The Empty Room (19 page)

“And what about you?” Dave, the leader asked. He was looking at Colleen.

“Me?”

“Yeah, you,” said Dave. He chuckled. “How you doing?”

“I’m fine.”

They were all looking at her. “Obviously, there’s a lot of alcoholism in my family. My father … Liam, others, I guess. So, I’m
very aware, you know, I’m very careful. I watch my drinking, you know?”

“Oh, we know,” said one of the men, and with that everyone burst into laughter.

She didn’t see what was so funny. She glared at Liam. Had he brought her here to make fun of her? Who were these people but a bunch of drunks, anyway?

He patted her knee and smiled. “It’s okay,” he said.

“Keep coming back,” the woman in the green cardigan said.

She didn’t listen to much that was said after that. She had the feeling there was a set-up here. Is this how they recruited? Well, it wouldn’t work on her. She supposed they couldn’t help it; they must look around and think everyone is a drunk. Like all converts, they just had to
proselytize
.

After the meeting closed—with a prayer, all of them standing in a circle holding hands—the woman in the green cardigan walked up to Colleen, her hand extended.

“My name’s Ginger,” she said. “It’s so nice to meet you. Liam talks about you a lot. He’s doing really well, isn’t he.”

“We’re all proud of him.”

“Why don’t I give you my number?” She held out a piece of paper. “Just in case you ever want to talk.”

“Thanks,” Colleen said, since it was the only polite thing to do.

Liam said his goodbyes and the group began to break up. Liam and Colleen, with a couple of others, left the room and headed
down the corridor to the front doors. Two young men slouched against the wall there, their clothes baggy, their eyes bright.

“What you want?” one said. He was fat, with a bald head. “We got what you want? A little taste, baby, a little french fry.” He licked his lips.

“Crunch and munch, come on, now. You know you want it.” This one had a line of teardrops tattooed down his cheek, under his left eye.

They whispered them over, gesturing with their fingers, leering.

“Are you kidding me?” said Colleen. “You wait in the hallway? Outside an AA meeting? What are you people, vultures?”

“Be cool, Colleen,” whispered Liam. “Just keep walking.”

The guy with the teardrop tattoo stepped into her path. “You got a fucking problem?”

Her heart pounded but she couldn’t stop herself. She was incandescent. “You should be ashamed of yourselves. They’re not even out the door yet! What’s the matter with you?” She sounded like a schoolteacher, when she wanted to sound like an avenging angel.

“You fucking with my business, bitch?” the fat one asked, in an ominously quiet voice.

Liam pulled at her elbow. “No troubles. We’re leaving. She’s not from around here, you know?”

“No kidding,” said the fat boy. He made a little kissing noise as Liam urged her toward the glass doors. “I’ll be waiting for you, mama.”

When Colleen looked back, the two girls were coming down the hall with Dave. Dave laughed and said something to the men, and although they laughed back, he kept his hands on the girls’ arms.

Colleen’s breathing was ragged. “Do you go through that every time?”

Liam shrugged. “Temptation’s always around. That’s never gonna change. It’s not about them. It’s about me. There’s a bar on every corner, a dealer down every street.”

“If you say so. But that’s insane.”

Liam chuckled. “Not half as insane as doing what I used to do.”

He sounded so strong, and so clear. She admired him, and told him so.

Liam stayed with Colleen for another week, and then he went off to his new apartment with his new clean-and-sober friends. She never found out exactly what went wrong, or when the wheels came off his resolve. Six months later he was back on the pipe, on the pills, on the booze, on whatever he found lying around. He disappeared into the streets. Three years later he collapsed in an alley. The police found him, and after a night in hospital his parents let him come back home. He lived in their basement, trying every day to get clean again. He stopped using, but when Colleen saw him she struggled not to burst into tears. Several of his teeth were missing and those that remained were cracked. His face was covered in sores. Brown lesions disfigured his long skinny legs. He crawled back to those meetings, but somehow he couldn’t grab hold again.
He said he’d do it his way and didn’t need a sponsor, didn’t need to “work the steps” as they called it.

