Saugatuck Summer (Saugatuck, #1)(3)

“. . . But you weren’t there, Colleen,” I continued, clinging to Mo’s understanding gaze. “You didn’t see the scene. You didn’t find her lying in a pool of her own puke. You weren’t the one in the ICU that first night, with the nurses telling you not to wait too long before making the decision to pull the plug. If Frederica’s having trouble getting around, it’s her own f*cking fault. She’s pulled my leash for the last f*cking time.”

“Topher . . .” Colleen groaned, and I could practically hear her making the effort to rein her temper in. “Even if you were right—and I lived with her four years longer than you, so maybe I know a bit more than you think about how she operates—she’s sick. Okay? If she tried to kill herself, it’s because she’s sick. You can’t hate her for that.”

Oh lovely. Now it was time for a recitation from the Enabler’s Handbook.

“I don’t hate her.” I busied my fingers trying to pick grains of sand off the dark blanket. “Hating her would require caring about her, and I don’t. Not anymore. She’s toxic, and I need to protect myself.”

She was silent a moment. Then: “You better hope you don’t ever need help from the family.”

“Don’t worry, sis. I learned long before puberty not to expect anything from this family.” My mouth twisted bitterly and I hung up before she could take another opportunity to tell me what an awful person I was. It was the same old refrain, and I’d heard it all before. Topher, you’re so self-centered. Topher, you’re too dramatic. Topher, you just want attention.

Feh. They used those insults to try to make me feel guilty so I would do what they wanted me to do. I had to remember that. I was doing what was healthy for me. Protecting myself. And that didn’t make me a bad person.

I sat beside Mo silently, staring out at the waves crashing against the beach as I tried to convince myself of that once again.

Thanks, Colleen. Way to f*ck up a nice afternoon.

Mo didn’t press me to talk. She knew I’d open up in my own time. I wasn’t even close to manly enough to stuff down my feelings about shit. I wore them on my sleeve, and yes, that had gotten me my ass kicked regularly throughout my school years, thanks for asking.

After a while, she asked softly, “What do you think your mom will do if you go see her?”

I scrubbed my hands down my face. “Same thing she’s always done. Try to make me as sick as she is.”

She tilted her head and looked at me, waiting for me to clarify.

“She just . . . ever since I was a little kid—and by that, I mean, like, six years old—my job was to comfort her and make her feel better, you know? And probably at least some of that was my fault, because I was just one of those really oversensitive, overly empathetic kids who would do stupid things like bawl in sympathy with a cartoon character who was being picked on.”

I picked up a handful of cool sand and let it trickle through my fingers. “So whenever she got drunk and went on a crying jag, or just got into one of her woe-is-me-everything-is-horrible-nothing-will-ever-get-better riffs, I was the one who heard about it. I’m the one who spent hours and hours crying with her, telling her it would be all right, that she wasn’t a horrible person, a horrible mother, et cetera. And eventually she’d pass out, and then it would be fine until the next time. And she’d just . . . suck me in. Every damn time. I couldn’t not try to make her feel better. I had to try to fix it for her.”

“She never got help?”

I shook my head. “Her late husband kept offering to send her to rehab, but she always refused. She doesn’t get drunk anymore because she says she can’t handle the hangovers, but it doesn’t stop the other behaviors. She’s just a bottomless pit, emotionally speaking. She doesn’t want to be reassured, she just wants attention and pity.” My last shrink had called that “narcissistic supply.” Like I was a drug dealer helping her get her fix. It was either cut her off or stop caring about everyone and everything so I wasn’t left wide open.

Mo nodded and massaged my shoulder. We fell silent again, and she drew me against her and let me rest my head on her shoulder while she rubbed my back.

“You know what really makes me feel like a selfish *?” I said at length, as the afternoon began to age toward evening. “There was a while there in the hospital when she was starting to improve . . . and I didn’t want to believe it. I cried when they told me she was out of the woods, and not because I was happy. I had accepted it, you know? Years before, really. Around the time I was fifteen or so, when she made a big production of telling me she had lumps and that she knew it was cancer even though all the doctors told her they were just cysts, and if it was cancer, she was just going to let herself die since she couldn’t stand to lose her breasts. That’s when I accepted that she was going to die. I knew someday she’d drink herself to death or kill herself, and, then, once it seemed like it’d finally happened, I was okay with it. I was f*cking relieved. I just wanted it to be over with, you know?”

“I don’t think that makes you selfish, Topher.” Mo’s voice was gentle, and I found myself thinking, not for the first time, that she would make a damned good therapist once she finished her degrees in psychology and social work.

My eyes stung, and I wiped them on the back of my hand. “I wished her gas hadn’t been shut off the week before. I wished for once she’d managed to be a responsible f*cking adult and pay her bill on time. Core temp of, like, eighty degrees, can you believe that shit? If she hadn’t gotten hypothermic lying there on the floor overnight, it would have been game over. That’s the only thing that kept the brain damage in check, and I wished it hadn’t happened. What do you think Colleen would say if I ever admitted that?”