WYATT
THREE MONTHS LATER
Days have passed. I’ve been learning to grab things, pulling and pushing, along with other stupid stuff to gain control of my body. Shit like flexing your fingers is crap if you ask me, but I can write my name again. I can stand without feeling queasy now, and hopefully, I’ll be able hold a throttle. But I’ll never race again.
All day, every day, it’s been me and Circe as we’ve tried to repair all the broken pieces of our badly damaged bodies. When I say Circe and I, I mean it in the terms that she’s been what’s cooled me. She’s calmed me, and made me feel whole when all I wanted was to collapse in my mind. Finding a way to settle my mind without the rush of a track and without sex has been hard. I sat confined in my head and despised returning to a dependency on drugs. I’d thought I’d found peace in that coma, but that was a lie.
It’s been two weeks since the last episode. I should have been put into a mental institute for the way I behaved, but Circe stayed.
That sneaky sister of mine, she saw it. She understood it far better than I gave her credit for. Yeah, she’d always been my rock in the situations with Mother, but thrusting myself into despair, feeling that I was unfairly blaming our Mother for everything…well, let’s just say it all came crashing down. If she hadn’t brought Circe to me, and reminded me of what I was caring for, I’m not sure I could have stayed out of that rubber room.
I’ll forever be grateful that she knew what I needed. It was her, my Siren calling me, dragging me back, helping me see the light at the end of my dark tunnel.
The first time she’d really had a clear picture of what an episode of mine is like was when I was smashing things. Losing my calm exterior and invariably destroying everything around me and within, she saw it all. Without her pushing me to it, it wouldn’t have been possible to get me to listen. I needed the help of the hospital psychologists to combat my mania, and she knew it.
I’d always dealt with the resulting pressure of never being enough when it came to my mother’s attention. I’d felt it was my fault for not being a better person, or a better son to her. After the day of clarity we had before the accident, I realized it wasn’t just me that suffered. We all did. And no, I don’t just mean me and her, I mean it as in all of us. Wyatt the son had found his place in her heart for a day, but it took an accident for me to find a stable position where I didn’t blame us anymore. It wasn’t our fault.
It took a while for Whiskey and Doll to come to grips with the final moments of our mother’s passing too. The shrink had us all together so that we could hash it out. They’d never had the chance to see the peace, the utter and complete calm that settled over her. And because they’d missed it, they’d only ever had the reception of cold, calloused and harsh Marca Crown. I felt for a while that they’d been robbed of it, that at some point, it was my problem and my fault. Circe straightened my ass out about that pretty damn quick, as did the Dr. Marshall.
No, I’m still not settled with her death. No, I definitely don’t feel settled with our parents’ decision to leave me in charge of everything. And most emphatically, I don’t feel that they gave my brother the position he was born for. He’s a truer leader than I. But the past is past, and that was their call. We have to abide by it, for now.
It’s funny. Things are almost normal now. A little over a week ago, Circe moved into my room. Her chest took a bit more time to recover from than they’d hoped, and my head was constantly monitored, if not regulated.
Doll and Whiskey are still hiding something from me, but I’ll get to the bottom of it eventually. They have quiet conversations that die down when I’m close, and it’s pissing me off. It hurts to think they don’t want to let me in on whatever it is, but they’ll come around.
Doll, of course, is back to her usual antics in the public eye. She’s racing and off doing what Doll does. We celebrated her birthday in the hospital before Whiskey flew out again last week, and I was saddened to see him go. The will wasn’t holding him here, and I think Mom and Dad knew it wouldn’t. He needs the snow like we need burnt rubber.
We’ve never really had a chance to be brothers, and now that our family is smaller, I’m a bit desperate to fix that. We’ll never be close, as too much has separated us. It’s not age, but decisions that have directed us apart.
After Mother’s burial, the police brought me her effects from the accident. It hurt at first to see the carnage. The worst of it was her phone. She had snapshots in there of each of us that were candid. I was barreling around the track in one, sitting on the back porch in folded down race gear, talking to Dad. His hands are pointed out to a spot on the track with a larger than life smile, and I’m caught mid-laugh with my face lit up. There were ones of Doll in the kitchen, pouring over her cereal while reading a bike magazine. There’s one out on the track with her hair whipping behind her at breakneck speeds, and even sneaky shots through the door as she did her makeup.
Surprisingly, there were pictures of Jamieson. She’d snuck out to his trials, his competitions, his training days, and none of us knew she’d done it. I think it made it more heartbreaking that we always felt she was callous and heartless toward us. She was more loving than we knew. She just didn’t know how to show us.
It’s amazing the things you see when the mirror is cracked. We’d always seen her as the heartless person who couldn’t give us the time of day. We were wrong—so wrong. Every day, I thank the heavens that I had that moment. Heartbreaking, yes, but it’s something I’ll treasure forever.
“Hello?” After a light knock on the door, Sali pops her head into the room. Circe is down at the café with her mother, enjoying a coffee, and I was just trying to shave with my opposite hand.
“Hello,” I greet her from the washroom, shaving cream covering half my face. There are bits of toilet paper sticking here and there from my mishaps. Stepping out of the small alcove, Sali is more than grinning, she’s beaming.
“Mr. Crown, I was asked by an ambulance attendant to give this to you. They’d found it at the scene, and had forgotten all about it until they were cleaning out their locker at the hall. You were gripping it tightly, he said.” She hands me a small black felt bag with a tiny box inside, the tiny box I thought I’d lost.
“I wondered where that went. Thank you.” She nods her head, then starts back toward the door.
“By the way. She’s the one, Wyatt,” Sali states with a nod, smirking like a Cheshire cat. It’s the first and only time she calls me by my name, and she’s one hundred percent right.
“Yes. Yes she is.”