by KL Evans
“I’m not really seeing her, I’m just—“
“He’s totally seeing her. He wrote an article about her a couple of months ago and got all personally involved with her. You know,” Ava said, gesturing grandly around the small room, “the way he gets personally involved with all of us—“
“I didn’t get personally involved with you, Ava. You attached yourself to my hip.”
“You like my car and not paying for gas so we have a mutually beneficial arrangement, now don’t we?”
I exhaled loudly and didn’t even try to hide the fact that I tilted my phone toward me again.
“Anyway, he became totally infatuated with Charlie while he was researching her for a story,” Ava went on, completely ignoring me and completely enjoying gossiping about me right in front of my face, “and then she OD-ed and he saved her life like the knight in shining armor he dreams of being.”
“Jesus Christ, Ava, will you please—“
“What?” Missy gasped. “Damn, Seth! Good for you!”
“Yeah, and then she was in the hospital for a long time after that and he visited her like every single day,” Ava added. “Now that she’s out he spends every day with her and they’re in this serious relationship except neither of them realize it or they just refuse to admit it.”
“We are not in a relationship,” I insisted even though it felt like a bold-faced lie. “I just can’t not look after her. She literally has nobody. She has no parents, no family, and no friends other than me. Her only sister just died and she’s trying to get back on her feet and I can’t just walk away from her while she’s so fragile.”
“Aw, Se-eth,” Missy cooed, clutching my forearm. “You are such a sweetheart. Lord! That poor girl.”
“I’m really not.”
I’m not. I’m a selfish asshole and no matter how many Missies or Christians or Charlie Reids come in and out of my life, I always will be, and you taught me that. Rather, you made me realize it about myself.
“It’s not that you can’t walk away from her. You don’t want to walk away from her. You love her,” Ava said with a snort just as the door opened and Bonnie entered with Christian, who was clad in the standard black-and-white striped jail uniform, the sight of which was deeply troubling to Missy.
“My God, son,” she said, voice hitching and hands clutching her chest. “Look at yourself. I hope it was worth it.”
“It was,” he stated with utter defiance, dropping himself into a chair and glancing around at each of us. “So what’s up, y’all?”
His flippant attitude suddenly set me off, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of Ava ragging on me or you not calling me or his total disregard for his mother’s emotional suffering, and not to mention his entire future, but I snapped on him.
“What’s up is you’re probably going to jail, Christian. How do you like that?”
“Psh,” he said, still flippant. “Hey Seth. How’s it going? I see you’re still sticking your smug nose into business that has nothing to do with you.”
“You know, if more people had been sticking their smug noses into your business, you probably wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.”
“Okay, Christian,” Bonnie interjected. “Here’s what’s going to happen: when you appear before the judge next week, we are going to plead no contest. Are you okay with that?”
He flipped his palms as if to shrug. “Fine with me.”
“Good,” Bonnie said. “The reality of this case is that there will be either jail time or fines, and the fines are steep. However, if you agree to jail time, I can probably get you time-served and negotiate for a reduced sentence. You would likely be eligible for early release for good behavior. Realistically, and if you cooperate, I imagine that you’ll probably do about three to six months.”
Missy choked back a sob. “Oh my lord. What am I going to do with you? Is this just how it’s going to be now? Huh?”
“Guess so,” he said flipping his palms again, and my blood was boiling. My teeth were grinding, but it wasn’t enough to keep me from opening my mouth.
“You guess so?”
He cocked his head and raised one eyebrow at me. “Yeah, Seth. I guess so.”
“Do you realize you literally chose going to jail over going to college?”
“Like I said,” he hissed, head still cocked like a pistol, “I guess so.”
“What is wrong with you? Honest question,” I said. “I’m here to get your story and understand your life, so just enlighten me. You and your mother are essentially homeless and, because you’re smart and dedicated and a hard-worker, you were handed a golden ticket out of the slums of Dallas to go to any university in the state, for free, and all you had to do was fill out some paper work, but instead you decided to go on a crime spree because…? Why?”
“It wasn’t a crime spree,” he said, cool as ever.
“Oh right. I forgot. You’re just trying to bring beauty and culture to your community, right? Is that why you painted, ‘Eat Shit, Cronies,’ in six-foot letters on the side of the courthouse?”
“What I did was non-violent direct action against oppression.”
“How were you being oppressed? Because you were being charged with a crime that you committed? That’s not oppression, that’s consequences. Cause and effect.”
“Hah.” He licked his lips. “Listen to you, you smug mother fucker.”
“Christian, I am sick of that God damned mouth of yours,” Missy growled in voice that was still fragile and shaky.
“Mama, you’re worried about all the wrong stuff.” Christian stood and pointed aggressively at me. “This guy doesn’t fucking get it.”
“So explain it to me,” I said, also standing up, as if it would make me intimidating or the alpha male in the room. I am not intimidating nor am I an alpha male. Not even close. And it didn’t help that Christian and I were the same size. If it came to it, he could easily kick my ass and he looked like he knew it. “Go ahead.”
