Masquerade

“We’d really like you to come down. It’s not—”

“It’s not something I haven’t dealt with before,” I cut her off again. I don’t need her to try and make this easier on me. The fact is nothing would make me deal with it better. Saying it on the phone won’t make it any less real than in person.

“We’re assuming it was a suicide attempt. She took pills. We don’t know if she changed her mind or if she wasn’t lucid enough to make decisions, but sometime after, she must have tried to leave her apartment. A neighbor found her collapsed in her doorway and called nine-one-one.”

The tears that I didn’t realize had formed in my eyes are brimming over and starting their slow descent down my face. This is her third suicide attempt in the last four years.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor tells me.

“Me too,” I whisper. I’m sorry about all of it.

I push out of bed and race to my closet. “We’ll be there soon,” I tell the doctor before dropping my cell to the dresser. Yanking a sweatshirt over my head, I’m already shoving my feet into my te

“Maddox!” I yell as I run into our small hallway. “Get up!” My fists come down hard on my brother’s door. “Come on! We have to go.” I try for the doorknob, but like I knew he would, he locked his room. Before I can knock again, he’s jerking the door open, his eyes wide and frantic with worry.

“What the fuck happened? Are you okay?”

“It’s Mom. She…”

Anger washes away the worry on Maddox’s face. His jaw tenses. Veins pulse in his hand; he’s gripping the doorknob so tightly I think it could break. Quite the pair, aren’t we? While I worry, he gets pissed.

“What did she do?” It’s almost as though he blanks out in times like this. Goes numb. All I have to do is bring up either of our parents and I can see the emotion drain from him and I hate it. He and Dad used to be so close… and then something switched and I was the one who got his attention, yet Mom was all about Maddox. Now he can’t stand to talk about either of them.

“Pills. We need to go, Maddy.”

“Don’t call me that. I hate it when you call me that.”

I reach for my older brother’s hand, but he jerks it away. “Yeah, because that’s what’s important right now. We need to go see her.”

He’s shaking his head and I know what he’s going to say before he does. That he doesn’t want to go. That he doesn’t care if she needs us. Before he can, I say the one thing that I know he can’t say no to. “I can’t do this without you. I need you.”

“Fuck,” he mumbles under his breath. “Gimme two minutes.” The door slams, guilt tingeing the edges of my pain. I shouldn’t manipulate him like that, but he’s my brother. Her son. Mom and I both need him. She can’t help that she fell apart after what Dad did.

Realizing I forgot my phone, I grab it and the car keys, and I’m pacing the living room when Maddox comes out, his dark hair all disheveled. He doesn’t look me in the eyes. He’s pissed and I know he knows what I did.

We head out to the car and I drive us to the hospital because I don’t trust him to do it when he’s mad. He likes to go too fast and the last thing we need is to get into an accident on the way.

I’m shivering by the time we walk through the hospital doors and only part of it is from the cold. Maddox isn’t wearing a jacket, even though it’s a frigid cold January in Virginia.

“We’re here to see Beatrice Cross,” I tell the desk clerk. Maddox doesn’t step up beside me. He has his arms crossed about five feet away from me.

“Are you family?” the clerk asks.

“Yes. We’re her children.”

She puts bands on each of our wrists and directs us where to go, as if we don’t know where the ER is. We could find anywhere in this place.

I’m not surprised when my eyes pool over again. No matter how many times this happens or how many times she slips back into her depression, it doesn’t get easier.

Right before we leave the sterile white hallway and head for the emergency room, Maddox grabs my wrist.

“Don’t cry for her, Laney. Don’t cry for either of them.”

Maddox is so much older than his twenty-one years. He’s always been the strong one and both of us know it. It’s not that simple for me. My mom just tried to take her own life. My dad is in prison and my brother—my best friend—hates the world.

“Why did this happen to us?” I ask. He grabs me and pulls me into his arms, letting me cry into his chest.

I can feel his awkwardness as he holds me. He’s not real big on affection and it makes me feel like crap that he has to console me again. But that’s what he does. He hates it, but he tries to make everything better. Mom couldn’t take care of stuff, so Maddox did. He’s still doing it.

“I don’t know,” is all he says. Honestly, I’m a little surprised I got that much out of him.

“We need to go see her.” I wipe my eyes with my sweatshirt.

Maddox nods at me, but before we can go in, a nurse stops us. As soon as I tell her who we are, she gets that small smile on her face that says she feels bad for us, but she’s trying not to let it show.

“Let me get the doctor first, okay? She wants to speak to you.” She disappears behind the sliding doors, the sound echoing through the halls. The emergency room is quiet tonight and I almost wish for more people around to distract us.

Right away, the door slides open again. A woman with graying hair, wearing the same smile as the nurse, comes out. “You’re Ms. Cross’s children?”

“Yes.” Of course it’s only me who answers.

She leads us over to a small room with a couch. Goose bumps blanket my skin the second we walk in. It reminds me of the place they take family members to let them know when someone has passed away.

She’s okay… she’s okay. They would have told me if she wasn’t.

“As I told you on the phone, your mom overdosed on pills. Some of them seem to be medications that have been prescribed to her, but we’re not sure if that’s all she took.”

Oh God. Has she been buying pills illegally? How did this happen? How did we go from a normal family—with a mom and dad who used to laugh together, a mom who used to love cooking di

“She’s sleeping right now, but she’s been in and out of it. You need to know that she’s still a threat to herself. She…” The doctor pauses for a second before sighing. “She’s continued to say she wants to die and she attacked one of the nurses. I just want you to be prepared when you go in. We had to strap her down for everyone’s safety.”

A cry climbs up my throat and I clamp my mouth closed, hoping it won’t be able to escape. Why aren’t we good enough to make her want to stay? I don’t understand her not wanting to be with me. With Maddox.

My brother’s hand comes down on my shoulder and he gives it a comforting squeeze. No matter how angry he is, he’s always here for me. I hate how all of this has scarred his soul.

“Where do we go from here?” Maddox asks her, but I want to be the one who’s angry now. I want to yell that we’ve been through enough. That I’m eighteen fucking years old and Maddox only twenty-one. We’re not supposed to be dealing with this. We’re supposed to be in college and going home for long weekends instead of being alone.

“We did a psych consult and we think it’s best that she be admitted to our inpatient ward. It’s a thirty-day stay. They’ll be able to help her better there. I would hate for her to be in a situation where she’s able to hurt herself further or, God forbid, someone else.”

It feels like a fist squeezing my chest so tight it shatters my ribs, shatters everything inside me, but I just want to be whole. Why can’t we all be whole again?