Free Away From Everywhere by Chad Pelley

after his father was diagnosed, they were all eating breakfast together. His mother and Alex had finished up quickly so they could get in the shower before Owen. It was just the two of them at the table, quietly sipping too-sweet tea and crunching burnt toast. Neither of them was comfortable with the idea of schizophrenia just yet.
    Nothing triggered it – no loud noise, no sudden movements – but his father jumped up from his chair, slung an arm above his head, pursed his lips, and started into a word salad. Something about it frightened Owen out of the kitchen and into his parents’ bedroom. He dove down onto their waterbed, lifted slowly up and down by the wave, and felt nauseated by the guilt. He felt like he’d just betrayed and embarrassed his father. He held his body still, as if he could pause life, maybe rewind it. He came back to the kitchen with his social studies textbook, pretending he’d only bolted from the room to get the book.
    â€œI’ve got a final today.”He flashed the book. It fell out of his sweaty adolescent hand and crashed onto the floor, buckling the hardcover corner.
    His father nodded, knowingly.“I’m sorry about that,Owen. I dunno. I thought it might be funny…I guess.” He shrugged his shoulders and slumped his head. “My pills aren’t magic, okay?”

    Prior to his father’s illness,Owen had never viewed his parents as a couple. He saw them only as two parents, living together, whose sole function was to raise and support their children. It took watching them fall apart, layer after layer, to see them as a couple who had loved each other. A couple who had loved each other in a way that one couldn’t persist without the other.
    The wall between the laundry room and his parents’ bedroom was paper thin; he could’ve poked a finger through it. One night he heard them talking as he searched for his pajamas in a ball of clothes in the dryer.
    â€œIt’s the pills, Claire. I’m into this, but I’m just …not … it’s a side effect, it’s not me…just keep going, here…just keep going, like this.”
    â€œIt’s okay, Roger.” A pause. She must’ve rolled over. “Just get some sleep, we can always try again, the next time you feel ready.”
    â€œI can stop taking the pills for a few days and–”
    â€œRoger, don’t you even think of it! I’m going to watch you swallow every pill now, like you’re a fucken baby, d’you hear me? Just go to sleep!”
    A slight whimpering then, like she was trying to hold it in, but couldn’t.
    It was the first time Owen had heard his mother yell at his father and it might have been the first time he’d heard her swear. So who was she now? She’d stopped folding towels and putting them in the hall closet; he was fishing his pajamas and tomorrow’s outfit out of the dryer.
    As he snuck out of the laundry room that night, he thought of the time his father was committed. Alex, who had taken to spying on his father, caught him outside and looking in a neighbour’s window one night at 2 a.m., and ran to get his mother out of bed. Alex woke Owen and they watched the scene from their bedroom window like a movie. Their mother ran outside in her blue-and-white nightgown, looking frantic and disheveled, and for the first time: old. She wept madly, wiping tears away with the flattened palms of her hands as she raced towards him. Owen read it as a mix of fear and sadness. Like she knew in that moment what she had been ignoring about her husband those last few weeks. They watched her run up behind their father, who was going through the neighbour’s garbage cans, and haul him back into the house. She dragged him inside; she managed to overpower him as he fought back, livid that she was sabotaging his secret lead. He claimed the neighbour was the kingpin of a nationwide sex slave trade. That he’d