by Zoe Fishman
“You too,” Paul called after him. “And thanks for everything today.”
“You got it. I’ll be in touch, after I talk to my guy,” he said, letting himself out.
Who was Paul to judge David? David had a pill thing, and he, he had a spending thing. Neither was better or worse than the other. Except, of course, David’s thing could kill him.
Paul settled into the couch and exhaled deeply. He would say something to David the next time he saw him. He would be a better friend.
But first: a nap.
Chapter Seven
Sylvie
The sand beneath her feet was hot. When Sylvie had taken off her socks and shoes, surprised by the warmth of the morning, her feet had shone like white marble in the sun.
She walked now, alone, toward what she wasn’t sure. She supposed the water, but it was the broadest beach she’d ever seen—sand bled right into the horizon. The sun beat down on her head relentlessly, and Sylvie wished for a hat. And that she’d worn sunscreen. Her skin was beginning to pink. Some water would have been nice too. Why was she so unprepared? That wasn’t like her.
Exhausted, and embarrassed by that very fact—she couldn’t have been walking longer than ten minutes—she sat. Just plopped down right in the sand, which was actually, now that she was in it, more dirt than sand. She scooped some into her hand and then watched it fall through her fingers, a salt-and-peppery mix. A cloud mercifully covered the sun, giving Sylvie a brief respite from the heat.
The ground beneath her began to vibrate. Like a train was running underneath her. Sylvie looked up. All around her was a vast nothing, just the dirty sand and the slight swell of would-be dunes. The vibration intensified, scaring her. She tried to get up, but she could not get her bearings, could not push herself up to standing.
That’s when she saw them. Horses. A herd of them: black, white, caramel, spotted, freckled, gray. There were so many of them, their hooves stomping and slicing through the sand as they stampeded toward her.
They were still far enough away for Sylvie to appreciate the beauty of their wildness—their matted manes; their feral eyes, the whites yellowed. Their synchronicity. A pack.
But as they came closer, right toward Sylvie, her heart began to speed up. A pounding in her chest that echoed in her ears, louder than the stomping of their hooves, although she couldn’t be sure which was which.
She couldn’t get up, Sylvie realized. No matter what she did, she could not will her arms to work. She looked down, surprised to see a beach ball where her stomach should have been, a beach ball underneath the black T-shirt she was wearing.
Sand sprayed onto her arms and into her face. She looked up. The horses were coming; they were right in front of her, the ripples of their leg muscles like fish through water. They had come.
* * *
SYLVIE OPENED HER eyes, gasping for air. Above her was the white ceiling of her bedroom, from which a suspended steel fan swirled lazily through the pale-yellow light of very early morning.
She lowered her arms beside her, resting them on top of the damp sheets. Slowly, she regulated her breathing, slowed down her racing heart. That nightmare, it was the same nightmare she always had, and yet every time was like the first time; her subconscious just as easily fooled.
“Jesus Christ,” she whispered, fingering the cotton of her T-shirt. She was completely soaked.
Beside her, Paul slept as he always slept, completely oblivious. Paul could sleep through a tornado tearing through the house, one that upended the bed with him in it. He would wake up in a dirt ditch somewhere, Sylvie was sure of it, the mattress on top of him, none the wiser.
When they had first started dating, Sylvie had found this quality endearing, but now it just pissed her off. Like a lot of things, she supposed.
She exhaled deeply, finally regaining her equilibrium back on earth. She was grateful it was only a nightmare, that she was not on the verge of being trampled to death by horses, that she was in her bed, alive. That was something; she was not always so glad to be alive.
She sat up, untwisting herself from the sheets, sighing because she was going to have to wash them. Gingerly, she put her feet on the floor, glancing at her stomach dejectedly. She was always pregnant in that dream. But again, always surprised by it. And always, always sad afterward, to find it not so.
Slowly, Sylvie padded toward the bathroom, to the shower.
