Patrick heard the automatic garage door begin its metal churn and his worry instantly clicked to anger. She had driven home.
Screw the notes—he needed no prop in the face of this sudden discovery. He pushed back his chair and thumped towards the mudroom, waiting for her to emerge from the garage entrance. Amy’s only saving grace at this point would be if one of her friends entered with her after offering to drive the car home.
Amy entered the mudroom alone.
“Hi,” Patrick immediately said.
Amy’s head shot up and she placed a hand to her chest. She burst into a giggle. “Oh my God, baby, you scared me.” She was drunk.
“Amy, what the hell?”
She swayed as she took off her coat and hung it on one of the hooks lining the wall. She turned back around and the coat slid off the hook and onto the floor. She didn’t notice. “What?” she asked.
“You’re drunk, and you fucking drove.”
“I’m not drunk,” she said. She did not look concerned by his accusation—her reply was spoken as innocently as someone saying they weren’t hungry.
“Yes you are. I thought you were getting a ride home?”
“I did—I was … but they left.” She spoke this with an air of certainty, as if it all made perfect sense.
“Your friends left you there? They left you to drive home?”
Amy shook her head intently and swayed. “No—no, no. Sarah was going to take me home, but I started talking to this other girl, and we became friends.” She stopped there, once again seeming to presume it all made sense, that Patrick could surely fill in the remaining pieces.
“What the hell are you talking about? What girl?”
Amy walked past him into the kitchen. She reeked of alcohol. She spoke over her shoulder as she took a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water from the faucet. “Just some woman I started talking to. She was really cool. All the girls wanted to leave early, so this woman said she’d drive me home. The girls met her. They thought she was cool too.” She drank the entire glass of water in one go.
Patrick’s head was spinning. It made sense and it didn’t. “But you drove home. You drove home.”
“I know—bitch left me there.”
“She did? A complete stranger?” He put a hand on his chest in mock surprise. “I’m stunned!”
“Whatever, Patrick.” She rolled her eyes, turned and placed the glass in the sink.
“Why didn’t you call me?” he asked. “I would have picked you up.”
“What about the kids? Who would have looked after the kids?” she said.
“I could have gotten at least half a dozen neighbors to stay here with them while I got you. You know that.”
Amy made a funny face. “That would have been embarrassing.”
“And if you came home in a police car? How would that have been?”
She began pleading her case. “Look, I had a ride, okay? Sarah was gonna drive me. But they left because this other girl said she would drive me. And then she left. What else was I supposed to do?”
“You should have called me,” he said. “You should have called Sarah. Why didn’t you call Sarah to come back and get you?”
“They had already left.”
More absurd logic. Patrick was angry. Yes, Amy had the grief card to play, but the horrific irony in utilizing it after such a situation would have likely prohibited even the most wasted of individuals from using it. But Amy did use it—sort of.
“Look, I know I fucked up,” she said candidly. “And I know with what happened to Dad it seems especially bad, but …” She shrugged. “I just fucked up. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again, okay?”
Patrick stared at her. She stared back, defiant, as though mentioning her father had given her a pass for her recklessness—a different, and in Patrick’s opinion, worse version of the grief card.
“Okay?” she said again, her eyes still frustratingly defiant.
Patrick said, “I’m going to bed.” He left the kitchen and headed upstairs.
Amy joined him in bed twenty minutes later. Patrick was rolled over onto his side away from her. The lights were off, save for the lamp on Amy’s nightstand that he had graciously left on. Pissed as he may be, he didn’t want her stumbling in the dark and banging her head on something.
Amy stripped down to her panties, did not brush her teeth, and then clumsily crawled into bed without saying a word. Patrick heard a drunken snore in less than a minute. He didn’t fall asleep until well after two.
• • •
Back at Friday’s, Monica Kemp approached the bar and ordered a vodka martini. She had not disappeared as her new friend Amy had thought, merely stepped into the ladies room, switched the blonde wig for a red one, her blue contact lenses for green, and then changed all of her clothes. When she emerged from the ladies room she might as well have been a new patron who’d only just stepped foot into the restaurant. She even sat across from Amy at the other end of the bar and did not receive even the slightest gaze of recognition when their eyes met.
When Amy eventually gave up and paid her tab before swaying out the door, Monica followed. When Amy got behind the wheel, Monica smirked. Her only feeling of sorrow came when she realized she would not be able to hear, nor see, Patrick’s reaction to his drunken wife’s entrance, mere weeks after her father’s alleged drunk-driving death.
Still, it had been a pretty good night. Monica had kept the drinks coming for Amy, knowing it wouldn’t be long before small talk about work and men and whatever would gradually dip into talk of personal despair—when the truth-serum known as alcohol made strangers into best friends and a tragic tongue uninhibited. Monica had listened to an emotional Amy with a practiced, somber face. She listened to her weep about Oscar the dog, about her father dying. Amy had even mentioned Crescent Lake. Nothing major though. Monica sensed that an entire bottle of tequila wouldn’t have pried open the particulars of that treasure. Amy just gave a quick, brief summary (Monica feigned surprise when she heard, stating she had read about it in the paper and seen it on the news. “That was you?” she’d asked, biting back a smile).
