Away From Everywhere (22 page)

Earlier that day, he was in the liquor store. He picked up a second bottle of wine, and laid it back down. Picked it back up. He pretended to read the beige label so that the pretty blonde in the tight black dress wouldn't look at him and wonder why he kept picking up the wine and putting it back down. He was moderately sober and thought it might be a good idea not to buy the second bottle, so he could start getting used to the idea of getting drunk and leaving it at that. Not needing to keep drinking for the sake of it. Because he was awake and bored. Or writing. Or just lying there, reading, always habitually sipping.

He was drunk now, and hated himself for his earlier resolve. His faith that he could wean himself off the wine. He was hating himself for searching through the cupboards, so desperate he never trusted his own eyes.

There was no wine in his house, but searching through the kitchen, he found the cheap bottle of rum he'd never finished because it tasted like rubbing alcohol, and he spent ten minutes digging through his freezer, refusing to accept that there was no ice there, and below it, in the fridge, no mix. There were no stores open where he could go buy mix. He couldn't stand the taste of watering it down. It would only make it worse.

He needed that mix and thought his solution was brilliant: he'd walk to a McDonald's drive-thru window and order an extra-large coke. He stuck a foot in his shoe, but the sudden shift in balance toppled him over and he caught the heater on his way down with the palm of his hand, tearing it off the wall. He just stared at it: the jagged white line separating the beige paint of the wall from the bare gyproc where the heater had been attached.

Ten minutes into the hour-long walk from Gower Street to the McDonald's on Topsail Road, he realized he was wearing only one glove. He took it off to stuff it in his jacket pocket but it wouldn't fit, so he threw it at a garbage can. He missed. He kept walking. It started to snow, lightly enough that he could've dodged each oversized flake. He thought of his father, how he'd sit with a cup of tea at his office window and just watch the stuff fall, be pacified by it. Alex always found it weird, but Owen wondered what he saw in it all. He'd watch his father watching it. One night his father turned to him.
C'mere.
He patted his lap.
What if it never stopped,Owen?What if it kept falling and falling
and buried us a hundred feet deep?Tell me what you'd miss the most out there.

Out there.
Owen kept on walking down the endless road, his body tense from the cold, arms tight against his sides, realizing that he'd grown into a man who spoke of the world with the same contempt his father had.
Out there
, he'd called it, like it was somewhere worth avoiding. All of it. Like the plague, slowly rotting us all away. It had been ten minutes since he'd walked past anything but commercial property adorned in signs and pushing products: hamburgers, clothes, booze, porn, electronics, gas for cars. Cars.
Out there.

The snow and ice-covered sidewalks had him stumbling along like a man fresh off a merry-go-round. A young teenage couple were walking towards him, but chose to cross the street rather than walk past him. All of a sudden he was that guy now. The disheveled guy you notice and avoid. It might have bothered him if being that person didn't make life so much easier.

He was about halfway there, and a blue car full of kids drove past him, music blaring from the open windows, an indistinct buzz and thumping bass. They each threw a snowball at him. The sudden onslaught toppled him over, and laughter soared out of the car. He was too cold and drunk and irritated to laugh at himself. He was the dumb drunk who gave bored kids something to do. They circled around again and teased him this time. They drew back to throw the snowballs and feigned throwing them over and over. They laughed each time Owen braced himself. The first real one missed, but he slipped trying to dodge it. He stood up and they pretended to throw some more, but he wouldn't give them the satisfaction of running. The second snowball was packed so tight it was ice. It felt like a baseball when it crashed into his face. It pushed his bottom lip deep enough into his teeth to draw blood, like a jab from a two-pronged fork, and he let out a guttural moan that seemed to earn him some sympathy from the kids. The throbbing fat lip added to his anger and justified, in his mind, his next move. But as he was scouring the ground for something to throw, a rock or a bottle, the car sped off before he could decide if he'd actually throw it. He kept a rock in his pocket just in case they came back for round three. He filled the half-inch cut with the tip of his tongue. Tasted the metallic blood there. Felt the warmth of it filling his mouth, enough to let it collect before spitting it out.

