I don’t know what she means, but I accept my fate. I feel like I deserve to be arrested, but that might just be my hungover confusion catastrophising the situation.
‘Would you like me to call your sister or Rachael?’ she asks.
A precision bolt of fear hits. ‘Neither!’
I can’t bear to have my closest people see how far I’ve plummeted. I’ve mastered the art of hiding it. If I see people in the evenings, I pre-drink. I carry vodka in my handbag and gulp it in toilet cubicles. I never agree to wine by the bottle to share. Can’t bear the excruciating wait while they get through a glass in a sedate and classy manner. When they talk, I hear nothing but the blinding noise of alcohol as I monitor how much is left, resenting their slowness, veins screaming for it.
But I’m careful. If I drink too quickly or have too much, I know they’ll step in and stop me. After every night out, I await the dreadedWe need to talk. Dreaded not because I’ll have togive up drinking. But because alcohol will choose itself over my friends.
And if I suspect they’re concerned, I throw in the wild card of a ‘sober’ evening, guzzling mineral water or lemonade while holding off drinking until I’m back home, alone. Then I make up for it. Late into the night, I drink enough for all of us. Those nights are the worst.
‘It’s the only way I can sleep without him,’ I confess to Maggie. I picture her, in her immaculate home, efficiently working through her problems, sleeping like a baby. Or like a proper adult, more to the point. One who hasn’t lost her way so badly, so humiliatingly, that she’s had to be parented by a ten-year-old.
‘We’re going to go to the doctor,’ she informs me. ‘There’s medication that can help. There are programs.’
‘Please don’t tell anyone,’ I say, begging her. ‘I’ve lost everything else that matters, now presumably including access to your daughter, and I understand why. I do. I can’t lose my dignity.’
Is there anything less dignified than begging to hold on to your already obliterated dignity? That ship has not only sailed, but circumnavigated the globe. This is me, pleading with my almost husband’s ex-wife—the woman witheverythingtogether, always—to keep my darkest secret.
‘I will help you, Audrey, and I will keep your secret. But you can’t have unsupervised time with Parker anymore. I’m sorry.’
Before I can process this missile—a direct strike to the heart—Parker comes back into the room, uniform on, backpack over her shoulder, tears streaming down her face as she runs over to me, launching into a hug as if she’s trying to apologise for exposing me. Or perhaps she knows this is goodbye.
‘I’ve ruined everything,’ she says, voice shaking. ‘I’m so sorry! This is all my fault.’
Nowmy heart splinters.
‘How could this possibly be your fault?’ I ask. ‘You did the right thing, calling Mum when you were worried.’
Then she looks at both of us, a replica of her mother—dark hair in a neat ponytail tied with a gold ribbon, backpack falling to the floor beside her feet, chest heaving, despair written all over her innocent face as she says, ‘No! It’s my fault you’re like this. Because it’s my fault Daddy is dead!’
I have never sobered up so fast. Maggie and I scoop Parker up as if she’s a baby bird fallen from the nest.
‘Darling, it wasn’t your fault that Daddy died. How could it be?’ Maggie says, the worry furrowed deep into her face.
‘I went to sick bay. They tried to call Audrey a couple of times, then you.’ Her voice breaks. ‘Then Daddy.’
I have been over this scene in my brain a thousand times, but I don’t think I ever quite imagined this little girl inside that school while the accident unfolded, teachers trying to shield her from the frantic efforts to save him outside … Ugh, I can’t bear it.
‘You weren’t feeling well,’ I tell her. ‘You can’t help that.’
Her little face falls in an emotion I’d recognise a mile off. Guilt.
‘Hailey Pearce said I was going to marry the piano,’ she confesses, hands wringing, more sleeve pulling. ‘They think I’m weird because I love classical music. And then someone saw you at my scholarship concert and said I have two mums, and I told them,So what if I do?And they teased me about that.’
The room is spinning. I am inwardly imploring Maggie to take the lead here, because I can barely keep myself upright.
‘Was that before or after you went onstage that night?’ Maggie asks, glancing at me.
‘Before,’ Parker confirms. ‘I tried so hard with my pieces.’
She did. So hard that striving to get it right flatlined the emotion, just as I’d said.
Silent apology is written across Maggie’s face. She’s sorry for doubting me back then. Somethinghadbeen missing from Parker’s music, and Maggie hadn’t wanted to face it. Even though we’d got her help since, she’d been suffering through all of this alone, until it got to be too much and she faked an illness and asked to be picked up from school early …
Such a normal, innocent, deadly chain of events that we have followed through to this new low, today. Me letting them both down. Maggie furious. Parker distraught. At ten thirty on a weekday morning.
I glance at the clock again. An hour and a half until noon. We have a broken child. A fractured family. Enormous problems. Yet my addicted brain prioritises just one thought as it blazes through this mess to the surface.
