“It means you care too much about him to stand back from the situation. If he tells you he can’t take much more, you freak out and feel like you need to do something. Me, I just hear him out. I just let him get it off his chest.”
“Nothing wrong with caring,” I said. I sounded a little on the defensive side. Probably because I was.
“Never said it was wrong. You asked the question and I answered it.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
We sat another minute. Vermeer sighed deeply, finally accepting that the run was unavoidably delayed. She curled up in the dirt at my feet, and Rembrandt took her cue and followed suit.
“Look. Here’s what I don’t get,” I said. “He’s so close to his mom. And she depends on him so much. Especially now that his father is gone. I just can’t understand how he could even consider such a thing. You know. Knowing what it would do to her and all.”
“But can you understand that he feels a lot of rage toward his mom? Because she depends on him too much? And because he has to consider her feelings first in everything he does?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but no answer had formed yet in my brain. And, before one could, I looked up to see Connor walking up the path toward the cabin. So I knew this conversation was over.
It was time for me to practice relaxing about the things I couldn’t control.
When I’d finished my run and jogged home, I found more opportunities to practice.
My mom was gone. Where to, I had no idea. She was starting to be away more and more. She said nothing about it, and I couldn’t imagine even wanting to know the story behind it. I figured if I knew, I wouldn’t like what I found out. Call it a hunch.
Roy had managed to come downstairs on his own and was limping around on his crutches, obviously looking for something. And what he was looking for was obvious.
I stepped into the hall just in time to see him leave the downstairs bathroom and make his way into our parents’ bedroom. I followed him. Stood in the doorway and watched him pull open the top drawer of my mom’s dresser and rummage around in there.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
It startled him so much he almost lost his balance and fell off his crutches.
I’d meant to say it casually. Not so much as an accusation. More like “Hey. What’s up?” I don’t think I succeeded.
“Oh. Hi. Buddy. You scared me. Listen. Mom took off and forgot to give me my pain meds.”
I doubted that. She had a written schedule. She checked off the doses with a pencil. I didn’t say so.
“So . . . ,” he continued, “. . . you know where she’s keeping them now?”
“No.”
“Help me find them. Okay, buddy?”
“No.”
My brother seemed to freeze in time. Really, the whole world seemed to. The utter silence was shocking. I remember thinking the birds had stopped chirping outside the window because of what I’d said to Roy. Though, looking back, it’s possible they’d just flown away by then. For their own reasons.
I heard him clear his throat carefully.
“Thought you cared enough about me to do me a favor, buddy.”
“I can’t do that one, though.” I wanted to say I couldn’t do it because I cared about him, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk like one of those corny made-for-TV movies where people say exactly what they’re feeling, as though there was nothing difficult about that at all. As though people did that correctly every day. “As a matter of fact,” I said instead, “I was going to ask a favor of you.”
“What?”
“I want you to come someplace with me.”
“Where?”
“I want you to not ask where.”
“When? Now?”
“No. Later on this afternoon.”
“Weird that you won’t even tell me what it is.”
“I know. But I’m just going to ask you to trust me. You trust me, don’t you? And if you do this for me, I’ll do something for you. I’ll ask Mom to show me where she keeps her schedule of your meds so I can look over her shoulder and catch it if she ever forgets and skips a dose.”
I waited for a minute. Watched as he rolled that around in his head. It was a useful offer only if she really was forgetting. It was no use to him if he only wanted to take more than what had been prescribed.
Meanwhile he seemed as though he never planned to answer.
“So will you go with me?”
“On one condition. That Mom or Dad won’t drive us.”
“How are we supposed to get there if nobody drives us?”
“Well how do you get places? You never ask them to drive you.”
“Walk. Or take the bus. But I don’t have a hurt foot.”
“I’m good on my crutches now. They’re mad as hell, and I’m not getting stuck in a car with either one of them lecturing me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Suit yourself. We’ll take the bus.”
I bolted down as much dinner as I could stomach, then took a plate up to Roy and told him to hurry. Told him we had to leave in twenty minutes.
When I got downstairs, my mom was doing up the dinner dishes.
“Roy and I are going out,” I said.
I had to run it by her. No way I could get him out of the house without her noticing. But it was dicey, and I knew it. She was a brick wall between me and our getting where we needed to go, and I knew I might not get through her. I could feel a little vein pulsing with tension near my ear.
“What?” She said it not like she hadn’t heard me. More like she’d heard it but she couldn’t believe it. “No,” she added. “No, no, no. I don’t like this one bit. I don’t trust either one of you.”
That was a sad
