Our Child of the Stars

by Stephen Cox

Genres: Alien Contact; Historical Fantasy; Family Life

Synopsis

"It's a wonderfully emotional, heart-warming journey of what it really means to be a parent" --The Los Angeles Times

In this magical, bewitching debut, Molly and Gene Myers' marriage is on the brink of collapse. Then a child arrives, with a remarkable appearance. Will he bring them together, or tear their whole world apart?

Molly and Gene Myers were happy, until tragedy blighted their hopes of children. During the years of darkness and despair, they each put their marriage in jeopardy, but now they are starting to rebuild their fragile bond.

This is the year of Woodstock and the moon landings; war is raging in Vietnam and the superpowers are threatening each other with annihilation.

Then the Meteor crashes into Amber Grove, devastating the small New England town - and changing their lives for ever. Molly, a nurse, caught up in the thick of the disaster, is given care of a desperately ill patient rescued from the wreckage: a sick boy with a remarkable appearance, an orphan who needs a mother.

And soon the whole world will be looking for him.

Cory's arrival has changed everything. And the Myers will do anything to keep him safe.

Release date: November 1, 2018

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

CHAPTER 1

Fall, Year Two

Molly sat by her bedroom window, sewing Cory’s Halloween costume. Looking out, Crooked Street was warm in the soft sunlight. Soon the old porches would shine with pumpkin lanterns, heads of orange fire with their savage grins. Long ragged witches and skeletons hung from the gutters and swayed as the wind ruffled the leaves of yellow, red and brown. She loved the sad beauty of fall, the possibilities as summer left and winter came.

The Myers house had been full of Halloween for days. The three of them carved pumpkins while sugar girls wooed their candy boys on the radio. Cory rescued his first brave attempt and now it sat in his bedroom with its quirky, jagged smile. The second magnificent globe would be shown off tonight. Gene and Molly had enjoyed days of Cory’s endless chatter, and making things from painted leaves, and Molly’s attempts to bake new things from her old Joy of Cooking book. Cory couldn’t decide between a pirate and a sorcerer, so Molly said at last, ‘Be both.’ He flailed his arms in excitement. Then he saw how much gold braid she brought back from the shop – two double fistfuls – and he ‘want it all-all Mom’. Red and gold – Cory never did half-measures. There was so much small print in being a mother, like racing to finish the costume because not disappointing him mattered.

Molly’s stitches were firm, rather than neat. Cory got so antsy and up close, she couldn’t sew straight around him. She retreated to the bedroom, with the chair propped under the handle. Gene thought that when he found time he’d mend the lock, but it never quite happened. She smiled, remembering last night, the signal that passed between husband and wife, the chair jamming the door in case Cory came wandering in, as he still did now and then. Last night he’d slept, and it was just Gene and Molly. They made the old moves under the patchwork quilt, with its wild pattern like leaves in fall.

As a child, the jack-o’-lantern was a familiar friend, and yet it still brought a shiver as night fell. Little Molly had loved dressing up as someone else, staying up late to hear scary stories, eating more candy than was good for her and running through the back streets at dusk, kicking up dry papery leaves. She could pretend twisting shadows were real horrors. The years passed and for a while it became more knowing, a game between friends who were hovering at the doors of adulthood. Then Molly put Halloween away, like a favourite toy in an attic box, though she still loved fall when the year ran downhill to the dark. In time, adult joys and adult fears came instead: her first job, a wedding song, the house. And a death.

She shook off a cold shudder. There were things to do.

Childhood was a lost country, something well known but now too distant – but then Cory came: their son, their miracle, and Gene and Molly had found so many things again. Snow angels and Christmas stockings, birthday surprises and fireworks on the Fourth of July. Cory would squat to look at some tiny green flower or stand entranced by the song of a single bird. He adored the day of disguises; he was made for Halloween and it was made for him.

As she sewed, Molly heard him outside in the hallway. That eerie creak could only be Cory swinging from the fold-down attic ladder and the little pad pad pad was him running along the corridor and back. You could never mistake that tread for anyone else. Sometimes all went quiet, which might mean Cory was hanging off the stair rail, upside down, to see how long he could do it. Or he might just be rearranging his treasure table in his neat little room. He might be out of the attic window and up onto the roof with his telescope, like some pirate up the mast. Cory often looked out across Amber Grove, official population 18,053 and proud of it, gazing north to the forest with its strange scar.

‘Safe Mom, look. Cory too clever to fall.’

But she didn’t think he’d fall. It wasn’t falling that frightened her.

