The Empty Room (7 page)

“I’m afraid we found the bottle of vodka in your desk. Or should I say bottles,” David continued.

There was a fifth of vodka in her bottom drawer, as well as a variety of small “nips,” most of them empty. She’d been meaning to get rid of them, but lately someone always seemed to be hovering about. Colleen opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. All her clever words dried up and her throat felt as though someone had stuffed it with gas-soaked rags.

“That is quite against university policy,” said Pat Minot. “I’m sure you’re aware of that.”

“Yes, of course, they were just things I meant to take home. I don’t drink on the job.”

“But you do, Colleen,” said Moore, leaning forward, his elbows on his spotless blotter. “I’ve seen you myself, grabbing a little sip or two in the kitchen when you think no one’s looking. You go into the bathroom and come out stinking. You think no one can smell it, but of course we can. You’re reeking of it now.”

She felt like crying, and she mustn’t. She just had to get out of this office. If she could just have a few minutes to herself. She swallowed and took a breath. “I haven’t had anything to drink today. It’s nine o’clock in the morning, for God’s sake.”

“Colleen.” Minot inched her chair closer. “Even I can smell it, dear, which means, if you haven’t had anything to drink today, and I believe you on that front, I do, that you were drinking heavily last night and it’s coming out of your pores. It’s your body’s way of trying to cleanse itself.” She tried to take one of her hands, but Colleen pulled away. “All right. All right. But this is a crucial moment for you, Colleen, and you have to make a decision. You are at a crossroads.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Colleen sniffed and her eyes stung. Her head was pounding.

Pat Minot reached into her pocket and pulled out a plastic package of tissues. She handed it to Colleen, who took it but did not pull one out; she wouldn’t give them that.

“You have been issued warnings, both verbal and written, and yet your performance continues to deteriorate. We believe you are an alcoholic and we want you to get help with your problem. Indeed, the university is willing to assist you. Our benefits will provide for time at a treatment centre and you can use the little sick leave you have left, as well as long-term leave, for the thirty days you’ll be away.”

Alcoholic. Away
.
Treatment centre
. Colleen began to shake in earnest, the tremors starting in her thighs and moving into her belly and
arms. She clenched her muscles, trying to control them, but that only made it worse. She shifted in her seat, rocking a little in an attempt to disguise the shudders.

“But here’s the bottom line, Colleen. You will agree to go home today, right now, since we don’t feel you’re in fit condition to work, and go into treatment tomorrow—I have arranged a bed for you at the Jane Ward Centre—or else we will be forced to terminate your employment, effective immediately. If you choose the first option, your job will be waiting for you upon successful completion of the thirty-day program, provided there are no further such incidents. You will also be tested for drug use, randomly, and for so long as we deem necessary.” Minot held her hand up, seeing Colleen was about to protest. “Let me finish, Colleen. If, however, you choose the second option—the termination—you will receive the severance and vacation pay owing to you, but that is all. The decision is entirely yours, Colleen, but Dr. Moore and I hope you will take the help we’re offering you. If you get, and stay, sober you can have a wonderful, healthy and productive life, Colleen, of that I have no doubt, but if you continue in this manner, your future is very dim indeed.”

Colleen wondered what gave this woman, whom she had never met before today, the right to tell her what her future would be like. If Colleen had Minot’s life, maybe she wouldn’t drink either. But she had her life, a fucking mess of a beat-down existence and who the hell wouldn’t have a drink? The idea of living without a drink at the end of each soul-numbing day to soften the wretched
loneliness of it all was impossible to imagine. The truth was, she was dying for a drink right now.

She rubbed her temples, willing the jackhammers over her eyes to quit it. “I’ve worked at the university for years.”

“We are aware of that,” the woman said, “but it doesn’t change anything.”

Colleen looked from Moore to Minot, back and forth, and everything became still. It was interesting: the direr the situation, the calmer Colleen typically became. She knew this about herself. She was one of those people who seemed made for crisis. Doubtless this skill was the better part of the legacy of growing up in a house with a madwoman.

