by Amy Isan
“A little. Just a snack or something would be good.”
He vanished without a word. I heard him moving again, with a silent ferocity built inside him.
I would have to try and talk to him, but it felt impossible. How could I? What right did I have?
He came back. “I don’t have anything snacky here, so I’m going to go run up to the store real quick, what would you like?”
I stared past him, “I don’t know, anything.” I swallowed my spit. “I’m sorry Hugh. Thanks for... being there for me.”
“It’s nothing.” He disappeared through the door. I heard the front door open and close.
Alone again. How could he not even invite me? I fumed and crossed my arms, squeezing myself too tightly. I tried to regain my composure. We both went through a lot... I wanted a drink, and that made me even more angry. I felt like I was already a failure at this. I threw the stack of brochures on the floor, scattering them across the room.
I walked into the living room and looked around. I caught a glimpse of the picture of Marcia and Hugh again, and I remembered a bit more about last night.
I knelt down and slid the blue binder free, and spread it open. Wedding pictures. I was digging through... this photo album.
I flipped to the end, mostly by gut feeling, and read the back of the picture again, feeling very familiar with it all. My stomach knotted. It felt like I was less present than her, with her decorations and pictures all over the place. I was the ghost, not her.
I slumped down onto the floor, my throat rising. I burst into tears and sobbed, holding the picture against my chest. I didn’t want to feel this way. I didn’t want to feel angry and resentful, pissed and mean. I didn’t want to feel any of it.
It was like I was trapped, spiraling without control over anything.
I let the tears flow, big gasps of air making me as noisy as possible. The tears rolled off my chin and started spotting my thighs.
Another thing to add to my shitty day. All I wanted was to live a normal life, a life I dreamed of. To be in love, that freeing feeling.
I thought about Hugh and I. This wasn’t normal, was it? The baggage, the anxiety. It felt like a rehash of our last relationship, which is maybe why I felt so raw when I saw him again. This couldn’t be right. How could it ever be normal? If I got sober? If he moved on?
Did I rely on him too much to fix me? Hope too much I could fix him?
My mind flashed. I had some rum stashed away in my luggage.
How could I forget?
My palms started to sweat as I thought about it, how I could just sneak a little bit. That couldn’t hurt could it? I mean, I was only at the hospital because I got out of control. If I had a shot or two, that should be fine, right? Just to wean myself off it, just to wind down.
I tore open the bag and retrieved the half empty bottle. I squeezed it in my hands, holding it tight, staring into the caramel colored liquid.
Then a key scraped the lock and I froze up, the bottle still in my hands. I couldn’t let him see me like this.
“I’m back,” Hugh announced as he walked in. He sounded more cheerful. I heard him moving through the entryway and set a bunch of groceries down on the counter.
I felt like I was stuck, I was still kneeling over my bag, the rum sloshing in the bottle. Then it was too late. Hugh walked in and saw me.
“Caitlin?” Hugh’s voice hardened. “What the hell are you doing?” I spun on my feet and faced him. He was holding the picture of Marcia in his hand.
I scrambled to try and do damage control. “Hugh, what...?”
“Are you drinking?” He rushed up to me and yanked the bottle from my hands. I tried to fight to keep it from him. He stared at it in disbelief. “What are you doing? Why?”
“No! I was just... thinking about it.”
“I don’t believe you.” He looked away from me, staring at the bottle as if he’d never seen it before. Like he blamed it.
“No! You have to believe me! I hadn’t taken a single sip! You can smell me!”
“I shouldn’t have to. It’s bad enough you had to hide it from me, you had to lie to me.” His voice was rising and his face was turning red. Not so much in anger, but confusion and frustration.
I stood up and faced him. “I’m not lying.”
“I’ve been trying my best to give you space, to help you. I’m sorry if I’ve been off. I’ve been thinking.” He held up the picture, “Why was this on the floor?”
“Why was it in this house?”
