Love Will

by Lori L. Otto

“No,” I assure her. “It was that one night. Still don’t have a taste for the shi–stuff.”

  “What led up to that?” Shea asks, still laughing.

  “Have some bread.” I wink at her as I hand her a plate, trying to inform her that she doesn’t want to know the answer to that question.

  “Was that before you two met?” Mom asks.

  “Yeah,” I tell her.

  “Where’s that Rosser kid?” I hear Livvy yell from the other room.

  “That’s your idol…”

  “Oh, my God,” Shea says, touching her hair.

  “Stop freaking out. You look beautiful, but she wouldn’t care if you didn’t,” I tell her. “She’s not like that. In here, Liv!”

  I reach out to hug her, but she bypasses me and embraces my mother first, then stops in front of Shea next. “Are you the woman who made my baby a good eater?”

  “Maybe?”

  “She’s finally putting on weight. You’ve saved us. Shea, I’m Livvy, and I’m forever indebted to you.” My sister-in-law hugs her tightly.

  “Oh, no, it was nothing…”

  “It was everything to me. Jon’s bringing her in. Will, you’ll be amazed at how big she’s getting.”

  “Well, look at you!” I say, seeing a tiny baby bump and reaching for her belly.

  She grabs for me, squeezes way too hard, and whispers harshly in my ear. “Don’t you dare say another word because you are the only one that knows, and you better not be calling me big or I’ll take back the invitation to be Godfather so fast it’ll make your head spin. Got it?”

  “Okay,” I’m barely able to respond.

  “Love you, too!” she says cheerily after she lets me go to say hi to my little brother and Callen.

  “Do not say a word about her being… you know what,” I say softly to Shea.

  “Oh, okay. She does know she’s kind of showing, right?”

  “Certainly don’t say that, or you’re gonna lose the lifelong friend you just made.”

  She laughs lightly. “I’m not saying a word. But she’s even prettier in real life.”

  “There’s your Uncle Will.” Jon enters the kitchen, handing Edie over to me.

  “What do I do with her?” I ask him as she starts to fuss.

  “You can talk to her… or sing to her… she loves riding on shoulders–you have to hold on to her with both hands.”

  “She’s so much bigger than I remember her,” I say, lifting her in front of my face and staring into her brown eyes. She still doesn’t seem too certain about me.

  “They grow, Will,” Livvy says sarcastically. “She’s crawling now. And she said ‘mama’ last week.”

  “It was ‘baba,’” Jon argues. “I like to think of it as a dyslexic ‘dada.’”

  Edie’s eyes drift to Shea, getting wider just before she presses her little lips together to make a raspberry noise with the help of her tongue. We start laughing when my niece does, which makes me laugh even harder.

  “She loves making people laugh,” my brother also informs me. “She takes after Max.”

  “She’s the cutest thing.”

  “You don’t have to hold her like she has cooties, Will.”

  I hug her close to me, letting her grip my t-shirt in her tiny hand. She looks up at me curiously. “It’s been a long time since I’ve held a baby like this. That’s all.”

  “You’re doing fine. Is that pumpkin bread?” he asks. I nod. “You made it?” Shea responds and walks over to serve him a piece.

  “Jon, don’t let her do that. She’s a guest here,” my mom says nervously.

  “Margie,” Shea pleads with her, “I feel at home in here, so please don’t kick me out. I haven’t had my own kitchen to work in for over a month now… it would mean a lot if I could help out just a little.”

  Mom finally relents. “Okay. But the second it starts to feel like work, I want you to stop and relax and spend time with Will. I know you two don’t get to see much of each other.”

  “No, we don’t,” I say to Mom while I look at Shea.

  “I know he wants to spend time with you.”

  Shea looks at my mother. “And I know Will wants to spend time with you.”

  The look of surprise on Mom’s face is priceless.

  Around seven, my mother takes the baby into her bedroom to rock her to sleep while the rest of us break out a card game of Max’s that’s not Mom-appropriate. It’s not really anyone-appropriate, but it’s funny as hell. I’m not sure Edie will be able to sleep through the laughter if our game is anything like the ones we play on the road.

