The Fix

by Kristin Rouse

  “Not before we met. Your relapse.”

  My mouth falls open in a little O, and I think very, very carefully about what it is I want to say.

  “Honey, I haven’t given it a whole lot of thought. Other than as what it symbolized, I mean. To tell the truth, I don’t know if I want to know what all I did. I doubt I’d be very proud of myself.”

  “But you’d have remembered if you’d done anything really, really terrible, right?”

  “I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I still don’t remember how I broke my leg.”

  “Oh. Right.” She’s twirling loose strands of her hair around her index and second fingers, pulling the locks so taut I have to wonder if it hurts.

  I ask her if she’s okay, and she flippantly says ‘yes’ and goes back to her own reading. I stand up to head out onto the front porch to smoke a cigarette, and feel a momentary sense of relief at not being grilled. I don’t know what’s gotten into her, but something’s off, no matter what it is she’s saying.

  So I ask her again when I come back inside. She double-taps the corner of her tablet to place an electronic bookmark and sets it aside.

  “I’d just been thinking about something, and I’m sure it’s stupid. But I was thinking about you and that girlfriend of your brother’s….”

  My throat goes dry.

  “… and I guess I just figured that maybe if you’d been so out of your mind as to, you know—do what you did then—that maybe you had been those days too, and you just don’t remember it.”

  I run my knuckles along my jaw, trying not to clench it hard enough to break teeth.

  “Jules, I’d never, ever cheat on you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Her silence and the way she looks down at her lap confirms that that’d been exactly what she was thinking.

  “I don’t get where this came from,” I tell her. “Why would you think I’d do that?”

  “I know you wouldn’t,” she says, pointing at me. “But you’ve said that when you drink, you aren’t really, you know… you.”

  Frustrated, I rub my hands on my face and shake my head. “This seems really unfair, Jules. Like you’re accusing me of being unfaithful when you know how much I love you. And I don’t think I deserve it.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says with a faint sigh. “It just had been something I’ve been wondering about. I know it’s not fair. Can we forget it?”

  “Sure,” I say, although I know I won’t be able to, and neither will she.

  Even more distressingly, I have no idea whether or not she’s possibly right.

  ***

  It’s Anja’s birthday, and the five of us are going out to celebrate. Jules is working late, but we’re going some place literally down the street from our house, so we all decided it made the most sense to meet here and walk over there together. I’m used to having the place to myself, but there’s something different about today I can’t quite put my finger on. I went to AA earlier, I jogged, I finished a book I’d really been enjoying. But something is really, really bothering me.

  We haven’t talked about Jules questioning me about my relapse days, like we said we wouldn’t. I know I’m not the only one thinking about them, though. It probably says a lot about me, and a lot about the asshole I am when I’m drinking, that I still can’t answer her initial question—no part of sober-me would even look twice at another woman. Why would I, when I have literally the most gorgeous, amazing girlfriend I could ever hope for?

  But I get what’s bothering Jules, because the same thing is bothering me—I don’t remember what happened. The whole terrible clump of days is lost to my memory in quite literally the worst blackout I’ve ever had. But something in my gut tells me if I had done that, even thought about doing that, I would remember. I’d beat my own ass over it. I’d remember every terrible moment and know what a scumbag I was. My gut, of course, has never been all that reliable, but I want so much to believe that about myself.

  I take a long, hot shower to shake out the cobwebs in my head and get myself together. I step out, put a razor to my cheeks to shear away a couple of days’ worth of stubble, then get dressed. Jules has already laid out the dress she’s wearing along with a pair of impossibly high, sexy heels. I don’t have the versatile wardrobe she does. All I have are the same few button-down shirts I had at Christmas. First new paycheck I get, I’m getting myself some new clothes, I decide, if only to look a little more like a guy Jules would date.

  I’m buttoning the shirt I decide looks the least bad up to my throat and start looking for where my ties might have been stashed when I see it. Simple white button-down. Breathable cotton. Crisp from starch, even though the last person who would have starched it did so well over a year ago. Tucked under the collar is the ugliest tie on the face of the planet: the tie Mac loved wearing to drive Dylan and me insane on Thanksgiving because he thought it was the funniest thing in the world how much we hated it.