Stitch stitch stitch, the red cloth against her dark slacks. Only a truly formal occasion or the most burning summer could get her in a skirt nowadays.

Their doorbell rang.

At once Molly put down the sewing and moved the chair from the door. She heard Cory scurry up the ladder into the attic and as she entered the corridor, the hatch shut. Cory had heard the bell; he would stay out of sight.

She walked down the stairs, taking care to look for any signs: a left-behind toy, a roller skate. On the walls hung her best photo of Gene’s parents, her nursing qualifications, the poster War is not good for children and other living things and the smiling portrait of Dr King. What would the Reverend have thought of Cory?

The door had a peephole now, and a thick chain. A lanky werewolf lurked on the porch with his sister, a teenage witch, and a friend, an Egyptian princess . . . These older kids were from down the zig-zag road, good kids, and they did not know Cory existed.

Molly adopted her public face: polite, not unfriendly, but not welcoming either. She picked up the bowl of candy and opened the door. ‘You’re a little old for this,’ she said, a little tarter than she’d intended.

The werewolf looked hungry, but the girls frowned at his outstretched paw.

The princess spoke. ‘Oh no, Mrs Myers. We’re going to a party. It’s just . . . Isaac has run off again. He’s a mutt, kind of brown and white, about so big.’ She held her hand about two feet off the ground. ‘Have you seen him?’

‘Sorry, I haven’t,’ Molly said, pleasant but distant. She knew the dog; she’d seen them walking it.

‘He keeps running off,’ the witch tried to explain, ‘and someone must find him ’cos they keep taking his collar off – do you think any of the kids around here might be doing it?’

‘No kids in this house,’ Molly said. ‘I’ll keep an eye out, though.’

The teenagers looked at each other. Far from here, boys and girls not much older than these were marching against the war, protesting the horrors of Vietnam, and dancing in the sun.

Molly’s stomach twisted in knots. She’d bet it was Cory ‘helping’ the dog, and that could expose him. The last thing she wanted was these teens hunting around the back of these houses. This was how it might start, like a spark on dry leaves.

Soft as milk, she said, ‘Oh, maybe it’s the ghost. Years back, there were three trick-or-treaters who came to a strange old house at the end of the road . . .’

They looked at her, too well brought up to be rude, but still teenagers enough not to laugh.

‘Hope you find him soon,’ she said, proffering the bowl. The werewolf took a big paw of candies. She shut the door, half hearing a low joke, and some protest from one of the girls.

Up the stairs, back to her bedroom, to finish the job. Cory was nowhere to be seen, and that gave her a moment to shut the door and finish her work.

Stitch stitch stitch. Molly shook out the Space-Admiral-Wizard ballgown or whatever it was. You could spot it wasn’t even, with bits finished too fast, like it was a race. She needed to check the supper, and this’d have to do.

Pad pad pad. When she opened her door, Cory squatted there. He sprang up from the floor like an unfolding frog to his full height. Violet eyes widened as he saw the red sack with arms. He made the tick-tick-tick of excitement. His ears went up to ten to two. That was full marks enthusiasm.

‘Best costume EVER Mom! Thank-you-thank-you-thank-you!’ and he grabbed her in a skinny hug. She put her face down to his and he stroked her cheek with his outer face tentacles, seven-inch fingers the colour of red plums. He popped a sweet little kiss with the inner feelers. ‘Very special,’ he said. By the end of the day his scent was crushed lemon balm, horses and rain. ‘Try-on-now-now-now.’

‘Cory, you need to stop bothering the Robertsons’ dog. And don’t take his collar off – that tells them someone with hands is involved.’

He met her gaze and said, ‘Playing not-bothering. Poor dog hate collar, Cory only helping . . .’

‘Do we have a deal?’ as she held out the costume like a prize.

Cory nodded and grabbed it, his rope-like tail swishing. Molly smiled. He didn’t care one sleeve was too long, and he must-must find the toy sword, although he’d never hit anyone, it was just for waving. He must practise his casting-spells game, all fierce frowns and nonsense words and fluting noises. She remembered little Molly dressing up in a sheet, her joy at running between dark trees, and the taste of strange candy. Since Cory fell into her life, he’d opened Molly up to live the fun of it all over again. His joy made all that time sewing worth it.

‘Where is big pirate hat? When-when we light Pumpkin Jack? Do Russians have Halloweeen? Do Russians have pumpkins? What China people do Halloweeen? Different from us?’

