Through Thick and Thin (14 page)

“Why all the socks, Aubrey?” And when he still doesn’t answer, she wonders if maybe it’s a drug thing. She does her best to banish such a thought from her mind, as such a thought can’t really help this conversation, if a conversation it can in fact be called. He walks past her again, lilting to one side. Aubrey’s walk, even long before his ACL surgery, has always been the kind that’s just slightly off-kilter. She had always thought of it as lilting, not limping, until now.

He pulls his suitcase out of the closet and carries it back to the bed. He puts it right on the bed, dirty suitcase on unmade sheets. She hates that. He knows she hates that. But she won’t say anything about it because she needs to say something about other things, about hundreds and hundreds of pills. She needs to pick her battles. She wonders if he knew this. He is now piling shirts, button-down shirts, into the suitcase.

“Are you just not going to answer me?”

“What?”

“Why are you packing?”

“Chicago?”

“Chicago?”

“Yes, Stephanie. Chicago. The Internet conference that the entire marketing team is attending and as their fearless leader, I will attend with them?”
Right,
she thinks,
right,
even though she doesn’t remember anything about an Internet conference in Chicago.
Aubrey’s job,
she thinks,
the place he goes every day.
Every day, in the city. And she wonders, can you be a very good marketer of sports when you are on drugs?

“Well, Aubrey, I think maybe you shouldn’t go.”

He turns to look at her, half-confused, half-mean, the way he looks a lot of the time when he isn’t looking blank, and then looks away. He drops his towel and reaches for his boxers and as he heads back into the closet, taking out a pair of pants and stepping into them, he says, without turning to look at her again, “Stephanie, would you mind then telling me why? And would you mind then telling me what your problem is this morning?”

She wonders if other husbands, other men, would say other things. Things so much nicer, things so much more along the lines of,
Is everything okay? Is our daughter okay? And you, sweetheart, are you okay? Is there something, some sort of help that you need?
Would Aubrey say something like that if he were not a hoarder, and most likely a habitual taker, of prescription painkillers? How long has he been in the basement?
Months now,
she thinks,
longer.

“I was in the workroom last night,” she says. He looks up at her, right at her. “And I found all the bottles, all the pills. And maybe there’s a good reason, maybe you want to tell it to me?” She pauses, she waits. “And if not, well I don’t know, but I think either way, I think we should talk.” Aubrey exhales and doesn’t say anything for a minute and Stephanie waits, waits for him to say it’s nothing, waits for him to say that everything will actually be fine.

“I can’t deal with this right now,” he says quickly, bending down to put on his shoes.

“Aubrey, listen,” she says.

“No, Stephanie,” he says, loud enough and sharp enough so that she’s sure the sound will reach Ivy downstairs, instantly undoing all the soothing and educational doings of
Baby Van Gogh.
Or Mozart. “You listen. It’s a basement, not a workroom. And I really can’t deal with this right now. I’m late. I’ve got a huge few days coming up right now. Can we just talk about this when I get back?” he asks, except it’s not really a question. So she doesn’t answer him. For a moment when she first saw the socks, and the suitcase, she thought that he was leaving, really leaving. Granted, he was leaving with only three pairs of underwear, but he was leaving all the same. And for the instant that she thought that, it did feel awful, just not quite as awful as she would have guessed.

“Alright,” he says, as if together they have reached some sort of mutual, beneficial-to-everyone agreement. He hauls his suitcase off the bed, wheels it across the hardwood floors. “Thanks, Stephanie, we can talk about this in three days.”

She doesn’t say anything. She waits five minutes, standing in their room. She thinks if she went downstairs right now that getting into her SUV and backing it over Aubrey, since he is already filled with prescription painkillers, would seem like a very viable option. She waits for the feeling to pass, and even after she’s heard his car pull away, it’s still lingering. And then it’s gone. And then she goes downstairs to get Ivy.

Once Ivy is safely secured in her high chair, making a game attempt at placing her entire plastic yellow dish in her mouth, Stephanie asks her favorite rhetorical question, “Do you want some mashed bananas?” and she wonders if maybe she could mash some bananas for Aubrey and then, when he gets back from Chicago, she could say, “Here, Aubrey, here, have some of this.” And maybe the potassium, because bananas are so high in potassium, could make it so that he had a little more energy, had a little more spring in his step, could give him that little bit of pep he seems to so desperately need. And then, the way you realize things in dreams, when you’re pretty sure everything might not be really happening, and eventually you’ll wake up, she realizes that these thoughts of giving Aubrey mashed bananas aren’t new. She’s thought them all before, when she didn’t know what was wrong with him, when she had no idea why he was this way. Now she knows. And she knows that bananas won’t help.

“Aubrey, honey, here, have a banana. It has some wonderful energy-giving qualities, and let’s talk about the fact that there are upwards of forty empty bottles of prescription pain medicines in your unplugged mini-fridge, let’s talk about the fact that in all likelihood what’s been going on here is that night after night, weekend after weekend, you’ve been taking every opportunity you can get to go down there, take Vicodin, and stare at the computer?” just doesn’t have the right ring to it.

The phone rings, and Ivy says, “Da,” and Stephanie knows at once that it’s Aubrey on the phone, that he hasn’t even gotten to the train station yet and he’s calling to say he’s turned around, and he’s on his way back. He’s calling to say that yes, he’s got a problem, as she has probably already surmised from the vast multitude of prescription bottles that he was hoarding down there in the workroom, or now we’re calling it a basement, in what had to have been a gigantic, enormous (really, Stephanie, it was enormous that’s what it was) cry for help. He’s calling to say, I want your help. He’s calling to say, with your help, we’ll get through this, we absolutely will.

“Hello?” she says.