“I am a target because I’m a poverty-stricken black male. There is a racist undercurrent and a socioeconomic death spiral in this city and it is the poorest rich town in the US. We live the way we do because my mother was never able to keep a steady job because she was raising me on her own. She couldn’t afford child care, so she couldn’t keep a job, and she couldn’t keep a job because she didn’t have child care. Do you see what I’m saying? Nothing was available to her back then, and that’s why we live the way we do now. And nothing was available to her back then because you know what people thought when they looked at her?”
Nobody in the room said anything because everyone knew, but nobody wanted to be the one to say it. But Christian did. And when he did, he spoke in a cracked voice that, for the first time I’d heard thus far, hinted at the fact that he was still just a boy.
“‘There’s another loose black woman having babies so she can live off the government tit. Just another hood rat who couldn’t keep her legs together.’ This is what people think about my mother, man. Nobody ever cared to know what really put her in this situation, and what put her in this situation was a man who lied to her and beat her. And the reason we’re in the slums of Dallas is because my mother is a survivor. Because she would rather have been poor and homeless than stay with an abusive fuck.”
Christian’s eyes were welling up and Missy was bent over the table, crying quietly, and I can’t handle women crying so I stood behind her with my hands on her shoulders. Ava had hooked her arm around Missy’s elbow and was handing her tissues, and Bonnie was waiting out the storm, and somehow I was suddenly in charge of the situation.
“Christian,” I started, and what the hell was I supposed to say to him?
You’re a product of your environment, I get it, and I’m sorry. You don’t need to explain all of this to me. I see it all the time and it makes me as mad as you are, and I’m not even the one who has to live it.
I’m not his dad and I wasn’t trying to be, but I thought m
aybe I could just be someone in his life that had his back. Not so far in the back of my mind, I was thinking about how you were doing so well and I was responsible for that just by being there. Maybe I could do that for him too. Maybe he just needed to feel less like the whole world was against him.
“I’m on your side,” I started again. “I’m here for you and your mom. Whatever they give you for this, you’ll get through it and when you’re done with it, we’ll help you figure out the next step. And while you’re away from your mom, I’ll be there with her. Ava will too. Deal?”
Christian’s chin quivered just enough that it shook a couple of tears out of his eyes and he quickly wiped his face before holding out his hand to me. “Deal.”
And we shook on it.
We sat back down and Bonnie continued discussing what could be expected from the process and I found myself feeling cautiously good. All the bull I’d dished out to Esther Harrison felt a little less like bull. But somehow, feeling good about it made me nervous. I don’t have anxiety, but in that room right then, I felt a shadow of what could have been anxiety. I might have thought about it a little too long or dissected it a bit too much, because it intensified into a really bad feeling in my gut. And that was when I checked my phone again.
It was 7:25 PM and you still hadn’t called, so I sent you a text.
Didn’t you have a test today? How’d it go?
The meeting wrapped up at 7:37 and there was still no reply, and my heart palpitated as I went through every worst case scenario imaginable. Like, you’d been saving up all the meds I’d given you and swallowed all two dozen or so of them in one sitting. Or you were passed-out drunk. Maybe you’d choked to death on your vomit. Maybe Dave was over and you were straddling his lap.
It’s funny how all of these scenarios were running through my mind and not once did I ever stumble across the actual horrible outcome of all of this. Oh wait, no. Not funny at all.
Nevertheless, I managed to remain attentive to Missy and Christian until we all parted ways, then I drove across the Metroplex like a bat out of hell, calling you over, and over, and over, and over. And you didn’t pick up. You didn’t even send a text. A storm was rolling in on the horizon in both an atmospheric and literal sense, but I drove. Fast. Too fast. I had no idea what was waiting for me as I unlocked the door knob, but I knew it couldn’t be good.
And after I’d called into your house and you didn’t answer, I finally found that none of the scenarios in my mind were correct and knew it was going to be a really bad, really stormy night.
Hour Twenty-Eight
The first thing that should have tipped me off was that the house was immaculate.
It’s so funny—no, none of this is funny. It’s so ironic that all the things that were signs of something bad looming in the distance were things that, on the surface, looked like excellent progress. You were hiding something from me in plain sight and banking on me getting distracted by all your progress.
Anyway, the house was spotless for the most part. All the piles of mail and bills were cleared from various surfaces, clutter was put away, the furniture had been cleaned of cat hair, everything had been dusted, the kitchen was tidy and scrubbed, the bathroom was sparkling, and the single, solitary space that wasn’t completely clean was the hallway between your bedroom and Jade’s. And that space had never been a mess. But now there were piles of random shit scattered all over it, and that’s the path that led me to you.
Lightning flashed and then thunder shook the walls. I stepped over clothes and old CD cases and DVDs and a few stuffed animals and books and a splintered, broken bookshelf on its side and entered Jade’s room.
“Charlie?”
You were crouched in a corner, a near-perfectly shaped sphere of Charlie, head dropped between your knees and hair cascading over your shoulders. You didn’t look up or even say anything.
“I tried calling you. Did you go to class?”
Nothing, and I turned a small circle to scan the chaos of the room. The mattress and box spring were leaned against a wall, the sheets and pillow cases were thrown in an opposite corner, the closet was empty and had vomited clothes and hangers into the center of the room, and just… shit. Everywhere. Chaos. The kind of chaos created by madness and fury, and I knew you hadn’t been to class at all.
