by Nicole Trope
She had dragged herself upstairs, thrown up again, and then managed to get herself into the shower and into bed. She thought briefly about taking herself downstairs again to get a drink—a sweet, relieving drink—but she couldn’t face Geoff and Lex again, and so, had turned on her side and closed her eyes.
At some point, hours later or minutes later, she had heard Geoff open the bedroom door, knowing that he wanted to speak to her about the interview, but she had made herself lie absolutely still so that he would not bother her. She had dropped gratefully into the black hole of sleep, but it hadn’t lasted long.
Now she is awake. and desperate, desperate, desperate for a drink. She looks over at her bedside clock and calculates it’s been fourteen hours since her last drink. Too many hours.
She hasn’t gone fourteen hours without a drink for the last two weeks, and before that, she hadn’t gone twenty-four hours without a drink for at least two years.
‘Alcoholic,’ she thinks but the word sounds stupid. She is not an alcoholic. Alcoholics live on park benches. They don’t have houses and children. They don’t do the grocery shopping and the washing, and clean the house. Do they? Could she be an alcoholic, and if she wasn’t an alcoholic, then what was her body doing if it wasn’t withdrawing from alcohol?
‘It’s just because I’ve had so much to drink in the last two weeks; that’s all,’ she comforts herself.
‘Liar,’ she hears someone say, and she takes her hands away from her face and switches on the bedside lamp, looking around wildly for the person who has spoken. No one is there.
She switches off the lamp and lies down again.
It had happened so gradually that she cannot pinpoint when it went from a glass of wine every night to a bottle of wine every night, to more than that. It had been a slow creep, one mouthful at a time.
She is fascinated by American television shows about grossly overweight people, watching them obsessively, wondering how on earth a person allows themselves to get to a size so large they cannot even walk or get out of bed. She has made the connection between her drinking and those killing themselves with food but only briefly before she denies it. ‘I am in control,’ she has always told herself. ‘I don’t drink until after five,’ and then, ‘until lunchtime,’ and then, ‘until Lex is at school.’
And now she has to admit that she doesn’t drink until her body cries out for it, which it does earlier and earlier each day. ‘How did that happen?’ she thinks now. She had never been much of a drinker when she was younger, preferring to remain in control of herself. No one in her household drank much at all. There were always bottles of alcohol left over from Christmas and New Year, and other family occasions, filling up cupboards and getting in the way.
‘No one likes to see a drunk woman,’ she remembers her father saying at a family barbecue where a cousin’s girlfriend had overdone things and ended up falling asleep on the couch.
Even at university, Caro hadn’t indulged much. She had only ever walked past the university bar to get to the vegetarian restaurant, and she can remember wondering what all the students sitting there were doing drinking in the middle of the day. She was judgemental towards girls who got drunk at parties and allowed themselves to be taken advantage of. ‘A lady is always in control of herself,’ her mother told her and her sister over and over again. Caro and Melissa heard constantly about all the things a lady was and was not, but mostly what Caro heard was that a lady never opened herself up to shame and scandal and judgement.
‘Keep yourself above reproach,’ was how her mother put it. It had only taken a few moments one afternoon for Caro to reveal herself to the world as guilty of all of what her mother considered the greatest sins. In the dark, she covers her face again, imagining reporting her behaviour to her mother. She can see how her thin lips will purse and her nose twitch as she considers what an embarrassment her daughter is.
Melissa wouldn’t understand it either or, rather, she would understand it but Caro knew that her sister would almost have to cover her mouth with her hand to prevent the words, ‘I told you so,’ coming out. Mentally, Caro lines up all the people who have commented on her drinking, made allusions to the amount of alcohol she gets through on a Friday or Saturday night, or judged her for her lack of dignity. Geoff is there, and her mother is there, and her sister, and even Lex, who is too young to know anything. Only Anna has never said anything, even when Caro could see that she wanted to. Anna has been a safe and accepting haven for Caro, and in the dark, she touches her mobile phone on the bedside table, wondering if Anna would pick up this time. ‘You won’t believe the day I’ve had,’ Caro hears herself saying. But Anna has probably also had a bad day, the worst day. ‘Oh God, Maya,’ whispers Caro.
