The Wide Night Sky

by Matt Dean

  Chapter 24

  The sheets were clammy against her skin. The hotel bed was so soft, so deep, that she wasn’t convinced she could climb out of it. She lay a while on her side, staring at the nearest wall and wishing for a cold drink. Her tongue tasted of stale wine. Cigarettes, too, though she didn’t remember smoking. In truth, she didn’t remember much.

  Her tracksuit had twisted around her in her sleep. She sat up and straightened it. Blue-gold light filled the room. The curtains were wide open, and the early sun, glittering on the water, made her eyes ache. There was no sign that Leland had shared the bed with her. She got up.

  Walking across the room was an adventure of shifting planes and receding surfaces. Music seemed to be playing somewhere, just barely within her hearing—next door, across the hall, or in some bean-sized bulb of her own brain. Even with the sliding glass doors closed, she could smell the sea.

  When she tried to draw the curtains, they turned out to be heavier than she’d expected. The hangers stuttered along the track. Sunlight hammered the orbits of her eyes, and she shaded them with one hand. She lost her grip on the pull rod and stumbled against the arm of the sofa.

  For a few uncanny seconds, the center of her vision became frighteningly crisp, as if she were looking through a small but powerful lens. A narrow column of light fell along the length of the sofa, where Leland lay with his legs crossed and his eyes wide and bloodshot. He was barefoot but otherwise fully clothed. The legs of his jeans were damp almost to the knee and flecked with grains of sand.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  She forced her mouth open; it felt like tearing Velcro apart. She needed a drink. Vodka or water would do—either or both over ice, cold enough to crack her teeth. Speaking with care, mindful of slurring, she said, “Did I wake you?”

  “Haven’t slept.”

  “You’ve been walking on the beach?”

  “That too. Where did you go?”

  Her mind was nimble enough to understand that she couldn’t answer truthfully, but too sluggish to provide a quick lie. She slumped against the arm of the sofa. Just as she opened her mouth to say something, anything, whatever happened to come out, Leland cut her off.

  “Never mind.” He sat up and patted the cushion beside him. “We should talk.”

  He smelled unpleasantly of seawater and rotting kelp, and Anna Grace didn’t trust her stomach. She had a pinching cramp under her rib cage. Her belly seemed to hold a large amount of dirty cooking grease. She wheeled the chair away from the desk and sat across from him, on the far side of the coffee table. She glanced at him. Only a glance. She was afraid to meet his eyes.

  After a moment, he began speaking. He was staring at the backs of his hands. “I was so angry about yesterday. So angry. But I never had any right to be pissed. From the beginning, this whole trip”—he waved his hand in the air—“was disingenuous. I didn’t bring you here just for a romantic getaway.”

  Anna Grace could guess why he’d brought her here. This was the intervention. At last. She’d been waiting. He’d spend the next few hours explaining how her drinking had set their lives on fire. Rehab would follow, assuming she agreed to it. Meetings, then. Inventories, amends, more meetings—assuming she agreed. Assuming she didn’t, instead, turn the intervention around on him. Hey, Daddy, what do you know about DaddiesLove.com?

  Leland turned to the window, and the light fell across one cheek. For the first time that Anna Grace could recall, he’d gone two days without shaving. Overnight, his whiskers had grown from shadow to stubble, and a patch of gray had emerged on either side of his chin. He said, “I’ve been all over the map. Emotionally, I mean. Rage, fear, misery, contrition.”

  How far did one go with amends? She had sins aplenty to confess to her husband and children. But would she have to come back here and apologize to the housekeeper who cleaned the restroom in the lobby bar?

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about him. For hours.”

  She homed in on her husband’s mouth, his eyes, his words. He was talking about his father. Garage, ocean, hyacinths, horseshoes: What did any of it have to do with anything?

  “It was just a coincidence,” he said, chuckling and shaking his head. “Took twenty-five years, but I finally see that—just a coincidence. Not my fault after all.”

  Late at night, she’d stumbled into the hotel, very near—she’d thought—to shitting her pants. At the back of the bar she’d found a unisex restroom. Locking herself inside, she’d stripped to the skin and found that she’d already shit her pants.

  With a terrible clarity—and yet at a saving distance, as if she were remembering a vivid dream or a gruesome film—she saw herself grubbing around on the restroom floor, trying to mop up her mess. The paper towels had been all but useless. They’d dissolved instantly in her hands.

  There’d been some roses on the vanity—roses wrapped in crinkly cellophane. She’d bumped against the cabinet somehow, knocking the flowers head first into the trash can. The blooms had landed on top of her soiled panties, and that, of all things, had made her cry.

  “It’s so easy to minimize,” Leland was saying. “Easy and tempting. One time in twenty-three years, that’s all. One time. But it’s just…inexcusable. It’s the intent, the desire, the—” He paused, his damp eyes drifting upward as he searched for the right word. “The thing is,” he said. “The thing is, the thing is.” He said it a few more times, until Anna Grace thought she might be hallucinating.

  She wanted suddenly to check the legs and hems of her track pants. Maybe she’d dreamed the worst of it. The memory of a dream was, after all, virtually indistinguishable from the memory of a drinking bout. The roses were a tip-off—they had to be. Why would there be roses in a unisex restroom at the back of a hotel bar?

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I hate having to say this as much as you hate hearing it, but everything needs to come out.” He blushed. “So to speak.”

  She propped one foot on the edge of the coffee table, and there, on the cuff of her track pants and on her bare ankle, was a crusty spattering of something brown. Her stomach gurgled and oozed deeper into her gut, and her throat seemed to burst upward into her mouth. Tears wetted her eyelashes. Returning her foot to the floor, clenching her jaw shut, she willed her heart to stop pounding, her head to stop spinning, her gullet to stop turning itself inside out.

  Slowly, quietly, Leland said, “I think I’m— I have to be— I must actually be—”

  What? He thought he was obliged to send her to treatment? He had to be crazy to put up with her? He must actually be prepared to leave her? Fine. She was ready. If only he would say.

  But she couldn’t answer him, couldn’t urge him on, couldn’t save him the trouble of forming the words. By clamping her back teeth together and lodging her tongue against her front teeth, she was—just barely—keeping herself from vomiting. If she opened her mouth to speak—

  She sprang from her seat. The chair rolled away from her and slammed into the desk. Covering her mouth with her hands, she lurched to the bathroom. The toilet had a seat but no lid. Even as she dropped to the floor with a knee-cracking thud, some devil at the back of her brain recorded a grievance. Commercial toilet, no lid: He’d brought her to that kind of hotel.

  She gagged and heaved, but all that came out was a mess of foamy pink spit. There would be more, she thought. This was just the proverbial calm. She waited. She could still hear music, and now she knew that it came from the wrecked wiring of her own brain, not from next door or across the hall, because she recognized it as Yvonne’s final aria from Under the Volcano. Distant, muffled, distorted—but unmistakable. Ashes, embers, stars.

  At last she vomited for real, her body rocking and aching from the irresistible spasmodic convulsions. Leland had followed her into the bathroom—she could hardly say when—and he flushed the toilet and crouched beside her and held her hair back. He was sobbing and apologizing—but then she was, too.

  When she retched again, w
hat came up was thick as tar and nearly as black. It left the tang of metal on her tongue. Blood. It was blood, and more followed.

  “Leland,” she said, rearing back, reaching for him, tasting blood on her lips. “Leland,” she said again, or tried to say, and then there was the sensation of falling.

  The Beginning of December