Too Close

by Hilary Norman

  It’s hard to believe that anything could be more shocking than seeing Phoebe for the first time in the ICU at People’s Hospital. Or coming into my hotel room last night and finding Holly naked in my bed.

  But right this minute, this certainly seems like an all-time winner.

  I get up from my chair, but then I feel suddenly weak and have to sit down again. I’m shaking.

  ‘Don’t you realize this is just what Holly wants?’ My voice sounds loud, too loud, in the kitchen. I don’t want to wake the baby.

  ‘I don’t give a damn what Holly wants,’ Nina says.

  She sounds and looks very strange. There’s something there in her face that I’ve never seen before.

  ‘But this is so exactly what she wants, Nina. To drive a wedge between us.’

  ‘Then she’s done a terrific job, hasn’t she?’ That look is still there. ‘If you won’t go, Nick,’ she says, ‘then I will.’

  ‘This is crazy.’ Christ, my head is going to burst.

  She’s standing at the door to the hallway, her back to me.

  ‘Don’t try to follow me,’ she says, and now her voice is so hard, and she really is going. ‘If you come after me, I swear I’ll call the cops myself and have you arrested for harassment.’

  Jesus.

  I’m up on my feet again, and this time I’m staying upright, but Nina’s moving a whole lot faster than me. She’s gone through the door and upstairs, and as I hit about the fourth tread up, I can hear sounds from our bedroom, and then she’s passing me on her way back down with a jacket and her purse.

  I spin around and see she’s already at the front door.

  ‘Nina, for God’s sake, where are you going?’

  That look is still there.

  ‘Leave me alone, Nick.’ Her voice is trembling now. ‘I mean it. Have enough respect for me to leave me alone.’

  And now I realize what the look is. And this shock has to be the all-time record breaker.

  She looks as if she hates me.

  I mean, really hates me.

  Chapter Sixty-three

  Being Sunday and Teresa’s full day off, Nick was in sole charge of Zoë, and Nina hadn’t called since she’d walked out, and he was getting way past apprehensive and well into full-blown alarmed. He’d called Bill Regan, Nina’s AA sponsor, twice and left messages for him to phone back, and he had even begun thinking about calling the Waterson Clinic. But then William phoned at seven o’clock, and again at nine, and both times Nick told him that Nina had gone to visit a friend and that she might be late, and William asked for the friend’s name and telephone number and sounded coldly suspicious when Nick was unable to give him either.

  ‘Is the nanny there?’ Ford asked.

  Teresa’s gone out,’ Nick told him.

  ‘You’re alone with the baby?’

  Nick’s hackles rose. ‘Is that a problem?’

  ‘Everything about you is a problem,’ William said.

  Nick put down the phone before he said something he’d regret after Nina got home. When she got home. If she got home.

  The headache which had receded that morning after he’d taken a couple of extra-strength Tylenol, was back in full force, but he didn’t care about the pain, and he didn’t know what to do. He still couldn’t go out looking for her – even without Zoë to consider, he wouldn’t know where to start. Bill Regan called back just after ten, but said he hadn’t heard from Nina, and he couldn’t even help with suggesting any bars to try, because there were so many and because Nina had been sober for such a long time.

  Teresa came home at eleven and went to bed, and Zoë woke up around midnight, and Nick gave her a bottle and changed her nappy and rocked her to sleep, and taking care of the baby made him feel better for a little while. But not for long.

  He hoped and prayed that he was wrong. He hoped that Nina had gone to see some friend he hadn’t thought of, or maybe she’d just spent the day and evening doing ordinary-type things like shopping and going to the movies, or maybe she was spending the evening at an AA meeting.

  But he didn’t really believe in any of those possibilities.

  Too many bad things had been happening to Nina. There had to be a limit to what she could handle, to how long she could stay strong.

  Nick thought she was probably drinking.

  The bars all closed, by law, at two in the morning. She came home just after two-thirty.

