Stronger

by Misty Provencher

  "Don't drink," I whispered. He pulled up his head and took my hand. He turned it over in his and kissed my palm, the last of his tears dropping into the center.

  "We are stronger than that," he said.

  He brought me home from the hospital and didn't tease me for looking like a walrus with all the gauze packing. After he put me to bed, Mrs. Lowt filled him in on how the cops came, but had to take Desmond away by ambulance before they could arrest him. I still don't know when the cops will come for me.

  Aidan called Edith and Leonard too, so the last couple of days, people from the meeting have stopped by to drop off lasagnas and casseroles, plates of cookies and cake. Aidan gave a heap of it to Mrs. Lowt, since he said there is more than we will be able to eat in a month. Mrs. Lowt comes by three times a day at least, with soup and other soft things that are easiest for me to eat with my bruised jaw and broken nose.

  But even with Mrs. Lowt's visits and the people from the meeting oscillating in and out, Aidan is the most attentive by far. He waits patiently to hear my answer to the same question he asks each time he passes by me.

  "I'm good," I say. He still re-fluffs the pillow beneath my twisted ankle. I don't want him to move anything else because it kills my bruised ribs and I can't stand to ask him to stop, so I'm relieved when his fussing is interrupted by a knock at the door. He goes to it, but answers now with the door chain in place, the opening only as wide as a fist. We only know Desmond is being detained, but don't know if or when he might be released.

  I hear the soft lilt of a woman's voice, but Aidan doesn't open the door right away. I'd push myself up to see who it is, if doing that didn't make me feel like I was suffocating.

  "Alright," Aidan says. "You can come in, so long as it's just talking."

  He closes the door, unfastens the chain and opens up. I hear the click of heels across the floor and a woman comes into view.

  I know her instantly.

  Claudia.

  She stares down at me, gaping a moment before her rich manners kick in. She looks behind her, sees the chair and settles herself on the edge of it, her beaded handbag placed genteelly on her knees.

  "I'm sorry," I say, as needles of pain shoot through my cheeks. Embarrassment floods my face, the rush of blood stinging the bruises. Aidan stands at the foot of the couch, between Claudia and I, his arms crossed over his chest like a watchful body guard.

  "He did this to her," Aidan says, the accusation and pleading both twisting in his tone. Claudia puts up a soft hand, halting any further speech from either of us.

  "If you don't mind," she says, her lips twitching uncomfortably. She focuses solely on me. "I'm not sure what to believe anymore, so I wanted to see you for myself. Now that I have, I would like to ask you some questions."

  "You're not going to grill her," Aidan begins, but I shush him through my swollen lips.

  "It's okay. Ask me whatever you want, Claudia. I'll tell you the truth. We both deserve for things to finally be out in the open."

  She shifts on the edge of the chair. "Do you love him?"

  "No," I say. "I thought I did, but somebody who loves you," I have to pause to pull in a painful breath, "wouldn't do this."

  She nods once. "Did you take my money?"

  "Yes." I figure there is no point in lying, no point in trying to explain, but she fidgets with the beading on her handbag.

  "Do you want to tell me why?"

  "I married Des before I finished high school. When he left me, to marry you, I didn't have any way to survive. He came up with the designer job for me and I didn't see any other way around it."

  "That's an excuse. I'm sure you could have done something else besides steal from me."

  "You're right. Stripping. I could have done that." My tone is not feisty or argumentative or seeking pity. It's as flat and unadorned as the bare truth of my words. She tips her head to one side slightly, considering it. I add more humiliating truth. "You're right that it's an excuse too. I could have done something, but I really thought I was stuck. I didn't see that I wasn't. I still loved him, back then."

  "Desmond is very convincing," she concedes, scratching something from the corner of her eye.

  "He's convincing and I was weak."

  "Was?"

  "I am. But I'm working on it. That's why I filed for divorce. I don't want to be weak anymore."