“Stephanie, hi. It’s Caryn. Do you know Melissa Quinn? I think you’ve met? She actually lives right down the street from you, on the other side of Linwood? She and I are going to power-walk over to Starbucks? It’s such a nice morning. Do you want to come with?”

Stephanie looks at Ivy, drooling sweetly in her high chair. She looks around at her beautiful kitchen, opening up into the family room. And she can’t think of anything to say. “Okay,” she says, “okay.”

Once they’ve all power-walked and are sitting in the window at Starbucks, once they’ve moved one of the large, inviting chairs to make room for the three strollers, and once everyone is in possession of a large amount of caffeine in a white cardboard cup, Caryn turns to Stephanie and asks what must be a completely normal question. It’s the kind of question a person might ask another person whom they have recognized as normal, like them, as one-half of a perfectly normal, you could even say golden, couple.

“What are you guys up to this weekend?”

And the correct answer, the truthful answer, would of course be, “Oh, me, you know not a lot, I’ll just be swimming alone in a sea of despair.”

“Oh, you know,” Stephanie says, “not a lot, Aubrey’s at an Internet conference of some sort in Chicago.”

“They have conferences on the weekends?” Melissa asks.

“Yes, this one’s on the weekend,” Stephanie says as the pit in her stomach, the one that’s been there for a while now, gets a bit darker, more solid than it already was. She hadn’t thought of that. How many things has she not thought of? “I think they’re golfing tomorrow or something,” she continues, “and then on Monday and Tuesday they have meetings.” That could be it.

“What does your husband do again?” Melissa asks, and Stephanie would like to find a way to be able to say, it’s not a great day, really it’s not a great time.

“He works in sports marketing,” she says, and she wants to just leave it at that. Really, she does.

“Of course,” Melissa says, nodding happily, as if the whole world isn’t falling apart. “He’s very sporty looking. I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but your husband is just so cute and sporty.”

“No, I don’t mind you saying that,” Stephanie says.

“That he is,” Caryn adds in, and Stephanie smiles, sure he is. Or at least he used to be, cute and outdoorsy and sporty, before he was someone who merely dressed himself in Patagonia and EMS to then spend the rest of the day in his workroom (or are we calling it a basement now?) taking pills and doing God knows what else.
God knows what else,
she thinks, and wonders if it’s possible that there could be more.

“You guys are originally from the South, right?” Melissa asks, and the word
relentless
pops into Stephanie’s head.

“Uh, no,” Stephanie says, “Aubrey’s from Connecticut and I grew up in D.C.”

“D.C.’s a great city,” Caryn offers, and this is just a conversation, this is just what people do, when they sit at Starbucks with their strollers.

“It’s nice,” Stephanie says.

“Are your parents still there?” Melissa inquires.

“My mom lives there,” Stephanie says. “My dad lives in France.” As soon as the words are out of her mouth almost automatically, she thinks,
Except that’s not true, except that’s a lie.
She thinks of how many lies there must be, wonders if anything she thought was real yesterday will actually turn out to be true.

“That’s so cool,” Caryn says, “I didn’t know that.”

Stephanie smiles. Yesterday she thought her husband was having an affair because she never lost the baby weight, yesterday she would have liked that to be a lie. Today she doesn’t think it would be so bad if that were true. She pushes absentmindedly at the stroller, sitting side by side with Caryn and Melissa, who are both doing the same thing. They all look alike. They look like suburban moms and how long has she been a suburban mom, and how long has she wanted to be?

“Do you get to France to visit a lot?” Melissa asks.

“No,” Stephanie says, “you know, not so much.” She stares out the window at the people strolling by on the street, the people not in here, not inside Starbucks.

Caryn’s daughter, Ashley, wakes up right then, and Stephanie thinks that’s good, that’s a blessing because she doesn’t want to talk about Aubrey anymore. And she doesn’t want to talk about France. For the life of her, she can’t imagine why she brought that up. Except that maybe it makes it easier to understand, easier to wrap your head around how much you have been lied to as of late, if you’ve been doing some lying yourself. Caryn reaches over and pulls Ashley out of the stroller and takes off her jacket. Stephanie watches, expecting the baby, once she has emerged, to be decked. She often is. She’s a baby frequently seen in smocked dresses, even just for a day around the house, a stroll, or a trip to sit in the front right corner of Starbucks. Today though, Ashley is resplendent in a long-sleeved white T-shirt that says
NEW!
written in white on top of a green field. The green field is one of those shapes so often associated with comic books. A cloud that has jagged pointed edges, and if it were a comic book you might see in it
BAM!
or
POW!
but here,
NEW!

“Cute shirt,” Stephanie observes.

“Thanks,” Caryn says, her voice an octave or two higher than it normally is, her gaze focused completely, adoringly on Ashley. She reaches out a hand, spreads her fingers wide, and places her outstretched palm on Ashley’s chest, right over the
NEW!
and leaves it there. Ashley never takes her eyes from her mother’s. She makes a few quick jerking movements, and says quickly, “Gah.”

“She
is
a cutie,” Melissa chimes in.

Stephanie wonders which came first, the drugs, or the rest of it, if there is a rest of it. Maybe it’s just the drugs, though somewhere in some other reality, perhaps the one she’s tried so hard not to be a part of, she can hear someone saying to her,
It’s never just the drugs, Stephanie.

“Stephanie?”

“What’s that?” Stephanie says, confused for a moment, blinking, disoriented, taking a moment to make sure that it wasn’t Caryn or Melissa saying to her, “It’s never just the drugs, Stephanie.” She’s pretty sure it wasn’t because after all it’s not as if she’s told Caryn about the drugs. Of course she hasn’t told Caryn. If she’s not going to tell Meredith, if she’s gone to such great lengths (she can’t even think about it) not to tell Meredith, she’s certainly not going to tell Caryn.