Stay

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  I grabbed it up before he could get to it.

  “I think you should wait,” I said.

  I stood and carried the pill bottle into his bathroom, where I stashed it in his medicine cabinet. When I got back out, Connor was talking to Roy, but Roy was clearly nodding off.

  I stood and watched, and Connor paused to see if his words were getting through. When it seemed we had lost Roy, he got up off the end of the bed.

  “I should go,” he said.

  We walked to Roy’s bedroom door together.

  “No, stay,” I said. “Stay and talk to me. We haven’t talked for a long time.”

  “Nah. Maybe later. I haven’t been to Zoe’s yet.”

  We stepped out into the hall together. I confess I was feeling stung. Partly because talking to me seemed to be no priority for him. Partly because I’d never called Zoe Dinsmore by her first name. Not once. It’s hard to admit, but it made me a little jealous. Suddenly Connor was closer to the lady than I had ever been.

  I walked him to the door. And, as I did, I expressed none of what I was feeling. You know, the usual. The way we always did things.

  “Maybe I’ll come by later,” he said, but he didn’t sound like he meant it. I wasn’t expecting him, based on the way he said it.

  “Right. Whatever.”

  Which was the closest I was going to come to saying I was upset.

  I closed the door behind him and turned around to see my mother standing in the kitchen doorway, her hands on her hips. I could tell she was angry. About something. In that moment I couldn’t even have ventured a guess.

  “Okay, where is it?” she asked.

  “Where’s what?”

  “Roy’s pain meds. I know he didn’t come down the stairs and get them himself.”

  “He asked me for them and—”

  “Never do that again!” she shouted. The first word, “Never,” was so sharp and loud it made me jump.

  “He said he needed them.”

  “It was too soon! You can’t put them where he can get to them. Promise me you’ll never do that again. Where are they?”

  “In the medicine cabinet in his bathroom.”

  She clucked her tongue at me as she climbed the stairs. I couldn’t help noticing that she hadn’t waited and forced that promise out of me. What would I do if he asked me straight out for them again?

  I decided my only real hope would be to lie and say Mom had hidden them but even I didn’t know where. Or maybe I’d get lucky, and by then it would be the truth.

  “I’m worried he might be sick,” I said to her retreating back.

  “He’s not sick,” she said, and kept climbing.

  I just stood there in the hall for a moment or two.

  Then, as I was walking up the stairs, I passed her coming down. She didn’t say a word to me.

  As I closed the door to my room, I heard the kitchen door slam, and her car start in the driveway. She never bothered to tell me where she was going. She didn’t even call out the word “Bye.”

  Roy’s second visitor arrived by cab about three hours later. I was looking out my bedroom window, and I saw the yellow cab pull up. That was an occasion, to see a cab in this town. We actually didn’t have a taxi service in Ashby. Somebody must’ve called one to come over from Blaine.

  The driver jumped out and came around to the curbside rear door. The way a gentleman will open the door for a lady. But it wasn’t a lady I saw climb out of the back seat. It was Darren Weller.

  He handed his crutches out to the driver, then carefully positioned himself so his one good leg was out of the cab, shoe sole down on the sidewalk. The driver reached a hand out to help him up, and handed him back his crutches one by one, until Darren was standing steady.

  I watched Darren slip the driver some kind of bill and then make his way, slowly, obviously painfully, up our walk.

  He looked different than last time I’d seen him. His hair was freshly combed, slicked back with some kind of men’s hair product that left wet-looking comb marks along his scalp. He was wearing neatly pressed chinos and a white long-sleeved shirt. The partly empty leg of his slacks had been carefully folded up and pinned.

  I was pretty sure my mom wasn’t home, so I went downstairs to let him in. I respected him too much not to go let him in. Though, truthfully, I was also afraid of him now. Or still. But more so now, because I thought he might punch me for not being nicer to his sister.

  I opened the door, and we looked at each other for a minute. Well, a few seconds. It felt long. He didn’t look angry. He looked more sad than anything.

  “He taking visitors?”

  “He might be kind of doped up on pain meds. I could go see.” Another awkward few seconds. “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. Come in.”

  He did, easing along on his crutches. I could tell how much it hurt him. I could see it in his face. Every time he rested his weight on them, I saw the wince. I remembered what Libby had told me about shrapnel in the muscles of his chest.

  “Maybe you could go up and see what’s what,” he said. He was looking up the stairs as if the second floor was the summit of a mountain he was only half sure he could climb.

  “Sure,” I said. “I will.” But then I stuck where I was for a moment. “Are you mad at me?” I asked him.

  His face looked completely blank.

  “About what?”

  So that was obviously a good sign.

  “Things didn’t exactly work out between me and your sister.”

  “Aw, hell,” he said. “I know what a pain in the ass she can be. I know it better than anybody.”

  The logistics were tricky, to put it mildly. But here’s how we worked it out: Roy came down. He came down the stairs with one hand on the banister, the other on my shoulder. I walked a couple of steps ahead of him and below him, careful to stop if he seemed wobbly.

