Frank’s practice grew steadily, and in many respects their lives settled into a predictable pattern. Frank worked while she took care of the house and kids, and a third child, Bea, followed just as they sold their starter house and moved into the larger one they had built in a more established area of town. After that, things got even busier. Frank’s practice began to flourish while she shuttled Jared to and from school and brought Lynn to parks and playdates, with Bea strapped in a car seat between them. It was during those years that Amanda began to revisit her plans to attend graduate school; she even took the time to look into a couple of master’s programs, thinking she might enroll when Bea started kindergarten. But when Bea died, her ambitions faltered. Quietly, she set aside her GRE exam books and stowed her application forms in a desk drawer.
Her surprise pregnancy with Annette cemented her decision not to go back to school. Instead, if anything, it awakened a renewed commitment in her to focus on rebuilding their family life, and she threw herself into the kids’ activities and routines with a single-minded passion, if only to keep the grief at bay. As the years passed and memories of their baby sister began to fade, Jared and Lynn slowly regained a sense of normalcy, and Amanda was grateful for that. Bright-spirited Annette brought a new kind of joy into their home, and every now and then Amanda could almost pretend that they were a complete and loving family, untouched by tragedy.
She had a hard time pretending the same about her marriage.
She wasn’t, nor ever had been, under the illusion that marriage was a relationship characterized by endless bliss and romance. Throw any two people together, add the inevitable ups and downs, give the mixture a vigorous stir, and a few stormy arguments were inevitable, no matter how much the couple loved each other. Time, too, brought with it other challenges. Comfort and familiarity were wonderful, but they also dulled passion and excitement. Predictability and habit made surprises almost impossible. There were no new stories left to tell, they could often finish each other’s sentences, and both she and Frank had reached the point where a single glance was filled with enough meaning to make words largely superfluous. But losing Bea had changed them. For Amanda, it spurred a passionate commitment to her volunteer work at the hospital; Frank, on the other hand, changed from someone who drank occasionally into a full-blown alcoholic.
She knew the distinction, and she’d never been a prude about drinking. There’d been several occasions in college when she’d had one too many at a party, and she still enjoyed a glass of wine with dinner. Sometimes she might even follow that with a second glass, and that almost always sufficed. But for Frank, what started as a way to numb the pain had morphed into something he could no longer control.
Looking back, she sometimes thought she should have seen it coming. In college, he’d liked to watch basketball games while drinking with his friends; in dental school, he’d often wanted to unwind with two or three beers after his classes had finished for the day. But in those dark months when Bea was sick, two or three beers a night gradually became a six-pack; after she died, it became a twelve-pack. By the time they reached the second anniversary of Bea’s death, with Annette on the way, he was drinking to excess even when he had to work the following morning. Lately, it was four or five nights a week, and last night had been no different. He’d staggered into the bedroom after midnight, as drunk as she’d ever seen him, and had begun to snore so loudly that she’d had to sleep in the guest room. His drinking, not Tuck, had been the real reason for their argument this morning.
Over the years, she’d witnessed it all, from a simple slurring of his words at dinnertime or at a barbecue to drunk and passed out on the floor of their bedroom. Yet because he was widely regarded as an excellent dentist, rarely missed work, and always paid the bills, he didn’t think he had a problem. Because he didn’t become mean or violent, he thought he didn’t have a problem. Because it was usually only beer, it couldn’t possibly be a problem.
But it was a problem, because he’d gradually become the kind of man she couldn’t have imagined marrying. She couldn’t count the number of times that she’d cried about it. And talked to him about it, exhorting him to think of the kids. Begged him to attend couples counseling to find a solution, or raged about his selfishness. She’d given him the cold shoulder for days, forced him to sleep in the guest room for weeks, and had prayed fervently to God. Once a year or so, Frank would take her pleas to heart and stop for a while. Then, after a few weeks, he’d have a beer with dinner. Just one. And it wouldn’t be a problem that night. Or maybe even the next time he had one. But he’d opened the door and the demon would enter and the drinking would spiral out of control again. And then she’d find herself asking the same questions she’d asked in the past. Why, when the urge struck, couldn’t he simply walk away? And why did he refuse to accept that it was destroying their marriage?
She didn’t know. What she did know was that it was exhausting. Most of the time, she felt she was the only parent who could be trusted to take care of the kids. Jared and Lynn might be old enough to drive, but what would happen if one of them got into some kind of accident while Frank was drinking? Would he hop in the car, strap Annette into the backseat, and race to the hospital? Or what if someone got sick? It had happened before. Not to the kids, but to her. A few years ago, after eating some spoiled seafood, Amanda had spent hours throwing up in the bathroom. At the time, Jared had his learner’s permit and wasn’t allowed to drive at night, and Frank had been on one of his binges. When she was nearing dehydration, Jared ended up taking her to the hospital around midnight while Frank lolled in the backseat and pretended to be more sober than he really was. Despite her near delirium, she noticed Jared’s eyes flicking constantly to the rearview mirror, disappointment and anger warring in his expression. She sometimes thought that he shed a large part of his innocence that night, a child confronting his parent’s awful shortcomings.
It was a constant, exhausting source of anxiety, and she was tired of worrying what the kids were thinking or feeling when they saw their dad stumbling through the house. Or worrying because Jared and Lynn no longer seemed to respect their father. Or worrying that, in the future, Jared or Lynn or Annette might begin to emulate their father, escaping regularly into booze or pills or God knows what else, until they ruined their own lives.
Nor had she found much in the way of help. Even without Al-Anon, she understood that there was nothing she could do to make Frank change, that until he admitted he had a problem and focused on getting better, he would remain an alcoholic. And yet what did that mean for her? That she had to make a choice. That she had to decide whether or not she would continue to put up with it. That she had to form a list of consequences and stick to them. In theory, that was easy. In practice, though, all it did was make her angry. If he was the one with the problem, why was she the one who had to take responsibility? And if alcoholism was a disease, didn’t that mean he needed her help, or at least her loyalty? How, then, was she — his wife, who’d taken a vow to remain with him in sickness and in health — supposed to justify ending the marriage and breaking up their family, after everything they had been through? She’d either be a heartless mother and wife or a spineless enabler, when all she really wanted was the man she’d once believed him to be.