She turned the hot water as high as it could go and stepped in. Sylvie angled her face upward, closed her eyes, relishing it as it washed over her. The heat did not bother her; it was the only way she felt truly clean, to emerge as red as a tomato.
She felt through the steam for her body wash and squirted it onto her loofah. Slowly, she rubbed circles across her body, the smell of lavender filling her nostrils. That dream. Wash it away. Forget it.
She had other things to worry about anyway. Teddy’s Bar Mitzvah, for one, which was a big fat nothing. The date of his service loomed large; it was now less than three months away, but as far as the party: nothing. No venue, no theme, no invites, no nothing. Part of this she could blame on Teddy’s lack of interest, but only a small part. The rest of this failure was her fault.
But maybe, just maybe, she should take a page from her behavior at the PTA meeting a few weeks earlier. If the kid didn’t like parties, why in the world was she throwing him a party? Because that’s just what people did? That’s what her parents expected her to do, like generations of Jews before them? Maybe, just maybe: screw it. Maybe listen to Teddy and do what he wanted to do. Not forgo the service altogether, she would never do that, but the other crap. If he didn’t want it, if it would only make him miserable, why bother?
Sylvie squeezed shampoo into her palm next and rubbed it vigorously into her scalp. But even before the Bar Mitzvah, she had something else to contend with. Something more pressing, something that had flooded her veins with anxiety from the moment she had discovered it.
Water poured over her head, the smell of vanilla and citrus overpowering the lavender, although it still lingered. Sylvie had been cursed with a superpower sense of smell. She said cursed because she would rather not smell so intensely every odor within a three-mile radius. She would rather not smell Teddy’s sneakers by the front door when she was upstairs in her room. She would rather not taste tuna fish in her mouth days after she rinsed clean the aluminum tin and placed it in the recycling bin. Cursed.
The day before, when Sylvie had come home from work, she had found Paul snoring on the couch, sitting upright with his head against its back, his mouth open wide enough for a wayward bird to fly into.
The old Sylvie, the not-high Sylvie—she had downed a pill in her work bathroom right before lunch; she was going out with her boss, better known as the Weenie, and a client who made her feel like an underpaid kindergarten teacher in her last year before retirement and really just wanted to not feel that way, so she had taken it even though she said she wouldn’t at work, but guess what? It had made lunch tolerable, and lunch wasn’t technically work, so who cared? That old Sylvie would have been exasperated by the sight of her husband passed out, knowing he had been passed out while she worked, while she ran to the grocery store to supplement dinner, while she fought the interminable traffic to get home and make said dinner. The new Sylvie, the Sylvie who was still high, was not.
After she had set the bags on the kitchen counter in a dejected heap of beige plastic, she had walked over to wake him up, and that’s when she had seen it: a round white pill that looked remarkably familiar. She had grabbed it on impulse, abandoning her plan and letting him continue snoring.
By the overhead light of the kitchen, she had examined the pill. It was one of her pills. One of his pills, to be exact. But what did it mean?
She had jogged up the stairs, to her bedroom and into her closet. She had dug into her purse, her hiding spot, relieved to close her fingers around the familiar, smooth cylinder. She had retrieved it, opened it. There had been two pills lef
t. That’s how many she had left behind that morning, wasn’t it? Or had there been three? She could not remember and had promptly broken out in a cold sweat.
She had put the bottle back in her purse and stood in the dim light of the closet for a moment, considering all possible scenarios.
Scenario one: Paul had gone looking for his pills and, not finding them, ransacked the entire house, including every purse and every pocket of Sylvie’s. Sylvie looked around the closet. It was as pristine as when she left it. This scenario was impossible. Paul rarely remembered to put the toilet seat down; he wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to refold and rehang every article of Sylvie’s perfectly. To be 100 percent sure, Sylvie crossed to her shelves of jeans she never wore. All folded perfectly, all in color-coded order. Scenario one was out.
Scenario two: Paul had gone looking for his pills and, not finding them, assumed Sylvie had thrown them out. He had refilled his order. But how had he picked them up? His buddy David? Possibly, although why not just ask her? Unless he knew what she was up to. Which brought her to scenario three.
