Turning Point

We're laying half-naked on the bed, not really thinking about anything in particular except each other, when he mentions casually, “Your brother and your wife are dating again.”

I don't remember what we were talking about before that, only that this particular sentence makes me snap partially out of the drowsiness I've floated into. The boy isn't actually my brother and she obviously isn't my wife, but the family terms are mutual, and they stand for a damn close relationship between us.

“Really?” I ask. “I thought she and her ex-boyfriend were going to try again. She was all screwed up over him a few weeks ago.”

“No. They fucked the last time he was in town, but he lives out of state. He doesn't have plans to come back. So... she went back to your brother.”

“Oh.” A moment of silence to contemplate this bizarre and somehow irreverent turn of events. Then, “Is my brother still all screwed up?”

“Yeah. We got him to stop doing it back-to-back nights, and his brother and I—” This is another mutual family term. My brother doesn't have an actual brother, only some old, close friends. “—we've been trying to stay with him when he's high so he doesn't do anything more stupid while he's up there... but he's still taking about twenty at a time.” His voice quavers, and I look over at him. “I'm worried about him,” he says, and I can hardly stand the emotion in his voice. It's more than worry. It's fear, a fear so strong that it's got him literally shaking.

“I know,” I say softly, because to say me too would be to trivialize whatever it is that's grabbed hold of him. I lay my head on his chest and I ask even more quietly, “What's scaring you, babe? What is it?”

“That he's killing himself! He's killing himself, this shit puts holes in your brain, and he knows it, and he's going to be dead before he's thirty, and he's doing it anyway. He won't stop.” His voice cracks again on that last part, and I'm whispering inconsequential it's-okays against his bare chest, wishing I had something to say. The tears are ready to leak from my own eyes. He's talking about cold medicine, I think, and part of me is stuck in numb disbelief. Fucking cold medication. Sudafed. My brother is de-congesting himself to death. Twenty a night. Jesus fucking Christ.

“We need to do something,” I say, and my voice is shaking through the spaces between my clenched teeth.

“What can we do?”

“I don't know! Something, anything! We aren't the only ones who see this, we aren't the only ones who want him to stop, so maybe there's something to be said for a stereotypical intervention. So he can see who loves him and who he's hurting. To see who wants him to stop.”

“Maybe...”

“We have to do something.” I'm turning into a broken record, but there's not a lot else I can think of to say about my brother anymore.

“Who, then?” he asks, going back to the intervention idea.

I tick off a pitifully short list of names, and suddenly my desperate frustration with it all—with the situation, with my brother, with the fact that there's nothing I can do—explodes. “We have to do something, Nathan! Anything, something, I don't care! We have to try! I can't watch him get lost again and not do anything, again! I can't!”

The tears are pouring down both of our faces now, because somehow seeing the other person cry about it too makes it okay, and we press our eyes to each other's skin, as if the pressure will make the waterworks stop. I recover faster, perhaps because I've done this before over the same boy for the very same reasons, and I'm whispering I knows and quiet Heys against my boyfriend's neck, as if they will make everything better, and suddenly I have to say it, even though I've been fighting with myself about it for the past minute and a half. It's too big not to talk about.

“This is what I've been saying for four years,” I say, and my voice is too agonized to be held in a whisper now. I roll from my side to my back and stare at the textured white ceiling of his bedroom so I don't have to look at his face. “It all kills you, not just his stuff, all of it. Every single thing you take or do or smoke does something like that to some part of your body, do you get it now? And it doesn't matter right now, and I know that, but how do I get you guys to see it like I do? It doesn't matter now, but in fifteen, twenty years, it'll matter to your fucking wife and kids! I'm watching my friends kill themselves in front of my face and there's nothing I can do about it. And so I just keep talking.”

There is a long moment of shell-shocked silence that probably isn't long at all, and when he talks to break it, his voice is as choked with tears as mine was.

“I don't want to do it anymore. I don't want to kill myself anymore, I don't want you to have to watch it happen.” He tries to keep going, but he doesn't know how. I turn to look at him again.

“So stop.” I would be surprised if he heard me, my voice is so quiet.

“I don't know how. I... I have an addiction.” It's the first time I've ever heard him say it. He's agreed with me in the past, but he's never said it out loud before, not like that. He's practically sobbing now, the realization having finally hit him full-on.

“I know,” I say, and I feel like I've said that a lot in the past twenty minutes, but I don't know what else there is to say.

“I want to stop. I don't know how.”

“So find someone who does,” I suggest, and he nods. I bring up a friend of his who quit for an extended period of time before, and he agrees that's probably the best person to talk to. We discuss the issue in small circles for a few minutes, until we're both crying again. I don't think either of us could stop if we wanted to. Now he's the one staring at the ceiling. Maybe it's to keep himself from breaking too much more, I think. I move my head from the pillow to his chest so that he doesn't have to worry about me staring at him while he's crying.

“I love you,” he says.

“I love you too.”

“I know, and that's why I want this to stop. I can't keep hurting something that you love. I'm sorry.”

I move back to my spot on the pillow. “Hey. Hey, honey, look at me.” I take his face in my hands so his eyes, flowing rivers onto the tanned planes of his cheeks, are looking straight at my face. “Do you remember what I told you about saying sorry?”

That particular mini-lecture happened about a week ago, when I was with him and his friends. He went to go light up, and he made an embarrassed face at me and apologized. I remember giving him a sort of sarcastic smile and saying, quite honestly, Sorry means you regret what you did. Don't say “I'm sorry” and then go smoke up anyway.

I never thought about it that way, he'd answered. I guess I take it back, then.

“Yes,” he answers in the here-and-now. “I remember, and that's why I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I want to stop.”

“So try,” I say, and I can't decide if I feel like smiling or crying. “Try.”

“I will,” he says, and whatever reply I was going to make is lost under the soft press of his lips, begging me to stay with him, help him, believe in him.

I answer him the only way I can think of: I kiss him back.