drooled down the dirty windows, making it hard to see without a light, but she didn’t turn one on. The past weeks had passed in a blur. She remembered Violet barging into the apartment in Boston, finding her curled up in bed, shaking her, scolding her, packing her up. She remembered driving to Vermont in a blizzard. She remembered refusing to live in the warm, sturdy farmhouse where they’d grown up, fighting with Violet over whether the old cottage on the place was even livable.
It wasn’t. But then Camille wasn’t livable either, so the place had worked for her fine.
She stumbled around now, stalking around suitcases and boxes. She hadn’t unpacked anything from Boston. No reason to. She didn’t want anything. But eventually she located the flat briefcase on the scarred oak bureau. She clicked the locks, pulled it open. Once upon a time, the briefcase had been filled with colorful files and advertising projects and marketing studies. Now it held a complete array of airline-sized liquor bottles.
Quite a few were missing, although not as many as she’d planned. She hadn’t given up her goal of becoming an alcoholic, but the ambition was a lot tougher to realize than she ever expected. Frowning, she filched and fingered through the collection. Crème de cocoa was out of the question—she was never trying that ghastly stuff again. Ditto for the vodka. And the scotch. And the gin.
Squinting, she discovered a bitsy bottle of Kahlúa. She wrestled with the lid, finally successfully unscrewed it, guzzled in a gulp, swallowed, and then opened her mouth to let out the fumes.
Holy moly. Her eyes teared and her throat surely scarred over from the burn.
As hard as she was trying to destroy her life with liquor, it just wasn’t working well. She set down the mini-bottle—she was going to finish it!—she only needed to take a few minutes to renew her determination.
She sank down in the creaky rocker again, closing her eyes. Maybe the drinking wasn’t going so well, but other things were.
Several weeks ago, she’d mistakenly believed that she wanted to die. Since then, she’d realized that one part of her was alive—totally alive, consumingly alive.
The rage.
All around her was the evidence. Violet had tried to give her a phone, but she’d trashed it. The cottage behind the barns had been built for a great grandmother who’d wanted to live independently, so there was no totally destroying the charm. There was just a front room, bedroom and kitchen, but the casement windows bowed, and the bedroom had a slanted ceiling, and the living room had a huge limestone fireplace with a sit-down hearth. She hadn’t fixed any of it. Hadn’t looked at any of it either. She’d been sleeping on a hard mattress with a bald pillow and no bedding. Cobwebs filled the corners; the floors hadn’t been swept, and the cupboards were empty.
She couldn’t remember the last time she brushed her hair or changed clothes.
Eventually this had to stop. She realized that in an intellectual way, but emotionally, there only seemed one thing inside of her. All she wanted was to sit all day and seep with the rage, steep with it, sleep with it. Fester it. Ache with it. My God. It had been bad enough to lose Robert. Bad enough to wake up in a hospital bed with a face so battered she couldn’t recognize herself, bruises and breaks that made her cry to touch, lips too swollen to talk…and that was before she’d been told Robert was dead.
Initially, the grief had ripped through her like a cyclone that wouldn’t quit. It just wrenched and tore and never let up. But then came the trial. She’d been so positive that the trial would at least bring her the relief and satisfaction of justice. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the dark street, heard her laughing with Robert, complaining about walking in high heels from the party on the balmy fall night, and then there they were. The bastards, the drug-high bastards. There was no reason for them to start punching her, playing her, scaring her. They’d have given them all their money in a blink. But it wasn’t money they wanted. Robert—he’d tried to protect her, tried to get in front of her. That’s why they were meaner to him. Why he ended up dead.
All three of them had looked clean-cut and young in court—because they were. They had cried their eyes out, which had impressed the judge, too. They’d come from good families, had no records, weren’t even drug users—they just made one mistake, thought they’d experiment one time, and foolishly bought some mixed cocktail that caused psychotic behavior. It was a tragic accident, their attorney claimed. The boys weren’t hardened criminals, nothing like that. And the judge had given them the most lenient sentences possible.
That’s when the rage was born. Camille remembered the day in court, feeling the slow, huge, hot well of disbelief. A few years in jail and they’d be out. Easy for them. They hadn’t lost their soul mate. They hadn’t lost anything but a few years, where she’d lost everything. Her life had been completely, irreversibly, hopelessly destroyed.
She stared blankly at the cracks in the stucco ceiling, hearing the drizzle of rain. Inside of her there was nothing but a hollow howl. It wasn’t getting any better. She couldn’t seem to think past the red-sick haze of rage. She’d tried curling up for days. She’d tried not eating. She’d tried hurling things and breaking things. She’d tried silence. She’d tried—and was still trying—drinking.
No matter what she tried, though, she couldn’t seem to make it pass. She couldn’t go under, around, through it. The rage was just there.
At some point, she got up and finished the shot of Kahlúa.
And at some point after that, she jerked out of the rocker and chased fast for the bathroom. The Kahlúa was as worthless as all the other darn liquors. It refused to stay down.
By the time she finished hurling, she was extra mean. She stood in the bathroom doorway, sweat beading on her brow, weakness aching in every muscle in her damn body. She wasn’t sure she was strong enough to lift a dust ball. Her throat felt as it had been knifed open and her stomach as if she’d swallowed hot steel wool.
With her luck, she was going to end up the first wanna-be alcoholic in history with an allergy to alcohol. Either that, or Kahlúa had joined the long list of liquors her body seemed to reject.
Thinking that possibly she could nap—and maybe even sleep this time—she turned toward the bedroom…just as she heard another knock on the door.
“Aw, come on, Violet. I’ll come up to the house for dinner. But right now, just leave me alone.”
“It’s not Violet. It’s me. Your neighbor. Pete MacDougal.”
A charge volted through her pulse as if she’d touched a volatile electric cord. Pete didn’t have to identify himself for her to recognize his voice. There was a time that voice would have comforted her. Pete’s clipped tenor was part of her childhood, as familiar as the rail fence and the tree house in the big maple and the toboggan hill between the MacDougals and Campbells.
She’d never played with Pete because he was older, Violet’s age. But she’d toddled after him for years with puppy eyes. When he was around, he’d lift her over the fence so she wouldn’t have to walk around, and he’d pulled her sled back up the hill, and he’d let her invade the sacred tree house when all the other kids said she was still a baby.
Pete was not just her childhood hero; he’d been an extra zesty spice to her blood because the four year age difference made him forbidden. Further, he was ultracool, with his biker shoulders and thick dark hair and smoky eyes. He was the oldest of three brothers, where she was the youngest of three sisters, which she’d always felt gave them a key connection. What that connection was, she’d
