This Broken Road

by A. M. Henry

  “Lying.”

  “…What?”

  “Lying. Not laying. I think.”

  Her whole body starts to shake and it takes me a second to realize she started laughing. Downstairs, the front door bangs shut and Rachel jumps. She wipes her nose with her sleeve again and uses the other sleeve to wipe her eyes.

  “How are you getting to Grandma?” I ask her.

  “Bus. Grandma’s picking me up in Williamsport.”

  “Don’t forget to pack some barf bags.”

  “I bought five bottles of Dramamine.”

  Voices downstairs, feet moving around in the kitchen. It sounds like Dad and Cheryl. Casey stayed at a friend’s house for the last two days.

  Rachel pats my shoulder and stands. “I should finish packing.”

  “Call me when you get there,” I say.

  “Didn’t you throw your phone at the wall?”

  “I’ll just steal Casey’s old one.”

  *

  My sister leaves at eight o’clock the next morning. I watch out my bedroom window until Cheryl’s rented Hyundai rounds the corner at the end of our street and I can’t see it anymore. The house feels as dead and quiet as it did the day Ryan’s mother picked me up. Casey is still at her friend’s house, and Dad hides in his office with the door closed.

  I don’t want to be here.

  I text Ryan, What are you doing?

  Five minutes later, he responds, Coming to get you?

  Yes, please, I answer.

  When he pulls into the driveway ten minutes later, I don’t tell Dad I’m leaving. I shut the front door as silently as possible and bolt for Ryan’s car. He’s still in his pajamas and his hair is flattened against his head on one side and sticking up all over the place on the other.

  “Did I wake you?” I ask.

  “Not at all. I’m offended. It took me an hour to get my hair just right.”

  “And it does indeed look fabulous.”

  Ryan’s tires skid on the snow at the end of the driveway, but he recovers quickly.

  “I woke my mom up,” he says. “She’s making waffles.”

  There is no Ryan in Colorado. But there is also no Mom.

  46.

  Two days before Christmas break my junior year, Casey starred as the lead angel in her eighth grade Holiday Spectacular.

  “You’re coming tonight, right?”

  It took me a second to comprehend what she said. I sat on the sofa in the living room reading; I didn’t even hear Casey enter the room. I’d snorted a pretty decent amount of heroin like an hour earlier, so my brain still felt foggy.

  “Tonight?” I asked.

  Casey already had her costume on—a white floor-length polyester dress with cap sleeves—and she had glitter all over her face, chest, and arms. Something sad flickered in her big blue eyes.

  “I’m singing in the Christmas show, remember?” she said. “You’re coming, right?”

  Casey was such a brat most of the time, my gut reaction was to tell her to go to hell. But those big, sad eyes did something to make me feel horribly guilty for intending to skip her school music thing. Must have been the drugs.

  “Yeah, totally.”

  One of my last sessions with Dr. Allen before Mom comes home. Before I make the decision to leave or go. I can’t look her in the eye when I tell her, “I bailed. I bailed on Casey’s Christmas show.”

  I snuck out of the house like half an hour before we would have left for Casey’s Christmas show. Jason had found out about a dealer who was selling off all of his oxy for half of what it usually cost because he’d gotten a tip off that the cops were going to raid his house. We spent every penny we had.

  Jason and I parked at the Walmart in Middletown and snorted one of our little blue pills in the car. Then we wandered around Walmart, content to just watch the other shoppers and be next to each other. I had completely forgotten about Casey’s school holiday show.

  “Was your sister upset?” Dr. Allen asks.

  I got home just after one in the morning. I let myself in through the front door, an expert at silence by then. As I crept past the living room doorway, the light flicked on and I saw Dad sitting alone on the sofa.

  He didn’t yell. He didn’t even look mad. He just looked tired and really sad—like so sad he might cry.

