Diana breathed into my ear. “He’s making me craaaaaazy.”
“Wine?” I patted her on the back.
We’d always told each other we weren’t going to get married. That we’d live together in a male-free commune. Wine afternoons and no sleepovers with boys allowed. Just us girls, making sure to have each other’s backs. I hadn’t seen her since that day last September when she’d told me about buying her car, but nothing much seemed to have changed.
“This way.” Diana took me by the hand through her two-story foyer—in her house it was a foy-ay, not a foy-er.
The family room was decorated for the party with plenty of candles and string lights, but no tree this year. Diana always put one up for her husband’s sake, even though she’d given up Christmas for herself years ago. I wondered if she’d ever told him why.
She saw me looking to the corner where it was usually placed. “He didn’t do it this year, so I didn’t either. I warned him if he didn’t take care of it, we wouldn’t have one. I guess he doesn’t care, at least not enough.”
“Nobody else will either,” I assured her. “Not so long as there’s plenty of food and booze.”
“Harriett will.”
“Well, I guess she could have come over and put up a tree, then, right?” My quip was meant to be light, but a shadow flitted across Diana’s face.
Not even a frown could turn my beautiful friend ugly. She would always be “the pretty one,” and I would always be jealous.
I let her lead me to the bar set up in the kitchen. A full spread of liquor and wine. She poured me a glass of white. Then one for herself. Not from the bottles she had chilling in festively colored buckets, but the special white she saved only for herself. And for me.
“Pinkies up,” we said at the same time, and clinked our glasses together.
The party got into full swing. There was plenty of food, including the platter of cookies sprinkled with colored sugar that Jonathan’s mother brought. I hadn’t eaten all day, but now a single plate of barbecued meatballs and cheese with crackers was too much to finish. I tried to pace my drinking, but the wine, even when I switched to what had been put out for the regular guests, was crisp and chilled and trickled into every crack and crevice. Filling me up until I feared I might overflow.
Every time someone from high school tried to get me to talk about the good old days, I wanted to throw up all over them. They’d never left home because they loved it here so much they chose to stay, or they had left but were home for the holidays because they loved it here so much they missed it when they were gone. I was the only one who didn’t want to come “home.” The only person who seemed to hate this shitheel town, and here I was. Trapped again.
But I put on the face of someone who loved it there. I bragged about my job, the old job, the one I’d lost two weeks ago because of all the time I’d had to take off since my dad got sick. I talked about my amazing life in the city, not mentioning that I’d lost my apartment there, that I was in debt I couldn’t repay, that I’d broken up with my last boyfriend because he wanted someone who was “wife material.” I laughed and held up my ringless hand when they asked if I was married, did I have kids. Maybe a cat or a dog or a parakeet?
“No, no,” I said. “Too smart for that.”
Some of them envied me, and some of them pitied me. I told myself I didn’t give a damn what any of them thought, but I must have, because every conversation was another slice, a digging cut, until my insides were a handful of fluttering ribbons. I was drunk. I should’ve gone home. I’d given up smoking a few years ago, but I wanted a cigarette.
Christmas is a hard time of year for a lot of people, and this year it seemed I was one of them. The lights, the festive music, the sparkly red dress, the wine and food and people laughing at the party—all of it left me feeling down and dark. This wasn’t sadness. This was despair.
I want, I thought as I pushed my way out the French doors in the kitchen and onto the deck, as I stumbled toward the garbage pails set at the back of the in-law apartment. I want, I want, I want.
I want … to die.
It was not the first time I’d had the idea that ending my life would be better than living it, but it had been a few years, at least, since I’d last entertained that idea. As soon as the thought rose to my mind, though, it felt right. I got calm. Outside, under the steadily falling snowflakes, I tipped my face to the dark sky and let the chilly flakes coat my face for a moment before I brushed them away.
I had a choice. I always had a choice. I did not have to stay here, in this life.
I didn’t have to have a life at all.
When the call from the hospice worker buzzed my phone, I let it go to voicemail. I waited for a minute or so, giving her time to leave a message. I read the transcription of it without listening. I already knew what she was going to say.
“Sorry.” A male voice interrupted me, and I turned the phone downward so the light wouldn’t show him my face. “I didn’t see you out here. You okay? Val?”
I turned, already weary, but it wasn’t Tom or Jim or Steve from high school; it was Diana’s husband. Jonathan. His black and silver hair glinted in the shaft of light filtering from his mother’s kitchen.
“Needed some air,” I said. “Great party, though.”
Jonathan leaned against the back of the apartment and pulled a lighter and a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “Sure.”
“Can I have one?”
Without a word, he shook the box to give me access to one of the cigarettes. Then he offered the lighter. The first drag was heaven. The second buzzed my head. I took my time before drawing again.
“Don’t tell my mother I’m out here smoking,” he said in a low voice, but with a chuckle.
“What about your wife?”
“My wife,” Jonathan said, “doesn’t give a shit if I get lung cancer and leave her a widow.”
It was the sort of thing I should tell him wasn’t true, except I’d heard Diana bitch about him enough to know that maybe it was true. I stayed quiet and smoked my cigarette. I stabbed it out against the side of the garbage can, then lifted the lid to toss the butt inside. The can was full to the brim with trash, and the most notable thing on top was a set of those plastic containers from the grocery store that hold baked goods. Sugar cookies, according to the label I glimpsed. I let out a laugh. So that’s what she’d been doing. That old bat made such a show of her “homemade” treats, and all she did was pick them up in bulk from the market.
“What?” Jonathan asked.
“Never mind.”
“I guess I should get back inside,” he said without moving.
I watched him. “I should get home. My dad’s sick. I should see how he’s doing.”
Both of us stayed still.
“Is it just me,” Jonathan asked after a moment, “or are most of my wife’s friends … assholes?”
I shook my head. “It’s not just most of them.”
“You’re her friend.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “and I’m also an asshole.”
“No, you’re not,” Jonathan denied with a laugh. “At least, not like they are.”