by Aubrey Watts
“We need to talk,” he said, “It doesn’t matter how many dates we go on or how many gifts I give you. You’re never going to forgive me are you? This isn’t working is it?”
“No,” I whispered, studying my hands. “It isn’t…”
I met eyes with him—briefly—and everything he wanted to say but couldn’t washed over his face all at once. “I know,” he said instead, releasing a deep breath and standing up.
He paused in front of the table and smiled down at me sadly.
“I think I should go,” he whispered, bending down to kiss me on the cheek. “I’m sorry. About everything.”
I frowned at him as he squared his shoulders and walked away. “But what about our food!” I called after him, gathering the attention of a few other diners. “You’re my ride! And the bracelet! I can’t keep it…”
“You can,” he said before walking out the door. “I want you to have it.”
And just like that he was gone.
A sad sense of finality crept its way through my veins. A few people gave me strained looks of pity and my cheeks flushed a bright shade of red. I had to get out of here. I pulled on my jacket and grabbed my clutch, stepping out into the foggy night.
Chapter 10
—
Soft jazz poured from a dimly lit lounge and followed me down the street. I walked until my feet hurt—until the tentative loneliness in my chest dissolved into something just a little more bearable.
Poulsbo wasn’t a large town by any means—but this part was new to me—and the night seemed to be stacked against my favor. This was the fourth time I circled this neighborhood. But I learned my lesson about asking for directions. Earlier, when my journey was still fresh, I stopped in front of a heavy rusted gated to ask a homeless man where the nearest bus stop was.
He wasn’t any help. “You’re like Alice,” he laughed, petting his matted dog. “Lost down the rabbit hole.”
And maybe I was—but now I just wanted to go home—and I began to relinquish myself to the reality that I had no fucking idea where that was. Unfamiliar street signs cited the names of members of the royal court and I stopped to lean against a flaking building on an uneven patch of concrete, appreciating the irony of it all. Fluorescent streetlights—faux beacons of direction—stared down at me mockingly—offering me a little less insecurity as I clenched a cigarette between my lips and lit it.
I caught a glimpse of my wedding ring and the bracelet and I sighed as I removed them both, stuffing them deep into the bottom of my clutch. Resplendent artifacts of my marriage; that’s all they were. If Stephen were true to form I would have the divorce papers in my mailbox by the end of the week.
A deep melancholy settled into the pit of my stomach. I willed myself not to cry and exhaled a bout of smoke from my lungs, waving my hand in the air to dissipate it.
My phone rang in my purse and I fished it out.
“Hello?” I answered, sounding more hostile than intended.
“Venus?”
I raked my fingers through my hair and sighed, slouching back against the building. It was my sister. “What’s up, Lu?”
“You said you would call me after dinner,” she said, ignoring the question, “are you alright? How did it go?”
“Right.” I twirled a strand of hair around my finger and looked around. “Sorry…honestly I just forgot. It’s been a pretty crazy night.”
“Really?” There was some commotion on the other end of the line, then the sound of a car door dinging and slamming shut. “So how did it go? I’m guessing I shouldn’t be expecting Stephen on our breakfast date?”
Breakfast date…
Right—I promised her I would meet her new boyfriend. We were going to do a double date. My mental note-to-self bank was getting fuller and fuller by the minute.
“Yeah,” I answered vaguely, ashing my cigarette, “probably not.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah,” I breathed, “shit.”
“That prick.”
A small smile etched its way across my face. Luna always knew exactly what to say to make me feel better. “No…it’s fine really. It was a pretty mutual agreement.”
“You’re still upset though.”
It was an observation—not a question—and I nodded even though she couldn’t see me. Sometimes I swore she knew me better than I knew myself.
“Do you need me to come over?”
My phone beeped and I looked down at it. The ‘low battery’ message flashed across the screen. “Nah,” I answered. “I appreciate it but I kind of just want to be alone right now. Do me a favor though…don’t tell mom about this. God, I definitely can’t deal with her right now.”
“I won’t. But are you sure you’re going to be okay?”
“Positive. I’ll call you tomorrow alright?”
“Wait—” she interrupted before I could hang up. “I know it might be awkward now…considering…but are we still on for breakfast on Monday?”
“Of course,” I said, “I wouldn’t miss it.”
“Great!” I could practically hear the smile in her voice. “Love you.”
“Love you too.”
With that—I pressed ‘end call’—exhaling a deep breath as I continued down the sidewalk. I still didn’t know where the hell I was going but remaining stagnant was making me restless.
I sighed and fished a silver flask from the inside pocket of my jacket, taking a long drink and bracing myself for the burn. My mother’s words rotated in constant rotation in my head. Maybe she was right.
Maybe I was a tragedy.
T H E N
Our backyard was packed with guests; some of them family, some of them neighbors and a few of them people my mother and Jeff worked with at the University. Claiming she still felt down in the dumps in the wake of my father’s death, my mother wanted to throw a party, and her and Jeff’s looming three-year anniversary gave her as good a reason to as any…
It might not have been a very good reason, sure, but no one was about to turn down the free booze and food.
