“Open your eyes. Open your fucking eyes!” Jason shouts close to my face.
The darkness surrounding me disappears when I blink my eyes open as his palm smacks against my cheek.
Sadness, worry, anguish, and fear.
That’s what I see written all over my brother’s face as he looks at me and shakes his head. I want to apologize to him that he found me like this, but what’s the point? He’s found me in similar situations many times since I got home, and my apologies aren’t worth shit at this point.
I want to tell him that I don’t want this crutch of alcohol. I don’t want to need it, feeling like it’s the only way I can survive the pain. The pain in my gut, the pain in my head, and the pain in my heart. Without drinking, it all comes back until I want to claw at my skin and scream until my throat is hoarse. I open my mouth, but the words won’t come.
He sits down next to me and kicks his legs out in front of him, mirroring my own.
“What was it this time? Flashback? Bad dream?” Jason asks quietly, listing off all the excuses I’ve given him over the last few months when he’s smelled the alcohol on my breath or found me passed out on the couch.
I lean forward to grab the letter from Aiden, but the room spins and I have to quickly lean back against the wall before I puke. Instead, I lift my arm and point to it.
He looks away from me to the crumpled-up ball of paper, letting out a big sigh before reaching over to grab it. I watch silently as he uncrinkles it and smooths it out against his thigh. I stare at his face, blinking a few times to keep it in focus, as he reads through the letter.
“Jesus Christ,” he finally whispers. “Where did this come from?”
I clear my throat and look away from him to stare at the opposite wall in our grandparents’ living room before answering him.
“It came when I was in Cambodia. Two weeks after he died.”
Jason doesn’t say anything for a few minutes, and I take the time to look around the room. I always loved this house growing up. An old farmhouse on the outskirts of Charleston, it was filled with happy memories and good times, the complete opposite of the home we shared with our mother in New Jersey. I looked forward to spending every summer here with our grandmother. She baked us cookies, she fed us home-cooked meals, and she paid attention to us. She loved us and she cared for us and she did everything she could to make us happy.
This house that was once full of dreams now feels like hell. I can’t stand these four walls that surround me, caging me in, not letting me get away from the memories and the pain.
“I’m sorry, Everett. This letter is…shit. I don’t even know what to say about this thing. Why didn’t you tell me? Is this why you’ve been drinking yourself into a coma since you got home?” Jason asks.
“It is what it is,” I shrug, ignoring the drinking comment. “He’s right. I’m an asshole, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.”
My brother scoffs, pushing himself up from the floor to stand over me. It hurts my head to look up at him. The overhead light is shining in my eyes and stabbing into my skull, and I curse when I have to shield my eyes to see his face.
“I know I’ll never understand everything going on in that head of yours. I know I’ll never be able to sympathize with all the shit you saw over there. And I know the sadness I feel about Aiden being gone is nothing compared to what you feel,” Jason tells me. “But enough is enough. You were doing something you loved over there and you didn’t know he was sick. Even if you had, you couldn’t have done anything about it. He had the best medical team money could buy, flown in from all over the world. What he had, even your fancy medical skills couldn’t have fixed. You’re still alive and you need to start fucking acting like it. I’m sorry that letter hurt you, but I’m not sorry Aiden wrote it. He’s right. You need to get your head out of your ass.”
I can feel anger start to replace my buzz, and I clench my hands into fists in my lap. I don’t want to hear this bullshit coming out of his mouth. I know I deserve it, but I don’t want to hear it.
“What the fuck happened to the promise you made me yesterday?” he asks, snatching the water bottle out of my hand and hurling it across the room.
It smacks against our grandmother’s oak curio cabinet filled with her good china and drops to the floor, the last few sips of vodka leaking out onto the hardwood floor.
“It hurts,” I whisper, looking down at my balled fists, unable to look him in the eyes anymore.
“Of course it hurts, you dumbass! It’s called alcohol withdrawal for a reason. It’s not supposed to feel good, but I guess you don’t even want to try,” he fires back.
Jason squats down next to me and grabs my chin, forcing me to look at him.
“I’m sorry Aiden’s gone. I’m sorry you’re hurting and you feel guilty for not being able to save him. But screw you for not even trying. I was too young to remember losing Dad, but watching Mom fade away and drink herself to death was bad enough. You can go fuck yourself if you think you’re going to leave me behind, too. If you won’t do it for me, do it for Cameron. She lost Aiden, too, you know. What do you think will happen if she loses you as well?”
With that, he gets up and walks away. The angry stomp of his construction boots banging against the hardwood floor makes me drop my head into my hands to stop the damn thing from feeling like it’s going to explode.
I want to go back to the people that need me, but my employer won’t let me.
I want to stop hearing Aiden’s voice in my head, but he won’t let me.
I want to drown myself in booze, but my brother won’t let me.
No one will just fucking let me be.
My brother has no idea what he’s talking about. Cameron will be fine without me, just like she’s been for the last four years. She doesn’t need me. She’s never needed me.
Everyone needs to just fucking Let. Me. Be.
Chapter 2
Everett
Wishing in the past…
Ten years old
My name’s Aiden Curtis, I’m ten, and my daddy’s rich,” the kid who just walked up to me says.
