One in Four

by Lucinda Berry

I gave my wife a wicked grin and pulled my hand out of her pants before grabbing my phone off the nightstand.

Wicked start

Maddie’s bathroom door opens, and she falls to her knees as soon as it does, spilling her into the hallway of her bedroom. She tumbles onto the carpeted floor, both hands gripping her head. One on each side. Blood pouring through her fingers. She tries to get up from her knees, but falls every time, until finally she just gives up and crumples on the ground like a wounded animal.

This had been our ritual for years. Me lying in the bath while she washed the horrible day off me.

“Do you know they have actual companies that come in and clean up your house after someone dies in it?”

“You know we don’t apologize for having emotions in this house.”

“They wanted someone with experience in providing an alternative treatment approach to getting sober than the traditional twelve-step one,”

He took her nervous smile and used it as an invitation.

We never forgot that they were all actors. Not once.

It’s why I understood the clients I worked with so well. I used to be one of them, and nobody knows how hard it is to get sober than someone who’s had to do it themselves.

“Anaphylactic shock,” she said in the same empty tone, without me having to ask. Her words fell into the room and landed with a quiet thud. “Like an allergic reaction?”

I shut off the car and just stared at the building. It was still covered in yellow police tape.

There it was. On the first page of my Verizon statement. Maddie’s number. Right there.

That’s the thing about trauma. You never get to go back to who you were before it happened. It doesn’t matter how badly you might want to or how hard you try. That person is gone. Along with that life. It’s a marker that forever changes you. And if it doesn’t? Well, then it wasn’t real trauma. Because real trauma? You’re altered forever. Anything else is just a hard time.

That was the thing about Noelle. I felt her with me always, even when we weren’t physically together. She was as natural to me as breathing.

That made Gypsy-Rose kill her mom.