“Baxter, no. Be quiet.”
But Baxter didn’t stop.
Alice sighed, trying to imagine what Jason might have jammed into the dryer. Stuffing things into toilets, sinks, any place that was off-limits happened to be another one of his favorite games. Then she saw the piece of red fabric sticking out from under the door of the dryer. It could have been anything—a red pillowcase or the tail of a shirt—but Alice knew exactly what it was. She’d seen Jason wear the red Superman cape a thousand times.
Her heart leapt, clogging in her throat as she reached for the handle of the dryer door. It wouldn’t open. She yanked harder, but the door remained locked. She fumbled for the power button and shut the dryer down. The metal drum eased to a stop, and the thumping inside slowed like a dying heartbeat. She opened the door, lifted the red cape, and her hands slapped to her face. Her fingers still smelled of rubbing alcohol, but she didn’t seem to notice.
Then Alice began to scream.
CHAPTER THREE
FEBRUARY 2011
HOW BAD’S THE hangover?
Alice’s eyes flickered and cracked open for a moment before fluttering back shut, and she waited. Waited to determine the degree of her hangover. That’s how mornings rolled now, waking to the same question every single day—how bad were the aftereffects of another night of drinking going to be? Not what she had to do that day, or what to have for breakfast, or what errands to run. No, none of that. It was always the same.
Memories from the previous night swirled in a dull haze, smeared like a greasy countertop wiped down with a piece of wax paper, and Alice left the muddled remnants right where they were. She wasn’t in a hurry to remember everything. Not yet. The memories would come bubbling back to the surface eventually, there to be pieced together, then regretted. Same kinds of mistakes, different sorts of circumstances. Rinse and repeat. Seemed like she usually ended up using remarkably poor judgment every time she got drunk, which was often. Every day often. In fact, she couldn’t remember a sober day in years. Part of who she had become. Not so much embraced, but accepted. A tiger’s stripes and all that.
She tried to cling to sleep a little longer, even for just a few more moments. Dreams were usually a better place to be—most of them, anyway. Reality would present itself eventually, and with that, the self-loathing would soon follow. It always did.
Alice had developed a rating system to determine what kind of toll the previous night of drinking would wreak upon her body and mind; a rating system that was hers and hers alone. Nothing to be particularly proud of, but when you put your body through a daily wringer as much as she did, the least one could do was devise a measuring stick to determine the effects.
She imagined other people awoke thinking about their upcoming day, facing tedious life decisions—what to wear to work, bills that had to be paid, whether to organize the garage, whatever. Others probably woke with visions and plans of how to accomplish their long-term goals and dreams—how to climb the ladder faster, toying with the urge to quit their jobs, to settle down and get married. And some people worried about their kids. Were they raising them right? Would they amount to something more than the parents who were rearing them?
But not Alice. She thought of none of those things. If she were able, she would probably embrace waking to mediocrity, whether it be copying and collating at Kinko’s, or changing diapers and wiping noses all day. The thought of actually overachieving wasn’t even on her radar—like going to graduate school, or working at a job that didn’t entail either pouring some slob a cup of coffee or pouring some slob a shot of tequila.
No, Alice’s first thoughts of the day were solely focused on the degree of her hangover. That was her reality. That was her state of mind. And the way things were looking, it wasn’t about to change anytime soon.
The rating system was pretty simple. Five was the head-buster—a full-blown, temple-pounding headache. The kind where the dull pain started at the base of her neck, stabbing and probing and inching its way over the top of her head, eating up flesh and coursing through the veins in her temples. Any sudden movement or an attack of her smoker’s cough meant sheer agony. As soon as she could manage to swallow two or three Motrin and chase them with a few swallows of whatever liquor was left over from the night before, Alice would stretch out on the floor, waiting for the painkillers to take effect, and all she’d think was shit, shit, shit.
