Chapter 9
NINE
I don’t want to do this. No part of me wants to go and celebrate the life of the woman who let me—and all her kids—down so profoundly at every single turn. She never even tried. She just—fuck!
I hurriedly pull my shirt on, buttoning it up, and stare into the mirror at my own reflection. I look like shit, and it was pretty clear Phillip caught onto that fact that I haven’t been sleeping because I look like shit.
I study the dark circles under my tired eyes and swallow hard, noticing my skin is pretty pale. I haven’t slept much at all. I’ve been planning this stupid bullshit funeral and worrying nonstop about doing right by the kids.
I have to be better than she was. They deserve so much better, but there’s no denying that itch below the surface—that need to get high and escape all the pain. Just for a second. A brief moment in time. I crave that escape as badly today as I did the first time I tried the crushed pills at a party when I was fifteen. I have no idea what they were, but I know it was only a moment before I felt like I was floating on air, not a care in the world. Just blissfully numb.
I try to push that feeling away, my mouth filling with saliva as I think about finding something to make me feel that way again. “Kellan.” Braylen’s small voice snaps me out of it, and I turn toward the doorway of my bedroom where he’s standing. He has his button-down shirt on that we got from a secondhand store, but it’s hanging open.
“I can’t get the buttons.” His bottom lip is pushed out slightly, and I can tell he’s been crying by his red eyes.
“Come here,” I say and kneel down as he walks into my room. I slowly do up the buttons on his shirt, searching for something—anything to say to him to make him feel a little better. “You okay?”
His little shoulder just lifts in indifference.
I think he’s going to be totally silent, which wouldn’t surprise me. Braylen doesn’t talk much, none of us do. Not really. But then he shocks me when his eyes meet mine, watery and unsure. “Do you really hate Mom?”
“What?” I ask, startled and almost dropping my hand from the button I was working on, but I recover and continue fastening it. “Why do you think that?”
I haven’t told them that outright or anything. I don’t know how they felt about Mom, but I know better than to say that to them. “I heard you talking to Tatum about planning a funeral for her. You joked about flushing her ashes down the toilet.”
I cringe, my stomach knotting because I had no idea Braylen heard that. “I thought you were asleep,” I say dumbly because it doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have joked about that in the house. I was tired and frustrated. The funeral, even though we went with the cheapest option, is still expensive as hell.
He shrugs sheepishly. “Couldn’t sleep. I heard voices and saw you and Tatum talking in the living room.”
I nod, not wanting him to think he’s in trouble. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“But do you hate her?” He doesn’t let me off the hook, and I struggle to find the right words.
“I...” Good job, Kellan. That totally makes it better . “I’m mad at her,” I say honestly, my heart squeezing. “I wanted better for you guys.”
His lips are pursed, and he’s watching me carefully as I finish his top button, but I don’t move to stand up. “She tried sometimes.”
It takes a lot of effort not to scoff. He doesn’t need that reaction. “Not hard enough.”
“Cason said she was sick.” I nod my head in understanding. I’m sure Cason tried like hell to make excuses for her over the years. I know I did before I left. Always tried to tell them that she couldn’t help it. That it was a disease. Everything I found on the internet about addiction to help us cope.
“She should have taken care of you though. That’s why I’m mad at her.”
“But you don’t hate her?” He seems to need this from me. To hear that I didn’t hate our mother.
But I feel a deep hatred for her. So many nights, I wanted her to just try. To be a mother to us. To keep us safe. To choose us over the men she brought home who supplied her with the drugs she so desperately seemed to need.
“I don’t want to hate her.” I settle on that, and he nods his head, but I can see the tears have welled up in his eyes again.
“I don’t,” he says softly, so softly I almost miss it, and I stare at him for a moment, totally in awe of my eight-year-old brother. He’s so damn young, but I know he understands hate. Disappointment. Fear. Anger. He’s not immune to any of the things I feel every day, but he really, truly doesn’t hate her.
He just walks out of my room sullenly, leaving me kneeling on the floor of my bedroom.
