Page 13 of The Ballad of Us
"It's time for you to make a decision. You have two choices, live or die, but the decision is yours and yours alone." Andrew picks up the remote I threw and places it back on the bed. "Call me when you're ready. We'll get you set up in a nice rehab somewhere you can heal."
He turns to leave, and I can't let him walk away, either. I can't be alone with the weight of everything I've lost. In one last desperate attempt to have the last word, I yank my pillow from behind my own head and chunk it across the room. It hits him in the back—a pathetic gesture from a pathetic man who's lost everything that mattered.
"Mr. Garrison!" The nurse returns with reinforcements, and suddenly, the room is full of people in scrubs reaching for me with restraints.
"I don't even know who you are anymore," Andrew says as he walks away, and the words cut deeper than any physical pain could.
I don't know who I am either. I was Rhea's boyfriend, the band's frontman, and Andrew's little brother. But strip all that away, and what's left? Just a broken man in a hospital bed, fighting against restraints like an animal in a cage.
"Let me go! Fuck you! Stop! Do you know who I am?!"
But as the sedatives flow through my IV and my muscles begin to fail, I realize a terrible truth. I don't know who I am anymore. I'm nobody without her. I'm nothing without the band. I'm just another cautionary tale about what happens when you love the bottle more than you love the people trying to save you.
As consciousness fades, my last thought is of Rhea, not as she was when she left, tired and defeated. I go back to her in the beginning, when she still believed I was worth saving. When she still believed in us.
The darkness that claims me is merciful, because in it I can pretend she's still here and haven't lost everything that ever mattered.
I can pretend I'm not alone.
Three
RHEA
I wake to sunlight streaming through unfamiliar curtains, and for a moment, I forget where I am. The silence is what reminds me. There’s no traffic, no neighbors, and no Gray's restless movements beside me in bed. It’s just the gentle whisper of wind through Georgia pines and the distant call of morning birds.
Twenty-nine today.
The thought settles in my chest like a stone. Twenty-nine years old, and I'm spending my birthday alone in a rented cabin, two weeks and hundreds of miles away from everything I used to call home. Part of me wants to pull the covers over my head and pretend today is just another day, but the stubbornness inside me refuses to let this milestone pass unmarked.
I force myself out of bed and into the shower, letting the hot water wash away the dreams that always feature him. Even here, even after everything, Gray haunts my sleep with memories of better times - his laugh, his hands in my hair, the way he used to sing me awake with ridiculous made-up songs on lazy Sunday mornings.
Don't go there, Rhea. Not today.
After coffee and toast, I stand at the kitchen window overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I make myself a promise. Today will be about me and proving to myself that I can celebrate alone. I need to learn that my happiness doesn't depend on someone else's sobriety, presence, or love.
The drive to the general store takes fifteen minutes down winding mountain roads that have a way of shaking loose whatever thoughts you're carrying. The store itself is exactly what you'd expect in a town with more churches than stoplights, with its weathered wooden floors, hand-lettered signs, and a bell that chimes when you push through the screen door.
Wandering the narrow aisles like I have all the time in the world, which I suppose I do now, I look through the offerings for my birthday dinner. There’s no schedule to keep, no one to check in with, and no emergencies to manage. The freedom should feel liberating, but instead it feels like floating in space with nothing to anchor me.
I find a single strawberry cupcake with pink frosting in the bakery section. It's nothing special, probably made yesterday in a home kitchen and delivered this morning, but it's perfect in its simplicity. As I reach for it, memories of birthdays from my childhood surface, and I remember how my mother would let me pick out any cake I wanted from the grocery store bakery— simple pleasures that felt like the whole world. When Mom was sober, she was a good, thoughtful, caring parent, often filling our lives with crafts and impromptu baking classes.
Today, I feel her absence more than ever. She’s been gone twelve years, since right after my seventeenth birthday. Mom had demons from her childhood. I was never old enough to ask the right questions to understand what those were. I learned to take care of myself early in life, also figuring out how to cover for my mom when life got to be too much for her. She liked to lock herself in her room while I was at school and fade away until the heroin wore off and she returned to earth.
Some years were worse than others, where her drug use was concerned. She’d go missing for days or weeks on end. One time a neighbor called family and children services because I was left alone when I was twelve. After that, she learned to sit in her room and shoot up. Venturing out with other addicts often ended up badly for her, and social services got involved when she didn’t return home for days at a time. She’d also come home beaten nearly to death, and I suspected from multiple baths I gave her that she’d been sexually assaulted on more than one occasion. Mom was all I’ve ever had, though, at least until my senior year in high school, when she lost the fight with her addiction.
Panic attacks began to plague me more frequently after she passed, when I was placed in a group home where I didn’t feel safe in the company of others. Feeling the weight of my recent orphaning, I clashed with the house parents and the other children in the home, mainly because I needed more privacy than they could give me. It takes a while to grow accustomed to sharing space with other foster children who have experienced their own traumatic pasts. It’d only ever been me and Mom, so I never worried about people touching my things or sleeping in the same room. Adjusting to living with so many people took longer than I or the system had patience for. I’ve practically been on my own since I was a small child, learning quickly to make things work so that I could stay with my mom. Being thrust into a group home with a thousand rules and no privacy amped up my already anxious nature. I lived on the edge of fear for seventeen years, waiting to come home from school one day and find my mom overdosed with a needle sticking out of her arm. Not having my mom, freedom, home, or privacy drove me over the edge a few days after my eighteenth birthday. Without having a spot to land, I signed myself out of foster care at the group home and walked off campus with not a dime to my name or a high school diploma under my belt.
My mom had no family, having lived inside a group home for half of her life after her parents died in a car accident. Wilson, a guy I met exactly once, is supposedly my father. I have no clue how to reach him, and why bother at this juncture in my life?
I had mom, that was enough for me. She was kind with a great deal of compassion for broken people, but it was more than she had for herself. Mom was graceful, affectionate, and generous. I saw her give someone the literal shirt off her back to help cover her after the woman had been exposed against her will. I miss my mom really hard on my birthday since it was the last happy memory I have of her before she passed.
Returning to the present, I grab a pack of birthday candles from the shelf nearby. The cashier, a woman with kind brown eyes and silver hair, smiles as she rings up my purchases.
"Whose birthday?" She smiles as if a stranger’s special day is enough to make her happy.
"Mine." I’m surprised by how easy the admission comes.
"Well, happy birthday, honey. Hope it's a good one."
