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She didn’t smoke except for when she was missing Helen acutely.
Right now it was about a pack and a half a day, and she guessed that at the rate she was going, she’d be at two by the end of the second week of what she was slowly coming to understand would be an indeterminate amount of time alone.
She’d started smoking with regularity when she got home from Vegas. The rubber band in her chest had relaxed since she found out she couldn’t be turned without her consent, less taut than it had been in weeks, considering. Consent she wouldn’t be giving, of course, not in a million years. The gaping hole of worry she’d felt about that particular aspect of whatever this fucked-up shitfuck of a situation was shaping up to be had in turn been patched over with a few pieces of plywood, which meant her other thoughts had less to run up against on their pinball machine track.
She wasn’t stupid; she knew exactly why she’d climbed behind the counter of one of the deserted gas stations she’d pillaged on the way home. She knew her hand had gravitated toward the fire engine reds (Helen, ever the Morley purist) in the locked case because she was finally coming back into her body and she suddenly, desperately missed the smell. Her smell. The smoky, heady mix of patchouli and cypress. That goddamn $43 shampoo. Break glass in case of emergency; stock up on a couple dozen cartons for a rainy day.
Once upon a time Carol wouldn’t have actually smoked them. She could probably count on two hands the number of times she’d smoked in her adult life, despite Helen’s unwavering commitment to habit. It endeared Carol in the way that she’d managed to romanticize the rest of Helen’s quirks after decades together but it never felt like it was for her, a remnant from a rebellious childhood she didn’t want to re-summon, a molotov cocktail of superstition and religious guilt that had never quite left her. Helen had her vices, and so did she.
Now there wasn’t much in her current routine that she hadn’t done with a cigarette in her hand. She smoked with her coffee. She smoked with her microwaved dinner. She smoked to dull the edges when she knew another drink would take her into morose territory. Smoked until her robe smelled as she gathered it around her shoulders when the sun went down. Smoked before bed so she could absorb it through her hair to rub off on her pillows, already panicked that Helen’s had begun to lose their scent, her scent, an irrational grasp at straws to quell what Carol felt to be a completely rational fear.
About a week ago she’d reclined under the stars and masturbated with a cigarette in her free hand but after she came she’d just laid there and wept, the red hot pinpricks of shame in her cheeks pulsing against the sting of her salty tears as the spark burned out. She hadn’t done it again.
She drew the line at smoking in the house, but sensed she wouldn’t give a shit soon enough.
She thought of Helen when she flicked the lighter, always thought of Helen. Her Helen. Hi baby. Replaying the images again and again on loop so she wouldn’t lose the memories, one of her lips always curled just so as she sucked the first clean gasps of smoke down her throat. Carol found herself imitating what she remembered through whatever fucked up osmosis muscle memory she’d absorbed from being attached at the hip to someone else for twenty-odd years. Her baby, didn’t they know, that was her goddamn baby.
She had always felt like a fraud when she joined Helen in her ritual, but of course she never would have said so out loud.
There was the odd shared smoke here and there on a vacation, the thrill of a new place making Carol plucky.
Sometimes Helen had a particularly stressful month at work, and Carol felt like what she needed most was to commiserate with a mirror of herself. She’d nab one, smoke half, and pass the rest into Helen’s free hand, her other gesticulating hastily as she roasted her rolodex’s victim du jour. They’d laugh and laugh, Carol’s body convulsing with giggles while she marveled to herself how goddamn lucky she felt to be the one to get to bolster her.
Once Carol was so drunk after an asinine award ceremony she almost couldn’t walk straight on the sidewalk, waiting for Helen to finish her post-show reward so they could call a car (the heels! it was the heels). Swaying left and right, she feebly volunteered that she couldn’t stand to see something in Helen’s mouth that wasn’t her fingers and bummed one out of pure frustration. Oh, shut up, Helen had guffawed into the night sky as she handed her the pack. You need to go to bed, is what you need.