‘I don’t understand,’ her mother had said when Caro explained about the accident.
‘There’s no way to explain it, Mum.’
‘No way to explain it? Caro, it’s been on the news. I’ve had friends call me about it. You should have called me when it happened. It wasn’t fair of you to let me hear it on the news. That’s not the kind of family we are. You should have called me or, at least, Geoff should have called me. How on earth could you keep something like this from your family?’
‘It only happened two days ago, Mum. I was going to call but I just . . . I was just trying to think about it by myself for a day or two. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s been so hideous and Lex is so upset. I can’t even explain how I feel. I can’t even think about it.’
‘Caroline, I’m going to ask you a question now and I would like an honest answer. I read on the internet that you were taken in for drug and alcohol testing. Were you drunk, Caroline?’
‘It’s standard practice, Mum. They do that with every car accident.’
As Caro had spoken, she had heard the squeal of her brakes again, felt the jolt of her car as it hit Maya, seen Anna launch herself into the road and the look of horror on her friend’s face.
The images and the sounds had returned hour after hour in those first days. They were there when she woke up and went to sleep, and when she stood in the shower. Squeal, jolt, Anna, horror. Squeal, jolt, Anna, horror.
It was a song she could not get out of her head, a thirty-second loop that played over and over.
‘What’s going to happen? Are they going to arrest you?’ asked her mother as the loop started again.
Caro had taken a sip of her vodka. One sip slowed down the loop, two made it slower still. Half a bottle of vodka made the loop fuzzy, and a full bottle made it disappear altogether. But it came back. It kept coming back, and only a drink, or two, or ten, could stop it.
‘Help me!’ Caro wanted to scream at her mother. Help me. Help me. I killed someone. I killed a child.
‘I don’t know what’s going to happen,’ she said, instead tipping the glass and feeling the ice on her teeth. ‘I just don’t know.’
‘Should I go to the funeral? I didn’t know her well but I think I should go, don’t you?’
‘No, Mum. Anna doesn’t want me there. She doesn’t want anyone from my family there.’
‘That poor woman. How could this have happened, Caro?’
Caro had stood up unsteadily and made her way to the kitchen. Geoff was at work and Lex was at school. Someone . . . someone . . . was bringing Lex home. She had poured a full glass of vodka, sweetened it with juice and lifted the glass to her lips again and again, and her mother’s questions had blurred and disappeared.
She had not yelled or cried. She had remained calm and answered. She had restrained herself, just like her mother told her a lady always did. She didn’t need to know that by the time the conversation was over, her daughter couldn’t walk straight. Caro was a master at concentrating just enough so the person she was talking to thought she was paying attention.
Over the years, the comments about her drinking have gone from mild, ‘You had a bit much at that party last night. Maybe you’d better take a week off from the booze, just to give yo
ur liver a break’; to the more pointed, ‘You’re drinking too much. It’s not good for you’; to ultimatums, ‘Give up the booze or lose Lex and me.’
Her mother had begun with, ‘I think you may be overdoing it with the alcohol, Caroline. You’re not setting the best example for Alexa. This is really not how a lady should behave,’ and moved on to, ‘I don’t know who you are anymore, Caroline. We do not drink, our family does not drink like this’; and only weeks before the accident, she had said, ‘You need to check yourself into rehab, Caroline. Your drinking is out of control. I’m sorry to tell you this, I really am, but Melissa and I have agreed that someone needs to say something.’
But every time anyone has said something, Caro has thought two things. The first was, ‘They have no idea what they’re talking about—a few drinks never hurt anyone.’ The second thing was, ‘What’s the point in giving up?’ Because there was no reason for her not to drink anymore, and it made her feel better, made her feel grateful for what she had, and able to view the third, empty bedroom in her house as just a room, instead of as the profoundly sad evidence of her failure to produce a second child.