  "I can see that." She chuckles, pushing her rear end back a little on the seat cushion. "Why didn't you ever say anything? How could you see me and never tell me what was going on?"

  "Des told me that if I said anything, he would be sure we would both go to jail."

  Claudia's lips flatten out, an empty line beneath her nose. She clears her throat with a tiny, delicate grumble before flipping up her chin. "As you still may. Just because I'm here doesn't mean that I won't be pressing charges."

  "I know," I say.

  "But I do give you credit for stepping forward first and filing for the divorce. That, at least, alerted me to the problem."

  "Filing for divorce wasn't for you, it was for me. I couldn't live like that anymore."

  Claudia's eyes shift around my apartment. "Well, it's not a penthouse, but it doesn't look like you've done so badly with my money."

  "I drank it all away."

  Her bottom lip drags open. "You're an alcoholic?"

  "Yes."

  "She's getting help," Aidan interjects. "She started attending meetings almost three weeks ago and hasn't had a drop in that time. There is a whole room of people who will tell you the same."

  Claudia eyes him skeptically and then returns her attention to me. "You've been sober for three weeks? Is that true?"

  "Not quite three weeks," I say. "And I don't know if it counts anymore, since I got pain killers at the hospital after this happened."

  Claudia leans back in the chair, studying me.

  "Did you two ever..." she begins, but the question fades off. I already know what she wants to ask. I don't want to tell her, it's humiliating, but she needs to know.

  "Yes. In his office upstairs."

  "You did that, in my house." Her words are slow, as if they're still processing.

  "Yes."

  "When?"

  "Whenever he called."

  "You were his...his call girl?" Her lips squeeze out the sour words. She ends with a puckered, hard swallow.

  "That's when he gave me money. It's how I lived."

  "It doesn't sound much like living."

  "No, it wasn't anything like living."

  Claudia clears her throat, clasps the opening of her purse. "I'm sorry that you made the choices you did, Lydia, but I appreciate you speaking with me about them. I think you could have done much better by both of us, but I can understand how difficult it must have been."

  "I appreciate that."

  "It doesn't mean I can let you off the hook."

  "I don't expect you to."

  "No?"

  "No."

  That seems to surprise her. Maybe it's my busted-up face or the pride in my words, maybe she can see and hear that I mean what I say. Claudia lifts her chin.

  "I think you owe a huge debt to me, considering you syphoned money from me for the last couple of years. I would expect to be paid back, but I don't know how you would go about doing that."

  "I could go to jail."

  "That's punishment. Not repayment." Claudia stands, tucking her purse under her arm. Aidan opens his mouth, but she speaks before he can. "My accountant is drawing up an estimate of how much you received from me. I would think that if you would agree to repay me, I might consider dropping charges."

  "That is a great offer," I say, "but I don't think I'll ever be able to repay it. My friend offered me a job at his hair salon, but I won't make enough to live as it is."

  Claudia rolls her tongue in thought. I figure she's going to bolt for the door, but instead, she stays put.

  "I believe Desmond delivered a twenty thousand dollar bonus to you for Christmas?"
r />   "Yes."

  "Then I have a proposition. I would be willing to gift you that money, if, in return, you take the job at the salon and attend night classes to achieve your high school diploma."

  "Are you serious?"

  "Quite."

  "Why would you do that?"

  "Look at you," she says, motioning from my damaged face, down to my ribs, all the way to my messed-up ankle. "This isn't only the aftermath of a woman who loved a thief. This is the body of a woman who wanted to break away. You made the first steps. I don't know how my professional team didn't find this first, but I may never have known about any of this deceit, if it wasn't for you. Therefore, despite what I believe my team would advise me to do, I'm going to follow my intuition here.

  "If you complete high school, earning a diploma, I will not require you to return the bonus. I'm assuming you still have most of it?" she asks.

  "Almost all of it." I rub my tattooed ring finger.

  "Good. You can live on that until you graduate. When you graduate, if you are willing to go on to college and complete a four year degree, then I would be willing to release you from your debt; the money Desmond gave you throughout our shared marriage."

