You'd Be Home Now (2)

“Joey,” I say, crying now, the tears warm and salty on my face. “I want Joey. Please, get me Joey.”





2


WHEN I OPEN MY eyes, he’s there.

I’ve seen my brother cry only once before, the afternoon he and Luther Leonard decided to dive from the roof of our house into the pool. Luther made it; Joey didn’t, and the sound of his sobs as he writhed on the brick patio echoed in my head for days.

But his crying is quieter now.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. His voice is croaky, and he looks sick, pale and shaky. There are stitches above his left eye. His right arm is in a sling.

“I thought you were drunk,” I say. “I thought you were just drunk.”

Joey’s dark eyes search my face.

“I messed up. I messed up so bad, Emmy.”

Girls swoon over those dark eyes. Or they did. Before he became trouble.

Joey Ward used to be cool, a girl said in the bathroom at Heywood High last year. She didn’t know I was in the stall. Sometimes I stayed in there longer than I needed to, just for some peace. It’s hard all the time. Pretending.

Not anymore, another girl answered. Just another druggie loser.

I cried in the stall, because I knew Joey was more than that. Joey was the one who taught me to ride a bike, because our parents worked all the time. Joey was the one who let me read aloud to him for hours in a bedsheet fort in my father’s den, long after he probably should have been ignoring me in favor of his friends, like most older siblings do. He taught me how to make scrambled eggs and let me stay with him in his attic bedroom while he drew.

    Until he didn’t. Until the day I knocked and he told me to go away.

He stands up, wiping his face with his good hand. His beautiful dark hair is in tangles, hanging over his eyes.

“I have to go,” he says. “Mom’s waiting.”

Rehab. It floats back to me from when Mom said it. Was that yesterday? Or this morning? It’s hard to tell. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. Things are bleeding together.

“Joey, why did you do…it?”

I wish I could get out of this bed. I wish my leg wasn’t hanging from some damn pulley in the air and that my body wasn’t heavy with the ocean of drugs inside me.

At the door to my hospital room, Joey turns back, but he doesn’t look at me. He looks at the floor.

“I love you, Emmy, but you have no idea what it’s like to be me.”

And then he’s gone.





3


I’M IN THE DOWNSTAIRS bedroom off the kitchen that my mother remodeled for Nana, hoping she’d come live with us, but Nana is stubborn and says she wants to stay in her own house until the day she dies.

The walls are painted pale gray. The sheets and blankets are white and crisp and perfect and I’m imagining how the sweat dripping off my forehead is going to stain the pillowcases. My mother doesn’t like messes.

At my feet, my dog Fuzzy nuzzles closer to my good leg, whines softly. I rub her with my toe. Her fur is coarse; no one’s been brushing her. Westies need brushing.

My bad leg is in a blue brace, propped on more white pillows. My knee is throbbing, sparks of white heat that make me breathe hard. Make me sweat.

I can hear them in the kitchen, my sister Maddie and my mother, arguing.

“Mom, she’s in pain,” Maddie’s saying. “Just let her have a pill.”

“She can have ibuprofen. She was on so much medication in the hospital. I don’t want her…”

My mom’s voice trails off.

“Mom,” Maddie says forcefully. “She fractured her kneecap. And she’s not Joey.”

“That’s right,” my mother answers, in a suddenly hard voice that makes me shiver. “And I want it to stay that way.”





4


MADDIE SLEEPS NEXT TO me in the gray room, her eyelids growing heavy as she clicks the television remote from one show to another: Keeping Up with the Kardashians, My Lottery Dream Home, Friends. When the remote finally slips from her fingers, I turn the television off and just listen, Fuzzy tucked next to me, soft and sleeping.

Maddie snuck me a pill after my mother went to bed, fed me crackers and juice, and I’m not sweating anymore.

I’m listening to the quiet of the house.

Some things haven’t changed since I came home. My dad still gets back late from his shifts at the hospital, peeking into the room at us to say hello and ask about my knee before he eats whatever Goldie has left for him in the refrigerator before going to the den and settling down with his drink to watch his own shows. He’ll fall asleep in the recliner, glasses slipping down his nose, while my mother is asleep upstairs. That’s the way they’ve been for what seems like years now, my mother up, my father down. I thought that might change, with everything that’s happened. That they’d get closer, somehow, after the accident.

I thought they might stay home with me, too, at least for the first few days, but they didn’t. They went right back to work. Maybe because Maddie is here now and can take care of me. And Goldie, too, if it’s one of her days with us.

    Sometimes I feel like I don’t exist in this house because I’m not beautiful and loud, like Maddie, or a problem, like Joey. I’m just me. The good one.