This Broken Road

by A. M. Henry

  Dad pried me away from Irae while Mom led her out, slamming the door behind her. I screamed and cried and tried to run after my nanny the second Dad let go of me. Mom dragged me to my bedroom and more or less threw me onto my bed.

  “You stay here until you stop acting like a baby!”

  I remember not understanding why she got so mad.

  By Wednesday of our third week with Stay-At-Home-Mom, Rachel and I had both learned to fear our mother. She would shout and scream at us for the slightest disobedience. She dealt out inconsistent punishments with the wooden spoon and time outs locked in the boiler room or the wine cellar, leaving us wary of even speaking too loudly in front of her.

  “I told you to clean this up!” Mom stood in the doorway of mine and Rachel’s room, still in her pajamas and pink bathrobe, looking red-faced and furious.

  “But… we’re still playing,” I told her. Rachel and I sat on the floor between our beds, My Little Ponies spread out in front of us.

  I don’t remember the exact sequence of events after that. I remember Mom yelling some more, and then she came into the room with a black garbage bag.

  “If you won’t do as you’re told, then I’ll clean your room!” she shrieked at us.

  And then Rachel and I watched in horror as Mom flew around the room and hurled our toys into the garbage bag. At first, we felt too stunned to protest. She wasn’t serious, right?

  I started to panic when she went for the stuffed animals on my bed—the ugly little penguin my uncle Christopher had given me when I was born, and the battered one-legged pink bunny from Grandma. Those were my most treasured possessions, the toys that came on every single vacation, the toys that had caused the entire housekeeping staff of the Marriott in Newport, Rhode Island to stop everything and search the hotel while I sat in our room in hysterics thinking I’d lost Pengie forever.

  Mom picked Pengie up and put him in the garbage bag. I ran at her with a blood curdling “NOOOOOOOOOO!!!” I remember that I went completely hysterical, like I did when Irae left. Maybe I reminded Mom of that night, and that’s why she wouldn’t back down. She stuffed Bunny into the garbage bag, too.

  I cried. I begged and pleaded. I followed Mom downstairs, and then followed her outside, sobbing the whole way. Rachel stayed silent. Casey managed to nap through all of this.

  Outside, Mom went over to the barbecue and opened the lid.

  “Mom, please! Please give them back!” I begged over and over again between sobs while Mom maintained a stony silence. “I’m sorry, Mom! I’m sorry, really sorry! I’ll be good, I swear. Please give them back. PLEASE!”

  Mom took the metal rack out of the barbecue and tossed it onto the patio with a CLANG. She turned the gas on, turned the barbecue on, flames leaping up with a soft whoosh. Then Mom turned to me.

  “Next time, you do as you’re told.”

  She reached into the garbage bag and threw Pengie and Bunny into the flames.

  I screamed and tried to get them out of the fire. I burned my hand pretty badly, but I don’t really remember that—I only have the scars on my left palm for reference. I remember Mom holding me back and making me watch them burn.

  I couldn’t stop crying. Back in the house, in the kitchen ten minutes later, I still sobbed, taking choking, heaving breaths between sobs because I could no longer breathe through my nose.

  “For God’s sake, Angela, calm down!” my mother screamed at me.

  The choking breaths made me gag. I threw up all over the kitchen floor. Mom screamed like a wild animal. She hurled the pot of alphabet soup at the wall. Then she came at me.

  “You clean that up!” she screamed. She grabbed me by my hair and hurled me face-first onto the floor, right into my own vomit. She knelt down and grabbed me by the neck, wiping the floor with my face. Her fingers pressed down on my throat so hard, I couldn’t breathe. I reached for her arms, clawing at her. I remember pressure building in my head—in my ears and behind my eyes. I remember the look on my mother’s face before everything went black.

  *

  “I’ve never told anyone about that.”

  Dr. Allen stares at me for a long time, trying to hide her emotions. Shock and disgust and horror hover in her eyes and in the set of her mouth.

  She sits up straighter and smoothes her skirt. “Wh… What happened next?” she asks.

