Not after looking into the bathroom goddamn mirror again not five goddamn minutes ago.
Terry sipped the scotch and winced. He really loved scotch, but right now it tasted like boiled socks. On the way back to the hospital from the meeting he’d stopped in the liquor store and laid down forty-four bucks and change for the bottle and would normally had savored every sip. Now he just drank it and hoped that it would either flush out his brain or knock him blind and senseless. Either one would work. He had even held out the reasonable hope that the drug interaction between the scotch and the Xanax would do the trick, but it didn’t. He couldn’t even passively kill himself.
He had never felt so powerless in his life.
No. That wasn’t true.
Thirty years ago, almost to the day, he’d felt even more helpless, and that was a cold hard fact. That had been the day that Mandy had died and he had been nearly killed. He’d spent weeks in the hospital and even now, after cosmetic surgery and three decades, his chest and shoulder still looked like patchwork.
Thinking about that made drinking more urgent, so he swallowed the whole cup and refilled it. The bottle was down about a third and he could feel the paint peeling on the walls of his brain, but he was still way too sober and he was still alive.
He hefted the bottle and considered it, wondering how much of it he would have to drink before he succumbed to alcoholic poisoning, and then wondered if his system would rebel first and throw it up. Probably. His gut felt like an acid wash.
It was all falling apart. Everything. The cops and the feds pretended to defer to him as if he were a person of some actual importance, but he could see in their eyes that he was just a figurehead in a pissant little town where the worst and most typical crime was overtime parking, and the local idea of a crisis was rain on Sidewalk Sale Saturday. His best friend was in the hospital. The town’s most prosperous farmer was dead. The selectmen were in a panic. Every night he had those horrible dreams — dreams that were now intruding into his waking life.
And my little sister’s ghost wants me to kill myself.
He raised the refilled cup in a toast. “Here ya go, Mandy. Maybe this one will do it.” He closed his eyes, tossed back the shot, hissed as the gasses burned his throat, and then opened his eyes again. Nope. Still alive, damn it.
Terry closed his eyes for a moment, took in a deep steadying breath, held it for a moment, and then let it out as slowly as he could. Then he took his cell phone from his coat pocket and hit speed-dial. It rang four times before a woman answered. “Hello?”
“Hello, sweetheart,” Terry said in a softer tone than anything he’d managed for days.
“Terry?” His wife’s voice was instantly concerned. “Where are you? You haven’t called all day and I’ve left a dozen messages—”
“Sarah…things are really bad right now.”
She paused, then said, “Yes, I know. Rachel Weinstock called me and told me some of what was going on. She said Saul was pretty rattled about an autopsy he had to perform.”
“Pretty bad right now,” Terry said again. He could feel his eyes filling with tears.
“Are you okay, honey?”
God didn’t save you, either. God won’t save this town, Terry.
“I’m…”
And you know what he wants from you. You see that, too. You see that every time you look in the mirror.
“Terry?”
Terry, the only way to not be like him is to be like me.
“I’m just tired, Sarah.”
“Can you get away? Can you come home?”
Tears were running freely down his face now. He took the full bottle of Xanax from his pocket, popped the lid off with his thumb, and poured the pills out onto the table next to his chair. Twenty-two pills. More than enough.
“Terry,” she repeated, “can you get away?”
“I don’t know,” he answered softly. “Maybe. Maybe there’s a way I can get free.”
“Please come home, Terry,” Sarah begged. “You can’t run yourself into the ground like this.”
“No,” he said.
“Will you try?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll wait up.”
Terry squeezed his eyes shut against a wave of grief and pain. The image of Sarah’s face burned in his mind — dark eyes flashing, thick fall of straight black hair just touched by a few strands of gray, a laughing mouth — and he fought not to sob out loud.
Terry, the only way to not be like him is to be like me.
“Call you later, sweetheart,” he said, when he could master himself enough to keep everything out of his voice.
“I love you, Terry.”
“I love you, Sarah. With all my heart.”
He disconnected and dropped the phone on the floor. With a growl of mingled anger and fear and heartbreak he swept all the pills into his hand and held the closed fist above his upturned mouth.
His upraised fist trembled with a palsy born of a dreadful inner conflict and slowly, as if moving against an almost irresistible force, he lowered his hand down to the level of his lips…and then down farther, past chin and chest until the clenched fist lay in his lap. Tears ran down his cheeks and his lips trembled with sobs.
“No!” he said in a hoarse and alien voice that was filled with a rage of passion.
Sarah had said, Please come home, Terry.
He sat there for many minutes, still holding the Xanax, feeling them grind and crunch in his fist. Beside him the bottle wafted its own perfume of escape.
Please come home.
He struggled to his feet and shoved the fistful of Xanax deep into his jacket pocket. He almost — almost — went to the bathroom to flush their temptation away, but did not. Ultimately could not. In order not to embrace the option he needed to know it was still there. The same with the bottle. He capped it and put it in his briefcase. He did go to the bathroom, though, and there he ran cold water and splashed it on his face by the handful for over a minute, then patted his face dry. It was still clear that he’d been crying, but there was nothing more he could do to repair that.
Turning, he went back into the lounge and stopped still. There, by the chair in which he’d been sitting, stood Mandy. His face was still streaked with blood, but tears now ran down and cut paths through the caked red. She looked at him with a mixture of horror and reproach.
Terry stood there in the bathroom doorway, gripping the sides of the frame with both hands, his nails digging into the wood. What could he say? How could he defend against the accusation in her eyes?
“I can’t do it!” he hissed. “I can’t! I have Sarah! I have my friends…my town! You can’t ask this of me.”
Mandy lifted her eyes to his and the look in them changed from one of horror to a look of total hopeless defeat. She shook her head from side to side, closing her eyes and finally hanging her head.
“It will all be worse now,” she said, but her voice was a ghostly whisper that he could barely hear. Between one teary blink of his eyes and the next she was gone.
Terry stood there, unable to move, for a long time as his heart hammered in his chest and icy sweat pooled at the base of his spine. When he could finally make himself let go and walk out of the room and through the hospital hallways he moved with the unnatural stiffness of the condemned walking the ghost road to the chair.