Gene would hate the risk, but she would take a Polaroid, just one, and hide it in their secret place. You couldn’t expect a keen photographer not to want snaps of her son.

She walked towards the stairs – but there was Gene’s brisk knock on the front door: shave and a haircut, two bits. Her tall, dark, bearded librarian was home early, as promised.

‘Dad-Dad-Dad!’ cried Cory, and holding up his robe with both hands, he was round Molly and down the stairs two at a time. Cory’s skin was the colour of lavender milk, the colour of vigour and health. How Molly loved to stroke his long, hairless skull.

On Halloween, he could be hidden. With the gigantic fake beard and the hooded costume and the robes a bit too big . . . he could pass. He’d go out with his only two friends and no one would pay any attention to the child at the back. This was his second Halloween; how special that felt for him, to be out in it, to be part of it this time.

The family embraced, Molly standing on tiptoe to kiss Gene.

Farewell Angelina went on the record-player, the LP worn from years of enjoyment. Joan Baez filled the house with music, that extraordinary voice making mournful love to the air so the whole house became sad and beautiful. There were many great singers but she was a family favourite; every time Molly played her records, Cory would sit and sway in time, cooing along, and, maybe later, Gene would reach for his guitar.

Gene pulled on his faded Yankees sweatshirt and grinning, slipping on his glasses, he wove one of his tall tales about a borrower in the library and what sinister thing was under his hat. The story only ended when Cory jumped in his seat and went, ‘Ooo ooo Dad teeesing. Dad big liar.’

They ate soup and hot sandwiches, Cory in the costume; he’d probably wear it for days now, even sleep in it. From time to time, Gene rubbed Cory behind one ear, purple with lighter stripes. In shape, his ears were half a piglet’s and half some strange shell.

‘Light lantern now-now,’ Cory pleaded as Gene finished his soup.

Pretend-serious, Gene said, ‘Not yet. The sun needs to be further down, so we can see.’

Every family inherits odd rules. Gene, who would listen to some arguments so easily, even change his mind when necessary, insisted that the pumpkin carved with such love could not be lit until today, the day.

Cory hopped up and down, flapping long arms and saying, ‘Can’t-wait-can’t-wait!’ Molly raised her eyebrows and Gene made a show of checking first his watch, then the window. When these passed some mysterious male test, Gene opened the front door and looked both ways to check the coast was clear. Mr Forster’s flag flew across the road; it wouldn’t tell. Only a bird or two looked on.

The strange shelf in the porch was perfect for Pumpkin Jack. The adults went first, looking and listening, and then Gene gestured for Cory to come. He helped him stand on a chair, a little stooped, with his hood up, Gene close, in case Cory fell – Cory, their son, who went over rain-slicked roofs and up high trees without fear. They were the last house in the last turn of six, but from habit, Molly kept her eyes fixed on the road, in case someone came.

‘Cory big-big, can do it, Dad,’ he said with his funny little crease of a frown. Gene lit the foot-long match and handed it over, and solemnly, carefully, Cory did the duty. The candle flickered, and then the pumpkin glowed orange from within. Cory must have grown two inches since the Fourth of July, Molly thought; she should mark the doorway in the hall, with him craning to stand as upright as he could.

There were moments you could live in for ever, too full to speak. Molly rested her head against Gene’s shoulder and remembered how they had brought Cory home from the hospital, a secret in the night, without a clue if it would even work.

Cory was a secret. So few people knew and those friends held his life in their hands.

The attic window and the roof looked to the north. You could still see where the Meteor fell, the flaming stone from space that had turned miles of State Forest to flame and smoke, and then to mud and ash. The Meteor brought destruction, it brought Cory, and it changed everything.

CHAPTER 2

Some years earlier

Winter held Amber Grove in talons of ice, sketching fairy-wings on every tree. Molly and Gene came out of the cinema, where she’d sniggered throughout the space film he’d chosen, his feelings be damned. He’d snorted and sighed.

Cold air burned her throat now, but his familiar arm was warm around her shoulders. ‘I’ve seen kids in the road make up a better story than that,’ she said, smiling.

‘Okay, sorry, that was garbage. Let’s go skating,’ Gene said. They walked the length of Main Street, past City Hall, past shops closed for the evening and one heaving bar, until they came to the park. The pond had frozen deep and solid and many people had thought of skating too. They lined up to hire the skates from the wooden hut that sold ice-creams in summer.

