Everything We Are

by Janci Patterson

  I tug at frayed threads of a rip in my jeans. “He told me he’d had issues with drugs. He told me had a past, a bad one. And god, Leo, you know I do, too. Drugs, yeah, but more than that.” Leo doesn’t know as much as Alec, and definitely not as much as Felix, but he knows the gist.

  “I’ve done stupid shit in my past, too. So has Roxie,” Leo says, and I nod. I’ve heard some stories, and I know Leo’s done harder drugs in the past than either Alec or I have, though I very much doubt he has as many regrets about his past as I do. “But a few years in the past and sixty days is a big difference,” he continues. “And a full-blown addiction, one that he had to go to rehab for, like, multiple times—that’s something else entirely. He should have told you.”

  “Yeah,” I say, quietly. “He should have.”

  I don’t know how that would have gone, if he had, sometime back at the beginning—which feels so much longer ago than the two and a half weeks it’s actually been. Would I have been more cautious? Would I have let him move in so soon? Would I have fallen so hard?

  That last question I know the answer to immediately—yes. I was always going to love Felix.

  But that doesn’t mean I would have made the exact same choices about it. And while I can’t bring myself to regret being with him, maybe it didn’t need to go this way for us to be together, ultimately. Maybe it didn’t need to end like this.

  Maybe it wouldn’t have needed to end at all. But now . . .

  I rub at my forehead, which aches from all the crying, but not nearly as bad as my heart.

  “Like, I don’t even really know what it means that he’s on maintenance drugs,” I say, floundering in my thoughts. “I think those are narcotics, too? I mean, he’s been living in my house, with my son, and taking drugs, and even if they’re prescribed, I just don’t . . . I don’t know what to think. About any of it.”

  Leo pauses. “It sounds like he’d tell you, if you wanted to know. It sounds like he wanted to tell you more.”

  “He did. I know it hurt him that I wouldn’t let him tell me, but I couldn’t—” My voice breaks. “I couldn’t hear any more. I didn’t know if I could handle knowing more.” I look up at Leo, and feel another tear squeeze its way out. “I still don’t know if I can. What if—what if it’s all worse than I think? What if—”

  I don’t say the rest of that thought: What if whatever I hear makes him become like Mason, someone I don’t even recognize?

  I can’t imagine that with Felix, can’t imagine he wouldn’t still be the man I love, even if he’s now the man I can’t be with.

  But it doesn’t mean I’m not afraid of it anyway.

  Leo leans back into the couch. “So you think it’s really over between you guys?”

  There it is, the real question.

  A long stretch of silence passes before I can get the words out. “I think it has to be. There’s no guarantee he can stay clean, and he’s been to rehab before and it hasn’t worked. And, god, if we were together and it happened again, if he went back to the drugs . . .” I squeeze my eyes shut. “I can’t do that, and even more, I can’t do that to Ty.”

  God, Ty.

  My heart had already cracked apart at thinking of how much he wanted Felix in our lives, and how I’m taking that away from him. It feels just like when I took away Rachel years ago in that car accident, only this time I’m doing it on purpose. To protect him, sure, but it doesn’t mean it won’t devastate him.

  But now it hits me that I’m going to actually have to sit him down and tell him this, that I’m going to have to look into my son’s eyes and break his heart.

  He won’t hate Felix for it; I won’t let him. But he might hate me.

  “Maybe it doesn’t have to be all or nothing,” Leo says, after a moment. “Like, if it’s him not having a track record for staying off the needle which is the real problem—and that’s a legit problem, Jenna, I get it—maybe you guys could just take a step back. Cool this off for six months, see if he’s still clean by then.”

  Part of me wants to grasp at this idea, cling to it like a life-ring in the middle of the ocean, even though it’s one I’ve thought of already, weighed and set sadly aside.

  I grip my knees tightly. “It wouldn’t work. The way Felix and I are—I mean, how quickly everything has happened for us, the feelings and us moving in together and seeing this future . . . We can’t do halfway. I don’t think we’d be able to slow down, not really.” I swallow past the thick lump in my throat. “Ty, too. He can’t back off on how much he wants Felix to be his dad. And if Felix does start using again . . . I just can’t risk it. Not with Ty.”

  Leo stares down at his hands. “God, I’m sorry, Jen. This sucks so bad. I can’t even tell you.”

  A little smile manages to tug at my lips, despite everything. “You don’t need to, Leo. I know.”

  “You really love him. Even after all this.”

  I nod. “Yeah, I do.”

  And then I’m thinking again of the look on Felix’s face when I told him to leave, of him apologizing and crying, and god, even though he hurt me, I want to take his hurt away, too. Even though he lied to me, I want to be there for him through this, to support him through an addiction that must be brutal and painful and scary as hell.

  But I can’t. Even if I could take that risk for myself, I can’t take that risk for Ty.

  Which means I’m going to have to hurt Felix even more.

  “But I still have to end it.” The hopelessness threatens to overwhelm me, drown me. “I have to.”