  Nick was dozing in an armchair in the living room when he heard a cab door bang and a man’s voice approaching their front door. He jumped up fast and his headache leapt violently back to life.

  The driver was a decent guy, one of the old breed. He was holding Nina up with both arms, and Nick could see that one or two more drinks down the line he would probably have been carrying her.

  ‘Your wife?’ the driver said. He was white-haired, probably Italian, and strong looking for his age.

  Nick nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

  ‘Better put her to bed.’

  Nina, transferred to Nick’s arms, didn’t smell like Nina. She smelled of beer, smoke, whiskey and vomit. Like a drunk.

  ‘How much do I owe you?’

  Nina realized whose arms she was in and made a weak attempt at a protest. ‘Let me go.’

  ‘In a minute,’ Nick said, and stroked her hair. ‘How much?’

  The driver shrugged. ‘Forget it.’

  ‘No way,’ Nick protested, softly. ‘You’ve been to a lot of trouble.’

  ‘No big deal,’ the man said. ‘I’ve been there, you know?’ He started to turn away, walking down the steps.

  ‘Please,’ Nick called out. ‘I’d like to give you something.’

  ‘Just take care of your wife,’ the driver said, got back into his cab and started the motor.

  Nick closed the door.

  She allowed him to undress her and guide her into the bathroom – only, he realized, because she was too weak to have much choice in the matter. But when she fell on her knees before the lavatory bowl and he bent down, ready to hold her head or mop her up or whatever she needed, she found the strength to look up at him briefly but fiercely.

  ‘Go ’way,’ she said.

  He nodded and straightened up. ‘Sure you’ll be okay?’

  Her face was chalk white. ‘Go ’way,’ she repeated.

  He stood outside for a while, listening to the awful sounds of her heaving and moaning, waited till he heard the flushing and then, a moment or two later, the water running into the basin. And then he went into the nursery. Far enough away to give her privacy, but close enough to be aware if she got into trouble.

  ‘Trouble,’ he said out loud, wry at his splendid understatement, to Zoë’s teddy bear. It was the old-fashioned one from FAO Schwarz that Nina had sewn up the night they’d brought the baby home from the hospital, the one Abbott and Riley’s men had ripped apart searching for heroin.

  ‘Big trouble,’ Nick told the bear.

  He had wanted to give Nina so many things, mostly love and peace. He thought he had managed the love pretty well, but lately the house on Antonia Street had become more of an emotional war zone than a peaceful home. He had known from the beginning that Nina needed stability. She had been so straight with him about that, about her drink problem, about her needs.

  And he had let her down.

  Seven years she’d been sober. And then Holly had climbed into his bed again – at least, that was the way Nina presumably saw it, and who could honestly blame her?

  He heard the bathroom door opening, and went out into the corridor.

  She still looked white and shaky and incredibly fragile.

  ‘Going t’bed,’ she said, slurring.

  ‘Anything I can do?’ he asked, softly.

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  Those words, at least, were clear.

  He slept downstairs until six o’clock, thankful that he’d woken early enough to avoid embarrassing Teresa, who generally came down at half-past. His head still ache
d as he got up and straightened the cushions, but it was better than it had been the night before.

  He went quietly upstairs and looked in on Zoë, who lay on her back in her pink romper suit, awake, kicking a little, contentedly, and smiling up at the new morning and her father. She really was smiling these days, corrected age and other preemie stuff notwithstanding. Nick gave her the index finger of his right hand for a moment, and his daughter grasped it with her own tiny fingers, and the warmth of her squeeze brought tears to his eyes.

  ‘I love you so much, Zoë,’ he whispered, and then, extricating his finger, he went out of the nursery and into his and Nina’s bedroom.

  It was still pretty dark, with the curtains drawn. Nina was dead to the world, sleeping it off, and Nick was glad for her. He couldn’t know exactly what it would be like for her, waking up, remembering what damage she’d done to herself, but he could hazard a guess. The longer she was out of it, the better for her.

  And for him, too, maybe, he thought with a terrible, conscious selfishness, since he hardly dared imagine what the coming day would hold for them as a couple.

