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17. Ian

17

IAN

“So sorrow’s heaviness doth heavier grow . . .” Act III, Scene II

Before Jade, my life was like riding a train. Steady, predictable, with no discernible ups and downs. But since I was cast in the one-act, since Jade McKinney took up space in my life, the train has become a roller coaster.

I was sure things between me and Jade were ending earlier tonight. The way she talked to my dad was not okay. Sure, she was standing up for me, but I didn’t need to be rescued, and it was presumptuous, not to mention disrespectful. My dad responded the way he always did when one of us talked back growing up—with grace and humility—and he even told me he respects Jade for standing up to him in a way he doesn’t see with a lot of kids my age. He told me if Jade didn’t really care about me, she wouldn’t have done that.

I know he’s right, and I know she cares about me, and I know eventually I would have gotten over the way she was so rude to my dad. Even now, the sting of it has lessened. Maybe because I understand now, in a way I didn’t three hours ago, that being the parent to your alcoholic mother might change the way you see and talk to other adults.

Lying in her childhood bed with her now, her warm body curled against mine, I’m rewriting my whole understanding of Jade. Her lack of respect for her parents, her fierce independence, her resistance to opening up to people. Jade’s walls are high because that is how she’s kept herself safe. And I understand wanting to be safe.

I’ve been playing it safe forever. On the one hand, I like the well-worn paths of familiarity. It’s like always ordering the same thing when I go to a particular restaurant: I already know I like the dish, so why take a risk on something new? On the other hand, I’ve never really had the confidence to do the things that scare me, so even when I wanted to branch out or face my fears, my self-doubt was like a critical, strict parent who wouldn’t allow me to do anything.

Which is completely the opposite of what my parents were like: supportive, encouraging, giving me the space to do or be anything I wanted. But something about all that freedom, even with their hands to hold, was too overwhelming.

College has made me a lot more confident of a person than I was in high school. The sheer fact of being without my normal support system close by and having to put myself around new people and situations forced me to trust myself and say yes to things I’d normally say no to. I think if freshman-year Ian could see senior-year Ian, he’d be really proud of himself.

Of course, any version of me prior to the one I was on September 17, when I met Jade for the first time, would not have believed I’d go into Jade’s house tonight after she explicitly told me not to.

But it didn’t feel like a choice. She told me not to go in, and then I sat in my car and couldn’t ignore the feeling inside me that leaving was the wrong thing to do. There was no waffling. There was no need to call anyone else for their opinion. The part of me that wanted to heed Jade’s words and leave was so small I practically bulldozed it on the way back into the house.

My hands shook as I opened the door, and I had to clutch the banister on my way up the stairs so my legs wouldn’t give out on me. But the look on Jade’s face when she turned and saw me banished any doubts that might have remained.

With one of my arms trapped under Jade’s neck, I slide my free hand down her arm just to feel her soft skin against my hand. Intertwining our fingers, I squeeze her against me.

I know Jade isn’t mine, but it’s been hard for me to stop feeling like she is since that moment in the stage manager’s booth. Maybe that’s what drove me back inside tonight. Maybe it was something in the way she insisted she could do this alone that tipped me off. Whatever it was, I want to bottle up the boldness I found in myself tonight and drink it another day when I’m drowning in doubt.

I dip my head, placing a soft kiss on her shoulder. My lips meet fabric, but I don’t care. It’s enough to just be this close to her, breathing in her earthy jasmine scent. I bury my nose against her neck, kissing the exposed skin. I shouldn’t disturb her while she’s asleep, but it’s hard to resist.

“I’m awake, you know,” Jade says, her voice scratchy, like she was on the edge of sleep.

“Can’t sleep?” My face feels warm from being caught.

“I can’t stop thinking about tonight. I just keep playing the moment I found my mom over and over again on a loop.”

Like a hammer to the chest, her words shatter my heart. I’ve never wished I had the magical ability to help someone fall asleep as much as I do right now.

“But I also keep thinking about the moment you walked in,” she whispers. “I wish I knew how to thank you.”

“I didn’t do it for thanks. I did it because I lo—” I clear my throat, catching myself before I say the words, hoping she didn’t pick up on what I almost put down. “I care about you.”

I wait, hoping she won’t call me out for what I almost just said, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Or if she does, she mercifully says nothing.

“Is it always like this after a breakup?” I ask, opening the door in case she wants to talk. Maybe talking out what’s on her mind will help her fall asleep.

“Yes,” Jade says. “She doesn’t always . . .” She trails off, pausing for a deep breath before continuing. “The danger is always there. But this is the first time in a long time it was really serious like this.”

“That sounds really scary,” I say, because what else is there to say to something like that?

