Chapter 24
ADAM
It took a full minute to realize we were home.
Whatever they gave me was strong stuff. I never did any drugs or took pain medication, but to get through the MRI, they insisted on loading me up on something in my I.V.
Once that was pumped into my system, I was out of it.
The world seemed both underwater and backlit.
My tongue was so dry it stuck to my teeth when I tried to speak.
Billie eased my seatbelt off with medical-care delicacy, then pressed her palm to my chest. “Can you walk?” she asked, but it sounded low and distorted.
She’d been soft-spoken all night, as if the volume of her voice might dislodge something inside my head. I nodded, but when I tried to stand, putting weight on my right foot caused pain to shoot up through me like searing hot water. Billie’s herculean grip on my bicep saved me from face-planting.
“You okay?” she asked.
I tried to grin but felt my facial muscles rebel. “I’m fine,” I hissed.
“You sure?”
“Yep.”
I limped up the flagstone path, Billie bearing most of my weight.
We somehow managed to make it up the steps, beads of sweat were forming on my forehead and the base of my neck.
For all of my big talk when I’d tried to send Billie home from the hospital, if she’d left me, I would’ve been shit out of luck.
I had no idea how I would have made it home.
Billie somehow managed to hobble me up the steps and get me through the front door.
The house was dead silent except for the low, flickering blare of a late-night infomercial echoing from the living room.
The muted blue light spilled over the stairwell, illuminating the framed kindergarten drawings and the chipped plaster of the wall with an eerie glow.
I was vaguely aware of being guided through the foyer to the kitchen, then paused to check if I was still conscious. My head lolled but I managed a thumbs up, though I could barely feel my own hand.
When I lifted my head again, I saw Sarah had dozed off on the recliner, knees curled up under the throw blanket, her face tipped towards the TV.
The remote was balanced precariously on the edge of her knee, threatening to tumble at any second.
Billie steered me into the family room and gently lowered me onto the couch, propping my feet on an ottoman and draping Joey’s Harry Potter blanket over my legs.
I watched as it took Billie a full minute to wake Sarah.
At first, she tried a gentle shake, whispering “Sarah, we’re home,” but Sarah merely burrowed deeper into the throw, mumbling something about “not missing the show.” The infomercial was selling some kind of mop system.
When Billie finally managed to coax Sarah upright, she was blinking in confusion.
After taking in her surroundings, she blinked several times at me and rubbed her eyes. “Oh, hey, is everything…are you okay?”
When she looked my direction, I gave her two thumbs up.
“He has two slipped discs,” Billie explained. “Thank you so much for staying with the girls.”
Sarah stood and stretched. “No problem. Wow, girls are so much different than boys. They colored for an hour. Just sat, in one place, and colored. For an hour. An hour. And they wanted to take a bath before bed and there was no water on the floor.”
Despite being high as a kite, I gleaned that her boys’ behavior was night and day different. Actually, I knew it was. I could see them in the backyard and hear them. They were wild. Two Tasmanian devils whirling through the place.
“Sorry about your back.” Sarah patted my foot in a very nurturing, motherly way. “Let us know if you need anything. Anything. The girls are angels, and we’re right next door.”
“Thanks.” I found myself once again giving her thumbs up.
I’m not sure I’d ever given anyone thumbs up in my life and I’d done it three times since I’d gotten home. What sort of drugs did they have me on? Thumbs up drugs?
Billie looked at me with equal parts concern and confusion, probably because of the thumbs. “I’m going to walk Sarah home, and then I’ll be right back.”
My hand shot out before I even realized it and caught her wrist, surprising both of us. She froze and so did I. Her eyes shot down as mine lifted to hers.
“Don’t go,” I said, voice thick and sticky, like there was honey stuck in my throat. I couldn’t believe how desperate I sounded, but the room was spinning, and I did not want to be alone in case my entire nervous system decided to shut down.
She hesitated, looked at my hand on her wrist, then at my face, and for a second I thought she might actually stay.
Then she smiled, a small, lopsided grin so unlike her usual impassive calm.
“I’ll be right back, Adam. I promise,” she said, prying my fingers loose one at a time.
“I’m just walking Sarah next door, and I’ll be right back. ”
An urgency rose in me. I tried to protest, but my mouth was slow, and the words got stuck behind my teeth. “Stay,” I managed, softer this time. I hated myself for it, but I didn’t let go. “Don’t leave me.”
Billie crouched down, bringing her face level with mine.
She studied me for a moment—as if she were memorizing the exact calibration of my exhaustion and apprehension—then tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
“I won’t be gone long,” she said, her voice softer than I’d ever heard it.
“You’re not going to die in the next five minutes, are you? ”
I didn’t have an answer. The world was a blur, the whole house off-balance. The only thing that was steady was Billie.
