Days Like This

days like this

danielle
ellison

Copyright © 2015
by Danielle Ellison

This book is a
work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance
to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

First Edition:
June 2015

All rights
reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any
form whatsoever.

Days Like This/
by Danielle Ellison

1. Fiction 2.
Romance 3. Coming of Age

Summary: A young
woman returns to her hometown to care for her bipolar mother and must face the
secrets she's been running from and the boy she once loved.

Cover design by
Jenny Perinovic

Interior layout
and formatting by Jenny Perinovic

Editing by Sarah
Henning

ISBN
978-0-9962205-0-7 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-9962205-1-4 (.Epub ebook)
ASIN B00VGTN85S (Kindle ebook)

to mom, for
letting me go my own way.

ON THE PRETTIEST DAYS, when
the sun was high in the sky, Mom pulled me out of school and drove us down the
coast. On those days she would put the top down on the black convertible, and
we’d fly.

This was a good
day for flying.

I felt it in the
air as soon as I’d woken up. The energy as the weather changed so it was the
last bit of one thing, or the first hint of another. I couldn’t sit in biology
class, not with birds flying around in the sun on the first beautiful day of
April. Life was happening outside while we studied it inside, and I wanted to
be part of it. Even though I was hundreds of miles away from the ocean, I
wanted to feel like I wasn’t.

I rolled the
windows all the way down as I drove ten over the speed limit up to Ogden Dunes
Beach. My cell vibrated in the cup holder. I picked it up
—
Rohan—and then
threw it back down. June probably told him I left in the middle of biology, so
he decided to check up on me. Rohan didn’t get it. He didn’t understand me.

“Sweet Emotion”
came on the radio, and I turned it up, let the beats overpower the wind. I hung
my hand out the window and held it tight against the force. Then, I pressed
harder so my hand wouldn’t move. Resistance was the key. If I fought it, if I
didn’t give up, then I could fight anything.

Aerosmith blared
around me, and I let myself wish Mom was here. This was her song, her whole
playlist. I should’ve stopped listening to it, because every time I did, it was
a reminder of what I’d been running from, but the woman knew music. Listening
to her songs didn’t mean I was destined to be like her, did it?

On the pretty
days when we’d drive, she put the car on cruise and I’d slide into her seat,
like sliding into her shoes. It was easy and exciting as I’d steered us along
the empty roads. Mom would stand up in the seat next to me. I’d watched her,
studied her movements and the delicate way she did everything. I’d wanted to be
just like her. She laughed into the wind and threw her hat out of the car; it
was gone before I could catch a glimpse of it in the rearview mirror.

“This, Cassie,
this is living,” she’d said. And she’d laughed this carefree laugh, like
nothing could touch us.

I remember it so
clearly. Her dark curls flickering in the wind, blue eyes sparkling. Head back,
arms out, eyes closed—it was as if she’d let go. In the mirror, her face had looked
joyful.

But that day,
like so many before and after it, was all a trick. There were no pretty days
with us, no peace, only days when she wasn’t as sick. Only days where I could
let myself block out what had happened before, or what would happen tomorrow.
There were only moments of happiness before moments of heartache when I woke up
and she’d be lost somewhere inside her head. She wouldn’t be the mom I needed,
and I’d be left alone, waiting for another pretty day.

Mid-chorus, my
hand buckled against the wind; I shook it out and let it rest on the window
frame. So much for resistance. Maybe it really was futile.

I left home for a
lot of reasons I still didn’t know how to say, but one of them was Mom. I
didn’t want to be anything like her, yet every single thing I did reminded me
of her. Like spending today at the beach instead of being responsible Cassie.
Maybe I couldn’t escape the future after all and I would end up being another
version of her.

But this was just
a day for me. It wasn’t a high before or after a low; it wasn’t the best moment
before the worst or a fleeting day of happiness in an endless string of sadness.
Tomorrow, I’d wake up at home and still be me. I wouldn’t be so low I couldn’t
get up, so depressed I couldn’t even remember my own name. I wouldn’t be a
number, a statistic, or another girl with a disease.

Not yet, anyway.

I turned up the
radio before the last chorus, and sang so loud I didn’t have to think anymore.

EVERY MORNING JOYCE Harlen
waved at me from her front porch when I came home from my run. She always had a
cup of coffee and some old record playing out of her open windows. Usually, she
had two mugs in case I had time to sit with her and, sometimes, when she seemed
lonely, I would. I could almost read it on her face, the loneliness, and she was
so much like Cass in those moments it nearly killed me. Today looked like one
of those days, so I stopped.

“Coffee,
Graham?” she asked me.

“I’d love some
coffee, Mrs. H,” I said. I didn’t really want coffee—I hated that stuff—but her
eyes lit up when she poured it and motioned to the seat beside her. I sat,
slowly, and noticed once again she left the seat across from her empty. The
seat that was for Cassie. It was as if nothing was different for her: I was
still the boy next door in love with her daughter and any second she would
bounce out of that door and sit next to us.

She wouldn’t.
She’d left.

And I hated
sitting and pretending that things were the same when they weren’t. Cassie
wasn’t part of my life anymore, never would be, but her mother was this
constant reminder. I wanted to ignore her, but when she had that look on her
face, and with her being bipolar and her daughter off in Indiana, I don’t know.
It made me feel heartless.