They’d been Gene-and-Molly for six months. They’d first met in a basement, painting signs for the demonstration. Gene, walking into a room of people, moved like he’d just rented his body and didn’t quite have the hang of it. He was handsome, though the faded clothes were behind the times, and he looked away when their eyes met. But throughout that afternoon, she’d often caught him gazing at her. Maybe he thought that her mouth was too wide. Maybe he’d spotted her only vanity: the popular bottle which kept her hair the golden blonde she had been at five.

She’d discovered Gene was quiet, never the first to speak in the group’s discussions, but what he said struck a chord with her. Imagine the impossible, but keep your feet on the ground. She contrived to sit near him.

They lived under the shadow of the Bomb, but they believed that the times they were a-changing. Gene and Molly hitched across the state to hear the singers and bands they both loved, whose music was not just beautiful but meant something profound. They’d marched against unjust laws, against the vicious, stupid war and the draft that fed it, against the horrendous weapons which threatened all life on land and sea and sky.

But Gene and Molly argued endlessly too. A trip to New York City revealed his indifference to real art like painting and sculpture; he hated having to be in the endless photos she took of everything. Meanwhile, he couldn’t believe she was so quick to sneer at the bands taking risks and breaking new ground. Sometimes, with a few old friends he trusted not to mock, Gene would pick up his guitar and play their favourites, love songs and protest songs, singing in his light, ordinary tenor.

They had been on other dates, but this one felt special. On the pond people swooped, trailing the white memory of their breath, laughing and shouting as they bumped into each other. Some walked on the ice like new-born foals. Molly saw a teenager take a tumble and heard a so-called friend cheer. Gene was all legs and arms, so skating might be embarrassing.

‘I haven’t done this for years,’ Molly said, taking a few hobbled steps to the edge. He held her hand so she could step safely onto the ice.

Like riding a bike, you couldn’t forget – then he zigged and zagged away, competent and picking up speed, and she accepted the dare, beginning the chase and gaining confidence as her body remembered. How different his movements were now; even when he was showing off she forgave him.

He grinned as she caught up. ‘The creek behind the farm froze every year.’

She thought, A man who can skate can learn to dance.

Above them the Moon was almost full, haloed with ice. Soon she’d taste his mouth and he’d taste hers, familiar and exciting all at once.

Out on the pond, a dark-haired mother was helping a little girl of perhaps six. The woman held the girl’s hands in hers, her face shining with encouragement. The girl looked down at her feet and up at her mother, fear and hope balanced. Molly wished she’d brought her camera to capture the moment.

Gene smiled; he often smiled at children. He wanted a family too. Already, something burned in her heart. Please, please, please.

They sat very close on a cold bench, making clouds with each breath. Her face burned with cold as she sipped hot chocolate, admiring the Moon. It made her remember her years in the bustle of Brooklyn. Out here in Amber Grove, she could get away from electric light and wonder at the stars blazing, filling the night with glory.

She went back to their old argument. ‘Put a man in a tin can and whizz him around the Earth, what good does that do?’ she asked. ‘They’ll send soldiers to the Moon, with bombs, so every time we look up we’ll see the threat of war. We’ll spread death through the stars like a disease.’

He took her hand, as he did at any excuse. ‘Humans got here by being willing to look over the next hill, to risk crossing the next sea. Space is the next place to go.’

‘People down here need real help now: clean water and safe births and a hundred vile diseases to conquer,’ she said. She was glad to be there right then, with him.

He looked up at the sky. ‘We’ll live to see people living on the Moon. There’ll be a city run by the United Nations, for science and peace and exploration. Weapons will be banned, it’ll be a place of kindness, so when we gaze up at it, we’ll see hope. In fact, maybe they’ll get a woman to run it.’

‘You idiot,’ she said, touched by his vision. If he didn’t kiss her soon, she’d make the move herself.

‘You know, the film was okay. As a metaphor, the flying lizard people worked,’ he said, his eyes sparkling behind the glasses.

She gave him a little punch on the shoulder. She didn’t want to talk disintegrator rays and whether those trashy books he read could ever be art, so she shut him up with her eager mouth. That kiss told her. She decided beyond all doubt: this man who believed in spaceships and aliens and justice and world peace was the one for her.

*

Molly waited, barely patient, for him to propose. It took Gene until that long hot summer when President Johnson stepped up the bombing in Vietnam. There in his tiny apartment which smelled of the laundry below, he did it with his guitar and a song, ‘Molly Skating on the Moon’. With tears in her eyes she said of course she would marry him, what took him so long? She didn’t know he wrote his own songs, the most beautiful thing anyone had ever done for her. He pulled faces and said none of his stuff was any good.

