“I looked at one,” Ty says, “but I couldn’t get the right color.”
“It’s tricky,” I say. “I’m not sure he can, either.” Jenna is quiet behind me, and I turn around, wondering if my phone wasn’t in my jeans after all.
Jenna is sitting on the edge of her bed, holding my chip in the center of her palm.
My heart stops as she looks up at me.
She knows what it is. It’s got the AA motto right there on the chip, as well as the number of days. I’ve known I had to tell her. I have to do it now.
A quiet peace settles in my gut. I can do it. I know I can. I’m scared, but I don’t want to use.
“Okay, kid, I’ve got to go,” I say. “But I’ll see you later.”
“Okay,” Ty says. “Don’t forget about the hair.”
We hang up, and I set Jenna’s phone on the edge of the bed, and then sit down next to her.
“Is this yours?” she asks.
I run my hands through my hair. “Yeah.”
The corners of her eyes wrinkle. “How long have you had it?”
I hold my breath for a moment before answering. “Four days.”
Jenna stares at me. This is so far from the response she was expecting. “What?”
I reach out and I take the chip from her. “I told you there was stuff in my past, right? Stuff I’m not proud of.”
“Sixty-four days. You were on drugs two months ago?”
I close my eyes. I’ve gone out of my way to make it sound like this stuff is in the past, because it is. But not by much. “I had been out of rehab two weeks when we met.”
“Rehab?” Jenna shifts on the bed, moving farther from me. “You were in rehab?”
“Yeah.” I try not to focus on the inches she’s scooted away from me, on the gap already widening between us. She stares at me like I’ve turned into someone she doesn’t know.
“Oh, god,” I say. “I’m telling this all wrong. Look, I didn’t want to keep it from you, but I didn’t feel like I could tell you until I was sure I could stay sober no matter how you reacted. I get it if you’re mad. I’m an addict, but it’s different this time, and I’m going to stay clean, I swear. You can drug test me every week if you want to. Every day. I can pass—I meant it when I said this wouldn’t be a problem.”
Jenna continues to stare at me while I babble, and I realize I spent so much time thinking about whether I was ready to tell her that I didn’t spare a thought for what I should say.
“This time,” Jenna says. She’s backed herself all the way against her headboard, like she’s scared of me. I reach a hand over and put it on top of hers, and she doesn’t move toward me, but she also doesn’t pull away.
“Yeah.”
“As in, you’ve been clean before.”
I cringe. I know how it looks. There’s no way to tell from the outside how different it is this time. “I’ve been to rehab before. Twice. But this time it was my decision. I begged my dad to let me go. I wanted to get clean and I’ve done the work and I’m not going back.” I can taste the truth of that. I’m ready for this. I’m not using again.
She stares at me some more, and I don’t know what to say.
“I told you about my history,” I say. “I told you I did heroin.”
Her whole body is trembling. “Yes. But you didn’t tell me you were an addict who was just out of rehab. Again. I’ve let you into my home, into my life, and I have a kid who thinks you’re going to be his father. And, god, sixty-four days.”
I’m shaking, too. “I know. But I swear, I didn’t mean to lie to you. I guess I thought you’d have an idea how bad it was. You can’t really do heroin without getting addicted.”
“So I should have known,” Jenna says. “You tried to tell me, but I was too stupid to get it, is that it?”
“No.” God, I should have told her the whole truth before, no matter the cost. “You’re right. I didn’t tell you, and that’s my fault, not yours. But I swear to you, I’m clean now. I have a therapist and I go to meetings almost every day and—”
“You go to what? You’ve been going to meetings and you didn’t tell me?”
She looks horrified now. Betrayed. And I deserve that. I’ve done this to her. I have to do the brave thing now, the thing I should have done a long time ago.
