But I can fight it.
I interrupt her. “I want to tell you something,” I say, feeling more focused. “I know you all think I’m making the wrong decision. I know you think you can take his place and everything can keep going. But I can’t let you do that. I can’t! You’re just a kid, and you’re not ready for that kind of pressure . . .” Now I’m sobbing, my insides feeling like they’ve been gouged out. But the crying does something—it makes me focused, able to finally speak my feelings. “We made a pact. A pact.” It’s all I can manage to say. And people are staring at us now.
Shorie grabs my arm. “We should call Ben—”
I wrench loose. “Nobody knows what it’s like for me. To have to go into that office every day.” I stagger toward her, but she ducks, and I stumble forward, over a chair or the hose or something. All I know is I’m on my hands and knees staring down at the dirt and a crushed red Solo cup.
I have done something irreparable, and I don’t even know how I managed it. I quiet myself. Close my eyes. It’s time for me to go. Way past time. I just need a moment. A moment . . .
“Mom!” It’s Shorie who’s screaming now.
Maybe it has something to do with the sensation that I’m heading back under, back to the place where everything is quiet.
11
SHORIE
Just like I thought, something terrible happened. Mom lost her shit—in a pair of flamingo pajamas, no less—at my first fraternity party. I’ve never been so embarrassed. I’ve never been so scared.
Now it’s seven in the morning, and Layton is waiting in her red Mini Cooper in the deserted parking lot outside my dorm. She’s going to drive me back up to Birmingham, and they’re going to confront Mom. We all are, I guess, since, true to his word, Ben is including me in the process. I’m wondering now if I should just leave it to the adults. My stomach is churning in a sickening way.
I toss my backpack behind the seat and slide into the tiny car, glancing over. As usual, Layton looks like she’s just come from the world’s most important conference meeting, impeccable in a navy sheath with a matching blazer and black stilettos, the charm bracelet on her arm jingling.
I feel like a rumpled mess next to her. It doesn’t help that I only slept a few hours last night. After I called Ben, and he came and collected me, Mom, and his truck, he dropped me off at my dorm. I don’t think he wanted me around Mom anymore. Didn’t want me to see her all groggy and weird. I don’t know where they went after that, but honestly, I kind of didn’t care. But then he texted me at six thirty this morning that Layton was picking me up. For the meeting, he’d said. The one I’d asked to be a part of.
As we pull onto 280 West, Layton points to the coffee in the cup holder. I sip it gratefully, and we exchange pleasantries. She’s quiet for a moment after that, then speaks.
“I should tell you—and I’m not trying to scare you—but I think your mom could really benefit from psychiatric help.” She glances at me. “Everybody has moments of crisis. Everybody could use someone to talk to. I see a therapist from time to time. It’s really not that big a deal, I promise. You could see one too, if you wanted. I could get you the name of a doctor who works with young people.”
“Thanks, but no.”
“I apologize, Shorie, I know sometimes I can be blunt.”
“It’s okay.”
She hesitates. “There is something else I wanted to mention. Something I wanted to ask you.”
“Okay.”
“Can you tell me how long the drinking has been a problem?”
“The drinking?” My voice squeaks in disbelief.
“At your going-away party, she had more than a few glasses of champagne.”
I hadn’t really noticed. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I mean, maybe. But we were celebrating.”
She nods, but it feels like she’s placating me.
“It’s not a problem,” I add quickly. “It hasn’t been.”
I’m telling the truth—Mom doesn’t drink much around me—but the reality is, I don’t exactly watch her every move. This summer I haven’t been around a lot, at least not at night. I’ve been riding around town with Daisy or barricaded up in my room, playing video games. For all I know, she could have been spending those nights alone, getting smashed.
“Because a lot of people are very smart about hiding their alcohol consumption,” Layton says.
A current of annoyance ripples through me. Who is she to be tossing around opinions? Assuming Mom is hiding some addiction. It’s not like she’s a doctor. And being so . . . matter of fact about it all.
Then she hands over a slick trifold brochure. I unfold it.