  “I think Rachel must have called Dad right after Mom threw me on the floor. She dumped water on my face and I woke up. I remember a couple days later she said she’d seen someone do that on TV. When I woke up, I saw Rachel’s and Dad’s faces hovering over me. Dad was crying. I tried breathing, but I it was hard. Every breath burned.”

  “Did they take you to a hospital?” Dr. Allen asks.

  “No.”

  “What happened after that?”

  I shrug. “Mom went away for like a week. I stayed home from school for like two weeks. We got a new nanny. Not Irae.”

  “Was she nice? The new nanny?”

  “I guess.” I don’t remember the nannies much. We had so many of them—young and old, black, white, some ladies who barely spoke English, college students, high school students, forgetful old ladies. We got a new one every couple months until Rachel turned twelve and Mom and Dad decided we could stay home by ourselves. I don’t tell Dr. Allen any of that. Just thinking about it makes me feel tired.

  “What was your relationship like with your mother after this?” Dr. Allen asks. “And with your father?”

  “I was afraid of Mom. I stayed away from her.”

  “All the time?”

  “If I heard her coming, I’d usually hide.”

  “What about family gatherings? Holidays and vacations?”

  I hate going through my memories in the shadow of That Thing We Never Talk About. The family buried it, so I’m just the quiet, awkward kid when we happen to look back on birthdays and vacations, photos of Mom, Dad, Rachel, and Casey together and smiling while I sit off to the side, as far away from Mom as I can get.

  I remember feeling like I’d wet my pants every time she raised her voice, and struggling not to cry when I had to be near her. At gatherings where we had to pretend to act normal in front of other people, I’d sit in my chair, hunched forward trying to shrink into myself, eyes on the floor, never seeing her. Never speaking near her.

  I don’t realize I started crying until Dr. Allen plops down on the couch next to me and pulls me into a hug.

  15.

  I don’t know why I told him. I guess after getting all over-emotional with Dr. Allen, I just needed to tell someone. Ryan told me about this one time his dad and his brother got into a huge fight and his dad punched Sean in the stomach, and then the words, “My mother almost killed me once,” just sort of fall out of my mouth, followed by the rest of the story.

  “Wow,” Ryan says after an awkward silence. “That’s fucked up.”

  Now my words have run out. I light a cigarette.

  “Give me one,” he says.

  I light a cigarette for him and hand it over. “I didn’t know you smoke.”

  “I don’t.” He puffs on the cigarette, inhales, and starts coughing.

  Now we have maybe ten seconds before one of the cafeteria aides comes outside and starts yelling.

  “You okay?” I try not to laugh and fail.

  “Shut up,” he chokes out. When he starts breathing normally again, he says, “I’m sorry. Sorry that happened to you. No kid should have to go through that.”

  I don’t know what to say to that. We sit in silence for a moment and I glance across the parking lot, to the site of our fight. “I’m sorry I punched you and called you a coward.”

  “I’m sorry I punched you back and called you a whore,” Ryan says.

  He puffs on the cigarette again, but doesn’t inhale this time. “My mom always told me you shouldn’t hit back.”

  “I think you should always hit back.”

  He nods. “Me, too.”

  *

  Derek se
nds a note home with Casey.

  “This was in my locker,” Casey says when she gets home, dropping a folded up piece of copy paper in my lap on her way to the other couch.

  I unfold it and read Derek’s spiky but tidy handwriting: Your cell still goes str8 to voicemail. They ever giving that back to you? Call me.

  He wrote his cell phone number at the bottom, knowing that without my stupid phone I don’t know any numbers except for the house phone in our old house.

  “What’s it say?” Casey asks.

  I scrutinize her expression for dishonesty, but you couldn’t fake her look of mild curiosity.

  “You didn’t read it?” I ask.

  “Nope,” she replies, snatching the remote off the coffee table and pulling up the list of TV shows we have recorded. “It was for you. Why would I read it?”

  For all her occasional brattiness, I think Casey is the most honest person I know.

