“Yeah. He told me he didn’t take it.”
“Oh. Okay. Good.”
“You think he took it?”
“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “About anything.”
And, with those words, it came over me how tired I was. Bone tired. It was like a wave that broke over my head and then took me.
Something came out of me that I wasn’t expecting.
“You still take drugs?” I asked her.
“Excuse me?”
“I heard you drank a lot and took a lot of drugs. Showed up places around town pretty much out of your mind, so then maybe a lot of people who wanted to be on your side, maybe after that they couldn’t be. But I never saw you out of your mind, so I was thinking maybe that’s a lie. I guess I was hoping it was a lie.”
“You saw me in a coma from an overdose of pain meds.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right. Well don’t I feel stupid now?”
She didn’t say more for a long time. I could feel her gathering up for something. Maybe to talk to me about it. Maybe to go back inside the cabin. Maybe she hadn’t even decided yet herself.
“After the incident,” she said, “I drank and used. And, yeah. It got pretty bad.” Her voice sounded unusually quiet. As though she’d lost all her energy. “Then I got clean and sober. Went to meetings and everything. For years—over ten years. Then I started needing some pain meds for an old back injury. From the accident. And then I got carried away on those. Which leads me to the time you met me.”
“You could go back to the meetings.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I’m still kind of on the fence about that. About whether there’s any point. Now if you’ll excuse me, that’s more than I usually tell anybody, even those I’ve known forever. And I think it’s more than enough for one day.”
She got up stiffly. As though her back was hurting her. Or at least as though something was. She walked back into her cabin and closed and locked the door behind her.
I stayed and hugged the dogs for a while longer. But sooner or later I had to go home, and I knew it.
Chapter Thirteen
Picking Up Stuff
Oddly enough, the first outside visitor to come around and see my brother was Connor. And I hadn’t even told him Roy was home.
He showed up sometime after breakfast. I wasn’t out running because, for the first time since I’d picked up the habit, I didn’t feel like I wanted to. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I heard the knock at the door, but I waited for my mother to get it. Normally she would get it. This time she never did.
I trotted downstairs and threw the door wide, and there he was. It was surprising to see him at my house, to put it mildly. I’m not sure if that showed on my face. Probably it did.
I almost said, “What are you doing here?” but I caught it just in time. Realized how rude it would sound.
Instead I said, “Sorry about yesterday. You know. How I said I’d come by and all.”
“Well, I wondered,” he said. “But then I found out about Roy.”
So that’s a small town for you.
“You want to come in?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’d like to see him.”
That was the first I realized he’d come here for Roy and not me. Which was fine. It just surprised me. Looking back, I’m not sure why. For all the time he’d spent at my house over so many years, of course he knew my brother. Cared about my brother. But somehow I’d gotten so wrapped up in what Roy meant to me that I wasn’t including anybody else in the picture.
I waited until we were walking up the stairs to say, “I’m not sure if he’s awake.” Purposely waited. I didn’t say it at the door, because I didn’t want him to go away and come back later. If we had to wait, I wanted him to wait with me. I wanted him to talk to me. I felt like we hadn’t talked in ages.
I wanted to know if he was okay.
Bumping into him relatively often outside his own bedroom seemed to be a good sign, but I wanted to hear it straight from him.
I knocked on Roy’s door.
“Oh thank goodness,” I heard Roy say from inside.
I didn’t know what that meant, except it meant he was awake.
I opened the door.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said. He sounded disappointed.
“Yeah, me,” I said, talking over my hurt. “Can Connor come in and say hi?”
We stepped inside without really waiting for an answer.
I pulled up a chair, and Connor sat on the end of Roy’s bed. Carefully.
“I thought you were Mom with my pain meds.”
“No,” I said. “Just us.”
“Where is Mom?”
“No idea. She might not be home. She usually gets the door when she’s home.”
“Do me a favor, buddy.”
My eyes had been gradually adjusting to the dim light, and I noticed that he was sweaty. As though he had a fever. Which worried me.
“What?”
“Mom has my pain meds in the downstairs bathroom. Kind of dumb if you ask me. Run down and get them, okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
I left Connor and Roy alone to talk and ran down the stairs. I called for my mom three times, but never got an answer. So I walked into the downstairs bathroom and grabbed the only prescription pill bottle with Roy’s name on it from the medicine cabinet.
I have to admit it: I had a little tickle of doubt, or dread. Or both. Because my mom may have been many things, but she was never dumb a day in her life.
But I couldn’t look into Roy’s face and refuse him something.
I carried it up
