The Empty Room (2 page)

Colleen put the cold club soda against her temple. God, it was so sad. What a non-life her mother had had, and this was the way it ended? Without even a little peace?
Please God, don’t let that be me. O keep my soul, and deliver me: let me not be ashamed; for I put my trust in thee
. She put the bottle back in the fridge, noting something fuzzy in the crisper that she was not up to dealing with at the moment. A stab of icy dread streaked along her spine. She could very well end up that way, couldn’t she? Or worse.

Don’t think about it now. Only this: you will not drink today. Not today.

SOGGY CROWS

I
t was early evening, a time when she and her mother usually went downstairs with a bowl of barbecue potato chips to the TV room of the split-level house and watched
The Man from U.N.C.L.E
. or
Daniel Boone
, or sometimes Bewitched, which nine-year-old Colleen liked best. On that night, however, her mother watched
Bonanza
with steely indifference. She wasn’t sewing either, as she usually did, her hands busy hemming or putting on buttons or sometimes crocheting an afghan or a sweater. Instead, she clutched a tissue and held a glass of scotch, cradling it between her palms as though she were cold and it warmed her. Periodically she sipped from the glass and then snuffled loudly into the tissue. Now and then she seemed to stifle a moan. Tiny and dark haired, with a black sweater wrapped around her shoulders, she looked like one of the soggy crows perched on the branches of the oak tree outside their home in Burlington when it rained, glaring at Colleen’s window, as though she had no right to be warm and dry while they suffered so.

Colleen sat at the far end of the couch and tried to concentrate on the television show, but need radiated off her mother in waves. Already in her pyjamas and pink terry-cloth robe, Colleen rolled
the robe’s belt up tightly, let it out and then rolled it up again. She couldn’t leave, because then her mother would say she was deserting her.

“So, that’s how it is,” her mother had said once, when Colleen, her throat thickening with shame even as she spoke, suggested her mother should be more easygoing, like her dad. Her mother’s eyes were hard with resolve, and pitiless. “Well, now I know where we stand,” she said, “and don’t think I’ll forget it.” She didn’t speak to Colleen for a week, and then only because Colleen broke down and cried so much she threw up.

Colleen vowed she wouldn’t ever let her mother punish her that way again, which meant she had to keep her as happy as it was possible for the woman to be (which, even at nine, Colleen didn’t think was very happy at all), and right now that meant staying, watching her mother drink and cry and drink. Colleen felt herself drowning, her mother a dead weight dragging her under.

Minutes ticked by, and then her mother finally said, “Your father is a shit, you know that?”

Colleen pulled Pixie onto her lap from where she had been sleeping on the couch between them. She stroked the cocker spaniel’s long, silky ears and the dog sighed.

“Of course, you’ve always liked your father better than me, haven’t you.”

“No. I love you both.”

Her mother sniggered. “Well, he’s drinking us into the poor-house, how about that for your wonderful father? And he’s got
other women, too, did you know that? Little whore of a secretary.”

“Mum, please …”

Her mother blew her nose and threw the soiled tissue into a half-full basket by the end table. “What do you care? I might just as well turn drunk myself. Bottoms up!”

As the pitch of her mother’s voice rose, Pixie’s head popped up. She hopped off the couch and moved to an armchair at the end of the room, Colleen’s father’s chair. Putting her chin on the armrest, she eyed them.

“Even the damn dog!” said her mother. “Even the damn dog.”

“It’ll be okay, Mum. You don’t have to be mad.”

“If it wasn’t for you, I could have left long ago.” She blew her nose and pushed the wadded tissue into her pocket. She turned her gaze to Colleen. “Get away from me,” she said.

And there it was. Now Colleen was expected to beg, to plead with her mother to love her:
please don’t make me go
away
. Colleen recognized the look on her mother’s face—part defiance, part despair and part regret—although she was too young to have words for what she saw. She only knew her mother wanted her to play a familiar, terrible, hurtful game that Colleen never won, no matter how hard she tried.

Not tonight. She got up and headed for the stairs. Pixie jumped down from the chair and followed.

Her mother gasped. “Pixie! Get back there. Sit.”

The dog obeyed, but looked so longingly at Colleen that she felt guilty for leaving her behind. She started up the stairs.

