Like usual, I was at my grandmother’s after school. Like usual, she was sitting listlessly at the kitchen table, dabbing at her eyes with a Kleenex, and, like usual, I was attempting to get her mind on something besides the fact that my grandfather had died two months earlier and he wasn’t coming back.

“Granna, come on,” I said. “Just go to the mall with me. You used to love to shop.”

“I loved to buy clothes for your grandpa,” she said, gazing out the window with empty eyes.

“So buy something for yourself.”

“And where would I wear it? Everywhere I go reminds me of him.”

I tried a laugh. “Then buy something for me.”

Her eyes drifted from the window to me. “You have plenty of places to go, don’t you, Brittany?” she said. “You have your whole life ahead of you; and mine’s all behind me.”

I tried not to groan as her eyes misted up again. I didn’t see how she could have any tears left.

“Get my purse, Honey,” she said. “I’ll give you some money to buy yourself something nice to wear out someplace.”

“No, Granna!” I wailed. “I want you to go with me! That’s the whole idea—to get you out of the house.”

Like usual, she pursed her mouth so the wrinkles feathered around her lips, and like usual I was about as frustrated as I knew how to be. Lucky for both of us the phone rang.

Interrupted
“You get it,” she said, eyes going empty again. “Tell them I can’t talk right now.”

They already know that, I thought. I’m surprised anybody’s calling—you tell them that every time.

But it was my best friend, Elizabeth. Her voice was breathless and weak.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“They’re at it again. Can you meet me?”

“Where?”

“At the 7-Eleven.”

“What’s going on?”

“I can’t talk. Just meet me.”

Actually, she didn’t have to tell me. I knew the scene by heart. I kissed Granna and made her promise to eat the Hamburger Helper I’d whipped up for her dinner and took off for the 7-Eleven on the corner. The Elizabeth Story played in my head.

“They hate me. I know they hate me,” she always said when her parents went into one of their rage duets. “Why else would they treat me this way?”

“Because alcohol does weird stuff to people,” I would always tell her.

“How would you know?” she’d say. “Your parents are perfect!”

Then I’d remind her that since she’s told me her parents both had drinking problems, I’d done a bunch of reading about it. I’d tell her—again—what I’d read and what it said she should do, and I’d help her find a way to get back home and start over trying to live with her parents.

What I never told her was that my parents weren’t perfect. They had problems of their own that were fast becoming my problems.
But I erased those when I saw Elizabeth standing outside the phone booth, face swollen from crying. I’d seen her look that way about a hundred times, and, like usual, I went up and put my arms around her. Like usual, she sobbed into my shoulder.

Tumbling Down
“My dad didn’t even go to work today,” she said between hiccups. “He’s been drinking all day. My mom came home and started yelling at him, and then she had to have a drink to calm down, and then they both started hollering at me.” She pulled away and blinked into my face. “They told me I’m a tramp because I want to go out with Kevin—just because he’s two years older than me.”

“They don’t even know what they’re saying, remember? You can’t reason with them when they’re drunk.”

“So what do I do?” she said.

I sighed and held back the we-have-been-through-this-a-thousand-times. “You get out of the situation until they sober up, and then you go to them calmly and tell them how much their drinking is hurting you.”

“It doesn’t work!” she said. She shook her head like one of those bobblehead figurines you put on your dashboard.

“OK,” I said. “Do you want to come home with me?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It seems like I’m always doing that.”

“It’s better than getting slapped or something,” I said. “My parents don’t mind.”

She smeared the tears off her cheeks with the backs of her hands and shook her head. “I called Kevin, too, and he said he’d meet me here in half an hour. I just didn’t want to wait alone; that’s why I called you.”

“Call me again if you need me,” I said. “I’ll be home. I have to write that paper.”

A Toyota pickup roared into the parking space in front of us, and Elizabeth squeezed my hand. “Thanks, Britt,” she said. “I love you.”

“Love you, too,” I said. But like usual I watched her go with a sinking stomach. I’d stake my GPA on the fact that she wouldn’t go to her parents when they sobered up. It would just start all over again like a song you hate, set on repeat.

Behind Closed Doors
Like my life is that much different, I thought as I trudged toward my house, a few blocks down. Lately it seemed like the same old thing was going on there, too.