Four generally required crouching beside the toilet and bringing up sour bile. She didn’t eat much—not enough to puke anyway. Food happened to be an afterthought. Only when her body trembled, reminding her that she needed protein, something in her stomach other than vodka or whiskey or tequila. Sometimes four turned out to be just the dry heaves, but that was worse than vomiting, in her own expert opinion.
Three consisted of a class-A sour stomach that sat low and heavy in her belly like a loaf of bread, the stomach acid churning and bubbling, eager to absorb something other than high-grain alcohol. Milk helped a little, but she rarely had any around. Blame that on the absence of a refrigerator or the lack of foresight.
Two produced the fuzzies—her brain like a bag of wet cotton balls, leaving her unfocused and uncoordinated. The fuzzies were a half-dream state—a disembodied feeling that left her in neither the here nor now, like she temporarily hijacked some poor woman’s body and beat the shit out of it. Recalling the previous evening’s encounters took even longer to piece together. Trying to remember what she drank, where she drank, and with whom she drank. The latter didn’t usually matter because she typically drank alone, even preferred to drink alone.
One stood at the bottom, the low man on the totem pole physically, but in many ways, it proved twice as brutal than the other four combined. One was the guilt hangover and resulted from not drinking enough the night before. Alice loathed the guilt. No Motrin, or milk, or hair of the dog could remedy that one. Feeling like a total failure for letting her life get so out of control and for attempting to drink her worries away. Drinking to forget all the mistakes she made over the years, especially the Big One. The Big One was what started all this in the first place. The liquor did what it was supposed to do at the time—numb her—but in the morning, regret was back. Back in a big way. The accident replaying over and over again, clear as if it happened yesterday.
CHAPTER FOUR
ALICE FELT THE presence before actually seeing it. Beside her. Under blankets and sheets that smelled of sweat and something even worse. She glanced back over her shoulder, noticed the tangle of black hair spilling out from under the sheets.
Then, as she tried to recall what transpired the previous night, her eyes settled upon the ceiling. A powder-blue ceiling. A different ceiling.
A single light bulb suspended by wires hastily wrapped together with masking tape dangled from water-stained plaster. But it wasn’t the light fixture Alice was used to staring up at in the morning in the crappy motel she had been staying at for the last few months. This place smelled different, too. Instead of the moldy scent her heater kicked off, the air reeked of cheap cologne and fried eggs, and the thought of fried eggs made her stomach hitch and churn. Flopped hard enough to get her into the sitting position to search for something to vomit in.
The room spun around her for a moment. A tiny bedroom. About enough space for the waterbed she currently rolled on top of, and the rocking sensation made the spinning and nausea that much worse.
Shit.
She was going to throw up. No doubting that. At the foot of the waterbed, she found a half-eaten bowl of popcorn, mainly un-popped kernels, a few pieces brown with butter. There were a couple of cigarette butts at the bottom as well. The bowl would have to do. Alice dumped the popcorn and cigarette butts onto the floor and let loose.
Christ.
Now the place smelled like cheap cologne, fried eggs, and vomit.
She glanced around the room, grateful that there wasn’t a mirror to greet her. She avoided her reflection when she could. Hated the face staring back a
t her. Hated everything about it. Not that she was ugly. Far from it. Alice could be pretty if she wanted to be. If she actually gave a damn. A tomboy’s face with a few freckles left behind from her teenage years, and a petite nose over lips that looked as if she had them injected with collagen, even though she hadn’t. Her body lean and tight despite all the liquor she consumed. But it was her eyes that were the most striking and always a topic of interest to men—and a few women as well. Kelly green eyes that befit her Irish blood.
Beer bottles littered the floor—all of them American brands. Pabst Blue Ribbon, Miller High Life, Budweiser. Cigarette butts were stabbed onto small plates, dropped into coffee mugs, a few crushed into the carpet. A half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s perched on the edge of the small dresser near the front of the bed. All the drawers partially opened, overflowing with T-shirts and blue jeans. The waterbed continued to loll under her as she stared at the tangle of clothes. Black T-shirts and faded Levi’s. Men’s clothes.