One morning he said he was going for a walk. He took a rope from his parents’ garage and hanged himself from a tree behind the Anglican church, the same church in which he’d sung in the choir as a child. If he’d lived to the end of that day, he would have had thirty days clean and sober, but it was just too late.

THE URBAN ANGEL

C
olleen awoke with a start. She wiped drool off her cheek. It was dark. What time was it? 6:30. The reflected light from the city beyond her windows, such as it was, looked like greyish dishwater. She swung her legs to the side of the sofa and groaned. Oh, her head and her stomach and that taste in her mouth. She ran her hands through her hair, which was flat on one side and damp with sweat. The whole dreadful day lashed back at her, leaving welts of disgust. Fuck.

Someone knocked at the door.

“Colleen? You in there?”
Knock, knock, knock
.

Jake. She had spoken to him earlier. Yes, she remembered that.

She must look like hell on a stick. “Yeah, yeah. Hang on. Give me a minute.” She lurched to the bathroom. In the mirror her face was blotchy and puffy, her eyes red. She ran the water ice cold and doused her face. She squeezed a glob of toothpaste onto her finger and rubbed it around her teeth. Powder. Lipstick. She brushed her hair and fluffed it.

It would do.

Jake leaned against the door jamb when she opened it, his head down but eyes on her. “Hey.” He straightened and kissed her cheek
with the corner of his mouth. “I been knocking. You all right?”

He was fresh from the office, topcoat open, black suit and white shirt, silver tie. His hair, which he had worn in an Afro back in the day, was shaved down to a mere shadow on his perfectly round head. He smelled of that scent particular to Jake, not cologne, just the scent of his skin, a little like cinnamon and cloves.

“Fine. I was asleep. Like you said, I needed a nap.”

“Uh-huh.” He walked past her and looked around the apartment. “Been a while since I been here. Nothing’s changed.”

“What were you expecting?” She closed the door.

He shrugged.

“You want something?”

“What you offering?” He cocked an eyebrow.

“Drink? Coffee? I don’t know.” She wasn’t in the mood for his banter. She never could play the game for as long as he could. It always hurt her feelings in the end.

“Got a beer?” He took his coat off and tossed it on the leather chair by the window and then sat in the far corner of the sofa with his arms draped over the back and his legs spread.

“No beer. Wine. Vodka.” She didn’t want one herself. She wanted water, and lots of it, and some crackers.

“Glass of wine, then. You got red?”

“White.”

“Whatever.”

She went into the kitchen and drank two tumblers full of water and ate five saltines before pouring him a glass of wine. She poured
herself a half-glass, just to be sociable. When she went back to the living room Jake was texting something.

“I hate those things,” she said.

His thumbs, which looked entirely too big for the tiny keypad, twitched over the keys for a few more minutes and then he put the device in an inside jacket pocket.

“So,” he said. “What’s up?”

He reached over and grabbed her by the back of her neck, shaking her gently, but still, it made the room dive and pitch. She squirmed away.

“Don’t.”

“Having a rough day, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Decided what you want to do?” He picked up his wine. “Cheers.”

“I just lost my job this morning, for Christ’s sake.”

“So, you did get fired.”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. Kind of.” She had a sip of wine. Just a sip. “Anything you can do to make it right?”

“I don’t want to make it right. I don’t have anything to make right. I didn’t do anything wrong. Why would you even say something like that?”

“Listen, Colleen, I’ve lost a job or two in my time. It’s not the end of the world. And, you know, maybe I deserved to get fired. I was hitting it pretty hard there for a while.”

“What’s your point?”

“Don’t look at me like that. I’m not judging you, I’m just saying. You always liked working at the university.”

“I’m not going back there. I’ve worked there too goddamn long as it is. I’m in a rut. I need something new, something challenging.”

“Like what? Shit. Hang on.” Jake pulled his phone out of his pocket, flipped it open and looked at the readout, but then closed it and replaced it in his pocket.

“You need to get that?”

“It’s nothing. Right, so, what do you want to do?”

“Is there anything at Jenkins & McEwan?”

“My office?” He pulled his chin back and looked like he might laugh. “You’re kidding, right? C’mon, Colleen. You and me can’t work at the same place. Shit.”