  I yank Mac’s shirt off its hanger and press it against my face. I move the fabric around and around, taking deep, not-so-steady inhales as I go.

  No… no….

  I’d been at an AA meeting when Jules had unpacked the last few of my boxes. She’d texted me that she’d saved one for us to unpack together to officially make the place ours. It’d been the obligatory junk box—I hadn’t even thought about the box that had lived under my futon. I wasn’t even the one who carried it out of my old place or into this one. It had been amongst a couple of things Lukas had asked me where I wanted dropped off. I’d said the storage closet, and forgotten about it. Apparently, Jules hadn’t.

  I search the house for the rest of the box’s contents. The cookbooks that had been in with the shirt are on the squat bookshelf in the corner of the kitchen. I can’t believe I haven’t noticed them there before right now. The photo albums made it onto the shelf above her desk along with some of her own. She’d tried to mix our stuff together seamlessly, make it all belong together like it was always meant to. But not this stuff. This stuff… No. It shouldn’t be any where near our stuff. This stuff is special.

  Anja’s voice lets me know I’m no longer alone in the house. “I could do your makeup before we go,” she says, obviously to Jules.

  “You stay away from my face with your chemicals, woman. It’s your birthday, not your wedding day,” Jules replies.

  I step into the living room, still shaking. All four of them are there, but I only see Jules.

  “You… You hung this shirt up?” My eyes feel like they’re about to bug out of my head as I hold the offending garment up to her.

  She quirks her head as she looks over Mac’s shirt in my hands and nods. “Yeah, it was getting creased. My iron crapped out on me or I’d have smoothed them out. It probably won’t look so bad if you want to wear it tonight, but that tie is ugly as sin. I meant to ask you what possessed you to ever buy it in the first place.”

  I’d asked the same question of Mac years ago.

  “I told you about this tie. I told you who it belonged to that day. Weren’t you listening? How… how could you do this?” I hiss at her. My voice doesn’t sound like my own.

  “Hey, what’s wrong?” Anja asks, stepping between the pair of us like she’s still my sponsor. I step around her to get closer to my girlfriend.

  “How could you do that, Jules?” I ask again. My voice is even more strangled.

  Her eyes are huge in response and shock. She’s looking at me like she doesn’t know me.

  “I thought it was just—”

  “This was Mac’s!” I scream. “I kept it in that box so it would still smell like him! And now it smells like us! It smells like your shampoo and my cigarettes and your fucking good-for-the-environment candles, and it doesn’t smell like him anymore!”

  “I-I’m sorry! I didn’t know!” she yelps. I only half-see Mattias and Lukas stepping up next to her, their eyes challenging me to scream at her again.

  But I can’t stop. I can’t stop, or I honestly wo
uld. “You did this with all of my stuff. You moved it all in like it’s as much yours as it is mine. But it’s not, got it? I might be mooching off you and useless to you for anything but a clean house and a decent lay but this shit is still mine, and I should have made the call about what to do with it. You should have asked me before you unpacked this stuff! It smelled like him! It used to smell like him and it doesn’t anymore!”

  “I’m sorry,” she cries. “Ez, please, don’t be—”

  I throw the shirt down at her feet and my jaw clenches tighter and tighter. Then I feel pressure against my chest—Lukas’s forearm presses me against the wall and Mattias’s voice, ominous and threatening, booms in my ears. It takes me a long second to process how much being restrained by them hurts.

  “Take a walk, Ezra,” Mattias says.

  I resist the urge to punch him in his smug fucking face.

  “Fuck you. You don’t live here.”

  “You’re being a prick to my sister, and that doesn’t fly in any house, period. Take. A fucking. Walk,” Lukas practically picks me up by my collar and shoves me towards the door.