“Hidden Sands,” I read. “Innovative. Individualistic. Intuitive.” I stare at the colorful shots of a tropical island resort, then glance over at her. “What is this place?”
“It’s a spa. But also kind of a low-key rehab.”
“Rehab?”
“They call it restoration. Kind of a mellower approach to recovery. Not everybody goes for drugs or alcohol. Some people—people like your mom—just need a space to rest. And to work some things out.”
I sigh.
“You’re going to need to trust us, Shorie,” she says. “We’ve been talking about this for a while.” She pats my knee a few times. The rest of the way, Layton takes work calls while I distractedly scroll through my phone, trying to find something that’ll take my mind off my mom and the impending intervention.
Another error message in today’s server report, identical to the previous one, does just that. I study it for a second, chewing my lip, then see Scotty’s email. The error’s probably nothing more than a glitch with one of our new functions, he’s written, which we’re NOT going to discuss because you have other things to do. Like college. Remember, Shorie, I agreed to “forget” to remove your email from the daily report list, but you need to focus on school or the deal’s off. Got it?
Shit.
As soon as we get to the house, I’ll slip into Dad’s office and have a look at his journals. If there’s some top-secret new Jax feature that he started testing before he died, he definitely would have written about it in one. And if the glitch happens to be more than that, if it turns out to be an actual problem—there’s a chance Dad could’ve noticed it before he died and written about it.
We’re the first ones to arrive at our house. Layton parks down the street so we don’t freak Mom out when she gets home, and I let us in the back door with my key. The house smells so familiar—cool and minty, with just a whiff of Foxy Cat’s litter. I kind of shiver with delight. It feels so right to be back here, but at the same time all wrong. I’m not back home the way I want to be, not really. I should probably be back in my dorm, sleeping off a hangover, like Dele probably is.
Layton, on another call, heads to the kitchen. I slip through the dining room and enter the tiny side porch that my parents remodeled for Dad’s office. Even though Mom’s taken a lot of his files back to the office, she hasn’t cleaned out any of his personal stuff. His brown leather journals are still lined up neatly on the small bookshelf beside his desk. Exactly thirty-nine of them, representing the thirty-nine months he’d helped run Jax.
I pull out the last journal on the right, running my fingers over the gold stamped lettering on the cover. February 2019.
But wait. The last journal should be March. Dad died on March 20—the first day of my senior year spring break—and he would have already filled out a little over 50 percent of the book. Or 0.612903 to be exact.
I check the previous years. Then this year’s journals. January, December, November, October, September, August . . . The rest are here, in perfect order, only there’s no March. I tear through his desk and the console behind it. In the living room, I look in the drawer in the coffee table and in all the nooks and crannies of the antique secretary. No journal.
I run upstairs, two steps at a time. My heart is thumping now. It has nothing t
o do with the error message; that I can handle, even if it gets me in trouble. I just don’t like the idea of my dad’s last journal, containing the last words he wrote, being lost.
I fly into Mom and Dad’s bedroom, check the dresser, nightstands, closet, even under the bed. Nothing. The bathroom’s clear too. I walk back out into the hall. I can hear a car door slam behind the house. Arch and Gigi. Or maybe Sabine.
And then I remember something from that terrible March night.
A nurse had taken Mom and me from the waiting room at the hospital in Alexander City to a smaller room down the hall. About a half an hour later, the doctor had come in and told us Dad hadn’t made it. But before he came in, while they were still trying to save him, a young female police officer had stopped by. She told Mom that an officer would have Dad’s car towed anywhere she chose. Then she held out a white garbage bag full of items they’d collected from the car.
On our way back to Birmingham, I sorted through the items. A windbreaker with the Auburn logo, an insulated coffee cup, a beige umbrella, his duffel, a little stuffed spider Beanie Baby. The spider Beanie Baby had been a gift for me, I knew. An inside joke referring to the time a spider bit me. I’d taken it out of the bag and slept with it that night. But there was something else in that white bag.
His March journal. I remember it clearly.
