Unforgivable

by Amy Reed

  I leave him on the couch to use the bathroom. To say it is filthy would be an understatement. It smells like piss and mildew. The counter of the sink is caked with dirt and hair and soap scum. Black mold surrounds the window. The toilet bowl has a black ring inside, like it hasn’t been washed in years. My shoes stick to the floor. There is no soap to wash my hands, so I rinse them under warm water and wipe them on my pants. No way am I going to touch those towels.

  When I open the door into the living room, David’s bent over the chair where I had been sitting, going through the pockets of my jacket. He takes out my wallet and opens it, pulling out most of the cash and a Starbucks gift card. I say nothing. He puts the wallet back in my pocket, lies back down on the couch, and closes his eyes. I wait a few more moments before entering the room, so he won’t know I saw him.

  “I’m going to head out,” I say.

  “All right.” David opens his eyes and reaches for his pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. “See you later, little brother.” Like nothing. Like he doesn’t know what he did.

  I know suddenly there is no coming back from this. I know David is lost for good. Whatever I thought I’ve been doing—waiting for him to get better, to snap out of it, to come back to me—that is never going to happen. He’s lying in his deathbed, and I’m his loyal attendant, holding his hand while he dies.

  David doesn’t even take the Narcotics Anonymous pamphlets I brought for him. He turns his head back to the television and leaves me standing here with my arm outstretched. I haven’t seen him move from the couch in days. If he eats or goes to the bathroom, it’s before I arrive or after I leave. He certainly hasn’t taken a shower recently. The apartment smells like someone getting ready to die.

  “Come on,” I say, throwing the pamphlets on the filthy coffee table. “Won’t you at least read them?”

  “Nope,” he says, switching the channel from one daytime talk show to another.

  “I’m trying to help you.”

  “That’s very nice of you, Marcus, but no help needed. Thank you. Have a nice day. Will you look at this shit?”

  The TV is turned to a show about eating disorders. A girl my age sits on a stage with her crying mother. She can’t weigh more than eighty pounds.

  “People are so fucking crazy,” David says, with absolutely no irony.

  “Will you at least take a shower?”

  “Jesus, Marcus,” David says, finally looking at me. “Get a fucking life and stop trying to control mine. You’re getting to be as bad as Dad.”

  “I care about you,” I say. “I’m worried about you.”

  He looks me in the eyes, his lips curled into a sneer, exposing brown, rotted teeth. He reminds me more of a dog than my brother. A stray. Something feral. A fighting dog.

  “Marcus, you’re fucking pathetic,” he says, and my blood drains out of my head and arms and legs, into my chest, where it weighs dark and heavy.

  “David—” I begin, but he cuts me off.

  “You’ve been following me around your whole life,” he says. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”

  “I’m trying to help. I—”

  “I don’t need your fucking help! How many times do I have to say it before it gets through your stupid head? I don’t need you. I don’t want you here.”

  “David—”

  “Leave.”

  “I just—”

  “Fucking leave, Marcus!”

  I turn around before he can see the tears stinging my eyes. I walk out before he can say anything else. I leave, like he told me to. Just like everyone else.

  I keep expecting to look at my phone and see a text from David asking to borrow money, to bring over some toilet paper, to buy him a burger. But days go by with nothing. Then weeks. I do everything I can think of, smoke everything I have, so I won’t think about him festering in that apartment. But nothing eliminates my worry. I know I’m losing him. My brother, my one and only friend.

  I keep texting. I keep calling. I say I want to see him. I say I’m sorry, but I’m not even sure what I’m apologizing for. I am too happy to receive his sporadic short, cryptic texts back. I am grateful for his lies about being busy. At least I know he’s alive.

  Something is my fault, I know it. I failed him. My guilt fuses with fear and love, and it’s getting harder and harder to tell the three apart.

  So when David finally texts asking me to let him come over one night when Dad is working late in the city, I say yes. He tells me he wants to grab a few things from his old room, but I know what he’s really there to do.

