I SPENT $50 AT BARNES AND NOBLE WHOOPS LOL
~time skip~
Cammie stepped out of her car and surveyed the shack on the outskirts of Oriental that Joe called home. She'd been driving for three hours and it felt good to stretch her legs. The tension in her neck and shoulders remained, a reminder of the argument she'd had with Nick that morning. He hadn't understood her insistence on attending the funeral, and looking back, she supposed he had a point. In the nearly twenty years that they'd been married, she'd never mentioned Joe Solomon; had their roles been reversed, she probably would have been upset, too.
But the argument hadn't really been about Joe or her secrets, or even the fact that she would be spending another long weekend away from her family. Deep down, both of them knew it was simply a continuation of the same argument they'd been having for most of the past ten years, and it had proceeded in the typical fashion. It hadn't been loud or violent – Nick wasn't that type, thank God – and in the end Nick had muttered a curt apology before leaving for work. As usual, she'd spent the rest of the morning and afternoon doing her best to forget the whole thing. After all, there was nothing she could do about it, and over time she'd learned to numb herself to the anger and anxiety that had come to define their relationship.
During the drive to Oriental, both Jared (A/N: I couldn't think of anymore male characters in the book series, so I'm just keeping it as Jared aha) and Macey, her two older children, had called, and she'd been thankful for the distraction. They were on summer break, and for the past few weeks the house had been filled with endless noise typical of teenagers. Joe's funeral couldn't have been better timed. Jared and Macey already had plans to spend the weekend with friends, Jared with a girl named Bex and Macey with a friend from high school, boating at Lake Norman, where her friend's family owned a house. Liz – their "wonderful accident," as Nick called her – was at camp for two weeks. She probably would have called as well were cell phones not prohibited. Which was a good thing; otherwise her little chatterbox would no doubt have been calling morning, noon, and night.
Thinking about the kids brought a smile to her face. Despite her volunteer work at the Pediatric Cancer Center at Duke University Hospital, her life largely revolved around the kids. Since Jared was born, she'd been a stay-at-home mom, and while she'd embraced and mostly relished that role, there'd always been a part of her that chafed at its limitations. She liked to think she was more than just a wife and mother. She'd gone to college to become a teacher and had even considered pursuing a PhD, with thoughts of teaching at one of the local universities. She'd taken a job teaching third grade after graduation… and then life had somehow intervened. Now, at forty-two, she sometimes found herself joking to people that she couldn't wait to grow up so she could figure out what she wanted to so for a living.
Some might call it a midlife crisis, but she wasn't sure that was exactly it. It wasn't as though she felt the need to buy a sports car or visit a plastic surgeon or run off to some island in the Caribbean. Nor was it about being bored; Lord knows, the kids and the hospital kept her busy enough. Instead, it had more to do with the sense that somehow she'd lost sight of the person she'd once meant to be, and she wasn't sure she'd ever have the opportunity to find that person again.
For a long time, she'd considered herself lucky, and Nick had been a big part of that. They'd met at a fraternity party during her sophomore year at Duke. Despite the chaos of the party, they'd somehow managed to find a quiet corner where they'd talked until the early hours of the morning. Two years older than she, he was serious and intelligent, and even on that first night she knew he'd end up being successful at whatever he chose to do. It was enough to get things started. He went off to dental school at Chapel Hill the following August, but they7 continued to date for the next two years. An engagement was a foregone conclusion, and in July 1989, only a few weeks after she'd finished her degree, they were married.
After a honeymoon in the Bahamas, she started her teaching job at a local elementary school, but when Jared came along the following summer, she took a leave of absence. Macey followed eighteen months later, and the leave of absence became permanent. By then, Nick had managed to borrow enough money to open his own practice and buy a small started house in Durham. Those were lean years; Nick wanted to succeed on his own and refused to accept offers of help from either family. After paying their bills, they were lucky if they had enough money left over to rent a movie on the weekend. Dinners out were rare, and when their car died, Cammie found herself stranded in the house for a month, until they could afford to get it fixed. They slept with extra blankets on the bed in order to jeep the heating bills down. As stressful and exhausting as those years had sometimes been, when she thought back on her life, she also knew they'd been some of the happiest years of their marriage.
Nick's practice grew steadily, and in many respects their lives settled into a predictable pattern. Nick worked while she took care of the house and kids, and a third child, Anna, 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. Nick's practice began to flourish while she shuttled Jared to and from school and brought Macey to parks and play dates, with Anna strapped in a car seat between them. It was during those years that Cammie 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 Anna started kindergarten. But when Anna died, her ambitions faltered. Quietly, she set aside her GRE exam books and stowed her application forms in her desk drawer.
Her surprise pregnancy with Liz cemented her decision not to go back to school. Instead, if anything, it awakened a renewed commitment in her 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 the memories of their baby sister began to fade, Jared and Macey slowly regained a sense of normalcy, and Cammie was grateful for that. Bright-spirited Liz brought a new kind of joy into their home, and every now and then Cammie 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 sentences, and both she and Nick had reached a point where a simple glance was filled with enough meaning to make words largely superfluous. But losing Anna had changed them. For Cammie, it spurred a passionate commitment to her volunteer work at the hospital; Nick, 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 at dinner. Sometimes she might even follow that with a second glass, and that almost always sufficed. But for Nick, 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 Anna was sick, two or three beers a night gradually became a six-pack; after she died, it became a twelve-pack. By the time she reached the second anniversary of Anna's death, with Liz on the way, he was drinking to excess even when he had 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 Joe, 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 barbeque, 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 feverently to God. Once a year or so, Nick 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 Macey might be old enough to drive, but what would happen if one of them got into some kind of accident while Nick was drinking? Would he hop into the car, strap Liz 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, Cammie 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 Nick had been on one of his binges. When she was nearing dehydration, Jared ended up taking her to the hospital around midnight while Nick 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 she 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 Macey no longer seemed to respect their father. Or worrying that, in the future, Jared or Macey or Liz 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 Nick 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.
That's what made every day so hard. She didn't want to divorce him and break up the family. As compromised as their marriage might be, part of her still believed in her vows. She loved the man he'd been, and she loved the man she knew he could be, but here and now, as she stood outside Joe Solomon's home, she felt sad and alone, and she couldn't help wondering how her life had come to this.
Comment a personal question you've always wanted to know about me. I'll answer one every chapter!
