Page 41 of How to Walk Away

This should have been thrilling news, but my heart was too numb to feel it. “That’s great,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, he thought he should keep that under his hat.”

“That’s why you went away?”

“That’s part of it.”

“And you stayed away because—what?—you were too fragile?”

“That’s part of it, too. I’ll give you the whole story sometime. But not tonight. Then you really will have nightmares.”

Fair enough. “So… you quit drinking entirely?”

“Entirely. It was brutal, but I did it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. We all have our struggles. I’m better for it, actually.”

“Does Mom know?”

“I have no idea.”

“You should tell her.”

“Nah.”

“It might help the two of you make up.”

“Well, that’s the thing, right there,” Kit said. “I’m not sure if I want to make up.”

She was offering up some answers to questions I’d carried around a long time, but somehow they were raising more questions than they were settling. What had happened that night she pushed our mom into the pool? What had they fought about? Who was mad at who, exactly? What on earth could have made Kit—who always longed so much for attention—shut us out for so long? I wanted to know, but I also didn’t. It had to be something big, and I wasn’t sure at this point I could even handle something small.

Wondering about Kit did offer a small distraction, and in the face of the wasteland my own life had become, there was something about a distraction that felt like relief.

Until Kit turned it all back to me.

“Can I tell you something comforting about your situation?” she asked, after a minute.

“No.”

It hadn’t been a real question, of course. It was just an intro. “Really? You don’t want to be comforted?”

“Nope.”

She wasn’t buying it. “Everybody wants to be comforted.”

How to explain to her that there was absolutely nothing she could say that would comfort me? Even the attempt would make things worse. There was no upside. There was no silver lining. There was no comfort.

But there was no way she could understand that. “Don’t comfort me. Don’t say a word. Just go to sleep before I kick you out again.”

“Okay,” Kit said.

So that’s how we stayed, two in the bed, all night long: Kit patiently comforting me while I rejected the very notion of the concept.

As long as she was just breathing in and out beside me in that snoozy, wavy, sleepy-Kitty rhythm of hers—it was fine. I didn’t believe in comfort anymore, and I knew for a fact that I would never, ever feel better. But having her with me like that? Not being alone? Well, it didn’t make me feelworse. That counted for something.

Ten

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