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Garret hadn’t been sleeping, and he knew it showed. He’d been sick with the craving for a drink (and it still pissed him off that Rene and Jordan had been right about him, and how publicly it had all come out), and when he did manage to fall asleep, the nightmares woke him up before long. He’d seen too many bodies to dismiss his dreams as unrealistic. He knew how little it would take to bring any of them true.
The details changed, but the image at the core remained the same – Abby on a table in the morgue, autopsy stitches leaving an ugly black vee across the pallid skin of her chest. Sometimes the heroin that had killed her directly, leaving her blemishless except for the trackmarks. Sometimes she’d been murdered like he’d seen so many junkies die before her, with a bruised throat or stabbed gut or a bullet hole marking how she’d met her end. Sometimes she clearly hadn’t been found for a while, her beautiful face all bloated and drooping.
At some point, Garret himself had begun to join dream-Abby on the slab, yellow with jaundice or bruised from a fall or mouth splattered red from an esophageal rupture. It was almost embarrassing in its lack of subtlety, and it had the perverse effect of making him crave a drink even more in the vain hope it would chase away the headache that sleep deprivation had brought on.
Then again, every time he reached for where he’d kept his bottles, he remembered the drams, so maybe they were doing their job after all. He just wished that hey had come along with fewer damn cravings.
At work, Jordan kept sneaking glances at him, clearly nervous even if she plastered on a smile whenever whenever she realized he’d caught her looking. It was hard enough to face work every day knowing that he’d nearly torpedoed a case with his own bad decisions. Now he couldn’t forget about it even if he’d been able to, with Jordan eyeing him like he might shatter at any minute.
“I’m not drinking,” he snapped when Jordan gave him one too many once-overs. “So you don’t need to look at me like that. You were right, I have a problem, I’m working on it.”
“I didn’t think you were.” She was being so careful with him, more delicate than he would have thought her capable of. That was even worse than the concern itself. “But not drinking is hard, right?”
“Stop talking like that!” Garret clenched his jaw. He didn’t have many qualms about yelling at Jordan, but the things he wanted to say would be going too far even for him, and he wouldn’t really want to say them if he didn’t have the mother of all headaches. “I’ve never heard you be this nice to anyone, even when you have the parent of a dead child in your office.”
Jordan raised an eyebrow. “Let me get this straight. You want me to be more of an asshole?”
“I want you to be normal.”
She nodded. “Okay, look. You’re clearly not having a good time with this whole quitting drinking thing. When I was in anger management, they gave me a rubber band. Told me to snap it whenever I was ready to blow.” She held out a rubber band. “I thought it might help.”
Garret slid it over his wrist, giving it an experimental pull. “And that helped?” he said skeptically.
Jordan grimaced. “I pulled it so hard it snapped and I almost lost it in an abdominal cavity. Too angry for rubber, I guess. But maybe it’ll work better for you.”
It didn’t work better for Garret, as it turned out. He made it the rest of the day with the rubber band on his wrist, but it only made him more irritated about the withdrawal cravings, and annoyed at how unprofessional it looked besides.
Another night of corpse-filled dreams didn’t help his headache, but at least Jordan wasn’t looking at him like he was a baby deer with a broken leg today. On the other hand, she cornered him with a tenacious expression he knew all too well as soon as he walked through the door, which might have been worse.
“So I’ve been doing some research,” she said, “and the rubber band thing doesn’t work for addiction. My bad on that. You want a distraction.”
“Talking to me about how much I want a drink is your brilliant plan to distract me from how much I want a drink?”
“I’m getting there!” Jordan shoved him. “You’re better when you’re doing autopsies, with something to distract you, so you just need something for the desk duties.” She held out a shopping bag.
Garret took it, peeking cautiously inside. “A Discman?”
“And a CD.” Jordan sounded weirdly excited about this. “To listen to when you’re doing paperwork. I had to ask the cashier where they kept your jazz stuff, but I think you’ll like it.”
Garret rummaged around in the bag until he caught hold of a CD case. Best of Coltrane. It would probably sound better on vinyl, but this was more portable. “So you do listen to me sometimes.”
Jordan grinned. “Let me know if it helps.”
Garret hated how much the music helped. Or maybe he didn’t. All of his emotions were filtered through an environment of ambient hatred lately, but when he thought about Jordan hunting down a Coltrane album for him, he felt happy. It took him a moment to even recognize the feeling. Jordan had switched from treating him like damaged goods to working at him like one of the tricky cases she obsessed over, and Garret had fought her on enough of those to know she never gave up.
He only told her that the music helped after she cornered him on his next lunch break. Had to keep up appearances, after all. Jordan corralled him back into his office with a strength such a scrawny woman really shouldn’t have been capable of, and sat down on the floor with her legs crossed.
“I have something else for you to try,” she said, pulling out a notepad. “Meditation.”
Garret sat down in his chair. “I hope you don’t expect me to join you on the floor.”
“You can stay up there, if you want to be a quitter about it.” Jordan laid down (the floor had to be filthy, Garret’s skin was crawling just thinking about it), holding her notepad above her face. “Focus on your breathing, and your body. Notice what it’s telling you. Allow any other thoughts to pass you by. If you find yourself fixating on anything, allow it to drift away like a leaf on the wind.”
It might have been relaxing if anyone except a loud-mouthed Bostonian was saying it. Garret’s body was telling him that it wanted its after-work bourbon, and to sleep for twelve hours. Jordan was bouncing her leg, heel clicking against the floor, and squinting at the script she’d written down.
They both gave up around the same time. Jordan sat up, meeting Garret’s eyes.
“No more meditating,” Garret said.
Jordan wrinkled her nose. “Agreed.”
Even with the meditation failure, Garret felt much better at work. Time had taken some of the bite out of his thirst, and the music and the knowledge that Jordan had his back dulled it a little more. The real trouble came at night, when he was in bed with nothing to distract him. He’d thought he was keeping the tiredness covered up with a happy (well, as happy as usual) face and copious amounts of caffeine, but Jordan must have noticed. Either that or she was determined to work her way down her list of coping mechanisms regardless of whether Garret needed them.
Jordan dumped another shopping bag on Garret’s desk. “A new hobby for you,” she said.
Garret rifled through the bag, pulling out a bag of yarn and a set of needles. “You want me to knit?”
“Something to do when you’re sitting at home hating yourself.” Jordan slid a book across his desk. “Make me a scarf or something, it’s been a cold winter.”
Garret’s first attempt at a scarf was a tangled mess that took three nights, and he had to unravel it as soon as he finished it. As he was undoing his work, he realized he hadn’t thought once about the nightmares.
His second attempt produced a perfectly suitable, albeit a bit lumpy, scarf, which he passed off to Jordan without any fanfare.
“Looks warm,” was all she said, but the next day, he saw her wear it into the office. Garret went a few days at a time without thinking about how much he wanted a drink, then a week. He kept knitting, and kept the Discman around, but he needed them less and less. Thank god for Coltrane, for yarn, and for friends who weren’t afraid to tell you when you’d fucked up.