  “How could you?” He spoke softly, but in my head it sounded like thunder. “How could you do that to her? How could you just bail on your own sister when she was so excited for you to see her singing?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, just stood up and went up to bed. I waited a few minutes after I heard him close the bedroom door and then I went upstairs and snorted oxy until I didn’t feel bad anymore.

  “She wouldn’t speak to me after that,” I tell Dr. Allen. “Not until like more than a month after the accident.”

  “How did she act then?” Dr. Allen asks. “Right after the accident?”

  I don’t like to think about the time right after the accident. When I came home from the hospital, my parents and sisters greeted me with stony silence.

  I shrug. “Like I said, she wouldn’t talk to me. None of them did, except to tell me when my next physical therapy appointment was.”

  Physical therapy—that was a nightmare all on its own. I think the only reason I recovered so fast was because I had a vague plan to walk right the hell out of my house and never come back.

  “Your whole family stopped speaking to you?” Dr. Allen asks. She makes that face like she’s trying really hard to keep her frustration in check.

  I shrug again. “I guess that was easier. But honestly I think I wanted to avoid my family as much as they wanted to avoid me.”

  I think it was around mid-April when I woke up after a particularly bad night’s sleep, and in the morning I couldn’t stand my bedroom anymore. I started with the mirror over the dresser. Photos of Jason and Derek and my sisters, and photos I took of the woods when I used to go hiking—all of them got tossed in the trash. I pulled the dresser out from the wall and practically ripped the mirror off, and then dragged the mirror out into the upstairs hallway.

  Next the posters—Led Zeppelin, Tarja Turunen, the Waterhouse painting of Ophelia, the giant map of Middle Earth. I tore them off the walls and shredded them.

  Then I attacked the closet. Anything I had made or altered, the band t-shirts, the combat boots—pretty much anything that wasn’t sweat pants or plain t-shirts—went into a big black garbage bag.

  All my CD’s, my iPod, my laptop, and my small collection of DVD’s went into a second garbage bag. I dragged the two garbage bags downstairs and into the garage and left them next to the big garbage bins. By then my knee and hip hurt so badly, I couldn’t move the mirror, so I just left it in the hallway. It was gone the next morning.

  No one acted any different.

  Not until three days later, when Casey knocked on my bedroom door.

  I didn’t hear her right away. I had developed a talent for lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, and shutting off my brain.

  It must have been just after dinner, because I could smell the melted-plastic-flavored-chicken wafting up from the kitchen microwave.

  Casey pushed the door open just enough to peek inside. “Angela?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “No.”

  Silent pause.

  “Really?”

  I sigh. “Obviously you can come in.” I rolled onto my side to face her.

  She stepped through the doorway on tiptoes, like she didn’t want to make any loud noises or sudden movements. It occurred to me then that my parents might have told my sisters not to speak to me. I wouldn’t have put it past them.

  Casey closed the door behind her and sat down on the floor next to me. She didn’t speak for a long moment. Then she said, “You threw all your stuff out.”

  “Yep.”

  “Why?”

  She stared at me for a while with those big concerned
eyes and for a split second, I felt something like love and empathy. But then I remembered her shrieking tantrums and the fact that she hadn’t spoken to me for months, and all my sympathy for others vanished in a puff of frustrated rage.

  “Because I couldn’t stand to look at it anymore.”

  More silence.

  “You’ve been limping. I thought you were all fixed.”

  Destroying my bedroom had killed my knee. Adrenaline rush, I figured—I didn’t feel the pain until the morning after I sterilized my bedroom. My knee and hip ached for days.

  “After I cleaned out my room, Casey was the only one who talked to me like I was a person,” I tell Dr. Allen. “She spent hours on YouTube looking for physical therapy videos to help me heal faster and reduce the pain.”

  “And how was your relationship with your family then? After you and Casey started speaking again?” asks Dr. Allen.

  “Mostly the same, I guess. Mom and Dad acted like I wasn’t there. Rachel seemed like she was afraid of me. But Casey sat me down on my bedroom floor three times a week to do my knee exercises.”

