Dawn
Morbus had told her how to get home, where the underground passage to her mother and safety was hidden. But could she abandon Vineland now, after everything? She wanted to. She couldn’t remember ever wanting anything this much.
—The Secrets of Vineland
Back at Audrey’s house, after printing all the pages, I lay in bed and tore through Winnie’s journal. I’d have to read it again for the nuance I was sure lay within. This time, I was only reading for the revelations.
Winnie is my mother.
Winnie is my mother, and Lincoln is probably my father.
And my mother Miranda has lied to me about that for almost forty years. Even though she regularly told me we had no secrets between us.
When Winnie came back, and… No. I can’t think about that part right now. It’s too awful.
Too awful because I understood all too well.
I understood both how Winnie could have been such a slave to her addiction that she made the choice to give me up, and also how a mama bear of a mother like Miranda, whose family had already been torn apart by her own father’s substance abuse, would have seen her sister’s falling asleep on the job as the final straw.
And how Winnie would have seen it the same way, and not only respected her sister’s decision, but anticipated it and taken herself permanently out of the picture.
I understood being that afraid of my own self, of what might happen if I drank again.
I lay back on the pillows, my heart racing at the enormity of it all. It hurt. It hurt everywhere—my stomach, my head, my chest. Everything throbbed, as if I’d been born again into an entirely new reality with different laws of gravity.
Oh my god, I suddenly also saw: The “Uncle Bernie” throwing people in the Facebook recovery groups off the scent of Winnie’s identity had to be Bernard.
Because much as Miranda had lied, so, too, had Winnie.
Really, Winnie had lied the most.
It was too much. I just could not be present with how I was feeling.
I wanted one thing and one thing only, despite all I had just read.
Fuck being present. Anyone would forgive me for drinking at a moment like this. The women in that meeting obviously forgave anything and everything.
I’d get back to sobriety tomorrow.
Robotically, I leashed Alfie, collected my keys, and drove to the twenty-four-hour liquor store my phone directed me to.
Under the fierce white lights of the store, I got a cold bottle of chardonnay out of the refrigerator case.
Two, just in case. The necks of the bottles were icy and slippery in my hands, and I felt a rush of anticipatory saliva in my mouth just thinking of those first sips.
In fact, I even felt a little buzzed already.
Buzzed and aroused, like I’d feel as clothes came off for the first time with a new lover.
My whole body wanted this. Deserved this. Needed this.
Back in my car, after paying in cash, I was seized by fear, my thinking brain coming back online just a bit. I couldn’t bring these into Audrey’s temple to sobriety. I’d have to drink them somewhere else. And then how would I drive home?
Had she already heard my car leave in the dead of night?
If she had, she hadn’t texted me to find out where I was going.
She probably knew. And she was letting me do it.
Because what else could she do?
May we find the serenity to accept the things we cannot change….
Alfie, who was sitting in the passenger seat, whined at me and lunged over to lick my cheek.
I looked down at the bottles sweating wet spots into the paper bag.
Did I really want to do this?
To throw away five months of sobriety?
I wanted to so badly.
I wanted to release myself from the pain I was feeling.
It’ll only be a temporary release, a voice inside me said. Twenty minutes for the first glass and diminishing returns after.
The last time I’d been drunk…I didn’t want to think about it, but apparently it was a night for facing things.
The Incident.
Compared to other rock bottoms I’d seen in countless movies and shows, it was tame. A narrow escape. But it had terrified me nonetheless.
I’d been drinking at home. Alone. It was fun at first—a Thursday night without a show to watch with Mom.
I’d gone to yoga, and on the way home I’d listened to a SiriusXM ’90s station, and a great string of songs came on, music that took me back to a time when life had been full of possibility, all horizon so far away I couldn’t possibly ever reach it.
I continued listening when I got home and danced around the living room while I poured myself glass after glass of a cold, crisp white—an expensive one I’d bought so that I’d force myself to enjoy it instead of just drink it.
Ha. It went down fast. I got drunk quickly and moved on to vodka tonics, periodically sitting at my computer and clicking through an online dating site I’d recently joined.
New men, dancing, and I even opened a file for a movie script I very occasionally, and only when drunk, poked around in. The night felt fun and expansive.
Until I got up to mix another drink, shimmying into the kitchen to the beat of another familiar tune, and I lost my balance, fell, and conked my head on something.
My kitchen table? The counter? I have no idea.
I’ve tried and tried to remember and can’t.
The only thing I remember was waking up to blurry vision and a sharp pain at the base of my skull.
When I tried to push myself up, I put my hand in a puddle of my own vomit and promptly threw up again.
My apartment pitched, and I panicked. I couldn’t see anything clearly. Could I make it to an ER on my own? Did I have to call an ambulance?
I don’t know how long it took me groping around my apartment, but I finally laid (washed) hands on my phone and told it to call Audrey.
Audrey called a taxi to take me to the hospital, and I managed to get down the stairs, out of my building, and into the car.
I sat in the waiting room for…an hour? Three? A hundred years? I threw up a few more times, in the bathroom fortunately. Ahead of me in the queue was someone who’d been shot and another with a knife sticking out of his shoulder. All around me, homeless men and women slept on seats.
By the time a nurse saw me, my vision had stabilized a bit.
As soon as I was partially horizontal on the cot, I fell asleep.
After rousing me from the depths of a dream with a light in my eyes, among other tests (I assume, since I can’t remember), the doctor said I had a concussion and asked if I had anyone who could check on me every few hours.
I said I did, but I cried all the way home in the taxi that the one person I could tell about this mortifying night, who would check on me, lived four hundred miles away.
As icing on the cake, when I got home, I discovered that Alfie, who I hadn’t taken out in god knows how long, had pooped and peed on the living room rug.
I deserved all of it.
Audrey flew up on the first flight out of LAX and stayed with me the rest of the week while my vision cleared and I cried and cried and cried.
I would never, never drink again, I’d told myself, and at the time it felt like someone had died.
Alfie whined again and snapped me out of the memory.
This time he crawled across the center console of the car into my lap.
I started to cry as I petted him.
I didn’t want to feel like this.
I didn’t want to feel like I had that morning five months ago, either. That, I had to admit, was worse than how I felt right now.
I never, ever, wanted to feel that way again. Sick. Mortified. Ashamed. Out of control.
The women in the meeting might forgive me for drinking, but I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.
Holding tight to Alfie’s leash, I got out of the car and set the bottles in the soggy bag on the front step of the liquor store. Then I got in the car and drove back to Audrey’s house.
Her bedroom light was on, but as soon as I killed the engine of the car, it turned off. Inside the house was silent as I made my way back to the guest room, where I fell dead asleep in the cool sheets.