  "Why would you do that?" I whisper.

  "I would like to see you succeed, Lydia. I truly would. None of us are without addictions and I know firsthand how they can lead a person in the wrong directions. But I think you are worth my investment, Lydia, and seeing what Desmond's done to you, on some levels, I even feel as if I owe it to you. I had no idea that he was capable of such violence or deceit. And I may never have known that the man I fell in love with was married to another woman."

  "Thank you," I say and Aidan echoes it softly.

  "You are welcome." She smoothes down her jacket as she stands, but I stop her with a question.

  "Do you still?" I ask. She turns back to me slowly.

  "Love him?" She shakes her head slightly, sending a soft, elegant wave through her carefully-styled hair. "I did, even a few weeks ago, I did. It's going to take me some time to digest all of this still, but love? No. I can't. Not after all this."

  "You're a strong woman," I tell her. Claudia smirks.

  "We both are, aren't we?" she says.

  Epilogue

  The pile of slippery coupons Jan gave me slides out of my hands and down the steps.

  "Shit, shit, shit!"

  I'm never going to get into the meeting room on time. Not when both work and classes each end at 5:30 and the meetings on those same days begin at 5:45. But I won't miss even one. I'm religiously five minutes late to all three of the meetings each week, but I haven't missed a meeting yet and Edith tries to stall Leonard until I arrive.

  I scoop up the coupons, some of them wet and muddy from whatever got tracked down the church's steps. Holding them close to my chest, the coupons still flutter out of my grasp as I stomp down the hall toward the meeting door.

  Edith leans out of the doorframe.

  "What's going on?" she asks as I approach. "I could hear you shitting all the way down the stairs."

  "Could've used some help," I grumble, but I also laugh. Of course, Edith doesn't offer to take the muddy coupons. All she does is laugh at me.

  "Looks like you can handle it. What is all this anyway?"

  "Jan could use some advertising. I'm giving him a hand."

  "Haven't you given him about fifty hands, by now? Isn't managing his entire business enough? Now you're advertising for him too?" Edith snorts.

  "I'm a marketing major." I shrug. "Business management is only my minor. Jan's my guinea pig."

  "And he doesn't mind a bit, since she's tripled his business," Aidan adds as he comes to the door. He steps past Edith and helps gather up some of the coupons. He swoops down, leaving a kiss on my mouth.

  He makes sure to kiss me every single time that we've been apart. That started back when I had to testify against Desmond, five years ago. I told the judge and jury everything and during the break for lunch, Desmond managed to follow me to the bathroom. He told me that he would get me for testifying, for turning Claudia against him, for betraying his trust. His fucking trust. When I started screaming at him, about what he'd done to my trust and how he could go fuck himself, that if he ever tries to come and get me, I would bury his nuts in his nostrils again, he bashed me in the face. The court bailiffs saw him do it, but didn't get to him fast enough to prevent me from doing just what I told Des I would. I brought my knee up into his groin so hard that the bailiffs had to scrape Desmond off the floor. Aidan got to court late that day, after everything had happened, and kissing my quickly-bruising face, he told me over and over and over again how grateful he was that Des hadn't done something even worse. Now, years later, our kiss is like a prayer. It is not an asking prayer, but one that has been answered, and it is the way we show how grateful we still are to have one another.

  "How's my almost-college grad?" he asks. "Only a week until graduation--"

  "That just makes me more tired," I say, but I do it with a smile. He wraps his free hand around my shoulders and gives me a squeeze and another kiss on the top of my head.

  "But you made it here."

  "I always make it," I murmur playfully. He straightens the coupons and hands them back to me. I give him one more kiss. "Now go sit with your men. I'll see you after the meeting."

  "You can count on it," he says. Then, dropping his voice to a whisper in my ear, "Don't forget, Mrs. Lowt is making us dinner and then...it's baby night."