  I sit in the kitchen while he roots around upstairs. After twenty minutes or so, he comes back down, his backpack bulging with things he’s not supposed to have. I tell myself he took things like Dad’s cuff links and watches, some electronics, harmless things made out of money. I don’t think about other possibilities. I pretend I don’t know what else Dad has. I pretend I don’t notice the feeling in the pit of my stomach that tonight has set in motion something I will never be able to stop.

  I drive him back to his apartment without mentioning any of the things that are spinning around in my head, nothing about the loneliness that threatens to swallow me up every night when I’m home alone in my room, nothing about the box where I keep my drugs and razor blades, nothing about the net of scars that’s growing on my shoulder, nothing about the infinite layers of pain that I can’t get to the bottom of no matter how deep I cut. The person I want to talk to isn’t there, hasn’t been there for a long time. He’s a skeleton with skin, inflated with smoke.

  here.

  I MEET MOM AT A COFFEE SHOP ON FOURTH STREET IN Berkeley, which is a very different scene from the places I usually hang out. This place is populated mostly by rich moms from the hills, surrounded by shopping bags from upscale boutiques as they sip their soy chais. Mom used to do a lot of damage on this street, when shopping and drinking were her only hobbies. I wonder if she’s gained any other hobbies in the two years since she left.

  “What are you going to get?” she asks me, trying too hard to appear relaxed and chipper. The side of her mouth twitches.

  I look at the menu, drawn in careful calligraphy on the wall behind the counter. Maybe the new me should try to eat something besides the usual burritos and snacks and pastries I live on. There’s something called a Green Power Smoothie that costs nine dollars. Mom’s paying, so I get that.

  We sit at a table by the window. Mom holds her coffee cup with both hands, as if she’s freezing and trying to warm up. I take a sip of the smoothie and nearly gag. It tastes like grass and seaweed.

  “This is disgusting,” I say. “I’m going to get a chocolate croissant.”

  Mom pulls bills out of her wallet and shoves them at me. “Is this enough? I have more if you need it. Get anything you want.”

  I take the money. I want to tell her to stop trying so hard. No amount of money is going to make me forgive her.

  When I get back, Mom is deep in thought. “So?” I say with my mouth full of croissant, savoring the more familiar flavors of butter and sugar.

  “I’m so happy you changed your mind and agreed to talk to me,” she says. She is looking down at her coffee. Her fingers cross and uncross.

  “Everyone deserves a second chance, right?” Did that really come out of my mouth?

  Mom looks up at me, her eyes wet with the beginning of tears, and I feel a dull surge of anger. She has no right to be sad. She’s the one who fucked up. If anyone should be sad, it’s me.

  “God, I can’t start crying already,” she says, wiping her eyes. “I haven’t even started yet. My sponsor thinks it’s too soon, but I need to do this.” She takes a deep breath, and I prepare myself for whatever’s about to come. “There’s a lot I need to tell you,” she begins. “To make amends. I don’t expect you to ever forgive me for leaving. But I want you to understand. Regardless of how you feel about me, I hope at least you won’t have this weighing on your heart.”

  “Did you rehear
se this?” I say.

  She laughs. “Yeah. Like a million times.”

  “I can tell.”

  “That bad?”

  I shrug. Honestly, I’d say the fact that I’m still sitting here listening to her means she’s doing pretty well. But I’m not going to tell her that.

  “First of all,” she continues, “I need you to know that I never wanted to leave you, Marcus. I was leaving your father. I was leaving a version of myself that I hated.”

  “But I was collateral damage?” I say. The old, dull anger weighing in my chest turns a little sharper.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “What about David? Were you leaving him?” It seems so strange saying his name out loud in front of her—illicit, forbidden—as if naming him will unleash some sort of dark magic.

  She looks away, takes a sip of her coffee. “In some ways, yes,” she finally says, her voice surprisingly strong. “I guess you could say that. Our relationship wasn’t healthy.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “I was suffocating. I was extremely depressed, suicidal even, and I was very much an alcoholic. Am an alcoholic. I’ve been sober nine months now, but it’s a disease I will always have. That’s part of why I’m here, making these amends. It’s part of my recovery.”