“Shorie, darling,” I hear Gigi call from downstairs. “Come help me clean up this mess!”
12
ERIN
I wake as Ben wheels the truck into my driveway and push matted hair off of my sleep-swollen face. I try to put the events of last night into some kind of order, but I can’t. My headache has morphed into a massive body ache, my mouth tastes bitter, and my brain seems only to be able to recall flashes of things. Shorie’s angry face. Loud music. Me screaming about Jax. Nothing hangs together the way it should. Did I really drink that much? It doesn’t seem possible.
I focus hard on our white mission-style stucco house with its chestnut trim and leaded glass windows. There has never been such a welcome sight. Perry and I bought this house when Shorie was two, a quirky fixer-upper in a south Birmingham suburb called Hollywood. Like in its namesake, stately stone English Tudors and Spanish missions line the shady streets. We’d loved it in this house with its uneven, creaky oak floors, thick plaster walls, and every staircase, door, and banister built to last forever. We would have lasted forever too, if we’d had the chance.
The weather-warped door of the detached garage just beyond the house catches my eye. Perry always meant to upgrade to one of those doors that looked like real wood. He never got around to it, and I sure as hell won’t be doing it anytime soon. Anyway, who gives a shit about what your garage door looks like? Only people who’ve never had to deal with any real problems.
“Erin.” Ben clears his throat, and I snap back to the present.
“Here we are,” I say absently and gather my purse and the tote with my toothbrush and clothes from yesterday. I’m still wearing the flamingo pajamas and an Auburn Tigers T-shirt.
This morning, I woke in the hotel room to the sound of someone knocking on my door. When I opened it to Ben, he said it was almost checkout time, then asked if he could come in. Something had happened last night, he said, didn’t I remember? When I said no, he filled me in. I’d taken his truck, abandoned it in a parking lot next door to a fraternity house, and gotten into some kind of an altercation with Shorie. He’d received a call from Shorie and Ubered over to us.
I drank the water Ben handed me, then downed a cup of coffee. How could all that have happened without me remembering? He said blackouts are something that can just start happening to a person, especially someone who’s been under a great amount of stress, anytime, with no warning, and I should be careful. He seemed worried.
None of it sounded right to me, but I was scared, very scared, and so I meekly let him drive us home. Now, as Ben swings the plastic tubs we emptied at Shorie’s dorm out of the bed of the truck and stacks them, he seems totally shut down.
“Just leave them here,” I say.
Ben holds on to the tubs. “I can bring them in.”
“I don’t want them inside.” My voice is an exasperated growl. “We keep them in the garage.” Then I realize I said we, and there’s no “we” anymore. There’s only me. I am alone. My resolve breaks, and I dissolve into tears. Down go the tubs, and I feel Ben gently touch my arms. “I’m so embarrassed,” I sob. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I really appreciate everything you did. I’m sorry for whatever . . . whatever it is I—”
I close my mouth. Talking’s not going to do me any good anyway, not like this, when I’m so strung out. I need a shower, a huge glass of water, and then bed. The guest bed. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, I’ll sort things out. Tomorrow, I’ll pull myself together and be the mom Shorie deserves.
Ben pulls me into a hug. He feels warm and comforting, and without even thinking, I rest my head on his shoulder. My lips accidentally brush against the salty skin of his neck, and like a jolt of electricity, something inside me responds. I’ve almost forgotten what skin tastes like.
I’m so tired, it happens like a reflex, my arms lifting and circling his neck, my body moving to his. But then he makes a groaning sound, and it sounds so open, so vulnerable, that I keep going, raking my fingers up into his hair, letting him nudge my face up to meet his.
Next thing I know, we’re kissing. Only it can’t be a real kiss, can it? Because even though it’s lips and tongues and our hands on each other’s faces and in each other’s hair, it’s Ben. Ben. And something else. This kiss can’t be real because it is very, very good. Soft and gentle and moving with that secret choreography that only the best kisses have.
And then, as quickly as it began, the moment is over. The atmosphere around us changes into something heavy and dark. A storm cloud of bad ideas and unwise decisions descending. We pull apart and stare at each other in stunned, horrified silence.