He’s as tall as me, and we have the same dark brown hair and blue eyes, but his clean black dress pants and fancy white dress shirt prove his daddy really is rich. I feel like a bum standing in front of him in a pair of dirty and tattered jeans that are two sizes too small for me and a T-shirt stained with grease and mud.
I want to punch him right in the mouth, but Grandma always says I should never be the one to throw the first punch and start a fight, but I should always throw the last one and defend myself.
“Is your daddy rich, too?” Aiden asks, grabbing the basketball out of my hands and tucking it under one of his arms.
I really wish this kid would hit me already. I don’t care if his family just moved in down the road and his parents are friends with Cameron’s parents, which means he’ll be here at the camp all the time. I still want to punch him.
“Aiden! Don’t be mean. Everett doesn’t have a daddy anymore.”
The scowl I was shooting at Aiden quickly turns into a smile when Cameron walks up between us. I don’t really like girls. They’re loud and annoying and always giggling, but Cameron is okay, even if she is just a baby and only seven. She’s always covered in dirt, always has hay stuck in her hair from the horse barns, always getting in trouble for climbing trees too high, and she can whoop my butt in every activity here at camp, including archery. It should be embarrassing that a little girl can shoot arrows and play basketball and swim better than me, but for some reason it doesn’t.
“You’ve got hay in your hair again, Cam,” I tell her, pointing and laughing at the pieces sticking out from her messy ponytail.
She just shrugs, puts her hands on her hips, and turns to face Aiden.
“You should apologize to Everett,” she informs him.
It doesn’t even feel weird that I’m letting a girl stick up for me. I’ve known Cameron since she was an actu
al baby. She wasn’t even a year old the first time my grandma brought me to the camp her parents own. I’ve spent every summer with her for the last seven years. For some reason, out of all the hundreds of kids at the camp, Cameron has always stuck to me like glue. And since she’s good at sports and stuff, it’s not annoying at all. It’s like having a girl for a little brother.
Aiden immediately wipes the smile off of his dumb face as Cameron keeps glaring at him, and he gives me a sad look.
“I’m sorry about your dad. If you want, my dad can buy you whatever you want if we’re friends. He’s got a lot of money.”
I think about the PlayStation all my friends at school have that my grandma says we can’t afford, the one my mom doesn’t even know I want, and I immediately agree to Aiden’s friendship request. It doesn’t take much for a ten-year-old to lose interest in a fight.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I ask.
“Rich!” he replies with a laugh. “What do you want to be?”
I look down and kick a rock away with the toe of my shoe.
“A doctor, like my dad was. But I can’t. My mom doesn’t like it when I talk about being like my dad,” I tell him quietly.
Cameron moves closer to me and rests her head against the side of my arm.
My dad was a doctor for the Army. Ever since my dad was killed in the war when I was three, my mom hasn’t been the same, which is why I spend so much time with my grandma, why she started bringing me to Cameron’s parents’ camp. My mom gets really upset when I talk about being a doctor like him, even when I tell her I don’t want to be in the Army and that I’d never die like he did. I don’t want to be a soldier, but I want to save people like him. She cries a lot and locks herself in her room for days, so I don’t talk about it anymore. But it feels good to be able to say it out loud to someone else and not feel bad about it.
“You can do whatever you want when you get older. I can’t wait until I get older and no one can tell me what to do. If you want to be a doctor, you should be a doctor. You can give people shots and cut them open and you’ll be so cool and be so rich. Doctors make a lot of money.” Aiden smiles.
“You think being a doctor will make me cool?”
Aiden nods. “Definitely.”
I smile at him. “Okay, we can be friends.”
“Yay!” Cameron cheers, clapping her hands together and jumping up and down. “Aiden and I have been playing when you’re not here, and I’m so happy you like each other, too. Now we can all play together! I’m gonna make a wish on a star tonight that we’re going to be the bestest of friends forever and ever and I know it will come true!”
Aiden and I both laugh at how happy Cameron is. He hands me back the basketball and asks if we want to play a game, which just makes Cameron even more excited. Aiden’s face lights up with a smile as he watches Cameron dance all around us, talking nonstop about all the best friend things we’re going to do and how she’s going to kick our butts in basketball.
I like doing stuff that I know will make Cameron happy, and it looks like Aiden will be good at helping me with that. When he wraps his arm around her shoulder, he calls her “kid” and tells her not to beat us too badly in basketball. And Cameron looks up at him and smiles brighter than I’ve ever seen.
I’m glad we have a new friend to hang out with and he thinks I’ll be cool as a doctor, but something makes me feel weird about watching the two of them standing there together like buddies without me. I quickly walk over to the other side of Cameron and wrap my own arm around her shoulder until the three of us are standing side by side.
“Promise me we’ll be best friends forever, no matter what,” Cameron demands, looking up at Aiden, and then turning her head to look up at me.
Aiden and I share a look over her head and we both shrug.
“Sure, Cam. We’ll be best friends forever, no matter what,” I agree.
“Yep, no matter what. Even if you are a girl,” Aiden adds.
