AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“If you’re really sorry,” she said, plunking the bottles down on the table in front of him, “take these.”
Mia grabbed her keys and her beat-up ball cap from the counter and left. Leaving him alone with the medication he refused to take: Levodopa, Carbidopa and Rasagiline.
Doctors had told him Parkinson’s wasn’t a death sentence. That if he took those pills like he was supposed to, he could have a life.
Not his old life.
No horses. No working cattle. None of the things he’d done and loved forever.
All those things that made him who he was.
A cattleman. A tough son of a bitch.
And without the work, who was he really?
He wasn’t a husband, hadn’t been for a long time. He’d never been a father. Not much of a father-in-law, either.
He’d been a waste and the disease was here to put an end to a miserable life.
Without the pills death crept closer on shuffling feet, its face a thick, unmovable human mask.
The booze helped, too.
And he went to bed every day knowing he was another day closer to leaving all the shame and the bitter regrets behind. And he liked it that way. The pain was bad, sometimes real bad; the electrical currents that ran through his body like he was water were getting worse.
But pain was nothing.
The booze helped with that, too.
Walter sniffed hard, found his face with his shaking hand and felt the scruff of his beard. He used to shave every morning, gave the guys a hard time if they didn’t.
When did I stop? he wondered. When he first had trouble with his hands, two years ago? When Mia finally made him go to the doctor and get diagnosed a year ago? When he started drinking?
“My boy is back,” he said aloud, the words echoing through the empty kitchen. His empty home and life.
Well, he realized, not so empty anymore.
Jack was back for a reason. Signs and shit weren’t something he usually believed in, but his son was back, in the bedroom he’d grown up in.
Victoria, at long last, was gone and with Jack being here, it seemed like now was a chance to make things right between them.
It took a while to wrestle his hands into action, to put them where he wanted them, on the white caps on top of those amber bottles, and it took even longer to open them.
“Damn it,” he muttered as the pills scattered away from him, rolling over the table and falling onto the floor. But he got three, a yellow one, a big white one and a small orange-ish one, cupped in the pink valley of his palm.
If he lifted his hand, they’d spill, with all the shaking, so he bent his head and licked the pills from his palm, tasting the salt of his skin. The bitter medicine.
He swallowed them dry and he turned, five small moves, pulling his ruined body around to go find the whiskey to wash them down.
Oh God. The heat was terrible. The sun was melting him down to wax. To bone.
“Jack!” Oliver cried, and Jack turned to look for him, but he couldn’t find him in the dunes. Sand kicked up in his face, the sun blinded him.
I hate Africa, he thought.
“Jack!” Oliver yelled again. “Why didn’t you tell anyone the maps were wrong?”
The guilt was a vise around his throat. And he couldn’t breathe for the agony.
“I meant to,” he gasped. “I did. But Mia—”
”Don’t blame her.”
“I don’t!” he managed to yell past the pain. “I blame myself. It’s my fault!”
He woke up with a start, jerking himself upright. Freezing despite his dreams of the desert.
His face, his whole body, was drenched in cold sweat.
The morphine beckoned but he ignored it. Looking at his father’s face two nights ago, at the ravages alcohol had made in that man, killed the allure of those painkillers.
He wouldn’t go down that road. Not if it meant being anything like his father.
He pulled himself from the bed, knowing from weeks of hard experience that once the nightmare woke up him, there’d be no sleeping.
Without turning on the light, he opened his bedroom door and took three steps left to the bathroom. Hazy moonlight slipped in the window at the far end of the hallway, but Jack didn’t need the illumination. Preferred things without it, truth be known. The dark was another layer he wrapped around himself, insulating him from the cold and harsh realities of the outside world.
Realities like Mia. Like his father. Like George Gibson, Dean of Cal Poly, who’d called Jack’s cell phone yesterday to remind him of the board meeting in six weeks’ time.
Might as well call it a reckoning.
No. He’d take the dark.
The bathroom tiles were cool under his feet and he reached into the shower and cranked on the hot water, tempering it with very little cold.
