The memory made her sick. Alcoholism stripped her of her humanity. It was a common occurrence to flirt for drinks, but quite a few guys out there knew that scene. Often she’d do more than flirt. One night she tallied up a fifty-dollar tab in Fells Point, and she was broke. She wound up blowing a guy in the toilet stall to cover it. Another time, in Massachusetts, she’d been thrown out of some gin joint for coming on to customers. Trudging home, she passed out on the street. When she woke up she was in the back seat of a Delta 88 being gang-raped by three chuckling men. It went on for hours and she scarcely even knew it, she was so drunk. Later, they kicked her out of the car, half-naked, bleeding, with semen in her hair, and all she could think to say before they drove off was “Give me some money for a bottle and you can do it again.” The driver got out, kicked her in the head, and pissed on her…
Yeah, she thought now. The Bad Old Days. How much worse could they have been? She was barely holding down a barmaid job at The Rocks when she met Dan B. He’d just come up from Charleston after the four-star restaurant he was chefing at folded from financial problems, and now he was working at The Emerald Room. He didn’t have to date her long to realize she had a problem; he was carrying her out of bars right and left, but the thing that didn’t jibe was he kept coming back.
That had never happened before—it almost shocked her. “You’re a sucker to want to have anything to do with me,” she told him one night after tying on a giant one at Middleton’s Tavern. “I’m an alcoholic.”
“If that’s what you think,” he shouted in her face, “then that’s all you’ll ever be!”
She got fired from The Rocks for being drunk on duty. When she told Dan B., she expected him to dump her. Instead, he stuffed her in the car and took her to an AA meeting. Three times a week he took her. When she pitched a fit, he made her go anyway, often forcing her into the car. “I don’t want to go!” she’d yell. “I don’t give a shit what you want!” he’d yell back. “I’m not going to sit around and watch you kill yourself! Either you go on your own, or I drag you in and handcuff you to the fucking chair!”
Why did he put up with her? He even dropped a shift to take her to the meetings. Sometimes she’d actually hide, but he’d find her anyway. Once she’d skipped out to the City Dock, was about to walk into O’Brien’s for a gin and tonic, when Dan B.’s dusty station wagon pulled up at the corner. “It’s time for your AA, Donna,” he said through the window. “Get in the car.”
The meetings depressed her—that’s why she initially didn’t like to go. A room full of people just like her, all telling the same grim stories. But eventually it sank in. It reassured her to know that she was not the only person in the world who’d done desperate things for a drink. Alcoholism, she learned, was a genetically founded disease, not just a failure of willpower. Some people could drink with no problem, others could have just one and that was their ruin. Dan B. sat through the meetings with her, which must have been particularly grueling, for he barely drank at all. Two beers was it for him. Yet he insisted on being there with her every time. One night she’d asked him. “Why do you do all this for me?”
“Because I love you,” he said. “Why do you think?”
It was an alien word to her, and one that had never been spoken to her by any man. Love—real love—was not something that happened to drunks. Then one day it dawned on her that she’d not had a drink in almost a month…
Dan B. had given her back what a horrible circumstance had stolen from her: her life.
A month later they got married.
««—»»
Which left them to their dreams. But what were they? Donna had gotten more out of the deal than she’d ever imagined; she’d gotten the chance to live again. She could scarcely think beyond that. But what of Dan B.? He’d been saving for years, in hopes to one day own his own place. The money he could bank from The Inn could make his dream real, yet he’d been reluctant to move. “If we move, you won’t be able to go to your AA meetings anymore,” he’d revealed his only worry. Again, it was her, it was Donna that was his only concern. “You’re all the AA I need now,” she’d assured him. She’d been the one to insist they take the new positions that Vera had arranged, not that she was too keen on living in the sticks, but because it provided her the opportunity, finally, do give something back to Dan B., to do something for him. The extra money they both made would give Dan B. his own restaurant that much sooner.
He slept beside her now, snoring softly in the big, plush bed. Donna felt blissful, sedate; they’d made slow love earlier. His semen still trickled in her; it reminded her of a gift, or a verifier of sorts. One day, when their other dreams came true, she’d give him a baby…
Suddenly, she shuddered beneath the covers, like a jag of vertigo. She groaned. A bad memory swung before her mind, an unwelcome image from the Bad Old Days. It was an anonymous poem: The past is as present as the truth is a lie, all this time you think you’re living, then one day you wake up and die. What an awful poem, and an awful recollection. The poem had always stuck in her head for some reason, perhaps to remind her to never take things for granted. It was from years ago. Donna had been blowing some cowboy in the men’s room of a bar in San Angelo, Texas. He’d left her sitting there with a twenty-dollar bill in her hand. She’d spat his sperm into the toilet, and then she looked up and seen the poem amid phone numbers and expletives. It had been written on the stall door in magic marker.
Why should such a memory resurface now? Things were good now, and the Bad Old Days were in the past. The past is as present, she thought, as the truth is a lie… What did it mean?
Suddenly the bedroom’s warm and cozy dark felt full of unseen ghosts. A tear drooled out of her eye, and she turned to hug Dan B. Ghosts, she thought. The memory was one of her past’s many demons, coming back for a little haunt…
Donna could live with that, she’d have to. Forget it, she thought. Goddamn the poet, though, and that funk-crotch cowboy slime who’d known just the right way to take advantage of her. “Say, honey, you say you’re twenty short on your tab? Well, I can think of way to clear that up a might fast.” Fuck you. He was probably in the same bar right now, pulling that same ploy. Yeah, she considered now. I guess everybody’s got their ghosts…
Ghosts.
The thought transgressed. It reminded her of the book she’d picked up at the mall a few days before they left town. When The Inn had been a sanitarium, the doctors and staff had taken some grim liberties with the patients.
After the investigation in the late thirties, hundreds of charges had been filed by the state: rape and sexual abuse, torture, murder. It had gone on for years. Donna couldn’t imagine the sheer horror that had occurred within these same walls. Hence The Inn’s reputation for being haunted, a reputation so notorious that local residents had set fire to the building. Many claimed they’d seen ghosts.
Ghosts, she thought.
Vera dismissed the book’s revelations as fantasy, but Donna, of late, wasn’t so sure. She hadn’t been sleeping well recently. Often she’d wake at night convinced someone was in the room, or standing just outside the door. Into the wee hours, she could hear the doors of the room-service elevators opening and closing downstairs, but it was strange that she’d never hear the elevators themselves traveling up and down from the RS kitchen to the upper suites. There were other sounds too, more distant sounds, like footsteps, faraway muttering, and something that sounded like a shriek. And tonight, when The Carriage House had closed, she came upstairs to shower before bed and had been absolutely irked by the impression that someone was watching her.