Page 44 of Never Bound

“Ethan?” he asked with careful curiosity as if he’d always wanted to ask me more about my brother but didn’t want to open wounds. Nobody knew better than him about wound-opening, after all.

I nodded slowly. “Like every few days, for almost a year. And he never replied. We used to be best friends. We had our own languages, all the same references, the same sense of humor. But the pills stole all that. All he wanted was money, and if he couldn’t get it from us, we—my whole family—were useless to him. And then Mom’s drinking got worse, and Daddy seemed to give up, and nothing’s been the same since then, and it won’t be until he comes back. And I thought if I had just tried harder, said something different, I could have made things okay, but I tried and tried and—” The tears were falling, as usual, but I wasn’t worried as much anymore about him thinking I was weak. He’d made it quite clear that that was far from the case. So I just let them all rain down.

“Hey, look at me.” He tilted my chin his way and lightly wiped away a tear from my cheek with his thumb. I breathed, trying to focus on where his eyes would be in the dim light. I had been hypnotized by that brilliant color so often I could almost see it in my head, even with hardly any light. “That is too much of a burden for anyone. You alone cannot fix your entire family. They have to want to fix themselves. Granted, pop psychology isn’t exactly one of my fields of expertise. But I’m fairly confident about this.”

I nodded through my tears. “You’re going to hate me for saying this, but you’re so lucky that you have a sister whowantsto come back to you.”

“Oh, Lou, your brother wants to come back to you, too,” he said, squeezing me tight. “I promise you he does. He just needs time.”

I pulled the blanket around me tighter and burrowed into the warmth he offered. “We are so good at blaming ourselves for things that aren’t really our fault, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, we are,” he said, sighing and resting his head on the back of the chair. “Luckily, we’re good at other things, too.”

“Like what?” I asked. “Bantering? Arguing? Getting into shitty situations and wriggling our way out of them?”

“Ah, that’s just speed chess,” he said, waving his hand. “You learned that from me.”

“I did not.” I raised my head again. “Remember when we first met in the bathroom, and my dad came in?”

“The showerhead story?” He rolled his eyes, making it clear where he thought it fell in the hierarchy of zany gambits.

“Hell yes, ‘the showerhead story,’” I repeated mockingly. “Which savedyourass as I recall. And that was all me.”

“All you?” He shook his head. “Ha. No. You planned, I executed.”

“Fine,” I said. “In that case, perhaps we should call ourselves, I don’t know, a team?”

“The two of us vs. the world? Yeah, I likethoseodds.”

“I’ve heard worse.”

“I’ve heard better.”

“Hey, a meteor.” I pointed up to the sky at the path where the dot of pure light had appeared. Or where I thought it had appeared.

“Wait, really? I didn’t see it.”

“Well.” I shrugged. “Sometimes I see things you don’t.”

HIM

“I won’t always be broke, you know,” she said delicately. “I just have to finish undergrad, get through medical school, and start my residency. I’ll start making money then. It’ll just take some time.”

I braced myself. I already knew where this was going. I’d expected it all night, ever since Milagros told her story. But I’d pushed it aside, drunk on the fog of sex and weed and jazz and wine and her, letting her share every dirty thought she’d ever had, then letting me in to touch and feel it all. It was easy not to think about the future, in the face of the miracle happening right before our eyes. But now she was speaking of other miracles. Ones that flashed and were gone before even the most powerful telescope could reach them, like that one meteor on a cloudy night. Miracles I’d promised to try to believe in but couldn’t yet.

“Erica and Milagros did it,” she said. “We can, too.”

Shit.

The fact that I didn’t answer right away, and every second I didn’t answer thereafter, made her panic just a little more.

“The truth is, I almost never think about freedom,” I finally said.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by her reaction. But I was.

“But why?”she demanded.

“Why?” I repeated calmly. “Let’s see. Because why waste valuable brainpower wanting something I don’t have? Because surviving day to day is hard enough without torturing myself thinking about everything I could have if I’d only been born somewhere else or someone else? Because I never thought I would live long enough to ever get it?”

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