“Mom!” I cried again, hearing the panic in my own voice.

I'd gotten good at blocking out some of Anya's and my worst memories, but here they came again, like a parade: all the wretched possibilities. Like how once, in a small town in Nebraska, my mother had found her way to the roof of a barn while tripping balls on LSD. I'd gotten the call in the middle school nurse's office, under the pitying gaze of a Ratched disciple. A robotic-sounding orderly had informed me that my mother had leapt from the rooftop into a field, and “thank God, only broke her sternum.” I'd spent two days at her hospital bedside, answering the requisite, terrible questions from nurses who were deciding whether or not to call CPS.

She had always been reckless. She had always been accident-prone. She was happy to be addicted, to this day, and even from the wagon could make the occasional spiel for drugs and alcohol that the whole program thing was effectively designed to halt. Once, my mother had told me—on the downswing from a night on E—that she believed people were meant to exist under the influence. “I pray to God that someday you feel this alive, baby,” she'd said, her pupils big as the moon. I'd been fourteen, and getting ready for school.

Mom was a mess, a mistake, unfit—and yet, she was all I had. I'd pulled her out of the ruins many a time, sure, but even so—it was impossible to imagine my life without her. She was my best friend. She was my worst enemy. I loved her more than anything, despite our whole miserable history. And I knew, with a shaking but deep conviction, that if anything happened to her that we couldn't bounce back from...I'd crumble.

I gripped the rickety brass knob of the bathroom door and twisted. It wasn't locked, but the light was off. With quivering hands, I reached for the switch. “Mom,” I whispered.

She was buck naked, sitting in the bath-tub. The tap wasn't opened all the way, and the drain was only half-in, so just as the tub was filling up, the water was slipping away. She sat in a pool that just barely grazed the tips of her hips. The wasted stream reminded me of something we'd been studying in my Intro to Classics course—that figure Sisyphus, from Greek mythology, who was always pushing a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down to the bottom again. But I shook off this nonsense. Now was so not the time to be thinking about school.

It was a relief, for a moment, to see her sitting upright—that is, until I saw her face. When she tilted her head up toward the light, I realized that half of my mother's face was tomato red, like skin that's just been burnt. When she tried to smile at me, everything got worse.

The skin around her left eye was swollen, even broken in some places. The wound was wet-looking; it looked like she'd tried to dress the slices on her skin with nothing more than a few handfuls of bathwater. I went to kneel on the grubby bathmat, deciding not to be fazed about seeing the naked body of the woman who'd given birth to me. Up close, the eye was even grislier. Somebody had clocked Anya good. Though it didn't look like she could open wide, what little I could see of the whites of her eyes were shot through with broken blood vessels.

“It's not so bad,” she croaked, cautiously. He'd gotten the corner of her mouth, too—I could tell from the way her lips moved as she spoke. The whole left side seemed...inflated. “Really, baby. It looks way worse than it feels.” But no sooner was the lie out than the rest of my mother's face seemed to collapse in on itself, making the most terrible picture. I leaned forward and pressed my mom's wet head against the front of my shirt.

“Where is he now?” I asked, after her sobbing had subsided. We both kept our faces pinned in the direction of the dripping faucet, as if it would be too hard to look at one another square-on while having this conversation. Anya sniffled, but didn't say anything. I repeated the question.

“Mom, you need to tell me.”

“But there's an explanation,” she whined. For a second, a white flash of fury wracked my bones. The very idea that she could protect any man who was capable of this…monstrosity, made me unbearably sick. If I were a praying lady, I'd have pulled a Scarlet O'Hara right there by the bathtub: “as God is my witness, I will never let a man lay a hand on me in anger. Not unless he happens to be tired of having testicles.”

But I remembered my mother's fragile body in my arms. Her life had been hard. She deserved to be happy. She had tried her best. I leaned across the tub and gently twisted the faucet, so the water stopped running. My fingers brushed against the dwindling stream. The water, I discovered, was ice cold.

“It doesn't matter,” Anya sighed. “He's not coming back.” With a slight inclination of her head, she indicated a corner of the sink. In a little pool of moisture, a perfect circle against the pink enamel—there was her wedding ring.

Chapter Eighteen

Landon

September 13^th

I'd never been angry like this before, not that I could remember. I'd been mad when we'd lost the championship to the Baylor friggin Bears in the fourth quarter last fall. I'd been mad the first time Zora cheated on me, and mad at myself for taking her back. I got mad thinking about a dozen tiny slights, a dozen skirmishes in games—but not like this. My whole body felt amped up, just the way juicers described life after taking a steroid cocktail. But I didn't feel capable and strong, like those dudes. I just felt helpless.

I'd heard in the locker room.

I'd started at the familiar pain, then remembered to roll my eyes as a wet towel slapped against my bare ass. A post-game snap was SOP for a Longhorn who'd made a winning play, so I knew not to get too twisted—but to this day, I have to confess that I hate that tradition. It was always the dirtiest dirt bags who could be counted on to target another man's junk when we should have been celebrating.

“That was a bitching last play, your majesty,” crowed Dixon, one of our fullest fullbacks. “I thought for sure that 22 was ‘bouta kill you dead. You're a fucking snake in the grass, Landy. Faster than fucking Forrest Gump.” Dix hooted and hollered at his own joke, and I took the opportunity to angle myself away from his towel. I slid the jeans up over my hips, already feeling the spots along my body that'd be sore by sun-up.

The team was prattling on at full-steam about the after party when I heard my phone go, which was already weird. Since the break with Denny and Z, I'd been getting way fewer calls than before. The Pastor had even lapsed a little from his weekly check-in (Sundays, at 3pm). I hadn't spoken to Pop man to man hardly at all since his wedding day. Half of me figured he was tripping on marital bliss, so had less need for his collegiate son—and the other half was content without an explanation. I felt bad about this, but there was also something nice about feeling like he and I were headed off to lead our separate lives in peace.

The number on the screen, so grudgingly entered at my step-mother's request (step-mother; still sounded weird...) was Ash's. In fact, Ashleigh Bennett. She wasn't Doll anymore. I'd finally gotten it through my thick skull at the wedding reception, watching her go all doe-eyed and cutesy with her ancient date. Ash was a pretty young thing with a bright future, and whatever thing it was that moved between us was impossible to act on. Had always been impossible to act on.

And I couldn't continue to put her on a pedestal in my mind and hate her in close proximity, because it: A) just plain wasn't fair and, B) was fucking with my mind. Besides, Clay had promised to introduce me to the Alpha Kappa crowd at the next mixer, and I had high hopes for some new pootie tang. There were lots of pretty faces at UT, and I was the fuckin’ Longhorns quarterback. Not that I could get too serious about anyone, as I was fixing to make a scout connect any day now. Anyways.