  Derek was the only one who treated me like a normal person when school started, but I still never got to hang out with him outside of school. With football season going on, I know he had no free time. But I still feel guilty—Derek made an effort when no one else would, yet I pushed him away and avoided him almost as much as I avoided everyone else.

  I couldn’t bear it if Derek hated me for the drugs and for ditching him and everyone else for Jason. I don’t care if anyone else at school hates me, but Derek is different.

  Dad gets home half an hour later, and I ask if I can use the phone.

  “To call Derek,” I tell him.

  After a slight hesitation, Dad says, “Sure.”

  I sit up on the kitchen counter—Mom hates that—and call Derek from the house phone.

  “Hey, guy,” he answers on the second ring.

  “How are things?” I ask.

  “You allowed to go out for coffee?” Derek asks.

  I call out towards the front hallway, where I know Dad hides in the shadow of the doorway. “Hey Dad, can I go out for a coffee?”

  Silence while Dad pretends to come from farther away than the doorway. He comes into the kitchen with his arms crossed over his chest. “With who?”

  I fight back the grammar correction and the sarcasm, but only half succeed. “Remember like twenty seconds ago when I said I wanted to call Derek?”

  I hear Derek laughing on the other end of the phone. Dad frowns and clenches his jaw, but then relaxes.

  “Yeah, okay,” he says. “As long as you’re home by…” he checks his watch, “five-thirty.”

  Derek arrives ten minutes later and we drive to the Quick Chek for extra large harvest spice coffees drenched in cream and Splenda, and then we settle into a table at the back corner of the little seating area.

  I haven’t hung out with Derek like this since long before the accident. I haven’t really hung out with anyone except Jason since we started dating. Derek and I had drifted a little by that point, but we were still buddies. Not BFFs like in grade school, but those memories tied us together, even if we didn’t hang out for weeks or months at a time.

  Derek never felt like a stranger. Never before now.

  My fault.

  I pushed everything besides Jason and opiates out of my life, not caring what destruction I left in my wake. I try not to think about everyone I’ve lost—my father, Rachel and Casey, Derek.

  Jason.

  I shut my eyes and shake my head for a second, throwing those thoughts back into the shadows.

  “You okay?” Derek asks, sipping his coffee.

  “Yeah, fine. Just got a chill for a second.”

  “Someone walked over your grave.”

  “My Grandma says that,” I say.

  “Mine too. And I always wondered, what if I get cremated? How could anyone walk over my grave?”

  “Maybe they’re walking over your ashes.”

  “What if I want them scattered at sea?” Derek counters.

  “Probably some got left on the beach, and tourists are stepping all over them.”

  “Well what if I have someone take a boat out into the middle of the ocean and dump the urn there?”

  We could go on like this for hours, “what-iffing” our way through dozens of random (and usually ridiculous) situations and remembering none of it afterwards. For a split second, I feel like we’re back to the beginning of high school.

  “If you do that,” I say, “I will make it my personal mission to swim all over your ashes. And since you’ve already felt someone walking over your grave, that means it definitely happened in the future. You can’t fight something that already happened.”

  “This is getting too metaphysical,” Derek says. “I give up.”

  16.

  “When was the first time you tried drugs?”

  Dr. Allen wears a bright orange blouse that matches the frames of her reading glasses. She sits across from me in the flower-patterned armchair. I add another green clay doughboy to the small army forming on the coffee table. Dr. Allen works purple clay into some kind of long-necked animal.

  “Does alcohol count?” I ask.

  I hate the way people who have never been addicts say “drugs.” They have no idea what that word means.

  “Sure,” says Dr. Allen.

  “I first drank at my cousin’s wedding when I was twelve. Me and one of my other cousins drank half a bottle of champagne.”

  Dr. Allen almost smiles.

  “What about other drugs?” she asks. “Did you ever smoke pot?”

  “Are you going to tell me it’s a gateway drug?”

  “Was it a gateway drug for you?”

