It’s the journal, my mum’s, Catherine’s, the fucking thing. Ryan’s post-it notes are still everywhere, the scribbles and the highlighting, and really, I didn’t expect to ever see this again.
“Read it,” he says, “and don’t talk to me until you’ve sorted shit out.”
He stands up, brushes his pants off and swings his bag strap across his shoulder.
“Sort what shit out?”
“Read it,” he says again, and he brushes a hand through my hair, “please.”
In reality, I don’t think much of it. I walk back to my trailer with stones in my shoes, and I throw the journal onto the floor.
I work all day, and by the end of the week it’s all done, finished, wrapped up with a bow and a gift tag. At the end of the week, the film’s all done, and I have to clean up my trailer and that journal, it stares at me like Ryan does, all big eyes and a chronic sadness that I can’t quite place.
Shit like this, like Ryan, it can prompt me to do anything, and really, it prompts me to do something I should have done years ago.
I read it.
Chapter 15
Ryan has four different highlighters.
Bluegreenyellowpink and as the lines in the journal blur together, so do the colours. The whole thing, these frayed pages, it’s just a rainbow of thoughts and feelings, and what Ryan deemed important. It hazes together like a sunset, like an ocean, like vomit, bile, piss, and my pupils cross over my nose just trying to take it all in. Trying to absorb it all like a toilet absorbs a hangover, like a rug absorbs sweat and cum and dust. The whole background is nothing; it’s meaningless, it’s stupid, but the words, they stand out too bold and too firm. The words, they stick out and imprint themselves on my fingers when I hold the pages too tight.
I am reading my mother.
I’m reading her like a handbook, like a magazine, like an Ikea instruction pamphlet, like everything she has ever felt, ever done, ever wanted. It’s written on the pages in front of me. It’s just quotes and passages, and some of those little lines of prose and thought, some I know are written by her, but the point is, the point is that it’s her explanation for everything that she has ever, ever done.
It’s her reasoning, it’s her justifying herself and her decisions to the great wide world, and maybe to me too. Maybe she knew I’d get a hold of this. Maybe she knew that it would end up in the dirty hands of the two of her children who hated her most. She gave it to Catherine, who gave it to me.
This, it’s her head and it’s her heart, and maybe most importantly of all, it’s her.
Catherine’s pages, they aren’t nearly as inspiring, most of her words have been scribbled down, with letters that trail off the page; the high of drugs and alcohol hindering any efforts at maturity or depth. There are one offs though, spaces of time where Catherine must have come hurtling back down to Earth just long enough to write a few letters, cry over them and let the ink mingle with her tears. I swear I can smell the saltwater, smell the liquid heart-ache, those fluids that her body was desperate to get rid of. I can smell Catherine on these pages, and absorbing all this, it hurts more than it was supposed to, but by the time I finish reading it for the first time, I realize that this is why I put it off so long.
I knew it would hurt, I knew that this whole thing would be a dagger to my heart, knew that it would leave me wasted, over-dosing on emotion, overdosing on Urie.
There is only one passage that Ryan has underlined instead of highlighted. One in the whole million-page thing, and it’s one line that has a two-page spread all to itself.
It falls on the thirty-fourth page of my mother’s half of the journal, and it sits all on its own, the kid who eats lunch in the school toilets, the ugly hooker, the leper. It’s obscure, because it’s so unlike the rest of the goddamn thing where words and pictures slip into every crevice.
The hardest things to say in this lifetime are ‘I love you’ and ‘I’m sorry’.
It’s my mother’s handwriting, and this is one thing that I can’t place, I can’t tell when she wrote it and I don’t know why. It’s not referenced, and it’s so out of place. The page, this one specifically, it’s fraying at the edges, and Ryan’s underlined my mother’s penned scrawl with a thin pencil line and an arrow.
An arrow to his own letters, his own tiny print that looks more like the footprints of a rat, a rodent, a lizard, his own custom font that really takes up even less space than my mother’s did.