It occurred to her that everything happening now might just be a trick of the light, some hallucination into which she’d fallen, like Alice down the rabbit hole. She might still be safe in her bed, dreaming a foul, cruel-hearted dream. She blinked, and then held her hands up to her eyes, pressing until black-and-white geometric patterns appeared on the inside of her lids. Take it back, God, she prayed, please take all of this morning back and I promise I’ll be better. She’d promised she wasn’t going to drink today and, so far, she hadn’t. This was some perverse joke of the universe, of some malevolent God focused entirely on her. Pound, pound, pound went the blood in the vessels across her forehead.

With any luck, she was having a stroke.

“We need your answer now, I’m afraid,” said Moore.

Colleen opened her eyes and was disappointed but not surprised
to find everything just as it had been. Was she never to get a break? Never to have a chance? The faces of her accusers were stern, implacable and just a little hungry. Oh, yes, how everyone loved to stick the knife in, to wiggle it. They were untouchable on their moral high-ground, where the air was so very fucking rarified and a thick shiny gate, made of money and privilege, and the kind of education Colleen deserved but didn’t get, protected them from having anyone do to them what they were doing to her.

“Do you,” she said. “You need an answer this very minute?”

They nodded, like bobble-heads.

She knew what the right answer was. She understood she should take their help in her trembling, grateful palms; she should break down in girlish tears and thank them for their concern and consideration and tell them how long she’d been drinking against her own will (which might be true but was none of their fucking business) and she understood this was probably the moment when her life could be saved. She looked down at her hands, clutching the cheap package of tissues. There was a stain of some sort on the hem of her turtleneck. She hadn’t noticed it when she dressed this morning. It was something yellowish and crusty. Colleen imagined Moore and Minot—their names sounded like some snotty law firm—congratulating themselves as the taxi took her off to a rehab centre. She imagined Moore talking to his skinny, buck-toothed wife over a wine-and-candlelight dinner about poor Colleen Kerrigan and what an awful mess she was. She imagined the narrow cot in the shared rehab room, the linoleum floor, the
shoddy dresser, the communal showers, and group therapy with droopy losers whining about finding a higher power and turning their lives over to God and heaven help her she’d slit her wrists with a fork.

“I’m very sorry my work hasn’t been up to snuff. I promise you’ll have no further cause for complaint, for any reason,” Colleen said.

“So you’ll take the help we’re offering?” asked Minot.

The woman must watch those reality shows on television with the snot-flying, tearful interventions for hopeless addicts, thought Colleen. She had the vocabulary down. Colleen had seen a few of them herself, enough to know that if you watched to the very end, the drunks and dopers all got thrown out of rehab, or left early, and ended up back on the bottle or the needle within months. What was the point, except to make the snivelling family members feel better, if only briefly?

“I’ve told you my work won’t be a problem. I think that’s all I should have to say.”

Moore blew out his cheeks and said, “So, you’re telling us you won’t go into treatment.”

“I’m telling you you’ll never have to worry about me and alcohol.”

“That’s not good enough at this point, Colleen. Your choice is rehab or having your employment here immediately terminated.”

“So, you’re telling me you care about me so much you’d fire me, leave me without a paycheque or references, with my mother in extreme difficulty and me her only caregiver, with no one to help me. That’s what you’re telling me and you think that’s right, that
it’s moral?” She heard the steely control in her voice, and she knew herself well enough to recognize the fury saddling up and getting ready to ride.

“Will you go to rehab, Colleen?” said Moore. “Say yes now, or I’m afraid this interview is over and you will be escorted from the building. Am I right, Ms. Minot?”

Minot’s expression of concern was like that of a bad soap-opera actress. So much care in it. So much practiced compassion. It felt as though something very heavy, like stones or bags of wet sand, lay over Colleen’s shoulders and chest. The weight held her down, made it hard to breathe. Screaming was an option. Baring her teeth and snarling like a cornered leopard was an option. Spontaneous combustion was an option. And for one swift second it occurred to her there was another option: she might merely toss the bags and the sand and the stones right off her shoulders and let them hit the floor with the sound of thunder and earthquake and the very heavens splitting asunder. The floor would open and swallow up all the terrible crushing mass, and bury it in the ground, dust to dust. It was possible. She had a fleeting sense of how light she would feel, how she’d float up to the ceiling a hope-filled thing, and it wouldn’t matter if she needed help or if these people pitied her or felt they were better than she was because just letting it all go would be such an enormous relief.