  I feel a sudden surge of emotion towards Casey that I’ve never experienced before. Between Rachel and me tormenting her and Mom doting on her, I feel like we created a perfect storm of emotions that produced a child who could not under any circumstances deal with her problems in a healthy way. But at the same time, she was willing to drop everything and run to the side of a person in need, no questions asked. She would have been perfectly justified in making my life hell after the hell Rachel and I threw at her as kids. But she didn’t. I’d betrayed her with the school Christmas show, but then there she was—not looking for an apology, not looking for an excuse, not looking for anything from me in return. Because when Casey loves something, she loves it with everything she has.

  47.

  “I think you need to sit your pops down and talk about this.” Derek sits on the floor beside the sectional, long legs stretched out in front of him. “Really talk about this. Before the she-devil gets home and starts ordering him around again.”

  He’s right. I know he’s right. But there’s the whole easier-said-than-done thing. On the TV across from us, Paula Deen bakes desserts on mute. I lie on the sectional the way people lie on their therapists’ couches in the movies.

  “I know,” I say. On the TV, Paula mixes a metric ton of butter into her cake batter. “I just feel like… like I’d be barging in on his privacy. He’s always locked in the office, or in their room. He’s a mess.”

  “He’s gotta grow up and deal with this like the rest of you.” Derek grabs the remote from the coffee table and flicks channels until he finds Law & Order reruns. “Maybe he should see a shrink.”

  I think back to the time Dr. Allen suggested a session with my parents. It doesn’t seem that horrifying anymore. I think it might even help, having a session with Dad…

  “Don’t overthink it,” Derek says. “When you get home, just go straight into his office or his room and tell him you need to talk to him.”

  “You make it sound easy.”

  “It is easy. Just do it.”

  I turn on my side so I can hide my face in the cushions. Derek hits me on the head with one of the throw pillows.

  “You’re getting makeup on the couch. My mom’ll kill you,” Derek says.

  “I’m not wearing any makeup.” Muffled into the cushions, he probably did not understand any of that.

  “Maybe you should. You’re starting to look old.”

  I sit up so fast that everything goes black for a second. Derek laughs. It occurs to me that I don’t deserve him as a friend.

  “Thank you,” I tell him, “for sticking by me. You’re the only one who did.”

  “What are friends for? Plus I owed you.”

  “For what?”

  “Remember in sixth grade when Pat Jones called me a fag that day in the cafeteria?” Derek asks.

  “Sort of.” Everyone was horrible in middle school, so most of those memories have blurred together.

  “You stood up on the table and told everyone his mother was still breastfeeding him.”

  Oh, that. Now I remember. “She was still breastfeeding him. Casey walked in on them when she had a playdate with his sister.”

  Derek bursts out laughing. “Are you serious?”

  I nod. “Casey’s not creative enough to make that up.”

  “Oh man. Gross.” Derek makes a face, shutting his eyes and shaking his head like he can’t get that image out of his mind. “And I thought your mommy issues were bad.”

  “If I was given a choice between my mother breastfeeding me or spending ten years locked in the wine cellar,” I say, “I’m pretty sure I’d take the cellar.”

  “You and me both, girlfriend.”

  48.

  Dad looks like a scared animal backed into a corner. He fidgets on the sofa outside Dr. Allen’s office while we wait for the guy with the habit cough to finish his session. It took three days of nagging for me and Cheryl to get Dad to agree to this.

  His foot-bouncing is going to drive me over the edge.

  “You know you’re not here for shots or forced electroshock, right?”

  Dad lets out a nervous laugh and his voice cracks like he’s in the middle of puberty. He coughs to cover it up and I can’t help but laugh.

  “I know,” he says.

  “If you don’t stop shaking your foot, I’m going to kill you.”

  He stops moving. “Careful, if she hears that, she’s probably obligated to report it to the police.”

  “Then you’ve probably got ten or fifteen minutes before the men in white coats come and take me away,” I say. “Think you can escape before then?”

