Authors: Kate Rockland
So yesterday, around the time she realized she and Billy were fifty thousand dollars in debt, she’d called and left Noah a message.
“Hi, Noah, it’s me.” Then, realizing he had probably moved on and could be dating someone new, and therefore not know who “me” was, she swallowed and took a deep breath. “It’s Alexis. I want to talk. So, um, call me. If you want.”
She’d checked her phone every five minutes since, but the screen had remained frustratingly blank.
Billy had two more weeks of this latest round of chemotherapy before Aldo would run tests to see if the cancer had finally run back to whatever hell it had sprung from. Billy had no idea of the extent of the costs (he thought insurance covered everything), as Alexis had intercepted the mail and hidden the bills in her pillowcase. He’d already lost his sarcastic smile, and his hair. She didn’t want him to lose his soul as well.
So she was going home. Wasn’t there an expression that you can never go home again? Yet here she was, turning into her parents’ circular cobblestone driveway and gazing up at their ugly McMansion.
It hadn’t changed much in three years. Still the same sandy brick color with turrets everywhere, a manicured lawn that her father paid Mexican immigrants to care for, and a six-car garage that held three cars: her father’s Jaguar, which he drove to his firm in town, a Mercedes her mother hadn’t driven since she got her third DUI a year ago, and a beloved, beat-up Volvo that Mark had restored that golden summer he joined the Marines. It was ironic: a six-car garage for a fractured family in which only one person drove.
She pulled the car up to the front door, opting to leave it there as a visitor and not pull it into the garage. Her hands were restless birds in her lap. She wasn’t planning on staying long, and she didn’t like leaving Billy for more than a few hours, even though there were days when he would grow angry and shout for her to get out of the house and stop hovering over him. He seemed calmer when Noah took him to chemo; Alexis felt awkward and stilted in the waiting room, where several other cancer patients and their families also sat in tan leather chairs. When she closed her eyes the green tiles on the walls of the room were imprinted behind her lids, the smell of rubbing alcohol lingering in her nostrils.
“I know this freaks you out,” Billy would say dryly. “Just go outside and grab lunch or something.” Shamefaced, she’d retreat to the little diner around the corner with the words of the menu blurring under her tears.
She wished she were stronger, like Noah, who was a legend in the treatment center for bringing the staff his special beer every week. “He cracks me the fuck up,” Billy would say after Noah dropped him off at the apartment after chemo. Alexis wanted to crack Billy the fuck up, but instead the place made her nauseous; she wanted to blame the pregnancy, but she knew it was more than that. Seeing Billy with no hair and an IV in his skinny arm depressed her.
Her mother answered the door, which was surprising. Alexis searched her memory and couldn’t remember a single time her mother answered the door. It had usually been done by their maid.
“What happened to Elsa?” Alexis asked as she was drawn in for a big wet kiss on the cheek.
She’s switched brands of vodka,
Alexis thought immediately. Her poison had always been Stoli, but this smelled … drier. Less sweet. The scent of alcohol was intense; ever since she got pregnant it was like she had Spider-Man sense. The smell of beer being brewed at Off the River Ale House drifting up into her window made her wistful. It was as if a part of Noah were extending itself, reaching up to her, caressing her each day. She thought about the message she’d left him, and squeezed the cell phone through her purse. He still hadn’t called back. What did she expect? She’d given him the silent treatment for three months and lost her chance with him. He only sent money in case she’d kept their child, she guessed. She felt overwhelmingly tired.
Her mother waved a manicured hand around in the air. She’d been a real beauty once; her nickname in college had been “Steel Magnolia,” since Bunny Allbright (formerly known as Bunny Montague) had been born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She had modeled to pay her way through college. Upon graduating, she landed the Cadillac of husbands at a polo match Alexis’s father was playing in. He’d been captain of a national team that traveled throughout the country, and Bunny went with her girlfriends to watch the game.
