Paul leaned against the car, the door open at his hip, his elbows resting on the roof, and his head in his hands. From the driver’s seat, his mom let out a sharp wail of frustration.
“Just let me close the door,” she moaned.
Paul didn’t move, didn’t respond. Two nights ago, he came home from hanging out at Malcolm’s and she was wasted again. He’d torn her room apart until he found another baggie of white pills. He flushed them, hoping it was the last. Apparently not. She either had more hidden, or she had a supplier. He stood frozen in futility.
The horn blared, and he jerked in surprise. His mom let off the horn, and pushed against his body. He gripped the roof of the car with one hand and the door with the other, bracing himself against her force. It wasn’t much force, and though he swayed, his feet stayed planted.
She gave up and leaned back in her seat. Paul dropped his head down until his forehead rested on the roof of the car. It was cold against his skin.
A voice came from behind him. “Hi.”
Paul’s head shot up. Celia stepped out from behind a van, two paper shopping bags clasped to her chest.
“Hi, Rebecca,” she said, tilting her head toward his mom. Nausea rolled through Paul’s stomach. He didn’t want her here, seeing this, but it was too late. He took a step back so she could look in the car. His mom stared up at Celia with glassy, vacant eyes.
Celia shifted the bags in her arms. “So, these bags are really heavy, and I was hoping you could give me a ride home.” Her eyes darted between mother and son.
Paul’s eyebrows pulled in. “Uh, sure.”
“Great. Thanks.”
Paul leaned down and popped the trunk open with the lever by his mom’s foot. She still hadn’t moved. Celia loaded her bags and shut the trunk, then she opened the passenger door and sat down by his mom. “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to sit up front with Paul.” She smiled sweetly.
His mom blinked hard, as though clearing her vision, and returned the smile. “Celia,” she said softly. “I miss seeing you around the house.”
Celia nodded. “You don’t mind if I sit up here by Paul, do you?”
“Oh, of course not, darling, I understand.”
Paul took that cue to take hold of her wrists and tug her to her feet. He got her standing and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Hold onto me, Mom, while I get the door open.” He managed to stuff her in, and she fell over sideways across the back seat. He just looked at her for a minute, and shut the door without trying to get her to sit up or belting her in.
He sat in the driver’s seat and closed the door softly, started the car, and pulled out of the parking lot. He glanced over at Celia a few times during the drive, but didn’t speak until they pulled into his driveway. He pulled up past the rust-bucket truck he bought last week, when it became clear his mom wasn’t going to look for a job any time soon. There was no joy in the milestone, though, because he had too much worry inside. He pulled his mom’s car as far forward as it would go, close to the back door and away from prying eyes. He looked over, focusing on Celia’s hairline, unable to quite meet her eyes. “Help me get her in?”
“Of course,” she said, scrambling out of the car.
His mom had fallen asleep during the drive. Paul opened the car door and reached down to pull her up under her armpits. He tugged her forward and her head flopped against his shoulder. She murmured but didn’t open her eyes. He backed her out of the car, gripping her by the torso. Celia leaned down to get her feet safely out and shut the door behind her. Paul walked awkwardly to the back door, with his mom clutched to his front and her heels dragging in the grass. It was a good thing she was so short and tiny.
Celia walked around them to the door and twisted the knob, but it was locked.
“My keys are in my back pocket,” he said.
Celia’s eyes darted to his hands, which were occupied. “I’ll just grab them real quick.”
His familiar, playful grin emerged. “No need to rush.”
She rolled her eyes, which made him chuckle. Sometimes looking for humor in a situation was the only way to get through it. She stepped off the stoop and walked around behind him, brazenly sticking her hand in his pocket and grabbing the keys. But one key got caught on the side of the pocket, and the keys dropped out of her hand. They flopped back against the seat of his pants, hanging halfway in and halfway out of his pocket.
He laughed and his body shook, the adrenaline wearing off and the heartache coming out as hilarity. His mom’s head dropped back and her mouth lolled open and a moan escaped, and though it wasn’t funny, it also was, and he laughed harder.
Celia grabbed the keys with her whole palm, and squeezed them, along with a good handful of his backside. Surprised, he whipped his head around to look at her. She just shrugged. “When opportunity knocks twice…”
She unlocked the door and opened it, standing back out of the way so he could pass through. He lugged his mom up into the kitchen and then down the hall, heading for her bedroom. Just as they reached her bed, vomit erupted from her mouth and splattered on the floor. “Aw, shit!” Paul didn’t know how much more he could take. He tipped her sideways onto the mattress.
“What can I do?” Celia said from the doorway.
Paul couldn’t turn to look at her. “Mom? Do I need to call an ambulance?” His voice shook.
His mom blinked her eyes open and gave him a soft smile. “I’m okay. I’ll be okay.” She closed her eyes again and turned onto her side.
