Tru shook his head, the motion knocking me out of my reverie back into reality in a sinking, heavy heartbeat. "No means no, honey. I won't bring it up again, but you've got to help me out here because I don't know if that's a promise I can keep when you look at me that way." He leaned in until his mouth was inches from mine, his eyes holding me captive. "I remember that look. Yeah, I fucking remember it, and I know what used to happen after, too."
I held my breath while his gaze, hungry and wary, roamed over me as if he were memorizing every contour. My nod was jerky. Truman Miller, charming and wild was, in this moment, the voice of reason. Things really had changed. My legs, stiff from sitting, wobbled as I walked. I stumbled a little before his strong arm looped around my shoulders, leading us toward my car with an almost brotherly side hug.
A few minutes later we pulled up in front of a small, weathered old house not far from the neighborhood where he'd grown up. The yard was overgrown with grass and weeds, and the house needed a fresh coat of paint, but all of it was unmistakably Truman—the beat-up old pickup in the driveway, a twisted metal sculpture in the front yard, the ancient rocking chair on the front stoop, an ash tray with several stubbed out cigarettes in it.
I wandered through the front door straight into a home recording studio. The soundboard and computer stacked on an old table along one wall; a camcorder; various recording equipment and other gadgets in the corner; and a drum set, guitar, mics and chairs scattered around a worn oriental rug in the center.
"I'm doing a project for Gracie's birthday. Let me show you what I've got." He led me behind his computer and pulled up a chair so I could sit beside him. The warmth of his thigh against mine heated my skin, even through his jeans. It felt intimate, sitting so close to him. I moved my thigh away the barest of an inch, but his followed. He didn't appear to notice as he scrolled through some files on his computer, but that point of contact was distracting.
"I've been shooting videos of band stuff for a while. I had this idea to make a compilation video of all the people who know her saying something nice, and I'm splicing in some shots of her singing and some old home videos from when she was a kid. I thought maybe you could say a few things about what you remember. She thought you were the shit back in the day, and you knew her when she was, what, twelve? You could probably tell a story or two. What do you think?"
I nodded and relaxed. I'd loved his sister like she was my own. "Sure, that'd be fun."
Tru set everything up and hit record, then left the room, presumably so I wouldn't be self-conscious. He was right, I had a cute story about how much Grace had admired her brother being in a band and how she'd told me she was going to be a singer someday. She'd accomplished that. I'd listened to their first CD, and she had a fantastic voice, the perfect soprano counterpoint to Truman's deep vocals. It was sweet irony that they were now playing gigs together.
I finished my story and yelled for him to come back. He shut the camera down and proceeded to show me some of the other projects he'd worked on, including an actual music video for one of their songs. Tru was in his element on film, and watching him ham it up on screen had me laughing to the point of tears. When we'd finished, he led me into his cheery yellow kitchen, which was clean but sparse. I sat at his wobbly kitchen table, my ass on a mismatched chair, and gabbed while he brewed a fresh pot of coffee.
"So, where do you hang out, since your living room is full of equipment?" I didn't need another coffee, but having one in my hands made me feel safer somehow.
Tru winked and flashed a smile as he stood, took my hand, and led me down the hallway. "I have a TV in my bedroom. Since being in bed is one of my favorite things to do, it made sense to combine the two."
It was as understated as the rest of the house. A double bed was tucked into the corner, the box spring and mattress on a generic frame. The small TV sat on a side table across from the bed.
Flyers advertising gigs with his band lined the walls, along with a poster of Johnny Cash. I smirked at the sight.
"Don't fucking say it." His lips twitched.
I gave him my best doe-eyed blink. "I don't know what you're talking about."
He laughed and threw a pillow at me. "I do not sound like him, dammit."
He was wrong. I'd seen his videos and I had a copy of their last two CDs. I caught the pillow. "Honey. You do. But it's OK because that man is a legend, and it's actually a very nice compliment, don't you think?"
Tru shook his head as I tossed the pillow back in his face. He detested the comparison, not because he hated Cash, but because he adored him. Tru wanted notoriety on his own terms. He didn't want his music or, more specifically, his voice to be viewed as a Cash tribute. I got it, but that didn't change the facts. He was a natural baritone. His inexplicable southern twang combined into a rich country sound that was beautiful, and very different from how he'd sounded when he was younger.
I turned away from him, deflecting another pillow, and froze as my gaze landed on his dresser. It was lined with prescription bottles, big ones full of huge pills, small ones with tiny pills. There had to be at least half a dozen. I turned to him, my mouth agape.
His expression was somber but expectant.
"You didn't bring me back here just to make that video for Grace." I tried to keep my voice calm, but I was sure he was going to confess he was dying.
What he said instead was somehow worse.
He nodded, picking up a pill bottle and turning it over in his hand. "Some are supposed to fix me, but they have side effects, so I have to take something for those, but the new med always has its own side effect. It goes on and on. Our healthcare system is so fucked up. No one seems to think there's a problem, loading me up with one drug after another. I've got one doctor prescribing all this medication for one issue."
I stepped toward him. My voice trembled. "What's wrong with you?"
