Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Dixon
Of course. Of course. Of course.
AJ agreed with me that Stu was more important than anything else, but I heard the disappointment in her voice, and I couldn’t help thinking that I had just lost the only chance I might ever get with her.
A week ago, she was just my memory girl. It had never crossed my mind she might be real, that she might be someone I’d want.
Goddammit! I was so fucking sick and tired of feeling confused.
I needed a meeting, but there wasn’t one within driving distance of Wisper this late in the evening. I didn’t know him well yet, but I knew Theo lived above the community center, so maybe he’d be awake. He might know of a meeting close by.
I wanted to call Nesty. I wouldn’t have survived my last stint in rehab if he hadn’t been there with me.
I’d heard he’d relapsed again and had gone back in, but I assumed by now he’d gotten out and I hoped stayed sober.
I had his old number written on a slip of paper tucked in my wallet, but he didn’t know I had a phone again, and I had no clue if he had one either.
His number could have changed five times since the last time we’d talked.
There were probably fifty messages on cheap phones that had been lost or traded or forgotten from here to LA. No one would ever hear them.
And besides that, Nesty might be high. My sobriety wasn’t as fragile as it used to be. I wasn’t scared that my best friend being high would make me want to get high. It might, but I had coping mechanisms now that I didn’t have in the past.
But talking to someone who was three sheets was draining. Exhaustion weighed heavy on me just imagining how the conversation might go. And I knew I’d end the call feeling angry and frustrated and scared for my friend if he really had relapsed.
No. Tonight I needed to talk to someone who had already figured their shit out.
Pulling to the side of the road, I grabbed my phone from my center console and looked up the number for Ace’s House.
I saved the number, and then it rang three times when I dialed, but a cold, robotic voice told me the center’s inbox was full.
That was the problem with fucking cell phones.
If you really needed to talk to someone, they wouldn’t hear their phone if they turned it off or turned down the sound.
And how come everybody’s damn inbox was always full?
I hung up.
Shit.
But I had AJ’s number. A friend would call in their time of need, right?
I hit the widget thingie for my contacts and searched the meager list of names. I didn’t see AJ’s, but the list was only about an inch tall, and at the bottom I saw an entry titled “Tweedledee.”
Smiling like a fool, I hit the little round phone icon under the name and waited.
AJ picked up on the first ring. “Dixon? You okay?”
“May I please speak to Tweedledee? This is Tweedledum.”
She giggled into the phone. “I thought that might make you smile. Remember your brothers used to call us Tweedledee and Tweedledum?”
“I remember. God, that was lifetimes ago. Sometimes I wish I could go back.”
“Are you at Mrs. Ellison’s?”
“No. I’m on Route 20 somewhere. I didn’t want to go back there yet, but I didn’t know where else to go, so I drove.”
“You can come back here,” she said. “I feel like I came on too strong earlier. I’m sorry about that, but when you kissed me, I just…
Well, I felt somethin’, but I understand where you’re comin’ from.
If you want to come back, you don’t have to worry about that.
We’re friends and only friends. I promise. ”
“I felt it too,” I admitted. “Don’t you get it?
That’s why I had to stop it. I had to stop the kiss because— Fuck, AJ.
From the first moment I saw you, I wanted you.
But I don’t want just a kiss, and that’s the problem.
Anything more than that wouldn’t be fair to you. I’ll fuck it up. I’ll hurt you.”
“I don’t think you will.”
I’d never known a more glass-half-full kind of person! She needed a wake-up call.
“I killed the last woman I loved. Stu’s mama. Her name was Kel.”
I heard AJ breathing over the line as she tried to process what I’d just said. “You killed her? How did you do that? The Dixon I used to know wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“That Dixon is long gone, AJ. That’s what I’ve been tryin’ to make you understand.”
“So, tell me about her. Tell me what happened.”
I didn’t decide to do it, but as I spoke, I drove back toward AJ’s little cottage. It took me a minute, and I had to pull over again, but I finally figured out how to put the call on speaker and then set my phone on the dash.
“Kel. She was… Her name was Kellie Gale. It fit her ’cause she was fearless, like a gale-force wind. We were both sober when we met. She’d only ever done a little coke and pot, but I had just gotten out of rehab for… heroin. Sorry, you probably don’t want the details.”
“It’s okay,” AJ said. “I do want to know. I can handle it.”
“Well, we kept runnin’ into each other. Yeah, we were both sober, but neither of us were bein’ smart about it.
We didn’t change who we hung out with, y’know?
Which is the first thing you do after rehab ’cause all your old friends are the people you used to get high with.
Anyway, we didn’t do that, and our friends were friends, so we kept bumpin’ into each other.
“Finally, she asked me out, but the love story only lasted about two weeks. We bonded over our families hatin’ us. And like addicts do, we became inseparable because we confirmed for each other all the lies we liked to tell ourselves so we could stay sick.
“The next time we were together, she said she’d always wanted to try H.
I was feelin’ strong and protective—and stupid—so I tried to talk her out of it, but she’d already bought some and brought it with her.
So, then my dumb ass says, ‘If you’re gonna do it, at least do it with me in case you OD or need help or whatever. ’”
“Oh no,” AJ whispered. “I think I know what happened next.”
“Yeah,” I said as I parked behind the AVery Pretty Petal delivery van outside her Gran’s house. “And by the next day, we were both hooked and high as kites.”
