Raze

by Roan Parrish

  Outside the window, a hopeful bird called to another who didn’t answer.

  “But it’s not bouncing off you anymore, is it? You’re absorbing it all. Over the last year or so you’ve seemed…I don’t know, heavier. Like every hit is landing.”

  He put a hand on my forearm.

  “Please hear this. I love you. You’re my dear friend. And I see you hurting yourself. If you were hurting yourself by using again, I’d intervene. I know this isn’t the same. But there are lots of ways to be an addict. You taught me that. So please. This is me intervening. Just think about whether maybe it’s time to step back a little. You’re no good to any of your sponsees if they hurt you by getting your help.”

  Caleb’s words burrowed deep. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had told me they loved me.

  * * *

  —

  When I got back into the city, I went straight to Felix’s apartment. I didn’t want to give myself any time to lose my nerve or second-guess what had been made so clear to me: that I wanted Felix. I wanted him in my life, I wanted him in my bed, I wanted him in my arms, and I needed him to know it. The rest of it I could figure out. But that I knew without a doubt.

  Duffel bag on my shoulder, I knocked on his door for the second time. Only this time, he didn’t answer.

  All the manic intent I’d gathered on the train ride back flooded out of me, leaving me anxious.

  I took the subway to Buggy’s Bagels, wondering why I’d never stopped in to see Felix at work before. He wasn’t there either.

  “He’s off for a few days,” the woman working behind the counter told me when I asked. Then she narrowed her eyes. “You his boyfriend?”

  My stomach twinged with joy that he would’ve mentioned me to a coworker, and I nodded. Then it lurched when she said, “And you don’t know where he is?”

  I squared my shoulders. “Thanks for your time,” I said, and walked out.

  Felix never took days off. If he’d done it now, then either there had been some emergency or he was even more upset than I’d realized. I called him and it went to voicemail. I left a message, asking him to call me.

  Wherever he was, I had to resign myself to waiting for him to make a move.

  * * *

  —

  I couldn’t sleep. No matter how many push-ups I did or how much I benched. No matter how many times I copied the facts from the latest podcasts I’d listened to into my notebook or how many times I crisscrossed the city to meet with sponsees, I couldn’t lie down without my mind racing to replay my fight with Felix. My non-fight. The fight in which he told me he needed me, told me he didn’t know if I liked him, told me I wasn’t living my life…and I said nothing.

  I gave up on sleep the second night after I heard a scuffle of squeaking and scratching from the alley and drifted into the living room, intending to read. I lingered at the window, staring out over the dark street. In the corner was the table I’d set up for Felix to work on dioramas. He’d seemed so excited about it, and had sat here for hours, working on sketches in a notebook, cutting out pieces he might want to use and collecting bits of twigs and rocks and glass from outside. But although he’d gotten inspired by each podcast I listened to, had a hundred ideas of what he could do, he hadn’t actually made a move on any of them.

  It was as if he thought he only had one chance and he had to find the right idea, the perfect idea, before he began. As if he thought I might not get him another box, and another and another, until he’d created every single display he might want.

  You live a diorama life, Felix had said to me.

  I sat down in his chair and looked at the bits and pieces laid out on the table, curious about what he’d intended to do with them, but I didn’t open his notebook because that seemed like an invasion. For weeks, I’d thought that the box was empty, but when I leaned closer, I realized that it wasn’t. Not quite.

  Inside the large box, in the back right corner, was a very small cutout of a man, sitting and looking at something no one else could see. Alone.

  I stared at him for a long time. Then, when morning came, I showered and went to a meeting. But not to any of the meetings I usually went to—not the one nearest me or the three I frequented with different sponsees. I found a meeting I’d never been to before. A meeting where chances were I wouldn’t know anyone. A meeting where maybe I could get help instead of giving it.