I don’t know. ‘Goodbye’ is pretty fucking hard too.
I bite my lip, rest my back against the wall behind me, my legs tucked under me and I take a deep breath that rattles my chest like the world is ending.
I don’t know it right then, but this week, the week that follows me reading this, it’ll make me say all three, and my mum, Ryan, they were both right.
These words, they are so fucking hard.
*
“What the hell are you doing?”
I can’t see who said it, not yet, not now, but Loretta, her arse sticks out from behind the antique cabinet in the hallway. Loretta, she likes to fiddle with things, fix them, tinker about like a watchmaker and the world, it’s her own personal Big Ben.
“Right now? I’m getting dinner. People do in fact require nutrition at some point during the day, and, you know, I didn’t do the breakfast or the lunch thing, so…”
Loretta’s head pops out from behind the cabinet, and she crinkles her nose, rolls her eyes up to her hairline. “For real?” She says, “I mean, I thought that the human body could live off booze and drugs and sex. Are you saying it needs food too? Jesus Christ, how the hell am I even alive?”
“Sarcasm doesn’t suit you.” And I take a too big bite of my bread roll. “The blunt honesty though, it fits you like a second skin.”
“Sarcasm requires more effort,” Loretta says, and she’s found her feet, has found her way to my side and has stolen my bread roll out of my hungry hands. “I’m a naturally lazy person,” she bites, gives it back, and rubs long fingers through my hair. “What are you doing?”
“Eating.”
“No,” she says, “before. You haven’t been yourself all week, locking yourself away and, I just…”
“Just what?” I ask, and maybe I’m genuinely curious. Loretta’s eyes are as dark as dark, and her hair is wet, it curls around her cheeks, around her neck.
“Nothing,” she says, “you’re being an asshole.”
“Whatever.” And I grab the handheld phone from the bench top. “I’m going back to my room. Don’t come in.”
“Like I’d want to.”
And a part of me wishes she did want to, that she’d follow me in so that I could delay all this a little longer. So I wouldn’t have to do this, so I wouldn’t have to call my mother.
I collapse on the bed like a falling high-rise, push my head into the pillow and my fingers, they grasp the phone too tight, enough that the flesh between my thumb and finger strains and aches and just, it hurts. It doesn’t hurt as much as the rest of me does though, when I realize I have to look my home number up. I can’t remember it, and Jesus, it has been long.
I can hear the phone ringing, that muffled click as someone picks it up on the other end of the line.
“Urie household, Grace speaking.”
The words pour from my mouth like a flood, like a storm, like tears. I can’t stop myself, and my voice, it shakes. “Were you really that unhappy?”
I can almost hear the quirked eyebrow, the apprehension that crawls into her voice. “Who is this?”
“Brendon,” I reply, and it’s curt and straight to the point. “Were you unhappy?”
“Wow.” She laughs a little; a coarse, strained sound that tears itself from the back of her throat. She sounds so fucking tired. “I can’t say I thought I’d hear from you again.”
“I can’t say I thought I’d call.”
She laughs again, and this time it’s a little more natural. “Honesty is the best policy.”
“I wish you believed that.”
“Ah, just because it’s the best policy does not mean I abide by it. I’m not an honest person, Brendon,” she says, and the sound is muffled over the phone. “I never have been, and I have only ever pretended to be for yours and your siblings’ sake.”
“Even now, you’re lying.”
She laughs, chuckles, a hearty thing that echoes in my ears. “Yeah.”
“Were you really that unhappy with everything? With Dad, with us…” I take a deep breath, exhale hard enough that it crackles into the phone. “…with me?”
“Oh, Brendon,” she starts, and I can hear her collapse onto the stool beside the phone. They still haven’t rearranged furniture, not that I ever expected they would. “Oh, Brendon, not all of us are destined for the life you’ve managed to set up for yourself.”