I need to be as open and honest with her as she’s been with me. “Jenna, I’m so sorry. I should have been more honest with you. But it’s not as bad as it sounds. I’m on maintenance drugs—a prescription—and they help me with the cravings, they make it easier to stay clean, and—”
“Maintenance drugs.” She keeps repeating each thing I say, like every piece is more unexpected and horrifying than the last. “You’re on narcotics.”
“Prescription narcotics.” My throat closes, and I taste salt. Tears are welling up in my eyes and I don’t want to cry because I’m the one who hurt her, but I can’t help it. “I’m sorry. But they’re legit, I swear. You can talk to my doctor.”
“I believe you,” Jenna says. “But you’ve done this before. You’re a heroin addict and you have no track record except that you relapse. You had been in rehab within two weeks of meeting me, and you didn’t find that relevant. You’re living in my house taking narcotics and you didn’t feel the need to tell me about it, even though I left you with my son, even though you knew Mason watched my kid while he was high. You’ve been sneaking around and going to meetings and all those times we talked about the past, all those times I told you things hardly anyone else knows about me, you were holding onto this, knowing I thought the drugs were in the past, knowing I might make different decisions if I knew, and denying me that right. That’s what you’re telling me, right?”
I grip my chip in my hand, and feel the engraving embedding itself in my palm. “It’s different this time. You can ask Gabby. She’ll tell you. Before, I wasn’t ready. I went for my family, but I wasn’t ready to change. But this time I did this for me, because I want to be clean.”
Jenna shakes her head at me. Tears are gleaming in her eyes. “And keeping this from me? Didn’t you also do that for yourself?”
The whole room seems to melt around me, like it’s made out of wax.
I did do that for me. I hid things from her, even though I knew she would be upset if I told her. I thought about me, about what I needed, but I didn’t stop to think about what I was doing to her, about how she would feel when I’d withheld this information for so long.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
That isn’t enough, it doesn’t even begin to make up for what I’ve done, and I know it.
“How can I trust you’re going to stay clean?” she asks me. “How am I supposed to trust that you’re going to a safe person for Ty to love? Do you know how it’ll destroy him if he believes he’s finally going to have a father and then you get back on drugs and take that away from him?” Her voice shudders. “How it’ll destroy me?”
My throat closes. I want to tell her she’s enough, that Ty is enough, that this life we’ve just begun building is far, far more than enough to keep me away from the needle. But it isn’t true, or maybe it is, but this is more true: I’m enough. “I know it’s scary. But if you’ll give me a chance, I swear you won’t regret it.”
Jenna looks at me for a long moment. Tears are running down my face now, and spilling from her eyes as well. “I want to believe you.” She hugs her knees up to her chest. “But I can’t.”
I hear the sound of a blade dropping, the horrible finality of the ax swinging over my head. I’m crying and she’s crying and I’m trying to figure out how we got from where we were minutes ago to here, now, with her looking at me and telling me she can’t do this.
“I love you,” I say.
She sniffles, and her breath shakes. “I know. I love you, too.”
We both sit there for a minute, and I�
�m grateful at least that she’s not screaming at me, that she’s not yelling at me to go. Then I hate myself for thinking that, because it’s what I deserve.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been honest,” I say. “But I’ll tell you everything now. I’m ready. I did some bad things, but I can tell you, now.”
Jenna puts up her hands as if to shield herself from the words. “Stop. I don’t want to hear any more.”
My blood turns to ice. “What?”
I did this to her. Most of it I did before I met her, and if I’d had a single bit of sense in my head I would never have touched the drugs to begin with. If I was a halfway decent human being I would have gotten clean the first time, or the second. I wouldn’t have had to kill a girl before I was motivated to get my act together.
I would have done the decency of telling Jenna the truth, even if it meant I never got to love her at all.
And then she says the thing I’ve been dreading the most: “You need to leave.”
“Jenna—”
“Don’t,” she says, cutting me off. “I don’t even know how to process this. I thought we were going to be a family someday. I was ready to let my son believe you were the father he’s been waiting for, and now . . .” She scrubs at the tears on her cheeks.
