Used While I Pretended to Sleep novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Tablet
Roxy palms her sleeping tablet, and at 12:40 four men she knows come into her room; she keeps her eyes shut, and Abel says Byron was the one who asked them up.
At 10:30 on Friday night, Byron handed me the tablet and a glass of water, same as always.
I put the tablet on my tongue where he could see it.
I drank the water, swallowed once, and smiled.
The tablet was still pressed against my gum.
"Sleep well, Rox," he said.
"You too."
He stood in my doorway a second longer than he needed to.
He was forty-six, my mother's husband, and the biggest man I had ever lived with.
He had been handing me this tablet every night for thirteen months.
He had never once checked my mouth.
When his door closed across the hall, I spat the tablet into a tissue and put it in the nightstand drawer with the others.
The drawer stuck, as it always did.
Every Sunday morning it was open an inch, and I would shut it, sure I had left it that way reaching for my phone charger.
I had stopped swallowing the tablets six weeks ago.
Roxy Kittredge, twenty-five years old, lying to the only family she had left.
They made me sleep, but the sleep felt like being buried, and I woke up in it crying for my mother.
I hadn't told anyone.
Telling Byron meant telling Denton, because Denton wrote the prescription, and Denton would want to talk about grief.
So I lay in the dark every night with my eyes open and my breathing slow, and I listened to the house.
Tonight it was loud.
Byron's three oldest friends had driven up from the city for the summer's first Friday, the way they would every week until Labor Day.
I heard cards, and ice, and Abel Finch's laugh, which carried through floors.
I heard them go quiet around midnight and climb the stairs to the guest rooms.
I heard the house settle.
At 12:40 my doorknob turned.
I have never been so awake in my life.
I kept my eyes almost closed, and my breath slow and even, and through my lashes I saw the hall light cut a long yellow bar across the floor.
Four shapes filled it.
"She's out," Byron whispered.
I knew his voice in any dark.
"Are you sure?" That was Abel.
"She's had it every night for a year. She doesn't wake for thunder."
"Humor me," Denton said.
Denton Radcliff was a surgeon, and he came to the bed first and sat down on the edge of it.
I smelled his soap and the rye on his breath.
Two fingers settled against the inside of my wrist, cool and dry.
My pulse was racing.
I thought about the lake in winter, flat and white and silent, forcing my breathing slow and steady until my heartbeat settled.
Denton waited a long time.
"Sixty-eight," he said. "She's under."
"Told you," Byron said, and his voice cracked on it.
Nobody answered him.
I understood then what room I was in, and who was standing in it.
My stepfather.
The man who had carried my mother's boxes up the porch steps and had held my head while I threw up at her funeral.
The doctor who told me to call him anytime.
Tucker Harland, who fixed my bike chain when I was twenty-one, standing in the doorway with his hands hanging.
And Abel, who sold boat slips and called me kiddo.
Four men I had known for four years.
None of them was telling the others to leave.
My mouth went dry, and my whole body wanted to sit up and scream.
I could have.
I could have switched on the lamp, and they would have run, and in the morning I would have been the girl who made a scene about the men in her mother's house.
I would never have found out why they came.
And under the fear, down low where I did not want to look, something I had no name for was holding very still.
So I kept my eyes shut.
The bed dipped on the far side, and a heavy hand lifted the blanket off my legs.
Cool air touched my knees, and my thighs.
"God," Abel breathed. "Look at her."
Someone in the doorway let out a rough breath through his teeth.
"Byron," Denton said quietly. "Last chance. We can walk out."
Nobody walked out.
Abel's hand landed on my ankle, warm and heavy, and began to slide up.
I did not move.
"Relax, Denton," Abel said. "It's not like she'll remember. And you're the one who asked us up here, Ron. Don't get shy now."
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