Page 9 of The Sound Of Us

Dropping to my knees, I take the old wooden box out. I like to look inside, especially on Fridays, to remember that I had not always been alone. Picking out the handmade beaded bracelet from the box, I close my eyes and reach for that feeling of closeness. Of safety.

Frank likes to tell me my mother killed herself because she couldn’t stand to have a cancer patient for a son, but I know the truth. She loved me as much as she could. It’s true that I’d hated her those first six months after she’d died, but I didn’t really. I’d just been so damn scared.

She’d been addicted to painkillers because that’s what happens to people sometimes when their sadness overtakes them.

She thought she could handle the pills that day she took too many. It had been an accident. She hadn’t deliberately left me. Maybe the pain had been too much that day.

Frank may tell me a lot of things and most of them may be true—I look like a chi-hua-hua when I’m sick; my curly blond hair is too girly when it’s grown out; my father didn’t even want me; why bother with finishing school or getting a driver’s license if I have a terminal illness (what’s the fuckin’ point, Axel, and besides you have me).

But this one thing that my mother had left me? I’ll never believe that. My father, yes. He definitely left me. He left us, me and my mom. And went gallivanting across the state in search of his lost youth or whatever. But my mother never left me. She’d made a mistake. A fatal one, but she never deliberately took those pills to kill herself.

She wasn’t much different from most people in River Valley, you know. It’s just the way it is around here. People can’t afford treatment for mental illness, let alone proper illegal drugs. So, we have a sort of system going.

For example, I have a regular supply of pain medication from my last chemo, which Frank sells to the guys at work for extra money.

The broken public healthcare system allows me to get medication for an illness I hadn’t needed treatment for in recent years, and I know that’s illegal, but for Frank, it’s good business.

I can’t believe we can actually get away with crap like this and that I actually do it, but I had come to some sort of agreement with the barrel of Frank’s gun.

I haven’t needed the pills in years (praise Jesus), but I still collect them at Frank’s insistence (“what if you need them one day?”).

I once asked Frank exactly that (what if I need them one day) while he sat at the kitchen counter, repackaging the pills. “You’ve been in remission for how many years now? If you were going to die, you’d have done it by now,” he’d replied. I almost felt bad about not dying when he said that.

My mother got caught up in prescription drugs and she just could never get out of it. But she never left me.

I replace the beaded bracelet carefully, my fingers grazing the pieces of paper folded neatly at the bottom of the box. Letters my mother had written to me in the early years of my life and during her pregnancy. I think it’s common for new mothers to do that sort of thing in the beginning.

Grow up stronger and brave, Axel, one letter had said.

Know that no matter what, I’ll always be with you.

I believe her, you know. That she’s always with me.

The front door creaks open. I shove the box back into the cubicle, making sure my other secret is also hidden from plain sight: a pair of black silk ladies’ underwear.

The particular way in which the door creaks makes my heart leap with hope. No Lube Fridays usually begins with the front door slamming into the wall behind it. I reach for my shoes anyway, so my toes are covered.

“Axel?”

I detect a slur but still, no door slamming. I leave the shoes and step out of the bedroom, pasting a smile on my face. Pepper whines softly behind me.

“Hey, you’re home.” Soft, gentle voice. The way he likes it.

“Something smells good. Better taste as good.” Words that begin as a compliment and end as a threat. Only I understand the paralyzing fear from those words.

“Beef stew,” I tell him. He hands me his gloves and the evening newspaper. I set them down on the kitchen counter. “You hungry?”

“Starvin’.”

“Blue plates or the white ones?” I ask, watching him from the corner of my eye, praying he’d say blue. His fists clench and unclench. Bad sign. I inhale carefully so it doesn’t sound like a ‘fed-up sigh’ on the exhale. Because what the fuck do you have to complain about, Axel?

“Blue.”

My out-breath sends relief skittering down my spine. You see, the blue plates were thinner, lighter. And had little impact when flung across the room. Also, I was able to dodge them easily enough. The white plates are large and if I was close enough, like I am now, a cut to my chin is inevitable.

Frank settles into the chair at the four-seater dinette just next to the kitchen.

Clench. Unclench.

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