She was never going to carry a child or nurse a child again, so if the alcohol helped her get through her sister telling everyone she was pregnant for the third time, or when some actress had twins at forty-six, or when Lex asked her why she couldn’t have a brother, then why give it up? She still functioned, albeit sometimes a little less than completely effectively. ‘They’re all neurotic,’ she’s told herself. ‘It’s not really a problem.’
Lying in bed, Caro takes a deep breath and admits to herself for the first time that it is a problem. Her drinking is a problem. It. Is. A. Problem.
She lets the words settle. She breathes them in and out again.
The thirty-second loop of the accident assaults her senses. It has been playing all day long and there is no way to stop it now. Caro moans again. She has a problem with drinking, and realises that perhaps everyone knew—has always known—how much of a problem it is. Everyone except her.
It is only eleven but she’s been asleep since eight. Now she’s awake. She knows that Lex is asleep and Geoff is probably also asleep, in the guest room, where he has been living for the last couple of years. It is actually his study but they have managed to squeeze a single bed into it as well. ‘Daddy snores, Lex, and Mummy needs to sleep.’
‘Why can’t I have the blue room?’ Geoff asked when they made the decision to sleep apart.
‘I don’t know,’ Caro had said, ‘Why do you think you can’t have it!’ And then she had needed to make it better, less painful, easier to bear.
‘I could go downstairs now,’ she thinks. Squeal, jolt, Anna, horror. Squeal, jolt, Anna, horror.
There would be no one around to witness her nocturnal failings if she did get up and make for the freezer and the relief it holds. She pictures the bottle of vodka, lying next to the carton of chocolate ice-cream. She knows that the minute she has her hands on it, the nausea will disappear and the shakes will stop. Her heart will slow, and she’ll be able to breathe properly for the first time in fourteen hours, because it’s been fourteen hours since her last drink.
The loop will slow down and stop, and then it will disappear.
‘Don’t do it,’ she whispers to the ceiling. ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it.’
‘I can give it up whenever I want to,’ she has always told Geoff.
‘Then give it up.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘You should want to, Caro; for Lex, for me, for yourself.’
‘Leave me alone, Geoff, I’m not your child.’
In bed, she turns the pillow over and has a frightening thought: ‘What if I can’t give it up?’
She thinks about getting up and going to see if Geoff is awake. She would like to tell him what happened today. She would like to tell anyone what happened today. She would like to describe the torturous loop. She would like to tell him that she literally feels like she is dying for a drink. She pushes the covers off her body. She is sweating profusely but is almost instantly freezing again and pulls them back on. She is itchy, but when she scratches at her arms, they burn. She would like to crawl out of her own skin.
‘Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it,’ she says again.
She wasn’t going to say that Anna pushed Maya—at least, she doesn’t think she was going to say it. She was going to say that Maya jumped out in front of the car and that it was Anna’s fault for allowing the child to be outside. That was the plan. She is sure that was what she was going to say, but then she was so sick, so badly in need of a drink and so tired, that somehow the truth had come out. But now she is not sure what the truth was. She can’t remember exactly what she’d had to drink, or how much she’d had to drink, so how can she be sure that she saw Anna push Maya?
Maybe Maya did leap from her front garden into the road?
How much had she had to drink? She has gone over it in her head again and again. She knows she had some shots of vodka, knows she had some wine, but she doesn’t know how much. It’s fairly likely that she shouldn’t have been driving but she hadn’t felt drunk. She’d felt sober, she’d felt fine.
Geoff and Lex had gone to see a movie that afternoon. ‘Come with us,’ said Geoff.
‘No,’ she had said. ‘I don’t feel like it. I’ll just chill here. You guys go and have a good time.’
‘Please, Caro, please come,’ Geoff had said and then had put his hands on her shoulders. He wanted her out of the house, away from booze, safely inside the cinema, where the only thing she could overindulge in was popcorn. He knew that she liked to go hard with drinking on a Saturday afternoon. ‘It’s the weekend,’ she always said. ‘I don’t have to drive in the morning.’
‘But why do you need to have so much?’ he asked. ‘Why not just have one glass, so we can go out to dinner or out with friends?’
‘Oh, give me a fucking break,’ was her usual reply.
