She was on her knees in the hallway pulling winter boots out of the closet when she heard Connor say the word withdrawal through his bedroom door.
Not to her. Into his phone, in a voice she’d never heard him use. Low and careful, the way you’d talk to someone about a body you needed to move.
Linda stopped. One boot in her hand, the other wedged behind a broken umbrella. The furnace kicked on beneath her and warm air came up through the floor vent and hit her bare ankles. She didn’t move. She didn’t breathe.
“No, I know. I know. But I can’t do three days. I literally cannot. My hands already — yeah. Yeah, like that but worse.”
A pause. She could hear him pacing. Three steps, turn, three steps. His room was small. She’d picked it for him when he was nine because it got the morning light and he used to draw at his desk before school, those dense little graphite cityscapes she’d kept in a shoebox under her bed until the shoebox got wet when the basement flooded two Januarys ago and she’d thrown it out without telling him. She thought about that shoebox now. Why she thought about it now, standing in the hallway holding a boot, she couldn’t say.
“Because I tried. I tried that and I threw up for like six hours and then I went and got more, so what’s the point.”
Got more.
She set the boot down on the carpet. Quietly, the way she used to set down his baby monitor when he’d finally fallen asleep. The same delicacy. The same held breath.
“Kyle, listen to me. Listen. I need you to spot me until Friday because if I go to that clinic they’re going to — no, they report it now. I looked it up. They report it to your insurance and then your insurance tells — I don’t know if it’s your employer but it goes somewhere and I can’t have that, I literally just started this job.”
Connor had started at the civil engineering firm seven weeks ago. She’d driven him on his first day because his Civic was in the shop, and he’d asked her to drop him a block away so nobody would see. Twenty-four years old and embarrassed of his mother’s Subaru. She’d thought that was the funniest thing. She’d told her sister about it that night, laughing, and her sister had said well at least he’s working.
At least he’s working.
She pressed her back against the hallway wall and slid down until she was sitting. The carpet was the same carpet from when they’d moved in. Beige, going bald near the bathroom door. She could feel the weave of it through her jeans, the thin spots.
“I don’t want to talk about rehab. Don’t — Kyle. Kyle. I said I don’t want to.”
He was crying. She could hear it in the way his consonants went soft. She knew that sound from a thousand iterations: the time he broke his collarbone on the trampoline, the time Mackenzie Riordan told everyone at school he’d peed himself in fourth grade (he had), the night his father left and Connor sat in the tub fully clothed with the water running because he said the sound of it helped, and she’d sat on the bathroom floor on the other side of the curtain and neither of them spoke for forty-five minutes.
She was on the other side of a barrier again. Listening to him and not being able to do anything about it.
Her hands were in her lap. She looked at them. Dry skin around the knuckles, a blister on her right index finger from the new pan she’d bought at Marshall’s that didn’t have a proper handle. Normal hands. Tuesday afternoon hands. She’d been about to swap out the closet, put the summer stuff in bins, get the winter boots accessible. She’d been thinking about whether she had enough of those vacuum-seal bags.
“Like a week. Maybe five days. I just need to get to payday and then I can — no, not that much. Not like that. Like maintenance. Just so I can function. Just so I can go to work and not—”
He broke off. She heard a thud. His fist against the wall or maybe his head. He used to do that as a teenager when he was frustrated, knock his forehead against whatever was closest, a wall, a doorframe, the steering wheel of the Civic. She’d taken him to a therapist about it when he was fifteen and the therapist said it was a self-regulation strategy and Linda had nodded and said okay and drove home thinking my son hits his head against walls and they’re telling me it’s a strategy.
“Oxy. No — I mean, it started with that, but now it’s whatever. Whatever I can get. I know. I know that. You don’t think I know that?”
Oxy.
She said the word inside her head and it didn’t connect to anything. Just a sound. Two syllables. She said it again. Oxy. Like oxygen. Like something you need to breathe.
Her left knee was doing the thing where it ached if she sat on the floor too long. She’d need to get up soon or it would lock and she’d have to kind of roll sideways and use the wall. Forty-seven and her body was already betraying her in these small administrative ways; a knee that locked, a shoulder that clicked, the new thing where she’d wake up at 3 AM and not be able to fall back asleep because her mind would just start, like a car engine turning over in the cold, grinding through whatever she hadn’t dealt with during the day.
From behind the door: “Okay. Okay, Friday. Thank you. Kyle, thank you. I’ll — yeah. Yeah, I’ll be careful. I’m always careful.”
