Drowning Erin

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  I’m still awake at 2 AM, when my mother’s name appears on my phone.

  I let it ring once, twice, wondering why I always answer. Why does it have to be me? Why can’t she go find him? Or maybe she could just let him spend a night in jail, allow him to actually see how serious a problem it is.

  She calls a second time and a third, and my hand twitches, but I don’t pick up the phone. Maybe I’m feeling sorry for myself, but I’ve had enough. For once in my damn life, I am not going to allow them to add their problems to mine.

  I must fall asleep after that, because it seems as if moments later the phone is ringing again, but the clock says it’s just after 4 AM. That’s when I start to panic. She didn’t go find him, and he’s still missing, and I’m a terrible daughter for letting it happen. I know all of this before I ever pick up the phone.

  My mother is crying so hard she’s almost incoherent. She tells me my father was in an accident. And then she tells me what I already know: that this is entirely my fault.

  By the time I reach Denver, the sun is coming over the horizon. I’ve only slept two of the past 24 hours, but I feel curiously alert, and curiously empty, all at once.

  I enter St. Joseph’s, a hospital I’ve never set foot in before, but it seems familiar—maybe because I’ve pictured this exact scenario so many times. I follow the directory to the elevators down the hall, and am then led by a somber nurse to my father's room.

  He looks different. Even if I'd walked into the family room on a regular summer day, if I saw him looking the way he does now, I'd know he was dying. His lips are thin, bleached of color, and his skin is so white it has a blue sheen to it. The veins on his hands stand out like rocky outcroppings across a desert plain.

  I press my lips together to keep from making noise, but my mom begins sobbing the moment she sees me, helpless and childlike. For a moment I hate her. I hate her for staying with him for so long, for letting him get to this point, for sitting there blubbering like a lost five-year-old who needs me to come in and fix everything. Just once, I would like to have been the lost five-year-old who got saved.

  I pinch my lips tighter, though, and go to her side, taking the seat next to her and letting her collapse on my shoulder. She tells me he ran into a telephone pole, and I silently thank God that it was an inanimate object he hit. It goes without saying that he was drunk.

  “Why didn’t you answer your phone?” she cries. “I called and called.”

  I’m not getting into this with her right now. Yes, I blame myself, but I also blame her. She’s never lifted one finger to solve this problem the whole time they’ve been together, so I’m not the only one at fault.

  "I don't know what's going on," she says, continuing to weep. "The doctors keep talking about the bleeding and cirrhosis, and it doesn't even make sense.”

  I ask the triage nurse to have the doctor stop by our room. It takes over an hour, and when he does walk in, he looks relieved. I imagine he’s glad to find someone besides my mother in the room. She keeps crying and saying "Please just fix him," like my dad's a broken toy.

  The doctor tells me my father has a subdural hematoma—bleeding in his brain. Right now they’re watching it, but he’s certain my dad will need surgery.

  “So can we get that scheduled?” I ask.

  “We’d like to wait, if possible,” he says, “because right now he’s unlikely to survive it. Your father has moderate cirrhosis, which is causing some internal bleeding. The odds of him making it through the surgery, in his current condition, are poor.”

  “How poor?” I ask. “50 percent?”

  “50 percent,” he replies, “would be extremely optimistic.”

  My mother cries again after he leaves. She says the doctor is mean and asks me to get a second opinion. I tell her I’ll handle it, and I convince her to go home to sleep for a while. Once she leaves, I take on the other parental role she abandoned, and I call my brother.

  I get a message saying his number is no longer in service.

  In movies, when the heroine hits rock bottom, the world seems to right itself. Things turn around.

  Except each time I think I’ve hit my rock bottom, I find out I can go lower. I thought my life couldn’t be any worse this time yesterday: unemployed and homeless and broken-hearted. But now my father is dying, my brother is missing, my mother is as helpless and grief-stricken as a child, and it’s on me to fix all of it, when I clearly can’t even take care of myself.

  My mother returns early in the afternoon, though I wish she had not. Her desperation is infectious. Her questions make me feel more overwhelmed and incapable than I already did. She cries and asks me what she’s going to do without him. She cries and asks why I haven’t gotten ahold of Sean, why they ever came to Colorado in the first place. And then again, why I didn’t answer the phone last night.

  It’s just after dinner when my father finally opens his eyes. He’s so happy to see me, and also so sad that I can feel my heart cracking in my chest. I’d like to be the one person in this room capable of holding it together, but I can’t do it.

  I sit beside him and take his hand.

  “I’m sorry, Erin,” he says. “It was just a stupid mistake.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell him. But it’s not okay, of course. He did this to himself, all of it, and it’s not okay.

  “The doctor told you the odds, with the surgery?” he asks. His voice breaks.

  I nod, unable to speak.

  “I just want to know you’re taken care of,” he pleads. “I just want to know that if I’m going, I don’t need to worry about all of you.”