This wasn’t just the year my father died. It was the year I turned fourteen. The year my mother started writing about me. The year my body shot up by six inches. The year I got my braces. And the year I started to notice boys more than just objectively. These events, all of them in close succession, would later be what I would come to know as “the birth of my depression.”
Fiona and I were sitting in the grass overlooking the impromptu festivities “You’ve really never tried it?” she questioned, raising an eyebrow at me.
I shook my head and eyed the bottle of dripping peach schnapps between her legs. She nicked it from my mothers vast collection when she wasn’t looking, running into the field behind our house with it hidden in the band of her skirt and a plate of hors d'oeuvres balanced between her hands.
“Gross!” she exclaimed, spitting a wad of caviar into the grass. She washed down the taste with the schnapps, offering the bottle to me.
“I don’t know…”
“Oh come on,” she urged, taking another drink as the cigarette we were sharing wavered between her fingers. Nicotine I could handle. Drinking was something I forever associated with my father. But I didn’t tell effortlessly-cool Fiona that. “It’s not that bad, I promise.”
“Just don’t hold it for too long in your mouth,” she instructed, stretching out in the grass limb by limb. Her crop top rode further up her torso, revealing a patch of bare skin. “It’s almost like juice or something.”
I took the bottle from her with unsteady hands and lifted it to my mouth, taking a slow drink. She was right of course. It wasn’t so bad at all. It was actually pretty damn good.
The second time I ever drank was shortly after.
My mother and Jeff were going skiing in Colorado to celebrate their anniversary (as if they hadn’t enough already) and much to me, Fiona, and Luna’s joint excitement, they were leaving us home alone to fend for ourselves for the weekend.
My mother left the house that morning wearing a large fuzzy hat that resembled polar bear fur. I called it ridiculous and she waved a perfectly filed nail at all of us, warning us of the repercussions that would come if we threw a party.
So naturally we did, or Fiona did at least. If nothing else, it gave her a reason to make-out with her latest boyfriend, an older boy (or man I suppose) whose name I never learned.
Students from both high schools in Poulsbo flooded through our front door in hoards. Someone brought a keg and planted it in our living room. Luna went tooth to nail with Fiona in protest of the whole thing, but eventually she gave up and disappeared into her bedroom with Minx tucked under one arm and a book under the other.
A beautiful girl with red hair and freckles, one of Fiona’s friends, shoved a drink in my hand and smiled at me before sauntering away. I shifted against the wall I was leaning on and stared down at the Styrofoam cup, sloshing around the unidentified substance before chugging it. Three drinks later and I was a people person; the light of the party; the one making everyone laugh.
Did anyone in attendance that night realize I was only fourteen? That my father just died? That I was hurting?
My mother and Jeff returned from their weekend to find a trashed house and two very inebriated daughters; but it paled in comparison to their own drama. Apparently Jeff got drunk and made the moves on another woman on the slopes and my mother realized, in a brief moment of clarity, that maybe he “wasn’t the one after all.”
The divorce papers were filed two months later and “irreconcilable differences” were scribbled down as the reason. I sat on Fiona’s bed as she packed, moving around her room like a cyclone and tearing clothing off hangers as a cigarette dangled from her mouth.
“You promise you’ll write?” I asked her for the fifth or sixth time.
She stuffed a bunch of jeans in her suitcase and looked up at me briefly, ashing the end of her cigarette. “Yeah, kid,” she said as she zipped the overflowing bag and hauled it out the door. “Scouts honor.”
She never did of course. But it was true what they said. When one door swung shut another swung open. Soon, my braces came off, my body filled out, and the grief that took shelter inside of me after my fathers death dulled into something just a little more like teenage angst.
I fell in love with alcohol before I even knew what love was. It made every situation better. It got me through sessions with therapists who tried to pick apart my brain, through my mothers drawn out psychobabble on why I was so “detached from reality,” and most importantly of all, through high school.
When sticky-sweet beverages like peach schnapps no longer satisfied me, I experimented. Tequila was an old friend whose presence was always appreciated at parties. Whiskey was the crush I stared at longingly from my locker. And Vodka…well…how do you really describe your first real heartbreak?
My mother did what she did best. She ignored the problem, if she even thought of it as one. She was just happy to have found a muse. A subject to write about that would make people actually stop and listen; the woes of adolescent drinking as told by her eldest daughter. It was only when I threw it in her face that she would react with any sense of chagrin.
“I don’t understand why you behave like this,” she’d say, leaning against the bathroom door with a look of contempt as I vomited. Then, she’d smack her lips together and shake her head at me as if I was the single greatest mistake she ever made. “Do you want to end up like your father?”
It was her usual repartee.
“Mom,” Luna would start, holding my hair back away from my face.
But it was never any use.
“This isn’t about you,” my mother would tell her. “You’re the good one. Your sister, however, needs to harness onto her inner power and get over this life hurdle.”
Life hurdle? Inner power? What hippie bullshit.
Since when was she so prolific?