  I decide it’s probably a good time to talk to my mother.

  “Hey,” I whisper in Shea’s ear before kissing her cheek. “You okay out here if I go, uh… do some groveling?”

  She takes my hand and walks me into the kitchen. “Remember what we talked about. You don’t have to grovel, Will. Your feelings are valid. You were hurt long ago. Some people find it easy to forgive, forget, and move on. Other people don’t. You were not wrong in how you’ve felt your whole life. What’s important is that you’re ready to try something different. You’ve had some realizations. You learned some things about yourself. Just go have a conversation with her. Don’t grovel.”

  I nod my head and accept the kiss she stands on her tiptoes to give me.

  “Make me proud with the game… take pictures of the good hands, okay?”

  “You mean the bad hands.”

  “The worst hands,” I clarify, hugging her tightly and sliding my bad hands down her backside, feeling her all over. “I can’t wait to be with you tonight.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it all day.”

  “So if Livvy asked you to have a sleepover with her tonight, you’d still stay here with me?” I ask her.

  She looks up thoughtfully, teasing me. “I’d tell her I’d meet her at midnight or so. But I don’t think she’d ask me. She’s been pretty handsy with your brother all night.”

  “Really?” I ask her, having not noticed. My eyes have been on Shea since her flight landed at LaGuardia.

  “Totally. Must be her hormones.”

  “Anyway. I’m gonna go talk to Mom. Wish me luck.”

  She gives it to me in the form of another kiss. “You’ll be fine.”

  I knock softly before entering my mother’s room. “You have a few minutes?” I whisper.

  “I always have time for you,” she says, putting Edie in a little crib next to her bed.

  “Does Edie stay here often?”

  “I’ve watched her a few afternoons for them. They bought me the crib so she has a nice place to sleep. I thought about setting it up in Max’s old room, but I don’t want her to be at the front of the house. I like keeping a close eye on her.”

  “I’m sure Liv and Jon appreciate that.”

  “They do.” She watches the baby as she sleeps. I take a seat on one corner of her bed, not at all comfortable in her presence.

  “Mom?” She nods and looks in my direction. “I know I’ve been hard on you.” I swallow and take a deep breath, staring at my worn-out sneakers. “Maybe you think I’ve been unfair to you. In some ways I probably have been. I feel like I’ve been angry since the day I was born.”

  She sits down on the other corner of the bed, facing away from me. “I don’t think you ever gave me a chance to be your mom, Will. You were hell-bent on me being the enemy from the time you could speak. Your first words were ‘go away.’”

  I laugh. “No they weren’t.”

  “They were,” she says, starting to cry. I look over my shoulder at her, but she doesn’t look back at me. “I don’t know if it was what you wanted or if you were repeating what you heard me say, or Jon say, but they were your first words. You and I never had a chance from that day forward.”

  “Oh, God, Mom. I was just a baby…”

  “I wanted you, Will. I don’t ever want you to think I didn’t want you, but you were brought into this world under the worst circumstance
s. You know that. Edwin hated me for having an affair. William hated me for not loving him like I loved Edwin. Jon was confused and crying all the time because his daddy wasn’t around anymore, and I felt so much guilt… and the alcohol numbed everything. Every time Jon would cry, you would cry… and then I would cry just before I’d remember the bottle of whiskey under the sink or the six pack of beer in the fridge. If you boys kept crying, it wasn’t loud enough to bother me anymore when I was drunk. I felt better.

  “In those times when your father was out of jail, he’d come around the apartment, and he wasn’t nice to me, Will… but I was weak–”

  “I know, Mom. I remember.”

  “I let him treat me like dirt. I had no respect for myself back then,” she continues. “He’d get violent, and on so many occasions, I would tell him to leave. I would yell at him and beg him to go away. You and Jon would be locked in your room, but Jon was old enough to hear the fear in my voice, and he would scream at the top of his lungs, too. ‘Go away! Go away!’ I would cry every time I heard him, knowing how scared he must have been. Locked in a room, knowing his mother was in trouble and having no way to help… and Jon always wanted to help.”

