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hadn’t been good for her.
She pulled a picture from her shirt pocket and handed it to
me. The baby. I’d seen him after he was born, hooked up to
monitors in the intensive-care unit. He’d looked barely alive,
his puny little chest struggling to rise and fall above ribs like
bird bones. I hadn’t been able to look at him for long. I felt
sorry for her that this flimsy piece of paper was all she had of
her baby.
“He was completely vulnerable,” she said. “Completely
dependent on me to take care of him.” She pressed her fingers
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to her mouth as her eyes filled. “I don’t care how hard this is,
being here. I’d climb Mount Everest for him. I’ll gladly give
up alcohol to have him back. To be a true mother to him.”
I stared at the baby, and something snapped inside me. I saw
bruises where this tube or that entered his body. Saw veins
under his skin. He was so defenseless. Fragile. Damaged. If
they said it was alcohol that hurt him, then maybe it was. And
I’d done my part to make his mother a drunk. For the second
time in an hour, my eyes burned.
“Marcus,” Laurel said. “Please get sober. If you don’t, then
I don’t want you coming over to The Sea Tender once I’m
home. Understand?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t understand.”
“If you don’t get sober, I’ll have to avoid you.” Her voice
broke. What she was saying cost her something.
“You’d cut me out of your life? Out of Maggie and—” I
lifted the picture in my hand “—this little guy’s lives?”
She nodded. “Get sober, Marcus,” she pleaded. “I love you,
and you’re a good man, deep inside. I know you are.”
No, I wasn’t. There’d been something off about me, right
from the start. I always managed to push away the people I
cared about. The people who cared about me.
I tried to give the picture back to her, but she cupped her
hands around my hand, forcing my fingers to tighten around
the photograph.
“Keep it,” she said. “It’s yours.”
I stared at her, the moment so charged it stole my voice.
What’s mine? I wanted to ask. The picture? Or the baby?
But the moment passed. She looked away from me, quickly.
So quickly, that she told me all I needed to know.
before the storm
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* * *
I drank half a bottle of whiskey that night, staring at the
baby’s picture. The booze didn’t taste as good as it usually did.
After a while, in a moment of monumental strength, I poured
every damn ounce of alcohol I had in the house down the
kitchen drain. I called AA’s twenty-four-hour number. There
was a meeting in Wilmington the next morning at seven.
I couldn’t sleep that night, afraid I’d miss my alarm. I left the
house at five-thirty and drove through a pink dawn to Wilming­
ton. Found the church building where the meeting would be
held.Forced myself to walk into the room and was bowled over
to see Flip Cates inside the doorway.He was a rookie cop in Surf
City,a year or two older than me,and he’d made that same hour
drive I’d just made to get there. He gave me a surprised smile.
An arm around my shoulders as he led me into the room.
“Glad to see you, Marcus,” he said.
“This your first meeting, too?” I asked.
He laughed. “More like my hundred and first,” he said, and
I thought, If he could do it, maybe I can, too.
I hit meetings every night, piling the miles on my pickup.
Flip got me a construction job with a boss who’d let me take
off for a meeting on days when I knew I was sinking. I doubt
I would have made it through without Flip, because eighty
percent of me wasn’t sold on sobriety. Eighty percent of me
craved a beer. But that other twenty percent was stubborn as
hell. It hung on to the image of a baby chained to tubes and
wires. Of a woman who’d said the words “I love you” to me,
even if she’d only said them as a sister-in-law to a brother-in­
law. That part of me was stronger than I’d ever known.
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I kept my sobriety to myself. I didn’t want to hear Jamie say
he was proud of me, when I’d wanted him to be proud of me
all along. I didn’t want to feel him watching me, waiting for
me to screw up. And I didn’t want to feel the burning guilt
that seared me every time I remembered that I’d slept with my
brother’s wife.
I got jumpy as Laurel’s release day neared. I wanted to see
her, sure, but living near her again? A mistake—for both of
us. I didn’t want to be her brother-in-law. I wanted more than
that. Not being able to have it, yet living next door to her,
would be torture. The last thing I needed with only two
months of sobriety under my belt was torture.
I had an AA buddy from Asheville. I decided to move [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]