​Chapter Forty-Eight
Natalie

I thought it was magic, Jerry scooping me into his van. He appeared in bits and pieces, flashes of frown and determination as he worked me out of my car and into his passenger side seat. The liquor store owner apparently asked me who he could call to pick me up, and I was somehow coherent enough to tell him. The fact that he didn’t call the cops is a small miracle. Jerry told me he went back later with a work buddy, told him my car wouldn’t start, and when they got to the liquor store, the thing magically turned over. The work buddy thinks I was buying wine for a béarnaise.

Oh Jerry.

The truth is that I was buying alcohol to kill myself. At least the little pieces that still hold onto everything I’ve lost. But you can’t tell a person that. You can’t tell them you’re made of more than flesh and blood, but also the secrets and sadness that make you stumble-drunk in a liquor store parking lot.

Even I think I’m evil.

Wren wasn’t home. Thank the gods, the heavens, the big floating nothingness above our heads. She thinks she hates me now, just wait until she catches a whiff of what I’ve done. I know what it’s like to live with an alcoholic, wishing things will change. And for her, they finally did. But I’m not even sure for the better.

Smelling myself in this bed, I have to go with the alternative.

Jerry’s out there somewhere on the couch. Wren came home. I could hear her and Jerry talking in the living room, but she didn’t come looking for me. He must have told her I was sick, which is true on many levels. It’s still inside me, the fetus. The clump of cells. I keep forcing the image of a black tumorous cyst choking off my organs but the image won’t hold. Instead, I see the tiny fuzzy shape of a small human being like they showed me on Wren’s ultrasound. My tears mix with sweat because even though I know it’s drafty in my room, vodka always makes me a billion times hotter. It feels like I’ve tripped and landed in a deep hole and there’s barely any room to breathe. It feels like I’m looking up and can only see a small orb of light pounding down onto my forehead.

I roll around for a while, wading through a sea of sheets. I argue with myself or the gods or the heavens or the great big nothingness that I know hovers dark and heavy above our apartment complex. “What do you want from me?” I whisper because I know it’s there, and it always has been.

I just don’t know what it is.

​