Chapter 13
Allie was fourteen days sober before she realized she was going to have to get Donna drunk—really, really drunk—if she wanted
the key to the Cabinet of Curiosities . . . and the only way to do that would be to get drunk herself. It was, she saw, the
next right thing. And in the last two weeks the notion of doing the next right thing had come to seem like a stick of driftwood
she might grasp to keep her head above water.
Tana Nighswander had talked about the next right thing at an AA meeting, the third one Allie attended.
Tana told her drunkalogue, how she used to deliver pizza and drugs, how sometimes when she showed up to make a delivery, it turned out the men waiting had paid for her as well.
She used her tips to buy gin. She said she had her first blackout when she was fifteen.
She was not frightened of brain damage—she hoped for it, wanted to lobotomize herself with gin, so she could just go along with the things her sister made her do without feeling bad.
When she was seventeen, she lurched awake in the front seat of a friend’s car, off the road, a tree branch through the windshield and broken glass in her lap, a six-inch gash along her hairline.
She didn’t remember where she had been driving, didn’t remember anything from the day before.
When she learned she was pregnant, she vowed not to drink anymore.
Her sobriety lasted three days. She did PCP while she was pregnant too.
Three months after Jett was born, she got home drunk, forgot he was strapped in the back seat of the car, and passed out on her couch.
If her friend Gwen Underfoot hadn’t come along twenty minutes later, Jett would’ve died from heat exposure.
As it was he needed a day in the hospital on fluids.
After Tana nearly killed him by leaving him strapped into a hot car, she had wanted to die.
She had never wanted to die more. She wanted to be dead so Gwen would take the baby and give him a good life.
“But I guess Gwen really wanted to see me suffer, so she took me to meetings instead, and that’s how I wound up sentenced
to life in AA with alla you clowns instead,” Tana said to reliable laughter.
Tana went to ninety meetings in ninety days, while Gwen was the mother to Jett that the baby needed. Tana said in those first
days she was scared all the time. Scared she was going to drink. Scared to be alone. Scared the baby would cry and her resolve
would crumble and she would start drinking again and wake up and the baby would be dead, blue and cold and stiff. She could
not have been more terrified if she was in a car sliding out of control down a steep slope toward rocks. The meetings were
her way of frantically pumping the brakes, trying to bring the vehicle to a stop before it was too late.
That was doing the next right thing, Tana learned—and although those first days of free-falling panic were behind her now, it was still how she tried to live
her life. She went to a meeting. She went to work. If someone walked into the Market Basket with their toddlers and couldn’t
afford groceries, she helped them out. She wasn’t a doctor or a professor or an airline pilot . . . she made forty-one thousand
dollars a year managing the Basket. But no single mom, red-eyed from crying, ever went home hungry when they visited her supermarket.
If an old fella came in using a walker, she went out to load his groceries herself, because that was the next right thing.
She went to church on Sunday and prayed for the strength to get through the next day sober; it was the next right thing. Whenever
she read a story in the paper about a baby who died because of negligence or shitty bad luck, she lit a candle in the chapel,
thanked God for saving her child from her, and promised herself again she would do the next right thing and try to do the
next thing right.
Allie believed, at first, that she was going to the meetings with Tana because it made it easy to meet Gwen and Robin afterward for a council of war.
Twenty minutes over coffee, or just five in a parked car.
But the morning she heard Tana talk about the next right thing, she was struck by two thoughts.
The first was that for her, the next right thing she could do for herself was go back to her faculty housing and pour out the wine, one bottle of it after another.
It pleased her to imagine doing that and being able to tell Tana she had done it.
The second was that she had it the wrong way around.
The AA meetings were not a pretext so the gang could meet in private to discuss Gwen’s situation.
Meeting Robin and Gwen was the pretext to go to the AA meetings.
Not only that: Allie was the last one to realize that the meetings were the part that mattered most, not their secret conversations afterward. What did they
have to meet about? Until she got into the Cabinet, not much. Allie believed at first they had joined forces to save Gwen . . .
only to discover they had joined forces to save her. And the other women had known it all along.
Allie knew other things too. The daughter of evangelical Christians and a lifelong churchgoer herself, she knew that Easter
belonged in April . . . but in that year of 2016, the movable feast of the Resurrection fell at the end of March. They had seven weeks to send King Sorrow back to the Long Dark forever or Gwen was ash.
And she knew about the key that Donna wore everywhere, not on a rope of silver, but on a chain of dullest iron. Donna said
it whispered and had once clutched Allie’s head to her chest so Allie could hear it. At first Allie had only been aware of Donna’s heartbeat
beneath the swell of her breast. It had made her almost breathless to have her face pressed to Donna’s chest (and she thought
Donna knew it too, maybe even took a cynical pleasure in it).
