Determination (22 page)

WHEN I woke, the room blazed with light, which confused me. I didn’t know if I’d overslept or who I would wake up next to. Someone kept asking for James, and it took a minute for me to realize she was trying to get my attention. Nausea caused a wretched acidic feeling in the back of my throat, and I took several long, deep breaths to keep myself from vomiting. Sound from the room came to me through a thick blanket as the room spun. I blinked a few times and tried to focus on the face in front of me. After several long minutes, shoulder-length blonde hair came into focus and then a woman’s smile.

“Hi, James. How are you feeling?” The woman scribbled something on a clipboard as she continued to try to engage me. I turned my head so she could see that I heard her, but my voice stuck in my aching throat like cotton, and my mouth was bone-dry.

“O-Okay…,” I managed after swallowing a few times.

“Are you nauseated?”

“Yeah, and my mouth is really dry.” I tried to lift my head, but it felt so heavy.

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“Those are both normal after anesthesia. We’ll get you some ice chips once you’re fully awake. We want to monitor you for a couple of hours, and then I’m sure Dr. Lindman will let you go home.” Instead of the contempt I expected to find in her face because of my addiction, I saw warmth and kindness.

“Thank you for helping me.” The words burned on the way out. I coughed a few times and felt wetness in my chest. My lungs ached with each deep breath.

“You’re welcome, honey. You know, you look a lot like my baby brother,” she said wistfully as she checked my IV. “He overdosed a few years ago. That’s why I do this job. No one should have to lose someone they love to drugs.”

She turned away for a moment and spoke to someone I didn’t see.

“Can you let his father know he can come in now?”

Too tired to be relieved that my father had stuck around, I closed my eyes and waited. A few minutes later, I heard the nurse telling him to sit in the chair by the bed, and I glanced at him as he put his bag on the floor. He bent over me to peer into my face.

“How are you doing, kiddo?” he asked with a smile, and I tried to smile back. I’m not sure if I quite made it, though. My brain had turned to mush at some point during the procedure. The concern in his eyes made the nausea ebb slightly because I knew I was safe.

“M’okay, tired, groggy…,” I told him and forced my eyes to stay open. We sat in relative silence for a long time, interrupted only by the nurse who checked on me every few minutes. The nausea lessened but never completely went away, and even though I woke up completely, my body remained heavy and slow. It took about half an hour for me to wake up enough to think about Brian. I wondered what he would think if he knew the drugs were completely out of my system and I’d be starting rehab on Monday. The request to use my father’s cell phone caught at the tip of my tongue and went no further. If Brian wanted to know about my progress, he’d call.

“Dad, did you give Brian our phone number?” I pushed myself higher in the bed and felt agitated that I hadn’t asked the question before.

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“I didn’t get a chance to, son. I’m sorry. With the rehab, and the administrators…,” he started, but trailed off when he saw my face.

Brian hadn’t called to see how I was because he couldn’t call. If my parents weren’t listed, he would have no way to contact me.

“Can I use your cell phone for a minute?” I asked and held my hand out when he bent to grab it out of his bag.

“We can stop by the cellular place and add you to my plan tomorrow. You should have a phone. I never even thought about it,” he said as he handed me the sleek new smartphone. It took me a few minutes to find the texting feature, but I typed in Brian’s cell phone number from memory.

[Jamie]
It’s Jamie on my dad’s phone. I’m in recovery from the
detox. Just thought you might want to know it went okay.

I hit send before I could change my mind because I didn’t know if he wanted to hear from me. He’d told me he loved me before he left the hospital. If that was true, he would want to know I came through the procedure okay. The phone beeped almost immediately.

[Brian]
I’m glad. Thank you for letting me know.

Sliding the screen up, I looked for more, but I’d read the whole message. The short, curt reply hurt more than I wanted to admit. I don’t know what I expected, but I thought he’d send something more than just “yeah, thanks.” With a heavy heart, I handed the phone back to my dad and rolled onto my side, facing him. Pulling my knees up, I curled in on myself. The new position actually helped my stomach, so I maintained that pose and talked to my father until the doctor came in to release me.

“The doctor said clear liquids for tonight. I have some canned chicken soup we can drain, and some kind of lemon-lime soda. Is there anything else that you might want? I can stop off at the market and pick up some popsicles or…,” he offered, trailing off. Nothing sounded too appealing right then except a bed. I didn’t know why I felt so tired after sleeping most of the day—maybe it’s just that I wanted the damn day to be over. The incision on my arm itched, and I hoped that meant the implant injecting the medication into my bloodstream was working.

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clean would be harder. In my discharge instructions, he listed his phone number for me to check in on Saturday since I’d gone home and my first counseling session wouldn’t be until Monday. I had no idea if I would need it. Getting high was the last thing on my mind right then, but I didn’t know how I’d feel in a couple of days. For an addict looking to score, four days could be a lifetime.

I glanced at the clock on the console as we pulled into the drive and saw it was only a little after six. The day seemed like it had lasted at least a week. Exhausted and more than a little depressed, I crawled out of the car on deadened legs. I stood off to the side while my father unlocked the back door, which reminded me I was just a houseguest because I didn’t even have a key.

“You want to watch a movie?” Dad asked, and I shook my head.

“I think I’m just going to go to bed.” Brian’s brush-off made my heart hurt, and I didn’t feel much like company. A headache loomed; the echo of pain made my temples sensitive, and I wanted to be asleep before it could take hold.

