by Jenn Bishop
I form a fist with my hand and bring it to my mouth. No, Emma.
I’m not ready to go back home. I’m not. My box for Becca is on the whole other side of Wyoming, on the top shelf of a closet. And it’s not even done. I didn’t get the chance to finish it, never mind come up with something for the art contest.
I’m supposed to have another month.
But nothing is going like it’s supposed to. Maybe it never does. Not with me, not with Austin, not with anybody. Rehab was supposed to fix him. It was supposed to help. So how could something go so wrong before he’d even been out twenty-four hours? On the phone this morning, Mom and Dad said they weren’t even sure what Austin took or where he got his hands on it.
He was supposed to be strong. He used to be strong. Like the buffalo.
But I guess he’s not anymore.
Or maybe he is. All of those bison, all of them, they were strong, too. But then I think about the buffalo last night and how fragile he was.
Can you be strong and weak at the same time?
* * *
It’s Dad who meets me at baggage claim in Logan Airport, still dressed in his suit and tie like he came right from the station. He’s typing something into his phone—he doesn’t see me, isn’t even looking. “Dad?”
His head jolts up. “Emma!”
I crash into him, burying my face in his chest. He smells like cologne. We’ve never been apart this long, and it hits me all at once how much I’ve missed him. Delia and Chris were no substitute for the real thing.
“Do you have a checked bag or—”
“Dad.” He’s not really doing this, is he? Acting like this was planned, like he was supposed to pick me up from the airport today. “Dad, how is he?”
When he looks back at me this time, the cheery Tony O’Malley from channel 7 weather strips away bit by bit until it’s only Dad in front of me. Not just my dad. Mine and Austin’s. And he pulls me close, patting my hair in the way that only Dad does, which is to say, he’s totally messing up my hair. “Better than this morning,” he says. His voice breaks on the last word. “Oh, Em.”
“Is Mom with him? How is she?”
“She’s… holding up. Do you need to grab something to eat? Do you want to swing by the house first?”
“I just want to see Austin. I need to see him.”
Dad reaches for my duffel, but I shake him off. I’m twelve; I can carry it myself. And as we head to the parking garage, neither of us says what we’re thinking. Where do we go from here?
* * *
A nurse is in Austin’s room when we get to the hospital, so Dad and I linger in the hallway. Outside the door is a whiteboard with my brother’s name in blue erasable marker. But they didn’t spell his name correctly. They wrote “Austen” instead, like that author my ELA teacher always raved about. I consider wiping my finger on the board, correcting it, but someone must have walked off with the marker, and anyway, it’s not like I want Austin to be in there. Maybe if I leave it up, some different person is in there instead of my brother.
But I know that’s not true because I can hear Mom’s voice as she asks the nurse questions. Dad’s shoulders slump as he stares at the wall. He keeps taking his phone out of his pocket, checking it, and putting it back.
The nurse startles when she exits the room. “Tony? Sorry, I didn’t realize you were out here. You know you can come in, right?” The way she calls him Tony instead of Mr. O’Malley makes me think she knows him from the weather. That she’s maybe even a fan.
“Oh, that’s okay. My wife’s got things covered.” He presses a hand to my back. “This is our daughter, Emma.”
She shakes my hand. “Holly,” she says. “Nice to meet you, Emma.”
“You too,” I say, even though it’s not nice at all, actually. Does she forget why we’re here? It’s not like my imaginary big sister had a baby. We’re here because Austin overdosed. He was supposed to get better. That’s what thirty days on Cape Cod was all about. That expensive rehab facility Mom and Dad made five billion phone calls to get him into, it was supposed to fix him.
But it didn’t. And now I’m not sure what will.
When we enter the room, Mom leaps up from the chair beside the hospital bed and hugs me tightly. “Em.” A tear slips out of my eye, but I’m still pressed against her and it melts into her linen sweater. I’m the first to pull away.