  I start to tug at my hair, wishing Mom would look at me.

  “I knew I’d scarred you for life from the first time I heard you speak.”

  “You didn’t, Mom. That’s what I’m here to tell you.”

  “You’ve never let anyone get close to you.”

  “I have, Mom. I’ve just been very picky about the people I’ve let in… and no, you were never one of those people. But I’ve always been close to Jon and Max… and there was Laila and Landry… sure, that didn’t turn out so well for me, and yeah, that probably didn’t help my cause at all, but that wasn’t your fault. Damon and I are as close as brothers, and I consider Peron a really good friend, too. And then Livvy. She’s like a sister to me, Mom.

  “I’m not broken. I thought I was broken for a long time, but I haven’t forgotten what it means to care about people, or to love someone. I just don’t take any relationships lightly… they have to be in it for the right reasons, and they have to put into it just as much as I do. Not many people seem to do that.

  “For so many years, Mom, you didn’t do that. And by the time you were ready to–when you told me you wanted to–I’d lost all faith in you.”

  “I know,” she whispers, finally angling herself toward me.

  “And I was a head-strong teenager. It was bad timing for you to make amends. You wanted to draw me closer when it was time for me to pull away naturally anyway. It made me want to run that much faster, and that much farther.”

  She nods and tries to smile through her tears. My eyes continue to water, but I try to keep it together, regardless of the difficult subject matter.

  “You had nothing to offer me then, Mom. Nothing to teach me. That’s what Jon was for… and so often, you deferred to him anyway. If I did ask you a question, you’d look to him first. I learned quickly to bypass you. If I needed money, I’d ask him, and he’d find a way to get it. When I needed help with homework, he was the only one who could help–”

  “You couldn’t expect me to know any of the things you and Jon knew about, Will.”

  “No, Mom. No. I’m getting way off track. I’m not here to point out your shortcomings. I feel like I’ve done enough of that my whole life. I think… I think you and I have more in common than I ever really wanted to admit. Probably than I ever really knew, and I want you to know that I’m beginning to understand how hard things must have been for you when…”

  “When…” She waits for a response.

  “When you were drinking, and when you were trying to stop, and probably every day since then,” I admit. “You know, I don’t drink. With the exception of a stupid night in Chicago and a few times when I snuck a beer from your stash when I still lived at home, I literally don’t drink. I made a conscious decision when I was sixteen that I was never going to be like you.”

  My mother starts crying again.

  “Please, don’t,” I plead with her, moving to sit next to her and taking her hand in mine. “I could sense back then my obsessive nature… how I allowed myself to be consumed with school and with music and with girls. I didn’t believe any of those things to be bad for me… but I could see how dabbling in something that was bad for me could quickly disintegrate into something that could destroy everything I’d worked so hard for. I didn’t attach a word to it. I never really saw myself as an addict, or someone who would be prone to addiction… until Max equated my situation to an addict’s one night a few months ago. It has eaten away at me ever since.”

  A large burst of laughter erupts from the living room. We both look toward Edie to see if the noise bothered her. Mom walks over to the crib and tucks the blanket around my niece to make sure she’s comfortable.

  “Is it warm enough in here?” she asks me.

  “It feels much warmer than I remember it.”

  “Since the landlord wouldn’t do it, Jon had a new central heating system installed for Christmas. It’s about time, right?”

  “No kidding… would have been nice to have eight years ago.”

  “I always did what I could.”

  “I know, Mom. Can you sit back down?” She nods and returns to the edge of the bed next to me. “I’m no different than you are, Mom.”

  “You are, Will. You’re so much better than I ever was.”

