“Fuck,” he mumbles under his breath. “Gimme two minutes.” The door slams, guilt tingeing the edges of my pain. I shouldn’t manipulate him like that, but he’s my brother. Her son. Mom and I both need him. She can’t help that she fell apart after what Dad did.
Realizing I forgot my phone, I grab it and the car keys, and I’m pacing the living room when Maddox comes out, his dark hair all disheveled. He doesn’t look me in the eyes. He’s pissed and I know he knows what I did.
We head out to the car and I drive us to the hospital because I don’t trust him to do it when he’s mad. He likes to go too fast and the last thing we need is to get into an accident on the way.
I’m shivering by the time we walk through the hospital doors and only part of it is from the cold. Maddox isn’t wearing a jacket, even though it’s a frigid cold January in Virginia.
“We’re here to see Beatrice Cross,” I tell the desk clerk. Maddox doesn’t step up beside me. He has his arms crossed about five feet away from me.
“Are you family?” the clerk asks.
“Yes. We’re her children.”
She puts bands on each of our wrists and directs us where to go, as if we don’t know where the ER is. We could find anywhere in this place.
I’m not surprised when my eyes pool over again. No matter how many times this happens or how many times she slips back into her depression, it doesn’t get easier.
Right before we leave the sterile white hallway and head for the emergency room, Maddox grabs my wrist.
“Don’t cry for her, Laney. Don’t cry for either of them.”
Maddox is so much older than his twenty-one years. He’s always been the strong one and both of us know it. It’s not that simple for me. My mom just tried to take her own life. My dad is in prison and my brother—my best friend—hates the world.
“Why did this happen to us?” I ask. He grabs me and pulls me into his arms, letting me cry into his chest.
I can feel his awkwardness as he holds me. He’s not real big on affection and it makes me feel like crap that he has to console me again. But that’s what he does. He hates it, but he tries to make everything better. Mom couldn’t take care of stuff, so Maddox did. He’s still doing it.
“I don’t know,” is all he says. Honestly, I’m a little surprised I got that much out of him.
“We need to go see her.” I wipe my eyes with my sweatshirt.
Maddox nods at me, but before we can go in, a nurse stops us. As soon as I tell her who we are, she gets that small smile on her face that says she feels bad for us, but she’s trying not to let it show.
“Let me get the doctor first, okay? She wants to speak to you.” She disappears behind the sliding doors, the sound echoing through the halls. The emergency room is quiet tonight and I almost wish for more people around to distract us.
Right away, the door slides open again. A woman with graying hair, wearing the same smile as the nurse, comes out. “You’re Ms. Cross’s children?”
“Yes.” Of course it’s only me who answers.
She leads us over to a small room with a couch. Goose bumps blanket my skin the second we walk in. It reminds me of the place they take family members to let them know when someone has passed away.
She’s okay… she’s okay. They would have told me if she wasn’t.
“As I told you on the phone, your mom overdosed on pills. Some of them seem to be medications that have been prescribed to her, but we’re not sure if that’s all she took.”
Oh God. Has she been buying pills illegally? How did this happen? How did we go from a normal family—with a mom and dad who used to laugh together, a mom who used to love cooking dinner for her family, a brother who could have gotten a football scholarship, and me, who was just happy to have the people I loved close—to this? “Okay…”
“She’s sleeping right now, but she’s been in and out of it. You need to know that she’s still a threat to herself. She…” The doctor pauses for a second before sighing. “She’s continued to say she wants to die and she attacked one of the nurses. I just want you to be prepared when you go in. We had to strap her down for everyone’s safety.”
A cry climbs up my throat and I clamp my mouth closed, hoping it won’t be able to escape. Why aren’t we good enough to make her want to stay? I don’t understand her not wanting to be with me. With Maddox.
My brother’s hand comes down on my shoulder and he gives it a comforting squeeze. No matter how angry he is, he’s always here for me. I hate how all of this has scarred his soul.
“Where do we go from here?” Maddox asks her, but I want to be the one who’s angry now. I want to yell that we’ve been through enough. That I’m eighteen f**king years old and Maddox only twenty-one. We’re not supposed to be dealing with this. We’re supposed to be in college and going home for long weekends instead of being alone.