You’d had a very bad day. And the fact that you were neither drunk nor high on pharmaceuticals, and merely folded into yourself in defeat made me so fucking proud of you. You were channeling your grief into something other than substances and self-destruction and I was so proud of you, but I was sad for you too. Your anguish permeated the room and it was thick enough to cut with a knife, so I joined you in your state of mourning and sat down in front of you.
“Charlie, talk to me.”
“Go home, Seth McCollum.”
“Do you really think I’m going to go home when you’re feeling like this?”
Instead of answering, you uttered a growl deep in the back of your throat that was anguish vocalized in its purest form, grabbed a fistful of clothing from the floor next to you, and pitched it at me. “Get the fuck out of here!”
“I’m not leaving, so you might as well suck it up and deal, and then talk to me.”
Heavy rain began pelting the foil-covered windows and more thunder rumbled in the atmosphere. You growled that same growl of utter despair, quieter this time, and it was appended with a single, guttural sob.
The sound was an expression of a unique kind of grief and I’d seen it a few times, most recently from widower George Traynor after his seven-year-old son had lost his battle with cancer. This is the grief of losing the single thing in the world that you love more than literally anything, including your own life. This grief is so intense that even the hardest of hearts soften in the face of it. This is the grief that, when witnessed as a third party, causes women to cover their mouths, and men to turn around, and battle-hardened nurses to find a secluded hallway where they can collect themselves. And I am not a man who cries; I didn’t then, but…
I inched closer to your knees, which were pulled to your chest, held there by your little arms, and picked up one of your hands. You let me do that even though it seemed to be a catalyst for a series of similar sobs, punctuated with pinched whimpers and abbreviated moans, and I was so sad for you. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen you in the aftermath of your sister’s death; only in the aftermath of your suicide attempt, and I suddenly understood why you did it. I still don’t agree with it, but I understand.
I was ill-equipped to comfort you. We had an unorthodox, undefined, pseudo-relationship, so I couldn’t insert myself into your comfort zone by pulling you close to me and saying, Baby, I’m so sorry, or, Sweetheart, I love you and I’m here for you.
“Please talk to me, Charlie.”
You finally lifted your head and looked at me through a pair of droopy eyes, the typical gray of which nearly looked white amidst the redness of hours upon hours of weeping. You didn’t say anything, but your eyes gave away everything I needed to know.
There’s nothing you can do, so no I don’t want talk to you.
“Did you eat today?”
You continued to look at me that way and I got that answer, too.
Of course not.
You don’t eat when you’re sad. That’s why you had become so much thinner than you were in the photo of you and Jade that was still sitting on the desk. I realized this right then, when we were sitting on the floor, and it subsequently occurred to me that you had been eating—when you were with me.
Did that mean you weren’t sad when we were together? Did it mean you were happy with me? Did it mean this really was a good thing for you? Did it mean I really was responsible for your progress?
“Charlie, I know you’re having a really hard time, but maybe you should look at all the good you’re doing with your life. You’ve made so much awesome progress and I think Jade would be really proud of you.”
That was the wrong thing
to say and you jerked your hand away as you dropped your head back down. So I tried again.
“What can I do right now that would help?” I was told at some point in my life by someone that that was the best thing to do for a grieving person: ask how you could help. But you said nothing, so I went out on a limb and tried one of those terms of endearment on for size.
“Baby.” And that felt way more natural than I expected. “I’m so sorry you’re sad. I wish I could help.”
You sobbed again and I thought that didn’t help either, but then you slowly leaned forward and crawled into my lap, wrapping your arms around my neck and straddling me in a vastly different way than all the previous times.
“I love you for trying,” you said, and it was the first time in a long time that you said I love you. You’d said you loved me so many times I’d lost track, mostly because I’d always dismissed it as your alcohol-induced banter, but this time hung in my mind as being potentially genuine. Because you were not only sober, but completely broken. “You can’t help, Seth McCollum. Can’t you see that? Nothing can help. Nothing will ever be good or feel good again. Nothing will ever make this better. I have nobody and nothing but a stack of medical bills from Jade and my hospital stay, and going to school is just going to add more debt and even if I have a job one day, I’d never be able to pay all that. I don’t just have nothing, I’m in the red.”
“There are resources for dealing with medical debt,” I said. “I’ll help you with that. And I know you feel like you’ll never stop hurting over this, but you will. Or you’ll figure out ways to cope with the hurt. You’ll find things in life that make you happy again.”
You pulled back and looked at me with a tear-streaked face of total incredulousness. “You know what would make me happy? My family. My sister. My aunt. A mom that cared more about me than her own drama. A dad who wasn’t a menace to society. I want my family, Seth McCollum. That is gone. Nothing will ever make me happy.” You paused to cover your face and wipe your eyes before shrugging flippantly. “But don’t worry. I’m making all A’s and I made sure to have someone send me notes from the classes I missed today and I’ll finish my program and get a stupid fucking job and live my miserable fucking life and yay fucking me.”
