8 - COLD MEDICINE
Lacey
I sat on the couch in the dark with my phone to my ear. Whiskers watched me from the armchair.
It took me a while to get the words out. Janice waited, and somewhere in the waiting she understood.
The concern in her voice was what broke me. I was crying before I knew I had started.
"Hang on, girl. I'm coming. Fifteen minutes."
Behind her, low, a man's voice.
"Janice, it's okay," I managed. "You're busy."
She made a sound like I had said something stupid. "There is nobody and nothing more important than you right now. Sit tight."
Fifteen minutes later she let herself in after one short knock.
"Don't get up. I brought the medicine."
I heard her moving around the kitchen, and then she was beside me with an arm around my shoulders, a glass of wine in my hand and a bowl of rocky road on the table.
I tried to laugh. It came out wrong. "I can't eat, Janice."
"Doesn't matter if it melts." Her voice was softer than I had ever heard it. "Drink some wine. Talk to me."
So I told her. The cat cam, the two girls, the couch. Brad. Most of it.
But I did not tell her the rest. I could barely bring myself to think of it.
Then she got angry. Really angry, the way I could not.
She called him a piece of shit and meant it.
She said something about driving to wherever he ended up and reminding him in person what he had done, her hands tight on my shoulders.
All the fury I should have felt and could not reach, she carried it for me.
I watched her do it like it was happening behind glass.
I get to have a family now.
The rocky road went to soup on the table. Janice nudged me, gentler now. "You going to be okay on your own? I can stay. Or you come to mine."
I almost said yes. I did not want to sleep alone in this house, or wake up in it. But I knew how it would go, tonight and then tomorrow and then the night after that, and I knew what I would let it become.
"I'll be okay," I said. "Go home."
She studied my face.
"Fifteen minutes away. You call me for anything." She kissed the top of my head and gathered her things. "Eat something. Toast, even. Drink some water."
At the door she turned like she had one more thing to say, decided against it, and let herself out with a soft click.
The house went quiet in a way it had never been quiet before, because before there had always been the chance of Brad in it.
Whiskers crossed the floor and jumped up beside me.
I had one more call to make, the phone heavy in my hand, my father's name sitting on the screen. I picked it up and set it down twice.
I sat with my thumb over his name a while before I pressed it.
I was seven the year my mother left. I don't remember her going.
I remember him after, sitting at the kitchen table with the big light off, not eating, still as a building with a load-bearing element removed.
She'd wanted more than us. That was how I understood it, in what he said and mostly what he didn't. Wanting was what burned a family down.
And he was the only one I had left. I wanted to please him so badly it organized my whole childhood. I buried anything in me that might make that dark kitchen happen again.
He never said don't be like her. He said it in smaller ways. Do you want to be respected, Lacey, or used? You don't get to choose after. Good girls don't need so much. I was a bright child. I learned.
By fifteen, half-listening to my friends talk about boys, I understood that whatever ran under my surface ran hotter than theirs, a wanting with a strange insistent weight to it that the other girls didn't seem to carry and I already knew never to say out loud.
He had loved Brad. From the first time I brought him home, Dad had looked at him the way you look at an answered prayer, the proof that I had come out right, after my mother left, that he had done my raising well enough on his own. That's a good man, Lacey. Steady. He'll take care of you.
Now I had to tell him his good man had been on our couch with two college girls while I was three miles away looking after other people's sick children.
I dialed before I could stop myself.
Two rings. Then his voice, warm, the one that could still reach all the way back.
"Hey, baby girl. How's my favorite doctor?"
I almost couldn't answer it. "Hi, Daddy." I had not called him that in years. It came out small.
"You sound tired, sweetheart. Long day?"
"Dad." I made myself say it flat and fast, delivering a diagnosis. "Brad's leaving. We're getting divorced."
The silence was complete enough that I could hear the clock in his kitchen.
Then his voice changed, and the first thing out of him, before anything else, was, "What did you do, Lacey?"
I had known it might come, and it still went in clean.
"I didn't do anything." My voice held, barely. "He had an affair."
A disbelieving breath. "Brad? Come on. That man wouldn't cheat on his own shadow. What happened, did you two stop getting along? Did you stop paying him any attention? You know how men get."
I cut him off. "I have a recording, Dad."
That stopped him. "A recording of what?"
"A cat cam. For Whiskers. I watched him. On our couch. Two girls, college age, in the middle of the afternoon."
He let out a long breath. I could see him rubbing his jaw. "Was it love, at least? Because a man like Brad doesn't blow up a good marriage over nothing."
"It wasn't love. It was two girls together while I was working. There was nothing wrong with me that he was fixing."
When he spoke he had retreated to safe ground. "People don't throw away fifteen years for no reason. Maybe he's not well. Maybe something happened to him that you don't know about."
"What did he say?" he asked, before I could answer. "When you confronted him. Did he have any explanation at all?"
"He didn't care. He said it wasn't working, it was something I'd done. Then he told me he's taking a job in Florida. He packed a bag and left. He didn't even say sorry."
A pause. "Do you want me to come down? I can drive down tomorrow. Whatever you need."
For one second I was small again and I wanted to say yes. I couldn’t.
"He's the one leaving," I said. "I'm fine otherwise."
"Alright. You call me. Anything at all, you hear me?"
I hung up first.
What I had held flat through the whole call gave out. It was nothing like the cry with Janice. That had been a release. I went down over my own knees with my arms around my middle and made sounds I didn’t recognize as mine. The phone slid off my lap onto the carpet. I left it.
I had known it, walking into the call. And some stupid hopeful childish version of me had hoped anyway, hoped he would just be my father for once, hoped he would say he was sorry for all the years I spent being the good girl so he would keep looking at me, hoped he would tell me this one was not mine to carry.
Brad had been the whole shape of my days. Outside of Janice, I had built nothing of my own, no one to call now. The aloneness I had lived in after my mother left, the one I had spent my adult life making sure I never felt again, was already coming up through the floor.
I pulled Whiskers into my chest. He rumbled there, warm and entirely unbothered, the one living thing in the house that had not gone anywhere.
I stayed in the dark for a long time.