“We did a psych consult and we think it’s best that she be admitted to our inpatient ward. It’s a thirty-day stay. They’ll be able to help her better there. I would hate for her to be in a situation where she’s able to hurt herself further or, God forbid, someone else.”
It feels like a fist squeezing my chest so tight it shatters my ribs, shatters everything inside me, but I just want to be whole. Why can’t we all be whole again?
I look at Maddox and he’s emotionally gone again. His hand is still on me, but the rest of him looks as though he’s checked out, leaving me alone.
“Okay… I agree. Can we see her now?” Is it bad that part of me doesn’t want to? That I’m scared to death to walk in there and see her? To risk that her anger will come out at me like it always does.
“Of course. Follow me.”
I know before he stops me that Maddox isn’t going. His eyes that look so much like mine soften as though he’s trying to tell me he’s sorry—words he’ll never say out loud.
“It’s okay,” I tell him, but really it’s not. I need him and he knows it. Mom needs him. We both know she’d rather it be Maddox with her than me.
My legs tremble slightly as I walk into the room. She looks so small in the bed. Her blond hair, so different from my dark brown, is stringy and matted. I just saw her two days ago. Two days and she didn’t look like this.
“Hey, Mom,” I say. The doctor is gone, leaving me alone in the room with her. Gray cloth shackles keep her hands tied to the metal on her bed, almost covering the scars on her wrists from the first time. The time I held her while she bled.
Of course, she doesn’t answer.
I stand next to her bed and touch her hair, but then pull back, afraid to wake her. Instead, I stand there wishing I would wake up and we’d be the family we were four years ago before everything changed. Before my dad got drunk and, while his girlfriend went down on him, drove into a yard and killed a little boy. Before we found out about his gambling and the other women. I guess we were never the typical family I thought we were. That isn’t true either. I knew that even then, when Mom would get pissed at me for spending time with Dad and Maddox stopped playing ball with him.
Tears roll down my cheeks in synchronized wave after wave, like a crowd at a football game. Maybe one of Maddox’s old games.
I think of the woman, Angel, who I visited a few weeks ago.
The pain in her eyes when I told her who I was. But also the forgiveness she showed even though my father took away her little boy.
Maddox hates the idea bogging down my brain, but I don’t know what else to do. Maybe the only way to end our family’s suffering is to continue to make amends, the same way I did with Angel.
Chapter Three
~Adrian~
“Party at my house. Are you in this time or does Cheyenne have that collar too tight around your neck?” I ask my best friend, Colt, when I sit on the chair in his studio apartment. He hooked up with his girl Cheyenne not too long back. She’s good people. Loves his ass something fierce. She didn’t leave his side while he watched his mom die or when we almost lost Colt the same night.
A little flash of Colt on the ground jumps into my head, so I pull a pipe out of my pocket and fill my lungs with smoke, hoping the high will cloud it away. Too close to home, except unlike with Colt, when it was Ashton there was blood. So much f**king blood.
Colt falls onto the bed, on the other side of his place. “Don’t talk shit about her, f**ker, or I’ll kick your ass.”
I smile at him because I expected him to say something like that. The cool thing about them is he loves her just as much as she loves him. She’s changed him and I don’t think he even realizes how much. I might give him hell, but I’m happy. One of us deserves that bullshit storybook ending.
“Don’t look at me like that. I hate it when you give me that dissecting look like you’re trying to pull out all my f**king secrets.”
I tap my head and play that stupid psychic game that he likes to give me hell about.
I don’t see the future; I just notice shit. When you’re seven years old and scared of your own f**king shadow, too scared to get close to anyone like I used to be, you learn to pay attention. To study people’s lives because it’s the only way to feel like you’re living and to think about how differently you’d be doing it if you had the balls to man up. Or, hell, if you hadn’t been given such a shitty hand to begin with.
“You know I’m just playin’ about Cheyenne. And I’d be more afraid of her than you,” I tease, putting the pipe to my mouth before taking another pull. I hold it out to Colt, knowing he’ll say no. He found his solace in Cheyenne and I have as close to it as I’ll ever get right here.
Colt shakes his head. “I have shit to do. I’ll talk to Chey about tonight. You act like having a party is something new. It’s just like every other night, right?”
Yeah, except for tonight I’m trying to forget watching my sister cry over Ash’s grave. Trying to forget I didn’t have the balls to go to her. That I watched him die.