The first time Faith could remember her father being drunk, she was five or six. Actually, the memory was of her mother yelling at her father for being drunk. He’d come home from a night out celebrating some big case he had won. It was very late. Charity had a virus, so their mom was in and out of their room every hour or so checking her temperature and Faith couldn’t get to sleep. She’d heard the front door open downstairs and her dad singing some ditty in his soft Irish brogue – when he was a teenager in Dublin he’d sung in a band that played in pubs and at weddings. He started up the stairs, slower than he usually did. His shoes dragging on the wood. At the top of the landing he opened the door to her and Charity’s small bedroom. The door creaked and the light from the hall backlit him so Faith couldn’t see his face. ‘I love you, my little ladies,’ he said into the dark, louder than what was probably intended as a whisper.
‘Look at you!’ Aileen had snapped from out in the hall. ‘It’s one in the goddamn morning! I told you she was sick! What, do you not care?’
‘I was celebrating!’ he’d replied jubilantly.
‘Patrick stop it! I’m not dancing. You’re drunk. You smell like a bottle of cheap whiskey.’
‘It wasn’t cheap,’ he’d answered with a hearty laugh.
‘That’s wonderful.’
‘I was celebrating, what’s wrong with that? I won my case; I get to celebrate. Jesus Christ, Aileen! Can’t a man celebrate something around here? It’s always so down.’ He started singing again. ‘You’ll be fine with it when I get the check, I assure you. Everyone’s happy when the money comes in.’
Her mother’s voice, laden with disgust and resignation, trailed off as she’d walked back down the hall to her bedroom. ‘The problem is, Patrick, you’re always celebrating something.’ She slammed the bedroom door closed. Her father slept on the floor of Faith’s room that night, between their twin beds.
Drunkenness wasn’t an event for her dad, it was a condition, a state of being. He liked his Jameson and he made no attempt to conceal his affection. He never hid his drinking or tried to minimize it. There were no mini-bar bottles hidden throughout the house, and he didn’t mix his whiskey with orange juice or put a beer in a water bottle to disguise what it was he was drinking. He wasn’t a fall-down, vomiting slob, or a mean drunk, or a gushy, teary emotional sot. In fact, except for a few really bad benders that she could recall, Sully acted no different off the sauce than he did on it, which meant that either he was constantly drinking, or he had a really high tolerance. It turned out that it was both.
Her father slept on her floor a fair amount. Or Faith would bunk with Charity and let her dad have her bed. She could smell the alcohol in the dark when he snored; it filled the room like a Glades Plug-In. She hated that smell – until he died. Then it actually became a pleasant part of a memory associated with him, like the scent of his cologne. Because her dad was always so mellow and happy, the worst part of his drinking was the fighting between her parents. Faith remembered always wanting one of them to just stop – stop drinking or stop yelling about it. Just stop. But as her dad’s tolerance rose and he fed his condition to keep his being in the state to which it had grown accustomed, the fights grew more intense and closer together. Vivian’s house became her refuge. She’d sleep over for whole weekends, and sometimes Charity would, too. Then her dad could have his pick of beds.
Aileen made her best effort to get them to hate their father for drinking. She talked about it, and about him, disparagingly, saying, ‘Oh, you don’t know the half of it when he’s had too much, Faith. The money he’s wasted, the time, the things he’s done.’ Sometimes she’d share some of the things that her father had done. Then the tears would start.
But Faith never felt bad for her mother. She wanted to. Charity did. She felt bad for not feeling bad, for not siding with her. Faith resented her because she knew Aileen was no teetotaler herself. She favored wine instead of Scotch, and she didn’t drink as much or as often as her dad, but she drank. There were nights Faith watched her father carry her mother off to bed after she’d fallen asleep on the couch waiting for him to come home. She’d seen the empty Chardonnay bottles in the trash bin in the kitchen. They just never fought about it. Aileen would pretend nothing had ever happened.
She and Charity had vowed they would never drink. Not a drop. They would never become like them. Of course those promises were made when they were young, huddled in Charity’s bed under the covers, whispering so that their dad wouldn’t hear them. The smell was gross, so the taste must be disgusting. It was their fear of immediately becoming their parents upon the sip of a single drop of alcohol that kept them from tasting so much as a wine cooler by the time most of their friends had already experienced hangovers. But like fairytale characters who have been doomed by a prophetic curse would come to tragically learn at the end of the story, there is no undoing fate. Some things are meant to happen.
‘How do you plead to the charges?’ asked the judge. The small, chaotic courtroom in downtown Fort Lauderdale was packed with defendants, attorneys, family members. Even though the judge was speaking, there was an electric undercurrent of noise as lawyers whispered to their clients or exchanged information with prosecutors. A continuous stream of suits paraded past the state and defense podiums up to the clerk’s desk, which was directly below the judge’s bench, to check the calendar.
‘Not guilty, Your Honor,’ said Faith’s attorney. He held his hand out to stop Faith from saying anything. ‘We demand discovery, trial by jury.’
‘Granted. Fifteen days, State. I need a trial date.’
‘January seventh, two thousand fifteen for report, January twelfth for trial,’ said the clerk.
‘Thank you,’ said the judge. ‘Next up?’
‘State vs. David Hoyt, page sixteen,’ barked the clerk.