Most other times Helen would feign surprise, clutching her pearls like a southern belle: Since when do you smoke?
Her go-to retort, since now, silly.
The memory she tried to visit least often surfaced tonight, of a spring night about a year ago. It wasn’t Helen’s actual birthday but they’d been celebrating it: four courses and two drinks apiece, a fine compromise for a night out, and Helen had had an uncharacteristic third with her chocolate cake. It was just enough to let her usual laser focus on Carol’s alcohol consumption blur like the photo of the cake she’d taken on her phone, waving her arm around maniacly and babbling about how she got the shot!
Carol knew she was foggy but she was fine, she felt totally fine to drive!, and besides, Helen didn’t know about the two highballs she’d had before they left the house, and what she didn’t know certainly wouldn’t be ruining a night out in her honor now, not after Carol had stuck her hand down Helen’s tights in the single-stall bathroom after they’d settled the bill. Helen’s eyes were wild, pupils blown, and as Carol bored into them while she pushed her up against the wall she felt like this might be as good as it could ever get for her.
She was still fine as she merged onto the highway, slowing down more than usual to yield even though there weren’t any other cars in either direction at that time of night. The radio was loud, both of them singing along to bits of Melissa Etheridge’s “I’m The Only One” (a song Carol would dry-heave if she heard now). One of her hands was on Helen’s thigh and she focused hard on keeping the other steady on the wheel, coaxing the car to stay to the right of the dotted white lines reflecting in her high beams. Or were they yellow?
Helen’s head bobbed against the back of her seat, gently humming the chorus with her eyes closed, a squinty smile teasing up the left side of her face. Carol somehow realized she’d made it to their exit and signaled to pull off, taking both hands back to the wheel.
Babe, wrong side, she thought she heard Helen murmur, her eyes fluttering open.
Baby, more insistent. She sat up.
The turn signal blinked right while the car swerved to the left, the wheel slipping from Carol’s grasp as she limply attempted to whip it back to center. Her name was the last thing she heard before the airbags deployed.
She’s grateful the rest is murky.
She most vividly remembers the hallway and the cold plastic chair. By that point she had found Helen again after somewhere along the way they’d been separated for exams. She remembers waving the young nurse away, insisting she was fine, it was fine, just a couple of scratches up and down her arm, she just needed to find her partner, her name was Helen Umstead, she’s my partner—my wife, it’s her b–birthday, stammering out the words in a staccato flurry of panic while someone else took her vitals. For some reason she kept thinking about those bright red stickers you saw on pallets at wholesale stores that read “THIS IS A SET, DO NOT SEPARATE.” Fuck, didn’t they know? They couldn’t have known. But how didn’t they know!
She limply held Helen’s hand as they waited for someone to formally discharge them. She had no idea what time it was or what had happened to their car. She knew that they were fine, logically, but physically, her stomach was clenched in a knot and suspended somewhere above her midsection. Yes, her mind repeated, they were fine, fine with a lowercase f, but Helen had a black eye, a prescription for oxy, and doctor’s orders to take it easy for a week or two. Carol didn’t have anything, comparatively, except what felt like an angry icicle of booze and bile in her chest.
She remembers thinking that she couldn’t have said sorry enough, so in the moment, she chose not to say it at all.
I need a fucking cigarette, Helen croaked, her head rising from where she had let it slump on Carol’s shoulder.
Anything you want, Carol whispered, tenderly stroking her thumb.
As the sun rose up over mountains in the hospital parking lot, the morning light crisp and harshly orange, Carol insisted on holding the cigarette steady in Helen’s mouth and lighting it for her while she sat below on a bench. Her fingers trembled as she cupped them to Helen’s cheek to protect the igniting flame, carefully avoiding the bruise that was already angrily purpling near her eye. She didn’t know what else to do with her hands after that, and she had to do something, so she lit one for herself and paced methodical circles on the curb while she wondered what would come next.