The first person she told about the wedding was sharp-nosed, brown-eyed Janice Henderson, her best friend from nursing school; she had a dirty laugh and a spine of steel. Janice’s neighbour Diane came over to share the celebration. She taught in middle school, Amber Grove’s first black teacher, and you just knew no mean boy would dare pull braids in her class. She’d lost her husband the year before, a lean, healthy man whose heart just stopped, leaving her and three kids; one of those tragedies that made so little sense.

The women saw a future bright and just and full of hope. They shared fierce books and articles about how things had to change for women and the world; they drank and they argued. Sometimes, Molly remembered, the three friends danced, just them, drunk in the kitchen at midnight. Gene liked her friends, but a couple of times he’d commented, ‘Hey, you and Janice can really put the booze away. Jeez, I couldn’t drink like that.’

Molly thought marriage mattered – not what they spent or whether they had a honeymoon, but the act of it; their promises before the people who mattered to them.

It was the second winter they’d been together. Her wedding day dawned very cold, the sky the bright blue of the brooch Gene’s mother had lent her. Molly’s cream dress was too tight. She was so nervous she had nothing but Scotch for breakfast. Gene’s father walked her into City Hall – her own parents had taken their frigid judgements to sunny Florida years ago, and good riddance.

Gene stood grinning in his best suit, with the flower in his lapel crooked. He was the one for her. The people they loved had come to support them and neither of them tripped over the words. Then off to dance, to his choices and hers: ‘Stop in the Name of Love’, the Temptations and the Supremes. Peter, Paul and Mary, the Byrds, the Beatles and the Stones.

Hours later, it was Janice who said, ‘They’ll have to put the old Baker place up for sale soon. It’s a ruin, so it should be cheap. We could be neighbours.’

*

The first warm day of spring. Crooked Street ran right up to the drop, that sharp slope of trees too steep to build on. Down there was the disused railroad line and then the meadows, a square mile of scrub, old walls and little creeks. Number forty-seven was the last house in the last turn, six houses half surrounded by the woods. With those gables and that porch, it should have been made of gingerbread.

Gene chuckled. ‘Looks a tad Addams Family. This place hasn’t seen any love for years.’ Creepers swamped the fences, two windows were boarded up and paint peeled on the front door.

The portly lady realtor in bright blue could spot newlyweds at a hundred paces. She chatted away as she stepped onto the porch and they heard the boards groan. When she opened the door, something scurried away.

Stairs creaked and they fought to open doors. The whole place smelled damp; mould had left green messages across the wall. Its last makeover was probably in Roosevelt’s time. But as Molly explored, she recognised her home-in-waiting; it was Cinderella by the fire.

‘I smell rot,’ Gene said. ‘What’s wrong with the roof?’

The realtor’s bright smile got brighter. ‘The kitchen has real potential. And the woods make it lovely and quiet.’

Molly signalled Gene with five fingers behind her back. Five was ‘adore’. Gene gave her a three, with that twist of the eyebrows she knew well.

Gene played the hard cop, but the realtor knew you always sold to the wife. ‘Look, wouldn’t this make the most darling nursery ever?’ she said, opening a door with a flourish. Yes, it would, with the view over the overgrown yard, then through big old trees; she’d paint it blue for a boy, pink for a girl.

Molly hugged Gene, full of wild baby-making thoughts.

‘I’ll be honest,’ the realtor said, ‘the place is a fixer-upper. Yes, it needs work. But the executors want a brisk sale, so that’s in the price.’

‘You’re kidding,’ Gene said. ‘I mean, it’s got a certain ruined grandeur and it’s not a bad size. But it’s a three-legged horse – it’s what’s missing that matters. That roof worries me . . .’

That evening, Gene drove them to one of their secluded places to talk over the cost. He had bought an old mud-green Ford, which already bore a new scar. Sober and on a fine day, he had misjudged a turn and scraped a wall.

Molly touched his home repair and felt a tiny whining mosquito of anger. Don’t spoil the mood.

They sat on the hood of the wounded car, looked up at the heavens and talked for twenty minutes or more as they tried to decide.

Then Molly pointed. ‘Look! A shooting star!’ A rock burned in the sky, just a bright hairline streak of falling silver.

‘Make a wish,’ Gene said, joking, ‘but don’t tell me, or it won’t come true.’

She kissed him and thought it already had. Everything was possible.

