All I Want For Christmas Is You by Jessica Scott Read Free Book Online Page A

have you been? With everything?”
    He scrubbed his hand over his scruffy grey beard, then leaned forward, folding his hands together. “When I lost Mel’s mom, I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever go through. I was wrong.” He looked up at her. “There’s a word for when a man loses his wife. Or a wife loses a husband. There’s no word for what I am now. Orphan parent is the closest thing I can come up with.” He shifted a little. “But I’ll get through it. You just try to keep going, try not to think about it too much because the sadness… Man, the sadness is like quicksand. It’ll suck you down before you even realize you’re sinking.”
    Sam looked away. “Yeah.” It was all she could manage.
    Thomas sighed heavily. “So what are you and your mom doing this week? And where’s your other half?”
    Sam bit her lips, wishing at that moment that Thomas wasn’t as close with her mother as he was. But he knew Patrick. Knew that he’d been there from the start and raised Natalie like his own.
    Knew that he was currently missing from the picture.
    And Sam didn’t have a good explanation for it. She couldn’t put a name to the lack inside her. To the emptiness that was so deep and so dark that it felt like no light would ever penetrate it.
    Someone told her that shadows were a good thing because it proved the light existed, that it was as real as whatever lurked in the shadows.
    But when there was no light, there was nothing to push back the darkness. It just kept coming and coming until it overwhelmed its prey, dragging it down, further from the light.
    “We’re taking some time off,” she said after a moment, when she realized she hadn’t answered him.
    Thomas said nothing for so long, Sam dared to finally look up. “You know, when I came home from Vietnam, I thought I was going to be so happy. I was alive. I’d made it. I had a wife to come home to.” He paused, his gaze going to a memory decades in the past. “But that didn’t happen. It was… Things didn’t feel right. At the time, I thought it was because of all the bullshit we had to endure. People calling us baby killers and murderers.” He rubbed his eyes behind his coke-bottle glasses. “But after a while I realized that it wasn’t the public’s problem. It was mine.”
    Sam listened intently. There was no public antiwar sentiment to make her feel like this. No, the problem was strictly hers. A problem that defied explanation.
    “What did you do?”
    “Self-medicated for a long time. Melanie’s mother left me for a while. Was hooked on heroin for a while.”
    Sam frowned. “Heroin is some pretty heavy stuff.” She never would have guessed that Thomas had been an addict.
    “Started smoking opium while I was in Vietnam. Bunch of us did. And let me tell you, that is a habit that you never quit. Every day I wake up and have to remind myself why I’m not chasing the dragon today.” He paused for a long moment. “And then I woke up one day, no idea where I was or what I’d been doing for the last year. Checked myself into a VA rehab center.”
    “Mel’s mom took you back?”
    “After a while. Took me a long time to unpack all my shit from the war.” He leaned back in his chair. “So whatever is going on with you or with him, give it time. You just got home. Don’t make any decisions right now because you think things are going to be this way forever.” He hesitated a moment. “If you’re not talking to someone, you should.”
    She closed her eyes, unable to find the words she needed. How to explain the fear that threatened to choke her when she even thought about what to say, how to say it?
    He shifted, pointing his finger at her. “It feels like it will but it won’t be. This, I promise you.” He stood. “But pretending that everything will get better if you just try harder isn’t the answer, Sammy. Believe me, I tried it. Sometimes, the hardest thing in the world to do is admit that your stuff is too much for