Patrick and Greg collapsed on the sectional, splayed across the couch like two stoned teenagers overwhelmed by the size of the world. “How was your time in the paddy wagon?”
Greg groaned. He looked at the plates on the coffee table with the remains of pie-a-palooza; the sugar crash would come, but now he was riding the only high left available to him.
“What does that mean?” Patrick asked. He pushed a plate with crust and whipped crème to the center of the coffee table with his toe to keep it from tempting Marlene. “You’ve got to give me something more than a groan.”
Greg propped himself up on his elbows. “Do you want the real answer? Or the bullshit one?”
Patrick gave this actual thought. Did he want to know if this was indeed behind his brother? Was it going to require a second stint to take? Would the kids be his again next summer, and perhaps the one after that? He fixated on the ceiling, as if the answer might reveal itself there. Instead he only saw a recessed bulb that needed replacing. “Real answer.”
“It was hell. At least at first. I know in reality, it was a long time coming. Sara had been sick for years. But inside it felt like one day I had a happy family—a wife and two kids—and then the next day I had nothing.”
“Not nothing.”
“They gave me slippers,” Greg offered. “But otherwise, it felt like nothing. It was like a reverse Wizard of Oz. I was living a full Technicolor life, and then woke up trapped in a nightmare that was devoid of all color, with a cyclone bearing down.” He smirked. “You have a lot of time to think. It’s easy to get maudlin.”
Patrick placed both palms against his eyes and pressed hard. “That’s because everything in there was beige.”
“It was so confusing. I was there against my will, even though it was my will that I was there. I don’t know how to make that make sense. It had this smell.”
“I was there. I smelled it.”
“I’m not sure that you did. It creeps inside you, slowly, over time, until you feel like you can’t take it. Your nose is burning, and your lungs are on fire, and you’re screaming, but no one can hear you because it’s all on the inside.”
Greg reached behind his head to fluff a pillow. Patrick was grateful he’d tossed the sequined pill-ow at Christmas so that Greg wasn’t confronted with its tackiness. “And then?”
“I don’t know. Around day nineteen it clicked. It was like for eighteen days everyone was speaking a foreign language. I was determined to keep my head down and just power through, convinced I could go back to my old habits afterward and just handle it better this time.”
“That’s addiction talking.” Patrick writhed to reach an itch between his shoulder blades. “So what happened?”
“On day nineteen I woke up fluent. Everything people said just started making sense. I didn’t understand every word, not at first. But certainly enough to get by. To have it mean something. I started to listen. And I recognized myself in everything they confessed. The lying, the hiding, the excuses. The shame.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Everyone there was an addict of some kind, and I mean everyone. The receptionist, the cooks, the janitors. There wasn’t a single person on the inside I didn’t have everything in common with. They all had crazy stories. I mean some things that would make your eyes pop. But I listened to them all. And if I hadn’t done it, or experienced it, I would have done it. I would have gotten there the way things were going. There was no question in my mind.”
Patrick listened, but didn’t have anything to add that didn’t take something away. He could point out something about Joe, about Sara, and how he was fluent in the language of grief. But why do what he’d always done—pull focus from somebody else?
“How am I going to explain this to others? Like, how will Clara ever understand?”
Clara. “Well, I helped your cause there. At the moment she’s angrier with me.”
“Aren’t you angry with her?”
“Aren’t you?” Patrick imagined what it must have been like to receive court documents in rehab and not be able to do much about it.
“You said you’d handle it, and I guess you did. I still don’t really know what happened.”
“That makes two of us.” It would be easy to assign Clara the blame, but he didn’t. He relented. “I went too far. I pushed her buttons.”
“You always push her buttons.”
“Yeah, but something was different this time. I think she was coming to me for help.”
Greg’s head flopped to one side like a rag doll’s. “What do you mean?”
“She’s going through some stuff.”
Greg kicked a leg in Patrick’s direction, but the couch was so vast he didn’t come close to making contact. “We’re all going through stuff.”
Patrick tilted his head back over the side of the sofa until he was looking at the Christmas tree upside down. It started with a point and broadened out from there, an upside-down pink triangle, glimmering with soft light.
“Can you make it right?” Greg asked. “I’m sort of in an all-hands-on-deck situation here.”
Marlene glanced up from her perch behind Patrick’s knees. She seemed concerned about this new arrival, unsure what Greg was about. She struggled to keep alert until she had a better sense of his agenda. Patrick
