He attempts to pull me away, but I don’t want to go away.
I need to go inside.
I tear out of his grip and start running.
I’m fast. Faster than anyone. Faster than the adults who are giving chase after me.
I run and turn on a dime to peel around the corner to the alley at the back of the house.
I leap up onto the kitchen window, swinging my legs over.
I knock the cactus off the sill and the pot shatters on the ground below.
I stare at it for a moment, thinking about how mad my mother will be.
But when I step into the kitchen, that thought isn’t in my head anymore.
There are hushed voices in the house.
My mother’s hysterical sobbing.
I creep forward on the linoleum floors, some substance sticking to my feet, maybe liquor, and see her sitting on the couch in the living room. There’s a blanket around her and she’s crying into her hands. People are all around her.
Consoling her.
For what?
Movement catches my eye, and I see someone go into my parents’ bedroom down the hall, just as an officer standing beside my mother looks at me.
“Hey,” he cries out. “You can’t be here.”
But I am here.
And I’m fast.
I run down the hall and into my parents’ room.
I come to a stop.
As everything inside me stops.
My father is hanging from the ceiling fan in the middle of the room.
A belt around his neck.
His face frozen in blue and purple pain.
A stack of books spilled over at his feet.
His shoes dangling.
A sliver of his socks showing.
Ratty, thin socks.
I know those socks.
I stare up at my father and the nightmare becomes real.
I scream.
I scream and I scream.
Chapter 1
Thalia
Manchester, England
I spent my fortieth birthday signing divorce papers.
In all of my forty years on earth, it’s probably the worst birthday I’ve ever had, and that says a lot, considering on my seventh birthday I fell off a pony (during a riding lesson that I had begged my parents for all year), split my lip, and broke my nose. There was also my thirteenth birthday party that my then best friend Susan Hawthorne threw for me, in which I wore white jeans and happened to get my period and bleed all over her parents’ white couch in front of all my friends and my then crush, Timothy.
It was even worse than my twenty-fourth birthday which I spent all alone in a hotel room in Des Moines, and my thirtieth birthday where I not only had food poisoning and spent it on the bathroom floor, but no one in my family even bothered to call me.
So, yeah, this birthday took the cake.
As if turning the big 4-0 couldn’t get any worse, I was brutally reminded that my marriage to someone I had thought was the love of my life collapsed in a very big and very messy way. If it wasn’t obvious before, it was obvious now that Stewart had never truly been the love of my life since he had the gall to send me the papers on my damn birthday.
Dick.
Thankfully, I signed them without shedding a single tear and got them out of the way before my friends and I all went out for dinner, which is a godsend because it meant I was able to knock back a few cocktails to lessen the pain.
I’m currently finishing my third dirty martini and I have to say I’m feeling pretty good, though I know that if I drink any more I’m going to start simultaneously throwing up in the bathroom and crying angrily over what a shitbag Stewart is. It’s been six months since he told me he wanted a divorce, and while the crying fits have subsided, they still crop up from time to time, usually at the worst moments, usually brought on by alcohol.
My best friend Helen can tell because when the waiter comes over to our boisterous table and asks if we want anything more to drink, Helen gives me a discerning look, which means I’ve had enough.
I take note.
“Just some Pellegrino, please,” I tell the waiter reluctantly.
“Oh, you’re no fun!” Kazzy exclaims from across the table, looking horrifically offended. “It’s your birthday, Thalia. Your fortieth!”
“You don’t need to remind me.”
“And you were served divorce papers today,” Liz points out. She gives the waiter a big smile. “On the plus side, that means she’s single.”
While the waiter is handsome in a James Franco kind of way and has been teetering the line between charming and sleazy (in