Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [49]
At eighteen he applied to a state school to study engineering. To everyone’s surprise, he was accepted; unfortunately, it took him less than two semesters to justify his most avid critics’ doubts. After a string of D’s and F’s, he dropped out. He followed his girlfriend to Michigan, where he worked at GM until his perpetual delinquency cost him his position. In four years he went through as many jobs. When his girlfriend left him for someone else she cited his drinking as the problem. He argued otherwise. She’d slept with his neighbor. That seemed like a pretty good reason to him.
He’d loved her, and her departure woke in him some innate sense of self-preservation. He knew he didn’t have an addiction, but was willing to admit he drank maybe a little more than was necessary. He could ration his drinking, cut back some. He traded whiskey for beer. Every evening after work he stopped at the Exxon station for a six-pack and for cigarettes. The first night the beer lasted until nine. The next night until eight when he decided he couldn’t be expected to go from constant drinking to a few bottles of cheap beer without weaning himself carefully. He walked to the bar down the street for a drink—just one—and had five. For two months he rationed his drinking in this way, promising he would only have the six-pack, finding himself at the bar by ten.
The night of the accident he’d found one of his brother’s letters buried under a month’s worth of unopened mail. Aden only wrote because his new wife, Rebekah, made him. Eli had missed their wedding, passed out at home on the couch while his flight took off down the runway. Rebekah had sent pictures. Every year he received a birthday card containing gift cards for local restaurants (Aden wouldn’t let Rebekah send money) or typed, printed letters recounting the news of their lives: his promotion, their first child. Eli didn’t own a phone. With her elegant penmanship, each letter as carefully scripted as her message, Rebekah did the brothers’ talking for them.
But the letter that night was in Aden’s crisp, square handwriting, the message without Rekebah’s practiced kindness: Their mother had been found dead in her apartment. Her manager discovered her after she’d missed three days of work. An accidental overdose, they claimed. The funeral would be held on the seventeenth.
He read the letter on the thirty-first.
Eli drove to the nearest liquor store and bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He drove to the field ten miles from his apartment where he sometimes liked to lie on the ground and stare at the stars, feeling their brightness buzz all the way to the back of his skull. He felt God best when in the field, exposed to the elements. He could feel the holiness of things humming in the trees, roiling the ground. He felt these things more clearly when he’d been drinking.
Lying on his back, staring up at the night, he tried to feel some pain at the loss of his mother. He tried to feel grief, if only to feel something at all. But the memories that battered him were merciless in their specificity, and they only inspired a pure, unadulterated hatred: his mother on her bed, half naked and passed out, the welts on his brother’s legs, nights crouching by the toilet, overcome to gagging with its stale odor as he set another razor blade to his skin. He stood up, threw out his arms, and screamed. He screamed until his spit was froth and his throat raw. Until he was empty.
Usually he walked home—he knew enough to walk when he’d been drinking—but that night he wanted to sleep in the field, under the stars. A ceiling over his head would be too suffocating. He needed to feel ample air around his arms and legs, to know he could run if his anger overwhelmed him. He woke to a storm. It was midmorning, dark and cold. He ran to his car, anxious to escape the