talked for a long time.”
“Nah. Maybe later. I haven’t been to Zoe’s yet.”
We stepped out into the hall together. I confess I was
feeling stung. Partly because talking to me seemed to
be no priority for him. Partly because I’d never called
Zoe Dinsmore by her first name. Not once. It’s hard to
admit, but it made me a little jealous. Suddenly Connor
was closer to the lady than I had ever been.
I walked him to the door. And, as I did, I expressed
none of what I was feeling. You know, the usual. The
way we always did things.
“Maybe I’ll come by later,” he said, but he didn’t
sound like he meant it. I wasn’t expecting him, based on
the way he said it.
“Right. Whatever.”
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Which was the closest I was going to come to saying
I was upset.
I closed the door behind him and turned around to see
my mother standing in the kitchen doorway, her hands
on her hips. I could tell she was angry. About something.
In that moment I couldn’t even have ventured a guess.
“Okay, where is it?” she asked.
“Where’s what?”
“Roy’s pain meds. I know he didn’t come down the
stairs and get them himself.”
“He asked me for them and—”
“Never do that again!” she shouted. The first word,
“Never,” was so sharp and loud it made me jump.
“He said he needed them.”
“It was too soon! You can’t put them where he can get
to them. Promise me you’ll never do that again. Where
are they?”
“In the medicine cabinet in his bathroom.”
She clucked her tongue at me as she climbed the stairs.
I couldn’t help noticing that she hadn’t waited and forced
that promise out of me. What would I do if he asked me
straight out for them again?
I decided my only real hope would be to lie and say
Mom had hidden them but even I didn’t know where. Or
maybe I’d get lucky, and by then it would be the truth.
“I’m worried he might be sick,” I said to her retreat-
ing back.
“He’s not sick,” she said, and kept climbing.
I just stood there in the hall for a moment or two.
Then, as I was walking up the stairs, I passed her
coming down. She didn’t say a word to me.
As I closed the door to my room, I heard the kitchen
door slam, and her car start in the driveway. She never
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bothered to tell me where she was going. She didn’t even
call out the word “Bye.”
* * *
Roy’s second visitor arrived by cab about three hours later.
I was looking out my bedroom window, and I saw the
yellow cab pull up. That was an occasion, to see a cab in
this town. We actually didn’t have a taxi service in Ashby.
Somebody must’ve called one to come over from Blaine.
The driver jumped out and came around to the curb-
side rear door. The way a gentleman will open the door
for a lady. But it wasn’t a lady I saw climb out of the back seat. It was Darren Weller.
He handed his crutches out to the driver, then care-
fully positioned himself so his one good leg was out of the
cab, shoe sole down on the sidewalk. The driver reached
a hand out to help him up, and handed him back his
crutches one by one, until Darren was standing steady.
I watched Darren slip the driver some kind of bill
and then make his way, slowly, obviously painfully, up
our walk.
He looked different than last time I’d seen him. His
hair was freshly combed, slicked back with some kind
of men’s hair product that left wet-looking comb marks
along his scalp. He was wearing neatly pressed chinos and
a white long-sleeved shirt. The partly empty leg of his
slacks had been carefully folded up and pinned.
I was pretty sure my mom wasn’t home, so I went
downstairs to let him in. I respected him too much not
to go let him in. Though, truthfully, I was also afraid of
him now. Or still. But more so now, because I thought
he might punch me for not being nicer to his sister.
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I opened the door, and we looked at each other for a
minute. Well, a few seconds. It felt long. He didn’t look
angry. He looked more sad than anything.
“He taking visitors?”
“He might be kind of doped up on pain meds. I could
go see.” Another awkward few seconds. “Oh,” I said.
“I’m sorry. Come in.”
He did, easing along on his crutches. I could tell
how much it hurt him. I could see it in his face. Every
time he rested his weight on them, I saw the wince. I
remembered what Libby had told me about shrapnel in
the muscles of his chest.
“Maybe you could go up and see what’s what,” he
said. He was looking up the stairs as if the second floor
was the summit of a mountain he was only half sure he
could climb.
“Sure,” I said. “I will.” But then I stuck where I was
for a moment. “Are you mad at me?” I asked him.
His face looked completely blank.
“About what?”
So that was obviously a good sign.
“Things didn’t exactly work out between me and
your sister.”
“Aw, hell,” he said. “I know what a pain in the ass
she can be. I know it better than anybody.”
