“Saving me,” Martha tells her mother. “He’s saving my life.”
BACK IN MARCH, when Martha’s drinking lost her everything—the condo in Marblehead that looked out over the harbor, her job as the restaurant/movie/theater critic for The North Shore Press, her husband—she moved in with her mother so she could drink in peace. “I’ve come to straighten out,” Martha lied the day they dragged her boxes across her mother’s powder blue wall-to-wall carpeting and into the guest room. Her mother had a condo too, in Swampscott. And a job. And a boyfriend. She wasn’t happy to have Martha back. “I’m not the Betty Ford Clinic here,” she grumbled. “You come back, you’re on your own.”
At first, Martha made a show of getting up with her mother every morning and having dry toast and lots of coffee. She circled ads for jobs in the classifieds in red marker and discussed the pros and cons of each one. Her mother frowned at her and shook her head, not disgusted as much as baffled. “Why don’t you just take yourself to AA?” her mother said one morning before she left for her job in the Better Dresses department at Filene’s. She wore a Donna Karan outfit that, with markdowns and her discount, she got for eighty-eight dollars. “AA?” Martha laughed. “I’m not that far gone. I just need to get my head on straight.” After her mother left, Martha paced while first the talk shows and then the soap operas droned on behind her. Her mind skipped and flitted from one thing to the next, leaving her unable to complete anything or to concentrate on something as easy as the Reader’s Digests her mother kept in the bathroom.
But at five o’clock she was always able to focus. She turned off the television and went to the kitchen to fix a vodka and tonic in her mother’s jumbo insulated to-go cup. She could nurse one of these until her mother came home and the two of them ate dinner together, sometimes joined by her mother’s boyfriend Frankie. Martha always cleaned up afterward, then slipped out between Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. By eight o’clock she was settled on a stool at Matty’s or the Landing, drinking until closing.
The truth was, Martha loved these nights. She loved the sound of ice cubes and laughter and jukebox music mingling together. She loved how her tongue felt thick in her mouth, how when she shifted her head too quickly the world around her spun. She loved the easy way a man might throw his arm around her shoulder, the first touch of a stranger’s cold beery tongue on her body. She loved everything about drinking. All of it. For Martha, her favorite part of the day was quarter of five, watching the clock make its slow movement toward her first vodka, filling the glass with ice, then tonic, holding the bottle of vodka in her arms like a baby.
HER OLD FRIEND Patty, newly relocated to Chicago, her voice filled with so much happiness that Martha wished she would stop calling, ended each conversation by reminding Martha that help was out there, “when you’re ready.” Patty had been to AA, NA, OA, and every other A imaginable. “I like drinking,” Martha told Patty. “So do I,” Patty said, her voice righteous, smug. It was Patty who gave Martha the Reverend’s number. She had described him as kind and helpful. “Also, very cute in a koala way,” she said. Who would have imagined that Martha and the Reverend would run off together? That they would end up here in this parking lot in Virginia, about to go into the Endless Caverns? Certainly not Martha.
She reads to the Reverend about all the other caverns they drove past. “The Luray Caverns have an organ made out of stalagmites. The Skyline Caverns have cave flowers not found in any other caves in the U.S.”
“Sweetheart,” he says, grinning at her, “we missed all of those. We weren’t thinking about caverns. Now we’re thinking about them and we’re here. That’s how lucky we are. As soon as we imagine something that we want, we get it.”
“Mel Gibson,” Martha says, closing her eyes. But really she is imagining a bottle of vodka.
“Now don’t go breaking my heart, darling,” the Reverend whispers, holding her close.
He is a solid man, like a rock or a mountain in her arms. Martha keeps her eyes closed and tries to think of something other than the way the first swallow of alcohol tastes, how it burns a little, punches your gut, makes you swoon.
“There’s no fairyland in there,” Martha says. She is whispering too. “The Luray Caverns have Fairy Land. Reflecting pools that make the stalactites look like sand castles.”
Reverend Dave steps away from her and laughs. “We already know it’s an illusion,” he says. “Saved ourselves the trip! We’ve got the Endless Caverns. Miles and miles explored,” he says, tapping the guidebook in her hand, “but no end ever found.”