Is it weird that I haven’t even looked at him yet? My brother, tucked into blankets, attached to wires, connected to a machine that monitors—at least, I think—his heart. Jagged green lines and red numbers on a screen. I don’t know what they mean, though I bet if I ask Mom or Dad, they’ll tell me. That’s my brother—that’s Austin under those blankets with his head turned away from me. Sleeping. Just sleeping. Still alive.
A lump forms in my throat as I rewind, back, back, back, all the way to the fall, before everything changed. Austin’s hand wrapped around the brown leather of a football, his fingertips on the white stitches. The cool air, the crunch of dead leaves. Becca and Kennedy and Lucy next to me in the stands.
We both made mistakes this year. Me and Austin. And we didn’t tell each other about them the way we used to. The secrets we’d share when we were younger, stuff we’d never tell Mom or Dad. That time Austin broke the garage window and confessed only to me after swearing to Dad that he had no idea how it happened. That time I cheated on a spelling test in second grade and felt so guilty I had to tell someone, so I told him. We kept them for each other, the secrets.
And maybe that’s why he couldn’t tell me this time. This mistake was so big, too big for anyone else to keep secret. So he kept it all to himself.
But now we’re here. In this too-cold hospital room on a late July night.
Someone has to say something eventually, so it might as well be me. “It wasn’t fair,” I say. Not to Austin, but to my parents. “It wasn’t fair for you to send me away. You took it for granted that I—”
“I know,” Mom says. “It wasn’t fair to punish you. You hadn’t done anything wrong. I’m sorry, Emma. If we could do it all over again, I—”
“No!” I can’t let her keep thinking that somehow I was the good kid and Austin was the bad one. It wasn’t that way at all. There’s no such thing as the good kid. No one is ever all good, not me, not Mom, not Dad, not Tyler or Becca, not anyone. “Stop saying that.”
“Saying what?” Mom asks.
“That I didn’t do anything wrong. I did. You just don’t know about it.”
Dad cuts in. “What are you talking about, E?”
“What happened at Camp McSweeney with Becca. That night in the cabin. She—I—I ruined it. I totally betrayed her.”
“Em, honey, slow down.” Mom hands me a tissue from her purse, but it’s not enough. I blow right through it, snot all over my hands, not that I care. Snotty hands are the least of my problems. “It’s okay.”
But it’s not. Nothing’s okay. I’m melting down. Austin’s lying there asleep. Dad looks like a truck drove over him in the night. I sit down at the edge of Austin’s bed to catch my breath, and when I finally do, I tell them everything. How it felt with Kennedy and Lucy. That’s what friends were supposed to be. People who got you in every possible way. I never thought that Kennedy would open her big mouth like that so the whole school would know about the kitty blanket. I didn’t mean to be mean. But I was anyway.
I wasn’t the good kid. Not even close.
And Austin? I’m his sister. I should’ve known something was wrong. That night he wouldn’t tell me where he was going, I should’ve told Mom and Dad. Even if it would have made him mad at me. I should’ve done it anyway.
Dad stops me there. “Oh, E. Please don’t blame yourself for what happened with Austin. We didn’t know—none of us. And part of me believes even if he tried to tell us, we would’ve been in denial. None of what has happened with Austin is your fault.”
“Your dad’s right,” Mom says. “About Austin. That’s on us. And, ho
ney, I know you feel guilty for what happened with Becca on the trip, but from the way you told it at least, it sounds like Kennedy shares in the blame.” Mom manages to find another tissue in her purse, and I use it to wipe up my hands. “You know, Dad and I expected you to be a bit more resistant about going to Wyoming. Now it’s starting to make sense.”
“Have you seen her—Becca?”
Mom shakes her head. “Between everything with Austin and the store, I haven’t had much free time. Honestly, I’m so lost in my own head, for all I know I walked right past Dr. Grossman at the grocery store without even noticing.”
Something nudges me in the butt right then, and when I turn around, Austin is lifting his head up off the pillow. His eyes flutter open and latch on to mine. He keeps blinking like he’s not sure I’m really here.
“Hey,” I say, pivoting my whole body so I’m facing him.