Alexis never saw her parents’ marriage as any great love story, but once, when she was ten and Mark thirteen, she learned that her father had once felt differently. It was during a Christmas Eve party, and Alexis and Mark were given the jobs of greeting guests at the door and bringing their coats and capes upstairs to be carefully placed in the master bedroom. Her arms laden with fur and leather, camel hair and silk, Alexis overheard the tail end of a conversation between her dad and one of the lawyers in his firm, a young up-and-comer named Steve Rubin, who’d recently become engaged to a woman he’d seen in a crowd at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
“I met Bunny in a similar way,” she’d heard her father say, followed by the deep inhalation as he took a puff of his cigar. It was a smell that still made her nostalgic—when her father had smoked cigars everything had been good at home. He’d quit with no explanation after Mark died.
Alexis paused in the doorway, her arms heavy.
“How’s that, Mr. Allbright?”
“Please, call me John. Saw her at a polo match, back when I played. Down in Nashville.” He said the name of the town in a faux-southern drawl, which both men laughed at. Listening, Alexis frowned.
“She was a beauty. I’ll tell you what, Steve. Saw her in the stands, wearing this ridiculous hat, must have been a mile wide. In it were little plastic birds of different colors. She had curly blond hair down her back, and big blue eyes. A tiny nose, and long swan neck. The longest legs this side of the Mississippi. I took one look at her and thought,
I’m going to marry that woman.
”
“And you did, sir.”
“Sure enough. But first I had to ask her daddy’s permission, they do it very formally in the South, and wasn’t he a hard-nosed prick…”
Their voices trailed off as they walked into another room, and Alexis scurried up the stairs, nearly bumping into Mark, who was on his way down. He’d winked at her; Mark was always up to some form of mischief himself, and encouraged that trait in others.
It was the tone in her father’s voice when he’d called her mother a “beauty.” She’d almost never seen them touch or act affectionate with one another, and things had grown worse (so much worse) when Mark died, but this was proof that once they’d been in love. Her mother had been so beautiful that she’d caught herself a husband just by wearing a big hat, her straw-blond hair softly blowing in the warm breeze on a hazy southern afternoon.
But now Bunny was speaking, her voice so crisp and clear anyone other than Alexis wouldn’t know she’d been drinking steadily since rising from bed that morning:
“I fired Elsa yesterday. She was hiding my medicine from me. Can you imagine that? Paying someone, and they are hiding your belongings.”
Her blue eyes were wide and still startlingly beautiful, like looking into the Mediterranean and seeing clear through to the bottom, but Alexis could see the broken capillaries around her irises.
Alexis strode past her mother, setting her purse down on a bench in the hallway, which was white marble and cold like a mausoleum. The place needed carpets to warm the floor. Drapes to lend the large windows charm. Her mother’s decorating style was bleak.
Her heart raced just entering the front hallway, seeing the familiar yet alien surroundings.
“Mom, Elsa was probably trying to help. And how could you fire her? I’ve known her my whole life.”
“Well, you haven’t exactly been around here making decisions lately, dearie. It’s just me alone here running this household.” She sighed dramatically, putting a hand up to her forehead.
Alexis sighed. She’d have to speak to her father about sending Elsa severance.
“How are you doing with the pills?” she asked her mother blandly.
Bunny let out air in a raspberry and laughed. “Alexis! You always had such an imagination. What pills?”
In addition to drinking, her mother popped a mixture of antidepressants and muscle relaxers like they were M&M’s.
Alexis tried talking to her father about it a week after the funeral.
He’d been in his study, a manly cave at the back of the house Bunny once paid a decorator a hundred grand to furnish. The walls were a dark green topped with a banner of eagles and American flags. The desk was the size of a pool table. Two leather armchairs framed the front. After knocking to speak to her father, Alexis sank into one of them and leaned forward, putting her hands on her knee. The room had intimidated her since she was a child; she and Mark were restricted from entering. Once, while playing hide-and-seek, Mark hid under the desk and it had taken Alexis two hours to find him; she simply couldn’t believe he’d had the nerve to choose the spot.
One silver-framed photograph sat on her father’s desk, taken in the eighties, with his arm thrown around Ronald Reagan, who came to Greenwich for a charity golf tournament her father’s law firm hosted annually. Mark’s All-American football trophy stood to the right of the photograph.
