Night comes. Or maybe it was already night. Time stops meaning anything. There's just the cycle.
Sweat. Shake. Vomit. Repeat.
And Aoife. Always Aoife. In that chair with her cold cloths and her water and her voice that never wavers.
"You should sleep," I tell her.
"I will when you do."
"I can't."
"Then neither can I."
Day two breaks me.
The hallucinations start around dawn. Subtle at first. Shadows moving in my peripheral vision. Footsteps in the hallway when I know we're alone. A voice that sounds like Father's coming from the other room, low and disappointed.
Then they stop being subtle.
Father is standing in the corner of the bedroom.
Not a shadow. Not a suggestion. He's there. Full and solid and real, wearing the suit he was buried in. His face is the wrong color. Purple, swollen. His eyes bulge the way they did when I found him hanging from that beam.
The rope is still around his neck.
"You're not real," I say.
He doesn't answer. Just watches me with those dead, bulging eyes.
"You're not fucking real."
"William?" Aoife's voice. Close. "Who are you talking to?"
"He's in the corner." My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. Someone small. Young. Scared. "He's standing right there."
"There's no one there."
"He's there. He's looking at me. He's..." My voice breaks. "He looks like he did when I found him. The rope. His face. He..."
"William." Her hands are on my face again. Cool. Real. "Look at me. There's no one in this room except you and me."
But I can see him. Over her shoulder, past her worried eyes, Father stands in the corner with the rope around his neck and watches me fall apart.
"I found him," I whisper. "I was the one who found him and I pushed the door open and I knew. I knew before I even saw him."
"I know." Her thumb moves across my cheekbone. "I read it. I know."
"His shoes. I saw his shoes first. Black Italian leather hanging two feet off the ground, and my brain couldn't...it wouldn't connect them to legs and a body and a rope because it didn't make any sense. He was my father. He was supposed to be invincible. He was supposed to..."
The sob comes from somewhere so deep it tears things loose on its way out.
Not a sound I'd ever make voluntarily. Not a sound I knew I was capable of. It rips through my chest and out of my throat and keeps going. Wave after wave of everything I've been drowning in for months.
Murphy men don't cry. That was the first lesson Father taught us. Before we could read. Before we could fight. He taught us that tears were weakness and weakness was death.
But I can't stop.
Everything I've been burying under cocaine and whiskey just rises up and takes me under. Father. The way he looked hanging from that beam. The way he looked before that. Alive and angry and terrifying and mine. Alex, who killed him and called it love. Jason, exiled to some country I'll probably never visit. Aidan, who never cracks, who never gets to crack, because someone has to hold the rest of us together. Matty, sitting on that couch with his pack of mints and his dead eyes. Unreachable.
