Worry about it later,Emma’s voice whispers through my thoughts. She and Dad must have slipped away downstairs during my meltdown.
“We gonna eat or what?” Shayna asks.
“I’m hungry,” Mom whispers like it’s a question she doesn’t know the answer to.
“Then let’s eat,” I tell them both. I loop my arm through Mom’s and guide her downstairs. Her gait is fragile, a shaky shuffle that keeps her fingers gripping tight to my arm for balance.
Shayna and I guide Mom to the table, one on either side of her. After a slow wrestle with gravity, Mom lowers herself into the chair facing the window. She looks so small at the head of the ten-person dining table. Nothing like what I know her as. So vulnerable. Breakable.
The image scorches my chest. I swallow hard, but the lump won’t go down.
I watch as Jay wraps a bib around her neck, Shayna slides a folded towel into her lap, and Dad places a paper plate with flimsy plastic silverware in front of her. Tasks meant for a toddler. Tasks I’d die of embarrassment having done for me. And they’re for my mother.
“Everything okay?” Emma whispers, her hand light on my back. “What’s wrong?”
I blink, and a sharp pain shoots from my clenched jaw into my temples. My fists are balled so tight my knuckles ache. I feel like I’m standing at the edge of a cliff, one breath away from tipping.
“I need some air.”
Before she can protest, I’m out the front door and heading for the barn. It’s the same as I remember—yellow siding, blue roof (because Mom insisted red was too cliché), a stack of old tires by the door for boots. I fling the door open, and it ricochets off the wall, sending birds blasting out of the rafters.
They streak past in a blur, and everything around me follows, going fuzzy and unsteady. The pain in my temples throbs harder, and my neck burns.
“What is wrong with me?” I whisper.
The barn gives me nothing back. Still, I ask again, yelling this time. “What is wrong with me?!”
The sudden urge to kick at the ground comes. I do it.
Then again.
And again.
Heat takes over my body. I grab a water bucket and hurl it at a pile of hay. A guttural scream rises from somewhere deep, tearing its way up my throat until it explodes out of me. My vision sparks with little white stars as I yell and shout, shaking out the furious energy that seems to have been lying dormant inside me.
“Steven.”
I whirl around to see Emma staring at me. She looks horrified, eyes wide and on the brink of tears.
I open my mouth to speak, but shame slams into me so hard my words stumble. Her eyes drift to the kicked-up dirt, then back to me, and I can’t read her face. Or maybe I refuse to, terrified to know what it’ll tell me.
“What are you doing?” she finally asks.
I grimace at the way she says it, like this version of me disgusts her. My face, still burning, pinches. I want to reach for her, tell her I’m losing my mind, I’m unraveling. Tell her that she feels like the only thing keeping me afloat right now.
“Steven…” her voice trembles, “what is happening?”
“I don’t know…” I manage, the words taking so much effort to get out.
“Honey…”
“What?” I snap at her, instantly hating myself.
She doesn’t say anything, and a sick familiarity twists in my gut. The way her jaw sets, the way she won’t meet my eyes…it’s an argument that’s happened before. I can feel it. I just don’t remember it. I don’t know how to tell her I’m angry. I’m terrified she’ll think the anger is aimed at her. She’ll blame herself. I know she will.
At my silence, she exhales sharply and crosses her arms over her chest, the cool February air fogging around her face. Her black puffy coat rustles, and her boots crunch in the dirt. Tiny innocent sounds that scrape against my nerves like nails on a chalkboard.
“Can you just—” I snap again, flinching at my own voice. “I need silence. Please.”
