Xander

 

“What’s the matter with you?” she asks, as I pace around the room like a dog which hasn’t eaten in a few days. And that’s how I feel, goddamn. It’s how I feel, a dog which is so hungry it might just start biting, howling. I go into the kitchen, ignoring her, and take some ice from the freezer. I bring it to my forehead, not caring when some of it slips through my fingers and shatters on the floor.

 

She follows me through. It’s late. We’ve fucked, we’ve eaten, and now the sun has set. It’s the first evening in months I haven’t had whisky coursing through my veins, bolstering me, making the night bearable. I’m stone-cold sober and the sun is down; it feels so strange to me I find it difficult to believe that once it didn’t feel strange.

 

“Xander? Are you okay?”

 

I’m hopping from foot to foot like I sometimes do before or after a fight. The energy compelling my body right now is like nothing I’ve ever felt before, like there’s a pinball bouncing around inside of me. “Fine,” I mutter, gritting my teeth. There’s an invisible spike in my head, buried dead-center in my brain, crushing my mind. I can’t think. I don’t know what to tell her; I don’t know what she wants to hear. I just need … I know what I need. I need it badly. But I have to stay sober just in case things get bad with Connor. I don’t want to feel resentful of Kayla or the kid, but at the same time I can’t deny that if they weren’t here, I could get shitfaced right now and there’d be no problems. They just came out of nowhere, fucking nowhere, and now they’ve taken over my life.

 

“Xander?”

 

“Mm,” I mutter, taking my cellphone and going into the bathroom. I lock the door and call Christopher.

 

“Kid?” he says.

 

“Old man,” I reply.

 

“What is it?” he pauses. “Are you drunk?”

 

“No, old man, but I want to be. I want to be so badly I don’t know if I can stop myself. Explain something to me, will you? How the fuck is a man supposed to stay sober? It makes no damn sense. Why would a man even choose to be sober when he’s got perfectly good whisky under his sink?”

 

“Xander,” she calls, knocking on the door. “Are you okay?”

 

“One minute!” I snap, way harsher than I mean to. But goddamn, can’t she just leave it be for a few minutes?

 

“You got a lady there,” he points out. “Maybe that’s a reason.”

 

“Maybe it is,” I agree. “But my head feels like it’s going to crack in half and my legs feel like they’re going to walk away from my body, so explain to me how the fuck I’m supposed to handle that.”

 

“Listen to me,” he says, his voice the type of grasping, serious tone a man uses when the other man better really listen. “You’re thinking of this all wrong. You’re trying to come up with reasons to stay sober, trying to get some justification or whatever the fuck … that ain’t the way to go about it, kid. You don’t wanna start wondering why you’re doing this. That comes later. For now, you just need to focus on the method. The method is all that matters. Stop thinking about why you shouldn’t be doing this, because that leads to relapse. That’s where that road leads every time. Trust me. I’ve been down it. You start wondering why you’re doing this, and then you resent it, and finally you decide that you’re tired of feeling this way and just say, ‘Fuck it.’ So right now all you need to think about are practical steps to stop yourself from drinking. Number one is to throw that whisky away. Number two is to climb into that lady’s arms, whoever she is, and forget about everything else. I’ve got some medication I can bring you tomorrow. I’d bring it tonight but I’ve got club business. Kid? You there?”

 

It’s only when he says that that I realize I’ve been biting my hand. I let it go. The teeth marks are deep and red. “Yeah. I’m here.”

 

“You hearing me?”

 

“Yeah, I hear you. Thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

 

“At the club.”

 

“Fine. At the club. See you later.”

 

“Throw away that whisky, Xander.”

 

“All right.”

 

I hang up the phone and go to the mirror, staring at myself. It’s like I’m looking at a different man. It’s the eyes that do it, red, bloodshot, the eyes of a drinker. I’ve never seen my eyes like that before. I won’t drink. I won’t give in like that. The old man is right. All I’m trying to do with this reasoning shit is reason myself back into a bottle. Kayla is waiting for me when I open the door, her hands folded over her knee. Her mouth is a strange shape, almost a curvy line: somewhere between concern and anger.

 

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she asks.

 

I make for the kitchen, but her expression is too urgent. I go to the couch instead; I can get the bottles after we talk. “It’s nothing,” I lie. “Just can’t sleep, is all.”

 

“Can’t sleep? Is that what you call jumping out of bed at midnight?”

 

“Yeah, that’s one way to describe it.”

 

“This is about the drinking, isn’t it?”

 

I roll my head in my shoulders. “I don’t want to talk about this, Kayla.”

 

“We don’t have to talk about it.” She shrugs. “I just thought you might want to. I thought it might help.”

 

“What, we sit around telling each other how hard our lives are and then sing some kumbaya? Next we’ll be braiding each other’s hair and doing each other’s nails.”

 

She folds her arms. “You don’t have to be such a jerk all the time.”