My parents didn’t drink or fight. They just didn’t speak to each other anymore. I couldn’t tell you when it began. I’d only begun to notice it when my grades had started failing.

“What’s this C in English?” Mom said to me one night.

Dad looked up from his latest issue of Time and said, “You got a C in English? What’s that about?”

“I just can’t concentrate,” I said.

“That’s easy to understand.” Dad folded a crease into the magazine that, surprisingly, didn’t rip the pages.

“I don’t understand it,” Mom said to me.

“It’s this tension around her, isn’t it, Britt?” Dad said—again to me.

“It is hard to do my schoolwork when I’m so stressed out.”

“That isn’t my fault, Brittany,” Mom said. “Talk to your father about that.”

“No,” Dad said, slapping the Time onto the coffee table. “Talk to your mother. But good luck getting her to answer you.”

“I will talk to you, Brittany,” she said. “You’re a rational human being.”

At which point, Dad stormed out of the room, and the silence, like usual, descended again.

But today when I opened the front door, they were definitely talking. On their highest volume settings.

“So that’s your solution,” Mom was shouting. “You’re just going to run away.”

“I’m not running away, Debbie. I’m trying to save my sanity.”

“You’re saying I’m driving you crazy.”

“I’m saying I need some breathing space. We both do. The situation here is intolerable for everybody.”

It was then that he noticed me standing in the doorway, and it was then that I noticed the bulging duffel bag by his feet. He looked at me sadly and picked it up.

“I won’t be far away,” he said—to me, not to Mom. “I’ll let you know which hotel I’m at.”

“You’re leaving?” I said. My heart was pounding right up out of my throat. “Dad, no! That isn’t right! You could get marriage counseling or something.”

“Staying here sniping at your mother isn’t right either,” he said. His voice had fallen to a softer level, and there was a mist in his eyes as he leaned down to kiss me on the cheek. He looked so much like his mother—sad and empty and hopeless—that I started crying, too.

But he left anyway and left Mom in no mood to discuss it.

“It isn’t about you, Brittany,” she said when I begged her to tell me what was going on. “I just need some time alone. Don’t you have a paper to write?”

“Yes, but, Mom, how can I . . . ”

“When is it due?”

“Day after tomorrow, but . . . ”

“Then you’d better get to it. You don’t need any more C’s. You’re an A student. We—I expect more of you.”

Good grief, I thought, as I made my way upstairs. She’s already talking like a single parent. What am I going to do about this?

Say It on Paper
What was I going to do about anything, for that matter? I felt strangely like some kind of tapestry, unraveling one thread at a time. But I couldn’t worry about me—I had to do something to help them.

What I did was not even look at my note cards on Charles Dickens. Instead I got out my journal and wrote and wrote and wrote. That was how I always talked to God. I knew if I just kept pouring out my soul and what was coming to me, I’d figure out what to do.
Finally, I knew. I broke out my Bible and wrote two long letters—one to my father and one to my mother.

“You can’t get a divorce,” I told them. “Listen to what the Bible says about that.” Then I listed every Scripture I could find on the subject, and then I promised I’d do everything I could to make life easier for them at home so they could work out their problems. If that included making straight A’s, then I’d make A-pluses.

By the time I finished it was 10 p.m. I looked wearily at the stack of note cards and tried to drum up some energy to get started. If I was going to make promises like that, I was going to have to follow through, or their whole marriage could fall apart.

Again?
No sooner had I reached for everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-19th-century-British-literature than the phone rang. It was Elizabeth.

She was crying so hard I could barely understand her.

“It’s horrible!” she said—I think. “She threw the iron at me. . . .”

“You have to get out of there!” I said. “Just run here, as fast as you can.”

We hung up without goodbyes, and I ran down to find my mother, who was scrubbing the kitchen floor.

“That was Elizabeth,” I said. “It’s really bad over there. Can she . . .”

“Not this time,” she said. She sat back on her heels and squeezed the rag into the bucket as if getting rid of dirty water was the most important task of her life. “I can’t handle anything else right now.”

I stared. “But Mom! She can’t stay there; it’s dangerous!”