“Do you know how fucking beautiful you are?” I said, not sure if I was actually speaking or just thinking it.
She blinked, startled, and then her mouth made a shape I’d never seen before. “What?”
I guess I was speaking it.
The question hung in the air, swelling between us.
I’d never said anything like that to her, not even when we were younger and I was more reckless with my words.
But now, with nothing left to lose and every filter burned away by the medication, it felt true.
Billie Bliss was fucking beautiful. Not in the way they said models or celebrities were beautiful.
She was beautiful in the way thunderstorms were beautiful—loud, bracing, a little dangerous.
You watched her and felt lucky that you survived.
I tried to clarify. “I mean, I know you know it,” I said, forcing the words from my mouth. “You just have to look in a mirror. But do you know I know it? I know that you are the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Her eyes went wide before she blinked and pulled her wrist away. “You’re on drugs.”
I felt my eyes getting heavy. Heavier. “You’re so beautiful, your face has its own gravitational pull.
It sucks everyone around you to it.” My eyes began to close, but I pushed them open with sheer force of will.
“It’s why I had to stay away. I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t get sucked in by you.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
My eyes closed before I could answer her.
Did she know the truth, that the reason I’d stayed away for so long was because I loved her.
I think that was it, and I was scared. Scared of that love.
I’d seen what losing that love had done to my father.
The question lingered, the echo of my own voice bouncing around in the empty chamber of my skull.
Just yesterday I’d explained to Joey why the moon didn’t crash into the earth—something about balance, about gravity and distance, about the invisible push and pull that kept everything both together and apart.
It felt that way with Billie, I’d always believed I could keep my feelings in a perpetual standoff, orbiting her from a safe distance.
Not too close, not too far. Safe for everyone.
But I’d never factored in the day when I couldn’t hold the line anymore, when gravity won.
When she’d finally get too close and know, she’d know I’d loved her my entire life.
That was my last conscious thought.
When I opened my eyes again, the world was white and blinding, and the inside of my mouth felt like it was full of packing peanuts.
For a terrible, disorienting second, I thought I’d woken up in a hospital, that the whole last year of my life had been a hallucination, a fever dream I’d concocted to make sense of waking up broken.
I hadn’t retired. I wasn’t a dad. I hadn’t moved back to California.
But then I recognized the sound of the stove’s igniter clicking, the faint hiss of gas, and the heavy, sweet smell of vanilla. I was home.
I tried to move. A mistake. My entire right side was on fire, as if someone had swapped out my spinal cord for a length of barbed wire.
I whimpered—actually whimpered—and immediately hated myself for it. I tried to sit up, but even that tiny, defeated motion filled my field of vision with black dots.
Billie must have heard the noise because she appeared a second later, moving with the purpose and focus of a paramedic on a stopwatch.
She was in sweats—my sweats, I realized, ridiculous and huge on her frame—and a white tank top.
Her hair was up in a knot, and she had that look on her face that I’d seen a thousand times, half-worried, half-annoyed.
“Don’t move,” she ordered. “If you sit up too fast, you’re going to pass out.”
“What time is it?” I managed, voice raw and alien. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“I took today off.” She set a glass of water beside the couch, then vanished back into the kitchen, returning with toast and an orange bottle of prescription painkillers. “Eat and take those.”
I ignored the medicine because I wasn’t going to take it.
“Where are the girls?”
“At school,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I dropped them off. They were worried about you but I promised them you would be a good patient, just like you would want them to be.”
I blinked, trying to process this information. “You…you took them to school?”
“Yes,” she said, as if this were obvious.
“Otherwise you’d have had to call an Uber and hope the driver didn’t freak out when you started having muscle spasms in the back seat.
And I don’t even want to think of what would have happened to you if you had passed out cold on the sidewalk and those horny housewife moms would have found you. ”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the image, so I did neither. Instead, I tried to make sense of the logistics. “What are you doing here?” I asked, still fuzzy, still not quite trusting my reality.
Billie just shrugged. “I’m staying here. You have one arm, you can’t bend, lift, or get up the stairs, and you can’t be here alone in case you need help. Unless you want horny housewives dropping by with casseroles or offering their help with childcare and assistance.”
She said the whole thing so fast, so matter-of-factly that for a moment, I didn’t compute the implication. “You’re what?”
She stared right into my eyes. “I’m staying here. You need help. I can’t be in my apartment alone. It’s a win/win in a lose/lose situation.” She straightened, turned and went back to the kitchen.
I could argue with her, but she wasn’t wrong. I never asked for help from anyone, which is why I’d never accepted help from anyone before.
Would I be able to accept help from her? What was the alternative?
I was still pondering that when nature called. I tried to push up and winced. She was at my side, her arm around me, helping me to my feet. It seemed, at least for now, I wasn’t going to have a choice.