Page 2 of Between Hello and Goodbye

“What about Mama…?”

I nearly snapped at him to shut up. She didn’t care about us. Still, a wave of relief hit me to see her and Dean staggering out of the blazing inferno that was our trailer, clutching each other’s arms, bent over, coughing.

I pointed. “There.”

Morgan’s eyes filled with tears. “Mama…”

“She’s gone, Mo,” I said. My heart felt like it was filling with concrete.

“She’s not. She’s—”

“Going to jail. Her and Dean both, for a long time. And even if they don’t, this is going to happen again. And maybe next time you don’t wake up to pee first, you get me?” I put my hand on his shoulder. “We’re all we have. Each other.”

We’d been that way for a long time, since Dad left five years ago. Mom hurt her back working two jobs to keep us afloat, and the doc gave her a pill. Oxy-something. Got her hooked so that she wanted more, long after the prescription ran out. Turned out, heroin wasn’t too different from the “medicine” and so we lost our mom too.

Sirens sounded in the distance, and the inhabitants of other trailers were shouting at our mother and Dean while dragging hoses and filling buckets to protect their homes.

“She’s gone,” I said. “Just like Dad.”

“Dad left—”

“Yeah, he left, but Mom did too. When she started up on the drugs. She’s right there.” I jerked my chin at our junkie mother who’d fallen to the ground like a drunk person. “She’s right there but she’s really not.”

Morgan nodded and wiped his nose. He was a smart kid and sweeter than me. He didn’t deserve this shit. He should’ve had a mom who packed him a lunch every day and a dad who watched his soccer games. Not an older brother trying to make up for all of it.

But life didn’t give a crap what you deserved. Sink or swim. That was it. I wasn’t big on signs or omens, but I could read the writing on the wall. The years since Dad left were a run-up to this morning. It was up to me to protect Morgan from whatever bad shit wanted to wreck him and turn my happy-go-lucky little brother into something else.

I’ll be something else. I’ll take it all to keep him safe.

I nudged his arm. “Come on.”

“What? Where?”

“We gotta get out of here before the cops find us. They’ll separate us and put us in homes.”

He looked at me with round, dark eyes. Eyes like mine, dark hair like mine, but he was slighter and skinny, whereas I was already bulking up from yard work, construction work, whatever odd job someone would give me. I was sixteen—seventeen in June—but Alice at the grocery and Phil at the hardware store both told me I could pass for twenty. Maybe older.

“They’re going to separate us?” Morgan asked, the tears coming again. “They can’t.”

“I’m not going to let that happen.”

They’ll have to kill me first.

Morgan turned back to the scene unfolding below. The firemen had arrived in a truck almost as big as our trailer. Their hoses blasted what was left of our home, while cops had Mom and Dean sitting on the curb. Neither looked panicked or even concerned that there might be two boys still inside the blackened, charred heap. Too high to care or remember we existed.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Morgan sniffled and wiped his nose. He gave the scene a final glance, then followed me as we half-walked, half-slid on our asses down the other side of The Hill. To the north, Allentown was a cluster of buildings just waking up on the spring morning, about twenty miles away.

“Too close,” I muttered, thinking quickly. We had to get out of the state if I had any chance of keeping the authorities off our backs. It was a longshot, already.

“Where are we going?” Morgan sounded small. Lost.

I put my arm around his skinny shoulders. “Home.”

“Where is that?”

“Wherever we make it. It’ll be like an adventure.”