Her attorney gently nudged her away from the podium and led her through the well and past the state and defense tables as the next defendant and his attorney made their way up. Jarrod was waiting for them in the front row of seats in the gallery. He stood and the three of them walked out to the hall, where the hustle and bustle continued. And that was it: she had been arraigned. She felt like she’d been strip-searched again; there were just more people in the room.
‘Thanks, Jack,’ Jarrod said to his partner, who was her attorney. Before he’d joined Krauss and Lynch, Jack Clark had been a big DUI attorney at Greenburg Taurig.
Jack nodded. ‘Let’s see what they’re offering. Because Faith was over double the limit, they’re gonna try and be tough at first, just warning you. That’s this office’s strategy. Let me see who gets assigned to the case. Hopefully it’s not a newbie – they like to offer state prison and make it sound like a deal.’
‘Prison?’ Faith cried.
‘No, no. Don’t worry about that. You’ll get probation and community service, I’m sure. No one was hurt, there was no accident, there’s no reason for prison. Your last DUI was ten years ago, which is better than less than ten. I’m just saying that brand-new prosecutors, which are the ones who handle DUIs, have something to prove, so they come out swinging. Their first offer won’t be their last. This may take a few weeks to work out, is all. Don’t worry, Faith.’
Jarrod reached for her hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ he repeated.
They walked out of the courthouse, heading to their car in the parking lot three blocks over without saying a word, although he still held her hand and she held his. After her breakdown with Detectives Nill and Maldonado, Jarrod had come to her and apologized for the affair. On his knees he had sworn to her that Sandra meant nothing to him, that he didn’t know why he had let it happen, that he hadn’t seen her since they’d broken it off, that he wanted to move forward, not always look in the rearview, because he couldn’t change anything back there. It was the perfect opportunity perhaps for her to get on her knees and join him, confess her rearview had a lot of shit in it, have a good cry together, followed by great makeup sex, and everything would be fine.
But that’s not how life works. Not every fairytale gets a happy ending.
Like a frightened bird that senses a cat lurking nearby, Faith’s eyes darted in a dozen different directions, trying to take in the unfamiliar surroundings of the Broward County Courthouse as they walked to the parking lot. The sidewalk was crowded. There was a long line out the entrance doors of people waiting to go through the metal detectors. The bail bondsman storefronts on 6th Street were busy with customers, as were the coffee shops and luncheonettes. The jail, as she knew, was right around the corner. There were criminals in plainclothes all around them, watching them. She felt like they were studying her. Why? Maybe they recognized her as one of them. Maybe she bore the signs of a defendant now, fresh from arraignment court. Or maybe they sensed how frightened she was, that she would make a good victim. There were so many strange faces; even walking down the street felt surreally dangerous. Derrick Poole might be under twenty-four-hour surveillance, but his partner was not. As far as she knew, detectives did not know where to find the man who they’d advised her used to be Poole’s teacher. He could be anywhere, clean-shaven and in a snappy suit, his eyes hidden by sunglasses. He could be right here, walking amongst the other criminals, watching her as she obliviously ambled straight toward him. With his hand in his pocket, he could be secretly thumbing the sharp edge of a tool he’d already used on one of his victims as he approached. Then, without missing a single step, he would simply plunge the blade into her in the stomach as he casually walked on by.
She tightened her grip on Jarrod’s hand as the same white van that had passed before passed a second time. She thought she might have seen it this morning when they parked. And maybe hanging around the bakery. She looked behind her, to her right, to her left.
‘You OK?’ he asked as they turned the corner into the lot.
She nodded.
‘I know you’re overwhelmed, but Jack will handle everything. He knows what he’s doing. It’ll be OK.’
She got in the car, wanting to say a thousand things, but opting to remain silent and study the cars.
When he was on his knees before her, asking for forgiveness, she had told him she understood, even though she still didn’t. He had asked her to go to an AA meeting and she’d politely said she would think about it. Of course, inside she was thinking, ‘Now? You want me to quit drinking now? When there is a pair of serial killers out there who know where we live? Who would love to see your daughter and me dead? When this horrible case is just beginning and I may have to testify? When I know that our marriage is treading into “irretrievably broken” ground? When I may have to go to prison myself? You think it’s a good time to throw away the lifeboat as the ship begins to sink and everything gets sucked down with it?’ But she didn’t say any of those things, because he would never understand, just like she would never understand how he’d ‘let something happen’ with the intern. They were stuck at an impasse, with each telling the other to go ahead, but neither was moving. She might very well have a drinking problem, or she might understandably be stressed out of her goddamned mind, but this was not the time to try quitting something that helped stop the anxiety, soothed the shakes, took away the pain. It wasn’t the time to quit and it wasn’t the time to ask. She would cut down, yes. Like smoking, she could limit herself to a drink a day, which is what the rest of the world drank, so no one should complain. She’d done it before – when drinking became part of everyday solutions – she could do it again.
He hadn’t brought it up again and she hadn’t gotten bombed since. She didn’t drink or smoke in front of him. To outsiders they still looked like a couple. But the emotional distance between them had grown into a chasm, with Jarrod on one side and her on the other, each watching the other pull further away as they held hands on the crater’s rocky ledge. There were only two possible outcomes that she could see: either they both lost grip and were pulled apart, or one yanked the other over to their side at the last minute. Actually, there was a third scenario, she thought as Jarrod turned on the radio and the radio personality started talking about the breaking news coming out of Palm Beach.
One pulled the other off of their ledge, trying to bring them to their side, but couldn’t hold the other’s weight, and they both dropped into the black abyss below.