She almost laughed. The sound came up her throat and she caught it with her hand, pressed her palm over her mouth. I’m always careful. Her son, the careful one. The boy who wore a helmet without being asked, who checked the stove twice before bed, who’d cried at six when he accidentally stepped on a caterpillar in the driveway.
Footsteps moving toward the door.
She stood up fast and her knee screamed and she grabbed the boot from the floor and shoved it into the closet and pulled the closet door shut and was three steps toward the kitchen when his bedroom door opened behind her.
“Mom?”
She stopped. Turned. Put something on her face. She didn’t know what it was. A smile, she hoped. Or at least neutral. At least nothing.
He looked the same. That was the worst part. He looked exactly the same. Brown hair that needed cutting, the old Gonzaga sweatshirt with the hole in the cuff where he’d picked at it until the thread unraveled, his father’s jaw, her eyes. Skinnier maybe. She’d thought that last week and told herself it was the new job, the stress of it, that he wasn’t eating enough because he was nervous.
She’d told herself that.
“You doing the closet thing?” he asked.
“The closet thing. Yeah.”
“Need help?”
“No, honey. I got it.”
He looked at her for a second too long. Something in his face she couldn’t read or maybe had been reading wrong for months. Then he went past her toward the bathroom and she stood in the hallway with winter light coming through the window at the end of the hall, that gray Washington light that made everything look like a photograph of itself, and she listened to the bathroom door close and the fan come on and the water run.
She went into the kitchen. Put both hands flat on the counter. The granite was cold. She stood like that for a while. A car went by outside and she tracked the sound of it; the Doppler shift as it passed, the way it seemed to pull something with it. She was aware of her heartbeat in a way that felt new. Not fast, just loud. Like it had moved closer to the surface.
There was a chicken defrosting in the sink. She’d taken it out this morning, before work, and set it in a bowl of cool water the way her mother had taught her, though she was pretty sure the internet said you weren’t supposed to do it that way anymore. Something about bacteria. The chicken was pale and blotched and still partially frozen, one wing sticking up at an angle that looked like it was waving.
She needed to do something with the chicken. She needed to season it and put it in the oven at 425 for an hour and fifteen minutes and make rice and maybe that salad with the cranberries he liked. She needed to set the table for two like she’d done every night since Marcus left. She needed to sit across from her son and eat dinner and ask about his day and listen to him talk about load-bearing calculations or whatever it was he did at the firm and not say I heard you through the door, I heard everything, I know what you are now and I don’t know what to do with knowing.
She picked up the chicken. It was slippery and heavier than she expected and for a moment she just held it, this cold dead bird, and felt the weight of it. Then she put it in the roasting pan and opened the spice cabinet and stared at the bottles without reading them.
Connor turned the bathroom water off. She could hear the pipes settle in the walls. This house and its sounds. She knew all of them. The way the third stair creaked, the way the dryer buzzed twice at the end of a cycle, the way his bedroom door didn’t quite latch and would swing open in a draft if you didn’t push it hard.
If you didn’t push it hard, it swung open. And you could hear everything.
She reached for the garlic powder and her hand was shaking. She watched it shake. She thought: I need to get this chicken in by five if we’re eating at six-thirty. She thought: withdrawal. She thought: he used to draw cities.
She thought: I threw the shoebox out.
The garlic powder lid was stuck. She banged it against the counter edge, harder than necessary, and it popped open and a little cloud of it puffed up into the air. She breathed it in. Her eyes watered. She let them.
Chapter 2: Tuesday, 6:41 PM
They ate at the table. She’d set out the good plates, the ones with the blue rim that her mother had given her when she got married, and she didn’t know why she’d done that. It wasn’t a good-plate kind of night. It was a Tuesday. But she’d pulled them from the cabinet without thinking, and now here they were, eating chicken off wedding china like it meant something.
Connor ate. That was the thing she kept watching. He ate the chicken and the rice and even some of the salad. She’d been bracing for him to pick at it, to push food around, to give her some visible proof of what she’d heard. But he ate like a person who was hungry, and that confused her, and the confusion made her angry in a way she couldn’t aim at anything.
“This is good,” he said.
“It’s just chicken.”
“Yeah, but the skin’s crispy. You did something different.”
She hadn’t done anything different. Same recipe she’d made two hundred times. She said, “Higher heat,” because it was easier than saying nothing.
He nodded and took another bite and she watched his hands. His hands looked normal. They weren’t shaking. She’d heard him say on the phone my hands already and now she was looking at them wrapped around a fork and they were steady and she thought maybe she’d misheard. Maybe the whole thing was a misunderstanding. Maybe withdrawal meant something else in whatever language twenty-four-year-olds spoke now.
