He looks down at her, eye to eye, searching for something. But his face switches to confused. Disoriented. Like he doesn’t remember who she is or how he got here.
My mom and I follow the police and my dad out. The school bell rings and kids instantly spill out of classrooms, babbling loudly and swinging lunch boxes in their hands. I don’t know why they’re out here. I thought they were keeping everyone inside. I must’ve just had an idea in my head that the stillness of the campus meant the administration and the teachers were keeping our secrets. But they weren’t. And now, I look up and there’s Ben standing in front of us, watching the stairs. He shifts. He squints. His superhero lunch box dangles at his side.
“Morgan,” he sputters, “is that Dad?”
chapter thirty-eight
My mom calls into work to say she has a family emergency and can’t return. Then she checks Ben out of school for the day. There’s no point in staying. She has to tell him things he might not be ready to hear but that need to be explained nonetheless. Because today my dad went too far. And now my mom has to tell Ben how sick his dad is and that he needs to get help from special doctors to get better. She has to tell Ben that no matter what, he should never go anywhere with our dad. I assume we’ll go straight home to talk then stare at the walls and each other, but Ben begs for ice-cream cones like an unexpected afternoon off from school equals an insta-vacation.
“Think you can handle ice cream?” my mom asks me while Ben jumps up and down, pleading for me to say yes.
I don’t know if I can handle it or not. The only way to know for sure is to go. That is what Brenda has taught me. That’s what I’ve been doing every day. Attempting and accomplishing things bit by bit.
“I want to try,” I say.
My mom squeezes my hand. “We’ll be right there with you.”
She and Ben follow me home to drop off the Bel Air. Knowing they’re right behind me makes the drive back way less stressful than the drive to Ben’s school. We ditch my car and pile into hers, where I sit in the back with Ben. His shoulders are even with mine thanks to the added height from his car seat. But not driving makes me feel even more trapped. I can feel the sweat collecting along my hairline and the barfy grumblings of my stomach.
“Windows,” I yelp, and my mom presses a button to roll down all four of them at once.
The wind blows in my face. It’s enough to keep the nausea at bay, but I’m totally counting the blocks down as we go. Three more. Two more. One more. I haven’t seen this part of town in so long, but I know it as well as I know all of Ben’s lines in his play. I miss it. I miss being here. And I’m so relieved when we pull into a parking space and I plant my feet on the solid sidewalk again. Ben leads us to the shack at the end of the pier like he’s on autopilot. We get soft serve ice cream and not enough napkins—a huge mistake since the remnants of Ben’s chocolate cone get smeared across his face like war paint.
We sit at the end of the pier and watch the ocean and the boats and every significant movement in our world at that moment. Tons of people are out even though it’s the middle of the day. There’s a false notion that people who live by the beach have money, but the reality is that burnt-out surf bums and dozing homeless people are also scattered among the moms dressed in designer sweatpants and thirtysomething entrepreneurs who make their own hours.
Ben scrunches his face up as he watches a homeless guy shuffling from person to person on the pier, holding his stained pants up with one hand and asking for spare change with the other.
“Does my dad do that?” Ben asks.
“Probably, sometimes,” my mom says.
“Why?”
And there’s the question we can’t completely answer. Still, my mom tries.
“Because he needs help. Not just with money to buy food, but with a lot of other things, too. But he needs to figure out for himself that he needs help. Grandma and I can tell him, but he has to want to get it.”
“So when he gets help, he’ll come back?” Ben asks.
“It might not be that simple,” I say.
“But what if I want him to get help so I can still love him?”
“It’s okay to love him no matter what,” my mom says. “And it’s okay if you miss him and want him to get better, because Morgan and I want that, too.”
Ben bites into the cone of his soft serve and chews thoughtfully. “Okay. That’s what I’ll do then.”
*