“I see it now, Colleen Kerrigan. You’re your father’s daughter, aren’t you.”

At the top of the stairs, Colleen stopped and tightened her belt, her stomach roiling. Her father sat in the dark in the living room, right in the middle of the good sofa where no one ever sat unless there was company. Colleen couldn’t make out his features in the dark. He was smoking and the blue-grey smoke was thick. Colleen walked toward him.

“No, Colleen. Not now,” he said.

She stood there on the carpet and felt something in the middle of her chest crink, like a sudden running-stitch in your side. Where was she supposed to go? Who was she supposed to go to?

“Nobody wants me,” she wailed, although she hadn’t meant to.

“Ah, Jesus,” her father said. “Come here, pet, come here.”

She ran to her father, who smelled of cigarettes and scotch, and buried her face in his chest, letting out great wrenching sobs. “Everybody’s so mad all the time,” she said.

“I’m sorry, pet. This isn’t your fault. It’s my fault. Mummy’s right about that. I won’t drink anymore, I won’t. I promise.”

She didn’t believe him, of course, but it felt good to have his arms around her, and so she said, “I believe you, Daddy. I believe you.”

IT’S A KNOCK-OFF!

I
n the shower the water felt good and Colleen wanted to stand there for hours, but there was no time. She didn’t bother to shave her legs either. Thank God for pants. Yuck, there was mildew on the pink shower curtain. She had to buy a new one. That pink was the colour of Pepto-Bismol, or Pepto-Dismal as she called it. Why had she ever bought it? It was vomit-inducing. She’d buy a new one—something in a cool pale watery blue. Clean and fresh.

When she stepped out of the shower, the towel she rubbed over her face smelled of mildew too. Disgusting. Her stomach cramped. When was the last time she did laundry? She patted herself down, since she’d read in a magazine that rubbing too hard could stretch the skin. Red dots had appeared on her torso over the past few years. Her doctor said they were nothing, just cherry angiomas, whatever the hell that meant. Colleen noted the scatter of them across her chest and stomach. Maybe her liver was giving out.

“That’s it, kid,” she said out loud, “your drinking days are over.”

A quick look in the mirror. This was always a dangerous moment in the day. So much depended on not hating oneself completely at such an early hour. Mirrors were treacherous objects. As a little girl she read Hans Christian Andersen’s story about the Snow Queen.
A wicked sprite fashioned a mirror with the power to make everything good and beautiful look ugly and mean, and all that was ugly and horrible look even more atrocious. The mirror was smashed into a hundred million and more pieces, some no larger than a grain of sand, and these flew about in the world, and when they got into people’s eyes, there they stayed, and then people saw everything perverted, or only liked looking at that which was evil. Splinters even found their way into the hearts of some people and that was the worst of all, for their hearts became like lumps of ice. Colleen was not convinced this was merely a fairy tale for children, and even entertained the possibility she had such a speck of tainted mirror in her eye, for she thought the world a pretty shabby, violent and decaying place and couldn’t understand why some people seemed so happy all the time, so impervious to the grief and sorrow of humanity. It was hard to believe perceptions could be so different, and impossible to tell who was right.

She considered her reflection now, and there was no sugar-coating what she saw. She grimaced at the haggard woman she saw before her, bared her teeth and shook her head. Men had once told her she was a pretty girl, they had desired her. Everyone told her she had such good bones, that she was lucky to have inherited her mother’s cheekbones. She did not see good bones. She saw a neck no longer firm, a softened jawline, a nest of lines around her eyes. A crease ran up her cheek. Her eyes were puffy and bloodshot, and a pimple reddened her chin. How the hell could she be almost fifty and still getting pimples?

She had an urge to smash the mirror. People did such things. She could do it. She could ram her fist into the mirror. But she’d probably break her hand. She could throw something. The canister of bath salts. She could throw that. She pictured a shard of glass actually flying into her eye. Blood and pain. She hung her head and swallowed back unexpected, and inconvenient, tears. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.
Stop it. Stop feeling sorry for yourself
.