She knew it didn’t.
“How’s work?” she asked.
“Fine. Busy. We’re doing a drainage assessment for that new development off Route 9.”
“The one by the old drive-in?”
“Yeah. The soil’s all wrong for what they want to build. Too much clay. Water’s got nowhere to go.”
She listened to him talk about clay and water and drainage coefficients and she thought about how good he was at this. At sounding like himself. At being Connor, the version of Connor she’d built in her head over twenty-four years, the one who cared about soil composition and ate chicken and wore a sweatshirt with a hole in the cuff. He was performing himself and he was doing it so well that she understood, with a kind of nausea, that he might have been doing it for a long time.
How long.
That was the question underneath all the other questions. Not what or how much or where does he get it. How long.
She thought about Christmas. He’d been quiet at Christmas. She’d attributed it to Marcus not calling. Marcus hadn’t called on Christmas or Connor’s birthday or any day since he’d moved to Boise with the woman from his CrossFit gym, the one with the visible abs and the Instagram account devoted to meal prep. Linda didn’t look at the Instagram anymore. She’d looked at it every day for four months and then her sister Brenda had taken her phone and blocked the account and said “you’re done with that” and Linda had let her because Brenda was right. She was done with that.
But at Christmas, Connor had been quiet, and she’d blamed Marcus. She’d blamed Marcus for a lot of things. Some of them he deserved. But this one, maybe, was something else entirely.
“Mom?”
She blinked. “What?”
“I said do you want the rest of the rice.”
“No, go ahead.”
He scraped the rice onto his plate. She watched him eat it. She counted his bites like she was keeping score of something, though she didn’t know what.
After dinner he helped her clear the table without being asked. He rinsed the plates while she loaded the dishwasher and they moved around each other in the kitchen the way they’d done for years, a choreography so familiar it was practically muscle memory. His hip bumped the counter at the same spot it always did. He reached over her for the dish soap the way he always did. Everything the same. Everything the same.
He went to his room at eight. She heard the door close. Not all the way, because it never closed all the way, and she stood in the living room and looked down the hallway at the thin stripe of light along the door’s edge and thought about walking down there and pushing it open and sitting on his bed and saying the words.
She didn’t.
She sat on the couch and turned on the television and watched something she wouldn’t remember later. A show about people buying houses. Or selling them. Someone was upset about a backsplash. She held a throw pillow against her stomach like a shield and pressed her chin into the top of it and breathed.
At nine-thirty she heard him leave. The back door. His car starting in the driveway, the particular rattle of the Civic’s engine, the crunch of tires on gravel. She didn’t get up. She didn’t go to the window. She sat on the couch and listened to the sound of his car get smaller and smaller until it was gone and there was just the television and the furnace and the house settling around her.
She picked up her phone. Put it down. Picked it up again. She opened her contacts and scrolled to Brenda and her thumb hovered over the name and she thought about what she’d say. Brenda would know what to do. Brenda always knew what to do. Brenda had gotten her through the divorce and the flooded basement and the year she’d had that thing on her lung that turned out to be nothing. Brenda was a fixer.
But this wasn’t a backsplash. This wasn’t a thing on a lung.
She put the phone down.
At eleven she was still on the couch when headlights swept across the living room ceiling. The Civic pulled into the driveway. The engine cut. A car door. The back door opening, the specific squeak of its hinge that she kept meaning to WD-40. His footsteps in the kitchen, lighter than before somehow, or maybe that was her imagination rearranging everything now, making even his footsteps suspicious.
He walked past the living room doorway. She saw him for maybe two seconds. He didn’t look in.
His bedroom door. The almost-close.
Silence.
She sat in the dark for another hour. The television had turned itself off, the auto-sleep timer she’d set months ago and forgotten about. The house was dark except for the light under his door and the green glow of the microwave clock in the kitchen.
She thought about the things she knew and the things she didn’t. She knew her son was on something. She knew he was trying to manage it alone. She knew he was scared. She didn’t know when it started or how bad it was or what he looked like when he was high, because maybe she’d seen that and hadn’t known what she was seeing.
That was the part that sat on her chest like a stone. The idea that she’d been looking right at it.
At midnight she got up. Her knee had locked from sitting too long and she had to stand there for a minute, shifting her weight, waiting for it to release. She walked to the hallway. Stood outside his door. The light was off now. She could hear him breathing. Slow and even. Asleep or something close to it.
