Page 76 of Drowning Erin

He shakes his head. “Your dad?” he mouths, and I nod.

He gets his phone, directs Uber to the address my father gives me, and the two of us sit there, me with my head on Brendan’s chest, watching the car’s progress on his phone while I listen to my father cry on the other one.

“Your dad needs help,” he says after we finally hang up.

“He refuses to get any. I tried, and he and my mother both went nuts. It was the summer after my junior year, and my mom threw me out.”

His fingers tighten around mine. “I don’t know how you did this in high school. You ran track, and you were valedictorian, and then you dealt with this bullshit at night.”

I shrug. “Between Sean going to juvie and my dad’s stuff, it just felt like someone in the family had to prove to the world we weren’t a lost cause.”

I still felt like a fraud, though, delivering my speech at graduation. No matter what I persuaded the audience to believe, I knew I was every bit as sick as the rest of my family.

“It’s just a lot of pressure. I don’t know why you never gave up.”

“I can’t just walk away,” I reply. “This is a problem I helped create.”

“How can you say that?” he asks. “You’re not holding a bottle to your father’s mouth every night. You’re not buying Sean coke.”

“I’ve spent my entire life covering for my dad and rescuing him, doing the same thing for Sean. I should have been helping them, but I was no better than my mom. All I did was make it easy for them to get worse. Hell, I’m still helping both of them. My brother and my father are sick, but my mom and I…we’re sick too.”

“That’s why you hid it all from Rob,” he says after a moment. “Not because your family is such a disaster but because you think you’re just as bad. You think he’d like you less if he knew.”

“He would. Anyone would.”

“I don’t,” he says, pulling me closer. “I think maybe I like you better for it.”

Eventually he leads me back to bed, and as he pulls me against him, I feel something changing inside me. I don’t understand him. I don’t understand how he can act like he doesn’t know me when we’re out and take calls from some other girl while I’m here, yet be so perfect at times like this.

Either way, I’m glad I told him. A secret you keep to yourself festers and grows until it begins to seem monstrous in your eyes. But now, in one fell swoop, it isn’t something quite so poisonous, something I can barely stand to acknowledge. Instead, it becomes a part of my history, what led me to where I am. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t admirable, but it isn’t quite as ugly as it seemed when I kept it to myself.

That night Brendan sleeps closer to me than he ever has, his fingers tracing some secret pattern over my skin as I fall asleep.

52

Brendan

Three Years Earlier

“Do you love me?” Gabi asks every morning.

There are no words for how uncomfortable this question makes me. Because I said it once, I can’t exactly stop saying it now. So she asks every morning, looking up at me with that mixture of expectation and unrest in her face, and I tell her I do. She asks every afternoon. She asks when we go to bed. She asks and asks, and I have to wonder if the reason she keeps asking is because she knows, like I do, that what I say isn’t true.

Her need for constant reassurance begins to wear on me. It’s not enough that we’re in the same place. She has to be right beside me with her fingers wound through mine. She’s jealous of Erin. She’s also jealous of the book in my hand, the television show I’m watching, phone calls to my mother. She’s jealous of anything that directs my attention away from her. She seems to sense, though, when she’s pushed me too far—just when I get to the point that I’m wondering if I can deal with this shit for even a few more weeks, she starts taking off her clothes.

I fall for it every fucking time.

* * *

On a rare afternoon without her around, I go online and look at pictures from the wedding. It’s an exercise in masochism, but I can’t seem to stop. I remember watching Erin walk down the aisle. It was the moment I finally knew I could commit. God, I wish things had happened differently. I wish she’d been willing to hear me out. Mostly, I wish I’d been worthy of her in the first place.

When Gabi gets home from her tour, I don’t really feel like having sex. That makes her cry, of course. Everything seems to make her cry these days.

She asks if I’m cheating. Is jerking off to thoughts of your best friend’s girlfriend cheating? I doubt it. I tell her I’m not.

She isn’t reassured because she knows I never turn her down. It even surprises me a little, the fact that I don’t want to. I guess maybe I’m kind of bored with our whole thing.

Or maybe it’s that I know it would be better with someone else.