Chapter 397 - Home

Chapter 397: Chapter 397 - Home

The drive home was so quiet that Roxie could hear the tires against the road.

She sat curled against the passenger door with her head resting against the window, watching streetlights pass without really seeing them. She was exhausted in every possible way. Her legs hurt from running around all day, her back ached from sitting stiffly in hospital chairs for hours, and her head felt heavy from crying, worrying and trying to understand too many things at once.

Zac had barely spoken since they left the hospital. Every few minutes he glanced toward her, then back at the road, but he seemed to understand that asking if she was okay would only make her cry again.

Roxie wasn’t okay.

Karen was alive. She had seen her awake, held her hand, heard her voice and watched her almost smile. Her parents were finally there, the doctors were monitoring her heart, and someone would call if anything changed. Those were good things, enough that Roxie should have felt some kind of relief by now, yet her body apparently hadn’t gotten the message.

Her hands still trembled every few minutes, and whenever the Tesla slowed at a light she caught herself staring at the dashboard clock and wondering what was happening in Karen’s room at that exact moment. Was she sleeping? Was somebody watching the monitor? Was her heart still beating normally?

Zac turned onto their street and finally spoke. "You want anything before we go home?"

Roxie looked at him. "Like what?"

"Food. Water. Anything."

She shook her head.

"You barely ate today."

"I’m not hungry."

He looked like he wanted to argue but let it go.

When they reached the bungalow, Zac pulled into the driveway and turned the car off. Neither of them moved immediately. Roxie stared at the house, at the porch light they had left on that morning and the closed curtains behind the windows. Nothing had changed since she walked out thinking Karen was probably angry and avoiding them, and somehow that made being home feel wrong.

After everything that had happened, Roxie expected the world to look different.

Zac unbuckled his seat belt. "Come on."

She followed him inside and immediately felt the silence. Roxie dropped her bag beside the couch while Zac went into the kitchen, filled a glass with water and brought it back to her.

"Drink."

She accepted it but only stared at him until he lifted his eyebrows.

"Rox."

"I know."

She swallowed a few mouthfuls before handing it back, then rubbed one finger over her dry lips.

Zac looked down at her shoes. "Sit. You look like you’re about to fall over."

"I’m fine."

His expression made the words sound ridiculous even to her.

Roxie laughed weakly. "Jesus. Now I sound like Karen."

Something softened in Zac’s face, and Roxie hated how quickly that made her eyes burn again.

She sat on the couch. Zac crouched in front of her and started working at her shoelaces before she could reach for them herself.

"I can take those off."

"I want to."

Roxie stopped arguing and watched his hands instead. It was such a normal thing, Zac taking her shoes off after an exhausting day, that for a few seconds she almost managed to pretend this was nothing more than that. Then he placed them beside the couch, sat next to her and asked if she wanted to shower.

Roxie shook her head. "Maybe later."

He left it alone.

For a while she sat there rubbing her palms against her thighs while Zac stayed beside her. Eventually the question she had been trying to push away came out anyway.

"Do you think she’ll be fine?"

Zac looked at her carefully. "She’s stable. She’s in the right place, and they’re watching her."

"That isn’t what I asked."

His mouth tightened slightly, and Roxie immediately regretted asking because she already knew there was no answer he could give her. Stable wasn’t the same as fine. Awake wasn’t the same as safe. Karen had been talking in the ambulance too, and a few hours later Roxie had been standing behind glass watching doctors shock her heart.

Zac reached for her hand.

Roxie stared at their fingers for several seconds before saying, "I watched them shock her."

His grip tightened.

"She was right there behind the glass and I watched her whole body move. Every time I close my eyes, I see it again." Roxie swallowed and tried looking somewhere else, but there was nowhere in the bungalow that felt far enough away from the memory. "And before that, in the car, when she wouldn’t wake up, I knew what to check. I watched her chest. I kept talking to her. I kept trying to get some reaction because I already knew how to do that."

Zac shifted closer.

"I used to do it with Mom."

Saying it made something inside her tighten.

Roxie had known there was a connection. She had felt it in the car even before she understood why her panic was getting so bad. Claire used to come home drunk enough that waking her could take several tries. Roxie had learned young to watch her chest or put a hand near her face and wait until she felt breath because that was easier than lying beside her wondering.

Claire had always moved eventually.

That was what mattered.

A deeper breath, a groan, an irritated hand pushing Roxie away. It didn’t matter if Claire got angry afterward. Once she moved, Roxie knew she was alive.

Today Karen had dragged all of that back without meaning to.

Roxie had been staring at her chest the same way, waiting for the same proof, except Karen kept getting worse.

"That’s what scared me," Roxie said, her voice beginning to shake. "I was looking at Karen and I knew what I was doing because I’d done it before. I hated that I knew."

