Drunk Mom (27 page)

Just look up, what’s the name of the street that you’re on.

Look up. Okay. What does the street name look like? Can’t remember. I remember that it should be on the corner, though, so I look toward what I think is the corner.

I have to walk up because my eyesight isn’t so good without my glasses. Where are my stupid glasses? Shit.

Can you see it?

Clarens Avenue and Bloor, I read out loud. This sounds familiar. Am I here? I say.

Clarens Avenue and Bloor.

I lost my shoes. Come and get me, please.

You can walk, it’s close. You’re right around the corner.

No, I scream into the phone, but there’s no one on the other end.

I can’t walk. I have no shoes. But I walk.

The next morning it’s the usual. I wake up in bed, terrified. Before I turn around to face my boyfriend—I hear him breathing behind me—I make up my mind about the course of action. I will not let him bully me. I can’t remember much from the night before and I know for sure that I came home shoeless, but I don’t remember anything after I started walking. So I don’t even know if he saw me or not. I have to assume yes. And if yes, I better not let him bully me.

Or should I just apologize. Assume that bad things happened—they always do—and that I owe him an apology. Promise that I won’t do it again. But do what again? I promise him I won’t do it again all the time. I apologize all the time. Maybe I can think up a good story, something about how I lost my shoes because of a genuine accident,
something about falling and having a concussion, something—

I can’t do this anymore, he says behind me.

Even as I rise, sit up, and all kinds of defensive lies fall out of my mouth, I feel some kind of resignation, an obstacle inside me that wasn’t there before.

I say things.

He says nothing else.

The baby cries in the other room.

I get up to attend to him and then I feel pain so sharp that it breaks me in two and I fall right beside the bed.

Are you okay? my boyfriend says. His voice is a sigh.

I don’t think so.

I’m on the floor. I look down. My right leg is a mess. My left leg is a mess. The skin on my right knee is grazed down to a bloody jumble with pieces of black embedded in it, now throbbing loudly in pain. But it’s not what has made me fall down.

It’s the fucking little toe. The littlest toe of them all, which is now not so littlest at all but is instead a big fat cherry of a screaming—no, throbbing—ache. Ridiculous. A little toe.

I’ll go check on him, my boyfriend says, meaning the baby.

I look closely at my little toe. I touch it but recoil immediately—it’s as if I just poked myself with a hot needle—the sensation is so intense that I let out a loud moan.

My boyfriend comes in with the baby in his arms, the baby stretching, extending out his arms ready to fall into mine.

I say, I think I broke it.

Okay. My boyfriend passes me the baby, sits down on the edge of the bed.

I lie down on the bed with Frankie crawling all over me and making happy sounds.

I can’t do this anymore. I think we should split up, my boyfriend says.

I had a concussion. I fell off—

No. No, you didn’t. You were drunk. You came home without shoes.

I can’t do this anymore.

I got hit by a car.

You got hit by a car? You should see a doctor, then.

I need help.

I can’t help you anymore. I don’t want to help you anymore. I don’t want to be with you anymore. I’m going to call the lawyer. If you want I can call one for you too. I’m going to look for a place or you can start looking for a place. I think you should probably start looking for a place right away.

I’m stunned. Every word falls on me like a brick. It’s a shower of bricks. He says everything that I don’t want to hear, can’t bear to hear. He has a right to say all those things, to mean them.

It’s over.

What lawyer? I don’t know any lawyers. He has lawyer friends. His friend Tommy is a lawyer. Tommy’s going to take his side, of course. They’ve been friends for years. Everyone, in fact, is going to take his side.

I’ve no one. I’m all by myself. The baby will be taken away. I’m a poor, stupid drunk slut, that’s all. I’m nothing and I have nothing.

I think about all that but then I say something entirely different. I say hurtful, mean things and I make up lies, more lies. The more lies I say, the easier it’ll be to believe them, I hope. I go back to the concussion story. It was a concussion, I insist.

Concussion, he says and gets up.

Slowly, painfully, I hop around the house and get myself and Frankie ready to go out. We’ll go to a park, I’ll have a little nap as usual. Frankie can sleep too. Yes, good. We’ll sleep, we’ll clear our heads, things will make more sense once we clear our heads. I’ll be able to convince my boyfriend that what I’m telling him is the truth. Why does he suddenly refuse to play our game where he pretends to believe what I tell him even though we both know I’m lying?

I strap Frankie in the stroller and hop out of the house.

It’s a beautiful day. I’m wearing white. I’ve washed my wounds and put dressing on my knee and on the smaller gash on my left leg. It’s not pretty but at least it’s clean. The white squares match the dress. I have a hard time walking but I figure out a way to place my left foot in a way—big-toe pad first—that there’s no pressure on the stupid little toe.

I’m going to think about things today and then I’m going to go back home and convince my boyfriend of my innocence. I’m so sick of being accused. I can’t take it anymore. This is really unacceptable. What right does he have to constantly monitor me like this? I mean, why is this any of his business? I had a concussion. How is that my fault. I’m going to turn—

Then there’s silence.

My own voice in my own head just disappears. And once it disappears, there’s an absolute, vast silence.

It stops all. It stops me.

It’s not a moment per se. It’s the invisible, non-existent pause between time’s passing, one minute turning into the next one. It’s so big that it contains everything else—around me and inside me.

I see me and I am looking back, looking for help.

And with that glimpse, everything crumbles.

I’m a liar.

I’m a liar and I can’t afford to lie anymore.