 

“There are quite a few folks who’d disagree with you there. But fair enough. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I really can be an incredibly polite gentleman. I’m sorry. I’ll try harder in the future.”

 

“Wow.” She rolls her eyes. “It’s like you’re intentionally trying to push my buttons.”

 

I hold my hands up. “Never. I’m a better man than that.”

 

“You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. I just think … it helps, doesn’t it, sometimes?”

 

I close my eyes and let my head fall back. “I’m sure it does,” I say into the personal darkness. “Let me tell you somethin’, then, since you really want to know. The day we found Arsen was the worst day of my life. I reckon you didn’t see him until we gave him to the morgue, which is why there was a delay, if you were ever wondering. But I spent some time with him. I sat with him, with what was left of my brother, just a blackened crisp. You ever got a bad potato chip, all crispy and burnt around the edges? That was my little brother. Nothing, not even human, burnt so badly I can’t even remember what he actually looked like sometimes.”

 

“Xander …” She puts her hand on my leg, only there ain’t anything sexual in it this time.

 

“So I went and did what any sane man’d do in that situation. I went to the nearest bar and I just started drinking. I’ll get shitfaced, I thought, and everything’ll seem better for a little while. And what everyone wants me to say—you, the men at the club—is that it didn’t help, is that really it makes me miserable. Maybe there’s some truth to that, but mostly it really did help. It helped me forget. It helped me laugh. It helped me not to care. When I’m shitfaced and I close my eyes, I see my little brother. When I’m sober, I see a burnt potato chip.

 

“So I just kept drinking, ’cause seeing my brother like that ain’t something I ever prepared for. I’m the outlawin’ one. I’m the one who deserves to be found burnt, dead and burnt. I don’t deserve to live while he’s dead. So maybe my drinking problem has got out of control. Maybe I drink too much. But the fucked-up part is that I don’t even wanna stop, ’cause when I stop I see him as he was then, and the reality is—the reality is real, and I know how stupid that sounds. I want a drink right now. This time tomorrow I reckon I’ll be climbing up these goddamn walls.”

 

I open my eyes to find Kayla crying, silent tears sliding down her cheeks. She tries to wipe them away before I see but she’s too slow. I touch her cheek, wiping them away for her. “What is it?” I ask. “Arsen?”

 

“No,” she whispers.

 

“What, then?” I wish my voice could be kinder, but with all this withdrawal shit coursing through my system, kindness is hard to find. Instead I just sit here, watching her, waiting. Her hair hangs in curls around her eyes; her fingers worry at the couch cushions.

 

“I’ve never told anybody about this before,” she says. “I didn’t tell Arsen. I didn’t tell Connor. I didn’t tell anybody.”

 

“Okay …”

 

She takes a deep breath and then talks very quickly, blurting it all out, talking so fast that words spill upon words. “When I was a little girl I never knew that it was strange that my parents were always acting so weird, always sneaking around in the day and being loud and annoying, never letting me get any sleep because all they did was have parties every single night, sometimes with other people but mostly just the two of them. They were alcoholics.” She lets out another breath, this one steadier. “They were alcoholics,” she repeats, eyes glassy. “I didn’t know the word for that, then. But that’s what they were. They couldn’t go a few days without drinking. Hell, they couldn’t even go a few hours. When I understood what they were, and what other girls’ parents were, I hated them. I really hated them. They made me sick. It wasn’t fair, you know, for them to be drunk all the time, for them to not even notice me.

 

“Why have me? That’s what always confused me. Why have me if you’re not going to care about me, or even notice me, or even acknowledge I exist? Why have me if all you want to do is get drunk and party every day? Anyway, this went on pretty much the same until I was a teenager. And then—” She stops, fighting back sobs. “And then my dad decided to drive drunk one night and swerved off the road right into a tree, killing them both. They died instantly, or that’s what the doctors told me. I went to live with my grandma after that and things were a little better, but then she died, too.” She shrugs. “I don’t mean to drop all of this on you. I just … I don’t want you to end up like them, Xander.”

 

Her words thud into me. I touch her hand, give it what I hope is a comforting squeeze. “I won’t,” I tell her. I smile sideways. “I’m a great drunk driver, anyway.”

 

She snatches her hand away. “That’s not funny!” she hisses, jumping to her feet. She stamps into the bedroom.

 

I go to the sink, meaning to empty the whisky bottles, but instead I just kneel there and look at them. It’s good whisky. Just because I’m not drinking, it doesn’t mean I should waste perfectly fine whisky. I’ll give it to the club. They can leave it behind the bar. Some of the other fellas’ll get some use out of it.

 

I leave it as it is and join Kayla in the bedroom, lying down next to her and wrapping my arms around her. She tries to stay mad for a little while, but then she starts to snore. I kiss her on the back of the head, wishing sleep would come so easily to me.