Until Death

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

One year agoLeo strained in the narrow, musty space, asking himself yet again if changing the light bulb in a useless corner of their house could possibly be worth this much trouble. His calves ached from balancing on the tiny stepladder while his toes threatened to slip backwards out of beat up sandals. The ancient, dead incandescent bulb had come out easily enough. He grunted, shifting his grip on the twisty new fluorescent one in his fingers.

Maria would have said his natural stubborn had kicked in, pushing his logical mind out of the way. If she’d been home instead of hospitalized yet again, she would have said that. Boredom and loneliness without her had driven Leo into a likely losing battle with the unreasonable Los Angeles housing market already. No matter what his wife might have said, he probably should have climbed the shelves instead of trying to wedge a too-short ladder back here.

“Brilliant idea,” he whispered. “Get that light working so you can verify the builders should have boarded this up to begin with. You’ll feel better about your whole damned life then.”

The grooves in the base slipped into alignment with the gritty socket at last. He turned the bulb slowly, not wanting to create an even bigger project for himself by twisting the thing until it broke.

He stepped down off the ladder and flipped the switch with his elbow. Leo remembered to breathe when the dead light bulb he'd just replaced slipped out of his fingers and exploded into shrapnel all over his feet.

So many bottles, more than he could count standing here. More than he could fit into his reality. Those f*****g curved green bottles. Maria hadn't even bothered to buy a different brand.

When he did breathe, it was a gasp harsh enough to tear through his throat, sharp as the frosted white glass digging between his toes, under the soles of his feet. He caught the rich, metallic scent of blood, but underneath was that bite of juniper. The perfume of those first shared drinks together, the taste of her mouth. Later the stench of her breath and skin and the taste of every part of her body at the end when she drank more than she ate.

Leo finally stepped backward, out of the blood-slicked leather, his feet slipping on the cold white-tiled floor of the kitchen. Twelve years of those blasted meetings. Drunks calling in the middle of the night. His wife getting up and leaving him cold and alone so she could rescue yet another lost soul.

Had any of it been true? There were dozens of empty bottles on the floor with a narrow path through them, maybe a hundred. Maria must have started drinking again years ago, right? She couldn't have put this many away in just a few months time.

But Leo remembered when they were in college, how she could swallow their rent money in a few days without even trying and still manage to make the Dean's list over and over again.

Her law practice had only suffered over the past couple of weeks when she was too weak and ill to go to work, but that didn't mean a damned thing. Was she in the hospital right this second getting treated for liver failure instead of some mysterious disease no one could diagnose?

He was only in this damned pantry, the useless space at the end of the laundry room, because she was finally sick enough to admit she needed help. Leo was a creature of habit, and his habit was to putter around the house when he was anxious and upset.

His main worry had been the unknown ailment that had gradually robbed her of her vitality and was starting to show in her bloated face and stomach. Stepping into this wasted space, some realtor's idea of a selling point, had thrown him into a nightmare he'd thought was in his past.

There were at least thirty full bottles on the shelves too, hidden in this awkward space neither of them used. Had she kept that dead bulb in here on purpose, just to keep him from seeing? Did she sneak in here with a flashlight, sit on that filthy stool and guzzle that s**t? Then chew her endless supply of spearmint gum, what she called her sobriety crutch to avoid smoking?

Why the hell had she kept the empty bottles?

He looked down at his crimson footprints, then back at the bottles on the floor of the pantry, several coated with a thick layer of dust.

The first time it had been the blood, Maria's blood, that yanked Leo out of his cocoon of denial and forced him to deal with how deep he'd fallen into the rabbit hole with her. That just-short-of-condemned house back East, what they'd been reduced to when she drank up everything they earned at part-time jobs. Disgusting stained brown carpet, warped countertops, cheap wood paneling that never did feel clean.

His blood on white tiles that cost a fortune, imported from somewhere on the other side of the planet to prove how far they'd come. Her blood on that bargain basement carpet. Hers hadn't come from glass, at least not that she'd stepped on.

Maria had tried to get away like she always did back then, pulling away from Leo when he tried to get the highball glass out of her hand. She hadn't tripped on a damned thing, at least he didn't think so now. Back then he'd tried to convince himself it was that carpet. Not only thin as a sheet but laid badly, with little wrinkles that caught every scrap of dust, food, and hair.

No, Maria hadn't tripped over anything but her own feet. Leo had watched helplessly when her head slammed into a bookcase that rebounded against the one brick wall in the whole place. For a long time after that night, before she managed to claw her way out of the thicket of juniper she'd disappeared into, he'd wondered if it would have been kinder if she'd slammed into the wall instead.

She'd sat back hard, books falling from the shelves around her legs, blood falling from her gashed forehead. She'd touched the wound, not feeling it when her fingertips brushed the blinding white bone escaping the bonds of flesh and muscle.

Twenty-seven meticulous stitches had closed the wound, but she carried a sunken scar a bit darker than the rest of her skin no matter what dermatologists tried to do about it. Sometimes she covered it with bangs, sometimes not. Maria refused more surgery, saying the scar reminded her how far down she could get.

Leo backed up against the opposite wall in their hard-won Southern California paradise. Metal handles of drawers dug into his spine one after the other as he sank to the floor, bleeding feet out in front of him. If his wife had been drinking long and hard enough to put her liver into the advanced stages of shutdown, she might have finally found a bottom neither of them could claw their way out of.