by David Wood
He pictured her at a payphone, the first call made to her mother. “Mom, I’m so sorry I left. I’m coming home.” Then to the airline, booking her flight. “First one out of Lisbon that you’ve got. No, it doesn’t matter which airport. Newark Liberty, La Guardia or JFK.” Next to a taxi service. “Please pick me up right away. I have an international flight to catch at noon.” Finally, another to her mother. “I’m all set. You can pick me up at the airport this afternoon…”
Finally Craig pulled closed and locked the downstairs door and headed up with the last of their boxes. He set them on the floor of the living room, plopped down onto the couch, and wondered whether Amy was coming back to the flat at all.
Maybe he was destined to be alone just like his mother. She was sixty-four and lived by herself in a large ranch-style home in central New Jersey. No friends, no family except for him. And even they hardly ever spoke. She was always at odds with her neighbors. Had no one to josh with, to shoot the breeze with. No one to call for help if help were needed. No one around to provide affection or comfort, not even an adoring pet. Especially not a pet.
(“They shit everywhere.”)
If Amy did indeed leave, the coming days and weeks would be like that horrible period in Hawaii. Sick all day, every day; exhausted, yet sleepless each night. Not eating, yet vomiting. Not drinking, yet drunk.
Headaches, nausea, fevers. Loss of appetite, loss of weight. Constant panic, anxiety. Loneliness he hadn’t believed possible.
Maybe he would go downstairs into the alley and collect that dog.
Bring him up and nurse him back to health.
(“They’re filthy fucking things. I won’t have a goddamn animal in my house.”)
Craig pushed himself off the couch. As he did, the pulse in his ear started up again. It seemed to come and go more frequently today. Each time it went, he was all but sure it was gone for good. So when it returned he felt his stomach drop.
He stepped over to the laptop. Opened it. Waited for it to “Welcome!” him. To tell him, “You’ve got mail!”
He pulled up the control panel and cut the speakers off. Then he typed pulsatile tinnitus into the search engine. Five thousand, five hundred and seventy hits. He clicked on the very first one and scanned the page.
It is strongly recommended that all individuals with pulsatile tinnitus locate an excellent physician with interest in the circulatory system and complete a thorough examination.
In his ear, the pulse concurred. It thumped louder, as though it were an entity stalking toward him, its footsteps thickening as it approached. He scanned the possible causes again: arteriovenous malformations, vascular tumor, aneurism. Same as they were last night.
Craig felt faint. His breathing slowed even as his pulse quickened. A cloudiness like last evening’s fog crept slowly over his eyes. He leaned back in his chair, felt himself fading out. He gently lowered himself onto the floor.
That was where Amy found him fifteen minutes later. “What are you doing on the floor?” she said, jostling him.
Slowly he opened his eyes. I have a goddamn tumor, he wanted to shout.
(Or an aneurism.)
Instead he said, “I was just taking a break from work.”
(With an aneurism you go like that!)
She felt his forehead. “You’re sweating.”
He sat up. “The movers wouldn’t bring the boxes upstairs. I had to carry them all up myself.”
She backed away. “You should’ve waited for me. I would’ve helped.”
Craig reached for the chair and pulled himself up. “Where were you?”
“I went to try to find us breakfast.” He sat on the chair. “Took that long?”
She glared at him. “Then I went for a walk.”
He didn’t respond. If he brought up the fact that she knew he was waiting here hungry, that she knew the movers were coming, that she could have shown some courtesy and gotten back here as quickly as she could, she would only accuse him of trying to control her, of restricting her from doing what she enjoyed.
“And I couldn’t get in downstairs,” she said. “The door was locked and you have the only key.”
“Why didn’t you use the intercom?”
“Intercom? What intercom? There isn’t even a doorbell down there.”
He shook his head. “There has to be. The movers called me from it.”
“Go down and look. There’s nothing. I wouldn’t have stood outside banging on the door if there was an intercom.” “Who let you in?”
