Marlena by Julie Buntin

Author:Julie Buntin
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

New York

I woke up at some sickly, colorless hour, the cat watching me from the floor. In the bathroom, I chased two Advils with two large glasses of water, and then sank back into a twitchy approximation of sleep, just alert enough to monitor the apartment’s horrible brightening. When Liam’s alarm went off, our room full of sun, I stayed in bed. I did not want to take the subway with him. I was hungover again. It was a bad one.

In our home office, the contents of the box were scattered across the desk—the trash can had three empty beers in it. A fourth, gone except for a single swig, stood near my open laptop. When I touched the trackpad, the screen revealed a Word document, covered in text. I closed the computer and grabbed the pin out of the box, for Sal. I put on more makeup than normal, to hide the ill tint to my face. I’d left the lids off my contact case; my toothbrush was in the bathtub, bristles against the drain. When I left the apartment, I took the bottles and the empty six-pack sleeve from the fridge to the recycling bin at the end of our hall, praying I wouldn’t bump into a neighbor.

Standing on the subway, crammed in between two men in business suits, my stomach heaved and settled, heaved and settled, lifting toward my throat and then sinking to my feet. No matter how sick I felt, I never threw up—not the night of, not the day after, not unless I made myself. I had no Off button. Nothing to stop me, no internal mechanism that said enough, please, what you’re doing hurts. I was so tired. The shame came then, that old familiar, and I watched my reflection in the subway glass cringe, thinking about the beer and the martinis mixing together, curdling my blood. In the morning, it was always possible that I might never drink again. But then I thought of stumbling into the kitchen while Liam slept, opening one more, powerless. I couldn’t go on like this. And yet, with a tiresome mixture of longing and dread, I was already imagining the moment, that late afternoon turn, when it would again be appropriate to drink.

She wasn’t there when I arrived, but a few hours into the day, when I came downstairs to ask Alice a question, the girl was in her usual spot. She was alert-seeming, staring into a heavy pictorial dictionary of dog breeds. Her face was clean and very pale, and when I approached, she was tracing the outline of the dogs on the page the way a child would, with her first finger. She wore dirt-caked jeans and a long brown jacket, her backpack overstuffed and covered in marker and patches and scuffs of mud. Nineteen, I guessed, though Alice thought older, closer to twenty-five. But I knew drugs bumped you up in your own timeline, leaving you, even if you sobered up, a little closer to death.

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