She was not only in some stranger’s house; it was a man’s place.
It was then that Alice felt her own nakedness—not a stitch of clothing on. Not even a pair of socks, and she always wore socks to bed, even in the hottest of summer months. She didn’t mind sleeping in the nude, and often did, but felt vulnerable without something on her feet. She must have gotten good and hammered last night if she agreed to lose the socks.
The guy next to her didn’t budge an inch. Sleeping like a log.
Good.
She wanted to find her clothes and get dressed before solving the mystery of her bedmate. Her cheap thrift-store sweater, blue jeans, bra, and panties were all cast off in the corner of the room, lying in a hastily disregarded heap. Her jacket was missing, as well as the memory of shedding her clothes the previous night. The jacket must be somewhere. She wore it to work yesterday—that much she remembered. She stood too quickly, little stars flaring and zipping around the inside of her head, and she fumbled to put her clothes back on. The quick, abrupt movements launched a pulsating freight train inside her skull, roaring down the tracks.
Alice kept an eye on the sleeping stranger, searching through the muck clouding her brain, trying to figure out who the hell he might be. She tended bar last night at the Frisky Pony, a low-rent strip club in the industrial section of Harrisburg. An auto-body shop to its right, a scrap-metal yard to the left. An off-ramp of Interstate 81 dumped out right behind the Frisky Pony, causing the steady hum of tires to blend in with what passed for dance music. Alice would be lucky to pocket forty bucks on a good night, but the Frisky Pony was off the radar to cops, so it was the place to be for her. For the moment. She’d be moving on soon enough. Alice knew that. Could feel it in her gut, an internal clock that always served as her wake-up call for when it was time to move on. She’d been in Harrisburg for almost six months and that proved long enough. Things were becoming too familiar. Too personal. A few of the strippers at the Frisky Pony—Tia and Naomi especially—had been wanting to hang out with her, inviting her to parties, drinking with her after the club closed. That was always a sure sign to move on—when people wanted to get to know Alice better.
Tequila. Now she remembered. She got into the tequila last night. Sauza Hornitos. Never a good sign when she could recall the brand of tequila she drank, but not the name of the guy she slept with. Then, little by little, the alcoholic haze began to dissipate, and the memories started to unravel, revealing themselves in all their ugly glory. Tia and Naomi had been drinking with her, matching her shot for shot, then proceeded to kiss for a while and eventually invited Alice back to their apartment for a girls’ night. Thanks, but no thanks, Alice recalled telling them.
Alice remembered Tia and Naomi dancing on the top of the bar, music thumping, both of them peeling off each other’s clothing, trying their best to seduce her. She resisted. It wasn’t the first time she got a private dance from the two girls. They were both nice enough, but dumb as hell. Alice got the sense that the two girls had absolutely no ability to see down the road a little. After a few more years and a few more miles on their tight bodies, flashing their breasts wouldn’t earn them enough money to pay rent, buy food, and take care of themselves. They were blind to all that. Even though they were the same age, Alice had enough awareness that getting by with a firm ass would only last so long before reality hit. Not that Alice had everything figured out—far from it—but at least she wasn’t grinding on a pole.
Alice remembered everything up to the point when both strippers got down to their G-strings, and that was about it. She couldn’t remember leaving the Frisky Pony or how she got into the bed where she currently found herself.
A waterbed. God, she hated waterbeds.
She peered out the bedroom window. A trailer park. It was snowing a little. A fresh layer of white tumbled down on top of black slush left over from the last storm. A couple of kids were throwing stones at a cat. The cat shrieked as a rock connected with the side of its head and the group of snot-nosed boys let out a victory cry. Bullies. She hated bullies worse than she hated waterbeds.
Alice zipped up her jeans and searched the room again for her purse and jacket. Maybe she could get the hell out before her mystery man woke up. She’d be fine not knowing whom she slept with—some mysteries better left unsolved. No purse in the room. No condom wrappers either. She hoped that she hadn’t been so drunk that she didn’t opt for protection. That’s all she needed right now. Getting pregnant or getting something worse.
