The Long and Winding Road

by TJ Klune

  There had been. The bottle had been half full when I’d fished that pill out for him after the day at the lake. I remembered that much at least.

  “Okay,” I said. I took a deep breath, trying to push the anger away as much as I could before I looked back at the Kid. “Here’s how this is going to go. You’re going to talk. You’re going to tell us the truth. We’re going to listen. I promise you that we will listen. But if at any point we think you’re lying, it’s just going to be that much worse for you. Are we clear?”

  “That much worse?” the Kid said, laughing bitterly. “What do you think you’re gonna do, Bear? Spank me? Ground me? Send me to my room? Come on. Let’s be real here.”

  “You currently enjoy a life with little to no responsibility,” Otter said. “You don’t have a job. You don’t pay rent. We put money in your account every month for you to use. You have everything handed to you. And for good reason. After—after everything, this was supposed to be your reward. You worked hard, so we made sure that you got what you deserved for that. It was one of the big things we discussed before we moved here. We didn’t want you to have to worry about the little things. Your focus should have been on your classes.”

  “And I have been focused on school—”

  “What’s your major?” I asked.

  He blinked. “What?”

  “What are you majoring in,” I repeated slowly. “What are you going to school for?”

  “I’m not… look, it’s complicat—”

  “How are your grades?”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine?”

  “Mostly fine,” he corrected, looking away. “Nothing to worry about.”

  He’ll lie, his therapist had said. Most likely he’ll try and lie his way out of everything. And you know how much respect I have for him, Derrick. Tyson is truly a wonderful young man, no matter what issues he may have. But he can be manipulative. Whether he means to be or not, it’s something he does. I don’t necessarily think it’s malicious, because I don’t know that he’s got a mean bone in his body, but he does know how to twist things sometimes.

  “Then you won’t mind if we check up on that tomorrow,” Otter said. “In fact, we should probably set up an appointment with your advisor. Just to check in.”

  “You can’t do that—”

  “I think you’ll find that we can do quite a lot,” I said. “You wanted to know how much worse it could be, Kid? You’re about to find out. Because starting now, I’m going to be so far up your ass, you’re not even going to be able to take a goddamn breath without me knowing.”

  He stood, eyes blazing, and there he was, my Kid poking through the zombie he’d become. This was the kid I knew, the kid that became outraged at the stupidest things. (“It’s called a Double Down, Bear, and it’s a sandwich that doesn’t use bread. Instead they use two pieces of fried chicken, and then they put cheese and bacon in the middle. Apparently it’s not bad enough that chickens are kept in cramped prisons and fed growth hormones. Oh no. Not for the Americans! No, we also get to have the chance of having a heart attack and the shits, all at the same time! KFC is the worst, Bear! They are the worst. That’s why I’m making these flyers with Colonel Sanders with a Hitler mustache. People need to know the truth!”) This was the Kid I’d known for years. He wasn’t gone. He was just buried.

  “I don’t have to sit here and take this,” he growled at us. “I’m not a child. You don’t get to treat me like one.”

  “I think you’ll find there’s quite a bit we get to do,” Otter said easily. “Sit down.”

  “You know what? I don’t think I will. In fact, I’m—”

  Otter slammed his hand on the table. The pill bottles rattled, some falling over.

  The Kid’s eyes went wide.

  Even I jumped a little.

  Otter pointed a finger at Tyson. “Sit. Your. Ass. Down.”

  The Kid sat down very quickly.

  “When did this start?” Otter asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Wrong answer. Who are you buying from?”

  “I’m not buying any—”

  “Wrong answer. Are there any other drugs we don’t know about? Any other pills hidden somewhere?”

  “Seriously? You think I—”

  “Wrong answer. I’ve asked you three questions now, and three times you’ve lied to my face.” Otter shook his head. “One more chance, Tyson. You get one more chance. If you lie to me again, you’re not going to like what happens next. I can promise you that.”

  The Kid looked at me, eyes pleading. “Papa Bear,” he choked out. “I don’t—why aren’t you helping me? I don’t understand what you want from me.”

