18
AUDRA’S MIND ACHED. The world had stretched so thin she imagined she could tear a hole in it with a fingertip. Everything moved in jerks, either too slow or too fast, and everyone spoke in jumbles of sound. Part of her knew it was exhaustion, but the other part felt she moved through a dream, that none of this was real. That it was happening to some other woman in some other town, as she watched it all play out like a strange television show.
She had lain awake through the night watching the red light on the camera, waiting for it to blink out, fearing that when it did, they would come again, put a gun to her head. At moments she wondered if that had really happened at all. Had she simply dreamed it, one of those nightmares that follows you into waking? But she did fall asleep at some point, only to wake again, like dragging herself up through tar, her heart hammering, lungs unable to grab the air they needed.
When she opened her eyes, Whiteside stood over her.
He hunkered down next to the bunk.
‘You’ve got to let them go,’ he said. ‘They’re gone, and that’s all there is to it.’
Paralyzed, she couldn’t raise a fist to strike him.
Part of her mind asked, am I dreaming? Is he really there?
His hand came into her view, the fingers open as if reaching for a glass of water. They slipped around her throat. Pressure. Just a little. Enough to hurt.
‘Don’t think I won’t,’ he said. ‘If I have to.’
Then he let go and stood upright, turned, left the cell.
Alone again, she gasped, her heart suddenly beating hard and fast. Chest rising and falling, grabbing at air.
She couldn’t tell how long it took for the waves of fear to ebb away, only that the sun had risen over the world outside, coloring everything around her in deep blues and grays.
After a while, Audra became less certain that Whiteside had been there at all. He might have been a phantom of her sleep-deprived brain. Another piece of her sanity breaking and falling away.
Perhaps that was the point. To get inside her head, break her from within. Make her crazy, keep her scared. Because scared is easy to control. Just as Patrick had done all the years they were together.
Her husband had made her doubt every single facet of her being, kept her constantly off balance until she barely knew up from down. Every morning, he’d berate her for her hangover. Every evening he’d come home with another bottle. One day telling her how pathetic she was for needing the pills, the next day getting another prescription filled for her.
It had started the evening after her defeat, when she gave Sean a bottle of formula for the first time. Patrick had come home from work with a bottle of white wine. He held it out to her as she fed their son.
‘What’s that for?’ Audra asked.
‘If you’re not breast-feeding,’ Patrick said, ‘there’s no reason why you can’t have a drink.’
‘I don’t want it,’ she said.
She hadn’t touched alcohol since she’d discovered she was pregnant, had sworn she wouldn’t touch it again after the baby was born. Too many nights had been lost to the blur. She wasn’t going to get pulled into that mire again.
Patrick shrugged and nodded. ‘Okay. It’ll be in the fridge if you change your mind.’
If she had possessed the clarity of mind to ask why he’d brought home the bottle of wine, why he wanted her to be drunk again after all these months of sobriety, things might have been different. But she didn’t ask. She was too broken for rational thought.
The night feeds came and went, Audra’s mind dimming with each one, sleep seeming like a strange and vague notion, not something she could actually indulge in. In the morning, Margaret appeared, volunteered to take over and let Audra rest. Audra tried to resist, but Margaret’s insistence and Patrick’s hard stare won out. She handed Sean over to his grandmother and went to the bedroom, where she dreamed her milk had poisoned him, made him sick, and she woke with an aching sorrow that did not leave her as the day dragged on.
Audra saw the bottle of wine there in the fridge that evening, but she ignored it, even though she was very, very thirsty.
Another night of fragmented sleep and toxic dreams, and even as she held Sean close, listening to him gulp down formula, she felt something had broken between them. She had let him down, and she had lost something she could never get back, no matter how hard she wished for it.
In the morning, Margaret came again. And, again, Audra handed her baby over. Once more, she went to bed. Now the mattress and the sheets felt like quicksand, and she wanted to be swallowed up, to stay in the dark forever.
That night, she poured herself a glass of wine. But just the one.
The night after, she had another glass. And a second.
A day later, another bottle of wine appeared in the fridge. Audra finished the first, and opened the next. She didn’t stop until she had passed out drunk on the couch. Patrick woke her in the morning, told her she should be ashamed of herself.
That night, he brought home a bottle of vodka.
Again, looking back, she should have asked why. But the lure of the haze was too strong to resist, when all she wanted was to blot everything out.
Weeks passed like that, nights and days blurring into drunken hazes and oily hangovers. The nanny had been in the apartment almost forty-eight hours before Audra noticed her. Jacinta was her name, a pretty young woman from Venezuela who looked at Audra with an expression of pity when they met in the hallway.
