Chapter 25 #2
I kept waiting for him to drop the act, to say something cruel just to remind us of who he was before everything burned down. But he didn't. The more he tried to keep it together, the more I wanted to rip the seams. Something in me wanted to see him fall apart.
After another hour of driving, Caiden’s voice cut through the hum, thin and scratchy. “I need to pull over. I’m seeing double.”
He eased the car onto a gravel turnout beside a half-collapsed barn, the structure listing toward the road like it, too, was exhausted. He killed the engine and let his head thud back against the seat.
“You want the first nap, or should I?” he asked, eyes closed, hands slack in his lap.
I hesitated. “You go. I can’t sleep anyway.”
He didn’t argue. He just tipped his seat back and folded his arms. For a while, his breathing was so soft I thought he’d already slipped under. But then he muttered, “Wake me if you get bored. Or if something tries to eat us.”
I didn’t laugh. I watched him instead, the way his face softened in sleep, lines smoothing, lips parted slightly. He looked younger like this. I wondered if anyone had ever looked at him and thought, he needs protecting. I wondered if he even knew how to accept it.
The cold started to settle in after a while of Caiden being asleep. I became lost in more memories.
When I was eleven, Mom tried to quit for real. She bought a whiteboard from the dollar store and wrote Day One in fat red marker. I watched her scrub it and rewrite it every morning for three weeks, and every morning she’d make eggs and drink black coffee and tell me:
We’re almost out of the woods, kid.
It never stuck. When she relapsed, she wiped the board clean and left it that way, hanging in the kitchen as a blank square that reflected nothing.
I wondered if I’d inherited that, the inability to finish anything, to crawl out of my own head. If this was what awaited all of us. The whiteboard, wiped clean, reset, over and over, haunted by the ghost of what we wanted to become.
I pulled my knees tighter, wishing Caiden’s coat was around my shoulders, but he’d balled it up behind his head.
The kind of ache I felt wasn’t just about my mother. It was heavier, wired into me like a birth defect.
There was a time, back in middle school, when I thought all daughters were supposed to hate their mothers. I thought the point of growing up was to tear away from them, to hoard your own pain and let theirs rot.
It wasn’t until I watched my friend Hayley’s mom brush her hair one night at a sleepover—gentle, patient, the two of them humming the same stupid pop song—that I realized it wasn’t supposed to be that way.
That some people didn’t grow up waiting for the other shoe to drop, or for a glass to shatter against the wall.
I hated my mother for all the wrong reasons and loved her for even worse ones. Even now, I wanted to believe she’d call. That I’d see her number light up on my phone and ignore it, just for the power of knowing I could.
I kept thinking about Mom’s Day One board, the little lies we both told ourselves, the way she’d come home after vanishing for days and pretend nothing had happened.
I wanted to blame her, but it was easier to blame myself. If I’d been a different kind of daughter. One who asked questions, who checked the medicine cabinet, who didn’t hide in her room during the bad spells.
Maybe things would have gone another way. Maybe she’d still be alive, or at least still be trying.
But my mind kept circling back to the way Mom looked the last time I saw her: fragile, like you could fold her in half and mail her away.
In the dark, I wondered if she’d been scared to die, or if it was relief. I wondered if, in her last moment, she’d been thinking of me, or if she’d already said goodbye in her own way years before.
My body ached with the wanting to know, and the knowing I never would.
Just when I thought I would spiral even further into terror and grief, Caiden woke up, rubbing his eyes.
“Fuck. I must have been tired,” he mumbled, analyzing how the color had changed from nightfall to a misty light color, hinting at daybreak.
I shrugged off the sleep I never found and rubbed at the smudge of fog on the glass, watching the world crawl back into color. “You were out for a while,” I said, steadying my voice into something almost normal.
He wiped a hand over his face and flexed his jaw, like maybe he could grind the tired out of his teeth. “You should have woken me sooner.”
“You looked like you needed it,” I replied.
He started the car. The engine coughed awake, and we sat a minute, exhaling little clouds, neither of us quite ready to talk about what we’d dreamed about or if we even dared.
The road was different now. The trees were pines and maples again, but the light through them was thinner, more brittle. We passed a string of rundown farmhouses, each one with its own collapsed barn and a muddy dog chained to a spike.
A few times, Caiden’s hand drifted off the wheel as if he were about to say something. He didn’t.
The world was colorless. Everything dipped in the milk-grey of early morning. The trees looked like ghosts.
I wanted to ask Caiden if he was okay, if he’d dreamed about Blake or his dad or whatever monsters chased him. But I kept my mouth shut. Some things, you don’t say out loud. Some things you just sit in, like a bath too cold to leave.
We passed a highway sign for Pathosbury: Next Exit. Caiden’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, and I felt it like a current in my chest.
“Almost there,” he said, but it came out as if he’d bitten his tongue.
I watched the town appear out of the autumn haze, all battered strip malls and the faint outline of the old mill smokestack. The trees thinned, replaced by brittle telephone poles streaked with rust.
My pulse thudded in my ears. I wondered if everyone feels this way, like coming home is a kind of drowning.
Caiden slowed as we reached Main Street, the car creeping past the pharmacy, the gas station, the little market I’d once shoplifted a candy bar.
Home.