When You Were Mine

Josh lowers his gaze, looks at the floor. “I don’t know. I just did.”

Why can’t he come up with a decent excuse? I feel oddly disappointed; I wanted something from him that I could at least try to believe in.

“Over six hundred dollars, Josh,” I interject. “Help us understand.”

“Why does it matter?”

“Because,” Nick answers levelly, “as your parents, we need to know how you got that money.”

“I just saved it.” Josh raises his voice, trying to sound impatient now. “Like I said. Birthday money and allowance and stuff. Who cares?”

We’re going to go around in circles now, just like I did with Emma. I haven’t even talked to her since the parents’ weekend, although I’ve texted her a couple of times. She replied only once, a few words that told me nothing. Now, with Josh, we’ll keep pressing and he will keep deflecting and we’ll never get anywhere.

“Is it drugs?” I ask, and it’s as if I’ve just done a poo on the floor. Both Nick and Josh look at me in blank-faced shock. I am not following the script for this particular family drama, and suddenly I don’t care. I meet Josh’s stunned gaze with a calmness I didn’t expect to feel. “Are you dealing drugs?” I ask evenly, with an almost-serenity that is bewildering to my husband and my son. “Is that where you got the money?”

“Ally…” Nick begins, and then stops.

Josh shakes his head. “Why… why would you think that?” He sounds wounded, and Nick looks torn, as if he wants to come to his son’s defense, but I see right through it. Right now, Josh looks like he did when he was four, and he’d broken a crystal vase in the hall, one of our wedding presents. He tried to convince me the neighbor’s cat had somehow got into our house and knocked it over, all wide-eyed innocence with a guilty darkness lurking beneath. It was kind of cute back then. It isn’t now.

“Josh. That’s not an answer.”

“Ally,” Nick says again, and again he stops.

A silence stretches on, elastic, stretching thinner with every second, until I’m sure it’s going to snap. No one says anything, and Josh keeps looking at anything but us. Nick’s body is soldier-straight, his shoulders thrust back, every muscle practically vibrating with tension.

Josh lets out another sigh, one of defeat rather than impatience. “What does it matter?” he says, clearly not expecting an answer, and that is when I know for certain.

Of course, some part of me has known all along. Some part of me knew the second I looked down at the roll of bills, even though I didn’t want to. But now I really know, a leaden certainty that lines my stomach and weighs me down, and I can’t bear it.

My son, my dark-haired golden boy with the impish smile and the lovable lisp, sells drugs. He is a drug dealer. I know it, and yet I still need him to say it.

“Josh,” I say quietly, a command.

Another silence ticks on, and each second feels fraught. Nick takes a deep breath, as if he is about to speak, to burst, and then Josh shrugs and says, “Fine. All right. Okay?” He gives us as a “happy now?” look, as if that’s the end of the matter, but of course it is only the beginning. The awful, awful start of something I can’t bear even to think of.

Yet another silence, this one like a thunderclap, or maybe the explosion of a bomb. I can almost see the wreckage strewn around us. Josh stares at the floor, and Nick opens and closes his mouth like an indignant fish.

“What,” he asks after a few endless seconds, “is that supposed to mean?”

“What do you think it means, Dad?” Josh asks and there is a snarl in his voice that makes Nick recoil like a wounded animal. I can picture the sepia-tinted montage that is going through his head right now—the camping trips when Josh was little and Nick was a Boy Scout leader; the soft summer evenings in the backyard, tossing a baseball back and forth. The half-marathon they did together last year, for charity. Their love of Marvel movies, which neither Emma nor I can stand. I see it all playing in Nick’s head, and then I see it going up in smoke, crumbling to ash, because we are now in this place—a place I never thought we’d be, one I never would have been able even to imagine.

“Josh…” Nick says helplessly, and now he sounds like the child.

I stare down at my lap. I am dry-eyed, heavy-hearted, the blood rushing in my ears. I am strangely unsurprised and yet I am also in shock. I know I can’t even begin to consider all the ramifications of this.

“What kind of drugs?” I ask quietly, more of a statement than a question. Nick makes some small sound of helpless protest.

Josh sighs. “Nothing major. It’s no big deal, you know. Everybody does it.”

“Everyone sells drugs?” I lift my head to stare at him hard. “I don’t think so. What drugs, Josh?”

Another restless shrug as he refuses to meet my eye. “Just some prescription stuff. Adderall, Xanax, Valium. Some Special K.”

Special K? “I assume you don’t mean the cereal,” I say coolly, and Josh lets out a huff of laughter.

“Ketamine,” he says, and there is something of a smirk about him, as if he is enjoying my confusion and outrage, at least a little, and that is almost as bad as

the rest of it. Who is this unabashed man-child, talking about these drugs so offhandedly, scornful that I don’t know the slang? And yet at the same time I feel a shaming rush of relief. Ketamine is a little different ballpark than crack cocaine, after all. Isn’t it?