Under the Influence by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online Page A

pizza. But if we felt like it we might just make a big bowl of popcorn with butter and call that dinner. We’d curl up on my bed with blankets while I read to him—fantasy mostly, or our book of Shel Silverstein poems—and if he fell asleep, I’d let him stay there.
    At first I only drank on the bad nights—if Kay had called up for one of her rare check-ins from Florida, or if my car had broken down and the bill wiped out my savings account. The night I learned the news (conveyed by our son) that his dad’s wife, Cheri, was having a baby (and later, when the news came of her birth) I could feel that bottle calling to me.
    I waited until I’d read Ollie his book and turned off the light. Then I took my bottle down from the top shelf of the cupboard. Peeling off the foil, turning the corkscrew, I could already feel the warm, comforting fog that first glass would produce in me. In the absence of an actual man in my life, the wine served almost like a companion.
    Ollie was a few months shy of his fifth birthday when the big trouble happened. It was one of those nights—increasingly common now—that I’d polished off a whole bottle. I was half asleep on the couch, but one sound I never missed was my son’s voice. He was calling out to me.
    Ollie lay in bed holding his right side and groaning. Wine or no wine, I knew the story with an inflamed appendix. You had to get itout. I carried Ollie to the car and laid him in the seat next to me with a blanket. Buckled him in.
    We were just a few minutes from the hospital when I saw the blue light flashing. My first thought: I’d been speeding. Once the policeman saw Ollie and heard where we were headed, he’d understand.
    But the policeman wanted me to get out of the car.
    â€œLet me see you walk a straight line,” he said.
    â€œI have to get my son to the hospital,” I told him. “He’s got appendicitis.”
    â€œYou aren’t driving this kid anywhere,” he said. “If your boy’s sick, I’m calling an ambulance.”
    He had me count backward from one hundred. He held a finger in front of my face and asked me to follow its movement back and forth with just my eyes. From the front seat, I could hear Ollie calling to me and moaning.
    The ambulance pulled up a couple of minutes later. By this point the police officer had put me in handcuffs. As awful as this felt, worse was knowing my son was in pain and I couldn’t be with him. Even hurting as he was, Ollie had seen the policeman snap the cuffs on my wrists.
    Ollie knew about police from the movies, mostly, where the people they caught had usually done something terrible. “My mom’s not a bad guy,” he said. Sick as he was, and holding his belly, he was crying louder now, not only from the pain. The last thing I saw as they pushed me in the backseat of the police cruiser was Ollie lying flat on the stretcher as they slid it into the back of the ambulance and closed the doors. On the way to the station, the police officer asked for the phone number of my son’s father.
    So it was Dwight who was there for the surgery, and afterward, when our son woke up. His mother, my former mother-in-law, called me later. “I thank God he was looking out for Oliver, Helen,” she said. “Because clearly, you weren’t.”
    Four days later—with Ollie home again, while I was waiting for the suspension of my license to go into effect—I received the letter from alawyer reporting my ex-husband’s intention to file for full custody of our son. “Evidence of unfit motherhood,” said the complaint.
    A guardian ad litem was appointed to investigate—which meant Ollie had to be interviewed multiple times. As little as I could afford it, I hired a lawyer—a move that put me more than thirty thousand dollars in debt. I bought a suit for the day we went to court—the most conservative outfit I could find