Don't Fail Me Now

by Una LaMarche

  “Hello?” She sounds annoyed.

  “I’m still here.”

  “So when are you coming back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When does Cass get out?”

  “Depends on when they release her,” I say. “They need your consent to give her psychological treatment. For, you know . . .” We mutually and silently acknowledge the ellipsis.

  “Our insurance cover that?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. They haven’t kicked us out yet.” I attempt a laugh.

  “That’s not funny. Those heartless sons of bitches will take me to the mat just to avoid paying for a prescription, let alone therapy.”

  “It’s okay, Mom,” I say.

  “Oh, what, you got the money?” Now she’s laughing, the quick rat-a-tat-tat giggle that makes her sound like Sweet Sixteen Maddie Means instead of inmate 2247 or whatever her number is this time.

  “No,” I say, “but maybe I will soon.”

  “Taco Bell start paying in gold bars?” she laughs, and I’m so pissed off by the mockery that I consider not even telling her. But she’s going to find out eventually, so it might as well be now.

  I take a deep breath. “The reason we’re out here,” I say, “is Buck. He’s sick, I guess—says he’s dying—and he’s leaving us some heirloom. That’s why we left. We’re going to see him, to collect it.”

  I brace myself for screams and tears, but instead Mom gets quiet. “Well,” she finally says. “Something was bound to get him sooner or later.”

  “It could be good for us, though,” I say. “If he saved something. You could finally get what he owes you.”

  “Oh, honey,” she says. “He can’t repay me what he owes me. There’s no way to get life back.”

  “But something, at least. We could pawn it, have some cash to get by for a while.”

  “He’s never going to deliver,” she says, her voice cooling. “Whatever he says he has for you, don’t believe it for a second. It’s probably an heirloom tomato. He’ll probably end up shaking you down for cash. He’s a liar, Michelle. Always has been, always will be.”

  Resentment flares in my belly. “This coming from the person who let him live a neighborhood away for four years and never even told us.”

  She clicks her tongue. “I was just doing what I thought was best for you girls.”

  “By not letting us see our father?”

  “Please,” she cries. “You think he tried to see you and I stopped him? Barred the door? I was trying not to let you see who your father really was. And is. A coward who runs away the second things get tough, who’s too selfish and prideful to look back just in case it makes him feel something for one second of his miserable life.”

  “Well,” I say, “he wants to see us now.”

  “Of course he does! He’s got nobody else. He knew you’d feel bad, that’s why he called you. He plays people, that’s what he does.”

  “Why can’t you accept that maybe he actually feels sorry?” I yell, my voice echoing off the increasingly claustrophobic-feeling walls. “You know, that’s a thing people do sometimes when they screw up their children’s lives, apologize?”

  She’s quiet for a minute. “That’s what you want, huh, an apology?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ve been sorry every day of my life since I had you. Not because I didn’t want you but because I wanted more for you. I wanted more than I knew you would get from us.” She sniffs loudly. “Believe me, I did my best, but I’ve been sorry every day. For you and your sister, and Denny. Because no matter how hard I try, I’m never going to be good enough.”

  Tears spring to my eyes. “But you were doing good. What happened?”

  “I wish I could tell you, but I can’t,” she sighs. “Sometimes one bad decision just starts a chain reaction.”

  I nod, letting the tears spill down my cheeks. The truth is I’ve never understood how my mother can live the way she does, scrambling and desperate, trying but failing to steady herself again and again. It’s maddening to watch someone you love mess up so much, and it’s hard to keep loving them. The resentment just grows and grows until it covers up the love like ivy on a wall. But now, after this week, I can see how things can get out of control so fast, even with good intentions. I believe for the first time that my mother really might be trying, in her own way.

  “We’re gonna get you out, you know,” I say. “As soon as we get the money from Buck, we’ll come back and get you out, maybe even get you into a good rehab.”

  “That’s sweet, baby,” she says. “But don’t worry. I called Violetta yesterday, and she has the money to spring me this time. She’s a dental assistant now, can you believe it? Clean for five years.” I wipe my eyes, trying to picture the rail-thin, gap-toothed woman I remember in any kind of medical environment.

