After Before and After

Conclusion: Chapter 17

It wasn't the end of the world, as it turned out. The world continued to spin even as the Langley and Merridew families worked out the messiest parts of their post-trial lives. There wasn't an easy day after the night Ralph went missing, but there were still more days. After everything that happened, more days was enough. More days was all they needed.

Of course, Ralph was grounded for a month. Home and school, that was it. Jeffery and Laurie refused to give him another opportunity to lie about his whereabouts. It was new to them, keeping Ralph on a short leash. He was such an easy kid until now. Perhaps, it was bound to catch up with them. Every teenager went through an awful phase, one way or another. Ralph's drinking problem was his awful phase. Except, alcoholism was never just a phase. It was a disease, one Jeffery and Laurie realized their son might have to battle for the rest of his life.

But if there was any kid strong enough and intrinsically good enough to beat it, it was Ralph. With the support of the people who love him more than life itself, he could beat it. And because Ralph was an optimist, he believed he could beat it. He'd have to wake up and choose to beat it every single day, but he would. He promised he would.

A change in Ralph's therapy plan was a non-negotiable of Jeffery and Laurie's. In place of his once a week meeting with a therapist, Ralph was registered into an outpatient treatment program through the local clinic specifically catered to teenagers dealing with alcohol abuse. It was an intense program with a high time commitment that drained Ralph of a lot of his energy, but it was proving to be helpful. The doctors overseeing Ralph's treatment focused not just on keeping his hands off the bottle, but on getting to the root of what it was that compelled him to keep drinking.

Emotional regulation ranked high at the top of the list Ralph's doctor helped him compile. He knew that he'd always been an overly emotional kid, and that he had trouble managing those emotions. Since he was very young, Ralph found himself overreacting and feeling his emotions more deeply than the situation often called for. Getting excluded from a group project in elementary school made him run out of the room crying. Being picked last for the kickball game in gym made him skip gym class for a week in middle school. Jack refusing to follow his rules on the island made him scream at the other and cry under fallen tree trunks. He and Jack living in different cities at the start of their relationship gave him severe separation anxiety that he dealt with through self-harm.

Identifying his struggle with emotional regulation was a first step towards making positive and maintainable change in his behavoir, including his decision to pick up a bottle at the first sign of stress. The rest of the first semester of junior year was draining and sometimes even painful for Ralph. But he woke up each day, always more days. He got through the good days and the bad. There would always be more days. More days after the bad ones, better ones too. More days was all Ralph needed.

The Merridew siblings struggled through the last few months of 1994 too. Jack was forced to come clean about his secret trips to Vine City, Georgia, the city Rebecka moved to the same year she first showed up at the Merridew mansion. The revelation answered a lot of questions Paige had about her brother's recent behavior, but it wound up creating more tension and controversy between the Merridew siblings.

Paige's feelings about her mother were complicated in a way that Jack couldn't understand. She was old enough to understand what was going on at the time that Rebecka left, and therefore she was old enough to feel abandoned and betrayed by her. Ten years wasn't enough to make her mother love her enough to stay. After raising Paige for most of ten years, she still wasn't important enough to turn down a pay raise on another continent. And for twelve years after that, she never called, she never visited, and she never regretted her decision. Jack never knew her before she left, but Paige did. Paige had a mother she loved one day, a mother who chose to leave the next. She had memories of being held by her mother, of lighting up at the sight of her after a bad day at school, of feeling comforted in her arms after cutting her ankle on the ledge of the pool in the backyard. She had a mother to remember well enough to miss.