Chapter Seventeen
Sasha
When Sasha comes to, she can’t remember where she is for a moment. She blinks open her eyes and finds herself lying on a concrete
basement floor. The air is smoky and heavy with the cloying scent of tobacco. She hears men’s voices talking nearby. The searing
pain of her broken pinky almost makes her cry out, but she bites her cheek and holds back terrified tears as she pushes herself
to sit.
There are three men across the room, sitting on metal folding chairs at a card table. One is smoking a cigar and they seem
to be arguing about something, but her head is spinning and she can’t really put it all together—what’s happened, what they
would want with her.
“My son,” she says in a hoarse whisper. The men look over, and one stands and comes over to her, peering down.
She presses against the wall behind and shakily pushes herself up using the basement doorknob as leverage.
She doesn’t take her eyes off the man, calculating the distance—could she run up the stairs before he reached her? She’s not bound or locked up. Why not?
“What are you doing here?” the man asks, standing directly in front of her, holding his cigar and blowing the smoke sideways,
not moving toward her like he plans to attack, but she doesn’t know what to expect. Her heart pounds. She grips the doorknob
of the open basement door with one hand and the brick wall behind it with the other, feeling cornered and paralyzed with fear.
“My son,” she repeats. “What do you want with him? Why was he here?” she asks, more desperate than ever to protect Drew. The
man’s expression changes into a smirk.
“The kid. That’s what this is about. Jesus.”
“We don’t want nothin’ with that kid, lady,” one of the guys at the table says, but he’s not even looking at Sasha. He’s drinking
a beer and focusing on the cards in front of him. She feels her phone buzzing in her pocket again and again.
“Is he in trouble? Does—does he owe you money or something? I’ll pay. I can—”
“He already paid,” the guy with the cigar says, smoke billowing out the sides of his chilling smile. “Stay out of it,” he
says, and Sasha feels a cold sweat forming beneath her coat and the broken bone in her finger throbbing and her head aching
and she wants to be home and she hates that all of this is happening, but she can’t possibly stay out of it. It’s her son.
He’s been through enough. She won’t let him ruin his life or get himself killed. Who the fuck are these people? What do they
want?
“Told ya she wasn’t police,” another of the men says.
“Paid for what? Please. I need to know if he’s in trouble. What do you—why was he here? What do you want from him?” Her phone buzzes in her pocket again—Tom worried sick about her, no doubt.
“Not a thing,” the man with the cigar says, turning his back to her and walking over to the coffee table, where he sits with
the other two beneath the swaying single lightbulb that hangs above it and casts dancing shadows around the basement. She
cradles her hurt hand in the other and looks down at it completely confused, unsure what to do next.
“That was just a little warning, from me to you. You were never here. And if you forget you were never here and tell someone . . .
well, that won’t go well for you. Or Drew.” When he says her son’s name, Sasha feels a wave of nausea so strong, she actually
cups her hand over her mouth, briefly thinking she could vomit. The pain, the confusion, the fear . . . it’s all so overwhelming.
One of the men who has remained seated gets up as if he’s suddenly annoyed and rushes to Sasha, who backs up and falls, catching
herself on the stairs.
“823 River Ridge Lane.”
“What?” she stutters.
“Are we clear?” the man says, slamming the door closed so she’s sitting in the dark basement stairwell realizing they’ve let her go and are not, in fact, planning on killing her or breaking the rest of her bones.
It was all a warning. She jolts to her feet and runs up the stairs and out the metal side door and just like that, she’s outside.
She’s free. Her car is there. She scrambles, almost tripping over herself to open the car door, and once she’s safe inside, she understands what has just happened.
Not all of it. But 823 River Ridge Lane is her address.
If she goes to the police, or even tells Drew or anyone, she supposes that means she’s dead.
Or worse, one of her children will be dead.
She screeches away from the empty parking lot and onto the main road, too numb to cry, glancing back in the rearview mirror
at the nondescript smoke shop that has a secret identity. It’s a front for something and she can’t believe she can’t figure
out for what. She tries to think about what she will tell Tom. How did she break a finger? She looks at the clock and it’s
just after 5 p.m. Tom might not even have noticed she’s been gone. He’s in New York and was going to have a busy day. She
looks at her phone and he hasn’t called yet. Thank God. Just a text that says, love you, I’ll call after the dinner rush.
There are five missed calls from Drew, and a voice mail. She calls him immediately, no answer. She listens to the voice mail.
It’s the school returning her message, explaining that Drew was suspended for punching another kid in the lunchroom, but there
is no more detail, just the office school counselor’s number to call back. She calls Drew again and he picks up.
“What’s wrong?” Sasha says before he can speak. “Is Chloe okay? Did she take the bus? I was supposed to pick her up. I . . .
Jesus.” She remembers that she was also supposed to pick up Regan and go to the café. Shit.
“Dude, where’ve you been? She’s fine. She called me to pick her up. She’s right here. Jeez. But I’ve been calling all afternoon,
though. What the hell?”
“Oh, thank God,” she says, and even in this heightened state, she still has to put him in his place. “Don’t call me dude. We’ve talked about this.”
“Sorry,” he mumbles.
“I just . . . I slammed my hand in the car door by accident and broke it. I had to go . . . to the hospital. I texted you to tell you to make sure she was picked up but there must have been no reception at the hospital—looks like it didn’t go through. So you’re all okay?”
“Dandy,” he says.
“Put me on speaker,” Sasha says. She can practically hear Drew rolling his eyes at this, but he does as he’s told.
“Chlo, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she hears her daughter say, and she can tell by the squeaks and laugh track of some annoying teen sitcom that
she’s half distracted and probably over it already.
“Drew is gonna watch you tonight and you guys can order in Chinese,” I say.