  “How nice for you.”

  She flinches. “I’m trying to make things right. I’ll do anything to make things right.”

  “So you think taking me out for coffee and apologizing is going to make things right?” I can feel my anger boiling, rising in my throat. Cruel words burn in my mouth.

  “Of course not. But it’s a start. It’s the first step in healing.”

  “Step, huh? Is that an AA thing? So what’s the next step?”

  I wait for her answer while she takes another deep breath. “I’m thinking of moving back,” she says. “I want to go back to school to get my master’s in social work.”

  “You can’t do that in Seattle?”

  “I was hoping I could be part of your life again. In this year before you go off to college.”

  I taste the bitter green of the smoothie in my throat. “Maybe it’s too late for that.” My voice is acid, sharp, burning.

  I can tell she’s using all her strength to not cry, to not make a scene. Such a change from the mother I remember, whose feelings were always so careless and out of control, bursting out of her and making a mess with no regard for who would have to step in it. She nods and looks me in the eyes and for a moment I see the woman before that, the one from my childhood, the mother who took us on adventures, the person I thought had to be the most beautiful woman in the world.

  “But maybe it’s not,” she says. “Maybe it’s not too late.”

  I don’t know what I’m feeling, if there’s a name for this mix of resentment and nostalgia and hope, for this glimmer of love breaking through my tornado of anger and confusion.

  No. A few words at a coffee shop cannot undo years of damage. A half-assed apology cannot make up for the fact that she left me, left David when he needed her most. She hasn’t explained anything. She is nowhere near off the hook.

  “Why did you leave?” I say.

  “I told you,” she says. “I was miserable.”

  “That’s not enough. A lot of moms are miserable, but they don’t leave.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s, like, against nature or something. Dads leave, not moms.”

  “I know.”

  “How does a mother leave her own kids?” My voice breaks, whether in sadness or anger, I can’t tell. But my throat feels like it’s going to close up.

  “I don’t know.” She is shrunken, gone. “I don’t know how I did it.” She is a shell.

  “If you’re going to do something like that, you have to have a reason.”

  “I couldn’t love anymore.” Now the tears are coming. Now her voice is thick with them.

  “You couldn’t love us?”

  “I couldn’t love anyone.”

  “You loved David.”

  She makes a sound like a whimper, then says, “David used up my love until there wasn’t any left.”

  “You blame him now? I thought you blamed Dad.”

  She shakes her head. “I couldn’t save David. That’s the only thing I knew I had to do, and I couldn’t do it.”

  “There were plenty of other things you had to do, Mom. David wasn’t the only one who needed you.”

  She nods. She swallows. “I was dead, Marcus. I wanted to die.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I guess it runs in the family.” I have never wanted to hurt anyone more in my life.

  “Marcus, you have no idea how hard it was for me. How hard it’s been living with that guilt and shame. I can’t sleep at night.” She is weeping now. Finally, she is making a scene. She is making this all about her.

  There she is. There’s the mother I know.

  “You have no idea how much I missed you both. I knew it was all my fault, and that hurt so much. This last year has been so hard. You have no idea—”

  “Okay, you can stop now,” I say. “I don’t need to hear any more.”

  “Oh, Marcus,” she weeps. “I know there’s no excuse for what I did, but I want to make it up to you. I’ll do anything.”

  People look at us with annoyance more than concern. How dare we disturb their right to an expensive coffee break? Who is this black boy making this pretty white lady cry?

  “Mom, stop crying. You’re making a scene. You’re embarrassing yourself. This is pathetic.”

  She stops crying. She sniffles. She looks up at me with a sudden clarity in her eyes. She says, “You sound just like your father.”

  That’s when I storm out and leave.

  “Marcus, wait!” she calls, but I don’t even turn around.