* * *
The logistics were tricky, to put it mildly. But here’s how
we worked it out: Roy came down. He came down the
stairs with one hand on the banister, the other on my
shoulder. I walked a couple of steps ahead of him and
below him, careful to stop if he seemed wobbly.
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When we got to the bottom of the stairs, Darren
swung over on his crutches and offered my brother what I
can only call an embrace. The word “hug” would not be
expansive enough to cover it. I could hear them speaking
quiet, almost reverent words into each other’s ears, but I
couldn’t hear what words they were.
Then Darren clapped Roy on the back a couple of
times, and they broke apart.
“Hey, buddy,” Roy said, turning his attention on me.
“Run upstairs and bring me down my crutches, okay?”
I did as I’d been asked.
Then I watched my brother and my ex-girlfriend’s
brother disappear—slowly—into my father’s den.
I wanted to follow, but I didn’t. I wanted to rate,
but I didn’t. I ached to be a member of the authorized
personnel—figuratively speaking—who could walk
through that door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.”
But I wasn’t.
You had to have survived a war. Watched parts of
yourself separate away. Actual parts, and maybe invisible
parts as well.
You had to know things I couldn’t possibly know.
* * *
Darren came out ab
out an hour and a half later. By him-
self. I tried not to think about everything he had likely
been told, and how much I wanted to know it. At least,
I think I wanted to know it. Sometimes it’s hard to be
sure until it’s too late.
He came over slowly on his crutches. It was clear he
was tired from so much moving around. He put a hand
on my shoulder. He never had before.
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“Where’s Roy?” I asked.
“On the couch in the den. He’s not feeling good about
getting back up the stairs. When your dad gets home,
you can tag-team the thing.”
“Okay.”
If he ever got home. You never knew in those days.
“Now do me a favor, okay, Lucas?”
“Sure,” I said.
He led me farther away from the den door. He leaned
in as if to say something important. Then he seemed to
go an entirely different direction in his brain.
“Wait,” he said. “Let me call my cab first.”
I sat on the living room couch with my heart pound-
ing and my fingers woven together, fidgeting.
He came out a couple of minutes later. When he eased
down on the couch next to me, he made a long noise.
A cross between a sigh and a grunt. It reminded me of
my grandmother before she died—of the noise she made
every time she sat down. But Darren was only twenty.
“I need you to do something to help your brother,”
he said. His face was leaned in close, his voice quiet.
“Anything. What?”
“Find out where there are some meetings in town.
Or in Blaine. Or wherever the hell you have to go. If
AA is all you’ve got, it’ll do. But try to find NA if you
possibly can. Try to find what they call an open meeting.
That way you can go, too. And then get ’im there. And
sit with ’im so he doesn’t walk out before it’s over. So he
at least has to pretend like he’s listening. And if he says
he’ll just go to that VA drug counseling instead, don’t
go that way. Trust the VA with his injury—what choice
do you have? But don’t give ’em his heart or his soul to
heal. Hell, most of ’em haven’t even healed their own.”
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I could hear a pulsing of blood in my ears. It was loud,
and pretty distracting.
“I don’t know what NA is.”
“Like AA, but for drugs.”
“What’s the N stand for?”
“Narcotics.”
“Oh.” I sat quietly for a minute. Then I said, “Is this
because he’s taking too many of those pain pills? Because
I think maybe he just got high on them and forgot how
many he was supposed to take.”
“Nah,” Darren said. “It’s not about that.”
I wondered if I wanted to ask what it was about.
Then I wondered if not asking would keep me safe from
Darren’s telling me anyway.
“He’s only been home since yesterday,” I said.
I think I was fighting back against the idea that Roy
needed to go to meetings. In fact, I’m sure I was. I wanted
Darren to be mistaken about that.
“This is not about what he’s been doing since he got
home. It’s about what he did over there. Guys pick up
stuff over there. It happens a lot. Because stuff’s easy to
get, and because it makes everything almost bearable. It’s
usually a situational thing. Guy needs it till he gets home.
Then he doesn’t need it anymore.”
“Maybe he won’t need it anymore,” I said.
“Well. Thing is, he might’ve said something to suggest
he’s one of the ones who can’t put it down without help.”
“What did he say?”
It was a brave question. But I think I figured if I knew,
I could find a flaw in Darren’s conclusion.
“He asked me if I knew how to get ’im any.”
“Oh,” I said.
