This Broken Road

by A. M. Henry

  On the far side of the finished part of the basement, cardboard boxes stand in untidy rows against the wall, full of all the stuff we can’t bear to throw out, but which Mom banished down here on the grounds that she didn’t want the clutter upstairs. Ten minutes into helping Dad sort some of this stuff into three piles—garbage, donations, and what we’ll keep—I wish I hadn’t offered to help.

  I open a box labeled “ANG” in black permanent marker. A stack of CD’s and folded up posters stares up at me—stuff I thought I threw away, but I guess someone dug it out of the garbage. The handwriting on the box suggests Dad.

  I take the CD’s out one by one, my hands feeling shaky. The Cranberries, Tool, Live, the Deftones, Tarja Turunen, Slayer, the Pogues—some of them CD’s Jason gave me. Tool’s Undertow is even signed.

  Deep breaths. Put them back in the box. Deep breaths. Close the box. Bury it. Throw it all away.

  11.

  “I know this must sound like cliché psycho-babble, but I get the feeling there is some underlying issue with your mother that goes back long before all of this.”

  I didn’t expect that. Didn’t have time to prepare. Dr. Allen sees me flinch.

  I will concede that she may actually know what she’s doing.

  Dr. Allen gives me a hint of a concerned frown. “We don’t need to talk about something that makes you uncomfortable.”

  I don’t know what to say, so I just nod and choose another piece of Sculpey clay from the coffee table.

  “You’re good at that,” she comments, picking up the blue rose I made.

  “I think that one was a fluke.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  I shrug. “I like art and all, but I was never really good at it. And I’m not… passionate enough to try and learn.”

  “What are you passionate about?” Dr. Allen asks. “Do you have any hobbies? Anything you’ve thought about pursuing after high school?”

  “I have no idea.” Do I tell her the whole truth? Do I tell her that I used to love singing in Jason’s band? That I loved playing Rick’s upright bass, and wanted to learn the guitar and the banjo and the mandolin and the violin and the cello? Do I tell her I used to like decorating and making my own clothes, and that I had thought of going to school for fashion design? Or do I tell her that I erased all of that? Erased anything that could get taken away from me because I didn’t want to lose it.

  “I don’t have any hobbies.”

  She pauses a moment to think. “What did you and Jason do for fun?”

  We’re headed towards the danger zone now. Jason reaches up out of the depths of my memory and I try to push him back down. Dr. Allen frowns at me, that same sad and concerned frown as when she tried to bring up Mommy Issues.

  I remember my daily routine around the time of the accident. It was bad then; we were low on drugs more often than not. Most nights I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned, my joints feeling like they were on fire. Some nights the nausea got so bad I would drag my blanket into the bathroom and spend the rest of the night on the floor by the toilet.

  On weekends I had to get to work at the mall at 8:00 AM. I remember this one particular weekend, when we were down to barely crumbs of heroin. Our guy got arrested the week earlier. Our new backup guy had vanished. Our emergency super sketchy dealer said he couldn’t meet us until Saturday afternoon.

  I had one bag with barely a pinch left in it.

  Teeny bump at 7:00 AM. Got up and dressed. Dad dropped me at the mall in Middletown and I snorted another bump in the Macy’s bathroom.

  Five hours until we got our refills.

  Jason picked me up in his Oldsmobile and we made the drive to Newburgh in silence. I picked the skin around my fingernails until my thumb started to bleed. Jason tapped the steering wheel and ruffled his hair every few seconds. An hour later, we sat in Jason’s car in the Goshen Diner parking lot and dumped tiny white mountains on the dashboard and snorted them with a piece of a drinking straw.

  Everything was perfect again.

  We sat in the car, Tool playing on low volume. Content to remain silent and just soak up the perfectness of everything. Snow started to fall and once it started sticking to the ground, the world outside looked like magical fairyland. We watched it, mesmerized, for what could have been hours. Or maybe just minutes.

