Page 21 of Not Another Yesterday
“I tried to get in touch with her earlier today, but she only called me back during dinner,” he says.
The fact that Ronan reached out to his therapist on Thanksgiving when he hadn’t seen her in a month gives me pause. My mom’s a psychiatrist who works with victims of severe trauma. That means, aside from her regular office hours, she’s always on-call and available to her patients when they find themselves in crisis. It must have been a bad nightmare if Ronan’s call to his therapist couldn’t wait until Monday, or maybe his grandmother’s visit yesterday affected him more than he’s letting on.
I’m contemplating how best to continue the conversation without inadvertently saying something that will cause him to shut down. “Were you able to get some relief by talking to Doctor Seivert?”
Ronan turns his head to look at me, eyes searching mine with something like gratitude for not forcing him to talk. “A little,” he says. “I’m actually going to see her on Monday.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I think I need to.”
I wish I was the woman he was comfortable opening up to, but at least he’s talking to someone.
Tuesday, December 20th
Ronan
It’s still dark when I wake—not from the soft patter of rain, though it's steady against my window—but from the persistent buzz of my phone under the pillow. I squint at the screen. 6:52 a.m. An unfamiliar number with an area code I don’t recognize. Dread twists in my gut before I even swipe to answer.
“Hello?” My voice is raspy, like my vocal cords were raked over hot coals.
“Hey, Rony,” Miranda chokes out.
I sit up fast, immediately on high alert. “Randi?” Holy shit, I haven’t heard from her since she left Montana last March. “Are you alright?”
“No. I need your help,” she says, her voice cracking.
Is she crying?
I’m already getting out of bed. “What happened?”
She holds back a sob, but I hear the whimper. “I… Everything is gone. My money, my phone, my truck,” she says, choking on the last word. “He fucking took everything. I don’t know what to do. I have no one else to call.”
There’s something about the way she says that—no one else to call—that lands like a stone in my chest.
I don’t ask her who “he” is while I walk to my closet.
“Where are you right now?” I ask, switching my black sweatpants for jeans while I balance my phone—with Miranda on speaker—in my right hand.
“I’m at a motel in Pikeville, Tennessee,” she says, then sniffles. No fucking clue where that is.
“Is anyone there with you?” I try to button my jeans one-handed.
“No,” she says meekly. Miranda doesn’t get defeated, but that’s all I hear in her voice. Defeat. “I’m all alone. I don’t know what to do.”
I pull on a hoodie before I ask her for the name and address of the motel. I pull it up on my phone.
“Okay, listen, Randi, I’m going to head to you right now, but it’s going to take me a while to get to you. I probably won’t be there until tonight sometime. Can you stay where you are?” I grab my wallet and car keys from my nightstand.
“I have to check out in a few hours, Rony. I don’t have any money to pay for another night,” she says, clearly trying to keep her composure but failing. “He took everything. Everything.” A renewed cry follows her words.
I make a split-second decision. “Okay, let me talk to the front-desk person.”
Miranda must have handed off the phone, because only a second later an older woman’s voice comes through. I cut to the point, pay for another night, and make sure she confirms Miranda is all set. The woman passes the phone back.
“Thank you, Rony,” she says. Her voice is hoarse. Like she hasn’t slept in days. Like she hasn’t stopped crying in hours.
My heart squeezes uncomfortably in my chest. I’ve always had a lot of love for Miranda. Not in the way she wants me to—at least based on what she told me the last time I saw her—but I care about her deeply. I also know that Miranda isn’t one to ask for help. She and I are so alike in that respect: way too damn independent for our own good, too afraid to ask for help because it makes us vulnerable and exposes us to pain. So the fact that she called me after disappearing into thin air, after not speaking to me for over nine months, makes me think she’s in a bad place.