  When we got to the bottom of the stairs, Darren swung over on his crutches and offered my brother what I can only call an embrace. The word “hug” would not be expansive enough to cover it. I could hear them speaking quiet, almost reverent words into each other’s ears, but I couldn’t hear what words they were.

  Then Darren clapped Roy on the back a couple of times, and they broke apart.

  “Hey, buddy,” Roy said, turning his attention on me. “Run upstairs and bring me down my crutches, okay?”

  I did as I’d been asked.

  Then I watched my brother and my ex-girlfriend’s brother disappear—slowly—into my father’s den.

  I wanted to follow, but I didn’t. I wanted to rate, but I didn’t. I ached to be a member of the authorized personnel—figuratively speaking—who could walk through that door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.” But I wasn’t.

  You had to have survived a war. Watched parts of yourself separate away. Actual parts, and maybe invisible parts as well.

  You had to know things I couldn’t possibly know.

  Darren came out about an hour and a half later. By himself. I tried not to think about everything he had likely been told, and how much I wanted to know it. At least, I think I wanted to know it. Sometimes it’s hard to be sure until it’s too late.

  He came over slowly on his crutches. It was clear he was tired from so much moving around. He put a hand on my shoulder. He never had before.

  “Where’s Roy?” I asked.

  “On the couch in the den. He’s not feeling good about getting back up the stairs. When your dad gets home, you can tag-team the thing.”

  “Okay.”

  If he ever got home. You never knew in those days.

  “Now do me a favor, okay, Lucas?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He led me farther away from the den door. He leaned in as if to say something important. Then he seemed to go an entirely different direction in his brain.

  “Wait,” he said. “Let me call my cab first.”

  I sat on the living room couch with my heart pounding and my fingers woven together, fidgeting.


  He came out a couple of minutes later. When he eased down on the couch next to me, he made a long noise. A cross between a sigh and a grunt. It reminded me of my grandmother before she died—of the noise she made every time she sat down. But Darren was only twenty.

  “I need you to do something to help your brother,” he said. His face was leaned in close, his voice quiet.

  “Anything. What?”

  “Find out where there are some meetings in town. Or in Blaine. Or wherever the hell you have to go. If AA is all you’ve got, it’ll do. But try to find NA if you possibly can. Try to find what they call an open meeting. That way you can go, too. And then get ’im there. And sit with ’im so he doesn’t walk out before it’s over. So he at least has to pretend like he’s listening. And if he says he’ll just go to that VA drug counseling instead, don’t go that way. Trust the VA with his injury—what choice do you have? But don’t give ’em his heart or his soul to heal. Hell, most of ’em haven’t even healed their own.”

  I could hear a pulsing of blood in my ears. It was loud, and pretty distracting.

  “I don’t know what NA is.”

  “Like AA, but for drugs.”

  “What’s the N stand for?”

  “Narcotics.”

  “Oh.” I sat quietly for a minute. Then I said, “Is this because he’s taking too many of those pain pills? Because I think maybe he just got high on them and forgot how many he was supposed to take.”

  “Nah,” Darren said. “It’s not about that.”

  I wondered if I wanted to ask what it was about. Then I wondered if not asking would keep me safe from Darren’s telling me anyway.

  “He’s only been home since yesterday,” I said.

  I think I was fighting back against the idea that Roy needed to go to meetings. In fact, I’m sure I was. I wanted Darren to be mistaken about that.

  “This is not about what he’s been doing since he got home. It’s about what he did over there. Guys pick up stuff over there. It happens a lot. Because stuff’s easy to get, and because it makes everything almost bearable. It’s usually a situational thing. Guy needs it till he gets home. Then he doesn’t need it anymore.”

  “Maybe he won’t need it anymore,” I said.

  “Well. Thing is, he might’ve said something to suggest he’s one of the ones who can’t put it down without help.”

  “What did he say?”

  It was a brave question. But I think I figured if I knew, I could find a flaw in Darren’s conclusion.

  “He asked me if I knew how to get ’im any.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  I couldn’t find a flaw in that.

  We sat in silence for a time. And the silence had a burn to it. I wasn’t sure if it was a temporary break in our conversation, or if we were just waiting for his cab to pull up and honk.

  “Did you pick up stuff over there?” I asked.

  It was another bold question. But I needed to know.

  “I did,” he said.

  “But then you set it down when you got home?”

  “I did, yeah. But not everybody can. And it doesn’t make me bigger or stronger or braver or better. Different people have different reactions to things. That’s all.”

  “What if he won’t go with me?”

  “Then you call me up and tell me, and I’ll come over and help you sort things out. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. But it sounded like a lot of responsibility.

  We sat in silence for a while longer. And, in that silence, I stepped back in time in my head. Back to before Roy came home. When I’d thought everything would be so simple. I’d thought Roy would just come home, and then everything would be great.

  I think I grew up a lot in that moment.

  “How old are you now?” he asked, knocking me out of my thoughts.

  “Fourteen.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “Four years. Maybe we’ll be out of that damn war by then. But if not . . . well, you’ll have to make up your own mind what to do. You can’t just do what I think you should do. But I’ll tell you this. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t go.”