  “Violetta is allowed to put sharp tools in people’s mouths?” I ask incredulously.

  “People change, Michelle,” she says.

  “Okay then,” I counter, “what about that rehab?”

  “We can talk about it.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “Baby—”

  “I’m not your baby anymore,” I say. “And your word’s no good this time.”

  “Okay then,” she says wearily. “You’re the boss.”

  I want to tell her that’s not the point, that I don’t want to be the boss anymore, not of her, not of anyone but myself. I just want my own life, where I can choose where I go and what I do and who I see. I want a life where I don’t spend all my time worrying when the sky is going to fall again. She can be in that life, and so can Cass and Denny—maybe even Leah and Tim—but they can’t be all of it anymore. She has to let me go.

  But instead of saying all that, I decide to let her go. I hang up. And then I sit in the stairwell and cry.

  • • •

  When I get back to the waiting room, Denny and Leah are still sleeping, but Tim is gone.

  “If you’re looking for your boyfriend, he’s looking for you, too,” the Mastino lookalike at the desk says with a knowing smile.

  “Oh, he’s not—” I start to say but then let it go. Explaining would only make things weird.

  “He got in the elevator a few minutes ago,” she says. “I’d check the lobby.”

  “Thanks.” I stand there, the phone still warm in my hand, sinuses screaming from all of the flooding they’ve suffered through today. I want to go back and hide in the bathroom till morning, not talk to anyone until I stop feeling so emotional. But maybe that’s my problem. Maybe I inherited a little more from Buck than just his eye color and love of action movies. If I run from everything I’m scared of, I’m no better than him. And if I keep pushing Tim away just because the feelings I get when I’m around him make me uncomfortable, I’ll never know what it’s like to really let someone in—a someone I’m not related to, anyway. Before I can change my mind, I spin around and head back to the stairs, taking them two at a time.

  I find him sitting on a bench outside the automatic front doors, under a streetlamp. I thought the Southwest was supposed to be all dry heat and cacti, but it’s freezing out, and he’s in a flimsy Hanes undershirt. As I get close I can see goose bumps running up and down his arms, which are so tense that muscles I never noticed were there are thrown into relief. Not that I care about that kind of thing.

  “Come inside,” I say from behind him. “You’ll get sick.”

  He doesn’t turn around, but his shoulders visibly relax. “I thought you left,” he says.

  “Where would I go?” Clutching my arms for warmth, I sit down next to him, and we share a few seconds of awkward silence. For the first time all week, he’s starting to show the wear and tear of life off the grid—his hair’s sticking up like permanent bedhead, and there
are dark circles under his eyes.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I just got worried. It’s a strange city, the middle of the night . . .”

  “Thanks,” I say. “I’ll be okay.”

  He gives me a look. “Really?”

  I let my chin drop to my chest, the weight of everything centering at the top of my spinal cord, curling me in like a snail. “No.”

  “Well, I have some good news,” he says. “My dad talked to the cops, and the search is officially off.”

  “So you called him.”

  “Yeah.” He looks at me with an expression of heartbreaking guilt. “I know you asked me not to, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Did you tell him where we are?” I ask.

  “No, not exactly,” Tim says. “But I did tell him we were with you and that Cass was in the hospital. I asked him to call off the AMBER alert so that we could focus on getting her better without looking over our shoulders for sirens.”

  “And?”

  “He said yes, on two conditions.”

  “Which are?”

  “That he can wire me some money for food and that he and Karen can come meet us in LA,” Tim says. “To take us home on a plane.”

  I let out a long, shaky breath. Mr. Harper doesn’t sound like such a bad guy after all. Just a worried-sick father. A foreign species I have never observed up close. “That sounds fair,” I say. “You guys have roughed it long enough.”

  “No, all of us,” he says. “That means you, too. And Cass. And Denny.”

  “But why would they—they don’t even know me. If they did, they would know I’m nobody’s charity case. They probably hate me anyway.”

  “They don’t hate you,” Tim says. “And it’s not charity; you’re Leah’s family. Plus, they know how much you mean to me.” He reddens. “I mean, I told them about you.”

