This Broken Road

by A. M. Henry

  Dad has less success hiding his feelings. The red creeps up into his ears and his eyebrows turn down.

  “You’re going,” he says, “whether you like it or not.”

  I fix him with my best scowl, but say nothing in argument. A year ago, I would have argued, yelled, screamed, and eventually would have done whatever I wanted anyway.

  I can’t run that fast anymore.

  “Whatever,” I say. “Is that it? Can I go now?”

  Dad looks sad for a second before he sighs and says, “Fine.”

  5.

  Dr. Ellen Allen conducts her therapeutic sessions in the basement of her split-level, and her name gives me a headache. Dad, still working from home (unemployed), drops me at the end of her driveway and tears off down the street without making sure I get safely inside Dr. Allen’s house. I head down the driveway, but then stop after a few steps. At four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, the street is totally quiet. A few cars parked outside the ranches and split-levels, the occasional dog’s bark—other than that, no sign of life. I could just leave and no one would notice me. I know where I am, and I’d only have to walk like fifteen minutes to the Goshen town center. I look up and down the street, the desire to flee—even if only for a few hours—seriously conflicting with the knowledge that they’ll find me pretty quickly. Dr. Allen would no doubt call asking about my lateness within the next ten minutes, and anyway, what would I accomplish if I left?

  Angela Before the Accident would have left, without question. She would have called Jason from a payphone or a gas station, because her parents took her phone away, and Jason would have picked her up immediately. They would have driven around aimlessly, chain-smoking, listening to whatever music Jason liked that week, and snorting oxy or heroin off the dashboard. Jason would have dropped Angela Before the Accident home whenever she felt like going home, and the drugs would have numbed her to the parental onslaught of where the hell were you, what the hell were you doing, don’t you know what time it is, what’s wrong with you, you’re out of control; and that long ago Angela would have locked herself in her bedroom, would have locked them out in every sense of the word. Eventually, they stopped trying to get in.

  Angela After the Accident hesitates.

  Where would I go? What would I do? I have no one to call, no one to come and get me. Without Jason, I have pretty much nothing.

  Dr. Allen herself—a black, middle-aged, short, dumpy sort of woman with greying black hair and grayish brown eyes—makes the final decision for me when she appears from around the back of the house and comes up the driveway.

  “Angela?” she calls in a kind of girly voice that I wouldn’t have associated with a shrink.

  I turn to greet her and walk farther down the driveway. She comes at me with her hand outstretched.

  “So nice to meet you,” she says with a genuine smile, her eyes crinkling at the corners. She takes both my hands in hers rather than going for the conventional handshake. “I thought I’d come out to find you. Everyone gets confused on their first visit.” She gives a little squeak of a laugh and beckons me to follow her around the side of the house. “I guess no one really wants to go wandering around in someone’s backyard, right?”

  We enter the house through a sliding glass door in the back, and I follow Dr. Allen through a cozy waiting room and into her office. Despite Rebel-Angela’s screams of protest, I think I like Dr. Allen.

  “Have a seat,” she says, pointing at a purple fuede sofa while she closes the office door.

  I sit and sink into the couch—way comfier than the ultra-modern white couches Mom has at home.

  “So,” she says with a smile, sitting down behind a spotless desk. “I’m Dr. Allen, but you can call me Ellen if you like.”

  I can’t think of anything to say, so I settle with, “Okay.”

  Judging from her office décor, I’d guess she sees a lot of kids. She has toys and games piled up on shelves in the corner—dolls and clothes, Legos, Transformers, a box filled with decks of cards, toy cars and trucks, building blocks, and a huge collection of board games. The smaller shelves near the door contain more art supplies than we have at school—paint, charcoals, Sculpey clay, and a bunch of art sets like a stained glass painting kit and a paint-your-own tea set.

  “Would you like to play a game?” she asks, seeing me examine her office.

  “Uhh…,” I respond.

  “Sometimes it helps,” she explains. “It’s hard to get some of my patients talking the first session. Awkward.”

