The hum wants me to argue.
The hum's got a hundred things to say, fast and bright and certain, about how I'm fine, how I've never seen clearer, how they're the ones who don't understand?—
I know that voice now. I've started, just barely, in the last few terrible weeks, to be able to hear that voice as a separate thing from me. That's the only reason I don't say any of it.
"Get your head right," Runes says quietly. "Whatever it takes. However long it takes. You do that, and the club’s waiting on the other side of it. You're not doing it for them. You're doing it so there's ayouleft to come home." He puts the cigarette in hispocket, unsmoked. "That's the only road back, son. There's no other one. I'd tell you if there was."
I look at him, and his face holds still. His is the only one all day that's held still.
"Yeah," I say. "Okay."
* * *
They drive me up the next morning, my mother in the front, my father at the wheel, and nobody talks, and the hum fills the whole car.
The place is low and brick and set back off the road behind a lot of green, and from the outside it doesn't look like anything.
It looks like an insurance office. It looks like nothing.
That's almost worse—the thing I've been so afraid of, the locked door at the end of everything, looks like a building where you'd go to renew a policy.
We sit in a small room, and people in soft voices ask me my name and the date and who the president is.
I get the date wrong by two days, and I watch my mother's hands twist in her lap when I do.
Then it's time, and my parents can't come past a certain set of doors.
My mother holds onto me so hard it hurts, and my father grips the back of my neck the way he's done since I was small, heavy and steadying, and says the only thing he says all day.
"Come home to us. You hear me? Come home."
And then there's a hallway, and a woman with a lanyard walking beside me, and a door at the end of it, and we go through, and behind me?—
The lock turns.
It's not loud. That's the thing I'll remember.
A movie would make it loud, a great iron clang, but it's just a small electronic click and a green light going red, and that's it, that's the whole sound of the world closing behind me.
The hum, for one second, goes silent.
And into the silence comes the cleanest thought I've had in months, flat and plain and true as anything I've ever known:I'm trapped.
I'm caged. I traded one set of bars for another, and these ones I walked into on my own two feet.
I stand in the hallway and feel the walls of it press in, and the desire to turn around and put my fist through that red light and the door behind it rises up so hard my hand actually closes.
And then, under it—way under it, under the hum and the panic and the animalistic need to run—that small flat exhausted thing speaks up again.
The one piece of me that the spring didn't burn down. The one that's so tired of not making sense.
See it through,it says.They told you the truth. This is the only road back. See it through.
I open my hand.
I follow the woman with the lanyard down the hall.
And somewhere behind me, a man I used to be stays locked on the other side of that door, and I leave him there, because the only way I get to go home is to get better, to get treatment.