Page 116 of Running Home to You
“I’m your friend. I’m your family. Someone has to tell you that you’re being a coward. That it’s time for you to get your shit together and go after her or you’re going to lose her forever!”
“Fuck you!” She launched up from the couch. “Stay out of my life! Stay out of my business!”
“I’m trying to help!”
“Help? Why would I ever turn to you for help? I should’ve never listened to you five years ago! I should’ve gone after her then, before everything turned to shit!”
“Abby—”
“I don’t need your help, Mick! You’re not my family, okay? So, fuck off and stay fucked. I don’t want to hear about Kate, and I don’t want to hear from you!”
She hung up and hurled the phone into the couch cushions. The room spun. Sweat soaked her clothes, and her heart thundered so hard she thought she might have to call an ambulance.
She stumbled into the bathroom, snatched the last pill bottle from the medicine cabinet, and poured its contents into her palm. For a terrifying flash, she considered taking them all at once. The ringing roared. Put her mother in the mirror across from her. She was just like her. Longing, sick, dying for a love she couldn’t have.
Abby chucked the pills into the toilet. She told herself she didn’t need them, but then she dropped to her knees and fished out a handful. She popped one in her mouth, slunk against the tub, and buried her head into her hands.
It still wasn’t bottom.
Bottom came a few days later at another poorly attended home game. She drank too much the night before at a party with T.K.’s friends. She assuaged the hangover with a few cocktails and an oxy that she swiped from the host’s bathroom. It was, shamefully, the reason she didn’t completely cut herself off from T.K. as she did the others. Her real estate and Hollywood friends often had plenty to spare.
As she stumbled into the dugout for warm-ups, she heard the words swirl around her teammates. Stockholm. Canceled.
“What?” she asked them.
“They’re cutting softball again this year.”
Abby went rigid. “They can’t do that.”
“Apparently, they can. I mean, they’ve done it before. It’s up to the host city and the Olympic committee.”
“That’s bullshit!”
Something snapped inside. Something deafening. This ringing wouldn’t stop. It drilled into her skull and sent her hands over her ears. Her teammates moved around her, wide-eyed, their mouths moving to ask if she was okay before she squeezed her eyes shut.
It was over. Everything she had done that horrible summer meant nothing. The pain, the pills, the loss. And of course it happened here, at UCLA. Her mother not in the stands but in her. Every horrible thing kicked up a storm as she grabbed her bat bag.
“Fuck this,” she said.
“Where are you going?” one of her teammates asked.
She stomped for the parking lot, determined to run. She didn’t care where, as long as it promised a drink and a dark place.
It took her several clumsy minutes to fish her car keys out of her bag, and when she finally got them, another person’s hand swiped in. “Hey, I don’t think you’re good to drive,” her coach said.
Abby jerked back. “I’m fine.”
He snatched the keys from her. “Not like this. Why don’t you come back and sit for a minute?”
Abby reached for the keys. A few of her teammates circled around, offering their support, but this wasn’t her team. This wasn’t Coach Whitley or the Eagles. This wasn’t Mick or Jill or T.K. And it certainly wasn’t Kate.
“Give them to me!”
She lunged, and the team boxed her out. Abby pushed them away. She couldn’t make out what they said in the ringing. She barely made out shapes or colors as she lost her breath. Except for her bat. The one thing she knew how to do.
Abby swiped it like a sword and, with nothing left to take aim at, she cracked her own windshield. If they wouldn’t let her meet the end she desired, then she’d create another. She smashed the headlights, her mother whispering in each one of them. The breaking and crunching metal of the same crash that took her life. And the ringing roared—of that phone call, of the horn honking from her mother’s head slumped on the wheel, of her scream in the morgue.
She wouldn’t know the other snippets until the police report. Fortunately, even when the team tried to stop her, she didn’t swing at or hurt anyone. But she hurt their cars. She took all her drunk, high rage out on the entire parking lot, bashing a dozen until the police finally came. It wasn’t until the cuffs snapped on her wrists that she could see again.