  “Okay.”

  “Pick one. You can set it up on the desk.”

  I mentally debate for about two seconds before deciding on Pretty Pretty Princess. I haven’t played it since I was like ten years old, when Rachel and I would make up new rules to torment Casey.

  “Good choice.” Dr. Allen laughs, helping me arrange the board and the little round box of jewelry on her desk. “You’d be surprised how many people your age—and older—pick this one, and how many little girls want to play Monopoly.”

  “Good to know I’m not a total weirdo,” I say, choosing the pink playing piece. “I used to play this with my sisters.”

  “You have two sisters, right? One older and one younger?”

  “Yeah. Rachel and Casey.” I spin first and score the pink bracelet.

  “I’m a middle child, too,” Dr. Allen tells me, taking her turn and thus earning a blue earring. “It’s tough. There were five of us. I think I was invisible until I earned the title of doctor.”

  That sounds like something that could happen to me, years down the line, if I had never gotten into the opiates and earned my parents’ attention. I wonder if she’s making this up. I get the crown on my next turn and say nothing.

  “Are your sisters over-achievers?” Dr. Allen asks. “Mine definitely were.”

  “I guess you could say that,” I reply. Over-achievers is an understatement. They’re perfect, and I defective.

  “Your father told me the older one… That’s Rachel, right? She went off to Princeton in September.”

  “Yeah. Huge scholarship. And she actually wanted to major in math.” I find Rachel’s interests offensive on a spiritual level.

  “You don’t like math?” asks Dr. Allen.

  “I suck at math. I just don’t get… numbers.”

  “More of an English person, huh?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  This isn’t how I imagined therapy. I wonder if my parents would keep paying if they knew I spent the afternoon playing Pretty Pretty Princess with a middle-aged woman. She takes her turn and steals the crown. All she needs now is a second earring and she wins.

  “When we were little, me and Rachel used to tell Casey that if she spun the crown when one of us was already wearing it, she had to actually fight us for it.” I don’t know why I tell Dr. Allen this. “Either that, or she had to let us pick something out of her room, to keep.”

  Dr. Allen laughs, genuinely amused. “I bet you girls got in a lot of trouble for that.”

  I almost cringe at the memory. Of course, I got into a lot of trouble for that. We both tormented Casey—who would never fight us for the crown—and took all her best toys. There was one day, when I was ten, Rachel eleven, and Casey seven, when Casey spun the crown and I happened to be wearing it.

  “You gonna fight me for it, Case?” I asked, knowing full well that she wouldn’t.

  Casey had always been the crybaby in the family when it came to physical pain, or any other pain in general. Her lower lip trembled and tears welled up in those giant blue eyes, and she said nothing.

  “Then I guess we’re going to your room,” I said, and with Rachel giggling at my side, we marched upstairs to Casey’s frilly, pink bedroom.

  As the youngest, most of her toys were hand me downs from Rachel and me. I didn’t want any of those, obviously; I wanted her new stuff. In particular, I wanted the new snow globe Grandma had sent for her last birthday, the one that showed Sleeping Beauty da
ncing with the prince, and had a blue sheen painted on Sleeping Beauty’s pink dress so it changed from pink to blue in the light, just like in the movie. I took it off her dresser and shook it, watching the snowflakes swirl around the dancing couple.

  “Oh, come on, Angie,” Casey whined, voice shaking. “I just got that, and I really like it.”

  I ignored her, leaving the room with her snow globe and handing her the crown on my way out.

  And then Casey lost it. Many, many torturous games of Pretty Pretty Princess had built up, I guess, and she threw the mother of all tantrums, and went crying to Mom. Through the tears and blubbering, Mom gathered that “Angie took my snow globe,” and then the whole Pretty Pretty Princess rule book came out. Somehow, though, Casey told Mom about it in such a way that it sounded like I made up all the rules, I took all the toys, and as a result, I got in trouble, had my room searched for all of Casey’s things, and was punished. No TV and no play dates for two weeks, plus I had to do all of Casey’s chores. Rachel got nothing, and never stood up for me.