  Leo puts his arm around me and pulls me in against him. “I get it. But if I were you, I’d still listen to everything he has to say first.”

  I look at up him. “Really?”

  Leo thinks about this for a bit, like he knows what he says is true, but he needs to figure out why. “Because you don’t want to break up with him and then spend the rest of your life never knowing the full reason behind it, you know?”

  He’s right. I know he is.

  Even if I don’t want to hear all the details, I need to, or I’ll always wonder.

  I sniffle against Leo’s shirt. “You’re really good at this, Leo. You’re a good friend.”

  “Yeah, well, that and gator hunting. Two highly prized skills.”

  “Don’t forget playing bass.”

  He shrugs. “Eh. Don’t tell my bosses, but I’m really only passable at that one.”

  We don’t say much more, and he holds me while I cry again, while I shore myself up for talking to Ty later today. For talking to Felix, when I can bring myself to do so.

  And I can’t help but think of the story Alec and I were telling, the one I believed was true even if Alec and I weren’t the ones in it.

  The one I believed was Felix and me, and always would be.

  Soul mates.

  But just because we’re that—and something deep in me can’t let that go—doesn’t mean we get the story, the happy ending. Maybe that’s all it ever was, after all—a story, and nothing more.

  Without him, I can’t see myself ever believing in it again.

  Thirty

  Felix

  When I leave Jenna’s house, I don’t go looking for a dealer or cruise by any of my old hangouts. I don’t let myself add up how much heroin I could afford with what’s in my bank account. Instead I call Gabby, and an hour later I’m crying on her couch—or my couch, I suppose, because I’ve just given her more than the thing is probably worth plus paid her back for the storage of my cello.

  I owe her, and this may be my last chance to do so while I still have a job.

  Gabby sits on the floor next to the couch with her hand on my shoulder. “God, Felix. I’m so sorry.”

  I shake my head. “It’s my own fault. I messed it up. I always knew I wasn’t good enough for her and so I lied to her and it’s all my fault.”


  Gabby shakes her head. “You love her, Felix. You made a mistake, but you did it for a good reason.”

  My eyes are streaming and my nose is full of snot and I sound like I have the cold from hell, and I hate myself for it. “No. I did this. I did all of this. It’s about time karma came back around and bit me in the ass for all the horrible things I’ve done.”

  Gabby squeezes my shoulder. “This isn’t because of Katy.”

  I sob. She’s right, of course. This isn’t because of Katy because Jenna doesn’t even know about Katy. I would have told her, but she didn’t want to know, probably because she can already tell what a terrible person I am and doesn’t want to have to hear it.

  “Karma isn’t a thing,” she says. “I know too many bad people who have everything, and too many good people with shitty lives to believe that.”

  She’s right. It isn’t karma, just the direct results of my own actions. “I should never have done this,” I say. “I should never have taken that job. All I did was hurt her.”

  Gabby sighs and rests her head on my arm. I kind of hate her for sympathizing, because I don’t feel like I deserve it, but at the same time, I crave it.

  “I want to believe in something,” I say. “I don’t know if it’s God or what, but I want there to be forgiveness for me, and healing for Jenna, and a second chance for Katy. But it’s just wishful thinking. If there is a God, I’m damn well going to hell.”

  Now Gabby has tears in her eyes, and I hate myself for doing that to her, too.

  “I wish I could take it back,” I say. “All the pain I’ve caused. All the people I’ve hurt. God, Gabby, you’re the best sister ever, and all the rest of us do is make you feel like shit.”

  “That’s not true. You’re a good brother. You went through a bad patch, but remember back in high school? You always stuck up for me.” She pauses. “Even when I was mad at you for hitting on my friends.”

  I manage to give her a flicker of a smile. “You were mad because it worked.”

  “I was,” Gabby says. “You know I’m going to be here for you, right?”

  “I know. But not all the time. You have to tell me if it’s too much, and I can lean on someone else.”

  Gabby nods. “Okay. Not all the time. But every time you really need me.”

  “I know,” I say. And it’s true, because she always has been, even when I didn’t like the way she went about it.

  Especially then.

  “Don’t do that to me again,” Gabby says. “I mean it. Don’t go back on the drugs.”

  “I won’t,” I say, and even though my heart has turned into this howling pit and I feel like both the couch and I are falling through an endless void, I mean it.

  “Do you want to use?”

  I do, but that desire is buried beneath the part of me that wants to fight through this, that wants above all to survive.

  “A little,” I say. “But most of me knows there’s nothing in the world so bad that doing heroin can’t make it worse.”

  Gabby squeezes my arm, and she just sits with me while I cry my eyes out.

  And even if she can’t take the pain away, it helps.

  Jenna doesn’t text me until the next morning. Can we talk? it says.

  Yes, please, I answer.

  Can I come to you?

  My gut twists. I wonder if she wants that because she doesn’t want to have to kick me out of her house twice. Of course, I answer. I’m at Gabby’s. I give her the address.