But still, despite getting a generous helping of Amy’s pain at the bar, Monica really wanted to bear witness to the train wreck that would inevitably transpire once Amy stumbled into the house—alone. The whole set-up had been an unexpected and opportune masterpiece on her part, and she wanted to see it to the very end, damn it.
Oh well—it was a luxury she would have to do without. She tongued an olive from her toothpick and supplemented the remainder of her time at the bar reminiscing about favorite kills.
34
Amy woke just before noon the next day. Her head throbbed and her mouth was dry and gross. The sheets clung to her hot and sweaty skin that seemed to get hotter and sweatier with each wave of nausea that washed over her.
She rolled to one side and glanced at the clock on her night stand. 11:54 A.M. She sat bolt upright in bed, threw off the bed sheets and stood. The room swayed and her stomach was suddenly in her throat. She felt the horrible pooling of saliva in her mouth that meant only one thing: Mrs. Amy Lambert would be having a face-to-face date with the toilet, and if she didn’t hurry, she was going to be dreadfully late.
• • •
Patrick’s eye luggage was accumulating by the minute. Steve Lucas had quipped about it again when they crossed paths in the office kitchen that morning, except Patrick was less cordial this time. In fact, he did not even respond, merely flashed Steve a look that burned, and when a guy Patrick’s size gives you that look, it’s time to take your lame jokes elsewhere. And Steve Lucas did, post haste.
Patrick sat as his desk, blowing on his fourth cup of coffee. His stomach burbled, wanting to be fed, but Patrick could never eat when he was upset. He marveled at people who shoveled it down under periods of stress. He was the exact opposite. Even something as simple as juice seemed akin to swallowing cotton. So he had skipped breakfast and planned on skippi
ng lunch. His stomach and head—he always got headaches when he went too long without eating—would no doubt complain incessantly, and his energy and performance today would suffer, but hell, he was pretty damn stressed. And after what had happened with Amy last night he had a damn good reason to be. Last night hadn’t been a mild disagreement about wanting to watch the Eagles game while Amy wanted to go for a Sunday picnic instead. That type of debate was almost always resolved before dinner (and usually resulted in Patrick taping the game and avoiding all forms of media and technology so as not to hear the game’s result while he and Amy went on the damn picnic).
The truth though? He never minded the picnics. Sure, he wanted to watch the Eagles game. Sure, he bitched and moaned a little. Yet somehow he always ended up having fun. Because he loved his wife. And he loved spending time with her. No other person on the planet could make him smile the way she did. No other person could make him belly-laugh the way she did. After years of marriage she could still make his stomach flutter when she emerged from the bathroom to model a new dress for a night out on the town. And after years of marriage he still masturbated to his wife. Most friends he confessed that fact to looked at him as if he was clinically insane—you jerked off to the idea of strange pussy, not your friggin’ wife for Christ’s sake. And yet whenever Patrick was alone and had the urge to treat his body like an amusement park, his fantasies always came back to Amy. He might start with a Victoria Secret model, or maybe some online porn, but it always finished with Amy. He didn’t know why. Was that true love? Or was it the simple fact that his wife was just flat-out smokin’ hot and their sex was great? It was all three, no doubt, except that notion of true love always felt like the winner, always seemed to burn brightest.
And that was why his stomach now burbled, grumbled, and gurgled. It was why his head ached. Why his eye luggage was accumulating. Patrick was worried. Amy had come through okay—or as well as anyone could—from the tragedy at Crescent Lake. They had all started to make small but steady steps in the right direction.
And then Caleb filled her slippers with tacks, shredding her feet.
And then Oscar died.
And then her father died.
Patrick wondered if Amy—his strong, very strong, wife—was possibly reaching her breaking point. Their psychiatrist had recommended medication after Crescent Lake. Nothing serious, just small doses of antidepressants, or perhaps the occasional benzodiazepine to calm you during extreme moments of anxiety when the inevitable nightmare or flashback occurred. Amy flat-out refused. Her kids were the Prozac, her husband the Xanax.
She was not anti-drug, and she believed wholeheartedly in counseling, psychology, and cognitive behavioral therapy. But Amy had later explained to Patrick that she didn’t want to use the drugs because if she did, then somehow the Fannelli brothers would win. She hadn’t been able to elaborate much further on her reasoning, it was just something she felt. Patrick had had a hard time grasping where she was coming from, and periodically asked her to elaborate. Finally, she came up with an impressive metaphor that seemed to explain her reasoning fairly well:
“I want to win the gold medal without steroids,” she’d said.
Still a little gray to some perhaps, but damn good as far as Patrick was concerned, and he’d let it go at that.
