You'd Be Home Now (8)
I have been floating in the water for two and a half months. Making myself invisible.
We’re supposed to seek solace in the stars, right? That’s what poets and painters and movies and books tell us. The great unknown. The mystery of life tantalizing us from galaxies far away. Look up, and revel in the wonder. Consider your little spot in the vastness of it all, I guess.
Invisibility does that to you. Strips away fancy layers, leaves just the bones and blood. Just enough to get around.
I butterfly my legs a bit to adjust my position. My right knee suddenly tingles with pain, causing me to suck in my breath, which causes me to choke on water.
And then the stars disappear.
At first, I wonder if I’m starting to drown, everything getting dark.
But it’s just my mother, hovering above me, blocking the last of the night stars and my sky as she reels me toward her with the pool skimmer. She’s annoyed with me, but what else is new?
“Emory,” she says. “Get out. I leave for the airport in an hour.”
My body bumps against the side of the pool. She drops the skimmer on the brick patio, where it makes a wet, thwacking sound.
“I don’t need,” she says, gesturing vaguely to the pool, to the lightening sky, “this nonsense today, do you understand?”
She’s already expertly made up, hair pulled back against her neck in a tidy turquoise barrette, dressed in her traveling clothes: burgundy leggings, black flats, expensive but casual-looking cream-colored cotton shirt, and a long, open-stitch cream-colored J. Jill cardigan.
“I just want you out of the water, showered, and ready for your appointment with Sue. All right? Can you do that for me? Can you do that one thing?”
Water streams down my face as I drop my legs and stand in the pool.
Her eyes meet mine. I nod. She goes back into the house, sliding the patio doors shut behind her. Lights glow from every window, like our house has a thousand eyes.
Of course I can do that one thing. I’ve never not done that one thing.
Today is the day my mother is getting on a plane to fetch Joey from the wilds of Colorado, where they’ve been hiking and counseling and tough-loving the drugs and bad thoughts out of his body for two and half months. She’s going to bring him back and dress him up and send him off to senior year at Heywood High like nothing ever happened. That’s how we do it in our house.
Like Joey’s chipped-paint, torn-seat, dented and busted-up old Toyota Corolla didn’t fly off Wolf Creek Road one night this past June, Candy MontClair screaming, Luther Leonard laughing like a maniac as his head splintered the windshield in front of me and Joey’s body flung against Candy in the backseat, crushing her, because he was dead weight, because he was so high he was no longer even conscious, he was on a whole other plane. He was like one of those fading stars hovering above me right now as I climb out of the pool and limp toward the house: so beautiful to look at, so full of secrets, but too far away to reach.
* * *
—
In my bathroom, I massage my knee while the shower warms up. Run a finger gently down the scar.
When I was in the hospital, they had a chart on the wall with six round faces, and the expression on each face got worse and worse until the last face was all scrunched up and crying. Each face had a number. The last, crying face was a ten and meant your pain was at “Hurts Worst.” That was the most you could hurt. That was the one I always wanted to choose, because it really felt that way, my knee and lots of other things. But my parents were down the hall with my brother most of the time and they didn’t need to worry about me, too. And I didn’t want Maddie to cry any longer. I said I was a four most days, the face that was mostly just a grim line for a mouth, neither here nor there. “Hurts A Little More.”
I bend over, grabbing the sides of the claw-foot tub with both hands, stepping my good foot in first and then carefully, painfully, sliding my bad leg over the side. There are four bathrooms in our house, three with claw-foots, restored originals. This is what it means when you grow up with a certain type of mother in a house built in 1884: you might have Sub-Zero and Wolf in the kitchen, but the rest of the house stays “true to history.” My mother is a fan of the past, except when it’s inconvenient.
I try to measure the throbbing in my knee. Is it a four? A six? Hurts a little more? Hurts a lot? I think about the scrip Dr. Cooper gave me back when Maddie was home, the one I never told my mother about. When Maddie left, she hid my pain medication.
That’s what happens when your brother is addicted to drugs: your mom gets so paranoid you might turn out the same way, she restricts your pain meds. She keeps them in a locked cabinet in the garage, along with every other possible medication in the house: aspirin, ibuprofen, Tylenol, Midol, whatever she takes to fall into her zombie sleep at night.
When I asked her where she was going with the Tupperware full of painkillers, she said, “I just want your brother to come home and have no temptations.”
When I asked her why she was putting all her jewelry in the safe in my father’s den, she said, “To be careful.”
“Joey never stole from you,” I said. “He wouldn’t do that.”
My mother stared at me in a way that unnerved me.
Would he? Would Joey steal?
“Well, did he?” I finally asked, exasperated by her silence.