Her father had worked the afternoon of the funeral. It was how he coped with things. Alexis knew this, and wished she could talk to him about it.
I understand you!
she’d say.
I get it. I know you throw yourself into work because it’s the only way you can deal with Mark being … Mark being not here anymore. I’m the same way.
But instead, there she had been, twenty-three and tongue-tied. He’d looked up after a few minutes, surprised she was there, and blinked a few times as though he’d forgotten he had a daughter.
“Yes, Alexis?” He removed his tortoise-shell glasses. Behind them, his eyes looked tired.
“I wanted to talk to you about Mom.”
It was hard to get the words out. If she wasn’t talking to her father about the law, he seemed uninterested in holding a conversation with her. She relished the tidbits of information she learned at the firm where her father had helped her gain an internship. “Dad, today I assisted in court!” Or, “I helped write a brief!” And they’d sit in his study and discuss her day. It was the only time in her life she had his full attention. He wasn’t a cruel man; at least he hadn’t been then. His own parents hadn’t spoken much to him, they thought children should be seen and not heard; thus, he saw his children as separate entities from himself, who would maneuver through life independently.
“What about your mother?” he’d said, frowning at the distraction from his work.
It came out in a rush of garbled speech. “She’s drinking too much. And why does she need to take Xanax?” She rushed ahead. “Also, she hasn’t been going to her tennis lessons. I heard her on the phone canceling with the club.”
Silence filled the room.
Her father sighed. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. “Alexis, your mother is a grown woman who just lost her only son. It’s not up to me to tell her how to live her life.”
Alexis balled up her hands into fists. “I think she’s depressed.”
He swept all the papers off his desk in one quick move. “Of course she’s depressed!” he bellowed.
Alexis watched the white documents fall like snow. She swallowed. “I just thought that maybe if you talked to her—”
“Alexis, I’m only going to say this once. Right now you need to be studying for your LSATs. Not skulking around the house following your mother’s every move. She’ll come around when she is ready. She’ll … shake this thing once she’s done mourning him.” He was unable to say Mark’s name.
Over the next few months, she’d watched Bunny slowly get worse. At first she preferred to not get out of bed until noon, and had Elsa leave a tray of food outside her door. Alexis would hear the door open and slam shut minutes later, a bagel with one bite taken, eggs barely touched. The gritty sound her shaker made as she mixed her first drink of the day would echo through the large house, the noise reverberating in the high ceilings. Even to this day, when Alexis visited Billy at work and someone fixed a cocktail, she’d cringe.
“You know what pills,” she said to her mother now. “And what are you drinking these days, Mom, still a vodka tonic with a few Xanax thrown in as chasers?” The house had a morbid hush, like a funeral parlor entryway.
Bunny wore a pretty blue silk robe.
Did she even get dressed anymore?
She gathered the front sections together, trying on a mask of righteousness. The blue veins in her hands stood out against her pearly white skin. “You don’t set foot in this house or call your mother for three years and now you’ve just come to insult me?”
Alexis sighed, walking into the kitchen, which had a ten-thousand-dollar fancy hooded stove that looked as though it hadn’t been used since whenever Elsa left, and poured herself a glass of orange juice from the fridge.
“You’re hurting yourself, Mom. Did you get the brochures I sent you?”
Alexis mailed her mother Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlets a few months ago. She had to attend a meeting at a church on the Lower East Side, and she’d felt embarrassed the entire time. She’d seen a sign on the subway that read
DOES A LOVED ONE SUFFER FROM ALCOHOL ABUSE?
Bunny sniffed. She dug her big toe, painted fire hydrant red, against one of the kitchen tiles like a child. “Enough about me. I want to hear about your life, now.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I miss you so much.”
Alexis’s heart turned over. She let her mother tentatively touch her arm, and then make small, rubbing circles. She felt a fluttering in the bottom of her stomach, and thought briefly,
I just felt the baby move.
She turned toward Bunny. “Well, I didn’t exactly feel welcome here, you know. Dad told me when I quit the law firm to leave and never come back.”