That first beer, yes. That had been the kicker. Bree tended to make a point of not thinking about it too much. It had been a long, long time and the craving was weaker. But sometimes it still surprised her, like an old ache. And when she did turn and think about it, the taste of that first mouthful was still fresh in her memory as if it was just gone midday.
Level and confront. My ass. What would you give for just – just once more – the taste? Just once more. No such thing as just once. We know where that leads. But before you die, don’t you want to feel that again? The cold filling the mouth, the eyes closing, the eyes opening to an easier world?
It was only later that it got harder. Al got less fun. Bree still maintained this. She knew – she fucking knew, OK, by the end of it – that things had got out from under her, but that didn’t mean that she was necessarily wrong about Al getting less fun. She’d started staying out when he’d gone home, and they started to row about Cass.
That always hit a nerve with her. That was when it got vicious.
‘You dare say that, you fucking piece of shit. I love that girl. I love her more than anything. I’d kill for her. Kill. I do everything for her.’
‘Who got her up for school this morning?’
‘I was sick!’
‘Bree, you’re drinking too -’
‘My drinking has nothing to do with -’
‘You were sick because -’
‘I got day flu.’
‘You got -’
‘I got her up yesterday, and the day before and the day before, and, ’cause one time -’
‘It’s not just the one time, love.’
‘Love’ stung her. The softness of it.
‘Al, do you even think, ever just think, just once what it’s like to be me?’ She’d hear herself slur on ‘ever’, losing the second vowel, but she’d plough on. The thought of what it was like to be her made her eyes prickle but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction, and the emotion was redirected into anger. ‘I’m holding this damn family together while you try to sell your piece-of-shit paintings.’ That would wound him, and she’d see him suck it down. Looking back now, it still made her hurt somewhere remembering moments like that when she’d see how hard he was trying. Turning the other cheek. That holier-than-thou stuff enraged her.
‘I work, and I cook, and I come home and I look after our damn kid, and if one morning I get sick I’m what, I’m a bad mother? I get a drink – yes, maybe I have a couple drinks because I damn well need to unwind and now you’re going to sit in judgement over me?’
‘I’m not sitting in judgement.’ He looked miserable, utterly defeated. Bree had always been strong, always stronger than him. ‘I love -’
Doors would slam, tears come. ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.’ And Bree would show him what was fucking what by going out and necking a couple.
‘I love her more than anything.’ Bree wondered. You had to say it. You had to feel it. What if it wasn’t true?
Bree could look back on all this now and know she was wrong. She didn’t like to think too clearly about how wrong – she’d been through that, and you’d go crazy if you spent the whole rest of your life fifth-stepping, Bree reckoned; you’d get addicted to shame.
But what was odd was that as she accessed the memories she didn’t feel wrong. She remembered not just what she did and said, but what she felt. And as she inhabited the memory she felt it again. She felt indignant. She wasn’t that bad then. Nothing worse than millions of normal people who bring their kids up fine, and whose husbands didn’t get their panties in a twist if they had one bourbon over the line most nights. She was dealing with it.
That was what she thought of as her double vision. That indignation was still a part of her. But so was the part that saw something else. And even back then, the part that saw things as they were was there. It simply didn’t seem urgent. I’ll keep an eye on that, she’d thought.
She knew that her morning routine wasn’t great; wasn’t how it had always been. She’d make sure she was in the bathroom alone, Al out of the house preferably. Then she’d run the shower and before she got in it she stood over the sink with her hands gripping the sides and she arched over it and retched. She had learned to do this silently, for the most part, feeling her diaphragm spasm. She had to do this for somewhere between thirty seconds and a minute. Most days, a few tablespoons of bitter yellow bile slicked onto the white porcelain. She’d ride it out. That, too, passed, and the nausea left with the bile.
Then she’d breathe in and breathe out. And she’d stand up straight. The shuddering and the retching gone, she would feel a lightness, as if she’d been purged. She’d swill her mouth and the sink with water, and step into the shower, almost bright, ready to face the day.
And even though her work at the Pentagon was paper-shovelling, she kept at it. She arrived on time and she left on time and she worked damn well. Until Al left she was keeping it going. She thought of Al’s mousy, too-long hair. The yellow tint to his sunglasses and the brown leather jacket he loved and always wore. The speed and anger of his going.
Bree looked out of the car window. America was passing. It was warm, but the air was thick and the sky was the colour of ash. A couple drops of rain fell on the windshield.
Al was still there when she’d started to lose time. They’d had so much time back then, when they were young and new-married, that Bree barely noticed it going missing. When it did, it had been funny – Al shaking his head at how Bree couldn’t remember getting home from parties and feigning theatrical outrage when Bree would ask: ‘Did we…?’
‘You’ve forgotten?’
Later, though, she lost time more easily, more unexpectedly, more disconcertingly. Time started to vanish in the way that dollars would vanish from her purse – just a tentative five minutes here or there, surreptitiously, calculated so she wouldn’t miss it but not calculated well enough. She’d find herself in a different room than she had been, tips of her fingers grazing the door jambs, mouth open to deliver a sentence she had no idea of. She would frown and withdraw. That, at least, early on.
The thefts became more blatant. Money from the purse was not an analogy. Money really had been going missing from her purse. And it was hard to be sure, at first, how much and when. But it was clear Cass was stealing from her. Finally, she confronted her about it and Cass reacted as she always did when cornered: with the sort of indignation only an eleven-year-old can muster. Her whole face shone red as she screamed back. Bree slapped her – not on the face but on the legs.
Al had gone by this time. Had he? Bree couldn’t always remember the sequence of events. But that would explain why she was so angry – he’d left them both in the shit, the way he walked out. She was under such pressure then. She couldn’t afford childcare. And her money was going missing. And Cassie was bed-wetting and Bree was exhausted and her good-for-nothing husband had meanwhile lit out for the territories with an armload of his own paintings. It was the first time she’d hit her daughter.
‘Never steal. Never steal from your mommy, never. You hear me?’ Blood thumping in her ears, rage misting everything. Cass’s yell, as the blows landed – suddenly turning the corner into a shriek, even shriller and even louder.
It was about this time that the sneak-thief started to get bolder. Money started disappearing from the bedside table. And drinks – the emergency half-jack in the wardrobe; the old miniatures of vodka in the ice compartment. And time – great chunks of time would have been pocketed, spirited away. It was very confusing.
Was the same person who was taking the money taking the time? That’s all money was, Bree had once heard someone say: frozen time. It became impossible to keep track of things.
The thief was eventually apprehended.