She took her hands from her eyes and got to work. A quick swipe of mascara. But she dropped the wand in the sink, leaving a black smear against the flesh-coloured porcelain. Her hands, she realized, were trembling just a little. She towel-dried her hair, which was good hair, fine, but lots of it and with a slight wave. She plugged in the hair dryer and used her brush to lift the hair from the roots. Ordinarily she’d bend over and dry her hair upside down but this morning such an acrobatic manoeuvre would invite disaster. When it was dry enough she piled it on top of her head in a messy but, she thought, charmingly bohemian twist, and secured it with a silver clip.

On a little plastic shelf over the towel rack miniature perfume bottles were arranged in a circle: Dior, Trésor, Chloé, Oscar de la Renta, Angel, Perry Ellis 360, Intuition, Ysatis, Opium, L’Air du Temps. Looking at the two tiny doves in etched glass on the last bottle brought to mind Ali, the beautiful young man from the Canary Islands, who once gave her a bottle, which she spilled down the back of her dresser the very night he gave it to her. The whole room smelled of gardenia and jasmine for a week. Ali turned out to
be married to a woman (possibly two, he was Muslim) back home. Goodbye, Ali.

Colleen loved these tiny bottles. She bought them years ago at Christmas when the department stores sold them as gifts. She felt she deserved a gift. They were so pretty and light and held all the promise of a lovely dress and a sparkling night, one filled with possibility. She imagined they contained magic potions. Sometimes she took them off the shelf and carried them to the living room, lined them up on the coffee table and lit candles round them, creating a sort of altar. She picked up the squat inverted triangle of the Trésor bottle. Dust filmed the glass. She cleaned it with her thumb. She really should give the whole place a polishing.

She glanced at her watch. 8:10. She’d never make it. Lipstick, but forget the foundation. No, just a dab of foundation on the broken blood vessels along her nose, and powder, to take the sweat-shine away. Jesus, but her stomach was a mess. She ran naked to the kitchen, smeared a couple of salted crackers thickly with butter and stuffed them in her mouth. Good and greasy. For some reason that always helped. She shouldn’t have anything else. Certainly not now. There were rules about these things. But … there was so little left in the bottle, and a quick swig would settle things down, she was sure it would.

Drinking before breakfast, however, was against these rules. She often woke up at around 4 a.m., heart pounding with anxiety, legs twitching and restless, as though they’d gone to sleep and were about to burst into pins and needles. This morning had been no
exception, and before she managed to fall back to sleep, she vowed she wouldn’t drink today. A detox day, as she called them. Sundays were
supposed
to be detox days, but Sunday had been such a lonely day. There was only so much reading she could do, only so much napping. A wee drink made everything prettier, and far more tolerable. And so today, Monday, would be her detox day.

Back in the bedroom, with the recriminating unmade bed and the not-terribly-clean sheets, she slipped into underwear, the same bra she had slept in, black pants and blue turtleneck. She crammed her swollen feet (she had spider veins on her ankles now, her ankles for Christ’s sake, when did that happen?) into knee-high stockings and black pumps. Tonight, when she absolutely would not be drinking, she’d do laundry. For now, this would have to do.

She hunched into her red wool coat. The red was flattering against her pale colouring, she knew, and the A-line shape hid a variety of flaws. It had cost too much, and she shouldn’t have bought it two years ago when her credit cards were already burdened. It was rather cutting-edge then, though, and she couldn’t resist. Now, even if it was a little out of fashion, she preferred to think of it as classic. She tried to channel Audrey Hepburn, her chin’s insouciant and slightly defiant thrust.

Colleen squared her shoulders. “Nothing is impossible,” she said aloud, quoting Hepburn. “The word itself says, ‘I’m possible’!” It was a sort of morning incantation. Some people strapped on St. Patrick’s Breastplate; Colleen preferred Hepburn.

Colleen grabbed her keys from the bowl on the end table and
then remembered her phone. She picked it up from the counter and popped it in her purse. Just then she had a sort of muscle memory.
The phone
. Did she call someone last night? She did. Oh Christ. Whom did she call? She spoke to Lori around eight-thirty or so. Yes, that was it, because
The Sopranos
was on. But they hadn’t talked long. Lori had kids, after all, and a life.

Colleen was in the hallway now and just about to press the elevator button when it occurred to her she might have called a man. Yes, it was a man’s voice she recalled, but whose? She prayed it wasn’t him. Jake. She groaned and felt a rush of panic. It probably was Jake, but she wouldn’t think about that, not now.