Page 71 of Let Me
“Did you see her?” Angie asks me quietly. The first question that breaks my stare with the pool, and actually requires a response.
I could brush it off. Pretend I don’t know who she’s talking about. But she’s heard me talking before, with Benji. She doesn’t know that Riley is to blame for Jack’s death, but she knows enough.
“I did,” I answer truthfully, surprising myself, my eyes meeting Angie’s watery ones. She has no judgement on her face, no surprise or shock or anger. Not even that greedy curiosity people get when they want to poke around at all the morbid details of a bad situation.
“Did you enjoy it?” is her next question.
I want to laugh, but I don’t. Not to be polite, because I’m rarely ever that. But because I don’t even know the answer. Did I enjoy it? I’m not sure. Did I enjoyher?Of course I did. I still can’t get the scent of her, the taste of her, out of my system. I still can’t stop thinking about her, even though Benji confirmed she left this morning, back to the States. I wonder if my dad paid for that flight. Why he cancelled the first one.
“I did,” I finally answer. It’s more or less the truth.
“But you’re not with her?” Angie asks. “It’s why you’ve been…” She frowns, mimes crying, complete with wringing her fists by her eyes and everything, which cracks me up.
After letting the laughter die from my lips, I nod. “Yeah,” I say softly. “It’s why I’ve beenthat.”
Angie is quiet for a moment and I go back to staring at the pool, thinking our conversation is over. I worked out in that water hours ago, hoping maybe if I worked myself into a sweaty mess, Riley would be a distant echo. It’s how I dealt with Jack’s death. Even before that, it was how I dealt with life in general. Working out made me physically tired and dulled that roar of darkness in my mind. Riley, I know, understands that.
But this morning, it didn’t work.
Nothing seems to be working.
“You know, Caden—and I’m sure you don’t want to take advice from a little old lady, but I’m going to give it to you anyway—the one thing I’ve learned in my sixty-five years that’s taught me more than anything else combined is this: Go after what you want. No matter the costs, go after it. Because you never know when your last day might be, and if you simply try to live with the pain, well…” she shrugs her thin shoulders, clad today in bright purple, “one day, you’ll drown in it.”
I know she lost her granddaughter, so the words mean more to me than they might have from someone else. But even so…
“What if what I want is bad for me?” I ask, still looking at the pool.
She laughs, soft and low. “Aren’t all the best things in life bad for us?”
THIRTY-TWO
Present
“YOU DECIDED to let me off my leash for a few extra days?” Mom asks when I let myself in, locking the deadbolt behind me. As if somehow that’ll keep the shit storm that is about to become my life from breaking through. There are cracks beneath the door, letting light in. This whole fucking place is falling apart.
She uses her wheelchair to roll into the kitchen, brows high on her head. When she broke her legs from a car wreck all those years ago, courtesy of her high, I thought that would have been the end of crack for her. But it’s amazing what a person can do, can get to, when they’re determined. It wasn’t the end. Not until we came here.
I scrub a hand over my face.
“Are you okay, Ry?” she asks softly.
I put my bag down and shake my head, and when I look at her, she’s patting her lap. Her legs never healed correctly, and while shecanwalk, it takes a lot of work. More work than she really cares to put in, and I don’t blame her. I’ve seen her try.
I walk slowly across the linoleum and sink into her lap, my legs hanging off the side of her chair. She’s no bigger than me, and together, we’re small weights in a too-big world. Still, she wraps her bony arms around me, like she can hold me together. I let my head fall to her shoulder, smell the strawberry shampoo of her soft brown hair.
“Did you miss me?” I ask with a smile.
She laughs, and I feel it in her small chest, her arms shaking softly around me with the sound. “Of course I did. Did you have fun seeing Adam?”
She doesn’t know.
I swallow. My throat feels dry. The truth is, of course, I didn’t have fun seeing Adam. The truth is we broke up because not only could he not keep his dick in his pants, he had to show it off to an entire fucking club. But the truth is, too, that that’s not why I’m sad. Not at all. But I can’t tell her, about Caden. She never knew.
But she’s intuitive.
“Did you miss Jack?” she asks. Which isn’t the half of it, but for some reason, I nod anyway. It’s close enough. And I do miss him. That’s the hard part, having these two conflicted emotions about the Virani brothers. I would never want to be with him again. We were destined to break up. But I didn’t wish him dead.
“Oh, honey.” She runs her hand through my hair, and I curl into a ball in her arms. She was never a good mother. But she’s here now. Sheisnow. And that’s enough, because now is all we have.