“What are you doing?” Raegan walks into my room, looking at me in concern. She’s in a black dress, simple with long sleeves. Her hair is tied up into a bun, and her eye makeup is thick.
“Braylen asked if I hate Mom,” I answer in a daze and stand up from the floor to face my sister. “He doesn’t.”
She’s quiet for a moment, chewing on her bottom lip. “You don’t either.”
“What?” I ask her, almost as stunned by her statement as Braylen’s.
“You don’t,” she says simply. “You loved her. Like we all did. You hated her addiction, but not her.”
I stare at her, unmoving and numb. I don’t know how to reply to that. Part of me wants to tell her that she’s thirteen and maybe didn’t see everything I did, but I know that’s a lie. None of us had a chance at childhood. We all grew up far too fast. She’s wise beyond her years, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing. “She let us down. Over and over.”
“She tried, Kellan,” she says it so softly, and I can hear the pity in her tone.
“Tried?” I bite out because I’m quickly losing control. “How the fuck did she try exactly? I don’t remember her going to one fucking meeting. I don’t remember a time when she was sober. I remember getting you all off to school while she was passed out on the couch. I remember keeping the scumbags she brought home off of us. All of us.” I grit my teeth and try to take a deep breath, but it feels like my chest might explode. “I remember getting shifted around from foster home to foster home, trying to track you all down and keep Mom sober enough to pass inspection to get you guys back, so I could watch you.”
“Yeah, and then you left us.” I hear Cason’s voice from my doorway before he walks further in to stand next to Raegan in a protective stance. “You think you’re better than Mom?”
My eyes fall closed momentarily as I try to go over all the bullshit AA and NA phrases they teach us to get through difficult situations.
“You think he’s not?” Tatum. He walks into my room and stands by my side, facing my brother and sister head-on. “He got clean.”
“She tried,” Cason says, his jaw clenched tight. He looks like he just got out of the shower. His hair is wet, but he’s dressed in black jeans and a black button-down shirt. “After you left, she tried. She was in too deep.”
“What does that mean?” I watch my brother and wait for his response.
“She went to some meetings. She tried to clean up, but it didn’t work. She was too young when she had you, Kellan. And with each of us, it was like she lost another piece of herself. She was too far gone.”
“She shouldn’t have kept having us then,” I say angrily. “She didn’t want us. Any of us.”
I feel Tatum’s hand on my shoulder, gripping tight, and I bite back my words.
“She loved us,” Raegan says, and how the hell can she believe that? I don’t get it. How can they think our mother cared?
“No, she didn’t,” I say firmly.
Cason just shakes his head while Raegan tips her chin up in defiance and looks me right in the eyes. “Yes. She did.”
We all stand in a strange sort of frozen standoff for far too long before Kieran comes in and whines about it being time to go and how we’re going to be late. It seems to break up the moment, and we all shuffle to get everyone dressed and out the door. We go to the church, and I sit through the memorial for our mother.
Her framed picture from when she was a teenager is up by the urn. It was the only picture I could find where she looked halfway sober, but I knew she wasn’t. I don’t remember a time when she wasn’t at least a little bit high.
There are a few other people here besides us, but not many. No love lost today. Except I look at my four siblings, and I see that’s not true. They did love her. They needed her, and she just left them behind.
It’s not fair. None of it is fair.
They deserved so much better, and now they’re stuck with me, and I’m just... broken. I look at her picture, next to the urn that holds her ashes, and I feel nothing.
I want to drink. I want to use. I want to go numb, but for some reason, even after the funeral, when the kids are in their room and Tatum went to go get dinner for us, I know I could sneak out and get high, but I don’t.
I see Phillip’s face, and I hear his determination. He thinks he can make me trust him. I trust no one.
But it didn’t faze him in the slightest.
He’s so sure he can get me to open up to him, and for some reason, I want to. I want to call him right now and tell him all the things I’m feeling. Have him talk me down.
Shine that beautiful smile my way.
What the hell is that about?