“I’m sorry,” Mom said woodenly. “I really am. But there must be someplace else. I’d be no good to Elizabeth tonight.”

For the first time I heard the catch in her voice, and I knew she was about to cry. As I stormed out the front door, it was beyond me how she could think of herself at a time like this. You have to put your own stuff aside when somebody else needs you, I told her in my mind. That’s what I do.

I met Elizabeth at the corner and steered her toward Granna’s house. In all the times I’d rescued her, I’d never seen her cry that hard.
I got her onto the porch where she sank onto the swing while I knocked on the door. And then pounded. And then jammed my thumb into the doorbell 20 times and yelled, “Granna” through the window until I was hoarse.

If I’d thought my tapestry was unraveling before, it was in shreds by now.

“What in the world?” I said. “Why won’t she answer the door?”

Elizabeth just shook her head and kept crying.

“OK,” I said. “I’m gonna try the window.”

It was locked, of course, so I jumped down into the shrubbery and looked around for a stick to pry it open. That’s where I was when I heard Elizabeth scream.

“What’s wrong?” I said.
I knew the minute I straightened up. A police car was just coming to a stop in front of the house, its blue lights twirling eerily in the dark.

“They sent the cops for me!” Elizabeth cried. Where she went or how she got there, I couldn’t tell you. She just disappeared, leaving me standing in my grandmother’s gardenia bushes facing a policeman who was approaching me with one hand on his gun and the other held up in warning.

Perfect Timing?
“Don’t move,” he said.

“I won’t,” I said, although it was hard not to just collapse into the mulch.

“What are you doing?” he said.

I told him—somehow. He looked at me for a good 30 seconds before he gave me a hand to pull me out of the bushes. “Anybody we can call to let us in and check on your grandmother?”

“My dad.” And then a little more of me unraveled. I had no idea where he was.

It took us half an hour to find him at his hotel and convince him that this really was an emergency.

Nobody else seemed to think that except me, and I was right. When Dad finally got there with the key, we found Granna in her bed—unconscious. On her bedside table was an empty container of amitriptyline.

“Antidepressant,” Dad told the policeman. “The doctor said it was safe.”

“Not if you take the whole bottle,” the cop said. He radioed for an ambulance.

From there on I was coming apart in whole tapestry sections at once. By the time the ambulance screamed away with Dad in the front and Granna lying motionless in the back, I couldn’t even stand up anymore. I sank down on Granna’s bed and looked up at the ceiling and said, “God! What good does it do to try to help all these people? I give up, God. Do You hear me? I just give up. You do it!”

Peace in the Storm
But it was the strangest thing. Instead of feeling the last thread loose itself from my Brittany-tapestry, I just felt, I don’t know, calm somehow. So calm, in fact, that I fell asleep right there.

I didn’t wake up until Elizabeth made her way into my grandmother’s unlocked house. She found me in the bedroom and shook me. There was sunlight slanting in through the blinds into my eyes.

“What’s going on?” I said, squinting at her.

“You better get home,” she said. “I went by your house this morning to get you for school, and your mom’s in a panic because you didn’t come home last night. Are you OK?”

“Yeah,” I said. I looked around for my shoes, which, it turned out, were still on my feet.

“Good,” she said. She sat down on the bed beside me. “I’m not. It was so awful when I had to go home last night, Britt. My dad was pacing around the house like some animal in a cage. And my mom . . .”

Like usual, I started to go into my routine conversation with her, but the thought I’d gone to sleep with tripped me up.

“Stop, Liz.”

She did, out of sheer shock, I’m sure.

“Look,” I said. “I hate it that everything is a mess at your house. Believe me, I know what it’s like.”

“You do not.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll go into that later. Just believe me when I say all I can do for you right now is keep praying. But I have to give you to God. I can’t do anything else.”

She sat there, mouth hanging halfway open, while I got up and smoothed out Granna’s covers.

“What am I supposed to do?” she said.

“What I’ve told you a bajillion times,” I said.

“What are you gonna do?”

“Go find out about my grandmother. After that, I have no idea.”

When I got home, Mom had one of those motherly two-emotions-at-the-same-time things going on. She grabbed me like I’d been gone six months, but her eyes were blazing.