  I squash my current doughboy into a pancake. “I smoked pot once in eighth grade. I hated it. It made me afraid of everything. The whole gateway drug thing is bullshit. All of the potheads I knew never touched anything else. They didn’t even drink. You don’t automatically start doing opiates just because you smoke pot. The real gateway drug is the heroin they disguise as little blue pills your doctor prescribes you for your back pain.”

  “Is that how it started?” asks Dr. Allen.

  I remember exactly how it started. “I broke my ankle freshman year,” I tell Dr. Allen. “At the end of soccer season. I got a cast and a 4-month prescription of painkillers.”

  I took the Percocet because the bottle told me to “take one pill three times daily as needed.” It did pretty much nothing to dull the pain, but it made me feel… perfect. Everything was amazing, nothing was boring. I took the pills right before the first day of soccer camp because my ankle still ached. During practice, I was the star player. I never got tired or winded and my injured ankle never slowed me down.

  “Total honesty?” I say. “I used the ‘my ankle hurts’ excuse to feel okay about taking those pills. I actually convinced myself that taking the Percs was totally normal and this was just temporary until my ankle totally healed.”

  “And your parents were okay with you taking the pills?” asks Dr. Allen.

  I shrug. “A doctor gave them to me. Plus they didn’t realize I was taking them all the time.”

  I started hoarding the pills after Dad picked up my last refill. Then I rationed them. I had so many left over from not taking as many in the beginning that it felt like they would never run out.

  Then one weekend Jason and I went to see his friend Rick after Rick’s motorcycle accident.

  “You guys have to try these.” Rick dumped a small pile of pills into Jason’s hand. “Freakin’ amazing.”

  I was used to Percocet and Vicodin by then. OxyContin, though—that was a whole new realm of euphoria.

  “Jason’s friend from work,” I say. “He gave us a ton of oxy. His doctor had prescribed him pretty much a lifetime supply.”

  “Crush them and snort them,” Rick had told us. “If you take the whole pill, you’ll probably get sick.”

  I never thought I’d feel so nonchalant about constant vomiting. It just became a part of my routine: wake up at six on Saturday morning, do a few lines of blue, go running fo
r two hours, come home, puke, shower, get dressed.

  “I never told Jason about taking the painkillers before that.” I shift in my chair, cross my arms over my chest. “Rick just happened to give us those oxys like a week before I would have run out of Percs.”

  My eyes burn a little and I try to fight the tears.

  “Why tears?” Dr. Allen reaches across her desk to offer me the box of tissues.

  “If I hadn’t taken Rick’s oxys, maybe Jason would never have become a drug addict. And if he hadn’t started doing heroin, maybe he never would have been in his car that night last February. He wouldn’t have died.” I choke out the last sentence and then give in to the sobs.

  It’s my fault he died. My fault.

  “You didn’t force him to do drugs,” Dr. Allen says. “Anyone can end up a slave to drugs. It’s a long and complicated road from sober to addict. No one specific thing turns someone into an addict. It’s a combination life events and experiences that lead someone to drugs, or violence, or crime. You are not the cause of Jason’s death.”

  I know it’s my fault, but I nod anyway and wipe my face with the sleeve of my hoodie. After a moment—after my breathing has gone back to normal, Dr. Allen shifts in her chair and takes a breath.

  “When did you start doing heroin instead?” Dr. Allen asks.

  “We ran out of free oxy,” I answer after a moment. “We started buying it, but we couldn’t afford to keep that up. It costs a dollar a milligram, and a thirty milligram pill would last us half a day. Heroin is cheaper.”

  “How often were you taking it?”

  “By the time of the accident? We were pretty much never not high.” I haven’t thought about those weeks leading up to the accident for a long time. I try not to. Our lives revolved around drugs—buying them, snorting them, buying more. Living in a constant state of anxiety that we would run out and not be able to get more. Every penny we had—allowances, money stolen from parents’ pockets, his paychecks from the body shop, my paychecks from Express—we spent on either oxy or heroin.

  “Do you think about it still?” Dr. Allen places her finished purple giraffe on the table next to my doughboys. “Doing drugs?”