“When I was eleven,” she starts, emotion straining her voice. She clears her throat, pushing past it. “The guy she’d been seeing for a year left her for someone else. It was her longest relationship since my dad, who she was with for nearly three years. She found some text messages between that guy and another woman and she went off the deep end. Like, the real deep end.”

Jade pauses. A horrible sick feeling overcomes me, as if my body knows where this story is going before I do.

“She drank so much so fast. My grandma wasn’t in town, but promised she’d start driving and be there as soon as she could. I was only eleven, and it was my first time dealing with my mom without my grandma. I did what my grandma always did—I started collecting liquor bottles from around the house and pouring them down the drain in the kitchen, but I only got rid of, like, two before she found me. When she realized what I was doing, she pushed me—like, to get me away from the sink. But I fell and sprained my wrist, ’cause that’s what I landed on. Plus, I was still holding the fifth of vodka in one hand and I didn’t want the glass to shatter everywhere. The bottle was fine, but I wasn’t, and my mom screamed at me and then snatched the vodka out of my hand. That’s the only time she’s ever lifted a hand to me or been outright mean, and I know she still regrets it.

“Anyway, she grabbed all the bottles I’d collected to dump, took them to her room, and locked herself in. I thought that was the end of it. I thought she’d drink herself to sleep and then wake up and, like, do what she normally did—mope around, drink some more, but mostly start to get better—and that would be it. So I went to bed. I thought it was safe.”

Her voice trembles, and she shivers like she’s got a fever. I hold her tighter, trying to communicate that I’m here, she’s safe, and it’s okay, but I don’t know how effective it is, because I’m shaking too. The urge to cry sits heavy in my chest.

“I woke up the next morning to knocking on the front door. I remember at the time being super annoyed by it, so I went looking for my mom to figure out why she wasn’t answering the door. I don’t know if you’ve ever opened the front door to a police officer, but let me tell you, it’s not an experience I want to repeat. I thought my mom was dead. I really thought, ‘This guy is here to tell me my mom is dead and it’s my fault.’ I was bawling before the officer got a word out.”

I know how the story ends. I know her mom is alive—I saw her last night. And still, I have trouble swallowing past the lump in my throat.

Jade huffs a laugh—kind of a forced, dark laugh. “She wasn’t dead, obviously, but she’d been in a pretty nasty accident. The officer was just coming to get me and take me to the hospital. My mom had asked for me, and that’s how they knew I was home alone. I had no idea she’d taken the car sometime while I was sleeping.”

“God, Jade . . .”

“I don’t beat myself up for a lot of things, and I don’t really have any regrets in my life, but I could have prevented that accident. I could have hidden the keys. My grandma always hides the keys first. I knew better.”

“You were eleven, Jade. It wasn’t your job to think about things like that,” I say and try to keep my voice steady, but tears prick the backs of my eyes.

“Anyway, it turned out she’d swerved off the road and into an electrical pole. The passenger’s side was wrapped around the pole. The cars behind her called 911 pretty quickly, and thank god no one else was hurt. The officer kept telling me it was a miracle she was alive, that I should be grateful. But I remember in that moment, riding in the back of a police car to visit my mom in the hospital, that I wished she had died, because it would have been easier to be an orphan than to be her daughter.”

Her words hang in the hair between us, suspended as if held up by invisible strings, the weight of them dragging them down to hover over us like a blanket on a laundry line.

“I know that’s a terrible thing to say,” Jade says, still whispering. Her voice is shaky.

“No, it’s okay.” I try to assure her I’m not judging her. How could I? I have no idea what it was like to grow up with an alcoholic parent. My chest aches as if my heart is literally cracking into pieces.

“But that incident—arguably one of her worst besides this one—fucked me up for years. My grandma blamed herself for a long time. I still blame myself. And both of us know the real person to blame is my mother, who refuses to admit she has a problem. It’s the incident that inspired my grandma to join Al-Anon. I went a couple times too, but I had a lot more trouble connecting with all of it than my grandma did.”

“What is Al-Anon?”

“It’s like a support group for family and friends of alcoholics.”

She says the word “alcoholics” the way I said the word “demisexual” the first few times. Like maybe she’s said it in her head a few times but saying it out loud still feels foreign.

“How long has this been going on?” I ask.

“My first memories around taking care of her start when I was five, but before that, my grandma took care of her.”

“Jesus Christ.”

A heavy horror settles over me at the reality of Jade’s childhood.

Jade has never been parented. She is the parent.

“ I have no respect for my mother. ”

Jade’s reaction at the tailgate when she saw those texts makes so much sense now. It activated the worry and fear she’s been programmed to feel when her mom gets out of a relationship.

No wonder her guard is always up. She’s never had a chance to take it down. She’s spent her whole life worrying about her own mother, taking care of an unpredictable alcoholic.