“You’re being ridiculous. This can be in my house, she was my wife for fuck’s sake!”
“She ‘was’? She still is! Look at your hand. That’s all the proof you or I need. You’re still wearing that damn ring.” He hid his hand in his pocket and frowned. He lowered the picture.
“I just don’t get it,” I confessed. I fell onto the bed, feeling utterly defeated. “It feels like you don’t love me.”
“I do love you Caitlin.” He joined me, sitting next to me. “But I can’t stand here with you while you’re drinking. You’re killing yourself. Wasn’t the hospital last night proof enough?”
I stared at him.
He continued, “But, I can’t watch another person die. I can’t have that on my hands. I thought you were going to try and get better. I never wanted to say anything before but — maybe you do have a problem. Maybe I have a problem, too.”
I slumped my shoulders and stared in the mirror. There wasn’t anything I could say. He was still looking at me, his face soft, his eyes watery.
He continued, his voice growing cold. “I can’t do this with you anymore. I want to be with you, but I can’t watch you kill yourself. I can’t watch you die.”
He stood up and faced me, waiting for a response.
“So... what now?” I said. “You going to take me back home?”
“Yes. I can get you a plane back tonight.”
“Fine, you might as well, since you want to get rid of me so badly.” My eyes burned and my hands were shaking. I looked around the room, feeling frantic and lost.
“Caitlin. I want to love you. I want to take care of you, but I can’t fix you. I want to experience life with you, but I can’t do that if you’re never sober. ” He shrugged and threw his hands down. “If you’re not present.” He touched his ring, “and maybe if I’m not either.”
I shook my head, almost refusing to believe I wasn’t dreaming.
“When you’re ready to go, I’ll call you a cab. You won’t have to see me again.”
I groaned, and broke down again. I tried to choke back my tears, but it was no use. I felt like my whole world was collapsing, the sky was shattering, and nothing mattered.
As he left the room, he squeezed his ring, before slipping the picture of Marcia in his pocket. He walked away quietly.
Hugh was leaving me.
I felt like throwing up.
We didn’t speak again until I left. All he said was “Good luck.”
I was going to need it.
Chapter 10
After landing in Bangor, I dried my face and got ready to deplane.
I met James before I went into the terminal, and he looked consolatory.
“I’m sorry to see you go, Caitlin.” I was surprised that he was wasting the time to talk to me personally.
I shrugged with a pitiful smile. “It happens. Thanks for flying me back home James, you really didn’t have to.”
“Good luck,” he said. He saluted me and I deplaned, feeling a little better that he sympathized with me.
The airport wasn’t very crowded, just a bunch of small groups of people clustered around some of the middle gates. Those were the more popular outbound flights, heading to New York or going up into Canada.
I felt sick, that stale air becoming a little too familiar. I sighed and pulled out my phone, psyching myself up to confess to my dad. Every time I talked to him, my gut reaction was to think of him as a drunk, so it was always refreshing being reminded
that he wasn’t anymore. It was almost a little surprising when I was reminded of reality.
“Hello, Dad?”
His voice was loud and clear, “Hey, kiddo, how’s it going?”
“Not great. I need a ride from the airport.”
“You’re in town?” His tone changed, and he sounded consolatory. “Not great huh? I can come get you in about ten minutes. Just sit tight, I’m visiting your mom so I’m kind of close.”
“Okay, I’ll see you soon.” I hung up. I was standing at one of the terminal windows, overlooking the numerous planes. Carts full of luggage zipped across the tarmac. A handful of aviation flaggers were having a coffee break.
***
Fifteen minutes later, I headed out into the baggage claim and found my dad. It was always easy to tell if someone was looking for something, that searching and distant look in their eyes. He was especially obvious, always putting his hand on his forehead like he was shielding his eyes from the sun, even if it was dark outside.
I surprised him by sneaking up behind him, and saying “Hello,” a bit louder than I needed to.
He jumped and turned, a smile spreading across his face.
