Degrees of difficulty by Julie E. Justicz

Author:Julie E. Justicz [Justicz, Julie E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-944388-89-8
Publisher: Fomite

11

Caroline, June 1992

Caroline lay on her right side under the pale, peach-colored spread of the narrow twin bed. It had been a long-time—since back in college, no doubt, more than twenty years ago—that she’d slept on a bed this narrow, and her long, bony limbs no longer seemed able to adjust. With the advent of middle age or the cumulative weight of exhaustion—how to distinguish?—she’d grown used to a dull aching in the back of her knees. The constraints of this child-sized bed, and the cold currents of conditioned air that blasted from the vent above it did nothing to help. Nor did the fact that she’d had nothing more than an aspirin to curb the pain since her arrival at Brady’s Rehab Center three days ago. She’d agreed to the detox to get a break, but hadn’t really thought through what it would require. She hadn’t understood how much she’d come to rely on her wine and Ben’s meds.

She had asked her shrink during their first session to prescribe something stronger, codeine perhaps.

“Nothing,” he replied. “Not for the first fortnight at least. We have to completely clean out your system.”

She had liked how he said fortnight—the dark cave of it, the promise of a physical and temporal remove from what she’d done, from who she’d become. But the pain in her legs wouldn’t wait that long.

Nothing comes of nothing, she had said back to him. Speak again.

And true-blue Oxford-educated man that he was, Dr. Thorne-Thompson passed the test, coming up with his own, far more impressive quotation in response. “In here, Caroline, we speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

She had liked him for his words, even if she didn’t like what they meant. A refusal of her request. A refusal of relief. For the pain she now inhabited, the same pain she’d had for years and which had always been worst early mornings and which had, in fact, been the reason that she first started dipping into Ben’s meds, a little relief to start each day. Was that the truth, she wondered, or what she ought to say?

Valium had not been relief as much as a thick blanket for her mind, keeping her thoughts muffled and safe inside her head when the world around her, in her kitchen, in her home, in her car, at work was frenetic and out of control. Was that, then, such a bad choice? To sip it slowly, to slow everything down, to soften her life?

She tried to find a way to curl up, fetal position, and still stay under the covers, eyes closed tight and wishing she could numb her brain back to embryonic nothingness. Anesthetize her brain out of the here and now. She’d had a tooth extraction a few years ago and could still remember the heavenly calm that she felt as she went under, a calm that lasted through the messy business of oral surgery and even into her recovery, when she woke up and looked around the dentist’s office and remembered a wonderful nothing about the past hour.

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