“I had absolutely no idea,” Chrissie had said at some point, sinking back in her chair. Zac had stayed fairly quiet, nodded a few times. “I mean, the autism thing, sure, after his appearance on Ricky Byrne…but everything else. Geez, Hel. I wish you could’ve talked to me sooner.”
“I know, I’m sorry. I haven’t been out much. I didn’t like to leave him.”
“Why?” Chrissie questioned, expression falling. “You don’t think, I mean, he wouldn’t do anything…stupid?”
“No.” Yes. No. Maybe. I…don’t know. “He needs me. No one else really understands him.” That wasn’t really true, not anymore. It wasn’t like when we were kids now. Hugo had made his own family while we were apart. I’d seen Ezra with him, the big brother he’d never had. Even Drew, as much as he irritated me at times, clearly loved him.
“Is that why he came back?” Zac asked. “Because he thought you’d make him better?” He sounded almost offended by the idea.
“I can’t make him better.” Hugo knew that. The thought was absurd. “If love could heal mental illness there’d be a hell of a lot less people suffering in the world.” I sounded annoyed. I hadn’t meant to, but I didn’t like Zac judging Hugo. Enough people did that already. “He came back because he’d missed me.” That’s what Hugo had told me and I believed him. However, even if there was a fraction of truth to Zac’s suggestion, I decided I didn’t care. I’d been hardwired to love Hugo Hayes from my earliest memories. I didn’t have a choice. If he needed me, I’d have been there, whatever the reason, misguided or not.
The guilt that pulled on my heart now wasn’t because I feared an urge to abandon Hugo or because he’d become too difficult to support, it was because I knew, like I’d just told my friends, that I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t a kid anymore. The world wasn’t as simple as it had seemed back then, back when youth and innocence made us believe we could conquer anything as long as we had each other. I couldn’t save Hugo like I’d once believed with all my heart. I could only love him so hard that it felt like my insides were being fed through a bone crusher, while I waited, watched, to see if he would help himself.
“Told me I was like a drug to him, that I was all he ever thought about,” I added with a chuckle in an attempt to lighten the mood.
“Yeah?” Chrissie said. “Sure he didn’t mean that as in you take all his money and ruin his life?”
“Hilarious,” I said. “I’m laughing really hard inside, honestly.”
Chrissie followed the rim of her teacup with her finger. “So, the happy pills seem to be working. What about therapy? I’m guessing he does that anyway being a celebrity type.”
I shook my head. “He’s tried it, it’s not for him.” Granted, as far as I knew, he hadn’t tried talking therapy since we were teenagers. Back then, he’d found it condescending and pointless. In Hugo’s words, their advice was obvious, stuff he knew he should be doing but…couldn’t. It also didn’t help that he found it difficult to talk to people, especially strangers. He used to sit there, he said, staring at a particular piece of frayed carpet on the floor, shrugging occasionally.
Time was the only way to understand Hugo. The only people who stood a chance of helping him express his problems were those who had invested enough time getting to know him, who had learned to recognise the subtle shifts in his behaviour and moods. His mind needed gently unpicking, thread by thread until the, often small, issue responsible for that day’s blow out would reveal itself. You needed to ask the right questions in just the right way, the whole act like balancing on a knife’s edge above a pit of molten lava. A therapist could have gained the best qualifications in the world, have a wealth of knowledge about autism or mental health issues…but they didn’t know Hugo, and chances were he’d never give them the chance to.
“Anyway, enough about my life…” I plucked a ham sandwich from the stand, readied it at my lips. “How’s David?”
“Is there even a point to me being here?” Zac cut in.
Mouth full of delicious carbs, I shushed him with my finger. He rolled his eyes, chuckled. Finally, with Chrissie on a topic guaranteed to keep her lips busy for a while, I got to enjoy my lunch. Sandwiches, scones, a selection of cakes that included my favourite – Victoria sponge. I saw Zac eye up the third slice as I lowered it onto my plate, but he kept any opinion he may have had to himself which I liked to think of as personal growth.
“…But then I didn’t know if Liam would be at Hugo’s party, so I haven’t invited him. Would that be weird? It wouldn’t be, right? I haven’t seen Liam since. We probably won’t even talk to each other. Is he gonna be there? Should I invite David?”