In the meantime, I just had to get through the night. And since it was three in the morning, the night would be short — it was practically over already. I rooted around beneath the kitchen sink and pulled out a bucket, the same orange bucket Jessica had grabbed too late the night Kelli got sick. I went back into the living room and placed it on the floor near Trevor’s purring head. Finally, I picked up his glass — which was empty — and brought it to the kitchen. The boozy fumes wafting up from the glass made me scowl — reminding me of performing this exact chore for my passed-out husband.

I enacted these rituals in the dark, as if they were shameful instead of merely practical, domestic. Typical, even — the same rites that sober people had performed in service of the drunk since time immemorial, that parents performed for children, women for men and vice versa, everywhere on the planet, throughout all of human history, I suppose. Inevitable and eternal. World without end, as my mother and I once droned in unison at mass. These were the routines that made life orderly and coherent from moment to moment — the covert connec­tive tissue of our days. Sometimes they made you feel weary, or taken for granted, but dirty glasses had to be rinsed out, pristine carpets needed defending from bilious onslaughts, and the inescapable fact was that someone had to do it. You didn’t have to like it, but you had to do it. That was the lesson at the end of the day. For morning to come, for the future to take place, there always had to be someone scuttling around in the background with a broom and dustpan. Someone had to suck it up.

It was very early but not yet dawn, maybe five thirty or six in the morning. I hadn’t heard him come in, hadn’t felt the give of the bedsprings as he lowered himself down, or felt the breeze created by the bedclothes being shifted. My back was to him and, as I came awake, my body seemed to solidify into the fetal position I’d been sleeping in — I didn’t shift or budge, because it felt like I was made of rock. My muscles locked up and I thought, weirdly, about the ancient people of Pompeii, caught unaware by exploding Mt. Vesuvius, which killed them instantly in an ungodly blast of heat from the centre of the earth. How they all curled up, the way I was curled up — providing perfect stone casts of themselves, for posterity, after the lava had hardened all around them.

Sunbeam

32

And then I was standing. I didn’t remember moving, or thinking, but now I was standing by the bed and looking down at him.

“Get out,” I said. Looking back, I think these words were the first I’d ever spoken to Trevor in the whole time we were acquainted that I had not weighed in advance before opening my mouth. They just came out. “Get out of there. Get out. Now.”