“Are you with him now?”
They’re the first words I’ve spoken to her since we said good-bye a month ago. I hate that these have to be the words I chose. I should have said, “I missed you,” or “You look beautiful.” I should have said words she would appreciate, but instead, I said words that are hard for her to hear. I know they’re hard for her to hear because her eyes cast downward and she can no longer look at me.
“It’s complicated,” she says.
If she only knew.
“Do you love him?”
She immediately shakes her head no. This fills me with relief, but I also hate that she’s with someone for the wrong reasons.
“Why are you with him?”
She makes eye contact with me now and her expression has hardened. “The same reason I can’t be with you.” She pauses. “AJ.”
This is probably the one thing I didn’t want to hear, because it’s the one thing I know I have no control over.
“He gets you closer to AJ, and I do the exact opposite.”
She nods, but barely.
“Do you feel anything for him? At all?”
She closes her eyes as if she’s ashamed. “Like I said . . . it’s complicated.”
I reach over and grab her hand. I pull it to my mouth and kiss the top of it. “Auburn, look at me.”
She glances up at me again, and more than anything I want to lean forward and kiss her. That’s the last thing she needs, though. It would only add more complication in her life.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
I immediately shake my head. I don’t need to hear how she’s sorry we can’t be together. The reasons we can’t be together are all my fault. Not hers.
“I get it. I would never want to be a part of anything that could keep you away from your son. But you have to understand that Trey is not the answer. He’s not a good person, and you don’t want AJ to grow up with him as an example.”
She rolls onto her back and stares upward. I don’t like the distance she put between us just now, but I also know that my words aren’t anything new to her. I know she knows what kind of person he is. “He loves AJ. He’s good to him.”
“For how long?” I ask her. “How long does he have to put on this act to win you over? Because it won’t last, Auburn.”
She brings her hands up to her face and her shoulders begin to shake. I immediately wrap my arm around her and pull her to my chest. I didn’t want to show up here and cause her to cry.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. I’m sure you’ve weighed your options, and this is the only one that works for you and I get that. I just hate it for you.”
I brush my hand over her hair and kiss the top of her head. She allows me to hold her for several minutes, and I savor each and every one of those minutes because we both know the next thing she’s going to say to me is good-bye.
I don’t want her to have to say it, so I kiss her once more on top of her head. I kiss her cheek, and then I graze her jaw with my fingers, tilting her face to mine. I bend forward and gently press my lips to hers. I don’t give her time to overthink it. I close my eyes, release her, and exit the tent.
She’s made her choice, and even though it’s not the choice either of us wants, it’s the only choice that works for her right now. And I have to respect that.
I drop my cat off at my studio and decide there’s no better time than midnight to go see my father. He honored my request and didn’t visit or call while I was away. I’m surprised he didn’t visit, but a small part of me is hopeful that he didn’t because seeing his son being sent to jail for his mistakes might have been his rock bottom.
I’ve learned over the years not to allow myself to grow too hopeful, but I’d be lying if I said every part of me isn’t praying he’s been in rehab while I was away.
I expected he would be either asleep or gone, so I brought my house key with me. All the lights are off.
When I enter the house, I immediately see the faint glow of the TV. I turn toward the living room and see my father lying facedown on the couch. Knowing he’s not in rehab sends a wave of disappointment through me, but I can’t deny the small rush of hope that he’s actually lying on the couch because he’s not breathing.
And that is not something a son should feel for his father.
I sit down on the coffee table, two feet from him.
“Dad.”
He doesn’t immediately wake up. I reach over to my side and pick up his bottle of pills. The fact that I just spent a month in jail for him should have been more than enough to make him never want to touch another one of these. Seeing that it wasn’t makes me want to walk out of this house and never look back.
My father is a good person. I know that. If he weren’t a good person, it would be easier to walk away. I would have done it a long time ago. But I know he’s not in control of himself. He hasn’t been for years.
After the accident, he was in a lot of pain, physically and emotionally. It doesn’t help that for the entire month he was in a coma, they had him doped up on meds.
When he finally woke up and began to recover, the pills were the only things to relieve his pain. When he began needing more than he was prescribed, the doctors refused his requests.
For weeks, I had to watch him suffer. He wasn’t working, he wouldn’t get out of bed, he was in a constant state of agony and depression. At the time, I didn’t think my father was capable of allowing something as small as a pill to completely devour him, but I was naive. The only thing I saw when I looked at him was a man who was in pain and needed my help. I had been behind the wheel of the car that took the life of his son and his wife, and I would have done anything to make it better. To rectify what happened. I carried a lot of guilt for a long time over that accident, even though I know my father didn’t blame me. That’s one thing he did right: repeatedly tell me that it wasn’t my fault.
Still though, it’s hard not to feel guilt when you’re a sixteen-year-old kid. I just wanted to make it better for him. It began with my being prescribed my own pain medication. It was fairly easy to fake back pain after a wreck of our magnitude, so that’s exactly what I did. After several months of his continuously being in more and more pain, it got to the point where even my additional pills weren’t enough for him.
That’s also when my doctor pulled me off of the pills and refused to give me another prescription. I think he knew what was going on and didn’t want to contribute to my father’s addiction.