I’m an alcoholic, I’m a liar and I’ve lied about everything.

There was no concussion.

I drank.

I drank and rode my bike and fell onto a busy street and broke my shoes. I got up and got back on my bike and then fell down again. Back onto the street. There were cars whooshing by, honking, people on the sidewalk stopping, asking: Is she okay? Are you okay? Is she okay? Are you okay? There was me kicking off my broken shoes. Walking barefoot through the streets with my mangled bike, walking into the darkness, coming out of the darkness, lost.

But I don’t want to be lost anymore.

What am I hiding? There are bruises all over my body. Yellow, green, blue, red. I hide them underneath white clothes. I paint my blackened nails over with red. I get sick and flush to hide the sound, wash and scrub to hide the smell. There are bottles hidden all over the city.

What have I built this tower of secrets for?

I glance down. Out of the corner of my eye I see that Frankie turns around the way he always does when he senses me looking. It’s our magical connection, mother and son. We feel each other.

It’s okay, baby, I say, it’s okay. We’re okay.

I’m only minutes away from home.

It’s okay, it’s okay, I keep saying to Frankie, to myself, who knows to what.

I walk back, stumble back. I’m crying but this is good. I’m just washing shit out. There’s so much shit inside me. I could cry for days. Months.

I’m feeling so incredibly relieved too. Yes, relieved. I don’t have to do this anymore. I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to make up stupid stories about concussions. I don’t have to conceal my tracks—bottles, bruises—pretend I don’t know where they’ve come from. My purse’s double lining will get stitched, there will be no need to hide anything
in any lining anymore. Everything will be out in the open with me. I will never get caught because there will be nothing to catch me with or to catch me for. I will live like a normal human being.

When I get inside the house, my boyfriend doesn’t want to hear it. He’s heard it all before. He’s heard it many times.

But you don’t understand. This time it’s different.

That’s what you said last time.

But it
is
different. And it doesn’t even matter that he doesn’t believe me.
I
wouldn’t believe me. Who would?

I suppose I’m sad that he doesn’t believe me, but I understand. I understand and I’m happy regardless. Frankie is here. As long as there is Frankie, I could be happy. I could lose my boyfriend, lose this house, our life as a family unit … and I would be happy anyway. Because this is over. Although it’s not over for a fact—you can never know for a fact. I just know
right now
that it’s over.

S
o now that I’ve finally caught
the
moment, stopped time and got out, I don’t know any better how to catch it. Because, no matter what anyone tells you, stopping is impossible if you’re a real addict. If you’re an addict it’s not in your nature to stop. It’s in your nature to do more and more. And more. And more.

And how do I know that this is the magical moment? Why would
this
be it, why
right now
?

It’s not fear of losing what I have, not my boyfriend’s words and the consequences he has outlined. Because I know that I can still probably go back and throw another lie at him, I can probably even reheat the concussion story and he will eventually capitulate and everything will go back to what it was like until one of us dies or something. Either way, we’ll be miserable until forever.

I don’t know for sure if this is the magical moment. But I know that right after I get back home to confess to my boyfriend and right after he
rejects my confession, I don’t crumble. I feel more solid than I have in months. Years.

And, limping on my broken toe, I march all the way across town to an AA meeting. Because that is the only thing that kept me stopped before. And this time I mean it. I really want it. I want it. The wanting is as strong as always. But now it’s for the right thing.

I
f you’ve read other addiction memoirs, you know that this is the part where I talk about how difficult but wonderful things became after I got sober. Things got very difficult indeed after I got sober. The reality is that often I’m not sure if they got anything else. I’m not sure if they really got that wonderful and, really, what this wonderful is supposed to be.

In fact, it is wonderful that possibly makes me relapse. I’m always chasing it because I don’t experience it—the wonderful—unless I’m truly on the edge. I understand the concept of wonderful, the concept of happiness, but I never feel as close to it as I do when intoxicated.

I know that here is roughly the part where I’m supposed to write that I found true happiness only after getting sober, but this is not the case.

I’m certainly feeling healthier already. But like the uncatchable moment of clarity in the midst of addiction, happiness is a glimpse, a flash going off. As an addict I see it—happiness—differently, or
rather, I want to see it differently. I want to see it as a platform, a way of going even further, beyond happy. Fuck happy. I want ecstatic, euphoric. I want godly. Meeting my son for the first time when I gave birth gave me a surge of godly. But it didn’t last long enough.

And, of course, I wanted more.

And now I
want
more again. And now I’m sober. The first time I got sober, it was the same: I wanted it more than anything. Now I
want
it again, just as hard. Yes, I wanted to be sober the whole time up until now but now it is desperate. The last ditch effort to jump off a speeding train. I don’t have a solution or the answer of why now, why this way. It just is this way. This is no self-help book.

As for the meetings, I could go to one or I could go to a hundred but without desperately
wanting
sobriety, it wouldn’t work. I need meetings to stay wanting, to remind myself how badly I
want
it, to see how there are others like me who want it just as badly. How there are many who want it but for whom the train of compulsion doesn’t seem to stop. They never get that moment, that pause that will be long enough for them to get off. Because that’s all it is—for some the train is too fast, some sleep through the stops, some jump off and jump right back on because they forget immediately that this is a death train. Me? I slept, went too fast, forgot … but then finally, stopped, limping on my broken toe, the lies falling off of me, making me light, making me vulnerable. Making me strong. So strong that for one moment I could halt the whole fucking train.