  I pull my legs up to my chest and hug them, pressing my face into the soft denim at the knees, rubbed so thin from months of squatting for condiment packets below the counter at work that they feel ready to split at any second.

  “Tim—” I start.

  “No, I should say it,” he says softly. “The thing is, I care about you. A lot, actually. More than I probably should after just a few days. When this all started, I just wanted Leah to feel better. I had no idea how big it was.”

  “What?”

  “Everything,” he says. “The three of you coming together, going to see him. I can actually see Leah changing. And I’m changing. I mean, you’re changing me.” He blushes again. “Not that it’s about me, I know I wasn’t even invited.”

  “I need to stop saying that,” I say.

  “It’s true, though.” His eyes are full of determination. “Denny and I could stay here in Arizona, for all it matters. If I’m good for anything, it’s just to help you and Leah and Cass make it the rest of the way. And I know it wasn’t fair for me to try to start something between us when you have so much going on. I won’t do it again, and it’s okay if you never want to see me again after this, but I just need you to know that—”

  “It didn’t mean nothing,” I say quickly.

  “What?”

  “On the rock. At the canyon. It didn’t mean nothing.”

  “Oh.” He looks completely shocked. “That’s . . . not what I was expecting.”

  “Yeah, well, welcome to the club.”

  “Come here.” He pulls me in for a hug and holds me there until I can hear his heart beating through his T-shirt, a comforting bass line cutting through the stillness.

  I press my forehead against his chest. “I just don’t know how to do this,” I say. “I’ve never—no one’s ever . . .”

  “Kissed you?” He tilts my chin up and kisses the tip of my nose.

  “Once, but it lasted, like, four seconds.”

  “Well, believe me, that guy doesn’t know what he’s missing.” He holds my face in his hands as he presses his lips to mine, soft and slightly parted, like he’s drinking me in breath by breath, and a feverish buzz starts down in my toes, somersaulting up through my body so fast that I have to break away before I start laughing or weeping, I’m not sure which.

  “I’m sorry.” I look up to see Tim grinning. This level of vulnerability is new for me. I don’t know how people do it; it feels like being bare-ass naked in the freezing snow. It’s definitely going to take some getting used to.

  “No, I’m sorry,” he says. “I told you, I can’t help it.” I smile and rest my head on his shoulder, looking out at the Subway sandwich sign illuminating the parking lot of the shopping center across the street and wondering if it’s like this for everyone: miracle moments hiding in plain sight, like fireflies flashing in the dark.

  “I’ve never flown before,” I say.

  “Once you take off, it’s like nothing,” he says, squeezing my hand.

  “Just hurtling through space.”

  “But the faster you move, the less you feel it.”

  “We’d have to leave Goldie.”

  Tim pulls back slightly and gives me a small, pitying smile. “Do you think she’d even make it back?”

  “Maybe. She’s gotten us this far. I can’t just leave her.”

  “It’s up to you,” he says. “But I noticed this morning, she’s about to turn over.”

  “Turn over?”

  “Yeah, the odometer. It’s almost at a hundred thousand. Just a few dozen miles, and it’ll turn over to zeros.”

  “Oh, right. It’s actually the second time that’s happened.”

  “I figured, on a car that old. Do you remember it?”

  I shake my head against his ribcage. “It was before I was born.” I try to picture Goldie’s odometer clicking over to one again. Starting from scratch doesn’t sound bad, but there’s something a little bit sad about it, too. All those miles, gone, like they never happened in the first place. All that distance traveled and then erased from memory.

  “Let’s go in,” he says, rubbing my arms. “You feel like you’re made of ice.”

  “I don’t know,” I say as we walk back to the front doors and step on the mat together, sending the automatic panels groaning open. “I think I’m starting to thaw.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Monday Morning to Tuesday Afternoon

  Flagstaff, AZ Kingman, AZ

  Cass comes to at seven fifteen the next morning. Thanks to a heads up from Munch, who has apparently forgiven me my trespasses, I’ve been sitting by her bed since 7:07, waiting. Bracing myself, really. I know I can’t predict how she’ll react, but I want mine to be the first face she sees. That much I can control, at least.

