Page 7 of Over You
Eddie Vedder’s voice floated through Bluetooth speakers. Something crunched beneath my Converse when I stepped inside the kitchen. Nash’s words were nothing but background noise.
Every cabinet was open and empty. Plates and bowls, cups and crystal lay in bits on the granite countertop. The wire shelving in the pantry had been ripped out and thrown to the middle of the floor next to crumpled boxes of spaghetti noodles and shredded bits of snack cakes.
The Grammy was missing from the cabinet by the floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the patio. The sheer, white curtains billowed from the breeze gusting through the busted glass. And my best guess was the golden award was now at the bottom of the pool.
I stumbled past the books tossed from the shelves in the study, my pulse thrumming in my temples while Nash went on and on about Spencer being under a lot of stress—like stress was an excuse. A causemaybe. But not an excuse to get high as a kite, leaving me to deal with the fallout fromeverything.What had happened hurt me just as much as it hurt him, but I didn’t have the luxury of being blissfully unaware.
I was trying to make sure he survived while he was slowly killing me.He was either too messed up to see that, or he just didn’t care.
“Georgia? You there?”
I moved into the foyer. “Yeah.”
“He knows he has a problem. . .”
“Okay. . .” I touched the wall. “I’ve got to go.” And I hung up.
An addict looking for their stash of drugs is like an F-5 tornado. They will tear up any and everything in search of a fix, and that destruction continued into our bedroom.
Windows smashed, mirrors shattered. The dresser had been dumped over. Spencer’s countless black Versace and Gucci shirts laid scattered across the oriental rug.
I moved into the master bath, but much to my surprise, nothing was damaged.
Then, there it was, the answer to his prayers and the damnation to mine. White residue blanketed the black, granite vanity. Pills sprinkled the floor.I must have missed one of his hiding spots.
Panic shook through me like a tremor before a massive quake. This was never going to stop. I couldn’t help him when he didn’t want to help himself. Grabbing the edge of the sink, I took breath after breath. What had happened to that boy that climbed my roof to save me, telling me I looked like Rapunzel trapped in a tower? The boy who noticed the bruise on my jaw from where my mother had hit me, and without a word, led me down the magnolia tree and through his backyard? Where had the boy who took me into his kitchen and wrapped a frozen bag of pizza rolls in a ratty dishtowel, then held it to my swollen face gone? Better yet, where had that strong girl who had survived years of abuse at the hands of her mother and strangers disappeared to?
“You know,” he said, sweeping a tendril of hair behind my ear while pressing the makeshift icepack to my cheek. “Rapunzel ended up getting out of that tower.”
“Fairy tales are a load of crap.”
“I thought girls loved fairy tales and happily ever afters?” He smirked, and my heart hiccupped when his finger grazed the other side of my face. And I had already halfway fallen in love because he was the first person to give a damn about me in my seventeen years of life.
“Well, I know better.”
He cupped my cheek with a look that bordered between amazement and pity before his gaze strayed once more to my lips. “Every fairy tale starts as a tragedy,” he said. “So, it stands to reason, that you and I have more hope for a happily ever after than anyone else, Rapunzel.”
That night, I had kissed him. I gave away my virginity, and the next day, I went home long enough to pack a bag of clothes. For the last five years that had been it, and I had started to believe in that fairy tale. It had been us against the world, and now it felt like it was the world against us.
“Losing My Religion” played again, and I glanced up.
A gum wrapper had been taped to the middle of the mirror with Spencer’s messy handwriting scrawled across it. I silenced the phone before I leaned over the vanity and grabbed the foil paper.
I promise. I’ll be sober tomorrow.
I exhaled. At one time, Spencer scribbled love notes to me on these gum wrappers, and now he wrote empty promises. He was lying, justifying, and then rationalizing his problem, but really, so was I.
I kept believing tomorrow. Tomorrow. . . A hundred tomorrows had come and gone. He’d grown to depend on my forgiveness. He knew I’d never walk away, and I was drowning right along with him. How much more could I realistically lose before we both sank to the bottom, gasping for air that would never come?
While I loved Spencer in ways that not even Browning or Dickenson or Shakespeare could pen, I loved him enough that I knew the only hope there was for him to get clean was to take away the one thing he swore meant more to him than life itself. If I kept staying, I was enabling him, and I refused to watch him die.
Fighting the choking sensation working up my throat, I took the tube of red, Louboutin lipstick, uncapped it, and placed it to the mirror beneath the gum wrapper.Tomorrow came and went.
The sound of an accordion came over the speakers, followed by the pitter-patter of hand drums. “Better Days” fromEat. Pray. Love.went into full swing, and while I listened to the lull of Eddie Vedder’s voice, everything suddenly clicked into place.
I had to get the hell out of California if there was any hope for either of us.
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