He climbed the stairs and went into his bedroom. It was mostly empty now, except for the mattress he slept on. He hobbled forward on his crutches and tugged his closet door open. Stared for a while at theMy Chemical Romanceposter taped to the inside of the door, the edges yellowed with age and turning up at the corners.
His eyes stung as he remembered the way Quinn had loved them. He remembered that night down at the creek. Quinn had stolen some alcohol, and he’d been drunk and angry, screaming the lyrics of “This is How I Disappear” into the night. He’d been so angry he’d been crying, and Aaron had never felt so helpless. Not just helpless to stop him, but helpless to even understand the depths of his pain and the places that this sudden, terrifying anger came from.
“Stop! Just stop it!”He’d shoved Quinn up against a tree.
“I need to leave, Aaron. I need to get the fuck out of this town, away from…away from all of them! Away fromeverything!”
Aaron had threaded his fingers through Quinn’s long hair and made a million promises to the boy he loved, and Quinn’s tears had shone in the moonlight. And then, later, every single one of those promises had been shattered by a bullet in the night.
Aaron reached for his prosthetic leg and slammed the closet shut.
He wedged his leg under his chin as he made his way carefully downstairs again. He knew better than to try to put it on from ground level. He needed a chair.
In the kitchen, the tap was dripping: another broken thing to fix.
Aaron winced as he tugged the liner on over his stump. He smoothed the liner out, and then fitted the prosthetic. Using the table for balance, he stood. The air hissed out of the valve as he applied his body weight cautiously to the prosthetic. He’d seen so many videos of amputees walking and even running with prosthetics, but Aaron still couldn’t trust it. It was all in his head, he knew, and it was something he needed to work on, but he still couldn’t get past that fear that he’d take a step and the leg would fail him.
Maybe he needed Uncle Will to gently bully him about his leg as well.
He stepped away from the table, his stomach twisting and all his muscles tightening as he anticipated a fall.
“Walk like you mean it!”his physical therapist had told him more than once, but Aaron just hit that same mental barrier every fucking time.
He made his way carefully into the den, and then realized his toolbox, with the paint scraper he needed to start stripping the wallpaper, was back in the kitchen.
Such a tiny fucking thing, but it was enough to make his eyes water and sting with tears.
Shit.
He hated this.
He hated how pathetic he was, and how he was here wallowing in self-pity over his goddamn leg when the two other guys he’d been walking with that day hadn’t come home at all. How they’d all been riffing on something—or someone, probably—or telling some stupid joke, and then Aaron’s world had turned upside-down in a blast of heat and noise and dirt and blood…but theirs had just ended, right there in that moment.
It wasn’t fair that they’d died, and it wasn’t fair that here Aaron was, months later, getting worked up because his life was suddenlyinconvenient.
His hot burst of self-hatred gave him the energy to get to the kitchen and back, lugging the toolbox with him. He thought suddenly of some cartoon he’d watched as a little kid that had terrified him: rows upon rows of toys that had come to life, marching along stiff-gaited. He wasn’t even sure if they were meant to be so scary and robotic—it had probably been the result of some old animation technique rather than anything else—but Aaron had run screaming to Mom and Dad anyway. And now he felt like one of those cartoon toys, jerking as he walked, like bits of him were made of clockwork.
He set his toolbox on the couch to save bending all the way to the floor, and opened it and dug through for the paint scraper. Then, clutching the tool in his hand, he approached the closest wall. He laid his hand on it, searching for a seam in the wallpaper.
He wasn’t sure why this was so hard. He’d cleaned Mom’s place out a few weeks ago. Maybe it was because Mom’s condo in Phoenix had never really felt like home. Aaron had only lived there a few months in total, and that had been spread over the years. This house though, this unassuming little house in Spruce Creek, Nevada, had been his home once. He’d been happy here. He’d formed his earliest and most enduring memories under this roof.
His Dad had lived here.
And the problem, Aaron supposed, was that he hadn’t been ready to let his Dad go. Nowhere near it. Mom…Mom had been in a slow decline with her cancer, and Aaron had known from the moment of her diagnosis that there would come a point she’d stop fighting. And it wasn’t about the expense, or even the toll on her body. A part of Mom had died when Dad had. She’d never been the same after his death. It hurt to admit, but she’d wanted to go. Whether she believed there was some sunlit place beyond death where she’d be with Dad again, or whether she was just tired of living with her grief, she’d wanted to go.
At least she wasn’t in pain anymore.
Aaron’s shaking fingers found a seam in the wallpaper, and he levered it up with the edge of the paint scraper.
It was time. It was time to stop wallowing. It was time to stand up straight again. It was time to move forward into a new life, even if he didn’t know yet what shape that new life would take. It was time to come to terms with his past, both here in Spruce Creek and in Afghanistan, and to stop letting it drown him. Hell, maybe it was even time to stop drinking.
His mouth quirked into a bitter smile at the thought. Well, baby steps, right? Because he had an idea that he’d really be able to use a beer after today. A beer, and probably at least one of those unopened bottles of whiskey he’d stashed upstairs where Uncle Will wouldn’t find them. Because after tearing the scab off this wound, oblivion sounded good.
He thought again of how his parents had put this wallpaper up, long before he was even born. Thought of how they’d bought this little house and made it their own.
And then he levered the paint scraper in under the sheet of wallpaper and ripped a wide strip of it from the wall.
Chapter 5