  “I think you do,” I said, voice a little hoarse. I didn’t look away from the Kid when Otter took my hand in his and squeezed. “I think you know exactly what we want. I think you know exactly what this is.” I nodded toward the pill bottles. “Found those in your room, Kid. Doesn’t look real good for you.”

  “You were in my room? I don’t go through your shit, what the hell gives you the right to go through mine?”

  “Aside from the fact that most of your shit, as you call it, we bought you?” Otter said. “How about you apparently already went into our bathroom and helped yourself to a few Vicodin. Not your best argument.”

  “Why are you doing this?” the Kid asked, glancing between the two of us, eyes hard.

  “Because we love you—”

  “Right,” he said. “Right. Love. Intervention style. That’s what this is, isn’t it? You think you found something that’s not mine, and now you’re staging an intervention. Jesus. Do you know how ridiculous this is? How stupid it is? There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m fine. You guys are really reaching here. Okay? It’s not what it looks like.”

  “Then what is it?” Otter asked. “Explain it to us. And remember what I said about one more chance. Because I was serious about that.”

  He opened his mouth once. Then closed it. Opened. Closed. He made a noise in the back of his throat and glanced toward the front door, like he was gauging the distance to see if he could make a break for it.

  In the end, he didn’t.

  In the end, he didn’t do anything at all.

  He just… sat there, arms across his chest, refusing to look at either of us. And it was easy to see it then. The bags under his eyes. His sallow skin. He was skinnier than he’d been before. He was wearing layers, but I could still see it. And it struck me just how much angrier I was at myself rather than him. I should have seen it. I should have seen all of it. It never should have gotten this far. There had been a point in our lives when it wouldn’t have, because every single thing he did, I watched over, not wanting to let him out of my sight for fear that he’d just be… gone, like everyone else in our life had been.

  And it was hard to understand that, to reconcile this person in front of me with the Kid I’d known. We’d been scarily dependent on each other, not knowing how else to be. And maybe it hadn’t been the healthiest thing, but goddammit, it’d worked for us. At least for a while. I’d protected him from as much as I could, and in return, he’d done the same for me. Maybe I shouldn’t have leaned on him as much as I had, and maybe I should have forced him out more on his own rather than tightening the leash, but we’d survived, hadn’t we? We’d gotten this far.

  Granted, right now wasn’t exactly the end result I’d hoped for.

  I had to remind myself of that. That this person wasn’t the Kid I’d known. Zombie Tyson wasn’t real. He wasn’t the Kid that wrote bad poems about Santa who was really Satan. He wasn’t the Kid who used to crawl up my legs until I held him in my arms, his hands in my hair as he babbled in my ear. This wasn’t the Kid who had grinned at me through a mouthful of soy ice cream, who laughed with his whole body, head rocked back, hands clutching his stomach. Who once asked Otter and me what the back room at a gay bar was for. Who announced to his graduating class that he was gay and proud of it, impl
ying that he would never take shit from anyone. Who had once called me on the phone, words choked and wet, saying—

  we were talking and then she said her face felt funny and then her eyes started to droop she started talking like she was drunk and then she fell down she fell down and her head hit the carpet and it made a weird noise i called 911 and the ambulance came but she wouldn’t wake up i yelled at her and i screamed at her but she wouldn’t get up

  —things that no kid his age should ever have to say.

  This wasn’t him. It couldn’t be. After all the things we’d been through, it couldn’t have come to this.

  “When did it start?” I asked him, and he must have heard something in my voice, something different, because he looked at me like he was actually seeing me.

  He struggled with what he was going to say, mouth opening and closing again, frowning and shaking his head slightly. “I don’t….”

  We waited.

  He looked at the evidence spread out before him for a long time. I wondered what that felt like, seeing it all there, all those empty bottles. I thought maybe he had wanted to get caught, that he’d wanted to be found out. Why else wouldn’t he have just thrown all of them away? If he had, we’d be sitting here with nothing to go on but Corey’s word, a stranger who could have just been making all this up for some unknown reason.

