Off the Deep End (70)
Being on the same page felt wonderful. It hadn’t felt like this between us in three years. Not since Isaac hit puberty. I’d forgotten what it felt like, but it only took a minute, and I immediately remembered how much I loved it. How much I loved him. Still. Even after all these years and buried underneath all the harsh feelings and resentments, there was an unshakable love between us. I took a moment to appreciate it before continuing.
“Maybe he’s going to call us soon, you know? Like he’ll reach out when he gets wherever he’s going or after he’s settled and things calm down. And then we can just let everyone know he’s all right.” What if this didn’t have to end in another tragedy? Tears filled my eyes at the prospect.
“The way I figure, everyone will be so happy when he shows up that they’ll all just be grateful he’s alive and okay.” He said like it was a sure thing, and I so desperately wanted to believe that’s how this would play itself out. He did too. His hope was written all over him.
Faking your own kidnapping was a pretty brutal thing to put your loved ones through, but Isaac might not have felt like he had any other choice. Teenagers couldn’t see beyond the moment they were in and had no idea that the only thing constant about life was that it changed. Isaac didn’t know things would’ve changed eventually and all this would’ve passed. There was so much life ahead of him, but he didn’t know that, and it was heartbreaking.
“This is so hard,” I said because I didn’t know what else to say.
“I know,” he said. His eyes were filled with tears too. Something about acknowledging the pain and how hard it was made it feel like for the first time in all this, we were in it together instead of on separate islands. “Here’s the next question.” Mark dropped his voice low again.
“What’s that?”
“Do we tell the police?” He pointed below us.
That wasn’t the next question. Not yet. There was one more thing we needed to discuss before we did anything else.
“There’s something that I haven’t told you that you need to know.” This was it. There was never going to be a good time. I just had to tell him.
His head snapped up. Instant mood shift. “God, Amber. I’m not sure if I can handle anything else today. I really don’t.”
“I don’t know if it’s related. It might be or it might not be, but we’re spilling all of our secrets today, so it’s only fair that I tell you mine.” He gripped the chair. His body stiffened in preparation for news I wasn’t sure either of us could handle on top of what we’d already been through, but our newfound togetherness propelled me forward. “Do you remember when Isaac had those irregularities that showed up on one of his EKGs?” He nodded. Of course he remembered. He’d been terrified there was something wrong with Isaac’s heart. His best friend had died from an undiagnosed heart condition during a track meet their senior year of high school, so he was especially sensitive to it. “The reason his heart was acting funny was because two days before we went to the pediatrician, he overdosed on his Celexa medication. He got horribly ill. He had violent diarrhea and had a terrible headache coupled with chest pains. He just thought the chest pains were anxiety until we went to the doctor.”
“When you say overdosed, what do you mean?”
“He took too many of his pills.”
“Why did he take too many pills?”
“Why do you think, Mark?” Why was he making me spell it out for him? This was hard enough as it was without having to give him a play-by-play account.
“There are lots of reasons he could’ve taken too many pills.”
I raised my eyebrows at him. “Name one.”
“He could’ve taken too much because he was trying to get high. I would’ve done something like that when I was a teenager if I was trying to get messed up. Maybe that’s all that it is.” He looked relieved, but I wasn’t sure him trying to get high was all that much better. Either way, he was still trying to kill himself. One was just faster. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“For the same reason you didn’t tell me: I didn’t want to worry you any more if I didn’t need to. There was already so much going on, and things were already so hard.” And like him, I leave out the real reason. The one we probably didn’t even admit to ourselves—I didn’t want it to be true. I wanted to pretend like it never happened. That was the truth. But there was no more pretending. This was happening. All of it.
TWENTY-ONE
AMBER GREER
Day fourteen.
Everything had shifted in the last twenty-four hours. Nothing was the same. You felt it in the house, from the thickness in the air to the way nobody made full eye contact with anyone else anymore. The house was so quiet. It had thrummed with a baseline level of activity for thirteen days. All that was gone.
We were all waiting, just like we’d been the night Isaac had gone missing. Each minute had crawled, and I’d wanted to jump out of my skin. The more hours that passed, the more it had taken away the possibility that something bad hadn’t happened to him. Up until eleven o’clock that night, there had still been hope that despite what it looked like, Isaac could come walking through the door at any minute. Duke got away from him all the time. He got away from all of us. Unlike those other boys, there were plenty of instances over the last decade where the two of them left together and came home separately. Duke was an escape artist. It was his favorite game to play, and he took off any chance that he got. So we’d waited and hoped. Just like we were doing now.