You'd Be Home Now (97)

    “I came here,” Carly says. “It seems okay. Better than where I was. My mom stole my Percocet and said the baby was bothering her.”

My mother reaches out and touches the baby’s cheek softly.

“Abigail,” my dad says. “I don’t know where our son is. I’ll never stop hoping he comes home and gets help, but right here, right now, we can do something. You can build something else that matters in this town. Look around you. These are all versions of Joey. Think of that.”

My mother looks at Carly. “I’m sorry about your mother. A girl needs her mother when she has a new baby.”

“Mom, you can do this,” I say. “Fuck your shoes. Remember?”

My mom is quiet, her face sad as she gazes at the baby, as she looks around at what the history of her family has become.

“I need some time to think,” she says slowly. “I just need a little time.”

“Okay,” I say, grateful. “We can do that.”



* * *



—

My father has taken a leave of absence from the hospital. Every few days, three of us, me and my father and Liza, take boxes of canned beans, bags of apples, toilet paper, baby wipes, bottled water, to Frost Bridge and the Mill. I sit to the side while my father talks to the people, taking their histories and temperatures, checking their injuries and illnesses. He cleans up the old needles and gives them new ones. Delivers strips of Suboxone, hands out flyers for the outpatient center.

    Because, he tells me, they can’t stop doing what hurts them. They can’t control it, but he can try to keep them safe while they do what they need to do. Each time we go, there are more of them, but there is never Joey.

At night, after everyone is asleep, I’m still texting him, even though his phone is dead and gone. Even though my words will drift into darkness and silence, they still matter. It still matters to say them, each and every time. Maybe in that alternate universe Daniel talks about, one word, somehow, some way, will reach Joey, wherever he is. A slight murmur in his ear that causes him to look around and think about us. Me.

Come home, I type.


Please answer me

Answer me

Answer me



Joey has been missing for thirty-four days.





47




“THIS IS VERY FESTIVE,” Daniel says, surveying Simon Stanley’s living room. It’s decorated with red-and-green streamers, Christmas lights, and a tiny green tree with silver ornaments in one corner, by the piano. Simon Stanley is plunking out a jazzy song, singing in a wavery voice. It’s the end-of-semester party he holds for the Drama Club.

Everything is bright and lovely in this house, but I can’t feel it, at least not all of it. Always, now, I feel the fact of Joey’s absence inside me, somewhere deep and painful. I shake my head, try to clear my thoughts. Concentrate on Daniel.

“Thanks for coming with me,” I say. “I felt like I needed to get out of the house for a bit.”

“I wouldn’t have missed this for anything,” Daniel says. “Theater people are so much more fun than regular people, in my opinion. Maybe I should join Drama Club in the spring.”

“I could see you, onstage, emoting,” I say, smiling at him.

“You look pretty,” he says. “The gray cardigan. It suits your eyes.”

And there they are, small butterflies in my stomach, flitting around. I don’t think I had butterflies with Gage so much as what I now feel like was anxiousness, always afraid I would say the wrong thing and drive him away.

This feels better than that.

“Daniel,” I say suddenly.

    That girl, the one who came out before at the dance, she’s back. I can feel her, and this time what she’s going to do is right.

“Do you want to go outside? Get some air?”

“Anything,” he says. “Sure.”

I grab our coats from the rack by the door and we slip out, Simon still singing. Nothin’ but bluebirds, all day long.

Daniel hooks his arm in mine as we go down the front steps.

“Cold,” he says, looking up at the sky.

“Daniel,” I ask. “Can I kiss you?”

His eyes drift to mine.

I hold my breath. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this isn’t what I thought it was. What it might be.

“I’ve been waiting four months to hear you say that, Emory,” he says quietly. “But I’ve never kissed anyone before. I’ve only seen it in the movies. And in the hallways at school. I’ll do my best, but—”

I pull him to me.

And it doesn’t feel like it was with Gage, urgent and scary. Instead, it feels like sinking, very slowly, into a pool of warm light. Soft and perfect.

“Wow,” Daniel says slowly. “That…damn. The poets were right.”

“I think I felt the earth move under my feet,” I say.

“The stars are exploding in the sky,” he answers. “I’d like to do that again, as soon as possible, like right now.”

He’s bending his head to mine when my phone pings in my coat pocket.

“Sheesh,” Daniel says. “Technology is supposed to make things more convenient, but I’m kind of hating it right now.”