But distraction didn’t help me when I needed it most.
This time, I need to do it all alone.
I head back inside, but instead of going to take a shower and get dressed, I find myself drifting towards the music room at the side of the house. It’s Dex’s private retreat, a conservatory with a sunken floor, tall windows, and a polished grand piano sitting in pride of place in the corner.
I pause in the doorway. I never really spent time in here; I respect his artistry, and know that his music is a deeply personal thing. But now, with him out of the country, it doesn’t feel off-limits in the same way.
I step inside the room. There are guitars mounted on the far wall: sleek electric models, and older, vintage acoustic makes. I lift down the beat-up old Gibson he got in high-school, and take a seat at the window, resting it on my knees.
My fingers strum a couple of chords. They echo in the morning hush. The words that have been echoing around my head since the moment I woke finally take shape.
Summer’s fading/ rearranging/ I fall backwards every time…
I stop, embarrassed even though there’s nobody here to listen. I’m a terrible singer, I’ll be the first to admit it. I can hear musical notes just fine, but when it comes to opening my mouth and singing along? It all goes horribly wrong. My whole life, my brothers ruthlessly teased me. Strangled cats, metal in the garbage disposal—I’ve heard it all. And that was fine. Dex was the musician of the family, I never craved the spotlight like he does, never wanted to perform.
But then something happened at Pinecrest that made me wish, just for once, I had his talent.
My counselor there was a woman named Jeannie. She was all hippy, kaftans, and inner-child healing. I couldn’t talk to her at all in our sessions, I couldn’t find the words, so she told me to write them down in a journal instead. She gave me a small blue notebook and a ballpoint pen, but when it came time to write my first entry that night, I found it wasn’t sentences and paragraphs that filled my mind, but lyrics instead.
Verse. Bridge. Chorus.
The messy and the indescribable, captured in a few imperfect lines. The feelings I’d been fighting to communicate suddenly slipped out of me, onto those scribbled pages. And once they were on paper—pen and ink, something real I could see—my emotions became easier to bear, somehow. They weren’t just darkness and pain, they were out there in the light. Named, and shaped.
Something I could lock away in a drawer at night.
I filled that notebook in a week, then another, and another. And slowly, I began to see a way out of the quicksand, a solid bridge to the person I’d used to be. Even after I left the center, I still kept writing. Fragments, thoughts. It felt silly, sometimes, scribbling away like a teenager in the back of class, but I know it helps me keep everything from pulling me under again.
I haven’t shown Dex, or anyone, and maybe I never will. But for now, the chords keep me company as dawn light slips through the window and the world slowly wakes.
For a moment, I don’t feel so alone.
5.
RYLAND
The last time I saw my brother we were fighting.
We fought all the time back then. About me ditching school and running with a bad crowd. On the weekends I’d disappear with some buddies to go drinking down the coast; only a favor from the local sheriff was keeping my record clean. I didn’t give a damn. I was seventeen and so furious it felt like my skin could split apart with the force of all my rage. My junkie mom had bailed on us, I never even knew my daddy’s name. Emerson was the one left keeping our family together, so he got the brunt of my anger, any chance I got.
But that fight was the worst. My high school principal had called him, said I was flunking out of my senior year. There’s no way I would graduate with my crappy grades, and as for community college? Forget about it.
Emerson was madder than I’d ever seen. He screamed about how he was working three jobs just to keep a roof over our heads; the one thing I had to do was graduate, and I couldn’t even manage that. Our little sister, Brit, was hiding in her room; the music loud to drown out our yelling. She’d made dinner for us all, I remember that. Three plates of nuked frozen macaroni on the folding kitchen table. Mismatched china, plastic water glasses.
It looked so hopeful. So utterly naive. Like we were pretending to be a regular family, and not broken white-trash rejects. I couldn’t take it anymore, something in me just snapped clean apart. Emerson was still yelling, about how as long as I was under his roof, I would get my useless ass to school, get a job, start acting like a man instead of a stupid, reckless kid. I grabbed my duffel bag, threw some things in, and walked out the door.
He stood on the steps and said if I walked away, we were done. He wasn’t going to save me anymore.
I kept walking and I didn’t look back.
Now, I sit on the back porch of his new house and awkwardly grip a mug of coffee. There’s fresh paint on the shutters and flowers planted in the back yard that borders the beach. We just finished breakfast with his wife and sister-in-law; now the women are lying out in the sun, their laughter drifting up to us as they throw sticks for the dog. The whole scene is so wholesome and domestic; all that’s missing is a white picket fence.
My big brother, all grown up.
“So how are you doing?” Emerson joins me on the porch. He settles in a chair and gives me an assessing look—the same one he’s been shooting my way since I arrived last night.
I shrug. “Fine, I guess.”
“Is this just a visit, or will you be staying a while?”