  I narrow my eyes at all of them. Mattias and Lukas glare back like they’re considering kicking my ass, as tears stream down Jules’ face. Anja’s eyes are darting frantically around the entire scene. I decide I don’t give a shit and palm my cigarettes and slam the door behind me as I take off.

  A storm is rolling in—the air feels electric and there’s a musky, pre-rain scent to everything. I glare at the sidewalk as I stalk my way up the opposite way of the restaurant. I hadn’t even thought to bring a coat, and the sleeves of my dress shirt aren’t doing much to block the brisk wind that’s whipping past. Maybe I should break out into a run, let endorphins cool my temper. My dress socks send my feet slipping in my shoes when I try. I stick to walking. That’s how Anja catches up with me.

  “Ezra, wait!”

  “Leave me alone, Anja.”

  “No.” Her heels clatter on the sidewalk as she catches up to me and grabs my arm at the elbow.

  I jerk it away.

  “I don’t want to fucking talk right now,” I snap.

  She grabs my arm again. Her nails sink into my forearm through my shirt, a squeeze of their sharp pressure is all it takes to bring me to a stop and spin me towards her. “Fine. You don’t have to talk to me,” she says. “You just have to let me stay with you.”

  “God damn it, Anja….”

  “No. No, a temper tantrum is not going to send you spiraling again, not when I can help. That’s what this is, isn’t it?”

  A temper tantrum. I would never hit a woman, and especially not my best friend, but I definitely want to lash out when I’m being compared to a four-year-old.

  “That belonged to my dad,” I say, my voice breaking. “It smelled like him. It smelled like the terrible Castile soap he used and baby powder and the hot tea he always drank. It smelled like him and it was all I had left of him and it’s gone.”

  “Scent doesn’t last on clothing forever,” Anja says sadly. “It can’t possibly. You know that.”

  “If she’d left it in the fucking box, it might have.”

  “Where? Where you’d never smell it anyway?”

  “You don’t get it.”

  “What it is for a parent to be dead? No, you’re right, I don’t. My parents are still alive and just won’t speak to me. Like hell I don’t get what it is to lose them. And it’s not like Jules and Mat and Luk have ever lost a father or anything. It’s not like they know how much that hurts. She said she’s sorry. She didn’t mean to do it. Now snap out of it.”

  It does snap me out of it. Almost. Mostly. My shoulders slump and my heart stops pounding in my ears and when she opens her arms to hug me, I let her.

  “Motherfucker,” I say, my face buried in her hair. “Why do I do this? Why do I fuck everything up?”

  She pulls away to look me in the eyes. “We’re alcoholics, my friend. That’s what we do sometimes.”

  The simplest answers are always the right ones, and the right ones seem like they’re the hardest to swallow. This one is the one that makes me burst into tears, leading her to comfort me like she’s comforting one of the little kids in her class. We find a place to sit down and she strokes my back to calm me down.

  “We don’t have to go back,” Anja offers as a few fat drops of rain sink into our clothes. “Jules might need a little more time, too.”

  “You should,” I say, nodding towards the direction of the house. “It’s your birthday. You should spend it with your family.”

  “I am spending my birthday with my family, you dope. Now where are we going?”

  “Not here.”

  “All right then,” she says. We turn for my car and she links arms with me. “Not here it is.”

  ***

  “It’s not like it’s late,” Anja reminds me for the fourth time since we sat down at the restaurant. “You sure you don’t want to call Ryan? Get him to join us?”

  “We’re going running together in Wash Park tomorrow,” I say. “I’ll talk to him about this then.”

  When you’re kicking yourself for freaking out at your girlfriend, who was only trying to be helpful and didn’t mean any harm, and feeling every bit the asshole you probably are, nothing sounds appealing. But it’s still Anja’s birthday, and I’d already taken her away from her husband and family. We went to a movie she’d wanted to see that she couldn’t convince Mattias to go to, we milled about a kitchen supply store, but we hadn’t talked about my meltdown until we were both too hungry to ignore our growling stomachs any longer. Obviously nowhere lets you smoke inside anymore, but seated out on the heated patio as we are, we can both sneak long pulls off of Anja’s vapor pen—I don’t get the appeal of the device personally, but Anja made the switch while we weren’t talking and won’t come with me to smoke outside anymore because of it.

