The answer arrived swiftly: Worried. Luke was always worried.
“Well… you know Sarah's bipolar,” Jake said, his voice tight.
“I know,” I said, thinking of all of the times I had to rescue Luke from his house back in that small town. How he described the times when she’d turn into Scary Mom.
“She had an outburst towards me. It was… I was scared, man. She had a knife.”
My hand went to my neck, and I felt the scaly roughness of the smaller bandage under my palm. The way that woman’s eyes looked in that room when Claire and I had stormed that house… that was how Luke’s eyes looked when he yelled at me the other night.
“Are you hurt?” I asked quickly, feeling my heart begin to race.
“No… she was just cutting vegetables when it happened,” he said. “She was still holding onto it, and she didn’t threaten me or anything. But I… I didn’t feel safe, dude.”
“When did this happen?” I asked, sitting up straight.
“Two days ago.”
“And you waited until now to tell me?” I asked, running my hand through my hair.
“Dude, I didn’t know who I could tell! I didn’t know how to help her! After her outburst, she dropped the knife to the floor, and it stuck in the wood. Then she started crying.”
“Where is she now?” I asked, hearing myself interrogate my brother with my cop voice.
“She’s in the psych ward. She wanted to go there — I drove her.”
A few heartbeats passed as I tried to assess what to do.
“She told me not to tell you because you’d tell Luke,” he said. “She doesn’t want him to know.”
“He has to know. She’s his mother!”
“On the way to the hospital, she had her face in her hands and kept repeating, ‘Don’t tell Adam, don’t tell Adam,’ so I didn’t. But then I had to let you know that we wouldn’t be visiting you guys.”
“So, you’re still together?” I asked.
I had to know if they’d broken up. If that was the case, I knew that Luke would insist on flying back home to see his mother; to make sure she was alright.
I could only imagine the amount of anxiety that would cause him.
There was a quietness on the phone line. Then Jake finally said, “…she pulled a knife on me, bro.”
I swept my palm over my face. “Okay, fair. So you broke up?”
“I told her that I couldn’t do it anymore. She said she understood.”
“How did she say it?”
“Calmly.”
I knew what that meant. Luke told me that his mom was at her most dangerous when she acted like nothing was wrong.
“And there are eyes on her now? There are people around her, right?”
“She’s in the psych ward, so I imagine so,” Jake said. “She’s safe.”
I let out a sigh of relief. “That’s good to hear. How are you doing?”
“Still shaken,” he said. “I never knew which Sarah I was going to get — normal Sarah or Scary Sarah. It was amazing when she was taking her medication, but then as soon as she stopped…”
He let me fill in the blanks. All I could picture was how Luke’s face looked that night he exploded at me, glowing from below with the light from his phone screen.
“Anyway, let’s not talk about that anymore,” he said, his voice trembling slightly. “It’s hard to be faced with two failed relationships in one year, you know? And then I look at you, and you have everything—”
“I don’t have everything,” I said quickly. I could feel that the words were valid as they left my mouth, but I couldn’t put my finger on precisely what was missing from my life. Still, I felt the absence of that thing, whatever it was, with an acute, painful hollowness.
“We all miss you here,” Jake said.
“I miss you guys too,” I said, a lump forming in my throat. Maybe the hole in my heart was shaped like my family. Was that what I was missing? I could feel that it was somehow related to that, but I couldn’t help but think the primary cause was connected to the relationship between me, Luke, and his anxiety.
At times, it felt like we were in a thruple with it.
“I wish you could still visit,” I said.
“I’m not in good shape to travel right now,” Jake said.
“After a breakup is the perfect time to travel,” I urged. “Get your ass out here to see us. We’ll go fishing.”
He paused. That got his attention. “Maybe in a few weeks, when it’s spring. I can only handle the cold for so long.”
I nodded. “It is cold and dark here. Going outside is like walking into a basement.”
My mind immediately snapped to the playroom in the basement — how, because of my neglect, it was like a dungeon. I couldn’t help but wonder for a few seconds if that was a reflection on our relationship.
In any case, I made a mental note about making fixing it up a priority.
“Alright, well, I’m going to return to moping,” Jake said, crestfallen.
“You going to the boathouse bar?”
“Probs.”
“Tell Claudia Luke says hi. She’s his old boss, remember?”
“Oh, right!” Jake said, brightening a few shades. “Maybe I can go down there to… forget…”
When we hung up, I felt pretty satisfied with myself that I’d planted that seed in my brother’s head. He’d always had a thing for Claudia. At one point, he even told me that he was bringing her to our family barbecue. When he showed up alone, I thought she’d rejected him or something.
It turned out that she did… and that things were less serious between them than what Jake led me to believe. Before Sarah arrived at the barbecue, he was lamenting about how Claudia rejected his invite.
Then Sarah showed up, and the rest was history.
I leaned back on the couch, thinking about that night. That night I got to introduce Luke to my family — how much fun we had.
…and how kinky things had gotten.
That was the second time I thought of the playroom this