“Hey!” he yelled, “I’m not thirty anymore! You’re going to give me a heart attack.”
I was grinning, but it faded all to quickly when my feelings boiled back up to the surface. I felt like crying, and I’m sure he could tell.
“Let’s get you home, alright? We can talk about it in the car if you want.”
I nodded, and followed him out into the steaming and hazy parking lot.
***
On the drive home, I decided to spill my guts on the whole situation. To try and make it clean.
“Hugh thinks I have a drinking problem.”
“Is that why he isn’t here?” My dad put on his turn signal, the gentle ticking barely audible over the oldies radio station. He turned the volume down a bit to listen to me.
“I — I think so.” I swallowed hard, trying to keep my voice from cracking. “Well, I know it is. I don’t know why I’m avoiding it. He told me he couldn’t be with me if I was going to keep drinking.”
My dad hissed like he just cut his leg. “That’s... harsh. But it’s hard...” he seemed to be choosing his words very carefully. “What brought that up?”
I realized I hadn’t told him about my hospital stay yet. For a moment, I thought about withholding it, but what good would that really do me? If I came back here and just kept up my lies and kept myself an arms length from my parents and my friends, could I really change?
“I ended up in the hospital a couple nights ago.”
“What?” My dad looked away from the road and stared at me. I wished the seat would swallow me whole.
“I had alcohol poisoning.”
He was silent, and he turned to watch the road. I couldn’t tell if he was mad or not. I tried to explain, “It hasn’t happened before, but I was under a lot of stress,” I groped for the words, “Hugh still wears his wedding ring from his wife. He’s a widower. How am I supposed to deal with that? He proposed to me, Dad. He’s weird and distant, and I hate that I feel like I can’t be with him.” I broke down, and lost it. “Like I’m not important.” My dad turned into our neighborhood.
My dad’s jaw moved, as if he were silently formulating a sentence. “I think,” he began, “that’s hard. I know it’s hard, Caitlin.” After he pulled into our driveway, he lurched the car to a stop and put it in park.
He turned in his seat to face me, resting his arm over the steering wheel, and his knee bumping against the console. “Caitlin. I’m an alcoholic. It was really hard for me to come to terms with that, but I did. Even though I’ve been sober, I can’t drink. For the first year, I couldn’t even be near people who were drinking — every single day was a test of my will power with your mom.”
“But didn’t you stay at home?”
“I didn’t. I mostly stayed at friends houses and motels in town for the first six months. I literally couldn’t be around your mom because of her drinking. I don’t know if that made her worse, but I had to do it for myself.”
I was silent. He wasn’t with my mom for that long? I hadn’t even known.
He continued, “He won’t let go of his wife, but he proposed to you? Do you think he made a mistake?”
I squeezed the seat and stared out the window. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense to me to wear your wedding ring and propose to other people. I think I was just confused.”
“Everyone deals with grief in their own way.”
“So he just proposed to me as part of his grief? He didn’t actually care?”
“He didn’t have to say anything to me when he saw me. He could’ve just walked away. He approached me. It isn’t my fault.” I felt like I was burning holes into the windshield.
“Forget him, Caitlin. He’s not here, and that’s over. You can’t fix him and he can’t fix you.”
“I didn’t ask him to fix me, I just wanted...” I cringed, “something good in my life.”
“You can have something good in your life. But you have to start with cutting out the bad, getting rid of the rotten parts. If we’re not going to put him aside right now, let’s look at it this way.”
I perked up a little bit, feeling like I was finally being listened to a little.
He said, “If what you say is true, then you guys weren’t doing well together. It sounds toxic.” My dad looked at the house. “It is toxic. It was with your mother and I, but we stuck through it.”
I cringed, shuffling my feet. “I tried. I tried to help him.”
“I knew even though your mom wasn’t sober, all she needed from me was to try and be there for her. She told me at the hospital before you showed up. If I wasn’t around and clean, she wouldn’t be alive anymore.”
