A/N this is supposed to be season 1, when Garret asks Maggie when things were over for her. It's Maggies thoughts that bring in a current plotline. And when they bring Whiny and Clingy back this season, if Maggie mentions anything to this effect, I am going to start wearing a tin foil hat. I swear it. Because I've come up with so many ideas that have appeared on the show, yet they were written before or at the same time I wrote them (the one that really made me freak was the chick in the most recent episode who drove her car off a cliff and then went to shoot herself and MISSED. I was like "Long slow burn...but this ep was written before long slow burn...')
"When was it over for you?" The words hang in the air and I wonder how to answer them truthfully without hurting him, without provoking him, he looks like hell, but he looks better than he did right after things went bad, he looks better now that Jordan's been around. But he still looks bad.
"I just-" I pause for a second, forming my thoughts. "-Woke up one morning and you'd changed. You didn't look the same, you didn't sound the same, you didn't even smell the same." It was the truth. He looked sunken and hollow, broken. He sounded like he had given up and he always smelled faintly of scotch.
I frown at the memory. The smell isn't there any more. I'm slightly surprised; he's cut back on his drinking for once. I'll never tell him that's why I thought things were over; I'll never let him know what really ended things for us. But it was that. It was the way that his preferred method of coping was to hit the bottle. I'm just afraid that if I tell him it'll force him further into his nice little bottle of Royal Lochnagar never to be seen again.
Right at the end, right before things finally hit their breaking point; he'd come home, sit down and drink. And drink. And drink. He wouldn't get drunk though. He'd at least wait until Abby went to bed to start on that. He always made sure that Abby didn't see that, to be honest, I think it was only to give her one less thing to use against him.
I don't blame him really, for resorting to that to cope. I really can't blame him for it. I know I didn't help things at all; I just started to drift away from him. I never really was that close to him, I loved him, but it just became harder and harder to show that love for him. Until I couldn't anymore.
But it wasn't just me; he never got on well with Abby. He kept trying to, he kept trying to be wonder dad, but they just didn't get along. He didn't have the patience for her; he couldn't handle the way that she constantly got her nose everywhere it didn't belong. So he tried to step back to stop himself from getting really mad at her which just made things worse because she accused him of being distant. There was no way him to win with that one.
And I was partly to blame for how much he hated his job. He wanted to go and work in the ER, he wanted to have this fast paced, hectic job to take his mind off of his life, and I told him to get something with better hours. So he started working in the morgue of all places. And when the deputy chief position came up, I pushed him into that, telling him it would be good. I wanted it just because I could see myself in the diamonds and pearls a six-figure salary would bring.
But that didn't mean that he had to do all that he did. There were other things to be done. He didn't have to come home and crawl into a bottle, but he did. He came home and poured himself a glass. That one was always downed quickly in a matter of two or three gulps. The next one was four or five. The third one was the one that was nursed slowly. Then came dinner. He'd finish the third and pour himself a fresh one for the meal, taking his time with it. That one would last him until Abby went to bed and then he'd have at least another three before we went to bed.
But the funny thing was he never really got drunk. Not until the very end. Not until I wanted to just give up on him, give up on seeing him go through three bottles a week. And his denying he had a problem. I should have been there for him, try and force him to do something, but I didn't. I just got fed up with it, whenever I asked him about it, he'd tell me he'd stop.
And he would from time to time. He'd stop. And then a few weeks later it'd be just one. And then just one would turn into just two. And just two would turn right back into what it had been. And he had given up stopping, I saw it, every time he stopped he'd get the shakes, his hands would start that slight little tremble which would slowly get worse and worse until he took a nice long swig to make them go away.
And I did nothing; I just stood there and let it happen. I stood their and watched my husband just drift away. I have to wonder what stopped him, finally. I stopped all contact with him until he called me over Abby, I just couldn't handle it. I just drifted away from him. I heard that he went through a lot, that he nearly reached his breaking point, that he was being forced to see the office shrink, that might have had a lot to do with it.
And Jordan was back. His drinking didn't get really bad until after she left. They had something. If I didn't know him better, I would have sworn he had something on the side with her. However, I knew him too well. They just were best friends, that was part of what made me grow distant. That he just seemed to get along with her better than with me. I never doubted his love for me; he always tried to make things work. But he just clicked with Jordan.
She was his partner in crime, he was a lot lighter when she was around, he laughed more, he was in a better mood. There was just something about Jordan that could bring out that side of someone. And then she left, and he was left alone again, without her. And his nightly drinking got worse and worse until he had just sunken away.
And then right at the end came the fights. The first one had actually been over his drinking. I asked him to stop, to get help, to do something, and he turned on me, claiming that he was fine, that he didn't have a problem. And it just exploded into a full out knock down drag out brawl.
That one progressed to another, and another, and another. Until we were all but screaming at each other in public. And Abby would just sit in her room; I knew that she knew that we were falling apart. But after that first one I left the drinking out of it, I didn't want Abby to know about it, and I know he didn't either. It was his little secret; he functioned fine, despite all the booze.
He was a functioning alcoholic. He got along just fine despite all that he drank. Despite the way that every night when he'd come up he'd have that sunken hollow look and smell like booze. He still held his job, still did damn good at his job. He still had his buddies, he still went out with them, still went out with me.
It was his little secret and I wasn't going to say anything about it. I never hated him; I never wanted to hate him. I still love him, I just couldn't handle it anymore, couldn't handle watching him drink his life away. Couldn't handle the man that he had become, so different from the one that he had been.
I stated irreconcilable differences on the papers. The catch all for things that you don't want to say. He'll never know that it was because slowly but surely I saw his bottle of scotch take more of priority in his life than me. He'll never know that I just got sick of his drinking. That I knew it was over that first night when I woke up and realized what he was.
But I know it. I just didn't want to hurt him, push him further away. I knew the reason why. I knew it and I did nothing to stop it, I just gave in. But I'm not going to tell him why, he doesn't need to know why, especially not if he's stopped. He doesn't need to know that I gave him up because he had changed. There's still a glimmer of what he was there, it's come back, but I don't want to do this again, not seriously, I can't. I'm afraid of that other side of him coming back out and having to loose him again. I don't want to put myself through that kind of pain again.