  I don’t tell Dr. Allen that part of the story.

  “Yeah, we got caught,” I say instead.

  She chats with me about the weather turning colder and the holidays coming up, wins the game, and then announces that my time is up.

  “It was great to meet you, Angela.” She shakes my hand, like I’m all grown up. “I’ll see you next week.”

  She shows me out into the lobby where a prematurely balding man sits reading Us Weekly. He gives me a dirty look and jumps up out of his chair when he sees Dr. Allen. I let myself out through the sliding glass door and head back around to the front of the house and up the driveway. Dad’s Cadillac idles at the curb, and he doesn’t look at me when I get in, or speak during the ride home.

  6.

  I actually fall asleep at a reasonable hour on Wednesday night (around 11:45), and dream about the Accident.

  An almost full moon lit up the snowy landscape so that everything looked bathed in a silvery-blue glow. A winter fairyland. We sped down a deserted Route 17M in Jason’s black Oldsmobile Cutlass—more like a beat up old yacht than a car. With heroin clouding our brains, we floated through that winter wonderland, and only we existed.

  He was in his Pavarotti phase then, and he played a mixed CD of arias at medium volume. Jason never blasted his music. He never liked loud noises in general, especially things like alarms or sirens.

  He hadn’t done anything with his hair in days, so the dirty blonde mess stuck up in odd places and lay flattened in others, like a toddler who had just rolled out of bed. His hair was like that a lot, and I never cared.

  The ice storm started, as Dad had said it would.

  “Stay off the roads tonight, Angela,” he had said without emotion, when he dropped me at work. He knew I wasn’t going to come home after Jason picked me up.

  They didn’t tell me I wasn’t allowed out anymore. They knew I would go anyway.

  The road turned slippery, the full moon making the ice glitter.

  “Maybe we should go,” I said.

  Jason nodded, smiled, took my hand and kissed my palm. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  I remember how his eyes looked in the silvery blue light of the snowy night—so pale blue they looked like ice. I can’t remember where we planned to go.

  Bright lights then, and screeching tires. A car came towards us, head-on and swerving sideways, coming too fast and taking up most of the road. We had nowhere to go—huge trees on both sides of 17M, and that car rocketing towards us, and then…

  A blur of darkness, light, darkness, light, crashing and banging and smashing and then suddenly nothing—cold, deep, black silence. And a dull, sort of distant pain. I couldn’t move my legs, and I smelled blood.

  “Jason?” It came out a choked, desperate squeak.

  He coughed, and it sounded like it hurt him to breathe.

  “Jason?” Louder this time. “Are you okay?”

  I reached for him and found his hand and held onto him. I had no sense of up or down, left or right. My head spun and I couldn’t see anything inside the car; I only saw the broken, jagged outlines of the windows and the moonlit snow beyond, the ground looking at me from the wrong angle.

  “We’ll be okay,” I reassured Jason. “We’ll be okay.”

  I squeezed his hand. Something dripped down my face. My vision kept blurring and my ears were ringing, and the darkness closed in.

  “We’ll be okay, Jason…”

  *

  “Oh my God, Angela, please wake up!”

  Casey shakes me so hard I feel something crack in my neck. Her eyes—Mom’s eyes—look like they might pop out. The pale yellow light of a street lamp comes in through my window and I think I hear someone scream before the scream gets cut off.

  “Are you okay?” Casey, frantic, throws her arms around me. It’s an awkward hug because she’s standing next to my bed and I’m sort of half sitting up.

  My mind feels fuzzy and soft and slow, like the morning after a Xanax-binge.

  “You were screaming.” Casey releases me, but keeps her hands firmly on my arms.

  “Bad dream,” I tell her, and then that night comes rushing back. Jason and his eyes, and bright lights and darkness, and the cold and moonlight, and I told him he’d be okay.

  Before I can put up my usual fight, the tears come. I can’t stop them. Casey climbs onto my bed and wraps me in a tight hug, like the comfy ones Dad used to give us when we were little, and she rocks me back and forth.