“Do you want to eat something before you go to bed?” A frown creased his face, and he dropped his bag onto one of the plush living-room chairs as he passed. I hovered near the door and took off my shoes. Standing in the living room, it felt like someone else’s house, and I didn’t want to offend the host by dirtying the carpet.

“I just want to crash for a while. If I get hungry later, I’ll come down and fix something.” I strode to the stairs, cutting off the conversation as I practically ran up to the second floor to get to my room. Uncomfortable locking my bedroom door, I closed it and changed into a pair of pajamas I found in one of the drawers. When Brian and I had lived together, we’d slept naked in each other’s arms. I missed the feeling of his skin against mine.

With a huge effort, I forced my mind away from the warm, sweet guy I missed in my bed. I crawled between the cold, unfamiliar sheets, closed my eyes, and prayed for sleep to come.

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Eleven

MY EYES burned with the need for sleep as they followed the sun’s early morning progress through the lightening sky. I don’t think I remembered for certain the last time they’d closed. As I lay back on my childhood bed and checked the new smartphone, I saw there were no calls, no texts, no messages of any kind. The clock, however, reminded me that in just four short hours, I’d officially be a junkie in rehab. The label wasn’t one I looked forward to carrying. It made me feel like I should walk into the clinic wearing a T-shirt with the word “failure”

blazing in bright scarlet letters. With little chance of sleep in those last few hours, I fumbled through yet more apps on the phone to see that Brian still hadn’t accepted my friend request. My heart broke a bit more as I traced the lines of his face in the tiny profile picture. Em, Alex, Leo, and even Mike had accepted the requests almost immediately, leaving only Brian’s outstanding. I took a deep breath and tried to quell the burning disappointment in my chest.

Closing my eyes against the throbbing pain, I rolled to the side of the bed. There was no point lying there knowing sleep would never come, so I walked into the bathroom to shower. Only after I’d taken my shirt off did I remember the doctor had said not to shower alone until the seizures were controlled. It frustrated me, being so helpless. The rage boiled just beneath the surface like a teakettle filled with roiling water.
Steven
. Even in death, he haunted me. The seizures were caused by rat poison in the coke I’d used to try to kill us both, and were worse without sleep. Between the guilt of surviving, the fear of the police, the desperate need for drugs, and the heartbreak of losing Brian—it felt like my mind never shut off long enough for me to rest. The stress and 144

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exhaustion caused by the seizures triggered them in a never-ending cycle.

Throwing on a T-shirt, I padded barefoot out of my room. It still felt a little strange calling it “my room” since the house didn’t feel like home. I was so grateful to my father for taking me in and helping me, but without Brian, I would probably never see any place as home.

Brian
was my home. My feet made no noise on the thickly carpeted stairs as I went down to the kitchen like a thief in the night, prowling around my father’s house. The guttural silence masked everything except the tick of a grandfather clock my father had bought for my mother as an anniversary present a few years before our family had shattered.

It killed my father that I tiptoed around the house like a guest, asking before I ate anything and being far more meticulously neat than any teenager should ever be. But no matter what he did, I felt like a stranger there. Most of the furnishings were the same, from our house in Alabama, but everything was different. It was almost as if aliens had come in the night and beamed us up to a spaceship and into a pod that looked like our house but missed little details, which made it look all wrong.

Coffee had become my new best friend. It helped to keep me alert and coherent without sleep. The smell of a freshly brewed pot met me when I walked into the kitchen, and I was surprised to see my father sitting at the small kitchen table at five in the morning. A mask of worry covered his face as he sat sipping from a black mug.

“You’re up early,” he commented, startling me as I pulled a mug down from one of the walnut cabinets over the coffeemaker. I noticed a tremor in my hand when I lifted the pot from the machine and carefully filled my cup. Only a few small drops of coffee escaped onto the counter before I finished. Another residual of the chemical damage within my brain—it seemed like something on me always shook. My hands shook, my knee bounced when I sat for too long, and my body was endlessly restless, like some kind of twitchy little rodent.

“I haven’t been sleeping very much,” I explained as I carried the mug carefully to the table and sat across from him. As I drank, the steam rose from my cup, warming my face. I closed my eyes for just a Determination

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moment and inhaled. When my eyes opened again, my dad was watching me.

“I don’t think I’ve slept an entire night since we moved to San Diego,” he admitted, and I set my mug down on the table, surprised. He shrugged and went on. “I didn’t want to move, but your mother…

something snapped inside of her when she found out about you and Brian. Honestly, I was afraid for her, so I went along with her idea to send you to that place. All I wanted to do was keep our family together, but it was the wrong decision. I know that now, but then….” He sighed and took another drink of his coffee before staring into its depths.

“Anyway, we should talk to your doctor and see if there’s something we can do. Not sleeping can’t help with the seizures.”

“I don’t want any kind of drugs if I can help it. What if I get addicted to them too?” I asked as I added a bit of sugar to my coffee from the bowl sitting between us on the table. The sugar took the edge off the bitterness when I took another long sip.

“Oh, I didn’t think of that. Damn it. I’m really flying blind here.”

His heavy sigh weighed on my conscience. I knew I should still be angry with him because of the center, because he didn’t stop my mother from screwing up my life, but the fear and heartbreak in his voice just pushed that to the side. The dark circles under his eyes bothered me almost as much as the rough stubble on his face and his haunted tone.

He looked ten years older than when we’d moved to San Diego, and my chest ached because I knew the change was my fault. I wondered how he could still feel so guilty after everything he’d done.

“Dad, do you love me?”

My father’s head jerked up, and his hands wrapped tightly around his mug as he looked at me closely for the first time since I’d come downstairs. Emotion welled in his eyes.