  Her still-closed lids flutter for a while before they finally start to lift. I’m holding her hand again, and as those big, dark eyes come into view, I squeeze, just once. No code, no cop-out, just I’m here. She blinks a few times, and I realize I’m holding my breath, hoping she’ll say, “What happened?” or “Where am I?”—anything that would make it just an accident. But she doesn’t, because it wasn’t. She looks at me, and then beyond at Dr. Chowdhury and Munch, with a kind of grim acceptance. She glances down at my hand on hers but doesn’t move.

  “Hey,” I say, struggling not to let my smile turn into the ugly-cry grimace it wants to become. “I missed you.” Dr. Chowdury has warned me not to bring up the suicide attempt because they’re transferring her to pediatric psych at eleven, and he doesn’t want Cass to feel ambushed. But now that she’s awake, it’s actually the last thing I want to talk about. “Are you hungry?” I ask. I’m glad the feeding tube is gone; I hope she never knows it was there.

  Cass shakes her head and winces.

  “You sustained a minor concussion, Cassidy, so you’re likely to have some pain for a few days,” Dr. Chowdhury says, crouching down on the opposite side of the bed. “I’ll have the nurse bring you
some ibuprofen with your breakfast, how does that sound?”

  “I’m not hungry,” Cass whispers. Her voice is soft, hoarse, and a little slurred.

  “You still have to eat,” he says gently. “We’ve been keeping your blood sugar stable with a glucose, lipid, and amino acid solution, but now that you’re conscious I think it will be much more pleasant for you to take food orally.”

  Cass looks at me, her eyebrows slanted down slightly, the way they’ve done her entire life every time she needs me to reassure her that something is okay.

  I nod. “You should eat. The food here’s not bad. Denny likes it.”

  Her cracked lips part in a shadow of a smile that makes my heart leap. “He’ll eat anything,” she says.

  I stay with Cass through her meal of jiggly eggs, an English muffin with strawberry jelly, a bruised banana, and a grade-school-style carton of milk. She doesn’t say much, which tempts me to make a joke about how her brain seems undamaged, but I want to keep things light, so instead I just sit there and tell her stupid, mundane details about the past sixteen hours, from describing the nurses’ identifying moles and tattoos to the contents of the vending machines. Before she gets carted off for a follow-up MRI, Denny comes in nervously and hands her a get-well card that Leah helped him make, featuring rainbows and shooting stars and a pack of carnivorous dinosaurs.

  “I’m framing this one,” she says, giving him a weak but affectionate squeeze. I leave her room clinging to that sentence like a life raft. You frame something you’re going to keep. Framing means longevity. Framing means she wants to live. I know it’s a stretch, and that I’m pinning a hell of a lot of hope on something you can get for $2.50 from a discount craft store, but I don’t care. I’ll take what I can get.

  Tim’s dad comes through with a money transfer through Western Union around lunchtime, and we pick it up at a grocery store in the strip mall across the street. Tim won’t tell me how much it is—I think he feels guilty—but he says it’s enough so that we don’t have to siphon any more gas and can eat at restaurants and do our laundry. I feel pretty conflicted until he drives us to a cabin at a nearby campsite that he’s put two nights of rent on and that comes with a fridge, microwave, cable TV, and, most importantly, a shower, a bare-bones outdoor stall with a wooden latch door that looks like the bathroom at Versailles, under the circumstances. I dig out some of the stolen bottles of hotel shampoo from my bag, and while the kids attack some take-out burgers on their bunk beds, I stand under that shower for fifteen minutes, gazing up at the sky. I’ve always thought those instructions on shampoo—wash, rinse, repeat—were dumb, because seriously, who needs to repeat? Now I know. I repeat and repeat and repeat until the bottles are empty, and then I turn off the water and scrub myself with a ratty towel until I have what feels like an entirely new layer of skin. I fall into bed still wrapped in the towel and sleep like a brick until four thirty, when Tim wakes me up to let me know we have to get back to the hospital before visiting hours end.