  “Maybe we should go,” I said once the snow started really sticking to the road.

  Jason nodded. Smiled at me. Took my hand and kissed my palm. “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you, too.”

  My eyes burn at the memory. I close them for a moment and Dr. Allen doesn’t say anything until I take a breath and open them again.

  “Did you go to his funeral?” she asks. “Were you well enough?”

  I shake my head. “No. They wouldn’t have let me anyway.”

  “Have you visited the place where he’s buried?”

  “No.”

  She uncrosses her legs and crosses them again, folds her hands in her lap. “You haven’t let yourself grieve for him. You suffered a terrible loss, Angela. I think you punish yourself, deny yourself things that might make you happy. Things you could love. But we need love in our lives. And we need to mourn the loss of loved ones, so we can heal and move on.”

  This is too hard. I don’t want to mourn. I don’t want to grieve. I don’t want to feel how I did that day in the hospital when Mom came in and told me, “He’s dead.”

  Easier to bury it.

  12.

  During gym, I browse through the books in the library’s history section, trying to think of ways to complete this assignment with minimal interaction with Ryan. Writing the paper is easy enough—two pages is like nothing. But an “art project?” What does that even mean? Mr. Harmon won’t accept anything less than a best effort. If I fail this class, that might upset my plans for taking nothing but electives next year.

  Ryan corners me right before history.

  “I don’t think we’re gonna be able to do half of this each and still get a good grade,” he says. “And I really need an A in this class. So we’re just going to have to suck it up and deal.”

  Heroin would be totally awesome right now.

  *

  More boxes in the basement. More relics of a past life, each one with its own sharp memory.

  Empty bottle of lighter fluid, melted and warped and blackened in places—Halloween the year we started a fire in the Shop Rite parking lot in Chester.

  Empty bottle of Tylenol, the top painted with blue glittery nail polish—where I used to hide the pills.

  Business card from the little book shop in Warwick, a phone number scribbled on the back—our dealer in Newburgh.

  Plastic bag of neon bouncy balls, big ones the size of jawbreakers—we stole them from Walmart and pelted them off the cars in the mall parking lot, to set off all the alarms.

  Small pile of guitar picks in different colors—reminders that I once had dreams about my future.

  The spare key to Jason’s house—“Mom’s never home, and if she is, she’s passed out until like four in the afternoon. Just let yourself in whenever you need to get away.”

  *

  It hadn’t struck me as odd before that I never visited the grave. Not like I had the option in the beginning. But still, I never had the urge to go. That thought never crossed my mind.

  I feel like a horrible person.

  Dad sits at his desk in his “office,” typing away on Mom’s old laptop. I always wonder if he actually spends the day looking for work, or if he just screws around on the internet.

  “Hey, Dad?”

  He turns around in his chair and takes off his reading glasses. I never realized how old he looks.

  “What is it, Angela?” He looks nervous.

  “Umm… I was just wondering… Like if you have time… Could you maybe take me to Jason’s grave?”

  A deafening silence hangs between us. I watch the emotions play out on his lined face: worry, sadness,
and then something like defeat.

  “Of course, sweetheart. You want to go now?”

  He hasn’t called me “sweetheart” since I was five.

  “Well… Not if you’re busy…”

  “Not at all.” He closes the laptop and stands. “Just give me ten minutes.”

  My heart hammers a hole in my chest as we pull into the gravel drive of St. Stephen’s Cemetery. I don’t know why I feel so on edge. It’s just a grave—just words on stone, right?

  We park and Dad leads the way through the rows of headstones. Some look old and faded. Some have fresh flowers, others have scattered bouquets of withered ones. Dad stops at a row near the big tree in the middle of the cemetery and I slow down, heart pounding harder than ever.

  A dark grey headstone straight ahead reads: “Jason Martin, Beloved Son and Friend.”

  No flowers. Just yellowing grass gone brittle in the frost and the skeletal shadow of the tree. And something in me breaks.

