She reaches down slowly and scoops up the hat. Then she looks at the pill bottle. A story is forming, but for the moment, she’s the only one who knows it.
“What’s a mantra?” says Will.
“It’s just a sentence you repeat,” says Diana. “For meditation mostly. But people use them for a lot of reasons.”
She clears her throat.
“I know about them,” she says, “because my mom used one when she tried to get sober.”
Hearing the wordmomcome from Diana stops you cold. You’ve only heard her mention her parents a handful of times, and if you ever asked a follow-up, she usually pretended not to hear it. All you know is that she doesn’t talk about them and she lives with her grandmother. And you’re not supposed to ask. She pauses a second now, maybe to make sure she’s actually willing to keep going.
“My parents were… addicts. Functional addicts for a while, and then not so much. My dad left. My mom tried to quit.”
She stops for a breath.
“The point is, she was at this meeting once when someonetold her she should have a mantra. Something to repeat to keep her centered and focused and everything. She came home and had me help her choose one. I think, in the end, she picked ‘I am healing,’ but there were some others she read me. And that was one of them. The thing you said about the days and hours and minutes. Like just a minute of sobriety was supposed to be a victory. Mom didn’t like it. Even a minute was too much pressure for her.”
“So you think it’s, like, a sobriety thing for him?” says Fran.
“Maybe,” says Diana. “Probably.”
Troy is already muttering to himself. And when Fran asks him to speak up, he says:
“It’s not a game.”
Will is noticeably silent now. The whole Boundary Waters seems to have stopped moving, just to give you all a moment to come face-to-face with this.
“No,” says Diana. “It’s not.”
She throws the hat to the ground.
“He’s not coming back?” you say.
Diana shakes her head.
“And he’s using all our pills,” says Fran. She squeezes her empty bottle like an amulet.
“He can’t help it,” says Diana. “That’s the thing. I mean, it’s okay to be pissed at him. But, like, it’s not even him. My mom…”
Her eyes are red, but there are no tears. You wonder if she’s cried them all already. Maybe there aren’t any left for this.
“My mom loved me. She still loves me. But she couldn’t beat it. Some of her relapses were…”
You all wait for the next word. But it doesn’t come. Instead, she switches gears and says:
“He might be more scared than we are.”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” says Troy.
But you all have a hunch that itispossible. Because you know what it’s like to be so deep in a spiral that even the worst decisions seem reasonable. And you know what it’s like to want something so badly, you’d do almost anything to get it. How suddenly the most ridiculous thing can seem like a good idea. Getting out of town. Taking a medical leave from school. Signing up for something called “Adventure Therapy.”
“We have to find him,” says Troy. “There’s only so many pills he can take at once. If we find him, we’ll get something back, and we’ll make him take us to the drop.”
“Yeah,” says Will. “And we’ll beat his ass.”
“Well,” says Fran. “If this is any indication, he’s headed north. So maybe that means we’re on the right track.”
Suddenly, the cut on the back of your head pulses with pain, and you look around with blurred vision. You’re not sure what you’re searching for. A sign of Silas, running through the trees, spying on you from a distant hill. But you don’t see him. All you see is trash. Trash and an empty cooler that used to be filled with food. Not long ago you had some and now you don’t. You close your eyes. Somebody’s stomach growls.