“I’m not saying I’d work for you. I wouldn’t work for you, but in some other department maybe. The salary’d be a hell of a lot higher than I’m making now.” She drank a little more wine.

“I don’t think there’s anything. Okay, okay, look, I’ll ask, all right. But don’t get your hopes up. You know what the guys in the business are like. They want their assistants to be, shit, you know …”

“What? I have experience.”

He shrugged, holding his hands up in surrender. “Yeah, okay, I’ll ask. I will. I can’t promise, though. But listen, babe, that’s not what I came over to talk to you about.”

She was still muzzy and unfocused from her nap. She should never nap late in the afternoon like that. Waking up in the dark
always disoriented her, made her feel as if she were viewing everything through a wall of water. The back of her head felt as though someone had driven a couple of screws into the base of her skull. She knew he probably wanted to talk about last night, but surely he could see this wasn’t the time for it, not with everything she’d been through.

“What could you want to talk about that’s more important?”

“You know I care about you, right?”

“I care about you too.”

“Good. So you believe me when I say I want you to be okay and have a good life and all that. Because I do, really, I do. I don’t know what’s going on with you, or … I don’t know … maybe I do. Like I said before, there was a time I was doing some stuff maybe I shouldn’t have been doing, right? You know what I’m saying. I was getting high all the time and shit.”

“You don’t do coke anymore, though, right?”

“Nah, coke-free zone. I’m good.” He sat forward on the couch, took a drink of his wine and rolled the glass between his palms. “Look, I’ll just come out with it. Last night, when you called, you sounded pretty tanked.”

“It was just a bad night. I might have had a glass or two, just watching television, and—”

“It was more than a glass or two and, babe, you call me like that, what? Twice a week, more maybe?”

“No, I don’t.” Something icy swirled in her belly. She had no idea what he was talking about, but something slipped in under
her mind’s door, some terrible draft of possibility. “I don’t call you that much.”

“Yeah, you do. And I haven’t minded ’cause, look, I know it’s not easy being alone and all that. No, let me finish. But the last couple of times you called, all this shit about killing yourself …”

Couple of times? She couldn’t remember when she’d called him before last night. What on earth had she said to him? “You’re exaggerating. What’s with all the fucking drama, Jake?”

“You said you were going to throw yourself off the balcony. We were on the phone for three hours. I was going to call the police.”

“What? Oh come
on
!” Colleen studied his face to see if he was, as he called it, yanking her chain. “You are joking, right?” The band of pain around her head throbbed. She couldn’t think straight.

“You don’t remember any of it, do you.”

His eyes held something very much like contempt. That was worse than anything. If he was angry, they could yell and scratch and throw things. If he was sad, she could console him. But contempt was so close to disgust. She knew of no way to wipe that stain off. Jumping off the balcony didn’t sound like such a bad idea after all.

“Jake, okay, maybe I had a bit too much to drink, and okay, to be honest, I’m not sure I remember the whole conversation. I don’t know what you’re getting so high and mighty about. It’s not like I haven’t listened to your bullshit for more hours than I can remember, over more years than either of us like to admit. You remember when I bailed you out that time you ran your car into a mailbox
and were so drunk the cops had to have you sit on the floor in the station because you kept falling off the fucking chair?”

“That was fifteen years ago,” he said quietly.

“You still drink.”

“Not like you do.”

“Fuck you.” She stood up, although she didn’t know where she was going. Or maybe she did. Perversely, she wanted a drink now, really wanted one, and it was her house and she’d goddamn well have a drink if she wanted to.

Jake reached over and grabbed her wrist. “Sit down, Colleen. Just for a minute.”

He pulled her down and she sat, glaring at him. “Say what you want to, then.”

“What you do is your business. How much you drink or don’t drink is your business, and I’m nobody to tell you what to do. But things have changed, you know, and I can’t have you calling me all the time, not now.”

“I don’t call you all the time.” But that was only part of the story, wasn’t it. She could tell that by looking at him. “You want to tell me what’s changed.”

“That’s why I’m here.” He took a deep breath. “You remember Taquanda.”