I wake up the next morning to a splitting headache from not sleeping and a missed call from Bauer. A week ago, I’d have dived for the phone, frantic for the possibility of news about my mom. But now I just stare down at the screen.
She never called me when she was gone. It was always all or nothing, silence until she showed up. Is that what she’s planning to do again this time? Knock on the door one day and tell me to get my stuff? And I’ll have to go because I always do. Last night my eyes snapped open every time I tried to shut them because Rebecca was right. Wanting things to be different doesn’t change anything. But she’s wrong too. I’m not a kid getting bounced back and forth between my mom and grandparents. I’m done letting them do that. Back then all I wanted was to protect my mom, but I want something else now too. Something I’m done walking away from.
So I won’t go. When my mom shows up again promising a fresh start, I’ll make mine too, and it won’t be with her. The headache almost recedes for as long as it takes to revel in that huge decision for myself, but surges back the second I try to set the phone aside without hearing Bauer’s message. My whole life I’ve lived with fear and worry for her and wanting to stop those feelings from ruling me isn’t the same as being able to. I squeeze the phone so tight I expect hairline cracks to slice across the screen when I tap to play the voicemail:
“Hey, kid. Checking in to see if you’ve heard anything about Joy. I put some more feelers out but nothing yet. Hoping you had better luck. Let me know. Also you reading anything good? I owe you a shit ton of amends and I was thinking I could send you some books or a bike! You said I never sold yours but I feel like I did and—”
I stop the voicemail and toss my phone on the bed before swearing a little too loudly into my hands.
A second later there’s a knock at my door. “Ethan?” Concern touches my grandmother’s voice. “Everything okay?”
“I’m fine!” I smother a groan before adding that I just have a headache and hope she’ll go away.
No such luck. A minute later she knocks again. “I brought you some aspirin.”
“I don’t like pills,” I tell my closed door. “Of any kind.”
There’s a moment of silence, then, “Could you please open the door?”
My head throbs as I stand. If she’d pounded her fist or given me an order, I’d have kicked my feet up and not even bothered to answer, but I can’t ignore that simple request no matter how much I’d like to.
I walk back to the bed after opening the door and sit down without looking to see if she followed. But then the mattress dips beside me and her cool hand brushes the hair back from my forehead. I pull away from the touch leaving her raised hand and pained expression hovering between us.
“You understand there’s a difference though.” She lowers her hand to the tiny white bottle she’s holding. “Taking medicine for a headache isn’t the same as...” She trails off and I’m not sure if she’s trying to be sensitive for my sake or she’d rather not think of all the ways she could finish that sentence.
“It all starts somewhere,” I tell her. I’m sure my mom started with popping painkillers too. I don’t know when she stepped up to snorting OxyContin, morphine, and Dilaudid, but I know it all led to her on the floor of our apartment with a needle between her toes because I would notice new track marks on her arms. “I’m choosing not to start at all.”
My grandmother’s light brown eyes pass over my face before she sighs. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Her words force me to pull back even more than her touch.
“Making you come here when we did. We should have let you stay a day or two, maybe gotten to visit her.”
“That’s what you’re sorry for?” I say, my jaw hardening. “You took me away my entire life, why should this time be any different?” I glance down at her painkillers. “You know she gave me stuff a lot stronger than that when I got hurt as a kid. One time she even—” I break off when I look up and see my grandmother’s face has gone as white as my sheets.
I fall silent. I’d wanted to hurt her, cause her a little of the pain she and my grandfather had caused me, but I didn’t think about how it would feel to actually do it.
“It was only a couple of times. And always near her rock bottom where she realized she needed to bring me to you guys. And I’m fine,” I add, when, if anything, more color leaches from her face with every new word I say. “I’ve never touched anything on my own and I never will.”
She starts crying then, soft, pitiful sounds that give way to body-wracking sobs. The aspirin bottle slips from her fingers and rolls across the floor toward the doorway.
My grandfather comes charging into my room then, eyes his crying wife and me sitting block still beside her. I scramble up off the corner of the bed when he swoops forward, but he doesn’t spare more than a glance in my direction. She turns into his shoulder, crying harder when he pulls her into his arms.
“Should have... What did we do?” she says through broken sobs. “So wrong...so wrong.”
I don’t know what to do so I stay pressed against the wall as I move toward the door, grabbing only my phone before hurrying down the hall and outside.