“You came back.”
I slide off the bed, taking a few careful steps toward my brother like I’m in one of those stores with breakable pottery.
He looks better than the last time I saw him. Clean-shaven. Healthy. Even though he’s in the hospital. It doesn’t add up.
His eyes get glassy, and he scrunches up his whole face. “I ruined your trip.”
Was that how he still saw it? My trip? He didn’t get it. Or maybe—maybe he did. Because he looks upset, finally, for all the pain he’s caused. “You didn’t ruin it,” I say, surprised by how much that feels true. In spite of the circumstances, I had a great summer in Wyoming. Well, until now.
But I needed to come home. I needed to see him.
“It was my choice to come home,” I say.
Maybe it wasn’t only that Austin took me for granted. I took it for granted too, having a brother like him. The kind of brother he was before drugs got in the way and messed everything up. That wasn’t the real Austin, the past six months. But this Austin, the one lying on the bed right now in front of me, that’s my brother.
I rest my hand on his bed. The blue hospital blanket is covered in tiny fuzzy nubs.
“Did you make it out to Yellowstone yet?”
I don’t tell him I only got to spend barely a day there. I just nod, rubbing a little blue nubby between my fingers.
“You get to see a buffalo up close?”
“I did,” I say. I tell him about last night, how I stayed with that baby buffalo until I knew he’d be okay.
What I don’t say, what I can’t even try to without bawling all over again, is how I wish I could do the same with him. Just stay there and protect him, not let him do anything that could hurt him. Just stay there forever, keeping watch.
Austin drifts off to sleep again. “The drug they gave him this morning left him a little groggy,” Mom says. “Takes a while to wear off.”
I sit back down on the bed, taking care not to squish Austin’s feet. “What happens now?”
“They’ll be releasing him tomorrow morning,” Mom says.
“To us?”
She nods slowly. “And then we’ll try something different. One thing I’ve learned from the support group is that abstinence-only isn’t the best path forward for most people. Medication-assisted treatment is.”
“What does that mean, though?”
“Austin would be taking a medication and getting regular counseling—”
“He’d still be taking drugs? But isn’t that what we’re trying to fix?”
“Yes, Emma,” Dad says. “To both. Substance use disorder, it’s a disease. A complicated one. I know it doesn’t always look that way, but we have to remind ourselves that. And educate others. This is no different than Austin having cancer or diabetes. And it might take several attempts to achieve remission.” He reaches over and gives my hand a squeeze.
“I know you wanted to believe that after this first stint at rehab, everything would get better,” Mom says. “Dad and I did, too. But the hard part comes now. And we can only take it day by day. All of us. Especially Austin.”
Dad steps in. “What Mom and I are trying to say, E, is that this hard work is Austin’s. It’s not your job to watch over him. If that’s anyone’s job, it’s ours. We’re the parents. But we can’t go back in time. All we can do now is provide our love and support, and be honest with each other. We’re learning on the fly now. All of us.”
I glance over at Austin, his chest rising and falling with each breath. The green line of that machine he’s hooked up to, bouncing around. Up, up, up, then down. Up, up, up, then down.
Suddenly the lack of sleep from last night hits me, and all I want is to crawl into my bed and sleep forever. I search Mom’s and Dad’s faces, wondering how much they’ve wanted to do that too. Just crawl into bed and never come out. But they’re here instead. Because they love Austin that much.
“Can someone take me home?”
Mom and Dad wordlessly duke it out for a moment until Mom says, “Sure, Em. I’ll take you.”
Someone must have just washed the hospital floor because Mom’s running sneakers squeak on the linoleum as we make our way to the elevator. It comes right away, and when the door closes behind us, I’m surprised by the calm I feel.
Maybe it’s that I’m so tired. Maybe it’s from telling Mom and Dad everything, finally. Maybe it’s from seeing Austin with my own eyes after a month apart.
Or maybe it’s this, what I know now—I can’t turn Austin back into the person he used to be. Dad’s right: we can’t go back in time. Austin’s sick. He has a disease.