Cameron frowns and pulls away from us, punching him in the stomach. I laugh out loud when Aiden bends over, clutching his stomach and howling in pain. Cameron finally gives me the same smile she gave Aiden a few minutes ago, and the weird feeling I had goes away when she holds out her hands and I toss the basketball to her.
“Rule number one, Aiden. Never tick Cameron off or she’ll punch you,” I tell him, patting him on the back and grabbing his arm to help him stand back up.
“Thanks for the warning,” he groans, rubbing his hand across his gut as we get into position in front of the basketball hoop.
Cameron, Aiden, and I spend the rest of the day playing H-O-R-S-E, and just like always, Cameron wins every game. Aiden doesn’t whine or complain, he just keeps challenging her to another game, and just like that, I don’t mind agreeing to Cam’s request that the three of us should be best friends forever.
Chapter 3
Cameron
You ruined my life.
I read aloud and roll my eyes at the one-sentence, typewritten note I just opened from the unmarked envelope, shoved between the stack of bills that just came. I’d like to rip the paper to shreds and toss it into the garbage, but instead, I shove it into a manila folder in the bottom drawer of my desk with all the others until I have time to make copies and give them to the local police.
“Well, at least this one is direct and to the point,” my friend and coworker, Amelia, says from her seat in the chair across from my desk. “Why can’t they be more specific? Tell us exactly how you ruined their life. Did you pull out in front of them at an intersection? Were they behind you in line at the grocery store when you took eleven items to the ‘ten items or less’ line?”
I can’t help but laugh at the serious look on her face. It feels good to laugh. I haven’t had much to laugh about lately, and I can always count on Amelia to cheer me up.
“I will have you know I only took more than ten items through that line once and it was an emergency.”
“Was it a wine emergency?” she asks with a raise of one eyebrow.
“Maybe…” I trail off with another laugh.
“You have too much stress in your life right now. I think what you need is a visit from your special friend.”
She gives me a knowing wink, even using air quotes around the words special friend.
“Let’s just call it what it is. Grady is a booty call. I need a visit from my booty call and I’m one step ahead of you. I was just getting ready to send him a text.”
Amelia gives me a high five and I try not to feel guilty when I send the text. He knows the score. He agreed to it and I have nothing to feel guilty about.
After we share a few quiet minutes, Amelia gives me a soft smile.
“Don’t let it bother you. You know some people just don’t understand what you do here.”
Amelia Sparks came to our camp with her five-year-old son three years ago, needing something to help them both cope when her husband came home from deployment, and we became fast friends. So when Amelia lost her job as a hostess at a restaurant in downtown Charleston last year, I immediately offered her the position of activities director, which had just became vacant. She’s been a godsend in more ways than one, around here at the camp and in my life, especially lately. Just looking at her now, so different from when I first met her, I know the feeling is mutual.
When she first walked into this office, her long brown hair was in a messy ponytail, there were bags under her eyes, which were bloodshot from crying, and she was so skinny I immediately took her into the house and made her sit down and eat something. She whispered when she spoke and she was too nervous to meet my eyes when I tried to engage her in conversation. It took me a month to finally get her to tell me that her husband wasn’t handling being back home very well. He was always angry and always drinking, taking his pain and his fear out on her and their son, Dylan. With the help of our counselors, she and Dylan found strength and happiness, despite what was happening back home. Amelia learned ho
w to take charge of her life and let go of the husband—who refused to get help—and put their family back together.
Her freshly highlighted brown hair falls in gentle curls around her shoulders, her makeup is beautiful and flawless, and the weight she put back on when she said good-bye to her depression gives her curves that I envy. She smiles easily and often, and she does whatever she can to pull me out of my own unhappiness, living her life to the fullest and making sure I’m doing the same.
I’m not, but it’s not for lack of trying on Amelia’s part.
“I’m fine,” I reassure her with a smile, sliding the bottom desk drawer closed. “It’s not the first angry note we’ve ever received, and it certainly won’t be the last.”
Now that my parents are semiretired and I’ve taken over running the camp for them, I continue handing the notes over to the police as a precaution, just like my parents have always done. Nothing bad has ever happened and I highly doubt anything ever will, but you can never be too safe when you run a camp filled with children. It still pisses me off that anyone would be angry about what we do here. Whether it be people who are against the camp in principle, someone who has a political agenda and hates anything involving war and soldiers, or someone who knew someone that went here, we’ve seen it all.
My parents turned the plantation my mother grew up on into the Rylan Edwards Camp for the Children of Veterans and Deployed Soldiers. When my father came back home from the war, he seemed like he had healed from the torture and abuse. But he was anything but fine. He spent months trapped in his own personal hell in his mind, seeing things that weren’t there and pretending like everything was fine so he could win back my mother’s love. His only focus was getting back to the woman he was forced to leave behind when he went off to war, and nothing else mattered to him, including his own health. With my mother’s help, he learned how to let go of the past and the pain, walk back into the light, and learn to live without regret. As soon as my father became well again, they knew there was nothing they’d rather do with their lives than create a safe place for other veterans and their families, to help them heal and teach them how to live again, without the pain and the guilt.