  I remember his ice-blue eyes. I remember his laugh, and the way it made my stomach do backflips. I remember feeling safe with him. I remember spending hours at a time just happy to be sitting next to him on his sofa without either of us saying a word.

  But he’s gone. He’s really gone and he’s never coming back.

  I try to hold it together. Hold my breath and grit my teeth to stop the tears, but I can’t do it. I think of the crash, looking at him and telling him it would be okay, and then I remember waking up in the hospital and Mom—no shred of sympathy—saying, “He’s dead.”

  I can’t handle this.

  I collapse into a puddle of grief in front of Jason’s grave. Dad leaves me alone, stands back and lets me cry myself dry. I stay there even after the tears stop, lying on the grass and again wishing that I had died in the crash.

  I don’t know how long I stayed there before I got up and walked back to the car. Dad followed me and our silence lasted all the way home.

  13.

  “Angela!”

  After school, Ryan Reagan in his older brother’s vomit-green Honda, driving behind me while I walk across the senior lot.

  “ANGELA!”

  I pretend not to hear him. Tires screech, the engine whines and growls, and the car appears on my right side.

  “I’ll drive you home.” A command, not an offer.

  “I can walk.”

  He steps on the gas, accelerates and swerves wildly to the left, blocking my path.

  “I want to talk to you,” he says. “About Derek.”

  For the first time since forever, I sense no hostility in him.

  Ryan doesn’t break the silence until we pull out of the parking lot and reach the first traffic light. “It wasn’t because he’s gay.”

  I don’t know what to say. I don’t believe him.

  “We had that game against Smithfield a few weeks ago,” Ryan says. “It was our last chance to make it into the regionals. Losing meant we were done for the year.”

  “You lost.”

  The hostility returns with a scathing glare. “Yeah, we lost. Derek threw the game.”

  Several seconds pass before I manage a “…What?”

  “He made us lose. Because he was screwing around with one of the guys on the other team. They knew everything, all the plays we practiced.” Ryan turns onto Willow Road a bit more violently than necessary. “Most of us on the team, we’re not like Derek. We’re not going to college without football scholarships. We’re not even getting into college without football.”

  He sounds too enraged, too despairing for this to be a lie. But it can’t be true.

  “Derek wouldn’t do that,” I squeak, “Even if he did, you guys broke his jaw.”

  Ryan just scowls at me. “And I’m sorry for that, okay? We got carried away, yeah. But it felt like he wrecked our futures. And then he walks away to the fucking Academy.” He pauses, takes deep breaths. “We stuck to the gay story so no one would find out what he did, so he wouldn’t lose this scholarship” He turns angry eyes on me when we stop at a red light. “No one knows about this. Keep it that way, okay?”

  I laugh without meaning to. “Who am I going to tell? My hordes of cool friends?”

  Ryan gives me a mocking smile. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.

  *

  I try not to knock on Derek’s door with as much anger as I feel. I hear someone run up the basement stairs and Derek throws open the door. The bruises on his face have completely faded.

  “Did you really lose the Smithfield game on purpose?”

  The wide-eyed look on his face could serve as a confession by itself.

  “Who told you that?” Now he looks angry.

  “Is it true?” I relax a little, thinking about why this whole thing makes me so angry. Why the hell do I care if he threw the game? If he was messing around with a guy on the other team, maybe it was an act of love. We all do stupid things when we’re in love.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, trying to sound sorry. I take a breath. “Can I come in?”

  “I was stupid,” Derek says. We sit on the sofa in the basement, some soap opera muted on the television. “I wasn’t thinking, you know? He fed me this sob story that some coach from Notre Dame was going to be at the game, some friend of his parents.” Derek pauses, frowns. “He stopped talking to me the day after the game.” He looks so sad. It makes him look like a little boy. “I’m such an idiot.”

  “Maybe. But we can all be idiots where boys are concerned.”

  He scowls.