  "You think I would forget? Thursday is my favorite day of the week," I say. We've been trying for the last couple of weeks. Since Fridays are our only day off each week (we're trying to save up enough to move out of Aidan's apartment and into a real house) Thursday nights are dedicated to staying up all night and having our fill of each other's bodies.

  Aidan crosses the room to his table full of guys and I follow Edith to our regular table, in the back. Natalie tips back in her chair, smiling when she catches sight of me. She waves for me to take the seat beside her.

  "Hey, Aidan said that Desmond called you?" she says. I nod.

  "I don't know how he got phone privileges, but yeah. He called to tell me again that he was going to get parole and hunt me down."

  "That bastard!" Nat's voice climbs. It still sounds funny when she swears, but she's picked up my bad habits. I guess that's what happens when you have a best friend that talks like a sailor. "You notified the authorities, haven't you?"

  "I did one better," I say. "I told Claudia. She's got enough connections and money to keep him right where he is. He's not going anywhere for a long, long time."

  "Well, I'm glad for that, but I don't like that he can even get on a phone."

  "Nobody does," I say. I flick my chin at the new face on the other side of Nat. "Who's this?"

  "This is Cora," Natalie says. The woman beside her, sweatered and sniffly, looks annoyed, or maybe it's bored. She dabs her nose with a tissue, eyeing the room before her gaze settles on me with a mild hatred. "Cora, this is Lydia Badeau, the one I was telling you about. You might want to ask her to be your sponsor. She's married to that guy you were eyeing earlier."

  "I wasn't eyeing him, I only noticed him," the woman says as she turns her eyes on me. "Just so you know, I'm not here for me. I'm only here to support my husband."

  She doesn't have to point him out. I know everyone in the room, but the hulking biker dude in the corner is particularly unmistakable. Especially his scowl. But, they wouldn't have let this Cora girl in here too, unless she was an invisible-card-carrying member of our little alcoholic club. I don't call her out on it. I just pull a card from my purse and slide it across the table.

  "If you want some help, you can call me," I say. Cora flashes me a dry smile as Leonard stands up, calling attention. He clears his throat so loudly that it rings in my ears, even at our back table, but the room doesn't really quiet down until Edith sticks her two index fingers in her mouth and blasts us with an ear-splitting
whistle.

  "Tonight, we have asked a few members to speak. Our group has grown and I think we would all benefit from hearing where some of the people in this room have come from, how they manage their addictions and what they've learned in their journey thus far. So, tonight, instead of breaking into our small groups, we're going to do an open talk. It is a night of lessons, and I've asked a few members in particular to share. Each will begin by telling us what they believe is an important lesson they have learned up to this point in their sober journey, as we might all benefit from their knowledge."

  One of the newer guys harumphs. Leonard twists, searching the room and I feel the back of my neck prickle as he says my name. I knew he was going to do it, but I'm not sure I'll ever love standing up and speaking in front of a whole room. At least it's not as bad as it used to be.

  I look around the room at these people who have become my friends and support. My gaze finally rests on Aidan and he smiles his encouragement from his table full of men.

  "Hi. I'm Lydia, and I'm an alcoholic," I say. The room greets me, the voices of my friends are recognizable. I wink at Aidan. "Leonard asked me last week to talk on this subject and I've spent all this week thinking about it. I've learned so many things since the first time I set foot in this room, it was hard for me to narrow it down to the most important ones. I guess the first thing I learned was that I was an alcoholic. That was a shocker."

  There is a low rumble of laughter around the room.

  "But once I learned what I was, what my weakness was, the other pieces of my life started to fall into place. When I first showed up here, I was still trying to convince myself that I didn't care about anything, but I think part of why I am an alcoholic is because I cared too much about all the wrong things. The truth is, I was terrified of the choices I had made up to that point, but I didn't think I had any control over it. I let everyone else take my wheel and steer me however they wanted through my life. So, I've learned that I do care and need to care and that I had to grab the wheel and make the choice to steer myself."