By the end of the movie, even though it wasn’t all that late, Lily and Aiden were both sound asleep after a long day and going without a nap. Timothy got up and turned the movie off while I stretched my arms over my head and began wiggling around to get out from under the kids.

Again Timothy proved helpful, coming over and offering, “Here, I can carry one of them upstairs.” When I nodded, he knelt down and carefully scooped Aiden up in his arms, and I did likewise with Lily, then led the way upstairs to set them in our big bed. Once I was satisfied they were adequately tucked in, we left the room and both peeked into Grandma’s room, but she was sound asleep, snoring like the devil. We left her door cracked open and returned downstairs where Timothy suggested, “It’s a beautiful night outside. Why don’t we sit on the porch now that it’s not buried?” When he saw my momentary hesitation, he laughed, “I’m not going to bite!”

“I know. I’m just tired.”

“Well I won’t keep you up late. Come on.” He held the door open for me to step outside, then gently closed the screen door and took a seat beside me on the porch swing. I pulled my legs up onto the swing beneath me, but he let his rest on the ground and gently rocked us back and forth as we sat there in silence, staring out at the beautiful black water with its grey-capped waves, letting the gentle breeze blow around us as the stars glimmered clear over our heads.

After a couple of minutes, I sighed, “I’m sorry you saw that tonight. I’m not... I’m not really that screwed up. I just sort of...snapped.”

“It’s okay,” he assured me. “I thought you were seeming too ‘Okay’ earlier today, anyways, after all you’ve been through.”

I laughed, “Yeah... no, but really, I’m okay. Tonight I just... I don’t know...”

“Well I do.” When I turned to look at him expectantly, he paused a moment before continuing, “I should have gone with you five years ago.”

“No, it was good you didn’t,” I assured him. “I needed time to heal–“

”See, that’s what I thought. I thought that you just needed to get away from everything and everyone here, and that if you could just forget about everything that happened here... I thought that you could forget about it and move on with your life and be okay. That’s why I didn’t try to call you or anything.”

“And I did. I have my kids, and a steady job, and–“

”But now you’re back here and everything smacked you in the face at once today. You haven’t moved on from everything that happened, you just escaped it for a while, and then you came back here and...” He sighed and looked out over the water. “It’s like you’re having to live it all over again. You never got over any of it, I don’t think, and now you’re back here, and with your mom here, you haven’t forgiven or forgotten her, so now you’re having to deal with all the bad stuff from your past at once, and it just... I don’t blame you, Jem. It’s too much.”

It hurt for his words to be so dead-on, but I wasn’t about to admit any of that to him, and I didn’t want to tell him how strange it was that he should know me so well when he had been my surprise savior in the end.

I sighed, “All right, then, Dr. Birdsong. What do you think I should have done differently? Not left? Stayed here where everything reminds me of everything that happened? Or maybe I should never have come back to take care of my dying grandmother? Is that better?”

“You can snap at me as much as you want, I’m not going home yet. And no, I don’t think you should have done anything differently. I just think I should have gone with you.”

“Yeah? And what would that have accomplished? What would you have done?”

“I would have taken care of you.” I fell silent. There’s not really anything you can say to that. “They asked me to look after you, you know.”

“Who did?” I asked. I already knew the answer.

“Both of them. Michael wanted me to protect you from Alex. Alex wanted me to protect you from the world.”

I sighed and shook my head, “Screw them both.”

“Why?”

“Please. They were telling you to look out for me? My brother and my– Alex. Where the hell were they?” I snorted.

“Struggling with their own deep shit.”

I laughed, “Right, right.” I waited, then observed, “Funny, isn’t it? Out of all of us... you’re the normal one.”

“Tell me about it. Fatty McFatster,” he joked. “I had my problems, too. What was I, though? I was a stupid hippie,” he laughed, leaning back and stretching his arms out. “I didn’t take anything serious. Not drugs or alcohol or death or sex. Nothing but rock’n’roll.”

“Whereas I took everything too seriously.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I did.” After a minute of silence, my words hanging clumsily in the air before us, I asked, “But what have you been up to for the past five years?”

“Me? Well, I joined the navy.”

I gasped, “No way! You joined the navy?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he laughed, nodding bashfully. “Still in. I’m just home on break for a while.”

“What made you join?”

“What else was I supposed to do with myself?”

He had a point, so I pressed, “Well do you like it?”

“I love it,” he admitted. “The regiment. The strictness. The importance of it all. It makes me feel like I’m somebody.”

“You are somebody,” I argued. He smiled and shrugged.

“I just... I guess I needed the regiment. I needed someone to control me for a while, to–“

”Make you forget?” He nodded. “Did it work?”

“Better than other things I could have done.” He hadn’t said it, but I felt the blow to my chest as that same voice whispered into my ear: like alcohol.

To shake off the nausea, I teased, “You aren’t going to ask me what I’ve been up to?”

“I know what you’ve been up to,” he laughed. “You’re a seamstress, right?”