‘You’re not fit to care for Sean,’ Patrick explained, ‘so I hired someone who is.’
Audra went to bed for four days, only emerging for another bottle of whatever Patrick had left in the fridge or cupboards for her. On the fifth day, a doctor came to the apartment. One Audra didn’t recognize. He smelled bad, sweat and mildew, masked with aftershave. He asked her a few questions, scribbled on a pad, and gave the paper to Patrick. Her husband came back after an hour with a bottle of pills and a glass of water. She refused the water, downed two pills with a mouthful of neat vodka, and went to sleep.
Looking back, it seemed to Audra that she had been sucked down by a sinkhole, unable to climb out again. Every time she resolved to go without a drink or a pill, Patrick would appear with a full glass, or another rattling bottle.
Sometimes she wondered about her child. She was surprised one day to pass through the living room on her way to the kitchen and see Sean walking across the room into Jacinta’s arms, a tottering gait, his hands up and flapping, giggling as he went.
‘When did he start that?’ Audra asked, suddenly aware that months must have passed without her noticing.
‘A week ago,’ Jacinta said. ‘You saw him do it yesterday. You asked me the same thing.’
Audra blinked. ‘Did I?’
‘Do you want to hold him?’
Audra didn’t answer. She went to the kitchen and fetched another bottle of wine.
She remembered Sean’s third birthday. They had a small gathering at Patrick’s parents’ apartment. Patrick had hidden the booze and the pills, told her he wanted her sober.
‘Don’t show me up,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t embarrass me.’
The fog had drifted from her mind that morning, and she studied herself in the mirror after she showered. The darkness around her eyes, the blotches on her cheeks. The skin too loose on her bones. But she did her best with the makeup and the new clothes Patrick had bought. She presented herself to him before they left to walk the few blocks south.
‘You’ll do,’ he said, a weary exhalation.
She walked next to Patrick along Central Park West, Jacinta hold-ing Sean’s hand as he tottered ahead. The buzz of the traffic fizzed in her brain, the cool air on her skin making her tingle, aware of the sensation of her clothing against her body, the weight of her feet on the ground. In spite of the rumbling ache behind her eyes, she felt something she hadn’t experienced for so long: she felt alive.
‘Patrick,’ she said.
‘Mm?’ He kept his gaze ahead, didn’t turn to look at her.
‘Maybe I should get some help.’
He didn’t answer, stopped walking. Audra stopped too, both of them standing like islands, the flow of people like water around them.
‘Maybe I should talk to somebody,’ she said. ‘About the drinking. And the pills. Try to change.’
Patrick remained quiet, but his jaw worked as he ground his teeth.
‘I didn’t know it was my son’s birthday until you told me.’
Tears came, hot on her cheeks.
Patrick took her hand, squeezed it hard, squeezed until it hurt. ‘We’ll talk about it when we get home,’ he said. ‘Pull yourself together. Don’t embarrass me in front of my mother’s friends.’
‘Why do you keep me like this?’ she asked. ‘Why keep me around at all? I’m not a wife to you. I’m not a mother to my son. Why don’t you just let me go?’
He squeezed her hand again, harder, and she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out.
‘Do you want to humiliate me?’ he asked, leaning in close. ‘Is that what you want? So help me, I will beat you senseless right here on the street. Is that what you want me to do?’
Audra shook her head.
‘Then shut your fucking mouth and start walking,’ he said.
Audra wiped at her cheeks, sniffed, got herself under control, and walked with her hand in his, the bones aching.
At his parents’ apartment, people milled between the tables laden with finger food and glasses of sparkling wine. Audra watched the bubbles, imagined the feel of them on her tongue, the sweetness of the swallow. She and Patrick sat at a table in the center of the room, Sean in a highchair, Jacinta feeding him a piece of cake.
Patrick Senior sat quiet in a corner, his hands quivering in his lap, the dementia by now evident for all to see. The guests ignored him, as did his son and wife. From the other side of the room, his distant eyes met Audra’s, focused, only for a moment, but long enough for her to wonder if the old man saw her. Did he recognize her, the way she recognized him, each lost and alone in a room full of people?
Margaret came to sit with Audra and Patrick Junior. Father Malloy – the priest who had christened their son – followed behind, smiling. Margaret took Patrick’s hand in hers.
‘Now, you two,’ she said, ‘isn’t it time you gave me another grandchild? We can’t have Sean growing up an only child, like Patrick.’
Patrick blushed and smiled as Margaret squeezed his knee. And Audra caught a glimpse of her function in the marriage, then. She shivered and counted the minutes until she could go home and retreat to the haze.