somehow, like she wants to wrap Marcus in a hug but all she can do is listen for as long as he needs her to.

Marcus shouldn’t have to like football or basketball. Maybe everyone else is thinking the same thing and filling all the cracks in Marcus’s voice, because he shakes his head suddenly and his face, usually still as a pond, pinches and twists. “No,” he says. “When I listen to myself say it out loud, I know that can’t be it. That’s not it at all.”

He leans back in his chair, slumped a little, but his eyes have more light in them now.

Sharon waits another beat, but Marcus doesn’t say anything else. “Thanks, Marcus,” she says, and we all echo her.

Silence again. The clock on the wall ticks, and my heart beats. Words tangle in my chest, too deep for even me to hear. I just know they’re there.

“I thought I could change my sister,” Nari says.

Her voice, ringing into the room, sounds different than it did when she said hi. It’s even more confident. Full of purpose.

“Seriously, I tried everything.” Nari looks at the paper, turns it over in her hands. “Tagging along to do the things she liked. Leaving her alone. Writing her notes. Getting mad at her. None of it helped.”

Nari looks around the room, her eyes finding Marcus and Caleb and Anna and kids whose names I’ve forgotten.

“My sister used to be awesome,” Nari continues. “Seriously, the coolest. She was super-funny and the only person I wanted to see when I was having a horrible day. She talked me through so much drama with friends, especially when everyone started getting weird in fifth grade—oh my gosh, I can’t even tell you.”

Nari shakes her head and looks up at the ceiling, her smile stretching wide like thinking about her sister that way makes everything good again.

“I learned to play guitar because of my sister. She’s an amazing singer and I thought it would be so cool to perform, like as a duo. A girl band, sort of. I got pretty good. We would practice in her room, with songs she wrote. She wanted to go on the road together, like during summer vacations—I think she almost kind of convinced Mom and Dad to drive our tour bus, and that’s impressive, because I have no idea how they’d ever take time off from work.”

I imagine Nari and an older sister I’ve never met hurtling down mountain roads, singing out the windows.

“When she overdosed, I wondered what I could have done differently. Should I have practiced with her more? Or less? Did I care too much about the band, put pressure on her? Did I annoy her? I thought these things all the time. It made me so tired.”

Everyone’s looking at Nari, but with different expressions: Marcus relieved, Anna nervous, Caleb hopeful.

“Then she had to go to jail.” Nari’s face tightens, and she squeezes her hands together. “That was hard.” Her voice sounds so quiet at first I think she’ll stop talking, but then she shares more. “Afterward my parents spent all this money to ship her off to some horse camp down in Connecticut that’s supposed to help, but she had to go by herself, she couldn’t even call us, and at that point I guess I kind of realized, yeah, okay, it’s not about me. And it’s not because of me.” Nari lets out a breath and her shoulders relax. Her voice is steady. “She seems to be doing better now, but not because of anything I did. Just like she wasn’t doing worse because of anything I did.”

Horse camp? Jail?! I try to absorb everything else Nari said, but I’m stuck thinking about what else we might have in common. I feel the heat from the sparrows’ fluttering wings rising up the back of my neck and to my forehead.

“Okay, that’s all I wanted to say,” she says more softly. “For now.”

Nari stands up and hands the paper to Sharon. When she turns back to her seat, her eyes look calm and still as bare fields.

“Thanks, Nari,” we say.

Usually, when the meeting ends, I run up the stairs and out the door. But this time, as Sharon closes, I take a deep breath and turn to Nari.

“Hey,” I say. “That was cool, what you shared.”

“Oh, thanks.” She lifts her backpack to her shoulder. “Once I started talking, I couldn’t really stop. It was kind of weird.”

“It was interesting,” I say. “I can’t believe your sister had to go to jail.”

“I haven’t talked to her much about it,” Nari says. “I’m not sure I want to.”

I decide to change the subject. “I was wondering—what horse camp were you talking about?”

“It’s this camp that’s specifically for teenagers who’ve had issues with addiction,” she says. “And their whole thing, like their way of dealing with it, has to do with horses. It’s called… what’s that word that means horse, but starts with an e?”

“Equine,” I say. “It actually came from an older Latin word: Equus, which basically means an animal in the horse family.” My throat immediately burns. Why did I even say that? Nari won’t care.

But she smiles. “It’s cool that you know that. Equus. So yeah, it’s equine therapy. That’s what they do at the camp.”

“How does it help?” I mean, I know how Sunny and Sam help me. I know how I feel when I step into the barn, how the sparrows fly so far away I can’t feel them at all. I never thought about how other people could feel that way too.

“Well, I guess Pia—that’s my sister—really likes it,” Nari says. “They started by having her learn to take care of the horses every day, feeding and brushing and things like that. She learned about riding too. According to my parents, they watch how she interacts with the horses and use that to figure out what’s going on and how to help.”

“That sounds right,” I say. “You can’t really hide stuff from a horse. They sense everything.”

Nari cocks her head and looks at me. “You know about that, huh?”

“We own two horses.” I smile just thinking about Sunny and Sam, how even the way their jaws crunch as they eat hay and grain sounds peaceful.

“Pia loves them so much now, she wants to have one at home,” Nari says. “But we live in town, so that won’t work, and boarding them is really expensive. My parents just poured all this money into the camp too—it’s totally impossible to think about owning a horse.”

“Can I have your number?” I blurt out. But as soon as I’ve said the words, warm wind rushes to my face. I don’t want to scare Nari away. I try to swallow the words back, but instead, more come out. “I could show you our horses.”

The wind blows hotter, but Nari doesn’t seem to notice. “Hanging out would be fun,” she says, pulling out her phone and stilling the air around me. I type my number into the text message she opens, and we record each other as new contacts. “But honestly, between you and me? I’m kind of scared of horses.”

“Seriously?” I try not to sound too surprised, but it never occurred to me that horses could be scary.

“They’re really… I don’t know.” Nari looks to the side, then back at me. She shrugs her shoulders. “Big?”

We both start laughing at the same time.

“Saying it out loud sounds weird,” she says, smiling. “But they’re scary, okay?”

I shake my head. “Sunny and Sam are big, but they aren’t scary. If you met them, you’d see.”

A new idea starts to sprout inside, just a tiny one, so small I can barely feel its little leaves bursting. By the time Nari waves goodbye as she starts walking downtown while I wait for Dad’s truck to curve around the road and stop for me, my idea’s a flower, full and sweet.

Equine therapy. Not only is it the perfect addition to my project, since it shows that horses can still be really useful, but it could give my family exactly what we need: Mom and Dad another source of money, Andy a reason to come home, and me my horses.