Now, he feared her will was cracking, giving into the pressures in order to win that metaphoric gold. Perhaps alcohol was becoming her steroid. A drug that required no prescription and would not label her a hypocrite by succumbing to the medication she had once vehemently opposed.
He was worried, felt justified in his worry, yet his wife’s words still played in his head often:
(“Just don’t … overanalyze everything so much.”)
But God damn it. God damn it. If she’d only gotten a ride home that night, he could have chalked the whole thing up to a night out with the girls that got a little out of hand. No problem. The night before? She wanted a little alone time, a few drinks by herself to mourn her father. Again, no problem—it could all be rationalized.
But she hadn’t gotten a ride home. She drove. Drunk. And now Patrick didn’t know what to think. He prayed it was a freak occurrence—a serious and horribly ironic lapse in judgment, something that would never happen again. Patrick had showered, shaved, dressed, and gotten the kids off to school this morning without Amy so much as lifting an eyelid: She was sleeping the dead sleep of the very drunk. And if he knew his wife, when she did wake, she would feel like death. He counted on that. If his words could not make a dent—he had yet to talk to her today; he assumed (hoped) she was still asleep and not avoiding him—then perhaps one hell of a hangover could.
Patrick turned away from his computer and stared at the phone on his desk, willing it to ring. He would not call her, damn it, she would call him.
More games, Patrick?
He mumbled, “Shit,” picked up the phone and dialed Amy.
• • •
Amy sat slumped over the kitchen table, her throbbing head propped up with one hand, her second cup of black coffee in the other. A silent mantra of “never again” played repeatedly, its gun-point promise bringing zero relief each time her stomach hitched and she felt a third cuddling session with the toilet bowl may be in order.
She had screwed up. Boy, had she screwed up. Last night was fuzzy, but the big parts, the serious parts, carried unavoidable clarity. Getting wasted was no big deal. Everyone’s done it. Driving home while wasted? Huge deal. After what happened to her father? Huge deal with a side order of idiot. Boy, had she screwed up.
She wanted to call Patrick. She wanted to call him the moment she sprang upright in bed and realized what time it was, realized what she’d done last night. Unfortunately, excessive vomiting followed by excessive guilt took precedence. Even after the vomiting, the guilt was still strong. The shame. She was ashamed to call Patrick. He had obviously gotten the kids off to school and himself off to work without waking her, and this made the guilt and shame that much stronger. She envisioned Patrick tip-toeing around and keeping the kids quiet so as not to wake Mommy. Telling the kids Mommy wasn’t feeling well, she had a stomach bug. The kids feeling worried for Mommy. Caleb wanting to go in to check on her.
Never again, never again, never again, never—
Should she call him? What would she say? Nothing really to say other than sorry and forgive me a zillion times. She would sound pathetic, but then, she felt pathetic. And she was definitely in the wrong—no denying that whatsoever. She could justify the martinis and aloof behavior the other night, no problem. In fact she had justified it, and it wasn’t bullshit. No justifying this though. She would plead guilty and hope for leniency.
Amy pushed back her chair and walked into the living room. Her cell phone sat charging on the coffee table. She stared at it. Maybe he’ll call me. Maybe he’ll soon get worried if he doesn’t hear from me. She closed her eyes and sighed. You’re playing silly games, dummy. You need to pick up your phone and call your—
Her cell phone rang and she jumped. The phone read: Patrick/Office.
Amy’s face went sunburn hot, her heart thudded in her chest, and for the first time in her life, she was scared to talk to her husband.
• • •
Amy’s phone rang three times before she answered it. Patrick was prepared to leave a voicemail, but when his wife’s voice greeted him, he suddenly had to regroup and prepare for a conversation—no easy task when your mind is already in message mode and the subject matter is as awkward as it was.
“Hey,” he greeted her. His voice felt sturdy, as he’d hoped. “How are you feeling?” Had it been the night after a party where she’d indulged safely, such a question would have been asked with devilish delight, an unmerciful bout of teasing endlessly following.
None of that today.
“Awful,” she said.
“Sick?”
“No… well yeah, sick-awful, but … awful-awful.”
Patrick knew what she was allud
ing to, but he wanted to hear it. “What do you mean?”
He heard her sigh. Then: “I’m so sorry.”
Patrick stayed quiet.
“I don’t know why I did it,” she continued. “It was a mistake. It was more than a mistake. But believe me, nothing you say could make me feel any worse than I’m feeling right now.”
He wanted to let loose, to let her know that her reckless behavior might have left him a widower and their kids without a mother. He wanted to know how, how could she possibly do such a thing after what happened to her father? He wanted to know, and he wanted to rant. Instead he remained quiet. What would ranting or an endless barrage of questions she’d already confessed ignorance to accomplish anyway? Besides, the main question Patrick wanted answered could not be given with words. It was something only time would reveal. In his heart he believed she would never do it again, but still, only time.
“Patrick?” she said.
Bad Games- The Complete Series Page 38