  This one was in Washington Heights, and like so many, it was in the basement of an unassuming church on an unassuming street, with nondescript folding chairs and a generic urn of coffee. I took a seat, surprised by how something could feel so familiar and so foreign at the same time. When the other attendees arrived, the meeting leader welcomed us and turned to me.

  “This is your first time with us, right?”

  I nodded. I knew the drill.

  “I’ve been sober for ten years, two months, and sixteen days,” I said. “My name is Dane.”

  A chorus of “Hi, Dane”s echoed back to me for the first time, and something inside me unknotted.

  It was a speaker meeting, two people sharing for longer, rather than multiple people sharing more briefly. When the first woman said she was a psychologist, I leaned in, interested. Padmini had long, dark hair threaded through with silver and the graceful hands and perfect posture of a dancer. She had just reached the twelve-year mark of sobriety and told the story of a life of academic pressure culminating in addiction and how far she’d come since then. It was a familiar story, but the way she described both her addiction and her struggles with sobriety were new to me, and I found myself rapt with recognition.

  “The biggest challenge for me,” she said, “is no longer a fear that I might use again. It’s overcoming the fear of what addiction revealed to me: that I am not safe. That I am not in control. That I am subject to something frightening that will never go away.”

  This made my heart pound.

  “I’ve spent a long time hearing my patients’ stories of addiction and trauma, just like I’ve heard them at meetings.” She smiled at us knowingly. “I know we’ve all heard them. And what I’ve come to believe is that addiction is a trauma.”

  She paused and let that idea sink in.

  “Not what we did while we were using drugs or who we hurt, ourselves included. The state of being an addict is traumatic. Being addicted is the state of not feeling in control of our lives, our decisions. It is desperately needing something that we know harms us. It is knowing, deep in our bones, that we are powerless. And being powerless is terrifying. It’s terrifying if you’re a child powerless before an abusive parent. It’s terrifying if you’re a soldier powerless in the face of martial orders. It’s terrifying if you’re the victim of sexual assault.”

  I thought of the nightmares I woke from, terrified that I was using again, the fear coming from the sense that I had lost the control I’d worked so hard to gain.

  “Much of getting sober is attaining a sense of control,” Padmini went on. “Control over our addictions, over our behaviors, our choices. But no amount of asserting control after the fact erases the loss of control we experienced, any more than asserting control can erase having been assaulted or attacked. It can retrain our brains and bodies to feel better, less afraid. But unless we can acknowledge the trauma we experienced, we’re not going to move past it, even if the cause for that trauma is no longer a daily struggle for us.”

  The room was very quiet, some of us riveted, some zoned out. I blinked dry eyes, wishing I had my notebook so I could write down every word she’d just said.

  She met my eyes, open and confident, and nodded at me just once. I nodded back. I thought she could see that the gift she’d just given me had been received.

  Chapter 14

  Felix

  I shoved a change of clothes into my backpack and c
aught the BoltBus to Baltimore, where Riven had a show.

  Of course it wasn’t until I got to the hotel and asked for Sofia’s room at the front desk that it registered: she was a rock star now. I received a cool gaze and an “I’m sorry, sir, there’s no one by that name here” from the man behind the front desk, who seemed to take his job extremely seriously.

  “She’s my sister,” I said. “I get that she’s like…going incognito or whatever, but if you could just call up to her room she’ll tell you who I am.”

  “I’m terribly sorry, sir, but I cannot call someone who isn’t here.”

  “Okay, wow, never mind,” I muttered.

  I stepped away and called Sof’s cell. She answered right away.

  “Jesus Christ, Felix, I’ve called you like a thousand times. What the hell!?”

  “I know, I’m sorry. I’m here, at your hotel.” The man behind the front desk tried to pretend he wasn’t desperately curious whether I was really Sofia’s brother. “I was gonna surprise you, but you’re famous now, so they’re pretending you don’t exist. Can I come up?”

  “Well, I guess it’s good to know the security measures work. Yeah, come on up. It’s 736.”

