Chapter 12
After the nurse left the room, my mother started to give me the good ole fashioned silent treatment. All the way through the doctor coming in, explaining the aftercare instructions, and discharging her—which took hours—my mom didn’t speak one word tome.
It wasn’t until we were in the car on the way back to the trailer that she graced me with conversation. “So where’d you run off to? Find aman?”
I rolled my eyes. “I went to finddad.”
She forced a laugh. “That deadbeat. I bet he’s dead in some ditchsomewhere.”
“I foundhim.”
I could see her pissed off face out of the corner of my eye. “And?”
“He’s doing well. It was surprising to find him with hundreds of letters and page after page of legal papers. Why the fuck did you let me think that he had abandoned me for all those years? Don’t you know what that did tome?”
“He walked out on us, Crit. Don’t let that slime ball ever try to fool you into thinkingotherwise.”
“Let’s just leave it. We’re not going toagree.”
I helped her hobble into the trailer and propped her leg up on the couch with a couple of pillows like the nurse had explained to me before weleft.
“Get me my damnpills.”
I grabbed her purse out of her reach. “You can’t take one for at least another hour, Ma. You know that. And you have to eat withthem.”
“Fuck you. You’re not the boss ofme.”
I was over it. All of the feelings of guilt for leaving her washed away as she looked at me with complete loathsome disgust. I looked around the tiny living room of our trailer, which was falling apart. The two buckets were nearly full of water from the roof leaks, the mildew was stinking up the place from carpet that had needed to be replaced years before, and the furniture was falling apart and mismatched, but none of that bothered me. The fact that the stove hadn’t worked right since I was fifteen was fine, and the way that the faucet in the bathroom made a glugging sound while it ran wasn’t the issue. The biggest problem in that whole dilapidated place was the woman who’d settled for that shithole so many years before. She was the problem with my life that I was running away from. She was the wretched quicksand that tried to suck my life away. My mother was a miserable excuse for a human being. I had known it for years, but I was finally letting myself be at peace withit.
I handed her the bag and started to dial the pizza place just up the road. “If you’re going to insist on abusing your medications, then at least eat something so you don’t destroy what little liver you haveleft.”
I barely got her to eat half a slice of pizza before she was popping two more pills into her mouth and falling asleep on the couch with a lit cigarette between herlips.
I pulled a blanket over her, put out the cigarette, and decided to call it a night. She had taken enough medication to keep her knocked out for the night and the walls were thin enough that if she needed me, I would be able to hearher.
The feeling of my old room, my old sheets and bed, my old everything was awful. I hated how stifling being back there was. My phone vibrated with another unread text from Abel. I powered it down; there was only so much drama I could handle for oneday.
I knew that he was worried about me and that it was probably wrong to ignore him the way that I was, but the image of him killing a man in cold blood right in front of me was something that was not going to go away easily. I wasn’t completely naive; I knew that it was the nature of the beast. Abel was the freaking vice president of the motorcycle club for crying out loud. I had seen a few episodes of Sons of Anarchy, I knew there was probably blood on his hands, but knowing it was probable and knowing it was fact were two very different animals in my book. Ignorance really wasbliss.
I woke up to a loud crash coming from the living room around five in the morning. I grabbed the robe that hung on the back of my door and raced to my mother’s side. She was laying on the couch, her eyes barely open, drool dripping from the left side of her mouth. She had knocked the side table over trying to shove up from the couch without hercrutches.
“Do you need to go to the bathroom?” I asked, putting my arm under hers, ready to hoist her up. That’s when I saw the almost empty bottle of pills lying open on the floor next to myfeet.
Horror rushed in. “Mom, oh my God! You didn’t.” She slurred a few words that I was unable to make out as I shook her. I looked down to her hand: she was gripping a syringe full of what I figured to beheroine.
“Mom what the fuck do you think you’re doing? This is not the answer.” I kept shaking her and she came to a little bitmore.
“Please, Crit. I’m so tired.” Her head rolled onto my shoulder and I sat down next to her, silentlypanicking.
She groggily patted my thigh. “I don’t want to fight anymore.” Her words slurred together as her eyes struggled to stayopen.
My voice cracked as I tried to figure out what to do. “Mom, you can turn this around. Let me help you get out of thishellhole.”
“Honey, it’s too late.” Her drool was dripping onto my arm as she started to position the needle to her vein. “There’s nothing in this world left for me. They’ve taken it all from me. I have nothingleft.”
I was like a deer in headlights, just waiting in the middle of the road for the accident to happen through the tears welling in my eyes. Slowly she pushed the drugs into her bloodstream. I knew that she was done. I knew that I should have been calling the police, but I just sat there paralyzed while I watched my mother take her own shitty life. The worst part, the part that really scared me, was that I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t sad. I was just numb. Maybe deep down I knew that it was all for the best, and if that was what she really wanted then who was I to stand in herway?
I cradled her in my arms while she shook, tears rolling down her swollen, bruisedface.