  “I’m an addict just like you are. I have the potential to do just as much damage to the important people in my life, and that scares the shit out of me. I, uh… this is weird to talk about with you, but I love sex. I love women. It was more than something I wanted, it was something I needed for so many years… it still is… but I’m either figuring out how to ignore the urge or realizing there are other things that are more important. I’m not sure which sometimes. But I’m so afraid I’m going to fuck this up with Shea. I don’t feel like it’ll happen anytime in the near future, but if we start a life together… I mean. Can I even do that? Can I make a commitment like that?”

  “Hey,” she says softly, interrupting me. “I understand your fear. I do. Tell me, Will, when did you make the decision to try to stop your, uh, behavior?”

  “When I left to go on tour.”

  “Well, that’s interesting timing.”

  “It made sense to me. I had formed habits… I was already making changes.”

  “I can see that. And how many times have you slipped up since then?”

  “There’ve been some close calls, but technically once–before Shea.”

  “And after?”

  “I haven’t since I’ve met her.”

  “And being with her–that doesn’t count?”

  “No,” I tell her, because in my mind, she’s the solution to my problem.

  “Why is she any different?”

  “The circumstances were different when we met,” I explain. “It was never just a hookup with her. That was never what I wanted with her. I never saw her as just… you know, a sex object, I guess. I respected her. Maybe we hadn’t known each other long, but I already knew I cared about her, and I knew she cared about me.”

  “Okay,” she says with a smile, seemingly satisfied with my response. “So, you’re telling me that in four months, you slipped up one time?” I frown as I nod, still ashamed of that night with Lola. I regret it ever happened at all. “I may have passed down to you some addictive tendencies, Will. I probably did, and you’re probably smart to recognize them, but do you know what you have that I wasn’t born with? What I still struggle with to this day?”

  “No.”

  “Structure and discipline. I mean, before rehab, there’s no way in hell I ever would have been able to go four months cold-turkey with just one slip-up, but even after… even now, Will, I can’t go four months on my own without turning to someone for support–whether it’s my sponsor or my pastor or just one of my friends.

  “I’m not telling y
ou not to worry about your situation. You should never let your guard down, but you have to understand that you were given weapons to fight this that I wasn’t given, and you’re obviously doing one hell of a job on your own. And I can see that look of regret in your eyes for that slip-up, Will, but you have to forgive yourself for that. You need to be proud of what you’ve accomplished. I’m proud of what you’ve accomplished.”

  “How do you know you won’t go back?” I ask her.

  “There’s never any certainty,” she tells me, “but every day, I remember the people I love, and I know who I don’t want to disappoint. I cannot let you and Max and Jon down anymore. Not one more time. Not one more day. And when I don’t remember that myself, for whatever reason, that’s what the people who hold me accountable tell me.”

  I nod my head and squeeze her hand.

  “Do you love her, Will?” She looks me in the eyes when she asks me.

  I hesitate to answer, but it’s not because I’m unsure of my response. I’ve just never answered anyone directly before. “Yes.”

  “Then you’ll do whatever you have to do to keep from disappointing her. Some days it’ll be really hard. Some days you’ll be tested to your core, but you can do anything for people you love.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek when I acknowledge what she’s said, hearing the irony.

  “Sometimes it just takes a while to remember what love feels like. You’re not the only one who’s struggled with that.”

  A searing pain stabs at my heart. I’m struck with overwhelming sadness and guilt–and I realize I’ve been such a self-centered asshole, never recognizing the tailspin my mother was driven into at her own broken heart when Jon’s dad left her. I’m more like her than I ever realized.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” I tell her in tears. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Honey, no,” she says, squatting down in front of me and grasping my hands. “I know.”

  “I hate myself for how I’ve been to you.” I can only hope she can understand my words because it’s hard to say them the way my stomach muscles are convulsing.

  “Stop that. Right now, just stop it. You’re gonna wake up the baby, Will… honey…” She reaches to wrap her arms around me. I kneel on the floor with her and cry on her shoulder for what may be the first time in my life. “Don’t you dare introduce hate into your life when you’ve just discovered love again, you silly boy,” she says to me. “I’ll never forgive myself.”