“I made this.” I say, “People are in charge of their own futures.”
“To an extent,” she says, and I’ve never heard her voice this firm before, not even when I was fifteen and high and stumbling through the door at three in the morning. “Your life, who you are, it’s all shaped by the people, the environment around you. Genetics too, I guess.”
“Not always.”
“No,” she says, “sometimes you’re just meant to be a certain way, and the rest of the universe falls at your feet to ensure that.”
I can hear her breathing and it’s more comforting than it should be, more warm, more needed than I ever thought it would be. Both of us, we’d just gone into the attic, shaken out an old rug and the dust is settling back on top faster than it should. The silence, it rests on my shoulders, seals my mouth shut until, after what feels like hours, I manage to pry my lips back open.
“You didn’t love Dad, did you?”
“No.” It’s so curt, so straight to the point that it surprises me. I was expecting some meandering, some quiet and embarrassed thought.
“Then why did you marry him?”
“People hold certain expectations,” she says, “and sometimes you love someone so much that you can’t let them down.”
I almost scoff; my mouth hangs open in disbelief. “You didn’t love him though.”
“Who says I’m talking about your father?” And it’s not a question, not even when she words it like that. It’s a cold-hard statement, and we both know it.
“Did you have an affair?” Because it makes sense, with her writing and with the way she’s acting now.
“Yes.”
“With who?”
She laughs, and I can hear the chair creak beneath her, can feel myself shuffle on the bed. “No one you’d know, love.”
“How’d you do it, then?”
“What?”
“How’d you live like that? How’d you marry a man you hated, have five fucking kids with him, two of which I know you fucking hated, and just…how’d you live like everything was normal.”
“It was normal, Brendon,” she says, and I roll over, my face pressed against the pillow. “It was normal for me. Life isn’t a bouquet of white roses, if it was there would be no adultery or rape or divorce. People don’t always get what they want, so you have to learn to like what you have.”
The silence settles again, and it’s a little less comfortable, a little less sincere, and my eyes slide shut and my mother, I can almost feel her do the same.
“Oh,” she whispers, “and for the record, I loved all my children. I still do. Mothers, we can’t pick and choose.”
My voice finds itself again, and my hands, my fists, they clench in the sheets. “Are you going to leave Dad?”
There’s a short pause, before a firm, “No,” echoes through the line.
“Are you still having the affair?”
“Yes.” There’s a smile in her voice, I can hear it.
“Are you happy?” This, this is what matters the most. Her reply, it’s not one I want to hear.
She sighs too hard, enough that I can feel warm breath on my ear. “No.”
My voice is lost in my throat, and I have to find it, I have to say something here because I need to, I do, I need to let her know that “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she whispers, and really, that’s all there is to it.
*
“So,” Jon says, “so I have six salmon and avocados, eight teriyaki chickens and three tuna rolls.”
“Sushi?” Loretta asks, and she leans over the table, sticks a hand into a plastic bag, and comes out with two clear, plastic boxes.
Jon nods from across the room, beer in one hand, Playstation control in the other. Katy’s on the floor beside him, moving frantically in time with the pink Mario kart that zooms around the track on screen.
I’m collapsed in the wooden chair that sits beside the table. That conversation with my mother, it worked as a vacuum, it’s left me here so fucking tired, so fucking emotionally drained that I can’t even form the energy to lift my head off the table.
“Brendon,” Loretta says, “Brendon, what do you want?”
“I’m not hungry.”
I can feel Loretta’s fingers in my hair, can feel them brush my forehead through my fringe. “I thought we discussed this like, two hours ago. Need food to function, sweetie.”
“I ate before.”
“Yeah, but you sure as hell ain’t functioning.”
My head lifts just enough so that I can stare her in the eye, her eyebrows are up past her hairline, and her lips are thin and pressed together so tight that I half-expect her to have diamonds instead of teeth the next time she speaks.
“I’m fine.”
