Free Calamity by J.T. Warren Page A

stupor, hell, out of her depression. He had pretty much let her be and gone on being Dad.
    He finished cleaning up breakfast and made Chloe her usual two slices of rye toast. While buttering them, he heard Tyler call out that he was taking Brendan to bowling and then the door sucked shut and silence settled inside the house. He felt bad about Brendan’s bowling, too; Anthony hadn’t been to any of the Saturday games since before the incident. The people there understood, of course, and one of the families was always kind enough to drive him back. At least today Tyler and Brendan could experience some brotherly bonding.
    Anthony couldn’t worry about Delaney’s SAT prep or Brendan’s bowling. He had more pressing problems waiting for him upstairs, down the hall in the bedroom whose door had seemed perpetually shut for weeks.
    The bedroom door squeaked just enough to make Anthony pause but not enough, not even close to enough, to stir Chloe from her slumber. In this room, their room, darkness reigned perpetually. The curtains had been pulled over the windows and Chloe had draped bathroom towels over them to completely obscure the sun. The first time she had done that, Anthony had told her she needed to seek help, that she was letting her good sense slip away. In response, Chloe pulled up her shirt and thrust the cesarean scar, still fresh and swollen, toward him. “And what about me? What about the life that was taken out of me and then from me? What the fuck about that?” He had not mentioned the towels again.
    The air was stale and dead. Motes of dust swam in spirals as he moved through the room to the bed. Whenever Chloe managed to will herself out of bed, to shower or eat, Anthony had used those precious minutes to tear down the towels, part the curtains, and open the windows. He hadn’t aired the room for almost four days now, and in those four days, Chloe had only showered once. He had been hopeful when he discovered her out of bed, but once she came out of the bathroom, she crawled right back into bed and went to sleep almost immediately. He couldn’t remember the last time the sheets had been cleaned.
    He set the toast on the nightstand and placed a hand on her hip. She squirmed beneath the sheet and curled into even more of a fetal position.
    He rubbed her thigh and spoke in a quiet, soothing voice, like cooing to a baby—oh, the irony. “Hey, babe. I brought your toast. You need to eat. You’ve lost more weight. I can tell. You should take a shower, so I can wash these sheets, air out the room. What do you think?”
    She mumbled something, which was a good sign. She wasn’t fully in the depths of sleep then. Anthony had discovered that while it might appear she was constantly sleeping, she actually had a few modes that varied in levels of out-of-itness . When under the heavy hand of her magic pills (her own Pillie Billy), she was completely out of it, practically comatose. When falling into or coming back out of that state, she could respond in small grunts and mumblings, and the occasional full, though sometimes incoherent, sentence. When the pill wore off and she waited too long before taking another, she became restless and irritable.
    He knew he should break her of her addiction, but he didn’t want to face the beast that would rise from the bed once her Pillie Billys were gone. He had to talk to Dr. Carroll, he knew, but he kept putting it off. What could he say but Chloe is addicted to those pills you gave her and if you don’t cut her off she’s going to sleep away the rest of her life ? He’d call later today. Sure, sure he would.
    “You want to eat some toast?” he asked.
    She squirmed under the sheet, grumbled something. She was headed into comatose country.
    “Come on, honey, just a few bites.”
    She rolled over so suddenly that Anthony’s hand was almost trapped beneath her thighs, which had shrunk into small pieces of driftwood. Face half-buried in the pillow, eyes closed, she said,