The day it happens, the day her heart shudders and stops, first movement it'd experienced in years, that day is the rainiest she remembers seeing in at least two decades.
It comes down hard and fast and sounds like bullets on the stained-glass windows in the foyer, and the nice professional woman from Oceanic ventures an apologetic farewell. Margo can't seem to move her mouth; too late, she clips out a cool goodbye, but the dial tone is already buzzing in her ear.
She lays the phone down gently on the receiver, as if sudden movements will bring it all rushing back, and turns slowly, instinctively, towards the door leading to the study, to the liquor cabinet.
No one's going to miss whatever she takes, not now.
The vodka, cool and mingling with the familiar bitterness of her lipstick as it slides harshly down her throat, it cuts sharply through her and helps her remember the last time it'd really poured like this: the day her son graduated from high school, valedictorian (how could he be anything less?). She remembers him giving his speech in the outdoor stadium in the sudden chill that came with the unexpected moisture, raindrops rolling down his face like tears, she thought in a fit of poetic insight (she'd majored in English in college, before she'd met her husband and given up her education for a chance to live the dream--ha!), and she remembers clinging to her hat in an effort to keep her own face from growing soggy. She remembers Christian showing up twenty minutes late, slightly sloshed in more ways than one.
She swallows, again. The liquid rushes warmly to her stomach, but it doesn't settle.
She remembers a million have-nots and apathies, and she wishes she didn't, remember, that is, because she doesn't recall just the things that she did; she sees the things she could have, should have done--the I'm so proud of you, sweetie that she could have whispered in his ear as she leaned in for a hug, instead of the fragile smile and accompanying handshake (his hand was so big and felt so foreign around hers) she'd settled for; the thousand words of encouragement, all the things mothers are supposed to say, all lying dead (but not buried, just drowned) in her silences; all the advice she could've given him before he got to be too old.
Don't be stubborn. Don't settle for second-best. Don't kill yourself trying.
Don't be like me.
That one makes her laugh, unexpectedly, around the bottle, and her voice echoes, lonely and too high, through the empty house. She sits down on the huge leather chair, thronelike and imposing in the corner (she's lived here for thirty years and she's never once sat in it, can you believe that?) and crosses her legs, almost daintily (old habits, she's a lady, after all), and her ring clinks noisily against the glass.
She twists it around and around, the heavy diamond twinkling at her mischievously, the inset brackets puckering her skin.
She can't bring herself to take it off.