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“Kit-Kat?”
My heart, thudding so heavily for so long, skips a joyous beat. I had no idea how much I needed to hear that.
“Can I come home? Right now?”
“Of course. What’s going on? You sound scared.”
“I can’t stay here any longer,” I say. “I need to get away from this place. And them.”
“Them?”
“Lenora and Virginia. They’ve been lying all this time. And I can’t be a part of it.”
But it’s not just that. There’s something else as well.
I need to confess.
“When I get home, I have things to tell you. About what happened to Mom.”
I hang up to keep myself from saying the rest. That can’t be spoken on the phone. It needs to be said in person, face-to-face, which is what I should have done six months ago.
What they’re saying’s not true, Kit-Kat.
But it is.
All of it.
Memories of that night wash over me as I leave the kitchen, trot down the hallway, whisk my way toward the front door.
My mother, in pain so severe that few words exist to describe it. She wasn’t wracked with pain. She was aflame with it. She waspossessedby it.
Me, literally creaking from exhaustion and worry and achingempathy, waiting for the painkiller to kick in, desperate to provide her with some small amount of relief. I stroked her hair. I whispered soothing words into her ears. I prayed to a God I wasn’t sure I believed in to dosomethingto put her out of her misery.
Eventually, the pain broke. It was still there, of course, but just a simmer instead of a full boil. The fentanyl had leashed it enough to allow my mother to rest, which was all I could reasonably hope for at that moment.
As she fell asleep, I reached for the fentanyl bottle, ready to take it back to the lockbox under my bed. I’d barely wrapped my fingers around it when I felt my mother’s hand on mine, stilling it.
“Leave them,” she whispered.
“You know I’m not allowed to do that.”
“Just for tonight.” Her voice was raspy, labored, slowly but surely filling with renewed pain. “Just in case I need one.”
“Mom, I can’t.”
She tightened her grip atop my hand, shockingly strong for someone so utterly depleted. In hindsight, I don’t think it was her doing it.
It was the pain, taking over and moving her like a marionette.
“Please, Kit-Kat,” my mother whispered. “Please.”
What followed was an internal tug-of-war that felt like hours but in reality lasted mere seconds. Part of me was compelled to follow protocol, do the right thing, care for her in the responsible way I’d been trained to do. But another part of me knew that my mother was suffering—and that I could help alleviate it.
“I’ll only take one,” she said. “I promise.”
One more pill.
That wasn’t so bad.