  I have the place to myself this morning, because Gabby had a shift at the hospital, and Will went off to a coffee shop to write. I’m not sure if he did that because I’m hanging out in his space, but he didn’t seem resentful, which I appreciate, though I make a note to ask Gabby if I ought to go back to Dad’s tonight.

  Dad doesn’t know a thing about Jenna, and I’m not sure I can explain now how such a short relationship can have meant so much.

  When Jenna arrives, she’s put on heavy eye makeup, but it doesn’t hide that she’s been crying.

  “Hey,” she says.

  “Hey.” I want to put my arms around her, but instead I let her in to the apartment. She takes my couch, and I sit in a chair across from her.

  Jenna takes a deep breath, and I brace for her to tell me it’s over. “I talked to Leo,” she says. “About everything. I hope that’s okay. I didn’t know who else I could tell.”

  I nod. I’m glad she found someone to talk to, at least.

  “Leo says that you screwed up, but you’re not like Mason, because if you were, you would have just told me the chip was from forever ago, and that would have been it.”

  “Everything I told you was true.”

  “I know,” Jenna says. “But you left a lot of things out.”

  “I know. I’m so sorry.” I want to ask for another chance, but I get the sense Jenna’s already composed what she wants to say, and I doubt anything I say now can sway her. My chest aches, and my ears pound, and I want at once for time to stop right here and to get it over with.

  “I want to hear the rest of it,” Jenna says. “You said there was more.”

  That surprises me, and I feel a tiny flicker of hope I immediately want to smother. “There’s not really more news. Just the details.”

  Jenna nods. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know, but Leo says I need to hear it, or I’m going to break up with you and then never know the full reason why.”

  The force of those words stuns me, and I pause. “So it’s over.”

  Tears fill her eyes. “Will you please tell me?”

  “Yeah. Of course.” And even though this conversation now feels like it’s post-mortem, I find I still want her to know. I love her, and I want her to know who I am, even if it means she doesn’t love me anymore.

  “I was miserable at Juilliard,” I say. “I told you that before.”

  Jenna nods.

  “I was lost. It was like I’d been on this road forever, and I finally got where I was going, and it wasn’t at all where I wanted to be. Everything sucked. School wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be, and I didn’t have to work as hard as I thought I would, and I dated a bunch of girls, but I’m not all that into casual sex, and that sucked, too.”

  Jenna is curled up on the couch with her legs underneath her, listening.

  “And then one time,” I say, “I went to this party. I’d never done drugs before—I didn’t even drink much. But I was so unhappy and someone handed me a pipe and I didn’t even know what it was, but I thought, what the hell?”

  I rub my forehead. “I didn’t find out until later that it was heroin, and when I did, I didn’t care. It was like I was lifted out of the pit I was in and suddenly floating through the life I’d always wanted, but didn’t know how to have. At first it was cheap and good but pretty soon I started needing more, and then I switched to needles and after that I had to be high all the time.”

  I keep going, telling her about how I stopped caring about everything else, how I stopped trying at school, but still covered for a full six months in New York before I got arrested and stayed in jail overnight and then sold out everyone I’d ever done drugs with because I was a rich boy afraid of prison. I tell her about getting kicked out of school and telling my parents and going to rehab once, and then twice, and staying clean for six weeks before I relapsed again.

  “After that, I was gone for more than a year,” I say. “I’d burned all my bridges. My family wouldn’t help me anymore. I ended up working at a convenience store for drug money and living in a house where all the cereal had weevils and one of the guys who crashed there liked to piss in the houseplants—which were fake.”

  I take a deep breath. “And then my dealer ODed, and the house got raided, and I was out of drugs and a place to stay, so I started buying Fentanyl, and did that for a couple weeks, unt
il I got scared. And when I ran out of druggie friends’ couches to crash on, I found a new heroin dealer and started picking up girls to do drugs with just to have a bed to sleep in at night.”

  Jenna’s eyes are closed now, and she’s curling in on herself, and I want to stop, but I can’t. She needs to know. She deserves to know.

  Even if I already know she won’t be able to forgive me for this last part. I tell her about Katy, how I picked her up and bought drugs, and we went home to her place. I tell her about waking up next to her dead body, how I called 911 and gave them the wrong name and then had to explain that to the cops. “The worst part is that I shot her up. I put that heroin in her arm, and I’ve thought a thousand times about whether I did it wrong. I don’t think I did, but I can’t be sure, because all I was thinking about was getting high.”

  Jenna’s crying now. Tears stream down her cheeks.

  “I Googled her later,” I say. “I found her obituary.” I take a deep breath. “She had a sister.”

  Jenna’s eyes open, and her breath shudders, and I know she’s thinking about Rachel. And I hate myself for the things I’ve done, for the person I am.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I wish I could change it, but I can’t. And I know you can’t love someone like me, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you everything from the very beginning, so you never would have thought that you could.”

  Jenna shakes her head. “I do love you.”

  My breath shakes. “Still?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Always.”

  And for a split second, I hope she’s going to say we can work it out. That this isn’t as bad as she expected, that I can earn her trust back and she can forgive me.