I can’t find my cat.
I’m crouched and searching under the bed when I hear Rebecca’s voice from outside my open window.
“You’re leaving.” It’s not a question.
I swear and turn around so fast I almost lose my footing. Straightening, I avoid meeting her gaze as my eyes travel past her to a packed bag on the ground beside her.
“Just like that? Were you even going to say goodbye? Or was I going to wake up to another note?”
How many of those did I leave over the years? Hastily scribbled flower sketches meant to say what I didn’t have the words for then any more than I do now.
She doesn’t wait for my answer, just spins her chair around.
“Wait! Rebecca, wait.” I scramble out the window, swearing when my foot catches on the ledge and sends me sprawling into a hedge of rosebushes below. Faint red lines appear up my forearms as I jerk away from the thorns, and a small dark shape shoots away.
I turn my anger on the cat. “Now you show up?”
“You have a cat?”
“I have an Old Man and he’s an asshole who likes to randomly attack things, people. Butterflies.” Except he doesn’t look like he’s about to claw Rebecca’s face off when he jumps up onto her lap and bumps his head into her hand.
“Doesn’t seem like an asshole to me.”
“Yeah, well, he’s probably still confused by the new location.”
Her mouth twists. “Guess it’s good he’s going back with you then. Here.” She scoops up the cat, ready to be done with this night and me.
Instead of taking Old Man, I move around to get in front of her. “Stop for one second and let me explain.”
“Explain what? That I happened to see you leaving otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten this touching goodbye moment?” She makes a disgusted sound in her throat. “You’re here one day and I’m already sneaking out for you. Look, I’ll make it easy for you. It was good seeing you again, Ethan, better than good.” Her voice cracks. “I kind of thought you’d stay longer this time. Every time you go away—” She lifts one shoulder along with one corner of her mouth. “But I get it, okay? Now take your cat.”
“No, you don’t.” And she should, I realize. “I don’t know what I was going to do about saying goodbye because I hadn’t thought that far. All I know is that my grandparents just told me my mom checked herself out of rehab and took off.”
Rebecca’s expression shifts from hurt to concern as her hand reaches out for mine.
I shift away, not wanting her to touch me when I know I have to leave. I step back so she doesn’t have to tilt her head so far to meet my gaze. “They didn’t even tell me when it happened so now she could be...”
“Anywhere. I’m sorry, Ethan.” She takes a deep breath. “So you’re what, going to find her?”
“What else can I do?”
“And you have a lead? Someone who saw her?”
I shake my head as various “anywhere” possibilities splash vividly across my mind. Anywhere means way more to me than it does to Rebecca.
“You know a place she’d go? Someone she’d stay with?”
My hands are in my hair, half pulling, half pushing, but the thoughts that keep coming are each worse than the last.
My mom walking alone down a street toward the wrong person.
My mom choking on her own vomit on the floor while some asshole trips beside her.
My mom on a metal table with a sheet drawn up over her.
“All day out there on her own. It’s too long, too long.”
“I know, but Ethan...” Her voice is a caress. I stop pacing and look at her. “I don’t think you should go.”
I feel that too, not soft but stinging. “What?”
She wheels closer to me and Old Man abandons her lap for my windowsill. “Hear me out, okay?”
That’s what I’d asked from her and she’d still tried to leave. There’s a part of me that wants to throw her own actions back at her. It’s what I would have done before, and it’s a near thing now, but I don’t.
“How are you planning to get there?”
I pull my new keys out of my pocket and explain about the car my grandfather is going to let me work off.
Her eyes are sad when she returns my gaze. “You’re going to take a car you haven’t paid for yet?”
My jaw clenches and I stare down at the keys to a vehicle that suddenly feels like a payoff. I wind up and hurl them through my open window, earning a yowl from Old Man as they whizz a good foot away from him. I’m not about to hurt my cat. He jumps down outside and makes his way back to Rebecca’s lap.
“So I’ll take the bus.”
Her eyes don’t leave my face. “You have enough money for that? What about a place to stay once you get there? And food? And what about him?” She starts petting Old Man. “Will they let him on the bus? What about—”
Her questions fly at me like arrows I can’t deflect and as each one pierces me, I get angrier. When I sneer it’s not meant for her, at least I don’t think it is. “Stop! Okay? Stop. I don’t know. She’s my mom. She’s gone and if I’d been there I could have stopped her. You don’t understand. It’s—”
“Your fault?” Rebecca’s smile slices across her face like a blade.
“I didn’t mean it like that.” Except maybe I did. I feel vicious right now and I don’t want to be that way around her. None of this is her fault. “You haven’t told me much about two years ago.”
“And I’m not going to now.” There’s a rasp in her voice that tells me she might never share everything about the night her world changed forever. “But I do understand and you know it.” She understands that kind of guilt in a way that I pray I never will.
I feel like I should say I’m sorry, but I don’t. I look away from her gaze that has grown way too steady on mine. “Look, I’ll figure it out. But I have to find her. I have to—”
“Go? How do you even start looking for her with no money, no car, and no place to stay?”
An angry sound tears from my throat. Rebecca wheels closer to me. Or she tries. The brick walkway stops and she’s forced to, as well. Her hands tighten until her knuckles turn white on her push rims, but that’s the only giveaway of her true emotions.
Automatically, I move to close the distance she couldn’t and I drop to sit on the brick beside her, my shoulders even with her waist. “Bec, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I can’t do nothing.”
“I’m not asking you to. But taking off like this?” She shakes her head. “That doesn’t help either of you.”
“I don’t care about me.”
Her eyes flutter, almost shutting, and her knuckles turn even whiter. “Yeah, but I do. So if you have to find her, I’ll help you.”