“Ah.” His voice is a rasp.
I feel like I want to disappear, like it might be better if I could just die.
“No, no. I’m sorry—” I say.
“I didn’t—”
“Me neither—”
“It was just—” He glances through the leaded glass of the front door, his expression pained. Then he grips his forehead in one hand. “I hope the neighbors didn’t see.”
I look around uncertainly. Jesus. The neighbors.
“I’m sorry,” I repeat numbly.
“I’m sorry too,” Ben says. “That was . . .”
My fault. So stupid. Wrong.
“Yes,” I say. “Left field. But it’s over. Moving on, okay?”
“Okay. Yes. Moving on.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, at the office.” I unlock the door. He doesn’t move.
“The tubs,” he says. He seems forlorn.
I need to get inside. Away from Ben. Away from myself with Ben. “Just leave them,” I say firmly, step inside, and shut the door behind me. I stand in the foyer, eyes squeezed shut, like it will somehow stop the disastrous tape from running. Like I have the power to force this cataclysm I created into nonexistence. But I can’t. It’s too late, and I know it and the helplessness makes me want to wail out loud. To scream until I’m hoarse. Oh my God. I have done a thing that can never be undone.
Reality: My husband is no longer the last man I’ve been romantic with. It’s only been five months—months, not years, for God’s sake—and I kissed someone. Like a goddamn horny teenager. And it wasn’t just someone. It was Ben. Ben! Perry’s friend. My friend. Sabine’s husband. I did a monumentally stupid thing, and now our friendship is irrevocably changed. Forever. Shit. Shorie—what would she think if she knew? She would be devastated. She would kill me. She would kill Ben . . .
I force my brain to stop looping through the bombarding thoughts. Order it to start at the top. Proceed calmly.
Say it, Erin.
Reality: I’ve fucked up.
Challenge: Unfuck it all.
If that’s even possible.
I open my eyes. Force myself to take in my surroundings. The hallway is cool and comfortably cluttered with Shorie’s things: two pair of boots, and a couple of her jackets that I never got around to putting away last winter, still hanging on the hall tree. In the chipped ironstone tray on the chest, a pair of earbuds that the cat chewed. I run my hands over her pink fake fur coat and watch as bits of the fur swirl to the ground. I forbade her to wear it past the front hall because it shed worse than Foxy Cat. But she looked so glamorous in it, her shiny light-brown hair cascading over it, hazel eyes sparkling, and the dimple flashing just under the corner of her lip. My daughter looks like Perry grew her in a petri dish all by himself, but I don’t care. They are the two most beautiful human beings I have ever laid eyes on.
I pull my T-shirt over my head and let it drop to the floor, then hook my thumbs in the pajama pants and step out of them. I feel better in my sports bra and underwear, but in the hallway, I still push the thermostat down to seventy. I should start a load of laundry. And get some water, and aspirin, before I head upstairs. I snatch up the clothes and head back to the living room.
“Foxy,” I call. “Foxy Cat. Where are you?”
The room is dark and quiet, strewn with signs of Shorie’s last-minute, late-night packing. A bag from Urban Outfitters on the slouchy sectional sofa. Ripped tags and receipts on the glass coffee table. Empty hangers and a suitcase she decided she didn’t need after all. I gather it all up and dump it in a corner near the back door, then stop, staring out the windows that look into the backyard.
There’s a car in my back driveway—a black Escalade. Arch has an Escalade. But why would Perry’s father be here on a Thursday? Clutching the T-shirt and pj’s against my chest, I tiptoe into the dark kitchen.
In the low light, I can see the whitewashed cabinets and tile countertop have been wiped down. The dishwasher is gurgling away, and the perpetually stacked-up drainboard beside the farmhouse sink is empty. Foxy slinks along the legs of the table, rubbing up against something in addition to the table legs. Human legs. Instantly I’m hit with a very distinctive smell. Chanel Coco perfume. Gigi.
Until the Day I Die Page 5