You'd Be Home Now
Kathleen Glasgow
To all the Emmys and Joeys:
Love remains
WE ARE FLYING IN the blue-black night, rain slashing the car. Trees become hands, become fingers, become teeth reaching out for us. I don’t know if we make sounds, because my heart is in my ears, drowning me. The car is weightless and heavy at the same time as it smacks against the earth, bounces, rolls and rolls, and Luther Leonard is half in, half out of the splintered windshield in front of me, his sneakered feet dangling at strange angles.
I say my brother’s name, but there isn’t any answer.
My hands feel around the seat for the belt lock, but they quiver so badly they can’t settle down. There is something I feel, but I can’t tell what it is. Something in my body that is not right. Something out of place.
In the lopsided rearview mirror, my brother, Joey, is a useless thing in the backseat, splayed over Candy MontClair, blood in his hair.
I say her name.
The sounds that come from her are not words. They’re raspy and wet, full and thin all at once.
I have to get out of this car. I have to tell someone. I have to get help. I have to leave this place of shattered glass and crunched metal and Luther Leonard’s dangling feet, but I can’t move. I can’t get out.
Through the broken window comes a howling in Wolf Creek Woods. There’s howling, and maybe it’s me, and then I realize it isn’t. It’s the howl of sirens, and beams begin to fill our broken car with light.
ONE
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
—mary oliver
1
MY SISTER, MADDIE, IS crying, her pretty face damp and frightened. One of my legs is heavier than the other and I don’t understand and I want to ask her why, but I can’t form words, because there’s an ocean inside me, warm and sweet, and I’m bobbing along the waves, just like the ones that carried me and Joey all those years ago in San Diego, when everything was perfect or as close to it as we could get. That was a nice time, when I was twelve and Joey was thirteen, letting the waves carry us, Maddie stretched out on the beach in her purple bikini and floppy-brimmed hat. Far away from Mill Haven, we were in a different world, where no one knew who we were.
I try to ask Maddie where Joey is, but she can’t understand me. She thinks I’m saying something else, because she leans forward and says, “Do you need more? Do you need me to press the button?”
And her finger presses a button on the side of the bed and the largest wave I’ve ever known billows over me, like the parachute game we played in the gymnasium in kindergarten, all of us laughing as the fabric gently overtook us and blocked out the world.
* * *
—
My mother’s voice is trembling. “This is not normal. This is not something that happens to people like us.”
My father sounds weary. He has been weary for years now. Joey makes people weary.
He says, “There is no normal, Abigail. Nothing has ever been normal. Why can’t you see that? He has a problem.”
My finger stretches out for the button to make the waves come again. My parents make me tired, years and years of fighting about Joey.
My mother’s hand touches my head. Like a kitten, I respond, leaning into it. I can’t remember the last time she touched me, stroked my hair. Everything has always been about Joey.
“There was heroin in his system, Abigail. How did we miss that?”
The word floats in the air before me, something eerie and frightening.
There was vomit spattered on his hoodie at the party. When we found him in the bedroom. He was woozy and floppy and strange and made no sense and I thought…
I thought he was just drunk. Stoned, maybe.
“I will fix this,” she says to my father. “He’ll go to rehab, he’ll get better, he’ll come home.”
She says rehab in a clipped way, like it hurts to have the word in her mouth.
“That’s not a magic wand you can wave and make it all go away, Abigail. He could have died. Emory could have died. A girl did die.”
The ocean inside me, the one that was warm and wavy, freezes.
“What did you say?” I whisper. My voice feels thick. Can they understand me? I speak louder. “What did you just say?”
“Emory,” my father says. “Oh, Emory.”
My mother’s eyes are wet blue pools. She curls her fingers in my hair.
“You’re alive,” she tells me. “I’m so grateful you’re alive.”
Her face is blurry from the waves carrying me. I’m struggling inside them, struggling to understand.
“But she just had a headache,” I say. “Candy just had a headache. She can’t be dead.”
My father frowns. “You aren’t making any sense, Emmy.”
She had a headache. That’s why she was in the car. She had a headache at the party, and she wanted a ride home and it can’t be right that a person has a headache and gets in a car and dies and everyone else lives. It can’t be right.