I fished my cigarettes from my back pocket and sat on my front steps, hands liquid. I lit each new cigarette off the butt end of the one in my mouth, until the pack was gone. Inside the barn, they were yelling at each other, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
With my bare hand, I dug a little grave in the snow piled against the stairs and buried the seven cigarette butts. The front door of the house was unlocked; it usually was, and I felt a retroactive fear about the hundreds of nights I’d gone to sleep in a place that could be accessed by anyone, anytime. Inside, all the lights were off. The stove clock blinked 10:42 p.m.—earlier than I’d thought. Mom probably wasn’t back yet from her night out with Bolt. I wanted her. A primal, cellular desire. I wanted to call her and for her to come home and sit with me on the couch, my head on a pillow in her lap while we watched The Godfather, something long enough to erase every horrible step I’d ever taken away from home. I took out my phone and dialed. To this day the memory of her number from when I was a teenager still lives in my fingertips. A few seconds after I pushed Call, I heard her phone ringing nearby, inside. I followed the sound through the kitchen and into the hall that led to the bedrooms. The house felt profoundly empty except for that preset bring, bring; she’d never bothered to change her ringtone. Her bedroom door hung open and I was sure, at first, that no one was there. Object by object—dresser, half-parted curtain, watercolor on the wall—my eyes adjusted to the dark. She was facedown on the bed, on top of her covers, wearing the Eagles T-shirt, her legs bare.
“Mom,” I said. “Mommy?”
I tripped over her boots as I approached, sure, sure—sure of what? I was overtaken by dread, out of my mind with it. I bent over her and pulled one of her shoulders until she rolled, awkwardly, onto her back. Her arms flopped. She was asleep, her exhales full of wine.
New York
I woke up at some sickly, colorless hour, the cat watching me from the floor. In the bathroom, I chased two Advils with two large glasses of water, and then sank back into a twitchy approximation of sleep, just alert enough to monitor the apartment’s horrible brightening. When Liam’s alarm went off, our room full of sun, I stayed in bed. I did not want to take the subway with him. I was hungover again. It was a bad one.
In our home office, the contents of the box were scattered across the desk—the trash can had three empty beers in it. A fourth, gone except for a single swig, stood near my open laptop. When I touched the trackpad, the screen revealed a Word document, covered in text. I closed the computer and grabbed the pin out of the box, for Sal. I put on more makeup than normal, to hide the ill tint to my face. I’d left the lids off my contact case; my toothbrush was in the bathtub, bristles against the drain. When I left the apartment, I took the bottles and the empty six-pack sleeve from the fridge to the recycling bin at the end of our hall, praying I wouldn’t bump into a neighbor.
Standing on the subway, crammed in between two men in business suits, my stomach heaved and settled, heaved and settled, lifting toward my throat and then sinking to my feet. No matter how sick I felt, I never threw up—not the night of, not the day after, not unless I made myself. I had no Off button. Nothing to stop me, no internal mechanism that said enough, please, what you’re doing hurts. I was so tired. The shame came then, that old familiar, and I watched my reflection in the subway glass cringe, thinking about the beer and the martinis mixing together, curdling my blood. In the morning, it was always possible that I might never drink again. But then I thought of stumbling into the kitchen while Liam slept, opening one more, powerless. I couldn’t go on like this. And yet, with a tiresome mixture of longing and dread, I was already imagining the moment, that late afternoon turn, when it would again be appropriate to drink.
She wasn’t there when I arrived, but a few hours into the day, when I came downstairs to ask Alice a question, the girl was in her usual spot. She was alert-seeming, staring into a heavy pictorial dictionary of dog breeds. Her face was clean and very pale, and when I approached, she was tracing the outline of the dogs on the page the way a child would, with her first finger. She wore dirt-caked jeans and a long brown jacket, her backpack overstuffed and covered in marker and patches and scuffs of mud. Nineteen, I guessed, though Alice thought older, closer to twenty-five. But I knew drugs bumped you up in your own timeline, leaving you, even if you sobered up, a little closer to death. What else is age but an awareness, in expression and gesture, in bone and skin, of your own ticking clock?
I had a box of expensive granola bars in my work desk drawer, the kind with whole almonds and chunks of dark chocolate. Liam bought them in bulk; he worried about my blood sugar. He would leave me if I didn’t stop drinking, I knew, and I also knew that I loved him, the sweet comfortable safety of our life, the paychecks and the coming home and knowing, always, that he’d be there. The way he folded the washcloths under the sink. How he called the cat Little Baby, Little Baby, and me, too. When Mom met Liam, the second he got up to go to the bathroom, she told me he was a snooze. She was a little drunk, it’s worth saying, and Liam hardly drinks at all. It took her years to come around, to see what I saw—that Liam was a man who would only leave if you forced his hand. Marlena would have understood that, I think. We wanted to be the leavers, instead of always being left.
I took two granola bars downstairs and into the reading room. The girl was focused on the last page, where there were no images of dogs, just a list of sources and photo credits in minuscule type. I came up behind her and touched her shoulder, which was probably a mistake, but I wasn’t thinking right, my head was thick and slow and my heartbeat was off. I was having problems with perspective. She turned with a snap, and when I saw her face up close I knew it wasn’t heroin that she was on.