“I swear, Jenna. I would never hurt Ty.”
“How many people did you hurt when you relapsed last time?”
I stare at her, stinging like she’s slapped me.
She’s right. I’m making her all these promises, but I can’t, not really. I think this time is different, but is it? I’ve been lying, when I’m supposed to be honest. I’ve torn out the heart of the woman I love, just like I’ve done to everyone else who’s loved me.
I’ve even been resisting therapy, telling my therapist that what I’m doing is for the best, but is it? The way Jenna is looking at me now—like I’m a dangerous addict, like Mason—I find I can’t be sure she’s wrong about that. God, there’s no way I can know if what she’s saying is true, and neither can she. That’s the problem.
My body feels like it’s breaking apart. “You really want me to go?”
“No.” Her voice breaks. “But I need you to.”
I sob, and she sobs, and I want more than anything to wrap my arms around her and hold her through it. “Is this . . . is this it? Am I ever going to see you again?”
She nods. “I’ll call you.”
I wipe my face. “Sure. Right.”
“No,” she says. “I will. Let me think about it and then we’ll talk. At least once more.”
I don’t know whether to be happy she’s allowing me that, or horrified that the next time I see her may be the end. She looks up at me and I see the stark pain in her eyes, and I know. It’s not just how recent it was. It’s not just that I’m an addict, or that I’ve relapsed before.
It’s because I lied to her. I did it under the guise of maintaining my sobriety, but I used that as a justification to lie, which is the opposite of recovery. It’s the opposite of everything I’m supposed to be.
I put on my jeans.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I thought I was being honest enough, but I wasn’t. The truth is, I used to lie about drugs all the time, and now I’m trying to tell the truth, but I suck at it, and I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Jenna looks at the door. “Where are you going to go?” she asks. And I know what she means.
“I’m going to Gabby’s. I’m not going to use.” I find my keys and my phone, and I look at her one more time. Jenna’s curled up on the bed, crying, and I know she’s not going to make that appointment with Allison.
God. Ty. I’m not going to be there to help him tonight.
“I love you, and I’m sorry,” I say. “Please call me.”
“I will,” she says through her tears.
And then I have to walk out the door, and leave her alone with what I’ve done to her, and somehow I manage to do it without entirely falling apart.
Twenty-nine
Jenna
I lose track of time after Felix leaves, just curled up in a ball of hurt and confusion and loss. I cry so hard I’m not sure how my body is even holding itself together anymore. I cry so long my head throbs like I’m hungover.
I cry and cry, lying in the bed that not so long ago was this perfect, safe haven of Felix and me, and now is empty and cold.
I can still see, through the blur of tears, the indent of his head on the pillow. The wrinkles on the sheets where his body was wrapped around mine.
I cry some more, remembering the look on his face when I told him I needed him to leave.
I cry some more, because I really did need him to.
Sixty-four days.
An addict. Rehab, again and again and again.
Meetings and therapy and maintenance drugs.
So, so many things he kept from me. This whole huge part of his life he lied about—by omission, sure, but it feels like lies all the same. All those times we’d talk and talk and I’d bare my soul to him, this person I felt I could tell everything to, and he was holding all this back, just talking around the edges of it.
The hurt is suffocating. The shame, too.
He thought I knew you couldn’t do heroin without getting addicted to it, and maybe I did. I should have seen it coming. I should have known somehow. It’s not like he didn’t tell me he’d had problems with drugs before; he’d even said once that there was more he couldn’t tell me yet. But I’d assumed, like an idiot, that it was years in his past, like my stuff. I’d assumed he’d done shit—maybe even some pretty terrible shit, like god knows I have—but that it wasn’t part of his life anymore, not something that could threaten us, or Ty, or this future we were all building together. I’d assumed that if it was, he would have told me about it himself. Not let me find out like it’s this dirty little secret, like I’m the wife finding another woman’s lipstick on a dress-shirt collar.
Or like the friend finding the bank statement that shows her bandmate has been stealing money from her.
