aid of Jack on the rocks, or in desperate times, Jack straight out of the bottle.
But when I walked up the stairs to Michael’s room—what just last night was our room—and saw him embracing Mallory through the open door, saw her wearing his sweater . . .
I won’t be right until I get out of here.
My voice quavers despite my best efforts. “I found something.”
Mallory steps away from Michael, adjusts his sweater, plays with the sleeves. Michael says, “What is it?”
“There are e-mails. Several of them, from a girl named Tiffany Harper. I’ve never heard of her.”
“Me, neither. What did they say?”
“I didn’t read them. But I brought them up on-screen so that you could.”
Mallory brushes past me and is halfway down the stairs before she calls out, “Where is the computer?”
“To the right once you get to the bottom of the basement steps,” I tell her.
Michael starts to walk past, too, but he stops just before me. I study the divots in the old, scarred floorboards.
“Thank you,” he says. “Casey, look at me.”
I turn farther away and notice an open beer sweating on the nightstand and wonder what it’s doing there.
Michael continues. “I’m under stress here. I didn’t mean to shout.”
Swallowing hard, I say, “Go read the e-mails. See what you can find out.”
I feel him standing in front of me for another long moment. Just go! I want to scream. I also want to step into his arms and let him hold me, too, but it’s time to find Dylan.
And anyway, my time has clearly passed.
He finally turns to go, and it’s like something’s been snapped away. I hear his feet hurrying down the stairs.
I walk over to the bed and sit down on the edge. The bottle sweats invitingly just like in a commercial full of mountains and rushing rivers and people having fun. People relaxed and unwinding.
I brush my fingers over the cold glass. It comes back in a rush, how the happy hours always started with beer, that good-time end-of-day drink, a round purchased by someone and then by someone else, until we were all throwing money into a pile at the center and bottles kept coming.
It feels as natural in my hand as a pencil, a toothbrush.
I nearly run down the stairs, stepping lightly as I can in the rickety old house, until I reach the kitchen, where I turn the beer upside down and watch it glug out in explosions of amber foam.
The smell of it nearly does me in and I almost tip the bottle right up again to save some, but the last drips come out and I sigh, shaking it briefly before setting it on the counter where we always put empty pop cans and such.
The girls are still watching TV, numbing themselves to the absence of their brother with insipid shows, but at least this vice won’t kill brain cells. Not literally. Anyway, they’re smart enough, and today is a rough day.
I shrug into my parka and step onto the front porch for a smoke. I sit down in the porch swing and prop my feet up on the railing. The cigarette flickers to life, and I sigh deeply after the first lightly dizzying puff. This causes me to cough.
The homes are close to each other here, with big picture windows in front rooms. The street is narrow, too, so it’s not hard to look across the road into the duplex across the way, with a Middle Eastern family living downstairs and two college guys upstairs. There’s a miniature porch off an upstairs dormer window, where the guys like to sit on balmy nights, drinking beer and smoking. Sometimes one of them plays his acoustic guitar, and we share a wave across the road as renegade smokers, an endangered breed.
Tonight it’s cold and the porch is quiet. Through the downstairs window I can see the flashing of a television program in the darkness of the room. Maybe the kids watching a movie, or maybe they’re in bed already. Just toddlers, they are. I’ve seen them walking as a family with the little ones in a double stroller.
Quitting smoking was next on my list. I wasn’t about to smell like an ashtray in my wedding finery, and besides, soon after that there would be a baby, and I wouldn’t smoke pregnant. Also, in my daily battle to stay away from the liquor store, I’d have a tiny, unwitting ally growing inside. I wouldn’t need to hold on to any vices