“Sure,” she says, and everything about her face implies a general displeasure. Nobody can portray unimpressed like Loretta can.
In the distance, Katy lets out a high-pitched squeal, and Jon yells out happily. Beneath that, beneath them, the default music plays on the game.
Everything right now, it’s so generic and my mother’s unhappiness, it’s spread over me like the plague.
“Brendon,” Loretta says, and she brushes my fringe away from my eyes, places a hand on either side of my face, on both my cheeks, and presses her lips to my forehead. “Brendon,” she says, “you haven’t been yourself, and I don’t think you’re fine.”
I slip out of her grasp, lay my head back onto the table and murmur something unintelligible. Loretta sighs, and I can feel her body tense beside me. She kneels on the floor, leans down next to me so that her head rests on the table beside mine.
“Jon told me that you called your mother.”
My eyes slam shut, and my fingers clench on the tabletop. “How the fuck would Jon know that?”
“How the fuck does Jon know anything? He’s the fifth Charmed sister, I thought we established that a few years ago.”
I stifle a snort, and Loretta, her fingers tap against the table legs. “But just, with your mother…you’ve been out of it the last few days, and I just want to…you don’t have to say anything, Brendon. I’d sure as fuck like you too, but I’m not gonna force you, and I’m not gonna bitch at you and I’m not gonna yell.”
Loretta, she takes a deep breath, in through the nose and out through her gently parted lips. I can hear her necklace dangle against the tabletop, can feel her breath against my neck, her fingers against my back. “I just want you to know that if you need it, then I’m here.”
And this, it hits me like a bus to the chest, like a plane to the ocean, like a nuclear bomb to Japan. This, Loretta, Jon, Ryan, Catherine, I need these people, and fuck, it’s awful, and I don’t want to need them, but I do. I need, I want, and I…I love, even if it’s hard, even if I’m not all that good at it.
“Loretta,” I mumble, “Loretta, I love you.” And maybe I’ve never, ever said that before. Not to anyone. Not seriously. “I love you.”
Her eyes don’t widen, and her face, her body, it doesn’t flinch. She just leans over gently, runs a hand through my hair and kisses me on the forehead. “I love you too.”
*
The thing about realizing that you need people in your life, the thing about it is that you suddenly have the irrepressible urge to see them, to talk to them, to not be mad at them anymore (even when what they do, what they say cuts you up so much inside, that your internal organs look like spliced meat).
The thing about realizing that I needed these people, well, it leads me to the Happier Days rehab clinic, not too far out of town. It leads me to Catherine.
“So,” I say, and it’s times like these, moments like these, in which I really, really wish I smoked. A cigarette between my fingers, between my lips, it would give me time to pause, seconds to actually fucking think about what I’m going to say. “How about you? You unhappy too?”
“Brendon,” Catherine says, and her forehead is furrowed, her grin giving her away, “Brendon, I’m in fucking rehab. ”
My face falls, not that it was exactly ‘up’ to begin with, but I can feel my mouth at my ankles, my eyes at my kneecaps. “So, unhappy?”
Catherine laughs, but there’s a bitterness in there that rattles through my skull. “Nah, just fucked up.”
She presses shaky hands to the table, and then her forehead to her hands. All I can see is this never-ending stream of dyed-blonde hair, dark roots that sprout from the earthy recesses of her too-soft-skull. Catherine, she’s so Catherine. “Oh, Brendon,” she whispers, and her breath, if I could see it, I’m sure it would leave a white cloud on the plastic table. “It all went wrong somewhere.”
“To say it ‘went wrong’ would imply that it was right at some point.” And I never really thought of myself as a negative person, but with mum and with Ryan and with Catherine, the day, it’s just been too long.
The walls here are paper-white, ghost-white, egg-white. This whole place is more bland than my sixth-grade girlfriend, and my voice, if I talk any louder, it echoes around the hollow insides of the room. There’s a large picture frame on the left wall that says, “No Drugs are Good Drugs.” Another one on the far right which says, “You Are Never So Sick That You Can’t Get Better.”