She put her hand flat on the door. The wood was cool. She could feel a tiny vibration, maybe the furnace, maybe the house, maybe her own hand still shaking from six hours ago.
She didn’t push it open.
She went to bed. Lay on her back in the dark. The 3 AM thing happened early, at 1:15, her mind starting up, grinding through it. Withdrawal. Oxy. Got more. I’m always careful. The shoebox in the flooded basement, all those little drawings of cities dissolving in brown water because she’d stored them wrong, because she’d put them somewhere she thought was safe and it wasn’t.
In the morning she got up and made coffee and set out a mug for him like she always did. The blue mug, the one with the chip on the handle. She heard his alarm go off at seven. Heard him in the bathroom. Heard him come into the kitchen.
He poured his coffee. He was wearing a button-down, tucked in. His work clothes. He looked young and clean and like someone’s son, because that’s what he was.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning.”
He leaned against the counter and sipped his coffee and she stood across from him and held her own mug with both hands and the kitchen was small enough that she could have reached out and touched his arm. The distance between them was maybe four feet. She could’ve crossed it in one step.
“Connor,” she said.
He looked at her over the rim of his mug.
She took a breath. She felt every part of it. The air coming in, the way her ribs expanded, the pause at the top before the release.
“I heard you on the phone yesterday.”
The mug stopped at his lips. He didn’t put it down. He didn’t move at all. For a second he was so still that he didn’t even look like a person, he looked like a picture of a person. Then something in his face cracked. Not all at once. A slow fracture, starting at his eyes, moving down.
He put the mug on the counter. He looked at the floor.
“How much did you hear,” he said. Not a question. A measurement.
“Enough.”
He nodded. He kept nodding, like the motion had gotten stuck. His jaw was working. His father’s jaw. She watched it clench and release, clench and release.
“I’m going to handle it,” he said.
“I know you think that.”
“Mom.”
“Sit down, Connor.”
He didn’t sit. He stood there with his hands at his sides and his fingers curled in and she could see it now, the slight tremor in his left hand, the one closest to her. She could see it because she was looking for it and because he wasn’t trying to hide it anymore, or maybe couldn’t.
“I’m not going to yell at you,” she said. “I’m not going to lecture you. I don’t know enough to lecture you about this and I’m not going to pretend I do.”
His eyes were wet. He wiped them with his sleeve, the one with the hole, and the thread caught on his watch and unraveled a little more.
“What I am going to do,” she said, “is sit with you. Right here. Right now. And we’re going to figure out who to call. Not the clinic. Not the one that reports to your insurance. Someone else. There’s got to be someone else.”
“There’s not.”
“There is. There’s always someone else. I’ll find them. That’s what I do, Connor. I find the thing that works. I’ve been doing it your whole life.”
He was crying now. Not the soft-consonant crying she’d heard through the door. This was different. This was open and ugly and sounded like it hurt. He put his hand over his face and his shoulders shook and he slid down the cabinet until he was sitting on the kitchen floor, his back against the dishwasher, his knees drawn up.
She got down on the floor with him. Her knee screamed and she didn’t care. She sat beside him with her shoulder against his shoulder and she didn’t say anything. She just sat there. The way she’d sat on the other side of the shower curtain when he was nine and his father had just left and the water was running.
Except this time there was no curtain. This time she was right next to him.
They sat on the kitchen floor for a long time. His coffee got cold. Hers did too. The morning light came through the window over the sink, that gray Washington light, and it made the room look washed out and honest. His phone buzzed in his pocket. He didn’t reach for it.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I know.”
“I don’t know how it got like this.”
“I know.”
“I’m scared, Mom.”
She put her hand on top of his hand. His left one. The one that was shaking. She held it and she felt the tremor move through her own fingers, into her palm, up her wrist. Like she was taking some of it from him. Like that was something a person could do.
“Me too,” she said. “But I’m here. And that door doesn’t close all the way, and it never has, and I think maybe that’s on purpose.”
He didn’t laugh. But something in his breathing changed. Something settled, just a fraction.
The chicken pan was still in the sink. The coffee was cold. He was going to be late for work. None of that mattered. What mattered was the floor and the light and her hand on his hand and the fact that she was not on the other side of anything anymore.
She’d spent years keeping things in shoeboxes. Storing them somewhere she thought was safe. And the safe places flooded and the boxes dissolved and the drawings were gone.
But the boy who drew them was right here.
He was right here, and the door was open, and she wasn’t letting go.