But I can still fix things with Becca. We can go back to how we used to be. I need her now more than ever.
And I can still win her back. I have to.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Even though I’m exhausted, there’s something I need to do, and if I have to stay up all night to finish, well, that’s just how it has to be.
Sure, the Becca box back in Wyoming was going to be perfect. But Becca knows I’m far from perfect, and maybe a box that’s honest about that is just as good as a perfect one. Maybe imperfect is even better.
I grab my sketchbook from my backpack and dig the boxes out from under the bed. Drag out anything—everything—that reminds me of Becca and all the things we used to do together. Playbills from musicals we saw in Boston with her parents. A photo of us on the Swan Boats after years of begging my parents to let us go on them by ourselves. Seashells from the summer before fourth grade, when Becca’s family rented that house on Nantucket and I got to tag along. All the small moments and memories—years of them.
I dig through my closet for the right box, and it’s surprisingly easy to find. The box from the gift Becca brought back from Paris. The last gift she gave me before I messed up everything.
My hands are covered in glue, my floor a patchwork of cut-up photographs and magazine clippings, when there’s a knock on my door. “You’re still up?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” I say. Not that I was trying, but it’s technically true. I can’t. Not when I still need to make things right with Becca.
Mom lets herself in, stepping across the few bare spots on the floor until she’s on my bed, sitting crisscross applesauce. “What are you making?”
“A box for Becca. I’d started one back in Wyoming, but by the time they get back from Yellowstone to mail it to me—I can’t wait. I just… I can’t.”
Mom reaches down and grabs a photograph of me and Becca from when we were in first grade. She and Dr. Grossman had enrolled us in dance class. We were little bunnies, with pink paint on our noses. We were supposed to be cute, I guess, except no one gave Becca the memo and in this picture she has the worst death stare ever. At the recital Becca tripped, knocking over me and three other girls and one boy. Yeah, that was the last time we ever took dance. (Probably for the best.)
“Oh, you girls were so sweet then.”
I grab a photo of me, Becca, and Austin at a Red Sox game last summer, a candid Dad must have taken when none of us were paying attention. And I see it, for the first t
ime maybe, how Becca looked at Austin like he was so much more than her BFF’s older brother. Was that why she could never tell me who she liked? Because she liked my brother?
“I should’ve done this more,” Mom says. “Peeked in on what you and Austin were up to. I always wanted to give you privacy—something I never had sharing a room with two sisters. But if I had, if I’d just kept closer tabs…”
“Mom, it’s okay.”
“No, it’s not, Em. It’s really not.” She hands the photo back to me. “There was something you said earlier, about Kennedy and Lucy. Something I can’t get out of my head. That they got you. Do you think Dad and I, that we don’t?”
“Of course not,” I say. But it comes out too fast. I set down the scissors and glance up at her. “Maybe a little?”
“Oh, Em.”
“It’s not your fault or anything. Just… you and Dad and A, you’re all kind of the same. You like the spotlight. You like being around a ton of people. That’s just not me, not who I am.”
Mom reaches down for a photo of me wearing a crown made of flowers. That would be a normal cute picture of a three-year-old, but no, I had also painted my own face. Messy black-and-white stripes, like a zebra.
“You have been your own person from the first moment I laid eyes on you. I’m sorry it hasn’t felt that way, and I will do better, but believe me, I see you, Emma. Every day. The beautiful person you’re becoming.” Mom wipes at her eyes, and I hate that I made her cry again today, after everything. But maybe this kind of crying is different.
“What I said before—about you being a good kid… I don’t expect you to always be good. I don’t expect that you won’t make mistakes. You and Austin, both of you are good kids, hon. Your goodness always outweighs your mistakes. I wouldn’t want anyone else as my kids.”
I spray some glue and sprinkle glitter over all of it. A tiny dusting so that the whole box sparkles, and then I hold it up to show Mom.
“Beautiful,” she says.
“Can you sleep in here tonight?” I ask her.