The font on both images is all different sizes and brightly coloured and it hurts my eyes to look at them. This whole clinic hurts my heart and my head, and it’s so un-Catherine that it must eat her alive just being here.
“This place kind of disgusts me,” I say, and Catherine laughs, chuckles loud enough that the sound echoes around my skull.
“Try being here for two and a half months.”
I raise my forehead, and force a sharp intake of breath. “When do they let you out?”
“Uh,” she whispers, and she has a tag on her wrist. Her eyes flick down, and she stares back at me with a face so pale that it damn-near camouflages with the walls. “Twenty-one days.”
“Not so long,” I say, and Catherine shrugs, leans her head back down on the table, and this pose, it mirrors me yesterday. Mirrors me and Loretta.
“Ryan’s been visiting me,” she whispers, and her eyes peek up at me from beneath her fringe.
My heart stops in my chest, and I wish it didn’t, because right now I don’t want to think about him, this, it should be about Catherine. “What?”
“Ryan Ross,” she says again. “He’s quite lovely.”
“Why’s he been visiting you?”
She crinkles her forehead, purses her lips and runs a hand through her hair. “I think he might miss you.”
“Then he should see me,” I reply in slight disbelief. “He holds all the cards at the moment.”
Catherine shrugs. “I dunno. I don’t pretend to know why people do shit.”
My head tries to wrap itself around all this, but all I can think to say is, “Do you know where he’s staying?”
“Yes,” she says, and she nods her head quickly, curtly. She’s sitting up properly now, I can see her bloodshot eyes and her gaunt face.
“Are you going to tell me?” I ask, and I gesture with my hands, roll my fingers around in tiny imitation circles.
She thinks for a second, before smiling and rolling her eyes to the plaster ceiling. “No.”
I sigh, but I don’t press it. Instead I close my eyes tight and try not to slam my head onto the table, try not to fucking cry. I’m too tired, and Catherine, I can feel her staring at me with wide, desperate eyes.
“I think you hate me, Brendon.” And the way she says it is so raw, so distracted that I almost pass it off as nothing.
“What?”
“I think you hate me. I think you think I’m stupid, that I can’t look after myself, that I can’t…” She’s struggling, her fists bang on the table, and a nurse in the corner casts us a wary look. “You think I can’t do stuff, you hate me.”
“Jesus Christ.” Catherine, she’s tugging at her wrists, at her shirt, at her hair, she’s crying, and this, this is the sociopath I’ve always known, this is Catherine, and this is why I leftLas Vegas. “Stop.”
I grab her wrists too tight from across the table, and she struggles adamantly against me, the nurse is coming over to help, but I manage to free a hand and wave her off. A “ we’re fine,” is forced from my lips.
“Do you want to know why I hated you?”
Catherine won’t make eye-contact, she’s still struggling against me, and I move around the table so I can crush her whole body into my arms. Her tears, they soak into my shoulder and they burn like acid.
“You were supposed to be the older one.”
“What?”
“You were supposed to be the mentor; you were supposed to be my big sister.” And my voice rips itself from my chest, from that deep trove in my heart. “It was always me, always me having to look after you, and you say I didn’t think you could look after yourself, and Catherine, it was because you couldn’t. ”
“I could,” Catherine whispers into my shoulder, “ I could. ”
“You tried, and then I had to come pick you up three years later and you’d been raped and you were trashed and, Catherine, you need help, you need supervision, you need parents or a boyfriend or something. ”
Catherine’s sobs are harder, they tear at my head and tug at my bleeding heart, and Christ, I’ve missed her, but I haven’t missed this.
“I love you,” I whisper into her ear, and I don’t mean it in the same way that I meant it when I said it to Loretta, but the part of me that still remembers the twelve-year-old girl who taught me how to blow bubbles, that part of me is so sincere that my heart aches as her blunt fingers clutch at my arms.