  “Don’t cry, Angela,” she whispers, and I think she’s crying, too. She can’t help it—Casey has always over-empathized with crying people. She’ll burst into tears even if she sees a stranger on the other side of the street crying.

  I’ve held this back for so long. Too long. And now it feels like an alien claws its way through my rib cage, ripping my heart out and tearing it to pieces. I want to scream and tear my hair out and disembowel myself with a kitchen knife and jump off a building. I want him back. I want to have died in the crash with him.

  I wake up later cuddled up beside Casey, half-wrapped in her pink Snuggie. My head hurts and my joints ache. Especially my knee. My clock says 5:57, and a grey early morning light shines in through my window. I hear Casey’s alarm buzzing down the hall, so I punch her in the shoulder until she wakes up.

  “Stoppit,” she mumbles, burrowing further into the Snuggie.

  “It’s like six o’clock,” I tell her. My voice comes out hoarse and dry.

  She flies out of my bed and out into the bathroom, pink fleece trailing behind her. Part of me wants to crawl back into bed, but I’m already awake. Mentally exhausted, but still awake. I’ve never been one of those people who can easily go back to sleep once they’ve woken up, so instead I head downstairs and turn on the coffee maker for Mom, Dad, and Casey, and make tea for myself.

  I sit outside with my tea and the box of Cocoa Puffs so I can enjoy the early morning quiet and say goodbye to Casey when she leaves on her bus. It gets to the house at six forty-two on the dot, dropping her off at the Greenaway Academy by twenty past seven. Casey goes there on a soccer scholarship.

  “See you later, Case,” I say when she comes outside.

  She hadn’t seen me when she opened the door, so she leaps off the front step in fright when I speak.

  “Don’t do that!” she hisses, pulling herself together.

  I watch her drag her bookbag and soccer bag onto the bus, and then I go back inside to get dressed.

  7.

  On Friday of the first week back to school after the accident, I found Derek sitting at my table in the art room during sixth period lunch. I raised an eyebrow and frowned for a moment before I sat down next to him.

  “Hey, guy,” Derek said. “How are things?”

  We had greeted each other that way since like the sixth grade. I could never remember how it started.

  “Hey,” I replied with a shrug.

  The art
room was empty—we had almost ten minutes until the bell.

  “You look good,” Derek said.

  I felt tired. My knee and my hip ached. I had on black sweatpants, a plain grey t-shirt, and a black hoodie, with my hair scraped back into an unwashed mess of a ponytail. It was one of those days I would have murdered someone for just a tiny bump.

  “Don’t lie to me,” I said.

  “You look like shit,” Derek said.

  I remembered third grade, when Derek’s family moved to Harrowmill and he became one of only four black kids in Harrowmill Elementary, and the only black kid in our grade. For the first few weeks, the other kids had treated him as a novelty, but none of the boys would actually befriend him. The girls wanted nothing to do with boys, so they wouldn’t be his friend either.

  I had already been established as the Weird Kid in school, so at that point I had no real friends. One day at lunch, Derek had approached the table where I ate lunch alone.

  “Can I sit with you?” he had asked.

  “Okay,” I had replied.

  The other kids in our grade—assholes, all of them—didn’t matter after that. They could make fun of us all they wanted, but Derek and I had so much fun together we didn’t even notice. We didn’t really acknowledge the other kids in our class until like the second half of middle school when he started playing sports and I somehow ended up friends with Lauren Hart.

  “But,” Derek said, taking a can of Diet Pepsi out of his backpack, “you look clammy and kind of feverish, and you never got like that when you were using, unless you were running out of stuff. So that means you’re staying clean. Which means when I say you look like shit, take that as a compliment.”

  He was the only person I knew who had no qualms talking about my addiction and subsequent recovery.

  “I’m seven months and eight days clean,” I said.

  Derek was also the only one who believed me.

  “That’s huge,” he said. “Even if it doesn’t feel like it.”