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By Root 489 0

the boys had together drunk a fifth of vodka that Bridget had had in the freezer for months, the bottle left over from a small summer dinner party she and Bill had given. She hadn’t even remembered the vodka was there. It had become, like the boxes of frozen peas and the Ziploc bags of unidentifiable meat, simply part of the refrigerator’s furniture. Lucas, strenuously questioned, insisted that both boys had drunk the same amount, and Bridget wondered how it was that Lucas had been able to walk to school. She thought the vodka had to have been Matt’s idea, because his friend wouldn’t have known it was in the freezer. Well, he might have seen it on a hunt for an ice-cream bar, but what boy would presume to ask for it? On the other hand, anything was possible. Who’d have thought two fifteen-year-olds would have wanted to become blind drunk on a Sunday night?

Matt was taken from her at the hospital. Bridget sat in a waiting room with televisions in the corners, each showing perky early morning talk shows. When Bridget was finally allowed into the ER to see her son, she found Matt unconscious in the bed, dressed in a hospital gown, and hooked up to several monitors. An IV had been inserted into the back of his hand, an image that chilled her. This was, of course, the same hospital at which Bridget received her chemotherapy treatments. She asked a nurse if Matt’s stomach had been pumped and was told that it was too late for that. Her son had already absorbed all the alcohol.

For seven hours, Bridget sat at the end of Matt’s bed while nurses and doctors jostled against her in the cramped emergency room, its various smells identifiable and often unpleasant. In the next cubicle, not three feet from where Bridget sat, an elderly man complained of agonizing pain in his abdomen. A doctor came to tell Bridget that Matt’s alcohol level was still remarkably high. The physician calculated that at 1:00 in the morning, it would have been nearly lethal. Her son, Bridget was told, had come very close to shutting down his kidneys.

Reeking of alcohol now, Matt occasionally regained consciousness, though he spoke incoherently. Bridget alternated between anger and heartache. What were you thinking? she would cry, and then immediately afterward would whisper, I love you so much. As long as her son was on the IV, Bridget was told, he would not have the terrible hangover she found herself wishing upon him, if only to allow him to feel the punishing effects of what he’d done.

Phone calls were made. To Bill (stunned). To Lucas’s parents (stunned and baffled). And to Matt’s school (they’d already been informed by the police). Gradually, what had earlier been terrifying—another two swigs of Absolut and might Matt have died? blown out his kidneys? inhaled his vomit?—became tedious as Bridget watched Matt’s urine drip into a plastic bag by her knee. By 3:00 that afternoon, Bridget had to remind herself of the gravity of the incident, repeating the words “he almost died” to shock herself into a more alert state.

In silence, mother and son had driven home, Matt at first refusing to enter the house. For most of an hour, he’d sat cross-legged in the driveway, sobbing, and Bridget could not get him to say why. Away from the IV, Matt began to experience the nausea and headache of a hangover, and she could hear him vomiting from time to time in the upstairs bathroom. (Good, she thought.) Bridget, hypervigilant, could not go to bed until after 3:00 in the morning, needing to check on her son’s sleeping form, waking him briefly each time. Her final task, before she crawled into her own bed, was to pour out all the alcohol in the house: two bottles of red wine, one bottle of white, a small bottle of Chivas she hadn’t even known was in the cupboard, and, finally, a six-pack of Sam Adams in the fridge, a silly and empty gesture since Bill would almost certainly replace it after his trip. Sam Adams wasn’t the problem.

The next morning, Matt dressed willingly and, subdued, ate a full breakfast. When he returned home that afternoon, he devoured guacamole dip with