I looked back at the house and saw Mom standing at the screen door looking out at us. “I have a headache,” Trevor explained. “I was just looking for some aspirin. Mom sees me in the bathroom, looking in the medicine cabinet, and she rushes in to grab an old bottle of tramadol she had in there. Like what, I was going to steal it?”
Zoe and I looked at each other, neither of us wanting to be the one to point out that he’d stolen pain meds before. With me, it was a prescription I got after having a tooth pulled. This was before California, when I still lived in Chicago. Trevor stopped by when he was in the city for a job interview.
He watched as I popped a pill into my mouth, setting the bottle down on the kitchen counter so that I could fill a glass with water and swallow it down. About ten minutes later, while I was taking a piss, I heard Trevor yell from down the hall that he had to get going and that he’d talk to me later. It wasn’t until a few hours later, my gums throbbing, that I noticed the bottle missing from the counter. I tried calling Trevor; he didn’t answer.
“I’m trying real hard,” Trevor said as he continued stalking around the yard. “I’ve been doing good. I know you guys probably don’t believe me, but I have been. I’ve been doing my best, and I don’t appreciate people treating me like a criminal.”
I looked back again. Mom was gone from the screen.
Together, Zoe and I managed to get him to come down from his mountain of anger. With the anger drained, all that remained in his eyes was a hollow sadness.
Voices from inside the house drifted out to us. Voices asking where the sugar was, voices talking about the drive back to Barrington later that day, voices asking did you see Carl’s new fiance, voices saying no, I have not seen Carl’s new fiance. The three of us moved away from the voices.
We went into the shed, that place where Dad had practiced magic for a kid who still believed in it, making a punching bag sway with nothing but the power of his mind and the expansion of metal when exposed to heat. The punching bag was gone, and so was Dad’s magic. Trevor and Zoe shared a cigarette, Zoe standing near the door and turning to blow the smoke outside.