Something in her has shifted. She’s not sure how much. She is sad. She is somewhere being sad. She rises from the chair and moves to the night table, passing through the sunlight into shadow. It’s dim here. She turns on the lamp. She picks up the bottle of Scotch. She slices the gold foil seal with her fingernail and peels it away. She pulls the black-capped cork and it resists and resists and then moves and it pops loudly. She does not have to lift the bottle to smell the dark honey smell of the Scotch. She waits. She waits, not knowing for what. Then she squeezes the cork back in, but not fully, not tightly, and she puts the bottle down in the exact spot where it was sitting.
She picks up the pills. The plastic prescription bottle is the color of caramel. She loved caramel as a child. She pushes down on the cap and twists it and opens the bottle and she shakes two of them into the palm of her hand. Pale blue, perfectly round. One is etched with the name, curving along the edge in a two-hundred-degree arc: PERCOCET. And within the arc is a large numeral 5. The milligrams. The second pill, flipped to the other side, is blank but for a deep, gaping, knife-groove through the middle.
Kelly looks at the two pills for a long while. She is aware of no thoughts, no decision going on, but finally she takes one pill out of her palm with her forefinger and thumb and she lays it carefully in the empty space where the bottle sat, PERCOCET-side up. She lays the second directly beneath, touching the one above, making the beginning of a perfectly straight vertical line. She moves the bottle of Scotch farther to the side, closer to the bed, clearing this space. She pours more pills into her palm, and she puts one carefully below the other two, and then another and another until there are … how many? She counts. Seven. Lucky seven. The bottle once held ninety Percocet. More than half of them are left. She takes another pill and lays it to the right of the first, and she lays in another pill below that, and another and another until she has two tight columns. Then she starts again at the top. And she refills her palm two more times. Her hands are steady, her hands are calm and steady. She builds a third column and another and she keeps building until she has seven columns and seven rows. A small, complex, scallop-edged square made up of circles. A perfect little square in the center of the night table. Forty-nine pills. She puts the half dozen still in her palm back into the bottle. She has more than enough.
She realizes she’s hunched over. Her back aches. She straightens. She breathes deeply in, lets it out. She looks down at the pills. They are perfect.
She turns and crosses the room and enters the bathroom. It’s dark in here and she keeps it that way. She can see what she wants. A drinking glass beside the faucets. She puts her hand on the glass and picks it up and she is about to turn and go but she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She pauses, though she keeps her eyes slightly averted, as if the person in the mirror is naked in a public place, is making a terrible spectacle of herself and you want to look but you don’t, quite, you do what you can to maintain a bit of her dignity even if she won’t. What can you say to her? What can you say? Kelly steps out of the bathroom.
She crosses the room, sits on the side of the bed, puts the glass on the corner of the night table. She looks at the pills. They were only recently made perfect there. Leave them alone for now. She picks up the bottle of Macallan and pulls the cork and it comes out easily, making a little echo of a pop. Kelly begins to pour and whatever is being thought-out inside her makes her lift the bottle quickly. She’ll have two fingers, neat, thank you. That’s enough for now. Just a little warmth for now is sufficient.
She is ready to lie down on the bed. Prop herself up and drink for a while. She returns the glass to the edge of the night table — she will not risk spilling any of her Scotch — and she begins to lift her feet. But she sets them back on the floor. She looks down. Her shoes are still on. How long has she been in this room? For a while now, and her shoes are still on. She considers this. In any room that she feels is her private space, she is always instantly barefoot. Perhaps in the six weeks of cold in Pensacola in the heart of their brief winter she will wear socks around the house. That’s all. But her shoes are still on. With her little black Chanel she wore her black Louboutin platform pumps and they need to come off.
She puts the toe of one at the tip of the heel of the other and nudges the shoe loose and lets it fall off her foot. It lands on its side and exposes its arterial-red sole to her. She looks sharply away. She finds the other heel with her bare toes and pries off the shoe and drops it to the floor. Kelly lifts her legs and scoots back on the bed, plumps a pillow behind her so she can stay upright from the shoulders up, and she reaches over and lifts her Macallan. She leans back and brings the glass to her lips.
Now the first taste of the Scotch is upon her, like warm dark honey, and she lets the sip go down quickly — this isn’t a glass of wine; this isn’t about taste — and she waits for the settling in: one second, two, a few more. And then, inside, she descends into a warm sea: first in the very center of her, in the place where she draws this breath and the next, she feels the undulant warmth and then it swells outward, across her chest and up all the way to her throat and downward, as well, even into the place where she takes a man inside her.
∼
Michael kept walking after Kelly failed to answer her cell phone, ending the call at the first sound of her outgoing message. He could not speak to her answering machine. At this moment he could not even begin to think what he might say to her answering machine. He reaches the end of the allée, but he does not turn back to the plantation house. He crosses the highway and he goes up the angled road that climbs the levee and he arrives at the graveled road on the berm. Before him is the river, nearly half a mile wide here, the far shore a dense line of trees. Upriver a ways, on the far shore, two push boats have laid by, side by side, each with a dozen barges at the prow. Michael shoves his hands in his pockets and he regrets that he no longer smokes. This would have been the moment to light a cigarette, to keep one hand pushed into a pocket and to smoke a cigarette with the other and hunch his shoulders a little and shut the door in his head so it’s just him and the cigarette and the smoke filling him like a sweet midnight fog where nobody can see him and he can see nobody. But it’s been more than a decade and there’s nobody to bum a cigarette from out here and he’ll be okay. He’s been pretty good at shutting the door on his own. He doesn’t have to think about anything he doesn’t want to think about. That’s why he has found this high ground and has put himself in front of the Mississippi.
But this thing did not end this morning as it was supposed to, and a vision of her rises in his head like river fog. He is standing alone in the grass between St. John’s Episcopal and its parish house and he is smoking a cigarette and nodding as civilly as he can to people from both sides of the aisle telling him how lucky he is. Very civilly, actually, given how badly he wants to separate himself from all this and smoke a cigarette in this hour before he marries Kelly. He feels kindly about all these well-meaning people but he just wants to be left alone for now, Kelly herself being the only person in the world he’d be willing to put out this cigarette for and talk to. Yes: he wants to talk to her even more than smoke. And he drops the cigarette and stubs it out and he heads for the parish house. He has no clear plan in mind. He’s not supposed to see the bride. He knows that she and her girls are in the parish house, but restrooms are over there too and so he has to take a piss and he will just go over with that intention and if something happens, it happens.