  “Shit,” he muttered, and he buried his face in his hands.

  We didn’t speak.

  “It’s not as bad as you think it is,” he said, voice muffled.

  “Pretty sure that’s not true,” Otter said quietly. “Especially from where we’re sitting.”

  He dropped his hands. I watched as he picked at the frayed knees of his jeans, something that was supposed to be stylish but that I never understood. What was the point of buying pants that already had holes in them? The Kid had laughed at me when I’d told him as much, that little smile on his face that he got when he thought I was being a grumpy old Bear, as he called it.

  “Do you know how dangerous this is?” I asked him. “What you could have done to yourself? What you have done to yourself? Mixing these drugs. Tyson. That’s not—that’s not healthy. For you. For your body. Christ. What if you’d…?” I shook my head, refusing to follow that train of thought.

  “I’m not stupid,” he said, a little anger returning.

  “This suggests otherwise,” I said, nodding toward the table. “In fact, this suggests you’re the stupidest you’ve ever been.”

  “All right,” Otter said, over the Kid’s squawk of outrage. “Let’s not get off track. Kid. When did this start?”

  “The pills? Oh, I don’t know, Otter. Maybe it was the time you guys forced me into therapy. You remember that? I told you I was fine, that I didn’t need anyone after Eddie, and especially not here, but you guys made me go, and then you jumped wholeheartedly on the drug train at her first suggestion. Remember? Yeah, I’m pretty sure you do. She said pills, and the both of you just sat there with these relieved little expressions on your faces. Oh look, here’s a solution, here’s a fix so we don’t have to deal with Tyson and all his problems. They’ll be muted and soft and just glazed over, right? Isn’t that how it went? Yeah. So, Otter, it started when you guys agreed to medicate me.”

  “And yet, you didn’t say no,” Otter pointed out, refusing to take the bait. “In fact, you didn’t argue at all. You agreed.”

  He rolled his eyes. “What would have been the point?”

  “We would have listened to you,” I snapped at him. “If you hadn’t wanted it, we would have listened. We told you that. If you didn’t want it, you wouldn’t have had to have it. Full stop. That was the deal. We could have found some other way around it.”

  “How, Bear?” the Kid asked. “By… what. Talking about it? About our feelings? I do that enough in therapy as it is. I don’t want to have to come home—if this is even still my home—and spend more time talking things over.”

  “Yes,” I said. “If that’s what it took. After Dominic—”

  His eyes flashed dangerously. “Leave him out of this.”

  “No. I won’t. After Dominic, after I found you in the goddamn bathtub again, if you had said no, Bear, I don’t want the Xanax or I don’t want the Klonopin, I would have listened to you. Because every single choice we made, I thought we made together. So no, you don’t get to throw that back in our faces. That’s not gonna fly.”

  “Is that when this started?” Otter asked. “With… Dom?”

  The Kid made a choking sound, and he shook his head furiously. “I’m not—I don’t—he’s not….”

  “It was easier,” Otter said. “Wasn’t it? Feeling numb.”

  The Kid said nothing, though his shoulders were trembling. It took everything I could to not go to him, to pull him close, to whisper in his ear that everything was going to be okay.

  “You wanted to feel numb, and it got harder and harder. So you escalated. Took more. And then we switched you to Klonopin. I remember that too. I thought there was going to be an argument, but… you didn’t say much at all.”

  He didn’t look at us.

  “And… what. You worried about how much you were taking, because you thought you were going to get caught. So you started buying it off of someone or someones, and they said we’ve got other stuff here, why don’t you try that? And you just said sure. Okay. Why not.”

  He bowed his head low.

  “And the narcotics, was that… what. Just to feel high?”

  He mumbled something.

  “Didn’t get that, Kid,” Otter said.

  He cleared his throat. “I said, I didn’t… I don’t like those.”

  “But.”

  “But I… I didn’t have. The money. And I ran out. I didn’t want—I thought you would have found out.”