  “You don’t need to worry about any of us,” I promise him. I know as I say it that as soon as this is over, I’ll be taking any shitty marketing job I can find—promoting wealth management or writing cheerful missives to the people Rob’s company will lay off, full of euphemisms about “new opportunities for growth” that will make me cringe with each keystroke. Sean and my mother will be more my responsibility than ever if he doesn’t survive.

  “I’m so glad you found Rob,” he says. “He’s a good man. He’ll make sure you’re all cared for. I just wish I could be there to see you married.”

  Oh, God. They don’t even know we broke up.

  I nod with a deer-in-headlights stare as my mother bounces out of her seat. “You could, Erin! We could find a priest. Maybe Father Duncan or even the hospital chaplain. You could do it right here.”

  I blink, unable to tell them the truth at this horrible moment, but unwilling to lie either.

  “Would you consider it?” my father asks, squeezing my hand. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not the big fancy thing you probably want, but you could still have that too, later.”

  I swallow hard on the lump in my throat. “We’ll see, Daddy. Rob’s not even in the country right now. Let’s talk about it later.”

  “Please,” he pleads, “think about it. I’m going to hang on until I can see it. Is Sean on his way?”

  Once again, the lies pour from my mouth. “Yes,” I say. “He’s out of state, but he’s driving here now.”

  Brendan was right. I am incapable of telling the truth, but the only person who ever knew the truth doesn’t want me, so maybe it’s for the best.

  That night, after my father falls back asleep, I let my mother have the pull-out chair and leave. I’ve been up for nearly 48 hours, and as I walk carefully down the white-tiled hallway, exhaustion makes me feel as if I’ve been adrift at sea for days. Finding Brendan in the waiting room, watching me with his worried eyes, is like finding solid ground. He crosses the room and wraps his arms around me, holding me tight. And though I thought I was too tired to cry, too cried-out to cry, I find that I’m not. I can feel it inside me, rising up.

  "What are you doing here?" I whisper.

  "Olivia told me," he says. “I didn’t want you dealing with this alone. Are you going home?”

  I shake my head. “My parents’ place,” I say, my voice growing choked. In
a few days, I may never be able to say those words again. “I want to be nearby.”

  “I’ll drive you there.”

  “You don’t need—”

  “You're not driving there alone, and you’re not staying there alone. You decide you want me gone, I'll go. But not until someone else is there with you."

  I mean to argue with him, but instead my shoulders begin to shake, and I cry silently against his chest.

  “I didn’t answer the phone last night,” I whisper, finally admitting it aloud. In spite of everything that’s happened, he’s still the only person alive I would be willing to tell. “I saw that my mom was calling, and I was so busy feeling sorry for myself that I let it go to voicemail.”

  He pulls me tighter. “You were right to do it. You should have done it a long time ago. This isn’t on you.”

  For some reason that just makes me cry harder.

  I don’t remember walking to Brendan’s car or riding to my parents’ condo. I don’t remember any aspect of it until we arrive in the guest room and he lies down, pulling me onto his chest as he drags the quilt over both of us.

  I am no longer crying, but I’m also not ready to sleep. My voice punctures the silence. “Why are you here?”

  “I didn’t want you going through this alone. I know how your mom is.”

  “But why?” I whisper. “The second Rob came back, you treated me like some one-time thing. Like you didn’t even know my name, and it never mattered. So why are acting like you care now?”

  He pushes my hair off my face, pressing a thumb to the tear under my eye and wiping it away. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so fucking sorry. It just seemed easier that way. I wasn’t going to ask you to sneak around behind his back. And if I can’t give you the things you want, someone should.”

  “Why didn’t you at least tell me that? You acted so ambivalent about it.”

  “I acted ambivalent because I was pissed, Erin. You think this is easy for me? Every time I hear from Rob, it sounds like you’re back together, or on your way to it. So I was fucking pissed off and being a dick about it. A few hours after you left my place, he’s calling to tell me you’ve got a date that afternoon. I just didn’t know what to do, and I still don’t know what to do, but I’m sorry.”

  “What about the girl?” I ask.

  “What girl?”

  “Crystal. Rob said she was at your place when he came by.”

  Brendan gives a low laugh. “I’m not dating anyone. I had to say something to keep him from walking in. You never came back for any of your stuff. It’s all over my apartment.”

  “I didn’t want to come get it. I thought it would be too hard, seeing your place. I was hoping you’d just drop it off.”

  “And I never dropped it off,” he says, “because then you’d never have a reason to come back.”

  “You put your arm around her,” I say, and my voice breaks all over again. “You were willing to let everyone know you were together last night, but you never did that with me.”

  “Erin, you were getting back together with Rob, and it’s not like we live in a major city. If we’d been all over each other, what do you think the odds are that it’d eventually get back to him? I was doing it for you, and believe me, it pissed me off every time.”

  “But…”

  He laughs softly. “Baby, go to sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

  “One more thing,” I say. “Who kept calling you at night? Was it Gabi?”

  He pauses. The silence stretches so long that it seems like a confirmation in and of itself.

  “No,” he finally says. “It’s her mom.”

