If We Break by Kathleen Buhle

Author:Kathleen Buhle [Buhle, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

NO COMFORT, NO CURE

I went to bed that night but couldn’t sleep. Sometime after midnight, I got up and quietly slipped out the side door and pulled my bike out of the garage. The night air felt cool as I rode down Lake Shore Drive in my cotton nightgown and helmet, pedaling as fast as I could. The road was empty, and the lights from my bike were the only illumination. I couldn’t calm my mind, and I wanted so much to exhaust myself. Hunter and Beau both seemed so vulnerable to me. The two men I’d come to rely on more than any others both felt so far away, on the brink of some awful ending.

I biked to the end of the road and back, my nightgown plastered to my body with sweat. My legs felt tired, but my thoughts still wouldn’t slow down. When I got back, I left my bike leaning against the side of the house and tiptoed back to bed, feeling that sleep would never come. I held the phone to my chest the whole night and woke to its ringing.

“Someone from the hospital leaked to the press,” Hunter said into the phone, sounding angry. “We’re working out a statement.” I didn’t care about the press, I wanted to hear about Beau. I also didn’t like that Hunter sounded angry. Angry wasn’t good. Angry meant that Hunter might be struggling. Could my fear of his relapse be real?

“I’m arranging a flight to take Beau to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia to see his doctors and get more tests done,” he said. “We’re still trying to understand what happened and put together a plan.” I felt far away from him then, a distance that kept growing. “I want you to stay at the lake with the kids,” he said.

Asking me to stay away made sense in a way, but we could have easily left the kids with my parents, too. I tried to push away this feeling that he didn’t want me around him. We’d always gone through everything important together. He was with his brother in the hospital, and I was at the lake with the kids. I knew that Beau and Hunter were both in crisis. Hunter’s addiction was invisible to almost everyone but me. I felt the weight of the situation, and yet I no longer had Beau to lean on.

I tried to keep up a façade that nothing was wrong. My whole body was shaky when I walked down to the beach the next day with Patty, Amy, and Michele, and I dropped a container of food into the sand. “Shit. Shit!” I said, as I knelt down and tried to salvage the sandwiches.

“What’s going on?” Patty asked.

All three of these women had stood by me my whole life, but I couldn’t let them in. The story hadn’t come out yet. I still believed that keeping secrets showed my loyalty. My secret stayed mine alone.

Hunter called me that night. Beau had been examined at Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia and a mass was found in his brain.

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