He used every bit of his strength to turn away from her and onto his side, but he couldn’t quite get there. His head, though, had moved on the pillow, giving him a blurry view of the half-empty glass and the completely empty bottles.
“Vicodin,” she said helpfully. “And something called gabapentin, which I got for my restless leg syndrome. It makes the opioids work better. Did you know I have restless leg syndrome? Well, I don’t really have it, I just said I did. There’s no actual test for that, so all you need to do is go to your doctor and say, ‘Doctor! I have a strong, irresistible urge to move my legs. Especially at night! Accompanied by uncomfortable sensations!’ Then they rule out iron deficiency and neurological stuff, and voilà: you’re diagnosed. I made the appointment last fall in case they wanted me to do a sleep study before giving me the prescription, but this doctor went straight to the drugs, so good for her. She also gave me some Oxycontin for the terrible pain, and she threw in the Valium when I told her there was this crazy troll accusing my boyfriend of plagiarism online, and we were both stressed out beyond belief. That was Valium in the soup, by the way.” He heard her laugh. “Which definitely was not in my mother’s version. I also gave you something for nausea, to make sure you don’t throw up all my hard work when I’m halfway to Seattle. Anyway, it’s all pretty foolproof in combination, so I’d relax if I were you.” Anna sighed. “Look, I can stay a bit longer. See you through the worst of it, if you want. Do you want? Squeeze my hand if you want.”
And Jake, who couldn’t have said what he wanted, and had already forgotten what he was supposed to do about it, felt her squeeze his hand, and he squeezed back.
“Right,” she said. “What else? Oh … Athens. I was loving being back in school. Education really is wasted on the young, isn’t it? When I was in high school I used to look at people in my class, and my brother and his friends, and think, This is fantastic! We get to sit here all day and learn stuff. Why are you all such assholes about it? My brother was the biggest asshole of them all, by the way. Not once in my entire life did he ask me a question about myself, or say a single loving thing to me, and I had zero problem with never laying eyes on him again till he started trying to get in touch with me. By which I mean, in touch with Rose. And that wasn’t because he was suddenly interested in her, either. It was because he wanted to sell the house. Maybe because the bar was tanking. Maybe because he was back on the drugs, I didn’t know, but I guess he figured he couldn’t leave my daughter out of it and not expect a lawsuit. I didn’t answer any of his calls or emails, so one day that winter he just came down to Georgia. I saw him waiting in a car in front of Athena Gardens. Unfortunately, he saw me first.”
Anna checked the time again.
“Anyway, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I thought, Okay. He’s seen me. He can obviously recognize his own sister, so even a moron like my brother is going to figure out what happened here. I hoped we were just going to leave each other alone, the same way we’d always done. And I mean, I knew he’d moved back into the house himself, so a little appreciation wouldn’t have gone amiss, but of course that was never my brother’s way. And one day I saw on Facebook that he’d signed up for some writing program in the Northeast Kingdom. And maybe you’re thinking, Okay, but why assume he was going to write about this one thing? All I can say is: I knew my brother. He wasn’t what you might call an imaginative guy. He was a magpie. He saw a pretty, shiny thing on the ground and he thought, Now that’s got to have some value. So he helped himself. I’m sure you can understand, Jake, what that must have been like, having someone steal from you like that. So a couple of months later I drove back to Vermont and I waited till he left for work, and you can color me surprised because that asshole actually managed to write almost two hundred pages. Of my story. And don’t think he was doing it for himself, either. This wasn’t some inner exploration through creative writing, trying to find his voice or understand the pain at the center of his family of origin. I found publication contests, lists of agents, the dude even had a subscription to Publishers Weekly. He knew what he was doing. He had a plan to make some serious money. Off me. People today bitch if you use a culturally appropriated word or hairstyle? That bastard just helped himself to my entire life story. Now you know that isn’t right, Jake, don’t you? Isn’t that what they say in the writing programs? Nobody else can tell your story but you?”
The not so distant cousin of Nobody else gets to live your life, he thought.
“Anyway, I went through the house and I got together everything I didn’t want left behind. All the manuscript pages for his masterpiece, and the notes. Any pictures of me or Rose that were still lurking around. Oh, and I got my mom’s cookbook with all her recipes, including the one for that soup you like. It’s been out there in our kitchen for months, on the shelf over the sink, not that you ever noticed. Where’s that novelist’s eye for detail, Jake? You’re supposed to have one, you know.”
He knew.
“And I found his drugs, of course. He had a lot of drugs. So I waited for him to get home from the tavern, and when he did I said I thought it was time for us to have a civilized talk about selling the house. He needed a shitload of benzos, by the way, before I could get near him with that syringe, but that’s what happens when you abuse opiates for as long as he did. I had no sympathy for him. I still don’t. And the way he went, it was even more pleasant than this. And this is pleasant, I think. It’s supposed to be.
It wasn’t, but it wasn’t painful, either. He felt as if he was reaching out to claw through something that had the consistency of cotton candy, but he still couldn’t get to the other side of it. He might not be in pain, exactly, but there was an idea that kept hammering at him, like when you know you’re supposed to be somewhere else but you have no idea where that place is or why you were going there, and also he kept thinking the same ricocheting thought, which was: Wait, aren’t you Anna? Only that made no sense, because obviously she was, and what he didn’t understand was why he’d never questioned it before, and also why he was questioning it now.
“After that I decided to leave Athens. I’m so not cut out for the south. I stayed down there long enough to pack up and find an attorney to handle the sale of the Vermont house. What did you think of Pickens, by the way? Bit of a douchebag, isn’t he? He got handsy with me once and I had to threaten to contact the bar association. As you might know, he was already on thin ice with them because of assorted other transgressions, so he became very proper and attentive after that. I did call him last week to warn him a guy named Bonner might turn up, and remind him about the sacred bonds of attorney-client privilege, but I don’t think he’d have talked to you, even if I hadn’t. He definitely doesn’t want to get on my bad side.”
No, thought Jake. Jake, also, didn’t want to get on her bad side. He knew that now.
“Anyway, I wanted to go west to finish my degree, but I wasn’t sure where. I was thinking about San Francisco, but at the end of the day I picked Washington. Oh, and I changed my name, obviously. Anna sounds a bit like Dianna, and Williams is the third most common surname in America, did you know that? I guess I thought Smith and Johnson felt too obvious. Also I stopped coloring my hair. Seattle is full of gray-haired women, lots of them even younger than I was, so I felt super comfortable. I never lived on Whidbey, though I had a couple of fun weekends there with Randy. We did have a bit of a thing while I was interning at the station, which I’m pretty sure worked in my favor when the producer job opened up. Hey,” she said. “Why don’t you stop staring at those pills? You can’t do anything about it, you know.”