“How’s Granna?” I said.

“You dad just called. They brought her around, and she said she just couldn’t go on without Harry, so she took all the pills. She’ll be fine physically, but she’s giving everyone a hard time, saying she wants to die, too. Your dad thought if you came over and talked to her . . .”

“I can’t,” I said. “There isn’t anything more I can say to her. I have to get ready for school.”

Mom shook her head. “It’s been an awful night, Britt. Why don’t you stay home today?”

I nodded and proceeded to my room like I was made of lead. Gone was the peaceful feeling I’d had the night before, and in its place was this sense of being completely useless. I hadn’t helped Granna at all—she’d tried to commit suicide, for Pete’s sake. I hadn’t done a thing for Mom and Dad. Mom certainly wasn’t rushing to the hospital to be at her husband’s side. And Elizabeth: She was probably running around right now looking for another place to stay instead of going home. I hadn’t fixed a one of them for all my trying, and the only thing that had brought me any peace was giving up.

I slumped into my desk chair but I couldn’t quite get my hand to reach for my journal. “God?” I said out loud, “What do I do now?”

Cranking It Out
Mom went on to work and I tried to go to sleep, but two things kept me awake. One was the unanswered question. The other, weirdly enough, was the stack of note cards on my desk.

How can I even think about doing a paper at a time like this? I asked myself.

But, not at all like usual, I went to the computer and flipped through the cards and started typing, one painstaking line at a time.

Once in a while my mind darted to Elizabeth, Granna, my parents. But every time I kept coming back to one thing: “I’ve done all I can. What do I do now, God?” and then I’d keep typing.

By 3 p.m., the paper was done. It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was definitely better than anything else I’d turned out that semester. I was printing it when the phone rang, and it was, like usual, Elizabeth. Only she wasn’t sobbing into the receiver.

“I went to see Mr. Sheetz,” she said.

“The counselor?”

“Yeah. He signed me up to go to Al-Anon. There’s a meeting third period tomorrow. I get out of class to go. That’s how important he says it is. I don’t know, though.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“What do I need a group for when I have you?” she said.

“Go. Those people know what they’re doing. I don’t think I really do when it comes to having parents who drink.”

“Are you saying you won’t help me anymore?” Elizabeth said. Her voice was going up into a whine.

“No,” I said. “I’m praying for you. I’ll always listen. But . . .”

“Fine,” she said. “See you later.”

Not at all like usual, I hung up the phone feeling as if I’d actually done something for her.

I liked the feeling so much that I went back to my room, and I tore up the two letters I’d written to my parents. I was curled up on my window seat, praying for Granna, when Dad tapped on my door. I practically threw myself into his arms.

“She’s gonna be OK,” he said into my hair. “Thirty days in the hospital and then some ongoing psychiatric helps. The docs say she’s severely depressed.”

I pushed back from him. “Good,” I said. “I mean, about the psychiatric help.”

“Good?” he said. He shook his head, eyes all guilty. “I was so wrapped up in my own stuff I didn’t even see how bad off she was. I could have prevented this.”

“You know what, Dad? We all have to stop trying to fix each other.”

He gave a hard laugh. “What do you suggest we do then, Brittany? Hang around and wait for the answers to fall out of the sky?”

I started to roll my eyes at him, but I stopped. Waiting for the answers to fall out of the sky was exactly what I’d been doing all day, and I suddenly realized that I was starting to weave back together, thread by thread, as a result.

Of course, I wasn’t sure Dad would get that, so I said, “We can get people the help they need, for starters.”

He glowered at me. “Don’t start with me about marriage counseling.”

“OK,” I said. “If you don’t want to hear it, I won’t. I’ll just pray.”

His frown got confused, in a way that told me that even as he left my room shaking his head, I’d maybe planted a seed.

Like usual, I wanted to run after him and try to make it all right. But like brand-new-usual, I closed the door behind him and went back to my window seat and prayed again.

“God,” I said. “Thanks for unraveling me enough to get rid of that one bad thread—the one that said, ‘It’s all up to you, Brittany. It’s all up to you.’ ”

Nancy Rue and her husband, Jim, live in Lebanon, Tenn.