She shrugged. “I walked around the back of the building to try to yell up to our window. When I came back around, the door was open again.”
He looked around. His eyes rested on the two brown paper bags on the table. “What did you get us to eat?”
She stepped over to the table and pulled down each bag, revealing two bottles of port wine.
He looked up at her incredulously. “Nothing to eat?”
“They didn’t have pound cake. I didn’t know what else you’d want.” He stared at the bottles, a grumbling sound emanating from his stomach. He bit down hard on his lower lip and didn’t say another word. “Have you heard from the landlord?” she said, breaking the silence.
He touched the mouse, which wiped away his sky blue keep writing screen saver. He pulled up his inbox and scanned the email addresses and subject lines of his new messages. Nothing from Amaro Dias Silva.
He shook his head. But as he was about to close out of his email inbox, one new message appeared. Sure enough, it was from Amaro Dias Silva.
He pulled the message up as Amy sat down on the couch.
My dear Sr. Devlin: Terribly sorry to learn that the flat is not to your liking. Of course I am willing to return your funds. Regret to say, however, that I am currently in Madrid on business and will not return until Monday. I realize this may create a great imposition to you, so I have arranged for my associate to drop by the flat with your funds. Unfortunately, he cannot do so before eight o’clock this evening. I hope this will not be too late. Please accept my apologies for any inconvenience this has caused. I wish you and your fiancée both the very best of luck. Yours truly, Amaro Dias Silva
Craig read the message aloud to Amy.
She didn’t say anything, just sat there and stared blankly at the far wall. There was a time when he thought he knew precisely what she was thinking, but not anymore—not since that shit she pulled in Hawaii.
He stared at Amaro’s message on the computer, wishing he still had easy access to Amy’s email account. Maybe she had shot her mother a message from some local Internet café. Maybe that was why she’d been gone so long. But she had been changing her password just about every other week for the past couple years. Ever since that heated argument when he found that message to her ex.
(She wasn’t only writing him. She’d seen him behind your back!)
The argument had led to
(your smacking her around)
her attacking him. And his fending her off, her falling to the ground.
(You tuned her like a piano!)
Then she’d had the gall to call her mother, to accuse him of striking her.
Since then he had obtained her password a few times. He’d looked over her shoulder and once asked her in her sleep. She eventually caught him and he had to resort to more drastic measures. A video camera, a computer program. He’d even gone so far as to place some powder on the keys.
“Do you want to go out and look for an apartment today?” she said at length.
He looked at her, tried to read her face. He almost asked, “For both of us?” but stifled himself. He didn’t really think he wanted an answer to that.
Who was he kidding? He knew the answer. She was leaving. She had already booked her flight. The ticket wasn’t for today but for tomorrow. That was why she wanted to go out and look for a place. She would help him find one, maybe even aid him in getting settled. Then, once she felt good about herself again, she would pick up and leave.
“I can’t. My credit and debit cards are gone. It’ll take a while to get replacements. I need that money back from Amaro before we can get another flat.”
“We can look at least.”
Craig gave it some more thought then shook his head. “Nah, that would be pointless. Let’s get our money back, then go out looking first thing tomorrow. With the money in hand, we shouldn’t have any trouble letting another flat.”
She stood up and moved toward the bedroom while Craig closed his email tab.
“Goodbye!”
He stared at the computer. Muttered, “What the hell?”
“Goodbye” “Goodbye” “Goodbye”
Finally the computer fell silent. He slapped the laptop shut and crossed to the front door. He locked it and peeked out the peephole.
It had gone dark in the hall. He couldn’t see a goddamn thing.
Chapter 11
Amy slipped into the bedroom and closed the door. Goddamn it. She had one of those hangovers that got worse instead of better as the day wore on. She had a pounding headache and needed to take a couple of Advil. She went back into her suitcase where she left it sitting atop the dresser. She pored through the compartment that held her toiletries and fished out the bottle of ibuprofen.
