Page 12 of The Last to Let Go
“None of this is your fault,” I tell her, but as those words pass across my lips, I have trouble believing them. And I hate her for making me doubt—doesn’t she know that my belief in her is all I have to hold on to?
I hear a click on the line, a pop. “Brooke, I have to go, okay?” She sniffles. “They’re telling me I have to go. I love you, okay? I love—”
I try to answer her—“I love you, too”—but the line is dead. I hold the phone in my lap and stare at it, waiting for my head to stop spinning, waiting for my thoughts to clear up. And when they do, I remember what’s important, what I have to do: I have to protect her, protect her from herself, even. She’s unraveling and she needs me to be strong enough for the both of us, for all of us.
I carry the phone in one hand and the stupid doughnut—which is the source of the five extra pounds I’ve put on since we arrived here—in the other as I make my way to the living room. Jackie sits on the couch with a basket of laundry next to her, folding clothes into neat piles that line the coffee table like towers in a skyline.
“Oh great, you got to talk to her,” she says, gesturing to the phone in my hand. “She sounded good, didn’t she?” Jackie says, smiling, nodding.
Of course she sounded good to Jackie—she saved up the real stuff for me. “Yeah,” I lie. “Jackie, I know she says she doesn’t want us to visit her, but I need to see her.”
“I hear you,” she tells me. “We’ll figure something out, all right?”
I nod. Then I look at Callie, folded into the cushions of the couch, absently picking at a pastry from Jackie’s shop. Jackie’s eyes meet mine, her lips pressed together into a hard line, her head shaking slightly back and forth. We share a silent moment of communication that somehow conveys how I’ve been feeling too: hopeless, frustrated. Callie’s been going to see this therapist once a week—Dr. Greenberg, a highly recommended child psychologist, according to the doctors at the hospital—except I don’t see any improvement, and if anything, I think she may be getting worse.
That night Jackie invites Aaron and Carmen over for dinner. I think it’s going to be another announcement, but dinner goes as usual. Unplugged, we all take turns talking about our day, except Callie. Aaron and Carmen brought dessert: a cake that Carmen’s mom baked. Jackie makes a huge deal about how she wants her mother’s recipe and maybe she will add it as a seasonal special at the shop.
We’re all sitting in the living room afterward when Jackie suddenly stands up and says, “Oh! Hold on,” and rushes out of the room. Ray shrugs. I hear her opening and closing the closet door in the hall, then she comes back, toting a stack of board games in her arms. “Game night!” She sets them down on the coffee table like an exclamation point. “Kids, this is what us old folks used to do for fun before video games and all that computer stuff came along.”
“Back in the Stone Age,” Ray adds as he leans forward in his chair to take the tattered lid off the Scrabble box.
“We’ve played Scrabble before,” Carmen says, nudging Aaron. “Right, babe?”
“Yeah,” he agrees.
“So have we,” I add, gesturing to myself and Callie.
“Thiskind of Scrabble?” Jackie asks, holding a woodenLtile between her fingers. “Or the one they have on the computer?”
We all look at one another; she has us there. We have video games, of course, but I’ve never been any good at them. That’s Aaron and Callie’s thing more than mine. I don’t mind; I’ve never had much use for games anyway.
We choose our tiles and arrange our letters. Ray insists that Jackie is making words up. “?‘Appliqué,’?” she argues. “It’s a design, like in sewing. It’s a word—look it up if you don’t believe me.”
“I will!” he counters in that good-natured teasing way of his.
I wish I could call my mom back right now and tell her that being here with Jackie and Ray, with their clean sheets and perfect marriage and balanced meals and game night, only makesmefeel worse. I know I don’t belong here and I never will. It’s like being underwater and not knowing which way is up, like drowning slowly, even though you’re trying so hard to find your way back to the surface.
I get stuck on my turn; there are no words to be made. “Pass,” I say.
“If you have anS, you can just add it to the end of one of the other words,” Jackie offers.
“Come on, just take your turn,” Aaron says.
“You could add on to this word right here,” Jackie says, leaning over to peek at my tiles like I’m some kindergartner who doesn’t know how to play the game.
“Pass,” I repeat.
“You can’t pass,” Aaron says, losing his patience with me.
“Do you have anS?” Jackie repeats. “If you do, then you can just—”
“I know,” I interrupt. “I don’t have one,” I tell her, pulling my row of tiles closer to me.
“Here, let me see,” she says, reaching for my little wooden tile tray.
“I don’t have a damnS, okay?” I don’t mean to yell, I don’t mean to knock over my tiles and mess up the whole board. I don’t mean to stand up and storm out of the room. But I do.
“Brooke, what the hell?” Aaron calls after me.
