You'd Be Home Now (20)

“Hey, Emory,” the voice says. “This is Shadow, Joe’s leader from Blue Spruce. I heard a lot about you over the summer. I need your help right now, okay?”

My voice is only a whisper. “Okay.”

I’m trying to picture what he looks like. He sounds youngish, but how young could he be to have a job like this?

“Joe’s in a bad place right now. You know the situation?”

“Yes. Max came over.”

“Yes. It’s really, really hard when old friends come by when you’re trying to maintain recovery. Your desire for friendship and connection is huge, but you have to say no to people who aren’t sober, and that can be an extremely hard and lonely thing to do. You know?”

“Yeah.”

“So, I’m really proud of Joe for telling his friend he couldn’t come in, but I need you to do something for me, okay? It’s going to seem really small, but it’s actually pretty big.

“I want you to take Joe for a walk, a hike, anything to clear his head. Sometimes being active, getting our blood flowing, is a way to calm down and refocus. Be outside. Breathe the air.”

    Joey is holding Fuzzy tight, nuzzling her fur. I can’t see his face.

“I can’t…I can’t hike or walk for a long time. I have a bad knee.”

There’s a pause. “That’s right. You were in the car. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have forgotten that.”

“We have a pool, though. It’s a nice day. We could swim. Can we swim?”

“Oh, for sure! That’s excellent. I love that. Thank you. These are just things that we need to do to help Joey, okay? Keep him safe, keep him feeling like he has a support system. I’ll give your mom a call, let her know what—”

“Oh, no, not our mom.” My voice rises in an embarrassing squeak. Joey looks up, shaking his head. “No, you can’t…don’t do that. She’ll get…that just wouldn’t be a good idea.”

Shadow pauses. “I see. Okay. I get it. I’m not a fan of omission, but I get it. Can you save my number in your phone? In case you need it sometime? I’ll save yours, too, okay? I’m a big fan of yours, Joey talked about you a lot. You sound like a good sister. Joey said you taught him to read. That’s amazing.”

I don’t say anything.

We used to read for hours in the fort in my dad’s den. My parents were always frustrated with him. They thought he wasn’t working hard enough, that he was lazy. I read a lot of books to Joey, just the two of us, until he got the hang of it.

“Can you let me talk to Joey again, for a minute? And then you guys can swim. Tell Joey to do a cannonball for me, okay?”

“Okay.”

Joey and I trade the dog and the phone.

    I hear Shadow say, “You’re amazing, brother. You reached out when you needed to and that was exactly the right thing to do.”

Joey angles his head, mumbles something, and then hands my phone back to me.

“I think I left my suit in Colorado. I remember swimming in a lake and hanging it in a tree to dry and that’s the last I saw of it. I don’t think I have another one,” he says.

We both turn at the sound of a tap on the patio door. Ryleigh is standing there in her pink-and-green swimsuit. She holds up an inner tube.

“I think I have an idea,” I say, smiling.



* * *



—

Gage’s swimsuit is a little droopy around Joey’s skinny waist, even though he tied it as tight as he could. He was always pretty thin, but it looks like he got skinnier in rehab. It must have been all the hiking. The suit has surfboards and sunsets on it. “I hope this doesn’t fall down,” he mutters.

“He said to do cannonballs,” I say, lowering myself into the water.

Ryleigh shouts, “Cannonball contest!” And jumps in the water, splashing Joey.

“All right, now, that’s war,” he says when she bobs to the surface. “Prepare to be drenched.” He takes a run, lifts, and tucks himself tight. Ryleigh squeals as she’s pulled and pushed in the waves.

When Joey comes up, he’s got a grin on his face. “I bet I can do fifty. How many can you do?”

“One thousand. Do you know this one guy once did eighty-nine cannonballs in twenty minutes? He was wearing a Speedo.”

    Joey treads water. “This is a lot better than the lakes we swam in this summer. I could never see the bottom. That kind of freaked me out. I like to know where the bottom is, you know?” He smiles at me, ducks back under.

Each wave bumps more and more water against me, which feels nice, like being in the ocean when we went on vacation to San Diego. Joey and I spent whole days in the sea, going farther and farther out, holding each other and screaming as the waves tried to knock us down. At night, my parents would go to dinner in the fancy hotel restaurant and give us money to walk the boardwalk in Mission Beach and get hamburgers at Woody’s. We ate on the beach as the sun went down, our hair still crunchy with salt, Maddie digging her toes in the sand. Sometimes Joey would give me one of his earbuds and we’d listen to music together. Sometimes he’d light a joint if no one was around. I don’t know where he got it or if he was stupid enough to bring it on the plane. The beach seemed like you could probably get it anywhere, from somebody.