  “Addiction is a bitch of a thing,” Otter said.

  And that got his attention. His head snapped up, and his eyes were wide, cheeks flushed. “I’m not an addict.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You are.”

  “Bear. It’s not like that. I promise, okay? I swear to you. It’s not—I can stop, anytime I want to. It was just—easier, it was easier, I took the easy way out. I swear to you. Oh my god, you have to believe me, you have to—”

  “Ty, you gotta take a breath,” Otter said, sounding worried. “You’re getting yourself too worked up. Okay? Just take a breath or you’re going to have a panic attack.”

  But even I could see it was already too late for that. I felt guilty at that, that we’d pushed him to this point, but I thought it was inevitable. We had to force the issue, and there wasn’t going to be any other end result.

  “No, no, no,” the Kid said, high-pitched and manic. “No, listen, okay? You gotta listen to me. Bear, Papa Bear, please, listen. Oh please. I’m not addicted. I swear, I swear, I—oh please don’t make me leave, you can’t let me leave, okay? I’m just a little guy, please, Otter, you can’t make me leave, I don’t know where to go, I don’t have anywhere else to go, and I can’t—I c-can’t be alone, I c-c-can’t because you’re all I’ve got. You’re all I’ve got left because Mrs. Paquinn is gone, and Dom’s gone, gone, g-gone, so please. Please don’t leave me too. I can’t breathe, oh, Bear, I can’t breathe. The earthquake. Bear, there’s an earthquake.”

  I had the darkest thought of my life while he spoke.

  What if he’s faking this?

  Otter was up and moving before he even finished talking. He bent over and picked up the Kid as if he weighed nothing at all, hands under his knees and across his back. Tyson continued to choke out words help and scared and don’t make me leave. I followed them down the hallway, through our bedroom, and into the bathroom, where there was a large jetted bathtub.

  “Get in,” Otter told me roughly, speaking above the Kid’s high-pitched chants of please please please.

  I did, knee knocking against the side roughly. I slid down the side, already reaching for the Kid.

  Otter handed him over, and
I could feel the sweat through the layers, soaked through and slick. The Kid wasn’t speaking, his throat closing, eyes wild and bulging. He was clawing at his own throat, leaving red streaks against his neck, and I trapped his arms at his sides, sitting against the tub, holding the Kid in front of me, his back to my chest, his legs stretching out, where they jerked and kicked against mine.

  His head twisted and turned against my shoulder, mouth open and teeth bared as he tried to suck in air. I leaned my forehead against him and whispered in his ear the art of breathing, something we’d been taught a long time ago, telling him that we were fine, we were safe, we were together, and we weren’t going to make him leave, he could never leave us, of course he couldn’t. He was here, we were here, and I needed him to breathe. I needed him to take in a breath and hold it, then let it out and hold again. He could do it, I told him, because I believed in him. I believed in him more than I did in anyone else. I knew what he was capable of, what he could be, and he’d just stumbled, just gotten a little lost. But we’d found him again, and he needed to breathe and breathe and breathe.

  Otter was on his knees beside the bathtub, a big hand wrapped firmly around the Kid’s ankle, holding him still, saying everything without speaking a single word. His thumb brushed up and down against the knob of the Kid’s ankle where his jeans had ridden up.

  It went on, as these did with him. People who don’t have panic attacks can never understand just how bad they can be. The mind works against the body, and even though you know you can breathe, you’re convinced you can’t, and there’s nothing you can do about it until it passes. You’re trapped in your own head until it lets you go. That’s what the Kid told me. He said it couldn’t be explained, that no matter how smart he was, once it got its claws in him, he was at its mercy until it finally released him.

  There’d been bad ones before. After Mrs. Paquinn. Dom’s birthday party. The wedding invitation. But I didn’t think there’d ever been one like this.

  It felt like it went on for hours.

  But I kept whispering in his ear, and Otter kept his hold on him, and eventually there came a great, gasping breath and the Kid tensed full body against me before he collapsed and began to sob bitterly against my chest.