“That makes me sound like a servant. I’m head seamstress and clothing designer for a children’s boutique, thank you very much.”

“Oh, are you? Well that’s mighty impressive,” he agreed, but I could see the disappointment in his eyes –not in what I had made of myself, but because everyone had hoped for so much more for me. Everyone had expected so much more from me. Circumstances had demanded differently, and I had done the best I could all things considered, but he was disappointed in the world, I knew, just like I was and everyone else who knew me was, for not giving me the opportunities I had the talent and ambition for.

“Well so what are you doing right now?”

“So how long are you here for?”

“I’m not sure yet. I tend to save up vacation time, so I have a lot stored up. We’ll see how long I can hang around before I need a break.” His wording caught me by surprise and I guess it showed on my face. “You know, that summer really messed me up, too. Don’t think I got out unscathed.”

I wasn’t liking the side of me that Hideaway was bringing out at all, because for some reason my momentary silence transformed into meanness again as I snorted, “Oh, I know. You obviously have such lasting scars. One of us wound up dead, two wound up drug addicts, I wound up single and pregnant while my boyfriend–“

He read my rising voice awfully well, though, and quickly cut me off, “I didn’t mean it like that. What I meant is, it’s okay to... I mean... I looked for lots of ways to make me forget, and none of them worked, but–“

”Why don’t you just ask what you want to ask?” I snapped, rolling my eyes.

He didn’t let my temper get at him, though, and just asked calmly, “What did your mom mean?”

“First off, don’t call her my mom. Second, about what?”

“You know about what.”

I turned my face out to the water, unhappy that he had asked even though I had just told him to, and waited a moment before insisting, “I’m not like Connie.”

“I know you aren’t.”

“I didn’t even want anything to do with alcohol until... until Catherine started it all.”

“I know.”

I didn’t continue, my brain jumping back to that summer to recall every tiny detail about Catherine’s face, her beach blonde hair, her sparkling blue eyes. She was absolutely beautiful and it had happened sometime during the school year while her family was away at their typical home. Next to me, she had always been teased for being the plain one, the tomboy, the dumb one. When she came back that summer, she was no longer Cathy but Catherine, an entirely new girl.

Everyone liked the new girl. She was funny and friendly and out-going, and still about the best athlete I think I’ve ever met. Maybe it was because we liked her so much that none of us reacted badly when she started drinking. I mean, it had been just light drinking at first, after all. A beer here, a glass of whine there. Her mom, smiling Mrs. Paramous with her bleached hair, had died only a month earlier in some really bad car wreck that Catherine had survived without a scratch. Though you wouldn’t have guessed it by anything she said or did that she had just been through something so terrible, she took advantage of the fact that her dad was willing to give her anything she wanted, even if it was alcohol by the truck loads. At first, none of us had accepted her invitations to drink with her for a mixture of reasons, mainly that we saw no point to it, really. I think Michael and I were probably the only ones with any real aversion to alcohol. Just the smell of it conjured up memories of my mother. But then... well, I’d had my reasons, but eventually even I caved. The first time I ever got drunk, it was all of us out in the club house, and man we had a time of it. Waking up to find vomit everywhere while clutching the worst head-aches any of us ever had the next morning wasn’t so great, and having to clean all the vomit up was even worse, but somehow that didn’t deter us.

“You stopped all on your own, though,” Timothy commented out of nowhere, and my eyes jerked towards him. Yeah, he had been thinking about it, too. We had been walking down the same memory lane. “Nobody made you quit drinking that summer. You did it all on your own. You stopped long before anyone else did.”

I nodded, then let my head fall to rest against the chain holding the swing up as I recounted, “But I went back.”

“It doesn’t matter. You stopped all on your own. And you’re sober now?” I nodded. “You’re not Connie.”

“No,” I sighed after a couple minutes. “No, I stopped that summer because I am Connie. I woke up one morning with this terrible hang-over and I looked at myself in the mirror and I reminded myself so much of my mother that it literally made me sick at my stomach. I couldn’t touch alcohol anymore. I was disgusted with myself, and I realized that I was too much like Connie to trust myself with alcohol again. That’s why I wouldn’t hang out with any of you when you were drinking.”

“The rest of us weren’t so lucky.”

I shook my head, “I don’t know that I was lucky. Now the smell of alcohol still makes me sick... If Catherine had never gotten me to drink, I never would have had a problem, would I? I would never have been able to see anything good in alcohol if she hadn’t been so pressuring, so insistent, if she hadn’t made it look like so much fun. But... but I still feel guilty blaming her. I can’t blame her. I mean, she didn’t hold a gun to my head or anything, but still... Isn’t that strange? She was so terrible, but in the end... I don’t know. I feel bad for her. She didn’t have you boys taking care of her when she lost her parent,” I shrugged.

He smiled, waited a moment, then pressed, “But later?”