Zac slipped an arm around her shoulders, and Roxie leaned into him while the hospital came back again. Karen unconscious in the car. Karen barely responding to her voice. The rush through the emergency room. Angela crying. Then the alarms and the doctor running past them.

"I thought if we got her to the hospital, that was it. I thought we made it." Roxie stared down at her lap. "Then they fucking shocked her."

Her throat closed.

"She was already where she was supposed to be. Doctors were right there, and she still almost died."

The first sob broke through before she could stop it. Zac pulled her closer, and Roxie pressed her face into his shoulder.

"She almost died after we found her. What if we were later? What if Ethan didn’t remember that place? What if we kept looking somewhere else?"

Zac’s hand moved slowly over her back. "You found her."

"But what if we didn’t?"

"You did."

Roxie squeezed her eyes shut. She knew what he was trying to do, but her mind refused to stay with what had actually happened. It kept running through every other version of the day, every road they could have taken, every place they could have checked first while Karen sat alone inside that car.

Then Claire slipped into it again.

Another person alone somewhere while Roxie had no idea anything was wrong.

The comparison made Roxie pull away from Zac and wipe at her face.

"I hate this."

"What?"

"I don’t even know who I’m fucking crying for anymore."

Zac’s expression changed, but he let her keep going.

Roxie looked toward the front door, and suddenly she remembered sitting in this same bungalow after identifying Claire, staring at that lock because some part of her still expected it to turn.

That memory should have felt old.

It didn’t tonight.

"I thought Mom was done."

The words came out wrong, and Roxie shook her head immediately. "That sounds horrible. I mean I thought I was done with this part. She died. I handled everything. I got through it."

Maybe that was what she had believed.

Claire died and Roxie kept moving because she had to. There were forms to sign, things to sort, funeral arrangements to make and a house full of Claire’s belongings that suddenly belonged to nobody. Roxie had been angry and exhausted, but she had functioned.

She had mistaken functioning for grieving.

Today Karen almost dying had taken all those feelings Roxie had shoved somewhere she didn’t have to look at and mixed them with something new. Now she couldn’t tell where one fear ended and the other started.

Karen’s hand had been warm when Roxie held it tonight.

Claire’s hadn’t been.

Karen opened her eyes.

Claire hadn’t.

Karen had asked Roxie to come back tomorrow.

Roxie had spent an entire night waiting for Claire to come home even after she knew there would never be another tomorrow with her.

Her mouth trembled.

"I think when Karen wasn’t waking up, part of me was back there."

Zac moved his thumb slowly across her hand.

Roxie stared at the front door. "I kept thinking if Karen opened her eyes, everything would be okay. Then she did, and it should’ve fixed it. She talked to me. She squeezed my hand. She asked for Angela. She’s alive, Zac."

Her voice cracked harder on the last word.

"So why does it still fucking hurt?"

She wasn’t really asking him.

The answer was already sitting somewhere inside her, and Roxie resented it.

Karen surviving had brought relief, but it had also shown Roxie exactly what she never got with Claire. Karen woke up and Roxie still had time with her. She could go back tomorrow, get angry, listen to excuses, demand answers, forgive her eventually or stay pissed for a while. Whatever happened between them next, there was a next.

Claire had died while Roxie was still waiting for one.

Roxie pressed the heel of her hand against her eye.

"I was still mad at Mom when she died."

Zac stayed quiet.

"That’s the fucked up part. I was angry with her and I thought there would be more time to stay angry. Maybe another fight. Maybe she’d come back like she always did and piss me off again." Roxie laughed through the tears, but it collapsed quickly. "I never thought that was just going to be it."

Her chest tightened until she had to take a deeper breath.

Today Angela had screamed at Karen. Roxie had been furious with Karen too. Mason had missed her call. All of them had unfinished things sitting between them when Karen got into that car.

Then Karen nearly died.

That was what Roxie couldn’t stop thinking about.

How close they had come to being stuck with every ugly thing they had said and every conversation they thought they could have later.

"If she died today, Angela would’ve had to live with that fight forever."

Zac’s arm tightened around her.

"And Mason would’ve had that missed call. I would’ve spent the rest of my life wondering why I didn’t tell someone sooner." Roxie wiped another tear away. "We all thought we had more time because you always think there’s going to be more fucking time."

Her voice broke again.

"That’s what I thought with Mom too."

There it was.

Roxie stared down at their hands.

Maybe that was the thing tying Karen and Claire together more than the drinking, the breathing or even the fear of watching someone die.

It was the unfinished part.

Karen had given them another chance.

Claire hadn’t.

Roxie had spent months acting like she had accepted that, yet sitting here now she realized how much she had never examined because examining it meant admitting there were things she still wanted from someone who was already gone.

She still wanted answers.

She still wanted an apology.

Sometimes she still wanted to scream at Claire until Claire finally understood what she had done to her.