  She made a choice and she’s going to have to live with it. Family isn’t just something you have on reserve, ready to be in your life when you’re ready for it. She can’t leave, then decide she wants a kid again as soon as it becomes convenient. Maybe she’s lonely, maybe she thinks she’s figured herself out, maybe she thinks she’s ready to be a mother again, as if nine months sober is enough to change everything about who she is.

  I am done. My heart is so full of pain and betrayal, there is no room for forgiveness. I have already accepted that I do not have a mother, and I am not going back. I sure as hell am not going to risk getting hurt again while she tests some desperate new theory that maybe, just maybe, she can try to love me as much as she loved David.

  there.

  PEOPLE COME TO DAVID’S FUNERAL WHO NEVER MET HIM—Dad’s colleagues, people who want to be Dad’s colleagues. It is a networking event, and he is the perfect politician. He never breaks character, neither smiles nor cries. He accepts the long line of condolences with serious grace. He is a man beyond suffering.

  I mostly sleep through the service. A priest I’ve never even met describes a made-up version of my brother, someone I don’t know, someone who had become a stranger, someone I hadn’t seen for a long time. The David he talks about, the one everyone wants to remember and the only one we’re acknowledging today, is the David that was long gone, way before he died, the one I have already gotten used to missing.

  I wake to an organ blaring weird syrupy music, just in time to follow my dad out of the chapel and into the lobby. I am stoned out of my mind and barely able to stand beside him as people take turns shaking our hands. I am glad for the hugs because in those small moments, I can rely on someone else to keep me upright.

  I say “thank you” more times than I can count. Nodding my head takes on its own kind of surreal rhythm. I am finding a kind of peace in the waves of sympathy, but then there’s a rustle in the fabric of the day, some kind of disturbance in the corner of my view, voices raised, people moving, an added electricity in the air.

  “Jesus Christ,” I hear Dad say under his breath. “Fucking hell.”

  And then I see her. M
om. Weaving through the crowd of people, her sister Katy following behind her with arms outstretched, as if she is trying to catch a wandering child. “Renae,” I hear Aunt Katy scold above the din of whispers announcing Mom’s arrival. “This wasn’t a good idea. We should go.”

  “I’m not going,” Mom slurs. “This is my son’s funeral. I have a right to go to my son’s funeral.”

  “Renae, honey,” Mrs. Alsace says, our neighbor from down the street. “The funeral is over. It already happened.” She is speaking gently, in low tones, trying to preserve some kind of dignity for my mom.

  “No,” Mom says, then nearly trips on a bench against the wall. “Who put that there?”

  “Renae,” Dad says in his lowest register. He strides over to where she is standing. The crowd has made a circle of space around her, as if getting too close will contaminate them somehow. My aunt has her hand on Mom’s arm, steadying her.

  “I’m so sorry, Bill,” Aunt Katy says. “She insisted on coming. I thought it would be good for her. We flew down from Seattle early this morning.” Katy looks at my mom, at her disheveled hair and wrinkled blouse, at her empty gaze at her feet. “She had a few drinks on the plane,” she says softly, but there’s no use trying to be discreet. Everyone is silent, still, listening.

  Mom’s not moving. She won’t look up from her feet. I can see the shame in her slumped-over shoulders, in the growing-out roots of her hair, in her purse strap sliding halfway down her arm. Shame radiates from her skin like mist.

  “Renae, it’s time for you to leave,” Dad says. “Our lawyers will be in touch. There’s nothing we need to talk about here.”

  “I want to see my son,” Mom says, her voice as quiet as breath.

  “Your son is dead,” Dad says, and that’s when I finally leave. I make my way through the crowd and out of the building before I have a chance to find out which son she was talking about.

  The church is only a few blocks from my house, so I walk home. The caterers are setting up for the reception, placing beautifully constructed platters of expensive hors d’oeuvres throughout the cold living room. There is nothing here that says death. There’s nothing that says David. This could be a wedding reception or an anniversary party. A bunch of people who didn’t even know David will mingle with glasses of wine. There are only two people who really loved David, and neither of us will be here.