Alix Ohlin - Inside

“I’m happy for you, Mitch,” she said wearily.

They’d stopped calling each other by their first names long ago, using nicknames and endearments instead, and his name falling from her lips now sounded strangely formal, distancing, even bruising. He sighed. “How’s Mathieu?”

“He’s made a friend.”

“Really? How did that happen?” Friendship wasn’t a social need Mathieu understood.

“At camp. His name is Luc. He comes over and plays on his PlayStation while Mathieu plays on his Xbox. They never talk. But they like sitting there together. Mathieu even asks me to invite Luc over.”

“Martine, that’s great. Really amazing.”

There was a pause on the other end. It could have been that she didn’t believe him, or that hearing him say “Martine” instead of “sweetheart” was as jarring to her as it had been to him. And possibly she was thinking, You should be here to see it.

“I have to go,” Martine said. “I need to get dinner.”

“Okay,” he said. “I can’t wait to see you — just three more weeks.” He was sticking to the fiction that theirs was a difficult but necessary separation, enforced by external circumstances over which he had no control, to be followed by a romantic reunion at the end of his rotation.

“I have to tell you,” she said, “I’m seeing someone else.”

“No,” he said without even thinking. He couldn’t imagine this. “I don’t believe you.”

She laughed. “You don’t have to. It’s true whether you believe it or not.”

“Is it that guy Michel at your office? Because you know he’s an asshole, Martine.”

“It’s not Michel. It’s Dr. Vendetti, actually.”

This was a name he’d never heard. “Who?”

“He’s my gynecologist.”

This information silenced him. There was so much to take in, all of it bad. That he had never once thought, in all their time together, about Martine even having a gynecologist made him dizzy with remorse. There was so much in her life he hadn’t paid attention to. And then there was the image, undesired but fully resolved, of Martine with her legs spread in stirrups, leaning back while this man put his hand inside her. He would have done anything, in that moment, to have her back, to have never left her — and this, he knew, is why she had told him.

“I have to go now,” she said. “Dinner, like I said. Take care.”

He was formulating exactly what to say next when he realized she’d hung up.

Mitch was a man of moderate habits. He didn’t smoke, rarely overate, walked as much as he could. So it took very little, when the need arose, to obliterate him.

To accomplish this goal, he bought two bottles of whiskey and invited Johnny to play cards. A short hour later he was twenty dollars down and felt the room temperature rising, so he took off his sweater. Seated across the table, Johnny smiled enigmatically, his freckled cheeks flushed red, the smoke from his continual cigarettes wreathing him cloudily, so that he looked like a magician or a wizard.

“You don’t drink much, do you?”

“I drink a regular amount.”

“You’re drunk now, and you’ve only had one drink.”

“Didn’t I have two?”

“And it isn’t easy to lose twenty bucks at gin rummy.”

“You,” Mitch said drunkenly, “are a damn card shark.”

Johnny shrugged and poured him another drink.

Mitch fought the urge to weep and tell him that he was his only friend. But it was true; in this place, right now, he was. Johnny won another twenty dollars before Mitch passed out.

It had been so long since he was hungover that he didn’t recognize the terrible commotion in his bloodstream. He thought he had food poisoning, then remembered he hadn’t eaten dinner. There was a terrible smell in the room, and when he opened his eyes he saw he’d thrown up into a bucket that Johnny must have left by his bed for just that purpose. Aching from his neck to his knees, he felt like he had a fever, so physically terrible that he couldn’t even think about Martine. Disgust — with himself, his body, and his behavior — was the closest thing to an emotion that he could summon.

Which was to say that things had worked out perfectly.

He had the day off and thought he might lie around in bed all morning, go for a walk in the afternoon, then see if Johnny was up for another night of drinking. If he could drink himself into oblivion for a couple of nights, his mind and heart might start healing, and he could sober up feeling better about Martine and Mathieu and himself. Or feeling nothing at all.

The light streaming through the thin white curtains hurt his head, and he thought about turning over, then decided this was too drastic a course of action, with potentially awful consequences. His stomach wavered unhappily, and he closed his eyes.

“You did a number on yourself,” a voice said.

He looked up to see Johnny standing next to the bed, silhouetted in the window, whose curtains he’d just thrown open.

“Get up,” he said. He seemed towering, mountainous. He left the room — for good, Mitch hoped — but was back all too soon with a can of Pepsi and several pills, which Mitch swallowed without asking what they were.

“You’ll feel better soon,” Johnny said.

“Thanks.” He was sitting up in bed now, pillows propped behind his back, feeling a sense of accomplishment for having made it halfway horizontal. Johnny sat by him for a while in silence. Every few minutes he handed him the can of Pepsi and told him to take a sip, more solicitous than Mitch would have imagined possible. As his headache slowly ebbed, Mitch realized that Johnny was waiting for the pills to take effect.

The can was half empty when Johnny said, “Heard the news this morning. About the kid you were telling me about last night. Thomasie.”

Mitch opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He closed it again, tasting on his tongue the sick trace of whiskey, the sugary bite of Pepsi. It was too early for him to feel anything yet, and he let this moment linger, knowing that soon he would feel altogether too many things. “What has he done?”

“He drank a pint of vodka and stepped onto the highway in front of a truck in the middle of the night. The trucker’s in the hospital. No note or anything.”

And there it was. Another terrible thing in a world already sick to death of terrible things. I should kill myself too, Mitch thought. His shoulders shook, and he welcomed the coming sobs — but what happened instead was a shudder of his stomach, and the Pepsi and pills lurched back out, strands of spittle webbing the bucket and his sleeves.

“I know you tried to help him,” Johnny said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“I didn’t do any good.”

Johnny took him by the hand, as if he wanted to hold it, but then curled his palm around the still-cold Pepsi can and said, “I’ll let you get dressed,” and left the room.

At the clinic, for the first time, everyone wanted to talk to him. To know what Thomasie had been thinking, what he had told Mitch about his mother. A helicopter had flown in reporters from as far away as Montreal, eager to report on Inuit problems and the crises of addiction, poverty, and fractured families. Mitch was supposed to be an expert on these issues, and his phone rang so incessantly that he finally pulled the cord out of the wall. He had nothing to say.

They held a combined service for Thomasie and his mother at the community center, where an elder delivered the eulogy and no one from the family spoke. A friend of Thomasie’s from high school played the guitar and sang a John Denver song. There was no sign of Thomasie’s father. The nurse from the clinic was there, and so was Fiona, with her parents, but when Mitch expressed his condolences she looked right through him and said nothing. He pressed his card into her palm and told her to call if she needed anything, and she crumpled it into her pocket like some useless receipt.