Going out with friends was easier if she’d had half a bottle of wine and a couple of shots. Then she could smile while Heather talked about her three boys and the chaos they caused, or she could nod in sympathy at Emma, who was juggling part-time work with twins. She could act like being the stay-at-home mother of one child was exactly the plan she’d had for herself.
She knew that she could have gone back to work, that she should have gone back to work. She had been good at her job as a preschool teacher. She’d loved the kids she worked with and only given it up to have her own family. But each time she thought about being surrounded by preschoolers all day she found the concept untenable. Babies were everywhere at the preschool. They came along in the bellies of pregnant mothers, and in strollers to fetch older siblings, and sat on hips at school concerts.
‘I don’t think I can love other people’s children anymore,’ she told Geoff.
‘Do something else,’ said Geoff.
‘That’s like asking me to be someone else.’
‘Get a hobby. Paint, draw, write; anything, for fuck’s sake.’
‘You can’t solve me like I’m a work problem, Geoff.’
Caro pushes the blankets off and then pulls them up again. Her whole body is shaking. Her thoughts return to that Saturday two weeks ago, and she remembers the look on Lex’s face when she said she didn’t want to go to the movie with them. It hadn’t been disappointment. It had been relief.
‘Just leave it, Geoff,’ she had said when he asked one more time.
‘Yeah, Dad, let’s just go,’ said Lex, and Caro can remember thinking, ‘She sounds so old. When did she start to sound like that?’
She had tried to stay away from alcohol after they left. She had really tried. She had cleaned the kitchen and then, because she knew that she needed to keep herself busy, she even cleaned the pantry, but eventually she couldn’t think about anything else. The first shot of vodka was always the best. It went down quickly and burned all the way to her stomach.
She felt like she could breathe again, felt her lungs fill with air.
‘Right,’ she had said out loud. ‘No more for me.’ And she had meant it, had really meant it, but Caro knows by now that she means it every day. Every day she starts again, and really, really means it when she promises herself she will not drink. She looks over at her bedside clock. She hasn’t had a drink for fourteen hours and thirty minutes. She pictures the bottle of vodka in the freezer again. It would be beautifully ice cold to the touch.
There was a stage, maybe four years ago, when Geoff would buy all the alcohol in the house. Every few months, he would buy a selection of wine and spirits, and that would last them until the next time they had guests over or saw they were running low, but Caro buys her vodka and wine herself now. She uses cash, and picks the cheapest brands available because some weeks she can get through two bottles of vodka and four bottles of wine. And that doesn’t include the gin, and the cooking sherry she found at the back of the pantry last month.
She sits up and swings her feet to the floor. ‘Just one, so I can get back to sleep,’ she thinks.
The red numbers on the bedside clock change again. She hasn’t had a drink for fourteen hours and forty-five minutes. She stays sitting on the bed. It is a king-size sleigh bed and Caro had loved it the minute she saw it. At the time, she and Geoff had been sleeping in the bed she had inherited from her grandmother. It was mahogany, and heavy and dark, with carvings of cherubs in the headboard. Both she and Geoff hated the bed but Caro didn’t want just any replacement. She wanted something special, and special meant expensive, and so she had waited. Once she had seen the sleigh bed, she had visited it every month, waiting for it to be sold or go on sale. It finally went on sale, and Caro admired the curves and the light-coloured wood every time she got into it. She wasn’t supposed to be in it alone, though. That had not been part of the plan.
Fourteen hours and fifty minutes.
She is stuck. She cannot lie down because her hands are shaking and her heart is racing and she’s hot, so hot, but she cannot get up because she knows where she will go if she gets off the bed. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees movement, turns her head quickly and sees Maya in the room. She is standing in the corner and staring at Caro. Her long blond hair is loose, not tightly plaited, like Anna keeps it. Kept it. ‘Oh,’ says Caro but barely any sound comes out of her dry throat. Maya turns towards the wall and disappears. Caro touches her chest and her rapid heartbeat reassures her. The nausea is getting worse, though. ‘Hallucinations,’ she thinks. ‘It’s part of detoxing.’ She has read about this, deleting her searches, as though she were looking at porn or talking to men on the internet.