I studied her for a minute. I could see the pain and disappointment there, the resentment she felt toward Mom and Dad. I felt it, too. It was the one thing I regretted the most from the years after I’d left home—that I wasn’t there to help her navigate the emotional minefield that was living in our parents’ house.
But I had to get out of there, for my own mental health. I knew that already at eighteen.
“You know, the thing you have to understand about Mom and Dad,” I told her, “is that they care about us and they think they know what’s best for our family. But their priorities are just different from mine and yours. They always have been. Mom has struggled so much with her anxiety and she found her own way to cope. I don’t think it was easy for her living with Dad. He had expectations of her she couldn’t meet, and things were much harder for her when I was little. He used to leave for days at a time because he was pissed off at her.”
“I didn’t know that,” Courteney said quietly.
“They probably didn’t want you to know. They didn’t want anyone to know. You know how they are. They’re more concerned about what the neighbors will think than anything else. Mom used to have these debilitating panic attacks, and it was so fucking tense in the house all the time. She wouldn’t even leave the house for long stretches, and I’d be left to take care of her because Dad didn’t want anything to do with it. Things were way worse before you were born.”
“I’m sure they were,” she said softly. “I always got that sense. And I’m sure that affected you.”
“Yeah. But for Mom, things changed with medication. Drugs were the only thing that seemed to work for her. That’s how she copes. And Dad… he was just never able to accept that I had some of the same issues that she did. He just wanted to go on with life and pretend everything was fine. He wanted to travel, so Mom had to be medicated so they could travel. It was that simple to them. When I went off my meds because I felt like they were doing more harm than good, they were so devastated. It was like they thought I’d given up or something. They thought I was suicidal because I didn’t want to be on medication. They could never seem to understand the bad association I had with pills, because of what I’d been through.”
“Because of Gabe.”
“Yeah. Because of Gabe.”
“Is it okay if I put all that in the book?”
“Yeah. You can put that in the book. I don’t care if people know I took medication for my anxiety, or that I went off it. It’s the truth. But maybe go easy on Mom and Dad. It’s not worth making your relationship with them any worse.”
“Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind,” she said. “Tell me some more about when you were kids. You were saying how Gabe loved his parents, and how different it was at their house.”
“Yeah. I spent a lot of time there. They had this rec room in the basement that was Gabe’s hangout. We’d listen to music down there. That’s where I learned to play guitar. I didn’t even know I was gonna be a musician until Gabe put a guitar in my hand and basically told me so.”
She smiled. “And what was it like, hanging out with him?”
“Fun. Gabe always knew where the party was, and he was always invited. People just liked him. He got along with everyone in school. The geeks. The jocks. Everyone. People just knew he’d do anything for them. He cared like that. I’m sure everyone says nice things about people they love after they die. But Gabe really was one of the good ones. He always found something to be happy about. Life just filled him with awe. Where I was hesitant and kinda cynical, he was always game to jump into something new and just find out where it took us. He had a great laugh, too. The infectious kind, you know?”
“I remember.”
“He used to call you cutie-pie. Do you remember that?”
My sister’s eyes softened. I really hoped she wasn’t gonna cry at some point. “I do.”
“He used to say, when you were like three years old, ‘That girl’s gonna be gorgeous.’ He always thought you were so