  “What it comes down to is that Fate brought all of this about so that I could punch Ryan in the face,” I say. “And you shouldn’t try to fight Fate.”

  Derek tries not to laugh. “Well when you put it that way…” He stands up from the couch and switches the TV off. “Want to go to Starbucks?”

  I make a face. “No. If we’re getting coffee, we should go to Quick Chek.”

  “Fine, but you’re buying.”

  “I have no money.”

  “That’s okay. You can owe me.”

  I have to remind myself that Dad said I could go out to hang out with Derek. I still feel like an escaped convict.

  *

  The idea of spending time with Ryan Reagan for the stupid history project feels slightly less nauseating now.

  I still can’t stand him. But it’s not quite hatred anymore. Nevertheless, we last only five minutes during lunch in the library before the mutual dislike reaches a critical level.

  “Of all the topics, you had to pick the Great Depression.”

  “You said pick one. I picked the one that matched my mood.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t pick the drug culture of the 1960’s.”

  The thread by which my patience hangs snaps. I pick a couple of the books off the table and throw them in my bag. “Why don’t we browse through these on our own and make up a list of ideas.” I start heading for the library door. “We can reconvene in a week.”

  14.

  Mom working from home two days this week. Kill me.

  I hide in the basement going through the boxes, debating whether or not to bring some of this stuff back up to my room. I miss the music, but it reminds me too much of him. I settle with a few CD’s from the smallest box, music from before Jason—Bob Marley and the Wailers, Led Zeppelin, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and the Lord of the Rings soundtrack.

  Yeah, I know; I’m a nerd.

  Bob Marley brings back its own painful memories, things that surprise me when I think about them. Surprise me because I don’t get how I could not think about them.

  When Casey turned three, Mom decided she wanted to be a stay at home mother. Dad still had his own accounting firm then, so they could afford for her to stay home. Rachel was in second grade, and I was in first grade, and Mom realized she only had until the next school year before Casey would start pre-school. I guess she thought it was her last chance to play Mommy, and spend the whole day at home caring for her children instead of leaving them with I
rae.

  I remember all of this vividly; it made frequent appearances in my nightmares before the accident.

  The day Irae left for the last time, it felt like my world had ended.

  “We talked about it,” Dad told me years later. “About whether it would be better to tell you guys, or just have her not come back and not mention it until one of you asked.”

  I loved Irae. Loved her more than Mom. Irae acted like a mother—she told us stories and tucked us in at night, she sang us songs, kissed our booboos away, wrapped us in hugs and threw us in the air for no reason other than we made her smile.

  I can still speak Jamaican patois. Dad says I spoke that before I mastered English.

  That night, Irae made us non-spicy jerk chicken and mashed potatoes—mine and Rachel’s favorite meal. I helped her clean up while Rachel played with Casey in the family room. Then Mom and Dad came home and had us all gather back in the kitchen.

  “We have something to talk about, girls,” Dad said.

  “Today is Irae’s last day,” Mom said. “Starting Monday, I’ll be staying home with you.”

  Casey didn’t really understand, and continued playing with her toys. Rachel shrugged it off, kissed Irae goodbye, and took Casey back to the family room. I just stood there, dumbfounded.

  “Why aren’t you coming back?” I asked her.

  I remember my heart racing. I remember every detail of Irae’s face: the dark gold eyes, the sad smile, perfectly sculpted eyebrows, and her hair wrapped up in the bright red scarf she always wore. I had always thought she was the prettiest person who ever lived.

  I remember trying really hard not to cry.

  “I’ll be staying home,” Mom said. “You’ll have me to take care of you.” In my memory her smile looks cruel.

  “But… But I want Irae.” My voice cracked. Tears made my eyes burn.

  “Well Irae is going to work for a new family,” Mom said.

  I lost my fight against the tears and ran, sobbing, into Irae’s arms. I begged and pleaded first for her not to leave, and then begged for her to take me with her. That’s when Mom got mad.