  I know both our eyes poured a little too lovingly over the wine list before we each settled on iced tea. We have an appetizer on the way, but Anja isn’t letting me off the hook any longer about what’s really going on.

  “The other day she asked about the relapse days. She wanted to know if I might have been with anyone while I was out of it.”

  She shifts uncomfortably at my admission. “That’s a fair question, considering.”

  “I keep telling myself that no way would I have ever cheated on her,” I say, finally giving voice to my own fears. “But I don’t remember. Why the fuck don’t I remember what I did?”

  “You were so out of your right mind as to walk around with a broken leg bone,” she says. “I know how it is to be that plastered.”

  “I didn’t used to black out. Before. I have an eerily good memory of a lot of the stupid shit I did. It’s fuzzy, but it’s there. This not knowing is strange for me.”

  “It’s been weeks, Ez,” she says. “I have to wonder if you don’t remember what all went on those days by now, if you ever will.”

  She drums her fingers on the tabletop and spins her phone around in a circle. Both of our cells have been quiet ever since we left. I figured Mattias would have texted Anja by now, wondering where she was, but if he has and I didn’t realize it, she hasn’t said so. “You were really angry at her for something that isn’t ultimately that big a deal. Is that all that was upsetting you? That and her doubting you? I don’t really think she means to be suspicious of you, I just think she still doesn’t understand all the way.”

  “She’s been with me for a while now,” I say, exasperated. “I don’t know how else to make her understand what a piece of shit I could be when I was drunk.”

  “Maybe you did, finally. Maybe that’s why she asked the uncomfortable question. She’s hyper-monogamous, you know that much, right? Even if it was just a kiss you remembered with someone else those days, she wouldn’t forgive it, no matter what state you were in.”

  That feels unfair, but I know it isn’t. I wouldn’t forgive a drunken kiss if it were her doing it, eit
her.

  “I know I wouldn’t have cheated on her,” I say again. “But I can’t prove it. And I’m worried her doubting me is a step towards something way more shitty.”

  “Look, I think the shirt was just a catalyst. I know you miss your dad more than I can understand—it’s not surprising you relapsed on the anniversary of the day he died. But I think it was symptomatic of something else going on. And I think you need to figure out what that is—with or without me or Ryan or your group leader or whoever’s help you’re willing to ask for. Yes, you’re in recovery, and that’s hard on relationships. I snapped at Mat really unfairly a lot when I was in my early days, and I know it hurt his feelings. Jules is strong enough to take it, but you need to prove to her that it’s going to get better if she sticks it out. A couple of good months and then a really nasty breakdown isn’t going to inspire a lot of confidence in you.”

  It’s hard to hear, but she’s right. I’m set to open my mouth and reply when her phone trills. She picks it up and screws up her eyebrows reading it.

  “Mattias?” I guess.

  “Yeah. He and Lukas are heading home from your place now. He, uh… He said it might be a good idea for you to give her a little longer before you head home. I guess she’s pretty mad you stormed off.”

  This doesn’t surprise me. I know she hates it when I take off—she’s told me that countless times before. And I know I hurt her, although I’m beginning to wonder whether I really underestimated just how badly.

  “You can stay in our guest room….” Anja offers, but I shake my head.

  “I’m gonna guess I’m not exactly Mattias’s favorite person right now,” I say, remembering how he stepped in between Jules and me, how furious he and Lukas were as they stared me down. They might be my friends, they might call me ‘brother,’ but they really will do anything they can to protect their sister. It’s alarming that I became someone they needed to protect her from. “I’ll call Constance and crash there. I think I’ve still got some clothes there, actually.”

  “Tell me you’re going to be all right and not do anything irrational,” Anja says. “I know this feels bad, but it’s just a fight. If Mat and I could make it through everything we did, you and Jules have got to be able to, too.”