Page 80 of Catcher's Lock

Belatedly, I backtrack to the bedroom and grab my phone. His call from the other night is in my recents, so I stab it with my thumb, only to stare out the window, unseeing, while an electronic voice informs me that the mailbox is full. Navigating to the contact, I pull up our text thread.

The last message is from two years ago, barely a week after hedisappeared, and it sucks all the air from my lungs.

Gem:

Je suis désolé

I’m sorry.

I’d almost blocked him when he sent it.

By then, Shilo and Hals had tracked me down at Penny’s and dragged me back to the Big Top lot in Calistoga. They’d been talking about canceling the rest of the tour. My dad was still three weeks away from wrapping his car around a tree less than five hundred yards from our driveway, and I hadn’t left the bunk in the Airstream for anything other than the bathroom in days. I also hadn’t yet found my way to the bottom of a bottle, but I’d been teetering on the edge, desperate to escape the flood of guilt and shame besieging me.

Because I’dknownit was a bad idea. I’d known he was wasted and in a dark place. I’d been so, so selfish to think “maybe” and “finally” and “fuck it, I just want to know what it’s like,” and his family was paying the price all around me.

And then he sent the text out of nowhere,only to me, and the relief nearly strangled me before the fury that followed. I didn’twantto forgive him. To excise the part of me that blamed myself, I needed him to stay the villain. And I hated—absolutelydespised—that in spite of the rage and the relief and the misery, I couldn’t completely cut him loose. He was metastasized into my bones, and there was no cure that wouldn’t kill me.

So I didn’t block him.

Instead, I changed his contact name to “Asshole” and sent a single, two-word reply:

Josha:

Fuck you

The old words swim in my vision as my limbs come back online in staticky bursts. It takes me three tries to decide what to type.

Fuck you.

You promised.

In the end, I settle for “Where are you?” and hit send with a numb finger before hurling the phone against the wall.

It’s too early for him to be at a bar, and the liquor store doesn’t open until ten, but Mendoza’s and Safeway will already be selling alcohol.

Scrambling to my feet, I head back to the kitchen. I check the fridge first, finding the last two bottles of the microbrew I stash in the crisper and dumping them down the sink. Next, I open the cupboard above the fridge and start emptying its contents. A decades-old bottle of dry vermouth that somehow escaped the memorial purge; the Shiraz I sometimes use for cooking, half turned to vinegar; the tail end of the Christmas bourbon.

My eyes burn, and the whole room reeks like a dive bar by the time my hand finds the Grey Goose Hannah’s husband brought over for a martini night that never happened. It’s unopened, because even Rachael won’t touch vodka unless it’s the only thing on offer. None of us will.

Except sometimes when I do.

When I’m feeling truly masochistic, and the only way out is through the subterranean tunnels I keep boarded up most of the time.

Even over the fumes wafting from the sink, the smell hits me as soon as I unscrew the cap—syrupy-sweet and sticky with demented nostalgia. The specters of my childhood crowd the kitchen and haunt the hallways, drawn to orbit my demise. Not for the first time, I wonder why I didn’t tear the whole place down the minute it was only mine. I could have thrown up ayurt, or one of those tiny houses that come in a kit, and had plenty of room for myself and Zombie during the off-season. Even in winter, I spend more time at the tent than here.

ButGemclimbed through the back window and cried beneath this roof. We danced in the living room and played Monopoly and Hearts and Cards Against Humanity with my siblings at the table behind me. There’s a dent in the hall, made by his shoulder from the first time we dropped acid, and a mark behind my old bedroom door, where we let ten-year-old Jeremy carve our heights into the frame.

How can he be everywhere and gone at the same time?

The first swig goes down caustic, burning with irony.

The second one tastes like revenge.

I take the bottle to the porch and sit down on the steps to wait.

By the time my truck rolls up the driveway, I’m halfway to drunk and all the way out of my mind.

His old surfboard sits loose in the cargo bed, propped sacrilegiously on the tailgate—the fucker never could be bothered to properly strap it down. He climbs from the cab still in his wetsuit, the black neoprene unzipped to the waist and hanging from his painted hips.