Freshman, sophomore, and junior year rolled by like nothing and by the time my senior year was coming to a close I had garnered a reputation that followed me across the stage as I accepted my diploma. One of my “friends” even joked that she hoped I lived through college.
I spent those years drinking before class. Drinking after class. Sometimes even drinking during class. I kept empty bottles of Pavlov stuffed beneath the twin bed in my dorm room as reminders of my idiocy, and when they piled up too high to hide any longer, I began sticking them in every nook and cranny I could find.
People around campus knew me as the girl who needed to be carried home from bars but always caught a second wind; the girl who never seemed capable of remembering a thing. But it would take my freshman roommate asking to be reassigned to a different room for me to realize the full extent of my problem.
As a result, I spent the rest of that year and the following years hung over and alone, but my grades spiked and I graduated with honors, as well as a list of fuck-ups that would impress even the most seasoned alcoholic.
Except now my drinking was no longer so easily excused. Excessive drinking, it turned out, wasn’t acceptable outside the pockets of high school and college—out in the big bad world where you need it the most. And everyone who took notice made sure to remind me of it; their tones soothing, their eyes laced with judgment.
I could practically hear their thoughts.
‘Why doesn’t she just quit?’
‘It cant be that hard can it?’
But they didn’t know a thing.
If they did, they’d know that what small amount of power I had left was relinquished to a girl I once knew as my stepsister and a bottle of peach schnapps when I was still just a kid.
Chapter 11
—
I paced back and fourth in front of the glowing emergency entrance and clawed my fingers through my dripping hair. The chain of events that led me here were a blur, but my scrapped knees, tattered dress, and muddy hands were pretty good indicators.
I was relieved when I stumbled upon the bridge. Not because it was practically safe looking, but because for the first time in what felt like hours, I had managed to find a landmark I recognized. One that pointed me towards home.
But it was the towering man standing on the edge of it who took me off guard. He was intimidating and under normal circumstances—I might have been afraid to be alone with him. But these weren’t normal circumstances.
I stepped on the unsteady platform and approached him hesitantly, not wanting to catch him off guard with my presence.
“Careful,” I called out to him, gripping the railing until my knuckles flushed of color. If the fall didn’t kill him the strength of the water certainly would. “The current is strong tonight.”
He jumped when he noticed me and for one brief moment we met eyes. Everything that happened next unfolded in slow motion. He struggled to regain his balance on the buckling wood and right when our fingers touched, he slipped from my grasp.
I wasn’t strong enough to pull his hefty form back over the edge—and so he fell—all twenty feet—into the harsh current below.
The world spun slowly off its axis.
My empty stomach lurched forward and before I realized what I was doing—I was taking action—clawing my way down the rocky hill and into the water after him.
He was still alive when I pulled him onto the edge of the muddy bank, although just barely. And as I bent my mouth to his, I silently thanked myself for taking that CPR class my freshman year of college.
After finishing off my cigarette and squeezing the excess moisture from my hair, I entered the emergency room lobby and approached a woman seated behind a glass partition. She raised her head and slid the window open when she noticed me, grazing her eyes over my frazzled appearance. “Admittance or visitation?”
“Uh…” I rubbed my throat as I searched for the right response. “I’m here to see the man who was brought in about an hour ago. For a near drowning.”
“Are you a relative?”
“No,” I answered, shaking my head. Was this really so hard for her to figure out? The smell of murky river water practically radiated off of me. “I’m the woman who pulled him from the water.”
A look of sudden understanding etched its way across her face. “Of course.” She nodded and sat up straighter in her chair, pressing a button that opened up a second set of doors. “He’s in room 201. Walk to the very end of the hall. It’ll be the first room on the right hand side.”
I thanked her and made my way down the dimly lit hall as my wet heels clicked against the tile. When I approached the room I lingered nervously outside of it.
I swallowed hard when another man stepped into view, lingering over a hospital bed with his muscular back turned away from me. I tried to turn and walk away before he noticed me but it was too late. The sound of my heels must have given me away.
“You’re her,” he said, taking a step towards me. His glazed over blue eyes gave me a slow once over as a look of pure gratitude surfaced in his expression.
“I…” I shook my head, feeling my mouth go dry. But before I could finish speaking, he pulled me into a tight hug that made my heart beat a little faster in my chest. He smelled amazing. But that wasn’t something I should have been noticing given the circumstances.
“I’m Liam,” he said huskily, extending a calloused hand to me. He nodded at the bruised man asleep in the bed. “That there is my brother Anders.”
“I know,” I answered automatically. “I mean…”
“Right.” Liam laughed, rubbing his neck. “You saved his life.”
I shifted awkwardly from foot to foot and let go of his hand as a lump surfaced in my throat.
“What’s your name?” he asked, twisting the toothpick dangling between his teeth. His eyes never left mine.
“Venus.”
“Like the planet?”
“Yeah,” I laughed, “I mean I guess…”
“Well, Venus,” he said, waving at an empty chair beside two beeping machines. “You look like you might want to sit down.”
“Uh—” I ran a hand over my damp dress and turned for the door. “That’s nice of you to offer but I just came to see if he was okay…”