“K,” she responds.
“Thanks for asking if I had plans,” Drew says.
“I decide when you have plans. Use my Grubhub log-in and get what you guys want for dinner. I have one more thing to do and
I’ll be back late.”
“Fine, but . . .”
She hangs up on him, relieved they’re safe and uninterested in further conversation about his ruined plans to sit at Blanc’s
with Roxie when he’d probably really be off doing . . . God knows what. She can’t even think about what he’s involved in.
What the hell could those men be taking money from him for? Drugs are the only thing that makes sense. And then she lets her
mind go to other sinister places. Or maybe guns . . . or bombs.
She pulls into a Stop-N-Go to get bandages for her finger, a bottle of water and something to eat because she feels her stomach twisting in hunger and she needs energy to hold together all the parts of her crumbling life.
She sits in the parking lot, under the glow of a single streetlamp in the otherwise empty gas station parking lot and sees the rain starting to fall again in the cone of light—a mist that seems to never end and only accentuates the fear and misery she feels.
She takes a bite of a prepackaged egg salad sandwich and then puts it on the seat beside her and starts sobbing.
She lets the tears come. She pounds the steering wheel with the heel of her hand and lets out a guttural scream. It’s all too much.
Then she sits in the ear-ringing silence for a moment and starts the car and heads to go and see Raffy. It’s time to get him
involved, and maybe the police. If she only knew what Drew was involved in, she might know if involving them would mean helping
to protect him or helping to indict him, but she doesn’t know. She needs Raff’s help on this. She needs him to pull himself
together and be present for once, goddammit. It might be futile, but she has to try.
When she pulls up, she can already tell it will be a drunk visit and not a buzzed one, but that’s to be expected. She has
to catch him fairly early in the day for any hope of a semisober interaction, and even then the fog and hangover aren’t really
that much better to deal with. Now she can see Raff has fallen asleep in a camping chair next to the firepit and the rain
has put out the fire, so he just sits with his head hanging back and his mouth open, getting poured on. It might be the saddest
thing she’s ever seen.
She sighs as she turns off the ignition, pulls her hood over her head and carefully guards her damaged hand as she opens the
door and readies herself for this dreaded interaction.
“Raff, get up,” she says, poking him in the shoulder.
“Huh?” He stirs and sits up slightly, squinting in the darkness to make out what he’s looking at. “What the hell, Sash. Leave
me alone.”
“Get up. Fuck, Raff. It’s raining on your face, for God’s sake. Get inside. I need to talk to you.”
“What happened to you?” he asks, looking at her hand. She would be pulling him up and forcing him inside if she were able,
because she doesn’t have all night, but thankfully, he starts to stand on unsteady feet and stumble toward the back door.
“Nothing. Don’t worry about it,” she says, following him inside. He flops on a chair at the kitchen table and rubs his eyes.
She sees his head bob like he’ll pass out at any given moment, so she gets to the point.
“Drew is in trouble. I know he hasn’t visited you in a while and you’re pissed about that, but have you talked to him at all?
Has he said anything to you?” she asks. He lays his head on the table and groans.
“Raffy!” she yells, and he startles and sits back up.
“I don’t know. God, Sash, how would I fucking know? I haven’t seen him in weeks. Months, maybe,” he says. He stands up and
tries to walk toward the fridge—for a drink, she knows—but he stumbles and holds on to the table, waiting out a dizzy spell.
“Come on,” she says, putting her good arm around his waist and getting him over to the sofa.
She goes back to the fridge and twists off the cap to a Heineken and brings it to him.
Enabling. That’s the word Drew used, and it flits across her brain every time she does this.
She can’t help it. Even after all these years, she sees the man she used to know when she looks at him—the man who put his coat around her shoulders walking down a busy city sidewalk after dinners at Lucino’s, the trips to sunny beaches, drinking from coconuts and planning their bright future, the happiness, the love, all of it.
And then she thinks about how it was stolen from him—his freedom, his future, his dignity, his confidence, his whole life.
She just hasn’t been able to blame him or hate him for ruining them or crumbling under the weight of the trauma. She just can’t.
She grabs a towel from the cabinet and sits next to him, pushing the wet hair back from his eyes and drying his face. She
sees tears in his eyes that he blinks away, and she gives him a moment to get the alcohol back in his bloodstream before she
explains what’s happened. Then she tells him about the construction paper, the man he handed money to, the men at the smoke
shop, his suspension. She doesn’t tell him about her encounter with the men in the basement. That would be too much.
“He’s smoking weed, Sash. Don’t overreact. I mean, you just laid it out. Handing over money, a smoke shop, a fight at school.
The construction paper thing seems like a giant leap, so I would just punish him like any other kid caught smoking weed. I
think you’re really going off the deep end here over nothing,” he says, and on one hand she really wants him to be right,
but on the other, she knows he’s not. If it is drugs, it’s way worse than weed; she knows that after what she just encountered.
She’s not sure what she was expecting from Raffy.
Maybe she just needed someone on her side.
She doesn’t want Tom to know. She wants Drew and Tom to be close and not for Drew to be a delinquent that Tom can never connect with.
She doesn’t want a pieced-together family.
Shit. Coming here was useless. She knows every time she comes that she will leave with a stone on her chest and an emptiness in her gut, but each time, she just hopes so badly that something will be different.
That she’ll see the face of that man she used to know. Just one more time.
But now, Raffy starts to nod off, and the bottle in his hand spills onto his lap as his grip around it weakens. She takes
the bottle and places it on the table and then gets up to leave.
She uses the front door on her way out but just before she opens it, she sees something on the bench next to the front door.
Drew’s new school backpack. Drew, who Raffy hasn’t seen in months.