And then Pat Minot said, “That would be a great shame, but yes, I’m afraid that’s the way it is.”

The way it is. Yes, that’s just the way it is and nothing would ever
change and people are who they are and so they ever will be. Colleen knew then that she was never going to get out from under the load of her own life. We play our parts. It is inevitable. She was not the sort of woman who would go to rehab, who would hand over her power to a bunch of strangers who were paid to pretend to care about her. She would not, could not show them who she really was. Her skin crawled. The very concept filled her with self-loathing. Whatever weight had shifted now lurched and settled itself again, right over Colleen’s heart.

Colleen stood up and smoothed the front of her pants. “Well, then. Fuck you very much,” she said.

The room was silent for a moment, and even though Colleen’s head felt as though it might pop like the mercury in an overheated thermometer, she got considerable satisfaction from the looks of true astonishment on Moore’s and Minot’s faces. They really hadn’t seen that coming, had they? She was able to arrange a small, self-contained smile on her lips, and for the first time since she woke up that morning, she felt a kind of dignity and control. Thus, she chose to think of it this way: things hadn’t been good at this job for ages, and though she’d miss Harry, Max (well, maybe not Max, not after he’d said whatever it was he said about her) and Michael, she’d find somewhere else, somewhere better. And who knew, Harry might very well go to bat for her and protest her firing. Yes, that was a real possibility. Even Michael. He liked her. The possibilities spooled out in front of her like a yellow brick road.

“How sad,” said Minot. She stood and faced Colleen for a moment,
then turned and opened the door. A security guard stood in the hall, waiting. “We’ll just walk you out then, shall we?”

The smile slipped from Colleen’s face. What did they think she was going to do, go berserk, pull a gun out of her bra and shoot them all? Dignity and control, my ass, she thought. Humiliation like a riptide threatened to knock her legs out from under her. Maybe it wasn’t too late? She glanced at Dr. Moore, but his face was aubergine. She felt a little weak.

So, that was that. She tossed the packet of tissues on Moore’s desk. “I want my things from my desk.”

“Of course,” said Minot. She gestured that Colleen should precede her through the door. Then she changed her mind. “Actually, would you just wait here a moment, please. Derek, stay with Ms. Kerrigan, will you?”

The security guard nodded and Minot disappeared.

The moments ticked by. Colleen kept her eyes on the antique instruments in the locked cabinet. The mysterious devices of weather divination. They looked medieval, and she imagined torture chambers and trials by fire. A scene from a film she had once seen flashed through her mind, set in Elizabethan England, in which a man was dangled above a huge cauldron of boiling oil. The executioner asked him which he preferred, head first or feet first. It would make no difference, of course; death would come either way, horribly and in shrieking agony. Would she want to get it over quickly, head first, skin peeling off her face, eyes bursting, lips and tongue and throat searing and … or feet first, hoping to pass
out from the pain before the oil reached … Why was she thinking of that now? Derek the security guard stood with his thumbs tucked into his belt. Executioner. Pitiless. Unreachable.

“Ms. Kerrigan?” Minot was back. “You can come through now.”

Colleen refused to turn and look at Moore before leaving. Followed by Minot and Derek-the-Executioner, she walked stiff-legged and jerky, the trembles in her gut making any effort at grace impossible. She made her way to the office that was no longer her office. Sylvia wasn’t there and Colleen supposed Minot had arranged that to prevent a scene. Colleen thought now she might well want to make a scene. It would be lovely to finally tell Sylvia what she thought of those boots, and those ridiculous turquoise glasses.

Two cloth shopping bags lay on her desk.

“You can put your things in there,” said Minot.

At least we’re being eco-friendly, thought Colleen, if not people-friendly.