  I tipped my nonexistent hat to the man behind the front desk and made for the elevator. I’d only ever spent time in one hotel: the Day’s Inn I’d helped my mom clean back home. The two were so dissimilar, it was hard to believe the same word even described them.

  The ceilings soared and the lobby was an open expanse of marble. The elevator was wrought iron formed into curlicues and flowers. And there were real flowers in huge arrangements on marble tables as I stepped out of the elevator, and more at intervals in the hallway. Huge white things that might have been lilies, but I didn’t know anything about flowers. This was Sofia’s life now.

  But the person who opened the door was still my sister, even if she was wrapped in a huge, fluffy hotel robe. She grabbed me and pulled me inside and proceeded to yell at me for scaring her.

  I threw myself onto the huge bed and lobbed a pillow at Sofia when she started in again.

  “Can you shut up for a sec?” I asked mildly. “I need to tell you something.”

  “What’s wrong?” she said immediately, clambering onto the bed to sit across from me. “Is Mom okay? The kids?”

  “It’s nothing like that. Can we talk?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “I’m sorry I ignored your calls the last few days. I was mad and hurt. I…I had this huge fight with Dane, and right after that I sent you the insurance info but you didn’t even have a minute to talk to me about the fight, and I took it really personally, like you don’t have time for me because you don’t care. And I know that’s not true. I just…”

  I took a deep breath.

  “I miss you so much, Sof. I feel like you disappeared on me all of a sudden after being together our whole lives. It feels bad. Really bad. No, let me finish. It’s not bad just because I’ve missed you. It’s like…I always thought we were in it together. So it was okay to spend hours shuffling our paycheck money from envelope to envelope because it was for us. Because when it worked out, it felt like we were winning. The way Mom used to make it a game to come up with lunches from the food we had around near the end of the month. And because we always talked about the future like it was something we were gonna figure out together.”

  She bit her lip and looked down at the snow-white coverlet. I knew she was remembering all the evenings we sat around the living room or on one of our beds, dreaming of how things would be in a month, a year, five years. How when our neighbors next door moved out and told us to take whatever we wanted from the stuff they didn’t want to lug to their new place, we crept around their rooms like treasure-hunting children, holding things up, wide-eyed but not wanting the neighbors to see how much we wanted them. How we took those things home and waved thank-you to the neighbors, then closed our apartment door and squealed with excitement as we found homes for all the things we’d been doing without.

  “But then this Riven thing happened and it didn’t include me, and then you were never home anymore, even before you left.”

  I could see the familiar stubborn look kindle in her eyes, and I quickly said, “It’s not that you did anything wrong by taking the Riven gig. I’m so happy for you, seriously. I just wish…I just want to still be part of your life.”

  “Felix, I…fuck.” She looked more serious than I’d ever seen her. “I’m sorry. I’ve been so caught up in everything with Riven—”

  “Well, of course you have.”

  “Wow, can you shut up for a second now? Anyway. I’ve been really caught up, I know. And I am sorry I disappeared. But I’m doing this for you too. You are part of it. The whole family is.”

  Her eyes got wide the way they did when she was plotting.

  “Because if this works out? This will be it for us, all of us. I’ll be able to pay for college for the kids if they wanna go and help them out just like you helped me. For once it doesn’t have to be all on you, bro. I owe you, like, everything. Let me finally do my part!”

  “I— What? You don’t owe me.”

  “Of course I do. Don’t you think I feel bad that you worked while I applied to college, and while I went to college, and studied, and on the weekends because you told me I should do schoolwork?”

  “What? No! I…I thought we were partners.”

  “We were! Partners whose main goal was to help me. Don’t you think I felt selfish as fuck about that? Don’t you think I feel bad that you gave up your whole fucking life for me?”

  I felt it like a physical punch to the solar plexus.

  “You…you think I have no life?”

  Sofia bit her lip and lowered her voice.