I sit up against the headboard, my face in my hands. Remembering now what it was like to confront Mason. Remembering the way he lied and wheedled, and then, when Alec and I wouldn’t let him off the hook so easily, how he screamed at us and called me a bitch and Alec shoved him and Mason called him names, and it was like our friend had become this person we didn’t even recognize.
Felix isn’t like Mason, I know that. Even in this, in the finding out of his secret, he was still Felix. Still the man I love, still the man who loves me.
And in some ways, that makes it so much worse. It’s easier to kick someone out of your life if you realize you never really knew them to begin with.
I love Felix, with everything in me. But the lies. The addiction. The lack of a track record of staying clean.
Can I live with this? Can I live with subjecting my son to this? What if I do, and it turns out I was wrong?
There’s a deep pit in my stomach that tells me I may already know the answer.
I scrub at my face, helplessly. These thoughts are all too tangled and raw and I can’t work through them by myself. I need to talk to someone. Not Alec, that’s for damn sure. Not my parents, either—there’s too much baggage from my past, and they can’t be objective.
That really leaves . . . Leo or Roxie.
I love both of them, but I’ve known Leo for longer, and something tells me he’d be better for this kind of thing. He’s a weirdo, for sure, but when it comes to serious stuff, he can be surprisingly sane. I pick up my phone and call him, and in this choked, teary voice, ask him if he could come over and talk with me.
“Sure thing, Jen.” He doesn’t ask any more, which I’m grateful for. I don’t want to spill it all over the phone and then have to do it again in person.
He must leave his apartment right away, because he
gets to my house in under twenty-five minutes. I’ve managed to pull on some jeans and a hoodie—I’m so cold, just trembling—but I don’t bother trying to make it look like I haven’t spent the morning sobbing, because god knows I’m going to start up again as soon as I start talking.
It turns out I don’t even make it that long. As soon as I open the door and see Leo standing there, in his “Virginia is for Lovers” t-shirt—with Virginia crossed out and Louisiana written in above it in marker, of course—with this concerned expression on his face, I burst into tears.
“Oh, man, Jenna.” He wraps me in a big hug. “Come on. Tell me what’s happening.”
We go inside and sit on my couch, and I tell him everything. I tell him about how serious Felix and I were, how deeply in love. How clearly I saw this future with him, how much Ty wanted Felix to be his real dad. How much I know Felix wanted all that, too.
And then I tell him about this morning. About the chip and the truth coming out and me telling Felix he needs to leave. How I couldn’t handle hearing any more, even though he had more to tell me.
“I’m just—” I draw in a shuddering breath. “It hurts so much, you know? That he kept so much from me. He was going to meetings almost every day, he said, and therapy, and all this stuff I didn’t even know was part of his life. Like he’d tell me he needed to run errands or go visit his sister, and god, I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t a lie, maybe he did visit his sister too, but . . .”
“But he definitely wasn’t being honest with you,” Leo says.
My throat tightens. “Maybe it’s stupid, being mad about that. I mean, meetings and therapy, those are good things, right? It’s not like he was running out to shoot up. I have the drug tests to prove it.”
“Yeah, but—” Leo starts, but I cut him off, the words spilling out of me.
“Should I even feel this way? Hurt like this? Betrayed like this? He came clean when I confronted him. Mason wouldn’t have done that. Mason didn’t do that.”
Leo frowns. “Yeah, I mean, Mason would have probably just lied more, right? Like he would have said the chip was from forever ago or something. But, Jenna . . .” He trails off, and my heart sinks. Because there’s part of me desperate for Leo to tell me I’m overreacting. For me to be totally wrong about this, so I can take it all back. Leo sighs. “I think it makes total sense that you feel this way. He’s not Mason, but it’s a huge deal, to be living with someone and not tell them you’re an addict, especially if your sobriety is so new. That’s . . . that’s like a life-changing thing, and you deserved to know.”
Everything We Are Page 25
