I Fall Apart

Lin

Nora lazed around the rest of the day.  I was disappointed she'd decided to get drunk last night, but I understood why.  She'd been a zombie the last week and getting drunk probably made her feel alive.  I could have grounded her, but I didn't want there to be any distance between us right now.  I needed her to know I was here for her.

The next week passed uneventfully.  Nora was back into the routine of school and I think it was doing her good.  She didn't seem terribly into her homework but I wasn't going to hound her at this point.  On Friday, she seemed upset when she came home from school.  I expected her to go out with her friends or with Aaron like usual, so I was surprised when she stayed in.  She locked herself in her room and refused to join us to watch a movie as a family.  I let her be and we went to bed.

I was awoken in the middle of the night by a crashing in the kitchen.  I shot up, immediately wide awake.  I figured there was a burglar so I grabbed my phone and began to creep down the hallway.  I soon realized it wasn't a burglar when I heard laughing coming from the kitchen.  Sighing, I started walking regularly down the hallway.

I was met with Nora sitting on the floor, a couple of pots and pans on the floor around her.  Plus a bottle of wine.  She looked like she'd been crying, but she was currently in the middle of a laughing fit.  I crossed my arms and looked down at her, sighing.

"Nora, what are you doing?"

"I'm-" she tried to stop herself from laughing but couldn't.  "I was just trying-"

She gave up and let herself fall onto the floor, laughing so hard she wasn't making any noise.  I reached down and picked up the empty wine bottle from the floor next to her.  I threw it in the trash.

"Nora, get up," I told her, annoyed.  She pushed her upper body up with her arms and drunkenly began to stand.  I took her hand and began to walk her down the hallway to her bedroom.  I pulled back her covers and she started laughing again.  I knew there was no point trying to talk to her at this point.  She was drunk off her ass and not responding to reason.  I pulled her covers up and turned off her light, then went back to bed.  As I climbed in, Vanessa turned around to face me.

"Was that Nora?" she asked me.

"Yep," I said.  "She drank an entire bottle of wine by herself."

She sighed. "This is the second weekend in a row she's gotten drunk," she pointed out.  "I guess we need to start locking up the alcohol."

"Yeah," I agreed reluctantly.  As I tried to get back to sleep, my mind worried.  Nora was spiraling downward.  She was choosing to deal with her feelings by getting drunk.  I would think she would know better based on her mother, but perhaps that's where she had learned it.  Vanessa and I would need to intervene before it got worse.

The next day, I woke Nora up early, definitely not willing to go easy on her this time.  I opened her blinds and told her to get up.  Before she got to the kitchen, she stopped in the bathroom and threw up.  The more natural consequences the better, I figured.  She was fifteen and her body wasn't ready for this.

As she sat at the kitchen table eating her breakfast, I joined her with my cup of coffee.  "So, V and I went to bed around 10.  You woke me up around midnight.  What happened in those two hours?"

"I found the wine," she said simply.  I nodded in agreement.

"It seems as though you did," I said.  "You're fifteen, Nora.  Why are you getting into the wine?"

"I just wanted to feel good," she said honestly.

"Nora, your mother just died from a drug overdose," I told her, as if she could forget.  "She spent a lot of your life battling alcoholism.  Why the hell are you going down that road?"