“I should take you to a rehab,” he said. “I should but I won’t so long as you agree to my terms. First: you will be weaned off your pills over the next twenty-four hours. Second: you will get up at a reasonable time in the morning, shower, dress, and go about the daily business of living. Third: you will be a mother to Brendan and Tyler again. Brendan, especially, needs both of his parents now, needs them strong and clear-headed. Fourth: you will get up right now, shower, and have something to eat. I will tell all of this to Stephanie or she can watch me drag you to a rehab. What’ll it be?”
She opened her mouth and clucked. He couldn’t tell if the tongue flick was a turrets-like side effect of her cocktail of drugs or an insulting verbal middle-finger. He waited for her to say something. Her eyes rolled from his to the door where the dresser was blocking an escape route. When her eyes lolled back to his, her expression had changed. The blank stare had given way to something harder, meaner.
“I hope you hurt your back moving the dresser.”
“Chloe, please—”
“I want my fucking pills.”
“No.”
“Fuck you. I gave birth to those kids. I am allowed to do this. I am suffering more than you could ever imagine. You’re so full of shit you can’t even tell. I don’t give a shit if you did see God. Who cares? You see Him again, tell Him I said, ‘Fuck off!’ You can take all your pathetic self-help shit and shove it. Now, get me my pills or I’ll get them myself.”
For a moment, Anthony was as dumb-struck as Chloe must have been only minutes ago. Then all her words and, more importantly, her tone, kicked him into action.
He slapped her across the face. Her head whipped to the side with such a quick jerk that he thought he might have snapped her neck. He expected that old voice to come back but it didn’t. It might never speak again.
She turned back to him and her red eyes were overflowing with raging blood, the white parts almost completely gone. The slap had burst more capillaries in her eyes. “Get the fuck out of my way.” She shoved him hard, one hand against his face, the other on his chest. The hit surprised him and he slipped off the edge of the bed, slumped to the floor. She scrambled off the bed and tried to climb over him. He grabbed her ankle and she lost her balance and crashed to the floor at the entrance to the bathroom. Her head bounced off the wood saddle bridging the carpet of the bedroom with the tile of the bathroom.
Anthony got to his knees quickly to brace himself for a return attack. He was conscious to turn his lower half away from her feet, but she did not get up; she stayed on the floor and cried. She grabbed either side of her head and sobbed in large, heaving belts. Words squeezed in among her cries but he couldn’t decipher them. He used to be able to understand her to the point of interpreting her grunts. No longer. She was someone else now, a parasite living in his bed.
He stepped over her and into the bathroom. Her pills were in the medicine cabinet and she had many bottles but he wasn’t prepared for just how many. Brown plastic bottles with white safety caps and white labels explaining how often the enclosed pills should be taken occupied the full length of the top two shelves. The bottles varied in size, some tall and thin, others short and wide. They had alien names: Effexor, Desyrel, Celexa, Parnate, Nardil, Tofranil, Elavil, Pamelor. We are the Desyrels from the planet Pamelor here to spread the good word of our god Nardil.
“You want your pills, your fucking drugs?” He grabbed a bottle—Sinequan—ripped the cap off, and threw the pills at her. They bounced off her body and onto the carpet. He grabbed another bottle, opened it. “What about these?” Large, green horse pills ricocheted off her face, rolled back toward him on the tile. “Still don’t like those? Try them all!” With both hands, he grabbed as many bottles as he could and in one sweeping gesture flung them down on his wife.
She sobbed harder and louder, though her cries had grown weak. Someone was knocking at the bedroom door, frantically knocking. Stephanie. “What’s going on? Anthony, please open the door. I’ll call the cops!”
“Go ahead!” he shouted. “They can drag my wife to rehab.”
He turned back to the medicine cabinet. Of the remaining bottles, one caught his eye because its name wasn’t some foreign alien-sounding title; this one was a household word throughout America. He seized the bottle, opened it.
“THIS is what you want, right? This is your Pilly-Billie. This is your crutch. This is your goddamn escape.” He stepped to her and tipped the bottle of Percocet upside down. A handful of oblong, yellow pills fell into her hair, rolled on the tile. Through her sobbing, she grabbed one of the pills and shoved it in your mouth with the speed of a frog snatching a fly mid-air. Each pill was 650mg. It wouldn’t take many to finish her off.
He bent toward her. “God loves you, but you make me sick.”
He stepped over her and went to the door where Stephanie was pounding more furiously and really insisting she was going to call the police. He moved the dresser with ease and swung open the door. Stephanie almost collapsed into him.
“What did you do?”
“Just gave her her medicine.”
Then Stephanie was in the bathroom crying over her sister and Anthony was on his way to the garage.
3
Brendan barely slept Thursday night. Dad hadn’t come home. Tyler had done something terrible with Paul. Mostly, though, Brendan was too anxious to find out why Dwayne had been so shocked when Brendan told him the girl’s name. Sasha Karras. Dwayne said he couldn’t tell him over the phone, that he would be by the following day, Friday; Brendan had to wait for his signal. So, Brendan went through his usual morning routine, no longer concerned with pleasing the gods but eager to please Dwayne. Greasy hair and sweaty clothes would not do. Ellis and Dwayne would be in their suits, so Brendan had to look the role as well.
He was sitting alone at the kitchen table waiting for the signal when Dr. Carroll arrived. The earliest glimmer of morning sun flickered between the vertical blinds in front of the door leading to the deck. There was no bacon and eggs (cooked in grease) breakfast today—cereal as usual for a school day. There was no school today, anyway, not that Brendan would be going if there was. And no Pilly Billie, either, though he knew where the bottle was.
Tyler was asleep—he had come home quite late, returning in Paul’s car and gone straight to bed with no more phone calls. He hadn’t been wearing shoes or a shirt. Stephanie was with Mom in his parents’ bedroom. There had been lots of crying last night, screaming too. Dad had done most of the screaming before he drove off in Mom’s car somewhere. Maybe God had a plan for him, too. Hopefully, God was keeping him safe.
Brendan slowly stirred his spoon through the milk and remaining pieces of Captain Crunch, which had started to disintegrate like tiny corpses in a muddy pool. When the doorbell chimed, Brendan almost fell out of his chair. It wasn’t the pre-determined signal but maybe Dwayne had changed his mind. He ran down the steps and swung open the door.
“Hello, son.”
Dr. Carroll was shorter than Dad and thinner. His face drooped forward as if made of melting play-dough; his white-and-black speckled beard did nothing to conceal his falling chin, which might eventually meld with his neck. The hair on his head was a spray-painted black mop. Large glasses framed his eyes in black plastic squares. Brendan had only seen him a handful of times, but every time Dr. Carroll wore the same thing: brown khakis that puffed out under his waist like clown pants and a dark blue dress shirt with a blue and pink flower print tie that dangled past his belt buckle.