In my medicine cabinet

The high-pitched clackety, pingy sounds reached Elliott’s ears and he opened his eyes with a pop and looked at the white ceiling, as bare as the dull thud in his heart. The cascading sounds of doom could mean only one thing. Briony had reached for the pills in the medicine cabinet.

He turned his head to the right. Yes, Briony’s half of the bed was empty, as empty as it had felt last year when she’d overdosed on seconal and gone to Soft Landings for rehab and then come home, eyes as vacant as a recently converted scientologist. Would it start again, Elliott wondered, starting to feel the pressure of the heavy blanket on his stomach, the quickening of his heart rate, and the familiar nauseous breath of air floating across the back of his throat. He tossed the blanket off his belly and lifted his knees up. That’s how he managed his nighttime panic attacks.

He heard the quiet click of the medicine cabinet door shut – not a casual closing, of course, but a gentle swoosh intended to conceal the fact from anyone within earshot. Briony tiptoed back into the bedroom.

“I woke up, feeling nauseated again,” Elliott said. “Were you able to sleep?”

“No,” Briony said. Was it Elliott’s imagination, or had her voice lowered since rehab? When they’d gotten married, she spoke as high as Julie Andrews, but lately sounded more like Bea Arthur. “The usual rough night for me. How long have you been awake?”

“Just a minute,” Elliott said. He saw the hypnotized expression in Briony’s face, the same one he observed during that dreadful year leading up to Soft Landings. She climbed into bed next to him. “The nausea will pass. It always does after a few hours.”

Briony began to snore, light at first and then sawing away. Elliott crept out of bed, grabbed a plastic wastebasket, and went into the den with it to do crosswords and anagrams. He always wanted to vomit when these attacks hit him, but his body always retained the nausea, retained the panic. He knew, even as the nausea began to rise, as his heart began to race, that his body wouldn’t let him expel this terrible feeling.