He rolled his eyes. “What would have been the point?”
“We would have listened to you,” I snapped at him. “If you hadn’t wanted it, we would have listened. We told you that. If you didn’t want it, you wouldn’t have had to have it. Full stop. That was the deal. We could have found some other way around it.”
“How, Bear?” the Kid asked. “By… what. Talking about it? About our feelings? I do that enough in therapy as it is. I don’t want to have to come home—if this is even still my home—and spend more time talking things over.”
“Yes,” I said. “If that’s what it took. After Dominic—”
His eyes flashed dangerously. “Leave him out of this.”
“No. I won’t. After Dominic, after I found you in the goddamn bathtub again, if you had said no, Bear, I don’t want the Xanax or I don’t want the Klonopin, I would have listened to you. Because every single choice we made, I thought we made together. So no, you don’t get to throw that back in our faces. That’s not gonna fly.”
“Is that when this started?” Otter asked. “With… Dom?”
The Kid made a choking sound, and he shook his head furiously. “I’m not—I don’t—he’s not….”
“It was easier,” Otter said. “Wasn’t it? Feeling numb.”
The Kid said nothing, though his shoulders were trembling. It took everything I could to not go to him, to pull him close, to whisper in his ear that everything was going to be okay.
“You wanted to feel numb, and it got harder and harder. So you escalated. Took more. And then we switched you to Klonopin. I remember that too. I thought there was going to be an argument, but… you didn’t say much at all.”
He didn’t look at us.
“And… what. You worried about how much you were taking, because you thought you were going to get caught. So you started buying it off of someone or someones, and they said we’ve got other stuff here, why don’t you try that? And you just said sure. Okay. Why not.”
He bowed his head low.
“And the narcotics, was that… what. Just to feel high?”
He mumbled something.
“Didn’t get that, Kid,” Otter said.
He cleared his throat. “I said, I didn’t… I don’t like those.”
“But.”
“But I… I didn’t have. The money. And I ran out. I didn’t want—I thought you would have found out.”
“Addiction is a bitch of a thing,” Otter said.
And that got his attention. His head snapped up, and his eyes were wide, cheeks flushed. “I’m not an addict.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You are.”
“Bear. It’s not like that. I promise, okay? I swear to you. It’s not—I can stop, anytime I want to. It was just—easier, it was easier, I took the easy way out. I swear to you. Oh my god, you have to believe me, you have to—”
“Ty, you gotta take a breath,” Otter said, sounding worried. “You’re getting yourself too worked up. Okay? Just take a breath or you’re going to have a panic attack.”
But even I could see it was already too late for that. I felt guilty at that, that we’d pushed him to this point, but I thought it was inevitable. We had to force the issue, and there wasn’t going to be any other end result.
“No, no, no,” the Kid said, high-pitched and manic. “No, listen, okay? You gotta listen to me. Bear, Papa Bear, please, listen. Oh please. I’m not addicted. I swear, I swear, I—oh please don’t make me leave, you can’t let me leave, okay? I’m just a little guy, please, Otter, you can’t make me leave, I don’t know where to go, I don’t have anywhere else to go, and I can’t—I c-can’t be alone, I c-c-can’t because you’re all I’ve got. You’re all I’ve got left because Mrs. Paquinn is gone, and Dom’s gone, gone, g-gone, so please. Please don’t leave me too. I can’t breathe, oh, Bear, I can’t breathe. The earthquake. Bear, there’s an earthquake.”
I had the darkest thought of my life while he spoke.
What if he’s faking this?
Otter was up and moving before he even finished talking. He bent over and picked up the Kid as if he weighed nothing at all, hands under his knees and across his back. Tyson continued to choke out words help and scared and don’t make me leave. I followed them down the hallway, through our bedroom, and into the bathroom, where there was a large jetted bathtub.