  Dad smiles. He looks less nervous for a while until Dr. Allen’s office door opens to expel Habit Cough Dude, who coughs all the way out the door. Dr. Allen emerges a few seconds later, hand out to shake Dad’s hand. They exchange formal greetings and I know Dad’s nervous again by the way he stuffs his hands in his pockets as we walk into the office.

  Once inside, he turns to me as though waiting for instructions. I look at the purple sofa and say, “Sit.” It comes out like an order and then I feel bad, but Dad sits down immediately.

  As soon as all three of us sit down, an awkward silence settles on the room. It reminds me of my first session with Dr. Allen.

  “Want to play Pretty Pretty Princess?” I ask Dad.

  Dr. Allen tries to cover a smirk.

  I expect Dad to have no clue what that game is, but instead he says, “Isn’t that the game you and Rachel used to make me play when you were little?”

  I don’t remember that. “We did?”

  “You used to think it was hilarious every time I put on a new piece of jewelry.” He smiles at the memory. “And then Casey was old enough to play, and you two didn’t want me to play anymore.”

  “Angela, you never told me that,” Dr. Allen says.

  “I didn’t remember.”

  She turns to my father. “We played that game during our first session,” she says. “Angela told me about getting in trouble for taking Casey’s things.”

  At first I had second thoughts after I told Dr. Allen she could talk about our sessions with Dad, but now I feel better about it. I realize I’d never have the guts to steer the conversation this way.

  Dad frowns. “Their mother told me Angela had been bullying Casey, threatening her and stealing her toys.” He turns to me. “Wasn’t that the day you fell on the stairs and broke your ankle?”

  My heart hammers in my chest. I’d assumed he’d have put that together after the last few weeks, but at the same time, he has done his best to bury his head in the sand.

  “That was Mom,” I say when I find my voice. “She dragged me down to the wine cellar and locked me in. I hurt my ankle when she was pulling me down the stairs.”

  The muscles in his face tense. He’s clenching his jaw. Dr. Allen stares back and forth between us, but says nothing.
r />   “I think I knew that.” Dad rubs the back of his neck like he always does when he gets stressed out. “I didn’t want to know, but I knew. Or at least I knew something was off about Tammy’s story.”

  “But you didn’t challenge her?” Dr. Allen asks.

  Dad takes a deep breath, turns to me. “You were only what, ten? But you didn’t cry. Not so much as a tear, even at the hospital. You had a broken bone, you should have been hysterical.”

  “I cried when it happened,” I say.

  “I think that’s how I knew,” he continues like I never spoke. “You should have been crying, but you weren’t. Silent even when they were putting the cast on, and I know that must’ve hurt like hell.”

  “Why didn’t you question your wife?” Dr. Allen asks. She tries to keep her voice even, but I can tell this subject still strikes a nerve.

  “It was always easier not to,” Dad says.

  Dr. Allen frowns, thinking. “What would she do if you did? How would she react?”

  I wait for Dad’s answer and realize after a few seconds that I’m holding my breath. I never saw them have an argument. Now I think about it, I never saw them have a full conversation that lasted more than a minute.

  “She wasn’t always like this,” Dad says after a moment. “When we first met… She was happy. But then her sister died.”

  “I didn’t know you knew Grace,” I say. My dead aunt has always been a picture on a wall—I never thought of her as a living, breathing person.

  “I didn’t really know her well,” Dad says. “She was already pretty sick when me and your mother were getting serious. The family was in denial, none of them wanted to accept that Grace was going to die. When she finally did… Well, your mother lost it.”

  This news surprises me. I would have thought Grandma was the one who lost it.

  “Lost it?” Dr. Allen asks.

  Dad nods. “Their mother—Angela’s grandmother—totally shut down. Wouldn’t leave her house, wouldn’t speak to anyone. Tammy and Mairéad had been pretty dependent on her, even though they were both done with college and living on their own. But she shut them out and Tammy had a nervous breakdown. I guess that’s what you’d call it.”