“So you fixed her?”
“No, Caitlin. I didn’t. When I got clean, I realized I couldn’t fix her, I could just support her.”
“So I could support Hugh, couldn’t I?”
“I couldn’t support her when I was a drunk. All I could do was enable her, or push her away. Neither of those things are what she needed.” He sighed, his eyes looked tired. “I should have pushed her harder to get sober sooner, but she wasn’t in the right mind, she wouldn’t have listened.” He rubbed his temples. “I wasn’t either.” He smiled at me, and added, “I’m glad you’re home again, Caitlin.”
We sat in silence for a little bit, and he finally shut his car off. I didn’t want to move, trying to let it all sink in. I’m not healthy, and I can’t help Hugh if I’m like this.
My dad climbed out of the car and grabbed my bags out of the trunk. He disappeared in the house.
I sat in the increasingly hot car and thought about what my dad said about Hugh and I being toxic. “Damaging, dangerous, lethal, fatal...”
Definitely not the things love and cure-alls were made of.
After some time, I finally went into the house. I found my dad making food in the kitchen, and almost forgot that my mom wasn’t home.
“Can we visit Mom later?” I said. He turned away from counter with a bowl of salad he was mixing together. He dried his hands and answered me, “Yeah. We can visit her tomorrow. She’s getting better every day. Tomorrow should be really good for you to see her, you’re going to be amazed.” He turned and topped off the salads with tomatoes, before mixing them in.
***
The next day, we got up early in the morning to go see my mom at the clinic.
We sat in the makeshift lobby while the nurses made sure my mom was ready to have guests.
The clinic wasn’t stylized like a traditional clinic. The building obviously used to be an old house that was renovated to meet the needs of the business, but while retaining some old charm. Decorations and paintings lined the wallpaper, and fireplaces seemed to be spread out into every single room. It was cozy, and not nearly as sterile and whitewashed as I expected it would be.
A nu
rse peeked her head out of the entryway and looked around. “Daniel Winters?”
My dad elbowed me and stood up. The nurse nodded and asked us to follow her.
At the end of one of the wings of the house, the nurse leaned over to open a door to a small bedroom. My mom was sitting on the bed, looking bright and a lot less miserable than when I last saw her.
“Oh my god, I didn’t expect to see both of you!” She cheered, looking excited and bright. She smiled, standing to meet us. I hugged her, holding her tight enough to squeeze the air out of her in a gasp. She laughed, and gestured to two chairs that were facing the foot of the bed. “What pleasure do I have for a visit today?”
My dad chuckled a little. “I was just here yesterday, Tammy.”
“Yes, but she wasn’t.” She pointed at me. “You’re back from Reno already? Where’s Hugh at?”
“He’s in Reno,” I answered. I gnawed my tongue a little, “Things went south.” My mom raised her eyebrows.
“What happened?” I was surprised to see so much energy in her. The only other time I remembered her being so vibrant was when I was in elementary school, when she’d take me to soccer practice. I gathered my thoughts.
“A lot of things...” I didn’t want to go over it again. “Is it stressful here?”
“Oh no, I’m fine. If anything, I’m a little bored. I’ll admit, it’s weird not having a drink first thing in the morning.” She smiled a little. “But when I woke up this morning, it was like I just discovered life again.”
“Wow — that’s fantastic!” I leaned forward. “You look good too, not nearly as...”
“Run down? Old?” My mom laughed, a kind of chortling laugh that couldn’t decide if it was a belly laugh or not. “It’s okay, I was run down, ragged, and spent. I thought that was just what life was for me.”
“But it isn’t,” my dad said. “It’s crazy how when you start drinking, you think it’s your ticket to really enjoying life — you get all fun and uninhibited, and it softens the edge on the harder things. Then you realize you aren’t enjoying life at all anymore.”
It felt more like he was talking to me than her. My mom nodded heavily, and reached across the table and took my hands.
