When we got to the hotel alive, Erich turned the car off. We both got out, and he nearly tripped on his own feet as he exited the driver’s side. I rushed over to lead him inside, sneaking under his arm to put it over my shoulder to keep him from falling on his face. He brushed me away, snorting and patting my head as he went ahead of me and grabbed the door for me.
We were lucky our room wasn’t far away, plus on the first floor. The last thing I needed was him falling to the ground, knowing I couldn’t lift him back up on my own. He again insisted he was fine, but his hand trailing on the floral wallpapered wall told a different story.
When we finally got there and I unlocked the door, he went straight for the bed and fell backwards to stare up at the ceiling. After a few seconds, he lifted his head up, a look of confusion and fake offense at why I didn’t join him. He had a goofy grin as he made room for me, and I imitated his graceful act of falling on my back on the bed next to him. My hair instantly splayed out in all directions as the bed absorbed my impact.
I was still annoyed with his irresponsibility, but we were safe. That was enough reason to forgive him for now and give in to the fun part of Erich’s out-of-character actions.
“Thanks for being my partner in crime.” Erich’s hair was tousled, his clothes wrinkled from the night as he held up his fingers to make a finger gun, winking at me.
I fought back a giggle, the butterflies in my stomach awakening from the unexpected fondness. “It’s my pleasure, cowboy.”
Erich’s eyes didn’t move from my face for a long time. His dilated pupils took up a lot of the light blue I grew used to seeing. As he rested his eyes on my face, I watched the right side of his lip twitch as he lost himself deep in thought. Before I could ask what was on his mind, he spoke up. “You’re just… so much better than Olivia was when it comes to this kind of stuff.”
Who was Olivia? Between the months of May through August, I never heard her name. “Who’s that, Erich?”
Erich’s blue eyes dulled in the artificial lighting of our hotel’s bedside lamp, and he stared blankly, almost through me, before turning his head to stare at the water-damaged ceiling. As if the thought slipped through his lips before his brain could stop him, he realized he mentioned her name. “A girl,” he mumbled, then cleared his throat and spoke a bit louder. I watched both hands go over his eyes and into his hair. “I think I loved her.”
I was shocked to hear this for the first time, but curiosity was getting the better of me, even if it wasn’t exactly a “pour your heart out” moment. I gently sucked in my lips. “Is she the one you traveled with before me? The one you mentioned when we met?”
Erich nodded slowly. He blinked once as his eyes traced patterns in the ceiling, then he kicked off his brown boots mindlessly. They hit the stained carpet floor with a soft thud. “I never told you her name.”
I propped myself up with one arm to face him. “Do you want to talk about her?”
Erich’s lips twitched as he collected the words scrambled in his head in order to form sentences. Once he was able to string them together, he finally spoke. “We did and saw a lot of horrible things together… Her mom trusted me and loved me like her own son. I spent some time with them after I couldn’t get my brother back.”
I didn’t know he had a brother, either. He never mentioned his brother, and I wondered if he would tell me more about him. I didn’t want to take advantage of his drunken state, but at the same time…
“You have a brother?” I asked softly.
Erich’s eyes swam around in his head. With the way they swayed with the motion of his whiskey-fried brain, I knew I would not envy his guaranteed hangover in the morning. “A younger brother. We were separated.”
“What happened?” I prodded.
Erich rolled over to face me. I was the interrogator, and he had enough truth serum to humor me. If this was part of the story, the lore was not a planned slip. “I never knew my dad,” he said.
I could feel my lips drying out as I sucked in, ditching the awkward tic to bite my bottom lip instead. How do I pursue thestory further? This wasn’t the Erich I’ve known, and I knew I should tread carefully. The last thing I wanted to do was make him angry or uncomfortable for telling me more than he wanted me to know. I didn’t want to betray his trust, though I always predicted he had his own demons following him along for the ride.
He rolled to his back again, and the number of times he switched from his side to his back in this short period of time caused me to feel the drunken spins for him. His Adam's apple bobbed gently as he swallowed to continue. “He was some guitarist. Played on street corners and dive bars. Never met him.”
I was intrigued. I shoved back the gnawing sense of guilt to push forward in my innocent interrogation by giving Erich a solemn nod to continue.
“We lived with my grandma for a while. Then we left and my mom started seeing another guy. She had my brother. I don’t remember much else aside from living in a trailer and never seeing my grandma again… I was born in Los Angeles.” Erich rambled, and I focused on the small drunken slips as he put words together. He then added as an afterthought, “I don’t want to meet her, though.”
“Your grandma? Why?” I questioned. I would be annoying him with my one-word question if he were sober. Typically, if his silence wasn’t cause to stop asking questions, he would flick my forehead to shut me up. “Drop it, Bambi,” he’d tell me as I rubbed the spot on my forehead and fumed at his cutesy nickname.
Erich let out one small fake laugh. The upward turn of his lips was cruel, an out-of-character response that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. “She didn’t go looking for us after all was said and done. Why would I go looking for her?”
I was putting the pieces together. I got the impression it had more to do with his fear of attachment, but I digress. “So what happened to your brother?” I asked in an attempt to change the subject from his grandmother.
Erich’s gaze was distant, but I could see his brain processing where to go next. The vulnerability in the way his eyes darkened made my heart ache. “My mom left us,” he said. “I was eleven years old and he was only five. She just… took off. Probably figured a tour bus going across the country would be fun and there was nothing going for her raising two boys.”
Erich paused, tapping his fingers against his chest for a moment before continuing. “I caught on much sooner than he did... I fed him, took care of him, and waited for our mom to come back for weeks until someone must have noticed something was wrong and called CPS.”
The vent in the room kicked on with a mechanical whirr. He was trying to think of how to effectively explain his story, while I was listening on bated breath for what happened next. “So, one morning, I’m trying to stretch the last of the stale cereal in the cupboard. We were so young we didn’t know how to cook and would end up trying to microwave ketchup and bread crumbs or eat peanut butter from the jar. Didn’t think our mom was actually never coming back.
“Someone opened the door and we both ran, thinking it was her and she’d bring us somewhere for real food. Instead, it was a strange woman in a blazer and a pencil skirt. My brother burst into tears, thinking it would be like the scary news stories he heard late at night—the ones where kids were kidnapped out of their homes and found in cornfields fifty miles away.” Erich chuckled, but it was short-lived as he realized he had mentioned something dark and not funny at all. “I was afraid she came to tell us our mom was dead.”
It was intimate listening to Erich tell his story, and I started to wonder if he told Olivia all of this when they were together. When did she come into the story? Wasn’t our conversation originally supposed to be about her?