His eyes softened, as though he were trying to cushion the blow. As though it were my diagnosis he was delivering, instead of his own. "I'm mentally ill, sweetheart."
I could only stare at him. He let it sink in for a moment, let me get my bearings, perhaps preparing himself for the questions. I started with the obvious.
"How? I mean, are you hearing voices or something? Like, telling you to kill people?"
He was already shaking his head. "Not schizophrenic, sweetheart. Depressed. I have been for a long time. It's not hard to notice it runs in my family. Grace has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and that's fucked her up huge. Sometimes the lows are so bad she can't get out of bed. Luckily the last year or so, she's been doing real good, taking her meds and going to school."
So many pieces of the puzzle of our past suddenly fit together. "Sawyer, too? He always seemed so content with life."
Tru scowled, his lips thinning into a tight line of disapproval. "Sawyer is too stoned 24/7 for anyone to know what the fuck is wrong with him, but I suspect he's about the same, under the haze. He's in total denial. In his world, his only problem is back pain."
Tru made quotation marks with his fingers at the word, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
He backed away from me to sit on the edge of the bed, nodding his head toward the bottles. "It's taken a long time for me to be able to call it a mental illness. The way my brain is wired, I don't think..." He struggled to find the right words, "I don't feel the same way about shit. I don't react to happy things the way other people do. I see people laughing and I can't, for the life of me, figure out how to get myself there, you know?"
I nodded, but I didn't understand. I couldn't. "What you must go through on a daily basis..."
His voice was tight with frustration. "There doesn't seem to be a damn thing I can do about it, other than load myself up with pills. I've taken just about everything over the years."
"Why? Nothing worked?"
He shook his head. "A few have worked pretty well, but they had bad side effects, like liver or kidney failure, so I couldn't be on them for more than a year or so. So
metimes the side effects have been too uncomfortable, like massive headaches or nausea so bad I couldn't get out of bed anyway. A couple of times I've found something that worked for about a year, maybe longer, and then it stopped. Like, it faded away and all of a sudden, and I was in bed again, sleeping all day instead of getting my ass up and earning a living."
I sat down next to him, looking at the bottles as he continued.
"If a med works, it usually means I lose something that's important, like my dick won't work, or I'm puking all the time. Gets to the point where maybe I don't feel like killing myself, but I sure as fuck don't have much worth living for." He sighed. "So I head back to my doc. You know what she said the last time I saw her?"
I shook my head, but he was staring at the wall, his mind in a different place.
"She said, 'Truman, you know what would really help you feel better? Getting some exercise. Get up, walk around the block a little, and get some fresh air.' She talked about endorphins and how she could keep prescribing the medication, but that I needed to put some effort into helping myself, too.
"So I looked at her, and I said, 'Yeah Doc, that's a great idea. Only problem is, I don't feel like I can get out of bed to take a piss, much less walk around the block, and you know why? Because I'm fucking depressed!'"
I took his hand. It shouldn't have been a shock. I knew his family. Even Pete's dad had a very suspicious car accident, and the family lore was he'd used the vehicle to kill himself.
But to hear Truman admit—even embrace—his diagnosis, to see the havoc it played with his life between medications and days spent in bed, was hard for me to accept. I'd always felt like Tru could and would overcome anything. Even hearing him admit he was an alcoholic didn't faze me, mostly because he was sober now, and that was the Truman I knew and loved.
A heavy weight descended over me, pushing down on my shoulders, clogging my throat. We'd broken up right as the cycle of depression was beginning to rear its ugly head. At the time I didn't recognize it. I'd thought he was abusing drugs and alcohol to escape his past, to help him deal with his dad, but now it all made sense. He was battling something dark, a real threat, and I'd left him.
"I don't know what to say. I'm so sorry, Tru. I didn't know." I stood and walked to the dresser once more, his row of pills in my face. "I didn't help you."
He stood, coming up behind me, folding his arms around mine as I hugged myself. "Don't do that. Jesus, don't do that, Jessa. I didn't fucking know, so how could you? It is what it is; I've moved past it. You should, too. We can't change what happened."
He turned me to face him, bringing me back to the edge of the bed where he guided me to sit next to him.
"Do you know what finally got me into rehab?"
I shook my head, unable to speak past the lump in my throat.
He looked down at my hand, still in his. His touch was neutral. Gone was the sly grinning, the innuendos. Tru was giving me something special, him, no walls. I could be there for him in that moment. I twined my fingers through his.
"It was something you said to me, before we split. I knew the weed was getting in the way of me doing the shit I wanted to do. I scraped money together to pay for guitar lessons, then went to them stoned off my ass." He shook his head as if he couldn't believe it, even years later.
"All I wanted was to be famous, to be as good as Leo was. I knew I needed to practice and quit the weed, and I still smoked, all the damn time. Eventually I gave up the lessons. I never considered not being high. That's how it'd started to take over my life."
I nodded and made a mental note to google addiction as soon as I got home.
He continued, "That should've been a wake up call, but it wasn't. The thing that really got to me was when you told me that you didn't really like who I was when I was stoned."
My eyes widened in surprise. "I can't believe you remember that."