Her big toe banged hard on the corner of the waterbed. “Shit.”
But the sleeping man didn’t budge.
She took a step closer to the sleeping man, but his face was buried under the blankets. “Hey. Guy. Rise and shine.”
Nothing. Nobody home.
Alice watched the blankets, looking for a sign of life, but the man laid completely motionless. She watched him for another minute—still as a damn rock.
Alice picked up an empty beer bottle. Held it out in front of her, right over another empty beer bottle on the floor. She glanced back toward the bed and dropped the bottle. CLINK. SMASH. The bottle shattered into a dozen jagged pieces. It was loud—loud enough to wake the dead.
“Hello? Time to wakie-wakie.”
But the guy didn’t answer, and Alice had a sinking feeling as to why.
No, no, no.
The guy couldn’t be dead. That didn’t make any sense. You don’t just wake up naked next to a dead man you don’t even know.
Alice kept watching the sheets, waiting for them to rise and fall. Maybe the guy was a heavy sleeper. She waited for him to move. To cough. Sneeze. Moan. Anything. But he did none of that.
Black hair. Who did she know that had a head of thick, black hair like that?
Who cares?Doesn’t matter.
Alice took another glance around the room for her purse, but the place was about the size of a closet, so it wasn’t exactly like searching for a needle in a haystack. Must be in the living room. Or in the bathroom. Anywhere but in there.
But she couldn’t help it—her eyes settled back on the sleeping man, who probably should be referred to as the dead man. Alice’s hands were shaking now, rattling along with her thudding heart, and the surge of adrenaline wrung the hangover right out of her system. The tremor in her hands continued throughout her entire body, straight down to her knees, forcing Alice to take a seat back on the waterbed. The mattress gurgled like an empty stomach and the water rolled under the dead man, giving him the appearance of stirring. After a few seconds, the water settled and so did the dead man.
Screw it.
She stood up, reached forward, and yanked back the sheets.
The man was dead, all right. That much was clear. His eyes cracked open, pupils dilated, and both corneas smeared a hazy white.
Alice’s heart jackhammered even harder as she jerked away from the bed, her feet getting tangled up with one another. She could feel the rapid thump in her chest as she stared down at the body—the second time in her
life that she glimpsed death firsthand.
* * *
The dead man happened to be good looking. Or at least used to be, in that arrogant, white trash kind of way. Alice stared down at the face of the man she knew—Terry Otis, the manager of the Frisky Pony. Terry fucking Otis, the coke-snorting, chauvinistic meathead that slept with all his strippers. Terry fucking Otis, that drank like a fish and strutted around the club like a rooster, throwing drunks out of his bar for touching the merchandise, then beating the shit out of them in the back alley. The big, tough Terry that drove a black Chevy truck on oversized tires, ironed his Levis, and kept his cowboy boots perfectly polished.
Now, Terry wasn’t so tough or cool anymore, lying in a pool of his own vomit, naked and dead.
She kept staring at her deceased boss, trying to extract memories of the previous night from her booze-addled brain. She remembered Terry being at the Frisky Pony—he was always there—but she hadn’t been drinking with him or paying him any attention. He was too busy snorting blow off the bar and watching Tia and Naomi grind against one another.
She’d never been to Terry’s before. Not that he hadn’t invited her to his trailer on more than one occasion. Open invite anytime, honey, he smiled and leered at her a half dozen different times. His breath always stunk from the dip of Skoal under his bottom lip. Always spitting into a beer bottle, half-full of brown spittle. We’ll have a good ole time whenever you’re ready.
Alice’s stomach lurched, and she heaved but brought up nothing because her stomach didn’t have anything left to give. Her face went red-hot and her pores opened, coating her face with a thin layer of sweat that reeked of tequila.
The room around her dimmed twice. Once from the sun tucking behind some approaching storm clouds, the other from slipping dangerously close to losing consciousness.
The Guilt We Carry Page 2