  66

  Brendan

  Present

  Erin is the last person I want to tell about Gabi, but at this point I don’t have much of a choice. And while I hate what this story says about me, I can’t go on letting her believe that my inability to be in a relationship is somehow her fault.

  So I start at the beginning. I tell her I was mad after the wedding, mostly at myself. That I couldn’t stand to see her with Rob, so I finally just left.

  I tell her how hard it was, hearing about her and Rob as they got serious. And how, for a while, Gabi seemed like she could fix me. That I led her to believe we were something we were not, simply because I was hoping she could be someone she was not. And I let her keep believing it because it was easier than telling her I’d made a mistake.

  And then I tell Erin how it ended.

  By the time I got to the apartment, the police had already kicked in the door and pulled Gabi out of the bathtub. When I came in, she was lying there on our floor, covered in blood, and in that moment I wanted nothing more than for her to be alive.

  Now I wish she hadn’t been.

  There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think of her parents. What it must be like for them to see their brilliant, beautiful daughter—the one who once biked 50 miles a day, the one who was going to medical school—and know she no longer recognizes them, can’t even feed herself.

  That’s why, when her mother calls at night, screaming at me, telling me I killed their child, I don’t argue.

  How can I? I didn’t put Gabi in that tub, and I didn’t cut her wrists. But that doesn’t make me innocent. If she hadn’t met me, it never would have happened.

  67

  Erin

  Present

  “She was under the water too long,” he says, and right then I think I know the story’s outcome. I can’t even imagine that a worse ending is possible, but it is.

  His sympathy lies with Gabi’s parents, but mine lies with him, dealing with that guilt day-in and day-out.

  “If I thought I could be with someone again, it would be you,” he says. “Before you got together with Rob, even while I was with Gabi, it was always you I wanted. It’s never stopped being you. But I can’t.”

  Because he thinks of what happened to Gabi as something he did, which means he’s capable of doing it again. He had a reputation for messing with girls’ heads before he ever left for Italy. To him, what happened with her was just the culmination of a pattern that had long been in play. So he decided to make sure the pattern ended.

  “Brendan, I’m not her. Surely you see now how unstable she was? The things she did even before you broke up with her—that wasn’t the behavior of a rational person.”

  “Maybe, but I had a hand in it. I’ve caused problems like that before.”

  “Gabi made her own choices. You did the best you could, what was right for you. If what happened to my dad isn’t my fault, by that same logic this can’t be your fault either.”

  He listens. For a single, hopeful moment there is something in his eyes that makes me think I might have convinced him. But then it vanishes, replaced by pain and a grim sort of certainty. I don’t know what it will take for him to believe he isn’t at fault. I just know that I don’t have it.

  When I wake the next morning, I realize two things simultaneously: my father is dying, and Brendan will really never be mine. He’ll never be anyone’s. What he said last night soothed my sense of rejection—and finally sorted out his behavior for me a little—but it doesn’t change anything.

  "Do I have makeup everywhere?" I ask as I lift myself off of his chest.

  He smiles. "I'm pretty sure you cried it all off yesterday. I like you better without it anyway."

  The way he’s looking at me hurts. I’ve seen that look before, and I made it mean so much. But just because he looks at me like that doesn’t mean he loves me. It doesn’t mean anything. Or maybe it does, but it won’t make a difference in the end.

  I take a quick shower and check my phone when I get out. There are multiple texts, including three from Rob, who somehow heard about my dad. He was boarding a flight home when he texted and will be here this afternoon.

  I should be relieved that he’s coming, because Rob is competent in ways other people are not. If there’s anything my parents need, he will find a way to get it. Wh
ether my father lives or dies, he will know what to do. But I’m not relieved at all, because when he arrives, Brendan will leave.

  When I get downstairs, Brendan hands me a travel mug. "I looked for coffee, but I could only find instant," he says.

  "My dad likes instant better," I reply, suddenly finding it hard to speak.

  There are so many stupid, trivial things about the people we love. Things you never care about until they’re gone. And then all those things—the sound of a heavy tread at the side door, instant coffee, creaky knees heading upstairs—become things you miss, when they’re things you never knew you loved in the first place.

  As we drive to the hospital, Brendan asks if Sean is on the way, and my whole body sags. I woke feeling like I was capable of handling this, and now I remember why I’m not. My brother is missing, and I can’t give my dying father a single thing he wants.

  "I can't find him. His phone's been disconnected."

  "Hey," he says, turning my face to look at him. "It's going to be all right, okay? You worry about your dad, and I'll take care of Sean.”

  It doesn’t really seem like something he can promise, but I nod as if I believe him.

  He pulls up to the front entrance. “I'll park and meet you inside.”

  "You don't have to—"

  "Yeah, blah blah blah. I know,” he says. “But I am." His mouth curves slightly to one side, and he looks at me in a way no one else ever has: as if he knows me. As if he knows everything I'm thinking, everything I fear, everything I need. What would it be like, going through life with someone who knows you that well, someone with whom you don’t have to pretend? It would feel like a miracle.