Pressing a lump of cold snow into his throbbing lip exaggerated his previous feelings of despair. The run-in with the kids meant he was sick: a pathetic drunk too weak to clean himself up.

The walk and the fresh air, and the encounter with those kids sobered him up some, but he still startled the girl behind the drive-thru window when he staggered up to it and rapped his knuckles on the glass. She didn't want to serve him, she was visibly scared and threatened to get security, but he persisted.

She yelled through the glass, “Sir! It's our policy. We can only serve people in cars, for your safety and our safety, and for health regulations.”Her breath against the window condensed, blurring her tired-looking face. Frizzy spirals of hair jutted out from under her cap. She looked equally irritated and sorry for the guy staring in at her.

He saw his patchy beard in the window, his hair woven together at all angles, like a worn-out rug. There were headlights on him now, from a car behind him. Beeping the horn. Throwing confused hands and shoulders in the air.

The commotion caught the attention of two other kids working that night. They looked about nineteen and found Owen's story hilarious and admirable. To a nineteen-year-old, a guy who walks an hour for mix must be the life of a party. They must have pictured him coming from a house party bigger than they'd ever been to, and gave him two extra-large cokes, free of charge, and a pat on the back. When he went to walk back home, one of the guys offered him a drive back to his apartment in exchange for an invite into the party. Owen nodded his head, no words.

When the kid dropped him off,Owen apologized, looking down at his feet, “Shit, man, I'm sorry. Thanks for the mix and the drive, but the party must be over.”The kid sped off, more pissed off at Owen than sorry for him.

He was too worn out to take his shoes off, and streaks of slush and dirty water followed him as he walked through his cluttered living room to his kitchen. He laid the cokes in the fridge. Somewhere in the last hour and a half, the urgency for the mix had diminished and the whole act seemed pathetic.

He blamed the look that kid gave him when he dropped him off. It was always the looks that got to him. He remembered his fat lip and touched it, to double-check whether that whole scene had actually happened. There was a blueberry coffee cake in the fridge he didn't remember buying. It wasn't uncommon not to know how certain things, like the coffee cake, ended up in his house.

All the dishes were dirty; every last piece of cutlery he owned was spread out across a pile of plates and bowls falling into the sink and begging to be washed: black and brown globs crusted onto everything like a colony of insects. Too much effort to wash off. He hated himself for it. For where he ended up in life, for the life that got away. For the alcoholism. Tonight was the first night he blamed the alcoholism for what he'd done with his life, and not the other was around.

He took a steak knife out of the knife block and went at the cake. He diced it up into cubes and used the knife like a skewer, but on the third cube his drunken grip sank the knife deep into the roof of his mouth. So deep that the knife was
stuck
there after he flinched and let go of the handle. His eyes burst open wide enough to tear the skin surrounding them. The salty taste of warm blood rained down on his tongue and added to the shock and pain. In front of the hazy bathroom mirror, he could barely watch as he plucked the knife from the roof of his mouth. The knife did more damage coming out than it had going in. The cut was deep enough to turn his stomach, deep enough for stitches. The flesh splayed and hanging open. Blood pooling and dripping.

He stumbled five blocks up to St. Clare's hospital, and the lady behind the glass treated him like a drunk who deserved whatever injury he had. Like she was sick of
his type
always taking up half the waiting room. She didn't even look up when she asked for his hospital card or what his problem was.

He waited on a stiff bed behind a green curtain for what felt like an hour, bored, contemplating just leaving, hating that he was so obviously drunk. But then he heard something distinct, familiar. It took him a second to place it. She was drawing back the curtains as it came to him. It was the way she was clicking a pen against her nails, like she always did, absentmindedly, when she was studying. It was Abbie. He hadn't seen her since they broke up and he moved out, yet he sensed her there, almost recognized her silent-but-deliberate footsteps, the dainty throat-clearing cough. He had forgotten that she worked there, and then he heard that clacking of pen against nail: two on the index, two on the middle, two on the ring, and two on the pinky. About a second-long pause between each two taps.