He sighed and put his hands on top of his head, blinking back tears, keeping his back to Celia.
“Where do you keep the bleach?” Celia asked.
“You’re not cleaning this up,” he said, swallowing hard, and went into his mom’s bathroom to get supplies to clean up. He got out a bucket, bleach, and some rags. He paused a minute in there to try and gather himself. He looked around the pink bathroom. Pink walls, pink carpeting, pink sink basin, pink towels. A pink toilet. He took a deep breath of the pink air before going back into the bedroom.
“You can let me help you. I want to.”
He knelt by the puddle of vomit and began wiping it up. “I’ve wanted to help you a million times, Celia. You never let me.” He cringed, wishing he hadn’t said that. He didn’t want to wound her, but he only had a modicum of control over his emotions at the moment.
“That’s not true. You helped me lots of times.”
“Not because you let me. I’ve had to fight to do anything for you.”
“Exactly, and you always told me how wrong I was to behave that way, so I’m expecting different from you.”
The tables had turned. His cheeks moved up as he smiled, but he still didn’t look at her. He dropped the disgusting rags into the bucket, and picked up a clean one, which he held out. “I guess you can get this wet for me.”
She quickly got it wet and brought it back to him. He wiped the floor, dropping the rag into the bucket when he was done. Next he opened the bottle of bleach and poured it directly onto the floor. He used another rag to rub the bleach around in a wide circle. The floor as clean as it would get, he stood and looked at his mom, sprawled on the bed.
“Let me.” Celia retrieved a pink washcloth from the bathroom and walked over to his mom. She gently wiped her mouth, and then lifted her head and adjusted the pillow beneath it.
Paul gripped the handle of the bucket with an iron grasp, knuckles white. “Washing machine,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Right.” She followed him back to the kitchen. The washer and dryer were in a small closet off to the side. He opened the washer and sighed when he saw it was full of clean, wet clothes.
Celia opened the dryer and transferred the dry clothes to the basket and the wet clothes to the dryer. He dumped the rags into the washer and then took the bucket to the sink to wash.
It was quiet a moment, then she said, “This is domestic.”
He glanced over his shoulder at her. She stood at the table, folding the laundry. “That’s one word for it.” He scrubbed his hands up to his elbows and dried them on a towel, then slumped down into a chair next to where she stood, still folding his clothes. “Don’t do my laundry, Celia.”
“Why not? Folding laundry is relaxing to me. It’s my favorite chore.”
“Just don’t.”
“You’re afraid I’ll come across a pair of your underwear. Are they embarrassing, Paulie? Any pink flamingo boxers hiding in here?” She rifled through the clothes in the basket.
Paul reached over and shoved the laundry basket across the table until it dropped to the floor with a thud. “You can see my underwear all you want, Celia.” He winked at her and smiled, but still a weight pressed down on him.
She sat down in the other chair.
He drummed his pointer fingers on the edge of the table.
“Is this the real reason you’re not going to school next year?”
“If I say yes, will you stop being mad at me?”
“Actually, I’ll be even madder. It’s stupid enough not to go because you need to help your mom pay her bills. It’s even worse if she’s letting you skip out on school because she’s gone down the rabbit’s hole.”
He glared at her. “She didn’t ask me to do this.”
“You don’t want me to blame her? She doesn’t own any of this?”
“Addiction and depression are diseases, not choices.”
“I know that. God, Paul, I know that. She’s sick. But you’re enabling her.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Oh, well I know how familiar you are with enabling people.” The anger he had been so careful with was slipping out of the leash he kept around it.
She matched his pose. “Finally, you’re fighting back.”
He breathed in roughly through his nose.
“Paul, it’s one thing to enable someone when you don’t have a choice. When you’re still in high school and you have to get through it, or when you have a little brother who needs you to keep things together.”
“That’s bullshit, Celia. You have family here now. You could move in with Fay. Don’t tell me otherwise, because Malcolm told me they offered that to you and Abe.”
“We aren’t talking about my family right now, Paul. We’re talking about yours.”
“We’re talking about your family because we have a similar problem, and we’re handling it the same way, and you’re giving me shit for it.”
She stood, the chair scraping across the floor. “That isn’t true. Our situations are not the same at all. And if you think I’m handling it wrong, and we’re handling it the same way, that means you know you’re handling it wrong too.”
He nodded. “Fine then. We’re both doing the wrong thing. Sometimes there’s only the wrong thing—there is no right thing. We just do what we do. You’re protecting Abe, I’m protecting my mom.”
“It would only be the same thing if I were trying to protect my dad. I’m looking out for a child, Paul.”
