CHAPTER 4: LACRIMOSA
Thus it came to pass that after the funeral service and unbeknownst to anyone, Aysha Napolipolita-Daitokuji holed herself up in her bedroom with six bottles of Stolichnaya and three of an American liqueur called Southern Comfort.
"Let's see how well it lives up to its name," the defeated woman said to herself, avoiding her own reflection in her full-length bedroom mirror as she poured herself a knock.
The drink Aysha took had been her first in decades. Her stomach ungraciously sent it back up again.
Resolute, and now remembering a few of her own old tricks, she swallowed a mouthful of mineral oil, counted to ten, and tossed down the second.
Its heat bloomed in her belly like a black rose.
So it is true what they say in the Fellowship, she thought to herself, once you pick up again you may never be able to put it back down.
By the time Kir and his older sisters forced the lock and lifted their mother from the polished parquet floor, she had fallen off the wagon with a vengeance.
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The mid-afternoon sun fell upon a beige throw rug that lay on the living room floor in the Satoru home. It was nearly covered with colorful toys, appropriate for children under the age of five.
"How is your mother?" Commander Hagio Triado Atola (Ret.) said to his daughter.
Alana, diapering her third child, sighed. "She's destroyed."
"Shall I go see her?"
"Suit yourself," Alana replied. She handed little Diktynna Napolipolita-Satoru to her grandfather. "You'll be here for her Bikreet, right?"
"Certainly. There isn't a lot for a retired commander to do these days."
"See Ma if you want. You won't like it."
"Isn't her friend Dee there to help her?"
"Well, you know Dee," Alana answered, shaking her head. "Her heart is too soft to allow her to say the things Ma really needs to hear." The young woman ran her hands through her knee-length hair. "Not that it would do any good. She listens to no one these days. She's in tough shape, you know."
"Drinking?"
"Yes. We've admitted her to three treatment centers since Daddy died. The booze has really done a number on her. They say that the disease progresses inside you, even if you stop taking alcohol into your body." Her lip quivered.
"Talk to me, my child."
"I'm – sorry, Father. But I'm tired of talking about it. I've screamed, I've pleaded, I've begged, and I've prayed. Nothing I do does any good. Nothing does any good, for that matter. One treatment center threw her out. She started drinking the same day she was discharged from the other two."
Atola could only shake his head ruefully.
"Turns out that Daddy was the only thing keeping her from the bottle all those years."
"I see," her father said quietly.
"Now that he's gone, she wants to follow him, and there's nothing I can do to stop her. Do you have any idea how terrible that is?"
"I'm so sorry." Atola enveloped her with his muscular arms in a hug. Although he'd never come to terms with a sober Napolipolita, he had been grateful for it, at least for his daughter's sake.
"And Father - do you know what frightens me more?"
The Thessalonikan shook his shaggy head, his heart sore.
"That I'm running out of tears."
Both stood silent for a few moments.
"Well, my child. All we can do is stay positive and hope that something – or someone – intervenes."
Both stood quiet, lost in their thoughts. Atola shook his shaggy head.
"And as for me – well, I expect that if I paid her a visit right now, she'd probably knock my block off."
Alana gave him a bitter smile. "She hasn't got the strength," she replied.
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Aysheia no longer had any constraints upon her behavior.
Her husband was dead (he, who had always been so proud of her sobriety!), her children were grown, and she had shamelessly manipulated her best friend into becoming her supplier. She refused to see or speak to anyone else. In the ensuing months, the desperately unhappy Cygnan relearned every trick she'd ever forgotten about getting her hands on enough alcohol to anesthetize her grief.
Two things were at least partially responsible for her terrifying bender.
The first was that she was very rich.
The second was that she was very wealthy.
Finding an empathetic gardener or maid willing to earn the equivalent of two months' pay for sneaking a bottle to the Lady of the House was no problem at all.
The Napolipolita-Daitokuji children despaired. Most of them had never seen their mother drunk, and this dreadful reality only made their grief harder to bear.
All of them knew that when their mother was in pain, she hid. She hid behind high collars, behind dark glasses, and behind long shaggy bangs which if arranged properly could cover half her face. They hadn't realized that she could also hide behind the locked double-doors of her bedroom, losing her soul as she grieved her dead lifemate.
According to a maid who'd had a chance to look around before Aysha threw her out, the grieving widow lay in bed all day crying, drinking, and clinging to Hikaru's old fur-collar smoking jacket because it still smelled like him.
Aysheia had also decided to stop eating, unceremoniously tossing the silver trays bearing her breakfast, lunch, and dinner off her bedroom balcony and onto the Mansion's carefully manicured lawn. The local crows had figured this out long before the woman's family had, and established themselves a stakeout position nearby at the appropriate times.
"That's so suicidal," Almah Stellamaris had whispered to Alia. "The damage to her system from the alcohol will only be worsened. Has she lost her appetite?"
Alia – veteran of her mother's binges since childhood – shook her head. "She's hungry, all right, but that's beside the point. She told me once that you can get drunk faster if there's nothing in your stomach to soak it up."
Almah had been horrified. Even though she was a physician, she herself only took a sip of wine here or there and didn't understand. She had been even more horrified when Dee finally confessed that she'd brought in bottles for her former Captain until her conscience could no longer bear it.
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These two factors had made Almah mad enough to have the gardeners place a stepladder up to the second-story balcony so that she could avoid the doors entirely. She had kicked off her shoes, hoisted her skirt, and up she'd gone.
"Get the hell out of my room," Aysha had moaned.
Almah knelt on the dirty floor, bending over her physically and emotionally ill patient. "You're wearing nothing but your underpants and you're on the floor right now, lying in your own vomit. Did you know that?"
When Napolipolita tried to cover her face with her hands, Almah -–though uncomfortable in this painful role - pulled them away.
"I am not leaving, not through the window, not through the door. Furthermore, I'm not leaving here until I check your vital signs and dose you with enough medication to keep your liver from rupturing. Frankly, I no longer give a damn if you like it or not. You are dying in front of my eyes. You'll have to go kill yourself under someone else's watch, because you won't do it under mine!"
Aysha had allowed Stellamaris to perform these little tasks only because she was becoming too weak to drink. The physician and prayerteacher steadfastly returned to the Mansion every day to inject her with vitamins, or perform less routine tasks such as suturing her patient's head and hand lacerations when she'd mistaken her full-length mirror for her bathroom door.
Almah concluded that this situation had to come to an end, and soon.
