“You were sick, Joe,” I squeezed out, feeling my heart hammer violently against my ribcage, his words taking aim at my heart in a deliciously devastating new way. “I know that you never intended to hurt me with any of it.”
“But we both know that I did,” he answered gruffly. “Hurt you.”
I had no answer to that.
He had hurt me.
Worse than hurt me, I think he ruined me.
“I love you,” was the only thing I could say to justify my staying, as illogical as that sounded. It was all I had. And somehow, it had been enough to weather the storm with him. “I love you, Joe.”
“Joey,” Mrs. Kavanagh called out, causing us both to swing our gazes to where she was standing with who I knew were two rehab porters. "It’s time to go, love."
No!
Don’t go.
Stay with me.
"Yeah, I know, I’m coming," Joey replied, turning his attention back to me.
Don’t go! I wanted to scream, physically had to clasp a hand over my mouth to keep from blurting. Don’t leave me alone in this. I’m so fucking scared…
“I love you, queen. Always have and always will,” he continued to break me down by whispering. “There was only ever you for me. Stone cold sober or off my trolly, my head knows that.” Taking my hand in his, he pressed it to his chest before adding, “My heart knows that, too."
"Joe."
"I've done you wrong in so many ways, I couldn’t even begin to list them, but I would never do ya wrong like that. I have never done you wrong like that, okay? If I’ve given you nothing else these past few years, trust that I’ve given you fidelity. I never broke that promise, Molloy. Fucking never."
"Joe, I just want you to get better," I pleaded, clutching him with a death grip. "I need you too. So badly."
"Joey, it's time to go," John Sr called out, sending another sucker punch to my gut.
"Yeah, two secs,” he called back in a frustrated tone. “Fuck, Aoif, this is it, baby. I have to go.”
“Just a few more minutes,” I heard myself beg and a pained groan tore from his chest. “I’m sorry. It’s just hard."
“It’s time to go, Joey, love.”
“Crap,” I strangled out, chest heaving from pressure. “Joe.”
“You look after yourself, ya hear?” he said, tone gravelly and thick with emotion. “Don’t be climbing any walls while I’m gone, Houdini.” Roughly clearing his throat, he pressed a hard kiss to my brow and then stepped back. “I’ll be seeing ya, Molloy.”
And then he was walking away from me.
Walking out of my life.
Leaving me behind.
I stood at his mother's graveside and watched him go.
With my fingertips touching the locket around my neck, the one he'd given me for my eighteenth birthday, I watched them take him away.
I stood and watched, my heart cracking and splintering with every step he took.
And I had no control.
He was leaving me, and I didn’t know if he would ever come back.
Trying to be strong for the both of us, because God knows he needed someone to be strong for him, I smacked on the smile I had spent my whole life perfecting, and kept my eyes trained on his back, feeling like I seconds away from dying.
I couldn’t breathe.
The pain inside of me was stifling.
Several headstones separated us now, as death surrounded us in the most poignant way.
It was almost symbolic really.
We were in the place a person went to when their life ended as our relationship potentially ended.
Well, the cruel fucking irony of it all.
My world was falling down around me, and I was powerless to stop it.
No.
No.
No!
I couldn’t save him, I accepted that now, but the scary part was that I wasn't sure anyone could. Underneath it all, he was the person I loved, and I still wanted to be with that person.
My flag was still stitched to his broken mast.
I had his baby growing inside of me, a baby I couldn’t think about raising alone, even though I knew there was a very high probability that I would have to.
I just wanted to make him better.
"Promise me, Joe!" I broke down and called out, crying hard, as I watched him walk away from me for what could potentially be the last time. “Promise me that you’ll come back for me!”
Weak girl.
Weak, weak, weak, fucking weak!
Shoulders stiffening, he stopped walking and turned back to me.
An expression of pain and frustration was etched on his face.
“Molloy.”
“Come back for me, Joe,” I cried out hoarsely, clutching my stomach. “Get better and come back for me…For your family.”
Looking shattered, he stared at me for the longest moment before nodding. “I’ll come back for you. For both of you.”
And then he was gone.
PART TEN
DON’T GO THERE
JOEY
At the rehab facility, they told me that I had to remember.
That in order to get better, I had to go back to the start.
To my earliest childhood memories.
If I didn’t, the holes my parents had left inside of me would never heal.
I knew that was bullshit.
They couldn’t heal me.
No amount of remembering could fix what was broken inside of me.
All I needed from these people was to keep me locked up until I had detoxed.
Until I had sweated every one of my demons out of my body.
So that I couldn’t hurt her anymore.
So that I didn’t break her heart for the hundredth thousandth time.
I wanted to get clean, but most importantly, I wanted to stay clean.
That was the best I could possibly hope for.
I didn’t need my mind patched up.
Just my addictive nature.
I wasn’t sure how long I'd been here, or how many days it had been since my mother's funeral. I didn’t know what day of the week I had, or when I'd last felt the sun on my skin, because I couldn’t think – at least not about anything but the pain coursing through my veins as my body endured the withdrawal process.
It was beyond agonizing.
The shakes, the puking, the relentless fucking muscles spasms.
It was never-ending.
For the first time in years, I forced myself to stare at the reflection in the mirror, staring back at me.
I honestly didn’t recognize my own reflection looking back at me.
Jesus, I looked like shit.
I was sick of myself.
That was a weird statement, but it was the god honest truth.
I was sick shit of every thought, notion, and idea that traveled through the fucked-up brain I had been given at birth.
I wasn’t sure where it all went wrong, or if it had always been wrong and I was only noticing now.
Either way, my life had gone to noticeable ruins, and I was standing slap bang in the center, the master of my own destiny, the destroyer of all things good.
“You want to know how it feels to be me?”
“Yes.”
“Hopeless. It feels hopeless.”
“Are you still frightened, Joey?”
“I was never frightened.”
“I think you’ve spent your whole life in a state of fear, and it’s your reaction to that feeling that fear that made you so reckless.”
“I was never frightened of him.”