I should’ve
left this town like Cass did, and then maybe I wouldn’t have to be reminded
every single day that I wasn’t good enough.

Mrs. H handed
me a mug. I took an obligatory sip. Four sips were usually all I could manage
to swallow, and it tended to equal the amount of time we could sit here before
she mentioned Cass. I wasn’t sure which was worse. Cass’s name was a shot to
the chest every single time. It’s not every day your fiancée leaves in the
middle of the night with no reasons why.

“How’s it
going, Mrs. H?” I asked.

“The same as
always, Graham. Not much excitement in my life, I must say, not like when I was
younger,” she said. When she was younger, she was a groupie. Technically, she
was a manager, but the way she painted her life, all travelling and bands and
pot in the seventies, she was a groupie.

“I love this
song!” she yelled, slapping her hand on the little table. Her eyes were bright,
as if some kind of fog passed her for only a moment. She sang along to the
opening verse and then stopped. “Did Cassie ever tell you about this song?”

Cass never
told me a lot of things, but this story I knew. I could even picture the way
Cass would recite it in such great detail as if she had been there. Her nose crinkled
up, her blue eyes sparkled as she whisked everyone away. She had a way of doing
that, of making people forget that they were only hearing a story instead of
living something real. But with Cass, nobody cared.

What the
hell am I doing here?

“This song was
the song that was playing the first time I kissed him. He was handsome—a lot
like you are now,” Mrs. H said. “Richard was standing across the room and the
crowd seemed to part when Stevie started singing this song. Our eyes met, and
that was the end.”

Stevie Nicks.
The gateway singer in the Harlen women’s souls. Even a song like “
Angel,”
that always seemed sad to me, brought joy to them. Cass
loved Stevie Nicks the same way, with this absolute assurance that she could
never be wrong about the choice. She’d loved me that way once, too. She could
make me lose control with a look, make me feel like I was flying with a touch,
and stop my heart with a kiss. That was the one thing I knew was true, but then
she left, and even Stevie couldn’t fix that.

“I should go,”
I said. All of this was a little too much for one morning. Her smile
disappeared. I took two steps before glancing back at her. Mrs. H was staring
into her house through the open window.

“Graham, do
you still want to go to school for that construction thing?”

I nodded.
“Architecture, yeah.”

I did the
construction thing, too. I’d been working with the local hardware store for odd
jobs for half a year now. It started out with me helping out around Mrs. H’s
house. A pipe, a broken window, and then everyone started calling me. It wasn’t
my dream, which was architecture school, but it was money in the bank. Money that
would hopefully send me to Rice University in the fall. But I still didn’t
know. My dreams had been wait-listed.

“Can you knock
down this wall?” She pointed through the window. Really? Those damn Harlen
women. Just when I told myself I was out, they lured me back in.

I went back up
the stairs and followed her direction to the wall next to the fireplace. I
shook my head. That fireplace was security for the whole wall. Knocking it down
would be a lot of trouble, and fixing it even more.

“Why do you want
to knock it down?” I asked.

She smiled, a
hand fluttering out into the air. “A big window! So I can see into the
backyard.”

“How big?” I
asked. We could put in a window, for sure.

“The whole
wall! Windows are supposed to be big, not tiny. This house doesn’t have enough
windows. Cassie said it always felt too small.”

Sounded like
something she’d say. Cassie thought this town was too small, too. This house,
this town, her life. “Sorry, Mrs. H. I can’t take out that whole wall for a
window.”

“But it’s crowded.”

“The fireplace
is there. Pick a new wall and then maybe,” I said. She shook her head slowly,
not looking away. Shit. Now I’ve upset her. I rested a hand on her shoulder.
“You okay? You taking your meds, Mrs. H?”

She shook me
off. “Graham Tucker, you can’t ask a woman about her meds.”

I held up my
hands, because if Mrs. H had been Cassie there’d be a second before I had
something thrown at my head. “I’m only making sure, ma’am.”

Mrs. H crossed
her arms, and the bangles on her wrist jangled. “Nurse Debbie comes by every
afternoon and I take my meds then. Every day.”

“Okay,” I
said. For some reason it felt like a lie. I knew enough about Harlen women to
tell that, too. “I should get to work.”

She didn’t pay
attention to me—her eyes were on that wall and when I crossed into my yard from
hers, something felt off. I couldn’t figure it out, but Cass used to get that
way sometimes. I would say something she didn’t like and she’d shut me out. She
was so determined to be right that nothing else mattered except proving that
thing could exist.

Stop it.

My life no
longer revolved around Cass anymore, but somehow her mother was still part of
mine. The woman had no one, except a daughter hundreds of miles away doing God
knows what. I didn’t care what she did, and in the last eleven months, she’d
made it crystal clear she didn’t care what I did. Or about me at all. I had to
step away from Mrs. H, because being around her meant being around Cass…even if
it was only stories. Cass in stories was almost as dangerous as Cass in real
life. Even surrounded by her ghost I knew that. In real life or in stories, I
knew one thing for sure: Cassidee Nicks Harlen broke my heart once. She would
never be allowed to do it again.