Hell on Heels(12)

I guess that’s why they say don’t believe everything you tell yourself in the night.

If I did, I was worried that in addition to having a coward’s heart, I’d find in me a gutless soul, and that was more than I could seem to bear.

Morgan returned with champagne to interrupt my self-loathing, and Leighton’s dramatic portrayal of the author with whom she’d effectively ‘bagged’ this week.

I politely declined his offer for a glass.

I never drank at my events, but especially not this one. Not on Henry’s night. Not when I would tell a room of strangers about the brother I loved who died too young.

“Of course.” Morgan nodded sympathetically, and I decided maybe I did like him. He had soulful eyes.

“I need to go check in with Tom and make sure we’re running smoothly. I’ll come find you after the speech, okay?” I leaned forward and kissed my best friend on the cheek.

“Char.” Her fingers curled around my upper arm. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I will be.”





“All set.” Tom adjusted the small mic affixed to the neckline of my dress.

“Ladies and gentlemen, here to provide this evening’s opening address, I have the pleasure of introducing the founder of the Halo Foundation, and the woman behind tonight’s fabulous event, Miss Charleston Smith.”

Tom cued me, and I stepped onto the stage as the clapping grew louder at my introduction.

It was a small stage and only took a few paces of my long legs to reach Kevin. He welcomed me in a dramatic showboat of a hug, no doubt for the guests’ benefit, and as we separated, he squeezed my shoulder in comfort, no doubt for my benefit, before he exited the stage and left me alone.

My hands gripped the edge of the podium and I looked down at my speech.

I didn’t need to read it. It wasn’t very long and I’d memorized it weeks ago. Nevertheless, I was comforted by the safety net it provided.

“Good evening, everyone.” I smiled as a hush fell over the crowded room and all remaining eyes came to me.

This was always the hardest part of the speech, the hook. The hook was Henry, and it gutted me a little every year I used him for it, but it had to be done.

Henry was the reason we were all here. He was the reason I was here.

“I buried my brother the year he turned twenty-four.” I heard gasps as I expected I would, and paused accordingly like I’d been taught to do.

“Henry was my favourite person in the world, my only sibling, and with him, I buried his suffering, but our family’s suffering lives on with his memory.”

My chest burned in a way that made me grateful for the crimson of my dress. This way, if my heart actually was bleeding, they wouldn’t be able to see it.

“Addiction is a petty thief; it steals the ones we love from not only us, but from themselves. He was only fifteen when addiction began stealing pieces of who my brother was. It started so innocently, as it often does with teenagers. Just a little fun here and a little danger there, but it was the gateway to a world that inevitably cost him his life.”

There were sympathetic nods from the room, and I prayed that none of them were crippled with that theft in the way I had been. I wouldn’t have wished that on my worst enemy.

“I remember not being old enough to understand what was happening to my brother, and my father had tried to explain it. He told me that Henry wasn’t like other people, that he was sick. Other people could walk by the stench of stale beer on the sidewalk and never notice. It wasn’t like that for him, not my brother. He needed to beat down the door of the nearest liquor store or bar and drown in a twenty-four case of Budweiser to satisfy an inch. My dad had been right. Henry was sick, and was for nearly a decade.”

I took a sip of water and thought of Henry, the way he was at the end. There was hardly any of my brother left inside his body. He was so angry, all the time. He would pick a fight with the sky if he didn’t like its shade of blue, and feel no remorse. The brother I knew had never been an angry person, not like he had been at the end.

He hated himself.

“It was never enough. That inch never went away. It wasn’t long until he added cocaine to his list of poisons. This, of course, allowed him to drink more and never feel the need to sleep. He lost days and sometimes even weeks to a high.” I paused, catching my breath. “As a family, we ran ourselves into the ground, trying to help him. We did everything we could. Henry completed two stints at world-renowned rehabilitation facilities and burned through over a half a dozen sponsors, but it never stuck. My parents drained their life savings and nearly destroyed their marriage trying to save their son, and they lost him. They lost him long before he died.” I was grateful in that moment my parents chose not to attend these events. “That’s the saddest part about loving an addict: no matter how much you are willing to sacrifice, you will never be able to save them from themselves.”

I flipped the page in my speech and gripped the podium a little tighter.

“I used to position the phone next to my pillow all through high school when I slept. I was terrified I’d miss the call, the one that told me my brother had died. That this time he’d driven drunk and killed an innocent family and himself in the process, that this time my seventeen-year-old boyfriend hadn’t been there to stop him from being beaten to death by one of his drug dealers. Or worse,” I paused, “that this time he’d followed through on what was one of many suicide threats and someone had found his body.”