He stood up, too, and leaned over the table, his face only a foot from hers and his voice a steady whisper. “Tell me you’re not doing this partly for your mom, and even for your dad, and I’ll believe you. Tell me it doesn’t matter to you when your dad is sad and suffering. That you don’t care when he cries, that his apologies don’t touch you. Tell me that, Celia. Tell me you don’t change your life around to try to fix his. Tell me you didn’t break up with me so you could continue to manage everybody’s lives to keep him happy.”
She dropped her arms to her side, but didn’t drop her eyes from his. “You know, Paul, I really want to walk out of here. I don’t have to do this. But I’m not running this time, because it matters to me that you see what I’m talking about.”
“It matters to me that you see what I’m talking about, Celia. You matter to me, and your life matters to me. I want you to see.”
“I do see! Okay? I get it. You’re right. I cut off parts of my own life in order to keep the peace. I do things to try and keep my parents happy. I’m enabling my parents. I get it, okay? But I have a deadline for when that stops.”
“In five years.” He crossed his arms.
She glared at him in silence.
He blew out a frustrated breath. “Celia, you were taking care of Abe long before you were thirteen. He was just a little boy. He’s grown up a lot this year. You don’t see that he can take care of himself now. You gave yourself that job a long time ago, but he’s aged out of needing you to do it. Abe’s as tall as you now, and he’s strong. You’ve shown him how to handle himself.”
“He still needs me,” she said quietly.
He lowered his voice. “You need him to need you. You’ve shaped your whole life around taking care of him. If you don’t have to do it, what will you do?”
“That’s not—”
Paul interrupted her, talking fast, frantic. “You keep saying you’ll leave when he graduates. But have you done the math? He’ll be a sophomore when you can start college. You’re a sophomore, not a kid. You’re going to wait until he’s eighteen to leave? An eighteen-year-old man doesn’t need his twenty-one year old sister hanging around taking care of him. He’ll be trying to take care of you long before then, if he isn’t already.”
She sat down again, limp in the chair, her breath coming fast. “That may be true, but that doesn’t mean he should have to live in that house without me.”
“You can’t keep bad things from happening to people.”
She barked out a humorless laugh. “You proved that to be true.”
“What does that mean?” He sat down, too.
“You’re supposed to get out of here—to leave this place and go follow your dreams. The best thing for you would be to leave all this behind and go,” she said.
“You still don’t trust me to know what’s best for myself.”
“Because you’re always looking out for everyone else. You don’t put yourself first when you should.”
“Celia, it’s not that easy. Sure, I could go off to college and try to forget about everything happening with my mom. But I’d worry. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate or study. She’d call me crying, and I’d drive back to check on her. I’d feel guilty every time I spent a dollar. It wouldn’t work. Just please, trust me to know what I need to do. Please stop being mad at me.”
She reached her hand over and covered his with it. “I’m not mad at you Paul. I’m mad for you. You deserve better.”
“I hate when you say that. I hate that word. Life isn’t about what we deserve. For me, as long as I’m living in a way I can feel good about, it’s all good.”
She brushed her palm back and forth over his hand.
“Celia.” He breathed her name on a whisper, and scooted his chair closer so he could rest his forehead on hers. “You do the same thing I do. You let other people’s problems shackle you. And not just your parents’ problems and Abe’s, but mine, too.”
She shook her head, their foreheads rolling together.
“It’s true.” He reached around her waist with one hand and pulled her even closer. “You can’t keep doing that. I can’t keep doing it. We’ll never be free if we do. We have to move on from everybody else’s problems.” He swallowed. “And my mom’s problems have outgrown my ability to handle them.”
After a moment, he let go of her and put himself back into his own space. “Having you see my mom like this, it’s…damn. This is eye-opening. Do you realize you’re the only person in the entire world who has seen her like that? Who has seen me like that? I keep picturing how I must look to you.”
She bit her lip and waited a minute before saying, “You look a lot like me.”
He nodded.
“Okay, so what, though? Nothing has changed. There are no answers.”
He looked her right in the eye as he said, “Maybe that’s not true.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not sure exactly. What we’re doing now isn’t working. Why not try something new? We both have people who would help us out if they knew we needed it. You and Abe really could move in with Fay.” He blew out a big breath. Celia sat still as a statue. “I don’t know how any of this works. But I think it’s not such a bad thing to rely on other people. I kept trying to tell you to rely on me, but I couldn’t see the same was true for me—that I needed help, too. Maybe it’s time we let people help us.”
He was talking about the Dearings. They would help him, if he could work up the courage to ask. His mind turned over the same old problems in new ways.
A groan came from down the hall. Paul stood. “I better go check on her.”
Celia stood and walked around the table to him. “Do you need anything else?”
“Yes.” He put his hands on her shoulders, his mind spinning at the events of the last hour. The only certainty he could find was standing before him and studying him with wide brown eyes. He pulled her to him and squeezed her tightly. She squeezed him back, offering the hug he badly needed.