“Later... Then later... I’m not an alcoholic, Timothy.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“That’s what Connie made it sound like. I think that’s why it made me so mad. I’m not an alcoholic, but...”

“But what?”

“God, I was so close. Or maybe I was one. I...” I trailed off for a moment, then continued, “I was so screwed up when I left here. I felt so bad for myself. The world hated me, life was unfair, I was angry at everyone. So I started drinking again, and I couldn’t stop. It’s like...like...”

“Like you were addicted?”

“Yeah...no...maybe. I had been like that for ten months, I guess... it’s not like I was drunk all day every day or anything. I think I only actually got drunk a couple of times that whole year, but I always had a drink on me, and I would drink just until I was about to hit the tipsy stage... Then, this one day, Aiden fell and busted his chin open on the tile in the kitchen, but I was afraid to drive. I was afraid I was too tipsy and would wreck the car, so I had to call an ambulance, and CPS got involved. They didn’t have any proof of anything, and they left me alone after one interview, but it scared me. It scared me that my son needed me but I couldn’t help him because of alcohol, and it scared me that I could lose my children. It made me realize what I was becoming. Who I was becoming.” I stopped to catch my breath, having rattled all of that without stopping for fear that, if I stopped, I wouldn’t be able to pick back up. Timothy didn’t say anything, just stared out at the water and gave me the time I needed until I continued, “So I went to an AA meeting, just to see... and I sat there listening to everyone whine about their problems, about why they drink, and I just kept thinking, ‘These people are idiots. I’ve had a rougher life than all of them combined, and they think alcohol is going to solve their problems?’ And just like that, I quit. I walked out of the clinic that night and haven’t had a sip of alcohol in eleven months... God, I’m a horrible mother, aren’t I?” I sighed, letting my head fall back onto his shoulder as I closed my eyes.

“No,” Timothy argued immediately. “You’re an incredible mom. Your kids love you more than I’ve ever seen any kids love their parents, and you loved them enough to stop. You’re smart enough not to even keep alcohol in the house. You’re not Connie.”

I smiled but kept my eyes closed and whispered, “Thank you.” Once again, we lapsed into silence, but it was the most peaceful silence we’d had all day. I finally broke it, asking, “You haven’t told me whether you drink still or not.”

“No, I don’t drink. Not at all. I didn’t after that summer.”

“Because of that summer?”

“Yep. The way I see it, all our problems started when Catherine started drinking, and only escalated when the rest of us joined her.”

I nodded, “Yeah. Alcohol and Old Man Tippet’s death.”

“I miss that old coot,” he snorted, and I elbowed him, insisting, “You’re going to hell for that one.”

“He was an old coot, bless his heart,” he snickered, mimicking the way our grandmothers had a habit of adding “bless her heart” to any insult they said.

“Still, you can’t say that about the dead. He’s going to come back and haunt you.”

“Why do I think that probably wouldn’t bother you? You’d probably be all excited to get to see him again.” I laughed and nodded, then let out a big yawn and closed my eyes again. “I must be awfully boring if you keep yawning...”

“I told you I was tired,” I reminded. “It’s been a long day and I couldn’t sleep last night.”

“Nightmares?”

“Something like that,” I shrugged.

“Well, I’ll let you get to sleep then, even if it is only like nine o’clock. I promised I wouldn’t keep you up late, though, so come on, let me see you safely into the house.” I pushed myself up from the swing and walked over to the door where he propped the screen open with his leg so he could still hug me goodnight.

“Night, Timmy.”

“Good night, Jem. Try to get some sleep.”

“I hope so. Are you going to come by tomorrow?”

“Am I invited?”

“Of course,” I replied, mimicking Lily so that both of us laughed.

“If I’m welcome, I’m here. And possibly even if I’m not welcome,” he laughed. “I have promises to keep, after all.”

I closed the screen door quietly and said good night again, then watched him head back to his truck. It was quicker to walk to his house, but that would have been considerably harder with a television in tow, I guess. Once he had driven away, I turned from the door and trudged upstairs, not bothering to close anything but the screen door. Hideaway had a nonexistent crime rate and most of the houses didn’t even have locks.

Upstairs, I intended to peek in on Grandma, but her door had been closed, and I could once again hear Connie inside. It looked like she was trying to make amends with her own mother before she died. No telling what she had put Grandma through. I sure didn’t know, because even when Grandma was raising Connie’s kids, bailing her out of jail, cleaning up after all her mistakes, she never would say a bad word about my mother to me. As she explained, it was for Connie’s actions to speak for themselves and me to decide for myself.

I undressed quickly, ready to collapse in bed, and when the letter fell out of my bag. I had forgotten that I’d packed it. I frowned and shoved it quickly back inside, not willing to let it haunt my dreams tonight, not when I really, really needed the sleep. Maybe a good night’s rest would help my temper. For everyone else’s sake, I sure hoped so, and thankfully, after slipping into bed between my two sleeping angels, spent very little time awake thinking about anything at all.

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