And now reflects on her searing naivete.
She walks into the living room, stopping to look in on Hannah. Yes, she’s gone to bed but not to sleep. She’s lying back, Beats headset on, staring at her phone, her face illuminated weirdly blue. It’s time for lights out but Parker lets it go. She also thinks it’s a good idea to be deaf to any spousal exchanges this evening, and hopes, contrary to wise parenting, the volume is up nice and fucking high.
Locking the front door, she returns to the kitchen and turns on the light to the side porch. If she’s lucky, he’ll follow the path of least resistance: around the side of the house, through the gate and aim for the kitchen.
Upon intercepting Jon, she will guide him into the bedroom. Maybe a shower, more likely just a fully clothed landing on the bed. Or the floor. It’s carpeted. Once, he collapsed on the driveway and once on the garage concrete, waking with nothing worse than amuscle ache. Apparently in their altered state, drunks often fall soft and limber.
The front doorknob turns, once, then again. He doesn’t pound. She sees his form moving through the snow in the direction she’d hoped, drawn by the lights. A back entrance will get him straight to bed without going past Hannah’s room. Had he come in through the front he might stick his head in to see her and ramble or puke.
Another thud, then a crash. He’s bypassed the garage—the code usually defeats him—and he’s tripped over the garbage.
She moves quickly now. Any more noise and, if Hannah has de-headphoned, she’ll come out to investigate. And that will be difficult—for Parker herself. Hannah tends to be sad about her father and mad at her mother.
Now through the sliding patio doors. The cold stings and she thinks about a sweater, but it’s too late. Jon’s weaving through the pool fence gate and along the patio. He’s fallen somewhere and there’s a gash on his head. The blood is dark and crusted.
She walks to him.
“Don’t start,” he mutters.
“You’re hurt.”
“You don’t care. You never care.”
You can’t counter word for word, thought for thought. It doesn’t work that way.
The best course is to distract and deflect.
His hair is wild, his clothes disheveled. He rages, “Did you call him tonight?”
“Be careful. There’s ice.”
“Oh, be careful,” he mocks. He seems to think of better words to sling, but then they sail away.
The scent of the whisky is powerful. Jon once told her that he could tell how much a driver had had to drink by the scent. He could predict the Breathalyzer result with uncanny accuracy.
They are standing in the drift gathering on the pool deck besidethe seahorse relief. She shivers as the flares of snowflakes dot her head. It’s twenty degrees, Alexa has reported.
“Where is she?” He stares through the door at the table, where sit Hannah’s notebook and parts for the history project. “What were you saying to her tonight? Turning her against me. You do that!”
“Jon, please. Just stop.” She says these words instinctively. They will have zero effect. Like always. He doesn’t hear them. So what is the point? But she can’t help herself.
He stumbles to the back of the garage and pukes.
If only it could purge his system. But it never does, of course. That’s not how the physiology works.
He stumbles back. “I know what you do. I know what you’ve told people about me. I’ve heard. You go to those parties and I know what you say. What you really think of me. You think I don’t know?” He frowns. “You think I don’t know what you’ve told her about me? She—” He hesitates, as if he’s forgotten his own daughter’s name. “I’m going to tell her. She deserves—”
Parker grabs his arm. He turns with a frenzied glare.
And five minutes later, the longest minutes of her life, Allison Parker is lying on her back, sobbing, in a drift of delicate snow—white spattered with red. The seahorse is bleeding too. She is pressing the flaps of skin torn from her face above her cracked cheek.
“Why are you doing this to me? Why...?”
Allison Parker now stepped out of the shower in room 306 of the Sunny Acres Motor Lodge.
The shower stall as blue as the blue wall the seahorse rose from.
Tears mix with the hot steam.