Page 17 of Burning Daylight
I throw another couch pillow at her, and she catches it, falling onto the floor and laughing.
Smiling, I pick my notebook back up and flip it open, but the words don’t flow the way they normally do. Instead, a hit of melancholy spreads through my chest when I realize I only have a few days left of this.
Felicity is coming back home, too, so we’ll still be around each other, but…it will be different.
Silently, I promise myself that I really will try to have fun tonight.
4
ROMAN
TWENTY-THREE YEARS OLD
Visiting my mom is never easy.
Not only because I don’t know which version of her I’ll get, but also because whenever I see her, the memories of who she used to be prick at me like a dull knife.
Sheusedto be healthy.
Sheusedto be a woman people looked up to.
Sheusedto be someone who loved me.
Now, she’s none of those things.
Still my mom, though, even if she’d rather forget that fact.
I trudge up the broken concrete pathway leading to the front door of her duplex. A few items of trash are scattered amongst the grass: a napkin here, a bright red chewed-up straw there. I nudge them aside with the toe of my boot before moving forward and remind myself one more time why I’m here.
Why I continue to show up.
For Brooklynn.
My gut tightens the same way it always does when I think of my sister.
Every day I try to find ways to help her but come up short because as much as I want to take care of her myself—get her out of this environment entirely—I don’t have enough money.
There’s never enough.
It’s not even that I don’t make a decent living. My art makes me enough to stay afloat. Or it would, if I didn’t give my mom every spare cent.
The problem is, my mom has a drug abuse problem, so we’re always one bad decision away from my sister not getting the care she needs.
Brooklynn’s been chronically ill for the past four years. We don’t know what’s wrong with her, and no matter how many tests they run or hospital stays she has, nobody can seem to figure it the fuck out.
She has constant medical bills, frequent checkups, and a fear that any random ache and pain could spiral into something worse.
Most recently, she’s been having seizures, and although her doctors can’t find the root cause, they’ve gotten her stable with medication. But I live in a daily panic that they’ll say she needs something like brain surgery, or that she’s developed something we can’t afford to fix.
Medical bills aren’t cheap. And neither are her meds.
Fucking big pharma assholes.
I reach the front door, the aluminum screen corroded with spots of reddish-brown shining through the chipped white paint. I knock twice before it swings open, and I meet the doe eyes of my little sister.
She smiles when she sees me, her brown irises sparkling. She’s the spitting image of our mom—or of how Mom used to look, at least—and every time I see her, it causes a phantom ache to rip open in my chest, reminding me again of how things used to be.
“Hey,” Brooklynn says, bouncing on her toes.