And underneath all of that, embarrassingly, painfully, Roxie still wanted her mother.

"I’m so fucking mad at her," Roxie whispered.

The anger was easier to recognize, but tonight it came with something else before she could stop it.

"I miss her too."

Her face crumpled as soon as she said it.

Zac turned toward her and pulled her against him.

Roxie didn’t fight it. She curled into his chest and let herself cry, but even then Karen kept moving through the grief. She saw Karen’s face in the hospital bed, pale and exhausted but alive. She remembered her asking if she had almost died, then asking whether everyone stayed.

Roxie had been able to answer her.

Yes.

They stayed.

Karen hadn’t been alone.

That mattered more than Roxie had understood at the time.

Claire had been found alone.

Roxie had spent months carrying that fact around without looking directly at what it did to her.

She clutched Zac’s shirt harder.

"I’m glad Karen woke up."

"I am too."

"I’m so fucking glad."

Her crying became worse instead of better.

Zac held her through it.

Roxie couldn’t explain why relief hurt this much, but maybe relief and grief had gotten tangled together because Karen surviving showed her exactly how close the other ending had been.

Today could have become another phone call.

Another body.

Another person Roxie loved becoming paperwork and belongings and questions nobody could answer.

It hadn’t.

Karen was still there.

Roxie would see her tomorrow.

She could be furious with her tomorrow.

She could hug her tomorrow.

She could ask why.

Tomorrow still belonged to Karen.

That thought made Roxie cry until her throat hurt.

Eventually she managed to say, "I think I never really grieved Claire."

Zac looked down at her but stayed quiet.

Roxie was grateful.

She didn’t need him to tell her what grief was supposed to look like. She barely understood it herself.

"I was too busy being pissed. Then I was busy dealing with everything. After a while I thought because I could get through a day without thinking about her, that meant I was okay."

Her fingers loosened slightly against his shirt.

"But today I kept seeing her in Karen. Then Karen woke up and suddenly I realized how badly I wanted Mom to wake up too."

That was closer to what had been sitting inside her all evening.

Roxie closed her eyes. "I wasn’t even there when she was dying." Her lip turned to a bitter smile. "I don’t even know how she died."

"You were there for her."

She didn’t need to remember every detail of the morgue. She didn’t want to. The feeling was enough. Waiting for movement that never came.

Today she had waited again.

This time someone moved.

Someone came back.

Roxie cried for both of those things at once.

For Karen because she almost lost her.

For Claire because she had.

For herself because apparently she had spent months pretending the second one hurt less than it did.

"I feel guilty."

Zac shifted slightly. "For what?"

Roxie took a while before answering. "For thinking about Mom when Karen’s the one in the hospital. Then I feel guilty because Karen lived and Mom didn’t. Then I get mad because Mom did that to herself, and Karen almost did the same fucking thing, and then I get scared all over again."

Her breathing started to shake again.

"I don’t want Karen to become another person I’m angry at after she’s already gone."

Zac pulled back enough to look at her.

"She’s here."

Roxie nodded quickly.

"I know. That’s why I want to go back tomorrow."

"You will."

"I want to yell at her."

A faint smile touched Zac’s mouth. "I figured."

Roxie gave a wet laugh.

"I want to hug her too."

"You can probably do both."

That made her laugh again, barely, but enough that some of the pressure in her chest loosened.

Roxie wiped at her face and leaned back into him.

For the first time since they got home, she could think about Karen without immediately seeing the shock.

She saw her awake instead.

Karen’s weak smile.

Her warm fingers.

The small, scared way she had asked whether Angela was mad.

Roxie held onto that version.

Claire still sat somewhere beneath it, but maybe Roxie could let both exist without letting one swallow the other.

Karen’s near death had opened something.

Roxie didn’t have to finish dealing with it tonight.

She was too tired anyway.

Her body had gone heavy against Zac, and the crying had left her throat sore and her face swollen.

After a while Zac rubbed his hand over her arm. "Bed?"

Roxie nodded.

He stood first and helped her up. Her legs felt weak enough that she let him keep one hand around her waist as they walked toward the bedroom.

Roxie changed into an old shirt while Zac pulled the blanket back, then climbed into bed and immediately moved toward him once he lay beside her.

His arm came around her.

"Stay awake until I sleep."

"I will."

"If Karen’s aunt calls, wake me."

"Okay."

Roxie tucked her face against his chest and listened to his heartbeat.

A few hours ago she had been listening for another one through glass and machines.

Tonight Karen’s was still beating.

That was enough for now.

Claire was still gone, and apparently Roxie had more feelings about that than she ever wanted to admit. Those feelings could exist without turning tonight entirely into Claire. Tonight belonged to both things, losing someone once and nearly losing someone again.

Roxie closed her eyes.

Tomorrow she would go back to Karen.

That mattered.

This time, she still had tomorrow.