I wanted to kiss him, but I knew that wouldn’t be the right thing to do right now, not when he was telling me this.
“There’s some things you just can’t take back, can’t change,” he said. “No matter how badly you want to.”
It seemed like there was something more he wanted to say, but when I waited for him to elaborate, he didn’t, so I didn’t push it. If there was something else, though, I hoped that he’d feel like he could talk to me about it. Because sometimes talking about it really did help, even if there was nothing you could do to change it.
Chapter Fourteen
Cole
June 17th.
The day my sister died.
I’d need to call my mother later and let her cry on the phone, as she’d done every year since Marissa’s death. They’d sent her up north to a rehab in the hopes of getting her off of the opioids that Sam had gotten her hooked on, and the few times we’d gone up to visit her, she’d seemed better, like she was on the road to recovery.
We’d all felt as though things were getting better, that life was getting back on the track that it was supposed to be on.
Sometimes, I replayed the scene in my head, going into my sister’s room to find her, slumped on the floor, the needle still sticking out of her arm. How long had she been there? Where had she gotten the drugs? Her skin was lukewarm, her lips tinged blue; there was nothing anyone could have done. But I still couldn’t help but wonder if I’d gone in sooner, if we hadn’t stayed at the bed and breakfast, if my parents hadn’t sent her away to that place to begin with, if maybe things would’ve gone differently.
My 1:30 appointment had canceled, so I shut myself in my office and called my parents’ house. My father picked up.
“Hi, Dad,” I said. “How are you?”
He sighed heavily. “We’re doing the best we can,” he said. “Today is always a hard day.”
“I know. That’s why I’m calling.”
“You aren’t at work right now?”
“No, I am, but there’s a break between patients.”
“Oh, okay. Well, we appreciate you calling. We went to your sister’s grave earlier this morning.” There was a pause. “I wonder what she would’ve been like today if she was still alive,” he said.
My father didn’t talk about Marissa much; I knew that he wanted to come across as strong, especially for my mother, but I knew h
ow much it bothered him. He and I were alike in many ways, we both wanted to think that we could fix things, that we could take care of things. But the whole thing with Marissa had shown us, if nothing else, how little control we really had over anything.
“I think about that sometimes, too,” I said. “How’s Mom doing?”
“About as well as you’d expect. Would you like to speak to her? Here she is.”
He got off the phone before I could object; I could tell from the slight quiver in his voice that he was doing his best to hold his tears back. The only time I had ever seen my father cry had been at Marissa’s funeral.
“I’m so glad you called,” my mother said when she got on the phone. “Thank you.”
“Of course,” I said. “How are you?”
“I’m trying to hold it together. Today is always hard. I planted some pansies at your sister’s gravesite. It looks very nice. There was some moss growing on the headstone, but I scraped that off.”
“I’m sure it looks nice there, Mom,” I said.
“We were there for a while. I know your father wanted to leave, but I just couldn’t. I know that doesn’t entirely make sense, since she’s not really there, but I always feel like I’m leaving her behind.”
“I just don’t understand why this had to happen,” my mother sobbed. “Still, all these years later, and it hurts as much as it did when we first found out. She’d been clean for so long—why would she use again? She had such a bright future ahead of her. She’d turned a corner—the hard stuff was in the past. Wasn’t it?”
“That’s what everyone thought, Mom. But obviously it wasn’t, at least not in her mind.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand it.”