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  She’d said that before she’d got drunk, as well as afterwards.

  He was terrified in case she really meant it.

  ‘Will you do something for me?’ she asked him two hours or so later, after she’d woken and he had brought her a cup of coffee.

  ‘Name it.’

  ‘Tell Teresa to go out for the day.’

  Nick sat on the edge of the bed. ‘It’s okay. I told her you have a virus or maybe the flu.’

  ‘I want her out of the house.’ Nina took a sip of coffee, gagged a little and handed it back to Nick.

  ‘You okay?’

  She nodded. ‘I want her out so we can talk.’

  ‘Oh.’ Nick felt his own stomach contract. ‘I’ll tell her.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He stood up, started walking towards the door and stopped. ‘Would you like me to call Bill for you?’

  ‘No.’ She paused. ‘Thank you.’ The courtesy was an afterthought, the kind you might extend to a stranger or a colleague.

  He turned the door handle.

  ‘Nick?’

  ‘Yes?’ He turned around, craving an ounce of warmth.

  ‘Is Zoë all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘She’s fine.’

  They talked in his studio, where he had gone to try to drown his fears in work. Nothing had helped, of course, and the patchily, darkly-daubed canvas that stood on his easel testified to that.

  ‘Wouldn’t you be more comfortable downstairs?’ he asked her.

  ‘Here’s as good as anywhere,’ she said.

  He cleared a space for her, sweeping some sketchpads off the wooden window seat and dusting it with his hands. No one else ever cleaned his studio; he liked to do it himself, since only he knew which scraps of paper might be fragments of future works. Generally, he took a pride in keeping the place clean and organized, but lately it just hadn’t seemed a priority.

  Nina sat down and leaned back at an angle against the window. She had showered and dressed in a baggy grey tracksuit, and she had tied her hair back, but she looked lousy, her face pasty, her hands shaking and her eyes ringed with shadow. Nick always loved seeing Nina in the mornings, liked her face without make-up, her mouth without lipstick, her hair uncombed. He had never seen her with a hangover before.

  ‘I can’t take any more,’ she said.

  Her voice was quiet and weak-sounding, yet there was an unmistakeable ring of determination in the words. Nick felt his heart shift in his chest. He sat slowly down on one of the paint-stained stools, aware that she didn’t want him sitting beside her on the window seat.

  ‘One day at a time.’ She looked down at her hands, resting flat on the tops of her tracksuited thighs. ‘Back to that.’ Now she sounded bitter. Sick and bitter. ‘The golden rule of the recovering alcoholic.’

  ‘I know,’ Nick said.

  ‘Yes, of course you do.’ She paused. Her mouth trembled and she had to catch at her lower lip with her teeth to steady herself. ‘I honestly believed I was past that, that I had made it, really made it, to the other side.’

  ‘You did. You will again.’

  ‘Yes, I will,’ she said. Back to determination.

  A faint glimmer of relief touched him.

  ‘I woke up this morning,’ she went on, ‘and I lay there thinking: back where I belong – just like my mother. Just a stinking drunk after all.’

  ‘Nina—’

  ‘And then I remembered Zoë.’ Her mouth worked again for a moment, but she controlled it. ‘I wanted so much to go into the nursery and pick her up, but I couldn’t, because I felt so dirty. And so I lay there for a while longer, feeling sorry for myself—’ She shook her head, a kind of grim half-smile on her lips. ‘Sorry doesn’t really cover it, actually.’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ Nick said gently, wanting to find a way to ease her pain.

  ‘No, please,’ Nina said. ‘Let me tell you.’

  He nodded.

  ‘And after I’d given in to that for what seemed enough time, and after you’d come in and brought me some coffee, I made myself remember Zoë again. Which was when I made up my mind about a few things.’

  Nick’s heart gave another sick lurch.

  ‘So I got up and called Bill. And then I took a shower and pulled on some clothes. And now I’m here to tell you.’

  He tried to steel himself.