  “I have a choice?”

  “Everybody has choices. Always. Just, sometimes they don’t like ’em. You can go where the draft board sends you. Or you can go to Canada. Or you can go to jail. If you ask me, jail is the more honorable way to go. You can look the guys who did fight straight in the eye and say, ‘Yeah, I sacrificed, too. I didn’t have it easy.’ But think carefully before you get yourself into a thing like a war.”

  “Maybe it’ll be over by then,” I said. Which had already been said. So it would’ve been more honest to say, “Oh dear God, please let it be over by then.”

  He opened his mouth to answer, but just then his cab honked in the driveway. And that was it for our visit.

  I knew when my mom was home because I heard her holler my name. I don’t usually use the word “holler.” But in this case it feels like the only one that’ll do.

  “Lucas!”

  I came to the railing on the second-floor landing and looked down, wondering what I had done wrong this time.

  “What?”

  She looked up at me, her face livid. If my life had been a cartoon, she would’ve had smoke coming out of her ears.

  “What did you do?” she shouted.

  She had a pill bottle in her hand that I could only assume was Roy’s medication. She held it up as Exhibit A in the trial that would likely end with my death penalty.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said. “I didn’t touch it.”

  “Four pills missing! Four! You think I don’t count them? I know he didn’t walk down the stairs by himself and get them.”

  “Oh,” I said. In that ugly moment the truth stretched out in front of me like a mile of bad road. One I would have no choice but to navigate. “He . . . we . . . I helped him come downstairs. Because Darren Weller came by to see him. It would’ve been harder for Darren to get up the stairs than for Roy to get down them. I never thought about the pills. I’m sorry.”

  She peered up at me for a moment. Her anger seemed to be draining away, but I swear she looked as though she was trying to keep it.

  “I’m hiding these where only I know where they are.”

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  Sooner or later he was going to ask me to get him some. And when I said I didn’t know where they were, I wanted it to be the truth.

  She narrowed her eyes at me. Trying to figure me out, I guess. I remember vaguely wishing in that moment that she saw herself and me as being on the same team. But that was not my mom, or my life.

  Then she turned and stomped away.

  Chapter Fourteen

  My Name Is Roy And . . .

  I beat Connor out to the lady’s cabin the following morning. Purposely. I figured she might still be sleeping, but I was wrong on that score. She was sweeping off her front porch with an old broom. A very old broom It was missing a lot of its straws.

  “Hey,” I said, patting the dogs’ heads as best I could while they jumped and danced around me.

  “You’re early.”

  She stopped sweeping and leaned on her broom. She was a lot of woman and it was not much broom. It didn’t look like it wanted to hold her.

  “I need to ask you about meetings,” I said.

  “Meetings,” she repeated.

  “Like for people who’re addicted to drugs. You said you used to go to them.”

  “Yeah. I guess I did say that.”

  For a moment she just stared at me. I was guessing she was curious as to whether I was asking for myself or a friend. So I answered what was in my head, even though it might not have been in hers at all.

  “And it has to be an open meeting. Because I need to be able to go, too. And I’m not . . . you know . . .”

  I hated to use that word. The A-word. It seemed harsh.

  She turned and walked into the house, leaving the door open. I stood there feel
ing like a fool because I didn’t know if that had been an okay thing to ask or not. But I figured if I had offended her, she would have slammed the door behind her. Or at least closed it, shutting me out.

  She came back a minute or two later with a little paper booklet in her hands. Maybe only four pages, or maybe six. She sat on the edge of the porch with it, and I sat down next to her. The minute I dropped my face to their level, the dogs smothered me with wet kisses.

  When I was able to open my mouth safely—which involved holding Rembrandt at arm’s length with one hand against his chest—I asked about the booklet.

  “We have so many meetings in this town that you need to sort them all out on paper?”

  “Hardly,” she said. “This is for the whole tricounty area. Okay. The one at the bank is still going on. That’s the only NA that’s right here in Ashby. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 6:00 p.m. Monday and Friday are open meetings. Wednesday is closed for addicts only. It’s in that community room at the First Bank.”

  “Oh yeah. I know where that is.”

  We sat in silence for a moment. I expected her to ask me who I was wanting to take to meetings, but she never did.

  I figured that was the difference between Zoe Dinsmore and myself. She didn’t seem to burn to know things. She seemed to be able to leave everything alone in her head.

  Either that or it was easy enough to figure out on her own.

  “Can I say how I feel?” I asked after a time.

  “You always did before.”

  That stung me a little. But I kept going. Zoe Dinsmore was pretty damned beelike, and if you were going to shrink back every time you got stung, well . . . I figured it would be a waste of time to come out to her cabin in the first place.

  “I feel like I’m having to save too many people at once here.” At the corner of my eye I saw her nod slowly. “I mean, I’m not even out of high school. What am I doing trying to help all these people? Three people all at once like this. That’s a lot, don’t you think?”

  “You can take me off your list,” she said.

  “But then I might lose you.”

  A pause.

  Then she said, “Okay. Seriously. Want me to tell you how to take the pressure off yourself?”