Catherine doesn’t reply straight away, but her crying, it’s earth-shattering, her tear-duct volcanoes set to explode again. “I love you,” she says, and I think it’s the same for her, she doesn’t love me, but she loves seven-year-old me, she loves eight-year-old me, nine-year-old me. She loves the baby brother that she could teach and look after and love unconditionally with the knowledge that I’d stare up at her with wide eyes and open-heart no matter what she did or said.
“Good,” I say, “good.” And I clutch her to me tighter, let my arms fold around her frail body, and her own arms still clasp onto my biceps.
“Yeah,” she says, “thank you.” And later, when the nurses come round to clear me out, to pry me off her coz hey, visiting hours are over, later Catherine will stare at me with wide eyes and a shaky smile.
“Goodbye, Brendon,” she says.
“G’bye,” I reply, and I close the door behind me.
That night she commits suicide in her room.
She drowns herself in the sink.
Chapter 16
So maybe this is where we flash to the future, to my present day, and I sit staring at a computer screen for too long, fingers clenched at the keyboard, because Catherine’s just died (even if it was a million years ago now) and I need to not fuck up writing the rest of this.
In reality, in this universe where I steal the show, where I’m the sun, and maybe Catherine is Earth, maybe I could end it, finish it here with this form of Armageddon. Leave it, say that was the end of it, because it’s not the end of me, but it sure as hell was the end of Catherine.
I could finish it here, apart from the fact that I can’t, because there’s so much more to this, and there’s so much more to Catherine and my life trails on, grows, stumbles blindly forward and as much as I wish writing this would be easier, it’s not, it’s hard, and it hurts like a bitch from hell. I’m ripping my heart out of my chest, crushing it into the scanner and watching the lights flash against it, copying it into a fresh Microsoft Word document.
Maybe this is when we flash back to my Hollywood apartment.
The phone breaks the silence of my bedroom like a knife across the throat of some hapless victim, but the nurse, her voice takes on no form that I can recognize. Default flashes across the computer monitor of my head, ‘the End’ rolls across the movie screen of my heart, and maybe I wish this was the finish, that there was nothing at the end of the credits.
Maybe a part of me died with Catherine.
Maybe that’s wishful thinking.
I breathe in so hard that my lungs scrape across my ribcage, my diaphragm splicing against the bone. I don’t even see Loretta, who slides beneath the door like smoke, like fog, like a spirit.
The nurse hangs up after a few hurried words, and a mumbled ‘sorry’, but my fingers are so tight on the phone that a part of me, something too easily silenced, it worries that I’m gonna break it. Smash it against my ear.
I breathe again, have to remind myself, because every part of me is suddenly hurting, aching, throbbing. I bite my tongue to stop myself from swallowing it whole.
It’s in these seconds that I hate Catherine so much, too much for my heart and my head to handle. There’s a pounding that courses through my body, and the words people die echo around my skull. People die every fucking day.
People are robbed of their lives, people give their lives, sacrifice them, let them go. They can’t just fucking take them, because her life didn’t belong to her. Nobody’s life belongs to them, because that, it gives them the right to end it, and nobody should be allowed that. People’s lives belong to the people who give a shit about them, everyone who has ever cared, because with that, knowing that, it makes suicide so fucking selfish, it makes it such a fucking crime. Catherine, she robbed herself. She robbed me.
Loretta slouches on the bed beside me, rocks back enough that the mattress creates groves, valleys, grottos beneath her. She rolls tired shoulders, and pries the phone from my clenched fingers. Loretta, she doesn’t ask questions, just presses her head into my neck, and digs a hand into my hair.
Me, I’m catatonic, some wayward coma-patient that escaped the hospital only to sit unconscious. Blood is staining my nails, my skin, as I sit there with my heart in my hands.
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