I couldn’t find a flaw in that.
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We sat in silence for a time. And the silence had a
burn to it. I wasn’t sure if it was a temporary break in
our conversation, or if we were just waiting for his cab
to pull up and honk.
“Did you pick up stuff over there?” I asked.
It was another bold question. But I needed to know.
“I did,” he said.
“But then you set it down when you got home?”
“I did, yeah. But not everybody can. And it doesn’t
make me bigger or stronger or braver or better. Different
people have different reactions to things. That’s all.”
“What if he won’t go with me?”
“Then you call me up and tell me, and I’ll come over
and help you sort things out. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. But it sounded like a lot of responsibility.
We sat in silence for a while longer. And, in that si-
lence, I stepped back in time in my head. Back to before
Roy came home. When I’d thought everything would
be so simple. I’d thought Roy would just come home,
and then everything would be great.
I think I grew up a lot in that moment.
“How old are you now?” he asked, knocking me out
of my thoughts.
“Fourteen.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Four years. Maybe we’ll be
out of that damn war by then. But if not … well, you’ll
have to make up your own mind what to do. You can’t
just do what I think you should do. But I’ll tell you this.
If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t go.”
“I have a choice?”
“Everybody has choices. Always. Just, sometimes they
don’t like ’em. You can go where the draft board sends
you. Or you can go to Canada. Or you can go to jail. If
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you ask me, jail is the more honorable way to go. You can
look the guys who did fight straight in the eye and say,
‘Yeah, I sacrificed, too. I didn’t have it easy.’ But think
carefully before you get yourself into a thing like a war.”
“Maybe it’ll be over by then,” I said. Which had al-
ready been said. So it would’ve been more honest to say,
“Oh dear God, please let it be over by then.”
He opened his mouth to answer, but just then his cab
honked in the driveway. And that was it for our visit.
* * *
I knew when my mom was home because I heard her
holler my name. I don’t usually use the word “holler.”
But in this case it feels like the only one that’ll do.
“Lucas!”
I came to the railing on the second-floor landing and
looked down, wondering what I had done wrong this time.
“What?”
She looked up at me, her face livid. If my life had been
a cartoon, she would’ve had smoke coming out of her ears.
“What did you do?” she shouted.
She had a pill bottle in her hand that I could only as-
sume was Roy’s medication. She held it up as Exhibit A
in the trial that would likely end with my death penalty.
“I didn’t do
anything,” I said. “I didn’t touch it.”
“Four pills missing! Four! You think I don’t count
them? I know he didn’t walk down the stairs by himself
and get them.”
“Oh,” I said. In that ugly moment the truth stretched
out in front of me like a mile of bad road. One I would
have no choice but to navigate. “He … we … I helped
him come downstairs. Because Darren Weller came by
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to see him. It would’ve been harder for Darren to get up
the stairs than for Roy to get down them. I never thought
about the pills. I’m sorry.”
She peered up at me for a moment. Her anger seemed
to be draining away, but I swear she looked as though she
was trying to keep it.
“I’m hiding these where only I know where they are.”
“Yes, please,” I said.
Sooner or later he was going to ask me to get him
some. And when I said I didn’t know where they were,
I wanted it to be the truth.
She narrowed her eyes at me. Trying to figure me
out, I guess. I remember vaguely wishing in that moment
that she saw herself and me as being on the same team.
But that was not my mom, or my life.
Then she turned and stomped away.
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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
My Name Is Roy And…
I beat Connor out to the lady’s cabin the following morn-
ing. Purposely. I figured she might still be sleeping, but I was wrong on that score. She was sweeping off her front
porch with an old broom. A very old broom It was missing a lot of its straws.
“Hey,” I said, patting the dogs’ heads as best I could
while they jumped and danced around me.
“You’re early.”
She stopped sweeping and leaned on her broom. She
was a lot of woman and it was not much broom. It didn’t
look like it wanted to hold her.
“I need to ask you about meetings,” I said.
“Meetings,” she repeated.
“Like for people who’re addicted to drugs. You said
you used to go to them.”
“Yeah. I guess I did say that.”
For a moment she just stared at me. I was guessing
she was curious as to whether I was asking for myself or a
friend. So I answered what was in my head, even though
it might not have been in hers at all.
“And it has to be an open meeting. Because I need to
be able to go, too. And I’m not … you know…”
I hated to use that word. The A-word. It seemed harsh.
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