Liam: Lost and Found

Liam: Lost and Found

A Short Story by Linda J. Lord

Trigger Warning: addiction, self-harm, mental health

The phone rang like a horn blaring.

Allyson scrambled out of bed, stubbed her toe on the dresser, cursed, smashed into the wall, and sank to the floor with the receiver pressed against her ear. Her mother's voice on the other end told her everything before she said a word. It was always that way with bad news. You knew it before it arrived.

She was on the highway within the hour, clothes stuffed in a bag without thinking, heading back to a town she hadn't set foot in for seventeen years. A jungle of memories. And the son she'd left behind.

Liam was asleep when she arrived.

She stood at the edge of his hospital bed and let herself look at him for the first time since he was three days old. He was seventeen now, long-limbed and pale, temporarily paralyzed from the waist down after the accident. She touched his hair, just gently, the way she had once imagined she would a thousand times. She told him what she'd never been able to say.

"I knew when you took your first steps because she called and told me," she whispered to his sleeping face. "I knew when you graduated grade eight. I know you like fast cars and that your favourite cookies are bear paws. I don’t know why she told me. Maybe to gloat. Maybe guilt."

He opened his eyes.

He looked at her without recognition for only a moment.

"I know who you are," he said flatly, and rolled over to face the wall. "You're Allyson."

She tried to leave. He called her back. Then he told her to get out. He threw his pillow at the door after she walked through it.

She stood in the hallway and sobbed.

What had she been thinking? She should have asked if he knew who she was so she could have prepared herself for his emotions. She wanted to explain everything. She should have never left him. She couldn't just walk away again — she knew that as surely as she'd known nothing in her life before it.

She came back the next day. And the day after that.

He screamed at her. He told her he didn't care. He hit her with every word she deserved. She stood there and took it, because she did deserve it, and because she wasn't leaving.

"You want me to leave again?" she said. "Make me. Get out of the bed and kick me out."

He couldn't. The irony of that wasn't lost on either of them.

She told him she'd gotten drunk the night before. Hadn't had a drink in eleven years. He was the reason she'd climbed back into a bottle after all that time, and she figured he owed her a conversation.

"It's not like you can go anywhere," she said.

She asked him about the accident. He told her to shut up. She kept asking. She could see it in him — the way guilt had settled into his body like something he'd swallowed whole. His best friend Marcus was dead. The passenger seat. The wrong side of a split-second decision.

"Can't take the truth?" she said. She was using his own words. "Well, tough."

He started to cry.

She went to him. Put her arms around him. He shoved her off the bed.

She got up off the floor.

That night, in a church basement, Allyson stood at the front of a circle of folding chairs and introduced herself.

"My name is Allyson and I am an alcoholic." Her voice barely wavered. She had been sober eleven years before two nights ago. She told them about being sixteen, about loving a boy named Troy who had a football scholarship and one foot already out of town. About the night her mother had looked at her belly and said, simply: we have to fix this. About the neighbours next door — the ones who wanted a child and couldn't have one — and how her mother had stretched out her arms and handed her son over like a parcel delivered to the wrong house.

"I should have never left him," Allyson said. "I should have never walked away. How do I forgive myself?"

No one answered. That wasn't how it worked. But she felt something loosen in her chest just from saying it out loud.

Liam ran.

She'd gone to the cafeteria to get him a Coke — he'd asked her to, quietly, without looking at her — and when she came back, the room was empty. He'd pulled himself up out of bed on legs the doctors had said might never fully wake, and walked out of the hospital.

She knew where he'd gone.

The cemetery was cold. She found him slumped against Marcus's headstone, a bottle half-empty in his hand, talking to the stone like it might answer.

"I'm not leaving," she said.

He tried everything. She stayed.

When she wrestled the second bottle away from him and he stumbled trying to get to his feet, she caught him. She guided him to a bench and sat beside him in the cold. He was crying again, or still. He told her then — the thing he hadn't told anyone. That he'd been the one who wanted to die that night. That Marcus had grabbed the wheel at the last second. That it was supposed to be him.

She didn't say anything. She just sat with him in the dark.

The judge believed him.

The accident evidence supported his testimony. Marcus's parents had come to his hospital room carrying a single flower from the funeral and told him they were angry and heartbroken and that they forgave him. They asked only that he get help.

Liam started rehab the following week.

Allyson was packing her motel room when he knocked.

"You leaving?" he asked.

"It's what you wanted, isn't it?"

He sat in the chair by the window. There was something different in the room — not warmth exactly, but the absence of heat, which sometimes amounts to the same thing.

"Did you love me?" he asked. Just like that. Straight out.

"Always," she said.

He asked about his father. She told him the truth: that she'd never told Troy, that she'd made the decision herself, that she'd thought it was better that way. He said he wasn't going looking for him. Just curious.

"I've been pissed at you a long time," Liam said, when they had run out of practical things to say. "Forgiveness might take a while."

She looked away.

"I didn't say I wouldn't try."

He stood up, nodded once, and headed for the door. Then he stopped. He turned around. He gave her the quickest, most careful hug she had ever received in her life.

"Thanks for coming."

"No problem," she said.

She sank into the chair after he left and sat there for a long time.

Months later, back in her Toronto apartment, she came home to find a letter in the mail. Her mother's handwriting. She almost threw it in the recycling without opening it.

She didn't.

Liam had graduated with his class, her mother wrote. Not valedictorian, but a respectable showing. He was sober. He had a girlfriend. He'd been accepted at U of T.

And then the letter turned.

Her mother had been seeing a psychologist. She had started attending AA. She had been secretly drinking for years, she wrote — all that pressure, all those demands, all that relentless insistence on perfection had been a cover for how imperfect she was herself. After Allyson's father died, it had gotten worse. She couldn't leave the house some days.

I was wrong, her mother wrote. I was so concerned about what people would think that I didn't care what you thought, or what you were going through. I knew you loved Troy. I couldn't get past his race. I have a lot to be sorry for.

I have a deep longing to try to fix things between us, if you are willing.

Love, Mom.

Allyson crumpled the letter.

She held it in her fist. She thought about it for a long time.

Then she smoothed it out.