“Nooo!” I wailed too.
I was not scared, or nervous, or thinking. They were saying things but the words were just sounds, like when you rewind a video with the volume up and everyone talks in reverse. I don’t remember. It’s not uncommon for me to black out while drinking. There’s a theory that alcoholics are suspended in amber, forever twelve, or twenty-one, or fifteen, whatever age they were at the time of their first drink, consumed by the same old fears and desires. Their development hijacked and replaced with a row of bottles, stretching on and on and on. Those hours in St. Patrick’s would be the start, then. The stop.
The last vivid memory I can retrieve from that afternoon is of Marlena. She’s leaning into my face, her cheeks iridescent as if recently wiped clean of tears, her mouth against my chin, finding my lips, and then her tongue, something uncooked and too-wet about it, something silly, and just as I begin to formulate a word for what is happening, kissing, she disintegrates into laughter, breathing it into me until it bubbles from my throat and overflows, like her laugh is my creation. And a smell, like scratching a branch with your nail until its green flesh shows, the residue left behind on your fingers. My first kiss, the one against which I’d measure all others, at least for the next few years. My first drink.
After that, there’s nothing.
Have you ever tried to demarcate the hours between the moment you thought you’d never fall asleep and the instant after opening your eyes, your bedroom flooded with the befuddling, sugary pink of dawn? Between point A and point B you exist, you are alive, your breath slowing, your body temperature dropping, the shadows cast by your furniture elongating and shrinking as the moon revolves through the sky above your flimsy house, if that’s even where you really are. Every night, anything could happen, and you would never be the wiser. What I’m trying to say is that day, I learned that time doesn’t belong to you. All you have is what you remember. A fraction; less.
*
I woke up in darkness. A desk, a lamp shape against a wall, a rocking chair, and soon I began to piece things together. Later in my life, I’d wake up not knowing where I was and it would be other lost mornings that came back to me first, so that I’d have to fight my way through those jumbled memories too. That morning at Marlena’s often surfaced. I was in a bed. A blanket covered my legs up to my knees, and someone slept just a few inches away. Their breath seesawed through the room. I wore only my bra, and, I realized after investigating with a hand (which moved less like a part of me than a creature, scuttling), a pair of shorts, open at the fly like men’s boxers. My (?) underwear still on. A soreness along my right leg, particularly noticeable when I shifted onto my side. I pressed the skin just below my hip, experimentally, until a bolt of pain made me flinch. I wasn’t tired, but my thirst was hysterical. Something horrible had happened in my mouth; it seemed possible that I had died and somehow woken up.
In the darkness, Marlena’s hair shone silver, as if strung with tinsel. The blanket, a diamond-patterned motel quilt, was shrugged all the way over her shoulders, so that she was just hair and those tendony arms slung around her pillow. She always slept on her stomach. On later nights, this was the pose she’d assume when our talk trickled out, when we were too drunk or tired to say anything more. It was how I knew she was done with me. She’d go from sprawled on her back staring straight at the ceiling, or curled on one side so we were face to face, to what I came to think of as her goodnight-for-serious position. After flopping onto her stomach, she’d snug the arch of her left foot over the outside of her right knee and raise her arms over her head. A ballerina fallen over mid-plié. Her breath was always bad. Those nights it was often a relief when she turned away.
I sat up, tugging the blanket away from her body.
“Mmmm,” she mumbled into her pillow, drawing her arms to her sides and tugging the blanket back. “You’re alive.”
“What happened,” I whispered.
“You got shitfaced. You were basically drooling. Greg had to carry you.”
“My leg hurts?”
“Yeah, you fell climbing up the ladder.” A swirl of shadows, a searing square of light above me, a rope tearing through my hands so fast and hot I couldn’t hold on to it no matter how hard I tried.
“Where are we?”
“My house, where do you think?”
“I have to go home.”
“Shh. I took care of everything. I texted your mom from your phone and was like, Staying next door, and she texted back, Have fun, with an actual literal winky face, so you can go back to sleep. I even set your damn alarm because you have to be home by eight in the morning. Please do not let that shit ring also, because it’s a Saturday and that is not how I roll.”
“How did you know which number was my mom’s?”
She rolled over. “She’s in your phone as Mom, peaches, really? Can we sleep now, please? I feel like death.”
“I’m so thirsty.” I was feeling almost giddy, a Christmas-morning excitement. I’d never been inside her house. And yet, behind that lurked a sick, cold horror. How many hours had I lived that I could not remember? What had I done?
“Water’s downstairs. Just be quiet. Sal is a light sleeper, and if he gets up I have to get up.” She settled back onto her stomach, lifting her arms.
I slid out of bed and poked around in her purse until I found my cell. The hall was no wider than a children’s slide and appeared to exist only to separate Marlena’s room from another bedroom. The door was cracked, and I could just make out what I thought was Sal, asleep in a fully extended recliner. I climbed a ladder down into a room wreathed with couches. Most of the ceiling soared to the barn’s beams; where it didn’t, the place from which I’d descended, a kind of makeshift loft held the two bedrooms. Another room was partitioned off below this lower ceiling—in the corner opposite, a cluttered kitchen counter ran the length of the wall, lit up by a bug light shining through a window in the back door. I picked my way to the kitchen, lifting my feet extra high out of fear of what I’d step in. A body on the nearest couch rustled and I froze, counting to one hundred before moving again, which is how long Dad said it took people to fall asleep.