Dying Breath. Wendy Corsi Staub

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      She stopped drinking a few days after Mike moved out—but not necessarily because her husband had decided, out of the blue, that he no longer wanted to live here and she found herself alone with Tess.

      Maybe she would have eventually figured out that she couldn’t continue to numb herself with booze.

      The reality: she stopped because one morning she woke up, threw up, and understood what was wrong with her before the test confirmed it.

      Pregnant.

      In this life of hers, filled as it’s been with stupefying twists and turns, that was one of the most monumental shocks of all.

      It was second only to her startling recognition of Paul Delgado’s face on that mailbox flier on a dreary afternoon more than fourteen years ago—and the realization that her visions involved real people. That the terrified pleading she heard might very well have been their last words; that the ragged gasps that filled her head might have been their dying breaths.

      For a long time after Paul Delgado, she routinely scoured the fliers from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, faces on milk cartons, countless websites on the Internet. All too often, she recognized images of strangers who had vanished without a trace.

      Her visions came to her before the victims disappeared, in every case. Cam was seeing their future.

      Yet she never found a way to identify any of the victims in advance, or figure out exactly when or where any of her premonitions would come to pass.

      Powerless to warn them and prevent the horrific events, all she could do was watch the prophetic dramas unfold.

      She made painstaking notes, writing down every detail in a series of Marble notebooks she kept hidden away in her closet.

      And, filled with dread, she simply waited…

      Wondering if perhaps the cruelest fate of all was her own: helpless, hopeless witness to the inevitable.

      Chapter Two

      Rain started falling an hour ago, pattering into the metal gutters beneath the roof of the brick Colonial. It cools the damp breeze that ruffles the white curtains at the window above the sink and lightly mists Cam’s skin as she stands beside it.

      Dinner finished, Tess is upstairs doing her homework.

      Cam stares out the window as she drinks a glass of milk, Dr. Advani’s orders. She never could stomach the stuff, not even in cereal. She’d pour just enough into the bowl to moisten the flakes, then she’d drain it off the spoon before every bite.

      Just another of my charming little quirks, she thinks wryly, trying not to gag as she drains the last few drops.

      She drank a glass every day of her first pregnancy, too. Back then, though, it was chocolate milk.

      This time around, she seems to have developed an aversion to chocolate, of all things. Usually, she needs a daily fix—preferably of her favorite: Godiva. Now she can’t even stand the smell of anything cocoa-related.

      Last time, it was coffee she couldn’t stomach. And red meat. And garlic. But only for the first three months; then it all passed, along with the morning sickness.

      Hopefully that will happen this time as well.

      Right now, it’s been pure torture getting up and moving in the mornings, and has been ever since St. Patrick’s Day, when she discovered her pregnancy. The morning after, Cam did her best to muffle the sound of being sick in the master bathroom. She forced down some crackers before dropping an unsuspecting Tess at school.

      Then she drove straight over to the musty basement of an Elks Club, where she uttered the stunning words for the first time.

      My name is Cam, and I’m an alcoholic.

      The moment she said it aloud, she felt an enormous flood of relief sweep through her.

      Yet with that came a trickle of doubt and disbelief as well.

      An alcoholic? How could she be an alcoholic?

      It wasn’t as though she were a barfly with a string of DUIs and cirrhosis of the liver.

      She never even drank in public, for God’s sake.

      And she never once got behind the wheel after a drink.

      She never drank herself blind drunk, vomited, blacked out.

      Never did any of the uncivilized, abhorrent, illegal things so many people associate with alcoholism.

      She was just…comfortably numb. That was it. That was all.

      Like the old Pink Floyd song her father frequently listened to when she was growing up.

      Obviously, the lyrics spoke to him.

      It wasn’t until Cam was an adult facing demons of her own that the lyrics spoke to her as well.

      “I hear you’re feeling down.

      Well I can ease your pain…”

      It took her a long time, though, to figure out how it worked.

      To realize, as her father had, that booze was a guaranteed escape chute.

      When she drank, she could block out not just the painful memories of her past, but the frightening visions that tormented her for all those years.

      The premonitions were fewer and farther between. Whenever one did strike, it would be more fragmented than before. A muffled voice, a blurred face, perhaps a snatch of scenery. Wrapped in a liquor-induced security blanket no chilling premonition could possibly penetrate, Cam grew more and more detached from the imperiled strangers in her head.

      Finally, the visions subsided altogether. She hasn’t had one since Tess was a toddler.

      Now that she’s shed the security blanket, though, she’s been holding her breath, waiting.

      Praying that if—when—the premonitions start up again, she’ll be strong enough to stay sober.

      How many times has she tried to get to this point before, and fallen off the wagon? She’d never made it to an actual AA meeting before March, let alone admitted to anyone, least of all herself, that she has a problem.

      No, but she did attempt to cut way back on the booze whenever Mike made her feel self-conscious about it; when he warned her that it was coming between them.

      Only now that she’s stopped can she see that drinking didn’t just protect her from the visions; it insulated her emotions—all her emotions. Fear and sorrow, yes, but pleasure and joy as well. Eventually, she was going through the motions of marriage—and, yes, occasionally even motherhood. But it was the marriage that suffered most, because she mostly drank at night, when Mike was around and her time with Tess had wound down.

      She never went cold turkey until now but she did manage, more than once, to limit herself to a single glass of wine with dinner—not СКАЧАТЬ