He squeezed my hand, as his brown eyes met mine. "You were the love of my life. I lived and breathed you. We had it so good. You saying that to me should've woken my ass up, made me stop. I knew you were going to leave me. I knew it."
His voice softened. "I didn't pick you, honey. And that's on me. You did what you needed to do, and I understood, even then. It was too hard to admit I was in trouble. If I did, I would've had to accept I was hooked, and it took me a long time to get to that place."
I turned and pulled him into a hug. We sat like that, holding on, comforting each other for a long time before he pulled back.
I could allow that he'd left me little choice, but I still felt ashamed. "I'm sorry I wasn't there for you, all these years. I can't imagine what you went through. It must've been hell."
He ran his palm over his head as he looked at the wall, his eyes hazy with memories. "Parts of it were. The breaking point was my ex, Jenny. I was with her for three years. She was an alcoholic, too. We were a fucking disaster. I'd go to work, hate every minute of whatever shit job I had at the time, grab a half case of beer on the way home, and proceed to get shitfaced every night, her right beside me. It was all I could think about during the day. I couldn't wait to get home and drink. We had some fucked up fights. It was probably the worst decision I ever made, hooking up with her. Got to the point where she'd be threatening me with a knife, us screaming shit at each other."
His voice sank low. "I wasn't me."
He pinned me with his stare as if in apology. "The drinking brought out the worst in me. We pushed each other's buttons to an extreme. But she was the only girlfriend I'd had that didn't nag me about my drinking. We fit together in the worst way."
His gaze fell to his calloused hands, clasped together between his knees. "We split after a pretty bad dust up. She got herself clean and sober first, and got back in touch with me about a year later. Seeing her sober did something to me.
"I was living with my mom at the time. I'd just broken up with another woman and spent some time living out of my truck. Talk about rock bottom. I knew then I had a problem. Seeing Jenny healthy, watching what it did for her, how much happier she seemed...I wanted that for myself. I was so fucking tired of being miserable. So I got sober, started going to AA, NA..."
"All the A's." We said it simultaneously before looking at each other and laughing.
I covered his hand with mine. "Thank you for telling me this. I know it's probably not easy to share."
He shook his head. "It's nice to share. I share all the time in meetings. That's kind of the point. I've told that story about you and how I chose pot over you a hundred times in meetings. It was the moment that defined the beginning of my addictions, and it was also a moment that reminded me, years later, of what I needed to do."
"Christ, Tru. You're amazing."
He scowled then, shaking his head. "I'm broke, mentally ill, and a former alcoholic and drug addict. I'm not fucking amazing, Jess. I'm surviving. I'm here."
I shook my head in disagreement, but sighed. "As usual, you are ever the pessimist."
"Well, it's true. I've failed at almost everything I set out to do."
I stood and turned to face him. "Except you did one of the hardest things ever. You gave up something you loved, something your body craved, your DNA demanded you needed, and you said no to it anyway, every day, every minute for over eleven years. How many of us can say we have that kind of strength? Shit, I can't even drag my ass to the gym every day, and that's something that makes me feel good!"
He smirked, but he was listening, his eyes following me as I paced in front of him.
"It's not about what you expected to get out of life but what you make of the life you have." I could feel tears in my eyes as one spilled over onto my cheek. I hastily wiped it away. "I think your recovery is a miracle. You did that. No one else. It's OK to own it."
He looked at me for a long time, his expression blank as he seemed to absorb the concept of being proud of himself. I started to shift uncomfortably, sure that I'd overstepped my bounds when he sighed, looking down at his hands. His voice
was so soft, I might've missed what he said if I hadn't been paying attention.
“I never should've pushed you away. Goddamn, but I love you, Jessa."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Down, down, down
Past~
Breathe. Inhale and exhale. You can do this.
The room spun around me. Overwhelming nausea left me dizzy and unsteady. I gripped my head, but the feeling of being confined, even by my own hands, was too much to bear. Staring at the ceiling was no better. Connecting the dots on the aged, cracked panels only made the sensation of falling worse. I brought my head down abruptly, holding onto the edge of my small dorm room bed, and pulled at the collar of my shirt. The air seemed to be made of something other than oxygen.
Stars danced in my peripheral vision. My breathing quickened. A small whimper escaped my throat as I tipped to my side against soft pillows and curled into a fetal position.
My rioting central nervous system was taking me on the worst of roller coaster rides. As I focused on the wall next to me, everything settled the tiniest fraction. The old, exposed bricks made my world smaller, simpler. There was only the porous red rock in front of my eyes. If I moved even an inch right now, I'd puke. I breathed deeply again through my nose. One slow breath, then another. I was afraid to open my mouth, afraid to close my eyes, afraid Amy would walk in and find me like this. Afraid of everything.
I'm OK, I'm OK, I'm OK. The words were a mantra in my head. If only my body believed them. I tingled and tensed as another wave of dizziness assaulted me. Yes, it was an all-out assault happening inside of me, a battle in which I wasn't sure who the enemy was. Over and over again, I'd start to feel better, but the sensations returned moments later. I could've been on a boat in the middle of a raging storm, for all the balance I had.
I Fell In: A mostly true story about lust, redemption, and true love. Page 11