  ‘I need to be able to trust you,’ Nina said.

  ‘You can.’ Nick slipped one hand down beneath the seat of his stool and dug his blunt fingernails into the wood. ‘You can.’

  ‘And do you trust me?’ she asked him.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘With a bottle?’ She bit hard into the pause. ‘No, of course you don’t. How can you, after last night?’

  ‘It was just one night.’

  It was as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘So how can I trust you when it comes to Holly Bourne?’

  He looked right into her eyes. ‘I hate Holly Bourne.’

  ‘And I hate alcohol,’ Nina said, simply. ‘And until yesterday, I thought there really was a big difference between our two addictions. Mostly because Holly was three thousand miles away, and in your past. But neither of those things are true any more, are they? Holly was in LA just the night before last. In your bed. Talking about having your child.’

  Nick stood up, frustration rising. ‘She broke into my hotel room. Like a burglar. You know that, Nina, and if you’re trying to say it was any other way, then you’re just inventing, and you’re sure as hell doing what Holly wants you to do.’

  ‘I told you yesterday, I don’t give a damn what Holly wants,’ Nina said, though today there seemed little anger. ‘Right now – this morning – I only seem to care about one thing.’

  She had not moved from the position she’d adopted when she’d sat down. She was still leaning against the window, was perhaps too weak to do otherwise, yet her voice had grown stronger and so, it seemed to Nick, had her resolve.

  ‘Yes, I got drunk last night,’ she said. ‘Fell right off the wagon. Slipped. And there’s not one single damned thing I can do to change that.’ She took a deep breath and looked up at him. ‘But what I am not going to allow myself to do is slide all the way back down again to where I used to be. I am not going to put myself through that again – the bingeing and sickness, and the awful, endless shame.’

  Nick sat down again on the stool. He felt oddly diminished, marginalized, as if right now, in his own studio, he did not really matter to his own wife. It was a numbing sensation.

  ‘I will not do that again to myself,’ Nina went on, each word seeming to grow tougher. ‘But much, much more important, I will not do it to Zoë.’

  Nick waited for her to go on, but she did not.

  ‘How can I help you?’ he asked.

  ‘Easily,’ she answered.

  ‘How?’


  ‘Forget about Holly.’

  ‘I have forgotten about Holly. I forgot about her years ago.’

  ‘You misunderstand me,’ Nina said. ‘I mean, forget about trying to find her.’

  Nick stared at his wife. ‘How can I do that? Especially now, after what happened in LA?’

  ‘You can leave it to the police,’ Nina said. ‘The way I asked you to when we were in Arizona.’

  ‘The police aren’t doing enough, Nina.’

  She shut her eyes. ‘Have you called Wilson or Capelli yet?’

  ‘Not yet. I wanted to wait till you and I had resolved this.’

  Nina opened her eyes, turned her head and looked at him.

  ‘And when you have called them, then will you leave it alone?’

  Nick shook his head. ‘I don’t see how I can.’

  ‘Then I can’t take this any more,’ Nina said, simply.

  ‘What do you want me to say, Nina?’ Everything was plummeting out of control, but he didn’t know what to do about it. ‘Do you want me to tell you lies about how I feel? Tell you how sure I am that the cops are going to come through for us now – that they’re going to forget about me and heroin and child abuse, and put all their resources into finding Holly before she finds a new way to hurt us?’

  ‘You’re obsessed, Nick.’ It was a statement, without recrimination. ‘You say that Holly’s the obsessive one – and I know you’re right about that – but you’re almost as bad in your own way.’

  ‘That isn’t true,’ Nick said, trying not to get angry.

  ‘I don’t want to fight with you,’ Nina told him. ‘That isn’t what I want at all.’

  ‘So what do you want?’

  ‘I want this to stop.’ She shook her head. ‘I know you think you can’t stop. But I can. I can make it stop, for me and Zoë.’

  Nick stared at her. He didn’t want to know what she meant.

  ‘I have to start taking care of myself again without you,’ she said.