Noelle put both hands over her mouth. She held them there. Then she took them away and laid them flat on the table again, and he saw that she was doing it on purpose, holding herself still the way you hold a ladder for someone.
"I'm going to tell you all of it," she said. "And I'm not going to ask you for anything. I just need you to let me get through it, because if you stop me I don't think I'll be able to start again."
He nodded.
She unfolded the paper. He saw that it was a list, written in her round hand, and that the hand got less round as it went down the page. She had been sitting here writing it while he was upstairs, or before he came home, or both.
"Seventeen days," she said. "The first one was the Tuesday after your party. You'd left for Baltimore at six in the morning. I came home from work at two-thirty and I opened the refrigerator for a seltzer and the bottles were there, and I'd been looking at them for three days, every time I opened that door, and I'd been telling myself they didn't register. And they registered. I poured a glass. I told myself I'd pour it down the sink. I stood there holding it over the sink for—I don't know. A long time. Linnie's bus was coming at three. And I drank it." She looked at the paper, not at him. "And then I had another one. And then I brushed my teeth and met the bus."
She went down the list. She did not spare herself. Wednesday, two glasses, after work, before the bus. Thursday, the rest of the first bottle, while Linnie was at swim, sitting in the car in the rec center parking lot, and then driving her home. She stopped there and looked up.
"I drove her," she said. "I drove her home from swim on that Thursday with half a bottle of wine in me. Four blocks. I need you to know that. I need it to be on the table."
"Okay," he said. It came out of him like something pulled.
The weekend he was home, nothing. She had held on through the weekend by her fingernails, she said, because he was there, because it was easier with him there, because she was ashamed. The Monday after, the second bottle. Tuesday, he left. Tuesday was the first time she bought something herself, at the state store on the far side of the square in Lancaster, where nobody from Lititz would see her. She'd bought vodka because vodka didn't smell, which was a lie every drinker told herself and every child in the house knew better. She'd poured it into a Smartwater bottle because she knew he'd never drink it. She said that and something passed between them, almost a smile, horrible, and went away.
"I told myself every day was the last one," she said. "Every single morning I wrote the number. I stood at that refrigerator with the marker and I wrote the next number, and I wrote a word under it, and I told myself, today it's true again. Today I'll pour it out and tonight I'll go to a meeting and tomorrow I'll start over. I could have written one, Emery. Every morning I could have wiped the board and written the number one. I couldn't do it. I couldn't stand there in the kitchen and write a one where she would see it. So I wrote eight hundred and forty-six, and eight hundred and forty-seven, and every morning it was a little easier." She put her finger on the paper. "Today I wrote brave."
He looked over at the refrigerator. From here, at this angle, in the overhead light, you couldn't see the dots at all.