She couldn’t win. He was mad at her for not picking something up for him at the grocery. Amy, of course, didn’t say anything about his not offering to go. The entire exercise would have been useless. He depended on her to do everything. To buy his food, to launder his clothes, to drive him here and there as though he were an invalid. Jesus, why couldn’t he do anything for himself?
She untwisted the childproof cap and dropped two pills into her hand. She stared at them. They weren’t Advil. They were large, white, oval-shaped. They were Vicodin.
Son of a bitch. Craig had promised her that he was done popping prescription pills. Assured her that he hadn’t taken a single one in ten months. If that were true, what in the hell were these doing in her suitcase? That fucking liar.
She squeezed them in her hand, wondered where he was getting them from now. Back when he practiced law he used to procure them from his injured clients. By the time he turned in his card to the state bar he had stockpiled a two-year supply. But even that was long gone. She had seen him finish them off in Hawaii. She’d witnessed him withdraw. And she’d endured his constant whining, his begging her to help him out, to talk to some of the doctors at the hospital where she worked. To ask one of them to write a prescription. After a few weeks she’d finally convinced him that was out of the question. She wasn’t about to get fired and maybe even arrested so that he could continue gobbling pain pills. And that was when he started nagging her to have her remaining wisdom teeth pulled out. Two of her wisdom teeth had been extracted a couple of weeks before she met him. And just before their second date as she got ready to go out, he’d pilfered a couple painkillers from her medicine cabinet. She had thought it was funny at the time. But her friends didn’t. And her friends had been right.
Craig’s drug use had been far more than just recreational; it was a way of life. And he and his friend Danny were into more than just pills. More than just painkillers and amphetamines and tranquilizers. They were into hardcore drugs. Not just the club drugs that everyone under thirty seemed to be doing on Friday and Saturday nights in the city. Not just ecstasy and ketamine and GHB. They were into heavy-duty hallucinogens like mushshrooms and LSD. They were doing coke, lots of it. And not just coke but crack. She didn’t know about the heroin until later. Much later. After she’d already agreed to move in with him.
After what happened though, what occurred in his Battery Park apartment, he promised her he would lay off the hard stuff. He continued taking pain pills and smoked a little weed. But the club drugs-- the coke and crack, and of course the heroin--all vanished from their lives. And that had been enough for her until the Vicodin started becoming a problem.
He promised me, she thought, clenching the pills in her hand. She almost started to cry.
Instead she placed the pills back into the bottle. There were about twenty of them. Not a single Advil, nothing she could take for her headache. She gritted her teeth.
Not only had he tossed out her ibuprofen but he had planted these narcotics in her luggage. What if airport security had discovered them in an x-ray? What if they had pulled her off the plane and demanded she produce a valid prescription? What if she had been arrested for his drugs?
Now he was tapping on the bedroom door.
He could never give her ten minutes’ privacy. In three years she hadn’t had any personal space. They had to do everything together. Eat together, read together, watch television together. And of course, they always watched his shows. Reality television was out. No Real World, no Top Chef, no Real Housewives. Only news and politics, re-runs of old sitcoms like Seinfeld and Friends. He controlled their movie-watching too. He didn’t let her touch or even see their Netflix queue. It’ll be a surprise, he’d say. Surprise, surprise. Another two hour documentary on global warming or the genocide in Darfur.
Still tapping.
“What?” she called through the door.
He didn’t answer, just kept tapping. Playing his stupid little childish games. He did it all the time. Called out her name, made her come running for no reason. Snuck up behind her, pulled down her pants. And laughed out loud as though it were the funniest thing in the world.
“Jackass,” she said. She stood up and opened the door.
He had already run away. She poked her head around the corner and saw him standing with his head pressed against the living room window. She sighed and slammed the door.