*

Gene and Molly told themselves it was a bargain if they did the repairs themselves. For months, they lived among crates and ladders and dustsheets and when they went to work, they smelled of fresh paint and old dust, no matter how much they showered. Gene slogged away at it every evening and all weekend, his dark hair dripping with sweat, while Molly worked extra shifts at the hospital to keep ahead of the bills.

Their first evening, Molly, Diane and Janice had sat on boxes and toasted Molly’s new home. Janice drank soda, pulling a face; she was pregnant again and alcohol made her ill. It had taken them years to conceive again after Chuck was born.

Friends helped when they could: Gene’s dad came down and the men fixed the roof with few words between them and no beer until afterwards. Molly stripped paper at midnight and, half-asleep, rolled paint onto everything. Sometimes Molly and Gene, exhausted, quarrelled about nothing, but they solved every problem under their old patchwork quilt.

Soon after moving in, one breakfast in that old-fashioned kitchen when she was tired and queasy and had a long shift ahead, she snapped, ‘If you want bacon, cook it yourself.’

‘Are you okay?’ he asked, and after a moment’s fear, she took the plunge.

‘I’m, you know, late.’ She wanted to conceive so much, but there had been a false alarm before which had brought disappointment so deep it shook her.

Gene held her and the seconds rolled on and on. ‘See the doctor,’ he said at last. ‘If it’s not this time, well, it’s fun to keep trying. It’ll happen.’

Soon, even a whiff of alcohol made Molly ill. Every morning the sun came up with a song and she’d be bent over a basin in a horrible and joyful sort of way. Gene wanted to touch her belly all the time.

It’s a girl, Molly said, she just knew, and they argued about names. She’d feed the baby the natural way; the baby would drink love from her own body.

Gene’s blue eyes, her hazel – the baby might have either.

The busy weeks passed, she felt the baby move and the whole world changed after that. The leaves out back started to colour, one or two canary or scarlet. Molly dreamed of a bright birthday with the trees in bloom, her daughter blowing out her candles under the flowers. What a strange new world the girl would inherit.

There were no portents of doom, no croaking crows or sinister shadows. Gene was working, bleary-eyed, and Molly was up a step-ladder, half-asleep, finishing the nursery – sunshine yellow, in case it turned out to be a boy, but she’d filled a drawer with pretty things for when she was proved right.

Someone ran a sword into her side, a burning sword, and she thought she’d faint. She swayed on the ladder but didn’t fall. No pain would let her risk that. Clinging to the steps, then the banister, while the beast gnawed at her guts, she made the long march to the phone downstairs.

By the time the ambulance came Molly was on the floor, coming around from the faint, sobbing with pain. Her baggy overalls were smeared with yellow paint, but Molly’s hand was daubed with red.

‘Call Gene,’ she sobbed, ‘call Gene.’

CHAPTER 3

Two cursed years

Someone folded up the sunshine and put it away. Dark clouds rolled down from the north and filled the marriage bed. The joy drained out of the music Molly and Gene had so loved, through the cracks between the boards and down into the earth.

When they came home from the hospital, Molly stood in front of their house, the place where it happened, with Gene’s strong arm around her shoulder.

She hadn’t given her lost girl a name. In her grief, she hadn’t been able to decide, so the child was cremated without one. That failure ached.

‘I’ll get the door,’ Gene said, and Molly felt more tears bubble up. Would they ever stop?

In the weeks that followed, even waking up felt like a betrayal. Molly walked away from the work she loved because she couldn’t face the sick and dying. Worse was seeing a healthy baby in its mother’s arms: that was a wound.

The doctor wrote her a prescription for pills that stopped her feeling anything at all, except empty-headed and dry-mouthed. She existed, that was all, too dead to rise before Gene left the house or to stay awake for his return. She couldn’t choose which book to read, or between two cans of beans in the supermarket. Trees, sunsets and pretty girls’ dresses all turned to washed-out grey.

After three weeks, she flushed the pills down the toilet and reached for a bottle of Scotch, making a different choice to dull the pain. So days ran into nights and then into months.

One blurry day among many, she woke in their bedroom, confused by the dim evening light. Gene stood by the bed with a tray. The acid taste of vomit clung to her mouth and nose, but she didn’t remember being sick. She must’ve passed out and he’d washed her and got her to bed. Tomato soup steamed in one of their best china bowls, buttered toast beside it on the matching side plate. Her stomach revolted and her head rang. She smelled of sick people and she was thirsty.

‘You’ve got to stop drinking,’ he said, red-eyed. ‘Coming home to find you like that? I’m worried half to death.’

‘I?