Like a door unlocking once the right code is entered, things fall into place in my mind. Earlier, with my dad, I thought she was projecting her issues with authority figures onto him, but she talked to my dad like he was her peer. She would talk to me the way she talked to him, and I understand now it’s because she wasn’t raised to see parental figures with an air of authority or to speak any differently to them than she might her friends.

I want to go back in time and take back everything I said to her in our argument. I want to apologize for being so judgmental, but it’s not the time, and I don’t want to take away from this moment. Jade is trusting me with these stories; with this glance into her life. It’s something I don’t want to take lightly.

“Is she only like this after a relationship? Is it always so unpredictable?” I ask.

“Yes. Well, there’s some patterns within the unpredictability. My mom called me two weeks ago worried that Rob was going to break up with her, and I missed it for what it was. That’s probably when she stocked up on alcohol. We’ve been able to avoid some post-breakup damage by recognizing the pattern. The breakup is never out of the blue. She isn’t a healthy person, so she can’t maintain a healthy relationship. She’ll get into one, and it will go well for a certain length of time, and then, when it starts to disintegrate, so does she. And from there, it’s a slow downward spiral until the breakup, and then she becomes the person you saw today. Although usually not as reckless.”

“What’s she like when she’s in a relationship?” I ask. I’m curious, but I also want to give Jade the space to talk about this with someone in a way that I don’t think she ever has.

“Oh god, she’s, like, the best. She’s present and fun and spontaneous in a good way. She’s silly, and she bakes. She’ll cook a month’s worth of food in a day. Our freezer is always bursting with meals when she’s in a relationship, and thank god, because when she gets dumped—and she always gets left, she doesn’t leave—she doesn’t cook a thing. She barely eats. We have to remind her to eat. She becomes a child.”

“And you become the parent.”

She nods—a movement I feel rather than see. The room is too dark for me to see much. A sliver of light from a lone streetlamp peeks in through the window. I’m glad there isn’t more light, because my heart is on my sleeve right now, and if she could see me, she’d see how I’m cracked into a million pieces for her.

“And when she’s single?” I ask.

“She’s so . . . normal. She isn’t on an upswing or a downswing. And she’s never single for a long time, but when she is, it’s like there’s this . . . clarity about her. I feel like when she’s single she sees me. And the rest of the time she just sees her partner or herself.”

“I’m so sorry, Jade.”

She sighs—a heavy sigh that seems to come from the deepest parts of her soul. I imagine laced in her exhale is some of the weight she’s been carrying, like she’s able to let go of some of it, knowing I’m holding some of it now too. I plant a kiss against the spot where her neck and shoulder meet.

“It took me years to feel safe enough to leave my mom at home after a breakup. I almost didn’t go to college, but my grandma insisted. I had more options for schools, but this was the closest. I’m only two hours from home, so I can get home easily enough if I need to.” She pauses like she’s gathering the courage to say what she wants to say next. “Thanks to you, tonight I did.”

I want to tell her it was an honor to drive her home, to be here with her, that I’m glad she didn’t have to be here alone, but all those words feel too small; too light for the gravity of it all. So I kiss that spot again, and then her shoulder. It’s still not enough, but she squeezes my hand, understanding passing between us.

“What will you do when you graduate?” I ask. I know she wants to bounce around between theater gigs, do some traveling. But if she had trouble going to college, how was she going to get around traveling hundreds of miles away?

Jade makes a scoffing noise. A bitter laugh. “I try not to think about it.”

I know this isn’t the right time to tell her that she’s going to have to deal with it soon, because the slow march to graduation won’t stop for her refusal to make a decision. I’m not going to swoop in and tell her how to deal with something she’s been dealing with her whole life when I’ve seen just a handful of hours of it.

“Then let’s not think about it,” I say, because that seems like the only right thing to say right now. I nuzzle into her neck, pressing one more kiss to her shoulder, wishing it were enough to solve all her problems and take away her stress.

It doesn’t, but she makes a noise of contentment and then sighs so deeply my arm moves up and down with the expansion and deflation of her ribs. It’s enough for tonight.

“Thank you, Jade,” I say, hoping I caught her before she fell asleep.

“For what?” she asks, her voice heavy with sleep.

“For trusting me. For telling me all this. For letting me in.”

She makes another noise—something to acknowledge my words. I’m not expecting a response, and when her breathing evens, growing deeper, I untangle my hand from hers and rub my eyes.

I’m relieved Jade is asleep, but I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight or tomorrow or anytime in the near future. My heart is irreparably shattered for her in a way that I don’t think can be fixed. Her story haunts me. Her childhood and how she became the person she is today. I understand why she doesn’t believe in marriage or love, really. In her shoes, I don’t think I would either.

My throat feels clogged, and tears are waiting just behind my eyes. I want to help her. I want to change her circumstances.

I want to take care of her.

Because no one has ever taken care of Jade McKinney.

But that’s going to change after tonight.