What surprised him more than seeing her was how thrilled she was to see him. She tossed her clipboard onto the bed to free her arms and splayed them wide for a hug, her raised eyebrows an inch above her eyes. She seemed electrified and flirtatious; she was alive like she was on the day he first saw her, sitting by the window in his mother's office. She was alive in a way that made him feel alive. There was energy there, he could feel it, like heat pouring out of a heater.

In a seductive voice, with a Marilyn Monroe curtsy to drive it all home, “So? How do you like me in the nurse outfit, Owen?” She ran her hands down her body, showing it off for the trophy it was. The body he loved for so long, the body he'd mapped, and knew right where to lay his arms when they slept so that they'd both be comfortable. The body with a soft brown mole on the left ribcage. Her body was more toned now, a gym membership maybe. He heard her white sneaker squeak off the linoleum floor and thought about how he'd always tease her about her tiny toes, every time he saw them, the biggest one not even an inch long.
So, do you ever just tip over when you lean forward too quickly?

She leaned over him in a way that might have meant she still loved him. A warmth falling down onto him. Some natural, distinct, and calming smell taking him back to a better time. The power of scent, so undervalued until a moment like this when you are alive with it.

“Oooh. You'll need stitches there for sure, but it's nothing serious. The only problem will be the awkwardness of stitching the roof of a mouth. They'll probably have to use a few staples on this sucker,O.”A smile like
Don't worry, won't hurt too much.

Being in her presence, even for those five short minutes, made it clear why he'd fallen apart since they'd broken up years ago. It was the way her warmth dripped down on him as she hovered there above him. That buzz in the room that muted out everything but the sound of her voice, the mothering, the feeling connected to something more through
her
. Solely and entirely through her. He had to consciously keep his hands by his sides. It wasn't love; it was necessity, needing one more chance with her. Or maybe not even her, just what he had with her. Something definite and meaningful in a world with no real meaning.

Abbie was fiddling with paperwork and his bed sheets, seemingly lingering in his presence. The words were there, on the tip of his tongue, heavy as lead. He spat them out abruptly. “So …how did things work out with that Adam Fleisher guy, Abbie?”

He wanted to hear a long, horrible story. Instead she didn't even have to speak. She took his hand and laid it on her pregnant belly.“I'm due in seven months! I'm thinking it's a boy, but Adam puts his ear to my belly and pretends he can hear a girl's voice in there.”She laughed then, like
How cute is that?

She let his hand drop and it fell like a stone. “I hope it is a boy. We already have a girl, Kaylen. I've always wanted a boy
and
a girl.”She looked down on him like she was only now remembering why they'd broken up. “Well, as you know, I guess.”

She was glowing. Her life was working out, just like she'd planned it, just like she'd wanted it to on all those nights she fought with Owen. With his hand on her belly, everything inside him had deflated. He felt pinned to the bed. He felt his lungs drag in each breath of solid, heavy air, and he knew that she was right to have left him. She reached into the pocket of her nurse's outfit and plucked out the ring.

“We got married two months ago. We honeymooned in Prague. You really would love it there!”

He couldn't swallow it; he couldn't stop his face from contorting like that in front of her. He felt his jaw twist to the left and only then realized he'd been grinding his teeth. Maybe to pin his tongue down, or to divert his pain to something more physical and manageable.

Her words trailed off as she saw that he still loved her, years later, or that he at least suddenly needed her in a way she couldn't offer up. It was there in the twitchiness on his face. She eased off on exuding her happiness, for his sake, and he felt appalling for it: snuffing out a blushing bride's happily-ever-after story with that unmanageable, tortured look on his face. Truthfully, he hadn't loved her all this time, but the very second he felt her warmth, her arms around him, he felt like all those years between then and now, and all the reasons they didn't work the first time, were gone. Irrelevant.

Abbie took a step back, not rudely, just to put a little more space between them.