I even gave up my drawing. I couldn’t delve into it without thinking of her. I couldn’t start drawing a pattern without wondering what she would’ve thought about it. I couldn’t even begin to think about colors without automatically wanting to incorporate purples and pinks and browns and oranges, all the colors that reminded me of her while she’d fluttered around and bulldozed my entire life.
As I drained my third beer and let the bottle slide to the ground, I picked up yet another one as my mind drifted back to our last conversation when the truth had poured out while she sobbed at my feet. I’d felt no compelling pull to lift her off the ground. She’d collapsed at my feet with her head in her hands, sobbing her apologies and trying to tell me what had happened. She’d concocted some story about my brother being killed or some shit, but I knew that wasn’t true.
My brother wasn’t capable of pissing people off like that.
Everything that had come from her mouth had been a lie. From the moment I first met her, our entire relationship had been founded on shit that didn’t exist. I had no precedent that told me she could’ve been telling the truth. I couldn’t trust the way she begged me to come back, the way she begged me not to leave. I had no choice but to believe that she was simply feeding me more lies, so I would stay and continue to help her.
My brother wasn’t capable of pissing someone off so much they’d want him dead nor was he clean when he died. I’d seen him three months before when I was trying to convince him to move back to San Diego and move in with me so I could take care of him and help him get back on his feet. It was the only time we’d ever had a shouting match about anything. My brother was boisterous but never angry. Even with the parents who’d raised him and cast him out when he first started doing and dealing drugs, he’d never held outward animosity toward anyone.
He hadn’t been murdered, and he hadn’t been clean when he died.
It’d taken me years to come to that conclusion and to accept that he died face-down alone in an alleyway with heroin coursing through his veins. No matter how far he’d run from his demons, they always seemed to catch up with him. Through the course of my brother’s life, I’d watched him get clean three times.
I was well aware of what he looked like when he was clean, and three months before he overdosed, he was definitely not clean.
Hailey’s last-ditch effort to save our little tryst had been pathetic. On her knees in the fucking dirt, unable to admit what she’d done while looking me in my eyes. After all the manipulation and all the bullshit, she was still unable to look me in the eye and admit when she had been caught.
Found out.
Defeated.
She was weak, and I didn’t need anyone like that in my life.
That’s what Hailey was for me. My heroin. A drug I had to get out of my system. I’d lost myself in her like John had lost himself in his own drugs. I swam in her eyes the way he swam in his high. I melted into her and thought she could heal me like John thought that needle could heal him. I allowed the beer to flow along my tongue as my body detoxed from her, flushing her from my system while replacing her memory with another sensation, a dull sensation that relaxed my body the way she used to.
And what if Hailey had been telling the truth? What if she had been there? Holy fuck, if her words were true, then that meant she was standing right around the fucking corner while my brother had struggled. All this time, I’d convinced myself my brother died alone. Without anyone to help him or surrounded by anyone he loved. If Hailey was telling even a partial truth, that meant she had fucking been there.
That meant she held his hand while he’d died alone and suffering, and she never once stepped forward to contact us.
I drained my beer and threw it behind me, listening to it smash along the tile flooring of my kitchen as I groaned. I had no more energy to be angry. I had no more energy to fight this. I had to let the memory of Hailey run its course. I had to flush her out of my system, and then I could get back to business as usual. I could be done with this leave of absence Drew insisted I take, and I could get back to running my life the way I saw fit.
But a knock at the door pulled me from my swirling thoughts, and I got up and stumbled toward the door.
I looked through the peephole and saw a mound of jet black hair. I sure as hell wasn’t opening the door for anyone tonight, but I was curious. I didn’t know anyone with hair like that. But as the figure stepped back and the face of the person came into view, every single atom of my body vibrated with fury as her eyes connected directly with mine.
Hailey was standing on my fucking porch.
The nerve of that woman to come here, thinking I’d open this door for her. The balls it took for her to just waltz up here and knock on my door like I wasn’t actively attempting to avoid her. I’d blocked her number, what fucking larger sign could she need from me?!
“Bryan!” she called out as she knocked on the door. “I know you’re in there.”
I backed away from the door and dragged myself back to my couch. I sat down while she tried peering through the windows, squinting to see if she could catch a glimpse of movement behind the curtains I’d drawn. I’d cut out everything, all the sunlight and all the noise from the city of San Diego. I didn’t want a bit of the outside world touching me while I tried to cope with all the shit that had gone down between me and her, and here she was shouting her beautiful voice and filling the corners of my house even as she stood outside.
“Bryan, we really need to talk. Please open up.”
I cracked open another beer and sank heavily into the couch. I guzzled it down, no longer tasting the burning sensation of alcohol as it rushed down my throat. I could feel my eyes growing heavy as she continued to knock and shout, but her words were fading into the background while sleep slowly overtook my body.
Her incessant knocking wouldn’t stop, and I couldn’t slip into my drunken state of sleep until she left.
Finally, she stopped knocking. I heard the rustling of paper behind the door before she walked off, and I waited until her car drove away before I got up. I tossed the empty beer bottle into the trash can as I stumbled over to the door, opening it up to see what the hell that sound was. I breathed a sigh of relief at the absence of her presence, but as I looked down at my feet, I took in the sight of the brown paper.
Judging from the size of it, even in my drunken stupor, I could tell it was a painting.
I picked it up and took it back into the house. I crunched over the broken glass that would be left there for me to clean tomorrow morning as I made my way into the kitchen. I set the wrapped painting down on the kitchen island and slowly began to unwrap it. Layer by layer, I peeled back the brown paper to reveal the one picture that had started this all.
The picture my brother had painted of our cabin in the woods.
Suddenly, I felt tears dripping down my cheeks. I didn’t know where they came from nor could I feel my chest lurching with sobs, but as they fell onto the painting I closed my eyes. My mind threw me back to the summers we spent at the cabin, summers my brother and I spent exploring the woods, running from snakes, and eating fresh blackberries from our own personal, secret vine we found. I smiled at the image of John with blackberry juice on his face, his hands covered in black and purple stains as we made our way back to the road.