I’m sorry, she thought, the two words stuck in her throat with a puff of smoke. I’m sorry this is as good as it could ever get.
The court-mandated interlock device was installed a month later, two weeks after the car finally came out of the shop. Carol had had to call and schedule the installation appointment herself. More insulting was the fact that she’d had to pay a hundred and sixty dollars plus tax to do it and oh, right, there was also the cost per month for that piece of fucking plastic junk.
She’d have done it a hundred and sixty times, though, if it meant she could have avoided Helen’s gaze in the front hall on the way to the door when the bald, polo-clad man from the company that’d fleeced her rang the bell two business days later.
After it was done, and he’d left, she’d found Helen out on the back porch, glazed donut eyes staring off into the distance. She didn’t turn her head when Carol slid open the porch door and Carol didn’t try to make eye contact either as she wordlessly snatched a cigarette from the pack lying on the wooden dining table and gently filched the lighter from Helen’s back pocket. They’d stood side by side, exhaling silently in the fading June daylight, then went back into the house and danced around each other for the rest of the night until dinner necessitated using their words.
The barely detectable, undeserved twinge of compassion she had seen under her wife’s disappointment in the foyer was what had finally made Carol cry that night, looking at herself for what felt like the first time in weeks in the bathroom mirror after she was sure Helen had fallen asleep.
Her last cigarette from before had been the night Helen died.
Helen had been the one to suggest they go out for a drink to blow off some steam, an olive branch for a job well done fulfilling what she knew had been a soul-sucking month of obligation for Carol, but Carol had been the one to suggest they go outside to get some air. And she’d thought about that on and off in an obsessive-compulsive spiral every few hours for the last twenty-six days.
Her bones had felt too big for her body at the end of the tour, floating outside herself, a deflated ghost levitating in the early evening darkness. It felt like when she routinely got too absorbed in writing and came to hunched over her desk in the dim glow of her computer, her shoulders having somehow shrugged all the way up to her ears hours ago without her noticing.
It wasn’t surprising or new; she’d just needed to shake herself out. She thought watching Helen blow smoke rings in the quiet parking lot while lightly ribbing all the special flavors of psychotic, asshat fan they’d just been forced into proximity with might help accelerate the process. Their relentless post-tour debriefs were one of the only things she really liked about going away.
(That, and on this most recent tour in particular, the fact that she couldn’t drive.
In the few cities where they’d touched down long enough to necessitate renting a car, Carol knew that Helen wouldn’t have let her drive even if she’d offered, because Helen was a stickler when it came to contracts and Carol wasn’t on the rental agreement because of course she couldn’t be, not anymore. They hadn’t exactly talked about it in the cramped airport vestibules; it was just what had happened when Helen took their turn at the desk the first time and then it was an unspoken rule that followed them around the country.
The upside was that there finally wasn’t a grim specter of risk hanging over their heads for a few weeks, no mental gymnastics for Carol to perform every time they needed to run an errand or search for a halfway decent breakfast spot that wasn’t inside of a strip mall.
No need to worry the minute she woke up whether she’d have to debase herself enough that day to blow into a plastic tube in order to do something as simple as run to the store for a carton of eggs, Helen always watching from the front window as she backed out of the driveway. No white-hot thrum of embarrassment to tickle the insides of her ears as she plodded through the dairy aisle.
It meant she could exhale the tiniest bit, even as the rest of the familiar baggage that always came on tour trundled along silently in the trunk like it always did.)
And look where that got her.
Carol came back to herself, one hand snuffing the last of her latest cigarette on the side of the adirondack chair (who gave a shit if the wood warped?), the other limp in her lap on top of an empty carton.
Another pack gone. She started to do the mental math for how many she had left at this point but gave up. Who cares, who fucking cares; it’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
Soon she would peel herself upright, up the stairs, attempt to sleep, face burrowing into her pillow.
And tomorrow morning she’d be back here again, lips curling around yet another familiar feeling she couldn’t quite name.