AJ must’ve heard me pull up because she opened her front door as I walked toward it, but I still had the phone to my ear, so I admitted something that had been eating at me for years because maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to say out loud into a phone instead of straight to someone’s face.
“It’s my fault. It’s all my fuckin’ fault, AJ. I could’ve flushed that shit down the toilet. But I didn’t.”
AJ clicked off her phone and slipped it in her jeans pocket, and when I stepped onto her porch, she grabbed my hand and tugged me inside. We sat on opposite ends of the couch again, not saying a word and just looking at each other.
“It’s not your fault, Dixon,” she said softly. “Deep down, you know that, right? You didn’t force her to do heroin.”
“I didn’t stop her.”
“Would she have let you?”
Sighing and shaking my head, I said, “No. She’d already decided to do it, and when she made up her mind, nothin’ stopped her. It’s what drew me to her in the first place. She reminded me of my brother, Bax. He’s always known what he wanted. I was the opposite, and I hated that about myself.”
I thought for a few minutes about Kel and all the things she had been so stubborn about, like when we left California and hitchhiked out to Nebraska because she said she just knew she’d be happy there and we could get clean.
And then in Omaha, she insisted she was sober enough to drive the car she said she bought but I found out later she’d stolen.
I was too high to realize she didn’t have money to buy a car, even a shitty, used one.
She hadn’t been sober enough—I should’ve known that too—and she got picked up a block away from where we’d been staying in a run-down motel we’d paid for with the last of the inheritance she received when her dad died a few months before.
She spent ten days in jail until I could come up with the money for her bail, and not one red cent of that cash had been procured by legal means.
Still to this day I couldn’t remember how we made it back to California, but that was where I found myself when I woke up one morning with way too much clarity for my liking.
It should’ve scared the shit out of me that I had no clue how I’d traveled across five states, but it didn’t.
Heroin was thorough like that; it let all your fears and anxieties seep into the ground beneath your ass and made wherever you landed comfy as fuck so you never wanted to move again.
And once Kel and I were back in Redding, it was like we’d never left.
We were as high as ever, she didn’t go back to Nebraska for her court hearing, and she died later with probably several warrants out for her arrest.
“When we found out she was pregnant with Stu, she swore she could handle it. She promised to stay clean for him, and I believed her because she believed. But I also knew better.
“And Stu,” I said, “as soon as I saw him, I knew I’d get clean. Kel felt the opposite. It was like she went into shock after he was born. She couldn’t figure out how she deserved such perfection. She didn’t think she could ever be worthy of him, so she made it true.
“Those first two weeks feel like a dream to me now. Sometimes I doubt they actually happened, that she was sober for two whole weeks of his life. But it didn’t take long for her to find some dope, and it didn’t take much for her to convince herself that Stu was better off without her.
After that, she stayed as high as she could until I took Stu away from her.
“But she must’ve known deep down that she was wrong, like her mama-bear instincts had been activated.
He’d get so hungry and cry so hard, she tried to physically fight me to get him out of my arms so she could breastfeed him, but she had so much bullshit runnin’ through her veins.
I couldn’t let her feed him that. His little body had already gone through too much, detoxing after he was born. ”
God, just remembering was making me edgy. Here I was, home and hoping for forgiveness, but I still hadn’t forgiven myself, and I wasn’t sure if I ever could. I shifted on the couch, trying to find a comfortable position, but there was none.
“The shit I put that kid through. I’ll never forgive myself, AJ. I swear I won’t.
“But that was when I started to believe in myself, because I knew what was right. Kel couldn’t see it, but I knew how bad things were, and that’s when all those lies I’d been tellin’ myself began to crack and fall away.
“Stu and I lived in an abandoned barn on the edge of someone’s property for a week so I could keep him away from her.
The old man who owned the place found us out there, and he gave me food and water.
He let us stay in his air-conditioned garage, and his wife bought formula for Stu.
They offered to drive me up here when I told them I had family who would take Stu, but I needed to do it myself.
“By the time I got back to California after I left Stu with Bax, Kel was at the end. I tried, AJ. I tried so fuckin’ hard to get her to go to the hospital. She wouldn’t, and she died right in front of me.
“But it’s not her I see when I get the urge to use again.
” I shook my head, letting the pain split me in two all over again.
“It’s Bax, holdin’ my kid and the jealousy that caused inside me, because no matter how blissed out drugs can make me feel, seein’ Stu for the first time was better, holdin’ him in my arms, feelin’ his weight.
I’ve never loved anyone the way I love him.
It’s still crazy to me how fast I fell in love with him.
It was faster than instantaneous, and now that I’m here, the hope I feel about getting to know him and be around him feels the same.
I want that. I need him in my life more than any high. ”
AJ wiped away a tear that had fallen from the corner of her eye.
“Don’t cry. Please don’t cry for me. I don’t deserve your tears.”
“Yes, you do,” she said. “You forget, I knew you before you told yourself all those lies. I knew you before your daddy damaged the sweet little boy you used to be.”
“He was never my dad, AJ. He was just the sorry son of a bitch who owned the house I grew up in.”
“What does that mean?”
But I didn’t have it in me to explain all my conspiracy theories tonight.
Instead, I asked, “What about you? What have you been up to all these years?”