I can’t do this anymore.

Chapter 16

February 1, 2014

My alarm went off in a whisper, set to the lowest possible volume, and still I flew out of bed to tap it silent. I held my breath and peered into the darkness until I could make out the shape of David sprawled in the beanbag chair. He hadn’t stirred at the sound. I breathed again.

My hours had changed dramatically since I started my new job. When I worked at Cubby’s, I seldom made it home before five, and I’d usually find David already asleep. But now I tried to be in bed by eleven, and he was never home at that hour. That first night he stumbled home at two and couldn’t find his key—or maybe he couldn’t find the keyhole. He yelled, Open the fuck up! and pounded the door so hard it rattled. I hurried to let him in, but not before he woke most of the other tenants in our building. They swarmed the hall in various stages of dress, all of them upset and clamoring for silence. One of them called the cops.

I made David hide under the bed when the officers rang the bell, and I answered the door and apologized for making so much noise. They gave me the once-over and sniffed my breath and warned me not to let it happen again. When they were gone, I whispered to David to come out, but he was already asleep. That was where he spent the night, on the floor under the bed.

Ours was not the kind of neighborhood where you could leave your apartment door unlocked overnight, but after that incident, that was what I did. The first night I lay for hours with my eyes open and my fists clenched, ears straining for any sound of an intruder, until I finally fell into an exhausted sleep so deep I didn’t even hear David when at last he came home.

So this was our new routine. The alarm went off at six, I rolled over, and there David was, asleep in the chair. It was months since we last shared a bed, and many more months since we last made love. No, that wasn’t right. It was months since we last had sex, years since we last made love.

I slipped out of bed and tiptoed around him and picked up the spoon he must have dropped on the floor. I turned on the oven, and when I looked back, I found him sprawled in the beanbag with a smile on his face and the needle still in his arm.

The shock slammed into me, and I froze there in the chilly kitchen.

He’d never brought it home before, even in the early days, when it was only coke. It was a workplace thing then, something to help him to supercharge his battery so he could power through the day. Cocaine was the young financier’s drug of choice, and it carried none of the stigma of other drugs, not the meth upstate nor the heroin downtown. It almost had a certain elite panache, like drinking Cristal. David would do a couple bumps during the day when the numbers were flying fast and furious, every deal bigger and more precarious than the last.