Scenario three: scenario two minus the Sylvie-throwing-them-out part. Paul was onto her, had noticed her complete personality change and wasn’t buying any sort of natural reason for it. He had put two and two together. He was going to confront her, and what was she going to say?
More important, how was she going to get more pills? She had been counting on Paul’s refill, because why not? A refill was meant to be claimed, and then she would stop. That’s what she had told herself, but now the refill had been claimed by Paul. And Paul was wise to her.
Shit.
Panic had seized Sylvie. What was she going to do? What was she going to say? An outside observer of even the most distant variety, much less her own husband, would be concerned about the fact that she had stolen, hidden and taken a prescribed narcotic regularly for weeks, usually accompanied by a glass of wine. But it was a phase. Just a phase that had been handed to her. Like a Nordstrom gift card.
There had been only one way out of her swirling brain. Another pill. Sylvie had taken it, ashamed of herself for wasting what could be her next to last but seeing no other way to make it through what was bound to be a very awkward evening. She couldn’t go to her own intervention sober; it defeated the purpose.
But to Sylvie’s great surprise, Paul didn’t say a word. All through dinner, not a peep. And even after, when Teddy had gone to bed: nothing. Sylvie had crept stealthily around him, a dazed smile on her face thanks to the pill but an unshakable pit of dread in her stomach.
It was so unlike Paul to bide his time with anything, to play the role of coiled viper planning his strike, but what else could possibly be happening? He hadn’t even asked her about the pill on the coffee table, which of course she had forgotten to put back.
She had even sat next to Paul on the couch, pretending to watch a home remodeling show with him that featured a married couple who clearly hated each other, until she finally went to sleep herself.
After much tossing and turning and then the nightmare, here she was. She had to say something to Paul. She couldn’t take it anymore.
Sylvie turned off the water and stood in the steam for a moment, reciting the lines she had written and then rewritten in her head. Keep it simple, she reminded herself, as she flipped her head over and squeezed water from her hair into the towel.
No eye contact, she told herself as she moisturized her legs.
She sat on the toilet seat and rubbed the lotion into the cracks of her heels. She really wanted a pill. But she had only two left, including the contraband from the coffee table. She should save them; she really should. For emergencies. They very well could be her last. Ever. Right, she would save them.
She hung the wet towel on the hook, avoiding her naked image in the mirror, and walked, head down, thinking, into her closet. Oh no, her stomach from this angle. No, this would not do. Sylvie stopped in her tracks and stood up straight, forcing her shoulders back. Better, much better. Not great or even good, but better.
She surveyed her clothing. It was Friday, a day once deemed business casual. But now it seemed that every day was business casual in her workplace of twenty- and thirty-somethings clad in skinny jeans and statement socks. Statement socks, for Christ’s sake. She felt a million years old there and dressed the part, albeit expensively. A red-and-white-striped button-down and elastic-waist pants it was.
Her purse, hanging mere feet from Sylvie, her secret-stash purse, mocked her as she pulled on her underwear and strapped on her bra. Sylvie had never been able to understand the ads portraying women stepping daintily into their undergarments, fastening the hooks suggestively as though putting them on immediately implied taking them off in the company of a heated suitor. She always felt like she was putting on a suit of armor, heading into battle.
If you take a pill now, you’ll only have one left, she chided herself as she buttoned her shirt. She pulled on her pants. But maybe this did qualify as an emergency. She could very well be about to walk the plank during this conversation with Paul. And the workday stretched long and endless before her, with no meetings on tap. Might as well be high, right?
She dug into the purse and took a pill. She couldn’t believe there was only one left. Had she really taken thirty? Was that bad? No, it wasn’t that bad. What was that, like one a day? Maybe two once in a blue moon? Now, three, that was different. Three was trouble.
She swallowed the pill dry.
