Promise Me

“Fuck, you aren’t kidding,?

? Jamie snapped. I could hear him rustling about. I assumed getting up and dressed. “Call me if anything changes.”

**

Gramps answered the phone at the farm since Aine and Fionn neither one answered their cells. He was an amazing guy at eighty-one. Grams had been gone for two years. I knew he was lonely but the kids all kept him going. More babies meant Gramps was hanging on, long silver ponytail and beard. He looked like a biker grandpa. I don’t think he had ever ridden a motorcycle in his life though. That would have been my other grandfather, Joey Bonds. I didn’t know him because he died before I was born.

“Gramps, it’s Jamie.”

“Kind of late Jamie, what’s wrong?” His deep voice was gruff and yet comforting. I knew he would be awake because since Grams death, he seemed to roam the old farmhouse, unable to sleep. I often visited to find him napping in the middle of the afternoon, in the worn recliner.

“Liam called from downtown. He’s summoning all of us to the hospital. Ronan was brought in to the hospital tonight. He OD on something.”

“Your brother Ronan?” The surprise in my grandfather’s voice was the same emotion that I experienced after I realized that my brother wasn’t kidding me.

“Yeah, my reaction was pretty similar.” I rubbed my hand across my messy hair. “Liam said he’s in bad shape. Grab Fionn and head to the hospital.” I knew Aine would stay with Gracie.

“We’ll be right there,” Gramps replied.

I hung up on Gramps and called my other brother Ciaran. Ryan answered his phone. I was waking everyone up tonight. “Hey Brat, I need Ciaran.” Fionn and Ciaran were going to have the hardest time with this news other than Mom and Dad. Ronan was Ciaran’s identical twin. He, Fionn and Ciaran were triplets born two years after me and Liam. This was bad. Really, really bad.

“Jamie is on the phone,” I heard her tell Ciaran. She sounded concerned. They all knew we didn’t call each other after midnight, unless something was wrong.

I explained what I knew when he said hello. I heard him moving around as soon as I said the words Ronan is at the hospital. I heard him kiss Ryan, his wife of two years. “I’m out the door now,” he replied. “I’ll meet you at Mom and Dad’s house.”

Ciaran lived in the house where Mom once lived next door to Dad. Dad’s house was where we grew up as boys. Mom and Dad had history. A teenage love affair that had gone bad but they had gotten back together. That is another story. They had been married for a lifetime and this was going to kill them.

I pulled into my parents’ driveway just a few minutes later. None of us really lived far from Mom and Dad except Ronan and Liam. My brother walked across the lawn to meet me. He had a coffee in his hand and another cup for me which I accepted gratefully. “He’s going to be all right?” Ciaran said.

“I hope so man. Liam said he’s not good.”

We walked up to Mom and Dad’s door and rang the bell. Mom answered in her nightgown. My mom, Stevie Bonds Moore is in her fifties. She was and always has been a spitfire but with us she was the calm in the storm. Dad, the enforcer. We were scared of him. I’m not ashamed to admit that. Even as a grown man, I could be intimidated by Declan Moore. She was going to take this hard. Dad was going to take this personally.

Her hair was a tumbled mess of silver curls that hung past her shoulders. Fionn was the only one of us to get her hair color. The rest of us were dark haired like our dad. Her eyes, a pale, hazel-green, we all got right now were sleepy. We had woken her as well. “What’s wrong?” Panic was written on her face.

I didn’t want to tell her. I glanced at Ciaran. He looked at me. “Mom, we need to go to the hospital downtown where Liam works. He called me,” I said.

She covered her mouth with her hand. Uncertain and afraid. I didn’t like seeing Mom like this. I saw Dad over her shoulder. He was a big guy. Taller than any of us except Fionn. He was solid still in his fifties. His hair was touched by gray. Lines around his dark eyes. He was bare chested right now but wearing jeans that were low on his hips.

“Who is it?” He asked.

“Ronan,” Ciaran replied.

“What happened?” My mother asked.

The thing you never want to hear about your child, we had to tell our mother. “He OD,” I replied.

My mother’s eyes filled with tears. She glanced over her shoulder at my dad. Then mom turned and went into his arms. “Come on Stevie. Get dressed so we can go downtown with the boys.” We were still his boys even though Liam and I were almost thirty. The younger ones were almost twenty-eight but the five of us would always be his boys.

**

So with a typical heroin overdose, they give you narcan or naloxone to counter the effects of the drug. You don’t die. Whatever was in the heroin I took was lethal. My breathing eventually stopped and my heart too. They pounded on my chest and intubated me so I could breathe.

I saw the light at the end of the tunnel and I followed it. Not looking back once. No thought of the family I was leaving behind. I covered my eyes to avoid the brightness of the intense radiance before me. Then suddenly I could see as I passed through. Wow, now that was pretty fucking amazing.

I recognized Grams and she was not happy with me. Her arms were crossed over her ample chest. Behind her stood three people I definitely did not know.

Chapter 2