Her head felt as though it were going to explode. She snatched up the Advil bottle and considered taking a Vicodin. But no, she didn’t even like taking narcotic painkillers when they had been prescribed to her after oral surgery. She wasn’t about to start taking them now. Not for a goddamn hangover. The headache would pass or she would go back out and buy some aspirin.
She took the bottle into the bathroom and untwisted the cap. Throw out my Advil, I’ll toss out your Vicodin, she thought. She lifted the lid on the toilet. A wave of nausea washed over her. She turned the bottle upside down and watched the large white pills drop into the water, each of them landing with a plop before descending slowly toward the drain. She twisted the cap back onto the now-empty bottle and flushed.
She imagined the pills screaming as they spiraled toward the drain. Imagined all the sewer-dwelling animals—the rats and various vermin—getting high on the potent drug as it dissolved into their water. She turned to leave, but as she did she felt something rise in her throat and into her mouth—an acrid liquid that began spilling over her lips.
She spun back around to the toilet and emptied her mouth. There was no food, only bile. A yellow-green fluid that continued flooding over her tongue. She expelled as much as she could but remained nauseous. Her face was flush and her forehead dripped with sweat. She vomited again. And again. A string of saliva hung from her lower lip like a broken cobweb.
That’s what you get for drinking on an empty stomach, she thought. No, that’s what I get for coming with Craig to this hellhole in the first place, she corrected herself.
Then she hurled into the toilet again.
Finally she stood, her knees sore from the bathroom tiles, weak and wobbly. She heard Craig rapping again on the bedroom door.
She looked into the cracked and cloudy mirror above the sink and studied her reflection. She appeared older than her thirty-three years for the first time she could remember. Her nose was red and swollen. The rest of her face was as pale as paste, except for under the eyes, where the flesh was puffy and a putrid black and blue. She turned on the water and splashed some onto her face.
Craig was still tapping on the bedroom door. She cursed him and tried flushing the toilet.
Chapter 12
Down in the alley the dog treaded lightly along the cobblestones as though it were
painful to walk. He moved from end to end, wagging his skinny tail and sniffing for food. He did not look up and he made no sound, just paced back and forth like an expectant father.
Craig heard the toilet flush and felt the sudden urge to urinate. He tore himself from the window and started toward the bathroom. When he heard Amy vomit he stopped dead in his tracks and waited.
He hated when she drank; even hated when he drank these days. He felt she shouldn’t need to now that they were together. He didn’t. When she drank you got one of two Amys. The carefree, fun-at-all-costs Amy, or the angry, I’m-taking-no-shit-tonight Amy. More often than not you got the latter. And the next morning, well, you steered as far clear of the hungover Amy as you did any of them.
She had gone to Alcoholics Anonymous once. Not because she was an alcoholic, mind you, but because she liked playing the victim. She drank too much, needed AA. Liked sitting around in a circle telling stories with strangers. Had an eating disorder, too—anorexia or bulimia, take your pick—and needed treatment. Anything short of a suicide attempt to garner attention. Like when she went crying to her mother and dipshit brother, yapping about how he had hit her. Now that was attention.
And then she wondered why he wanted nothing to do with her family.
True or not, they had believed her, took her word over his. And when last he’d seen her mother in New York, boy oh boy, did she rub it in. Had the gall to start talking about Hawaii—how gorgeous it was. How relaxing her day there with Amy had been. And how happy, how so fucking happy, she was to have her daughter back home.
That’s when Craig decided on the setting for his next book. That’s when he started planning this trip to Portugal. Oh sure, Lisbon would make a fine setting for his novel, but Europe had the added benefit of taking Amy away from her mother, of eradicating once again that cancerous element. And besides, even after Amy took him back when he returned to New York, he still felt as though he had lost, felt as though her mother had won. Craig didn’t like to lose, not in the courtroom, and certainly not to some odious old bitch that thought he was good for nothing. Sure, Portugal wasn’t Hawaii, but her mother would still have to cross a damned ocean to get to them.