It was the truth, though. I had thought the withdrawals from my first few days were the worst, but add in dehydration and cramping, and I was absolutely miserable. I could hardly manage to move my muscles and when I did, I pretty much moaned in pain. Our little walk had been enlightening and fun, but it left my body totally destroyed.
I really wasn’t trying to trick her into coming into my room, but I could see how she might have thought I was. My stomach hurt, my head hurt, even the muscles in my legs hurt and because I was in treatment, they couldn’t give me anything stronger than a Tylenol without taking me to the doctor. There was no way I was going to get poked and prodded by some random doctor, so I just suffered through it.
As much as I wanted to see Cassidy and talk to her, I couldn’t bear to get up out of bed and instead drifted back to sleep. While sleeping, I had the joy of reliving the last few months before I had arrived at the treatment center. My dreams were often filled with random women, drugs, and parties. I couldn’t even keep them all straight and the reality and dream life of my past seemed to mix together. It was a lonely life I had lived, even I had to admit that.
With friends and acquaintances filling my home for party after party, none of them cared about me. They came for the free booze and parties. They came so they could say they knew someone rich. I was an idol to them, but not because I had invented a technologically savvy way to buy tickets online; I was an idol purely because I had money.
I was wrapped up in it and couldn’t see it at all during that time of my life. When I would revisit those moments in my dreams, it always felt like I was on the outside looking in and watching my own self destruction. There had only been one person in my life who reached out for me and tried to hold onto me and prevent me from slipping off the cliff.
Spencer had reached out over and over; and I had kicked him off the damn cliff. He shouldn’t have stuck with me. There was nothing about the way I had been behaving that would have endeared me to him, yet my friend continued to be there for me. I had treated him horribly.
My dreams were vivid and often, but I always woke up feeling like I was drowning and couldn’t breathe. I hadn’t remembered falling into that pool in a drunken stupor, but I did remember waking up with a tube down my throat and my friend sitting next to me.
I imagined while I was drunk and in the pool, I had probably fought to breathe, but my drunkenness had prevented my efforts. Even though I didn’t have a conscious memory of those moments, my body still had them.
Water gave me anxiety, which sucked because I loved to swim. I really did want to get in the pool here. But I hadn’t worked myself up to that yet. Nightmares and fears were still too powerful for me.
When I was in the hospital, my father and brother had been called but didn’t bother to show up for me. Not even when they knew I had almost died. No one else came. If it hadn’t been for Spencer, I would have surely died that night, yet my own family wouldn’t be bothered enough to come sit with me. It left a hole in my gut that was hard to fill.
We hadn’t been close and I understood that, but if either of them had almost died, I certainly would have been there for them. That’s what families did. Even if you were angry with each other, you still showed up when it mattered.
Well, at least that was what I thought families should do. Apparently that wasn’t the case in my family.
My mother would have been there. If my mother hadn’t died, she would have been there the second she had found out. But then again, if my mother had been alive, I probably wouldn’t have been so desperately holding on to reality. A boy needed his mother. Especially me; I needed her.
Laura Levy had been one of the strongest women I knew. When she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, it was like a wicked joke that I thought couldn’t possibly be true. Despite losing her hair and going through treatments for months, I never actually thought I would lose her. I knew she was going to beat it. Every fiber of my being knew she was going to be all right. That made the day she died one of the most shocking in my entire life.
I could still remember my father’s screams as he woke up to her lifeless body next to him one morning. He cried out with such pain that I thought he had been hurt at first. Heath and I were only teenagers when we stood in the doorway to our parents’ room and saw our father holding our stiff mother in his arms and wailing with tears. There was nothing that could be done. It was clear she had been dead for hours.
The shock of the moment prevented me from crying. Instead, I took charge. I called 911 to have the police and paramedics come to the house even though I clearly saw that she was dead.
It wasn’t until the day of her funeral that I finally cried. When I saw my sweet mother lying in the casket and unable to hug me any longer. Unable to offer me advice about girls, or tease me about my grades. It wasn’t until that moment that the loneliness set in.
I didn’t intend to alienate my father or brother. I truly loved them. But as I managed to graduate from high school, all I could think about was getting as far away from our East Coast home. I applied to every college on the West Coast and managed to land a few interviews. Cal Poly drew my attention very quickly, though, and I accepted entrance there without talking it over with my family at all.
My father had assumed I would work with him; his anger toward me when I told him about college had probably been fear of being left alone. I was leaving him. I wasn’t going to be there to run things after he got old. Everything he had worked so hard to build was going to go to waste because I was leaving and Heath had long said he wanted to be a lawyer.
It baffled me why my father hadn’t been angry at Heath for not wanting to be in the family business, yet had been irate when I “went behind his back” and enrolled in college.
If I had been a better man, I wouldn’t have taken his words to heart. I would have known he was just a broken-hearted man who was losing someone close to him. But I hadn’t been a good man at all. I said things I would long regret. I said things that drove a wedge between us and prevented me from reaching out to him and him from reaching out to me.
Before coming to the treatment facility, I did call Heath, just to let him know where I was. I wasn’t looking for his sympathy, I was just relaying information.
“I’m heading to rehab,” I said in our phone call.
“Okay.”
“I’ll be away for a few months at Paradise Peak in Aspen.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” my brother had said.
“Nothing. I was just letting you know.”
“Fine. Enjoy your cushy resort. I’ll just stay here taking care of everything while you fuck up your entire life.”
He was angry. Heath had been angry with me since I left for college. Because I had left, he gave up his dream of being a lawyer to stay home and work in the mortuary business with our father. He had felt obligated not to leave Dad alone. Every chance he got, Heath tried to make me feel guilty for my decision.
But Heath could have gone to college, too. He could have followed his own dreams and I hadn’t forced him to stay home. Although I didn’t blame Heath for being angry, either; it was a messed up situation and neither of us seemed to get the happily ever after that we had been searching for.