Page 83 of The Ones We Fight For

Chapter 30

Walker

It was going to be a terrible day—Walker knew it the second his alarm went off. Everything inside him felt sick when his brain came to, awakened from another dream where he was close to drowning. The pressure in his chest felt claustrophobic. He took several rhythmic, deep breaths to ward off the stress that wanted to crash over him. He needed to deter another panic attack from consuming him. Not today. Please, just not today.

“Happy Birthday, Cole,” he muttered aloud with a sigh, pulling the covers off his body and wandering into the bathroom, thinking a hot shower might do the trick.

It didn’t.

When he made his way downstairs, everyone was up already. The normal pleasantries—or, in his family's case, loud arguing and general chaos—were absent. It was dead silent except for the sound of Carter dumping cereal into a bowl. The kids all looked up when Walker entered the kitchen, and he felt the vice tighten its grip on his chest. He knew he should say something. Anything remotely inspiring or nice to get them through the day.

He came up with nothing.

Instead, he remained silent and made his way to the cabinet on autopilot to grab a bowl. He wasn’t even hungry. There was no way the cereal was going to slide down his dry, strangled throat.

Get it together, Walker, he berated himself.

“So,” Walker stifled his panic enough to speak. “What do you all want to do today?”

Five faces looked up with matching expressions of sadness that made him die inside. The pressure increased. No one responded, so he picked a random person. “Piper?”

“What? You want me to be my happy, joyful self today?” Her unexpected sarcasm smacked him across the face. “Sorry I can’t be happy all the time.”

“I’m not expecting you to be happy,” Walker choked out and turned toward his youngest nephew. “What about you, Coop? Something you want to do today?”

“Nope.” Cooper’s reply was simple when he normally would have posed a thousand questions about possible activities. The curious sparkle behind his eyes had dulled into a muted haze.

“Anyone?” Walker swiveled to look over at the rest of the siblings, practically begging for someone to respond. His plea was only met with more silence. He tugged on the collar of his shirt, pulling it away from his neck.

“I’m just going to go read a book,” Pearl said sweetly after no one coughed up an answer for an agonizingly long time.

“I’m going to a friend's to study for my AP Chem exam.” Colin picked his textbook off the counter and displayed it for show.

“Carter?” Walker pried.

“I’m just going to watch TV.” Carter shrugged noncommittally.

“I’m going for a walk,” Piper announced, shoving her earbuds into her ears and leaving the room with a sour expression.

It was only nine in the morning, and he was already failing them.

Heaving an unsatisfactory breath of air into his lungs, Walker tapped his fingers anxiously on the island before abandoning his empty cereal bowl and grabbing his keys off the hook near the door. He wasn’t sure where he was going or what he was going to do, but he needed to get out of the house. Out of the room where he was disappointing everyone. Surely getting some fresh air, windows down and cool air blowing his face would help relieve the feeling of an elephant sitting on his chest.

Minutes after getting in the car, Walker found himself parked outside of Talia’s, fighting the urge to go inside and ask for help. His brain did its due diligence in reminding him that just a couple of nights ago, he had let himself get so wrapped up in Talia and their “date” that he even had her fooled into thinking she liked him back, just in time to reject her and screw everything up. Again. Recalling the look of hurt on Talia’s face when he pulled back after almost kissing her only made the pressure in his chest increase.

He didn’t deserve her help.

Walker started the car again and kept driving, searching for anywhere else to go. It was a bad idea to drive to the corner of 5th and Pine, but he was hell-bent on punishing himself for being reckless with Talia and failing with his nieces and nephews. What would Cole and Paisley think? The only two people on Earth who ever gave a shit about him were gone, and he was doing nothing to help their kids.

In the past, Cole would have woken up on his birthday to breakfast in bed made by his wife and kids, and Walker would’ve meandered over to their house to enjoy breakfast with them, free of responsibility. Asking what everyone was doing that day wouldn’t have been an imposition. It would have been met with excitement over whatever event Cole had planned for his family that day. One time, Cole got a blow-up kiddie pool and filled it with water and dirt, and it became the great mud-wrestling incident of 2015. Walker never let Cole live down the fact that he beat him, pinning his brother in under a few minutes. Up until the day he died, Cole argued that his back was out and that was why he hadn’t won, to which Walker would always reply with “you keep telling yourself that, old man.”

“Except you never got to grow old like you were supposed to, did you?” Walker asked the open air as he slumped down onto the curb. He stared at the streetlight. The cars passing under it became blurred by tears. Everyone was driving over the intersection and going about their day, unaware that two of the most wonderful people to ever walk the Earth had died there. How could everyone just move on? How could the world keep on spinning as if nothing had even happened?

Walker wasn’t sure how long he sat there, watching the light turn from green to yellow to red, but the throbbing of his tailbone said it had been a while when he finally got up to leave. The pressure in his chest hadn’t subsided at all. He had just been able to zone out on the street for a while to ignore the rising panic. In the end, he couldn’t sit on the curb forever. He had a responsibility to make sure his family was okay. But he still needed help.

Something. Anything to help him get through the day.

???

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