  “I think you’ve spent so long taking care of all of us that you haven’t spent any time figuring out what you want. And honestly? I think you’ve liked it that way. You liked being the one we turned to and you liked helping us, because you’re a fucking sweetheart. But also ’cuz it’s scary to want shit and you don’t like to be scared. Well, stop worrying about us, Felix. Worry about yourself. Let me take over. At least on the money front. Hell, I already sent Mom the money to fix the roof. We’re gonna be okay!”

  I sat there, speechless and deflated. I pictured the numbers in the bank account I’d opened unbeknownst to Sofia. The one I’d funneled exactly thirty dollars a week into for the last ten months in the hopes of helping Mom fix the roof in a year. I imagined Sof writing a check for the full amount with one newly-careless flourish of her pen.

  If my family didn’t need me anymore—if Sofia didn’t need me—what the hell was I doing? Just following in my mother’s footsteps, working the same job for years because it paid the bills and never getting a chance to change the story.

  “I—I—I was saving. For the roof. For Mom.”

  Sofia narrowed her eyes. “Okay.”

  “I wish you hadn’t paid for it without telling me,” I said, voice as prim and proper as it had ever been, to avoid tears.

  “Damn it, Felix, no! No, I’m not gonna ask your permission about how to spend my money. And you need to let go of whatever weird masculinity shit is telling you that it’s your responsibility. That it ever was. Yeah, our dad wasn’t around, but you weren’t Mom’s husband, you were her kid. That shit wasn’t on you.”

  Our father hadn’t stuck around. Neither had the kids’. And though I’d gone through a phase at ten and eleven of wishing they would’ve, it had dissipated soon after that, leaving a healed-over wound that I’d always considered minor. At Sofia’s words, skin thinner than I’d suspected felt scraped away, revealing something hollow and gaping. Something I’d been trying to shovel full on my own without ever realizing.

  I’d tried to f
ill that hole by making my mom dinner and making sure the kids did their homework. By contributing money and cleaning the house. By refereeing conflicts and soothing hurt feelings. I’d wanted to give them everything. Wanted them to have everything. Wanted my mom to feel like she had support and the kids to feel like they had structure. Because I loved them, but also because I never wanted them to feel like anything was missing.

  The way I had.

  And now, even shaken by that realization, writhing in my gut and squeezing at my heart was the petty, bitter knowledge that if I’d sung for Theo and Coco that day in Dane’s bar, I could be the one giving my family everything they’d ever wanted now. Everything I had tried to give in my own small ways for as long as I could remember. Ways that would never compare to Sofia’s now.

  Tears flooded my eyes and I tried to blink them away.

  “Fuck,” she muttered. “I’m sorry. I…”

  “I don’t want to end up like Mom,” I choked out.

  Sof’s eyes went wide and soft and I knew she thought I meant that I didn’t want to end up scraping to get by. But that wasn’t the image I had anymore. The image I had now was of Dane turning away from me, leaving me on my own as he went off to pursue a life he considered more important.

  She started to put her arms around me, but I pushed her away.

  “You know, sometimes I need someone to take care of me too,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself. “I really needed you the other day, Sof. I needed my sister, and you didn’t even have five minutes to talk.”

  Now she hugged me even though I still had my arms around my stomach. She squeezed me tight and I cried into her robe.

  “Jesus, this is the softest robe I’ve ever felt,” I said through my tears.

  She chuckled and squeezed me tighter.

  “Truth?”

  I nodded.

  “At the risk of upsetting you more, uh…thanks for not thinking I purposely abandoned you, but…I might have. Just a little bit. I saw this opportunity to get out of the Mom-cycle and I took it. And the second I was in another kind of life, even after just a couple days, it felt so good. Fuck, Felix, it felt so damn good. To be surrounded by people talking about music and art and fashion instead of rent and roaches and subway closures? Things felt easy for the first time in my life. It felt like a fantasy.”