On her way back into the bedroom, Sylvie stopped to massage moisturizer into her face and neck. The amount of lubrication it took past a certain age, just so your skin felt remotely pliable. It was criminal.
On the other side of the door, she heard Paul yawn. She knew he was scratching his balls, stretching—his wake-up routine was as familiar as her own.
It was time.
“Morning,” she said, trying her best to sound casual, although it was hard to catch her breath.
On cue, the pill began to work its magic, slowing everything down, trapping time and space in Jell-O. Problems were suspended; she felt buoyant and young, and the light, inside or outside, it didn’t matter, became almost comically ethereal.
“Good morning,” said Paul, smiling with his eyes closed. “You smell good.”
“Thanks, I showered.”
Sylvie perched on the edge of the bed and then thought better of it and got completely on, adjusting her pillow in its white pillowcase against the low oak headboard and leaning against it, her legs crossed at the ankles on top of the gold blanket, her toes a turquoise that she had immediately regretted upon leaving the nail salon.
“Paul?”
“Yes?” He opened his eyes and turned his head, looking up at her. “You sound so serious. You okay?”
This was not a question someone on the verge of staging an intervention would ask, Sylvie thought. Paul was many things, but an actor was not one of them. Sylvie’s nerves fluttered up to the ceiling like butterflies, leaving her only curious.
“I found a pill on the coffee table yesterday when I was cleaning up,” she blurted out.
“Huh?”
“A white pill? It—” Sylvie stopped herself. Was she really on the verge of outing herself, of admitting to the fact that she knew exactly what the pill was? Idiot.
“Oh yeah, David gave me that. My ankle was hurting, and I told him Motrin was fine, that I didn’t need one of those Oxywhatevers, but he refused to listen to me. I didn’t feel like arguing anymore. You can throw it away.”
“Oh. Okay. Sure.” Sylvie closed her eyes, the last of the butterflies fluttering up, up, up. She was safe.
“That’s what you did with my pills, right?” asked Paul.
“Your pills what?”
“The ones I was prescribed?” Paul rolled over slightly and pushed himself up, wincing a little.
Sylvie reached behind him and adjusted his pillow, helped him get comfortable.
“Oh yes. I threw them out. Are you sure you
don’t need them? Is the pain worse now?”
Sylvie was asking only because she knew Paul would continue to refuse them, continue to deny himself the pleasure of Jell-O suspension; and although there was a tiny part of her that felt bad for him because of it, mostly she was just glad that they were hers, all hers.
“I’m sure. Honestly, if I just stay on top of the Motrin, it’s fine.” He covered her hand with his.
“What’s David doing with those pills?” asked Sylvie.
“Remember when he fell through that roof a couple years back? On the job?”
“Oh yeah,” said Sylvie. “That was terrible. And he’s all alone, right?”
“Yeah. After his son was killed, he and his wife split up.”
“His son was killed?” asked Sylvie, covering her mouth with her hand.
“I told you that, Sylvie, come on.”
“I don’t think you did.”
“I did.”
“Okay, okay, it doesn’t matter.”
Paul glared at her.
“Okay, you did. Jesus. Sorry. I must have forgotten.”
“So anyway, he ended up with a steel rod in his leg and I’m sure a lot of pain,” Paul continued. “Voilà: a lifelong drug prescription and a free pass to addiction.”
Paul pulled off the blanket and turned to get up, swinging his good leg onto the floor and then his cast with his hands. Sylvie crawled over to his side of the bed and hopped off to hand him his crutches, which were propped against the bedside table.
“That’s a little extreme, don’t you think?” She hated that she felt defensive on David’s behalf, but she did.
“What?” asked Paul.
“To call him an addict.”
“The guy’s been taking these pills for years, so no,” said Paul, hobbling into the bathroom.
Sylvie sat back down on the bed and stared out the window. She heard Teddy’s alarm going off down the hall. A river of bubbles flowed through her veins as she watched a perched bluebird tweet from a tree branch. People were so quick to throw around the term addict.