But then, slowly, she thought she began to detect a susurration, not unlike the roar-and-hiss she had heard, once upon a time,
in the Aztec conch. Only this sound stirred a profound feeling of unease rather than a sense of wonder. It was the sound of
a madman whispering to himself in a dungeon. A madman sobbing under his breath with laughter. How iron might whisper and what
secrets it had to share, Allie could not imagine.
Allie could think of only one set of circumstances that might allow her to slip the chain off Donna’s neck.
It might just about be possible if Donna got plastered, pissed, pass-out drunk.
Allie had seen her that drunk a few times before, knocked out with her head on her arms, snoring the buzzing, labored snore, not of a petite middle-aged woman, but an asthmatic fat man.
And the only way to make sure she got that drunk was to get that drunk with her.
Allie had learned from Tana and her AA meetings that she could live with herself as long as she did the next right thing,
and by the end of February she knew the next right thing was to go back to drinking.
What surprised her was how ill she felt at the thought of losing her sobriety—the first fourteen days of bitter, refreshing
clarity she had had in nearly thirty years. But beneath the guilty feeling was a rotten excitement, an eagerness to drink
and drink until the booze hit her like a hammer between the eyes. To drink until she didn’t feel so bad about Gwen, until
she didn’t feel like locking herself in the bathroom and crying herself sick, as she had done three or four times already.
The eagerness to pick up a drink and be obliterated didn’t surprise her, but the regret . . . the regret almost gave her hope
for herself. You could only regret losing something if it was worth having.
In the second week of February, Colin had to pop down to New York City for a dinner with several of his largest financial
backers—the inner circle of billionaires who invested with his equity fund and who held the largest positions in Dragonware.
Ostensibly, the conversation was about the firm’s expansion into machine learning and artificial intelligence. In truth, though,
Colin was being called on the carpet. CNN and MSNBC had both run with the shaky iPhone footage of Colin shoving Gwen Underfoot
down at the opening of his Rackham College computer center. In the video, Colin’s face was a dead blank, his eyes slitted,
his mouth a thin line. He showed all the emotional warmth of a cobra striking from beneath a rock. Gwen—who was not identified
by name, only described as an off-duty EMT—was clearly moving to apply a compress to his injured leg. It was almost impossible
not to flinch when Colin put his hand over her face and shoved.
Colin had put out a brief statement saying he had just been attacked by an emotionally unwell friend and felt terrible about lashing out at a woman who was only trying to offer medical assistance.
He had been in a defensive crouch, acting without thought, and wanted to offer his sincerest apology to the woman in question.
This statement had not stopped shares in Dragonware dropping by almost 45 percent in two days.
Between the video, the congressional investigations, and the ugly stories about Dragonware’s handling of private data, the whole company had lost almost forty billion in market cap in the last eighteen months.
There were men far richer than Colin—including a Middle Eastern princeling and a pair of Russian oligarchs who vacationed in Italy with Vladimir Putin—who wanted to know when he was going to stop setting fire to their money.
Allie was hardly in the video herself. The kid with the iPhone had only started filming as Donna peeled Allison off Colin’s
back, and Allie’s hair was across her face, hiding her outraged features. But the school knew full well who had jumped on
their biggest private donor. They were conducting their own investigation, and in the meantime, she was still teaching. But
Allie had a pretty good idea that she would be looking for work again by the end of spring term. God knew who would hire her
now. Come June, she’d have nothing but the shirt on her back, and the twenty-four million dollars her parents had left her
when they died. And the house in Texas. And the other house in Cape Cod.
Colin drove to the jetport in Portland, Maine, to meet his Gulfstream, at nine in the morning, and left Donna to hold down
the fort at The Briars. Donna had a house of her own, but Allison wasn’t sure she spent any time there. They lived together
now, Donna and Colin, in every sense that mattered. Allie waited until four in the afternoon before she texted her:
Okay, I’ve got this bottle of gin you gave me for Christmas three years ago, the one with the funny name, and I feel guilty
pouring it down the drain. Do you want it?
The Port of Dragons gin?
Yes.
Come over here. You can pour it down my throat instead.
Okay. But I’m not staying. I think the one thing that would make me drink now is watching YOU drink. Two weeks today. Hard
but good.
You don’t have to watch. Just come to the door and hand it to me.
Okay, Allie texted, thinking she would pretend to let her resolve crumble when she got there. Only when she reached The Briars,
Donna answered the door in a red-and-black silk kimono, loosely belted, and a pair of red-soled Louboutin heels, and Allie
didn’t have to pretend. It was the kind of outfit designed to give her a twist in the pit of the stomach—Donna right there,
naked except for the kimono, the heels, and her smirk.
And the chain with the key on it. She wore that too, of course.