Are You Sitting Down? (27 page)

“How do you know all of this?”

“I’ve gone to a couple of meetings.
Nothing serious.
I just sit there and listen to other people tell their stories.”

I had stood up and told my own story once, but I didn’t tell Sebastian that.

“What do they say?”
h
e asked.

“It’s anonymous so I’m not really supposed to say, but believe me.
E
veryone else
feels the same
.
It
tear
s
them up inside.”

My
own
nightmares start
ed
out with me and my gir
l
friend drinking and using.
Sometimes, we
we
re in her trailer or my apartment, or at a party I don’t ever remember going to in real life.
We
we
re playing music and singing out loud while snor
t
ing lines of coke off a mirrored coffee table.
Then, I’m putting on make-up in the mirror, only now it’s floating in the air so that I don’t have to hold my head down to look into it.
My gir
l
friend
wa
s floating in the air too.

While
suspended
in midair, the mirror shatters into a million tiny pieces for no reason at all.
All the tiny pieces pull away in slow motion.
I look through the pieces and can see my friend screaming her head off, but I can’t hear her.
I stand up and push the tiny mirrors out of my way so that I can step through them to help her.
As soon as I sweep the pieces out of the air with my hand
, it’s like someone pushes play on a r
e
corder and everything catches up with real time.

I pull my hand away because it feels like I’ve cut it on the mirror.
I look at my hand and there’s no blood or pain.
I still can’t hear my friend screaming, but when I look back up at her we are no longer in the trailer.
Now, we are in the club, Project X, and we are on the dance floor.
She’s having a good time and looking at me all wide-eyed and wondering why I’m just standing the
re
looking at my hand.
All of a sudden, the noise of the club registers in my ears like someone pulled out a plug.
The music is loud and covers the garbled chatter of the people around us.

Flash to the club’s bathroom
where
I’m standing in front of one of the mirrors while she’s in a stall with the guy we met.
She screams and this time I can hear her.
All the mirrors on the wall explode just like the one before, but this time they aren’t moving in slow motion.
I can vividly hear all the tiny pieces of glass falling across the floor. I shut my eyes tight to protect them.
Shock registers in my hand again and I jerk it up close to me to examine it.
It feels like someone has a hold on my wrist.

When I open my eyes, I’m pinned beneath a man in a car in the parking lot.
His hand
s
are
wrapped around both
of
my wrists and he’s forcing them down so I can
’
t struggle.
I’m n
a
ked.
I can’t see his face, only a yellow smile in the dark and the whites of his eyes.
I don’t know where my friend is.
This time, I scream.
It’s a long continuous scream but it’s like only I can hear it.
He laughs and puts a hand over my mouth, cutting off the noise.
As soon as his large hand claps over my mouth
I shatter into a thousand pieces just like the mirrors, then
I i
m
mediately wake up.
I sit up in bed, usually in a cold sweat, and look at my hand because it’s actually hurting from the dream.
I don’t know why.

It’s always the same exact dream, every time.

I just knew Sebastian was going to ask if he could come to one of the meetings with me, but he didn’t
say anything
.
I think he knew it would be easier to discuss your problems without having a relative in the room.
Besides, there were plenty of outlets and meetings around town he could go to; he knew that from working as a bartender.
The groups hung up flyers on the bulletin boards in bars.
I could see his head filling up with questions he wanted to ask, but he kept them
to hi
m
self.
Being a typical guy, he probably thought he was too macho to go to a meeting.
Maybe hearing that his own sister
went
had changed his mind.
Recovery is difficult, but we don’t have to do it alone.
That’s one thing the meetings had taught me.

“Are you guys having fun?”
Mom asked, walking in from the kitchen.

“Yes, Aunt Clare and I beat the boys twice,” Rachel said.

“You did?”
Mom sang.

“Uncle Sebastian cheats,” Robbie teased.

“I do not.”

Sitting in my lap, Jake cooed and laughed a
t
the e
x
citement of his
little
cousins.

“Where did Ellen and Travis go?”
Mom asked.

“Upstairs,” I said pointing.

I watched her playfully tip toe up the stairs to eavesdrop on them.
She looked back at me and winked with a finger to her mouth to be quiet.
I was too rebellious and still clutching to my youth to admit it to anyone, but I admired my mother so much.
I kn
e
w she
wa
sn’t that old, but I always imagined that she was a teen during the time of gentleman callers, like in that Tenne
s
see William’s play.
I smiled at the thought of my mom sitting on the front porch serving cold lemonade to a dozen or so men who
came
with hopes of escorting her to
a
summer pi
c
nic.

Frank White was the lucky man, standing among them, who later ask
ed
for her hand in marriage.
She bec
a
me a house wife while he went to work to support them.
This was the
i
r first house.
The bank probably loaned them the money in good faith, or maybe it was a wedding gift from their parents.
Then, they started having kids and it all went downhill from there.
T
heir cookie cutter lives
were
filled with disappointments all brought about by their own children.

I’m sure they thought they only got it right the first time with Martin.
His life had turned out just like their
’
s was back then.
But then, Ellen got felt up by her boss and her marriage
wa
s on the rocks.
Travis
wa
s a
gay
.
Sebastian and I were both i
n
subordinate teen drunks who couldn’t get a decent job if our lives depended upon it.
I ha
d
a m
ixed
baby.
I’m sure that top
ped
her list of frustrations brought about by her
kids
.

“All I
’m going to say
is that I’m highly disappointed,” I
could
hear her say.

It was her final answer to all of our confessions.
And like she stated, she never really said much at all.
She didn’t have to.
The look in her eyes and on her face was enough to make you regret what you’d done.
She never said anything like, “I regret ever having you.”

Th
ose
were the cruel words I’m sure lots of kids heard these days, but we never heard it from our Mom.
Tears blocked her smile, but they
eventually
dried and her gleaming smile would come back.
She always hugged us when we walked in the door, so tight as if she had not seen us in ages, even if she’d just seen us two days prior.

Being the last child, there was a brief amount of time when I had Mom and
the
house all to myself after Dad passed.
I’d moved back in with her briefly because I thought she might like having someone in the house with her; the others thought it was a good idea too.

As a younger kid, I snooped through their dresser dra
w
ers and closets poking around for birthday and Christmas gifts.
Mom’s closet was a palace full of dresses when I liked to play dress
-
up and pretend I was someone else.
A few weeks after Dad died, Mom was napping on the sofa, and I was up in my room.
For some reason, I felt the need to go through Dad’s stuff.
I needed to take something of his—a tie tack, a watch, a photo, anything—and hold it in my hand.
I wanted something to keep to remember him by as I felt him slipping away in my mind.
The joint I’d just smoked at my open bedroom window didn’t help, but I still felt it was too soon to be forgetting him.

Instead of going to their bedroom to rummage through his closest or bureau, I went to his office.
Dad had an old roll top desk.
I remember pretending it was an oven when I was a kid.
Mom would send me up the stairs with a sandwich for him when he would be in his office grading papers.
I wouldn’t let him eat it until we had sat it on the desk and rolled down the lid, then turned a few imaginary knobs to bake the bread.
Dad had bought the desk at a yard sale with intentions of refinishing it.
It also had a broken lock he never bothered to fix either.

It had been years since I had used it for bread baking, and I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I saw my Dad sitting at the desk.
In the age of computers and less children in the house, he usually sat in front of a laptop at the dining table downstairs.
The top of the desk disappeared with its soothing slid
ing
noise as I opened it.
In my head, I could still hear the heavy metal slam of an industrial kitchen stove which I dreamed up as a child.