Spin

by Catherine McKenzie

  “Wrong again.”

  He grins. “I’m out of guesses. Shoot.”

  “What does E. stand for?”

  His smile drops. “It doesn’t stand for anything.”

  “So, your name is E., like the letter, full stop?”

  “No . . . that’s just something Amber calls me. You know, like Eric on Entourage ? Because of the red hair and . . .”

  “Because you work for Connor?”

  “I guess.”

  “So, what’s your real name?”

  “It’s Henry.”

  I roll his name around my tongue. “Henry. I like it. It suits you.”

  “Thanks, Kate, Katie, whichever. Anyway, I should get to my run . . . unless . . . did you want to join me?”

  “I already went this morning.”

  “Maybe some other time?”

  “Sure.”

  He lays his hand on my shoulder and squeezes gently, then leaves through a set of French doors that lead outside.

  As I watch him jog easily over the lawn I can still feel the heat of his hand on my shoulder. Is this a good thing, or a sign that I should avoid any further contact?

  I think the evidence to date (liking it when he touches me, awkward silences, grinning at each other) points toward avoid-any-further-contact, since I’m, you know, in rehab, and spying on his boss’s girlfriend.

  Yeah. Henry is definitely off limits.

  Chapter 11

  Apple Peels and Other Fairy Tales

  The scraping of a branch against my window wakes me from one of those vivid, realistic dreams that starts to fade as soon as you wake up. Only the taste of it remains, and this dream tastes like alcohol. Tequila shots, I believe.

  Why, oh why, did I have to wake up?

  I open my eyes. I can tell by the total blackness that it’s late, late, late.

  I peel back the covers and walk toward the window. I peer at the manicured courtyard. The sky is a bowl of stars that falls right to the horizon. Black clouds whip across the moon.

  I feel hot and feverish. I reach through the bars and pry open the window. The cold night air rushes in. The wind feels good against my cheek.

  I climb back into bed and search out my nighttime friends, the cracks in the ceiling. I try to reach back into my dream, to rejoin the party, but something about it feels off and wrong.

  Oh God. I didn’t just have a user-dream, did I? No, no, of course not. Yes, I dreamt I was drinking, getting drunk even, but my dream was nice, right? Fun, even. Nothing like Amy’s drugmares.

  God, I miss Amy. Without her, the room feels empty and lonely. I hope she’s doing well, and that take-three sticks.

  I shut my eyes firmly, willing myself to sleep.

  It works eventually.

  It’s Day Eleven: Identifying Patterns of Behavior. I’m standing on the path, trying to psych myself up for my run.

  OK. Eight minutes today. No more of this wimpy five or six minutes shit. Just find the longest song you have and run for its entire length. I scroll through the songs on my iTouch. The winner seems to be “Hotel California.”

  OK, then. Although . . . do I really want to listen to a song about a place you can never leave given where I am right now?

  I look for the next-longest song. It’s the Pogues’s version of “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” clocking in at 8:11. No, no that’s worse. Shane MacGowan’s whiskey-soaked voice is not going to take my mind off the lingering taste of last night’s maybe-user-dream.

  “Hotel California” it is.

  I stretch my last stretch, place the earphones in my ears, and put one foot in front of the other. It’s as painful as it is every other day; running just doesn’t seem to get any easier. At least not for me.

  I remember the last time I danced to this song. It was with Zack at our high school graduation dance. I knew I was leaving for the city right after I threw my mortarboard in the air. My university classes didn’t start for several months, but I wanted some time to acclimatize and find a job to help me finance the tuition my parents couldn’t afford. I’d told Zack I was leaving but not that I didn’t want to try the long-distance thing. He’d been bugging me and bugging me to let him come with me to the city for the summer, and I kept putting him off. He brought it up again as we twirled in the gym. I’m not sure what it was, but I snapped and told him no.

  It happened right when the song speeds up. You know, where the drums kick in and you can’t slow dance properly? He let his hands drop from my waist and shrugged off my arms. A minute later, the song was over and he wasn’t mine anymore.

  The drums kick in, and I pick up the pace to match it. Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

  The song ends as I come to the gravel road that passes through the front gates. Amber’s standing in the middle of the road with her arms crossed over her chest, staring at the gates again. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail. I pull the earphones from my ears and look at Amy’s watch.

  Eight minutes. I did it! And not a monkey in sight.

  “What’s up?” I ask.

  She peels her eyes from the gate. “Not much. Thanks for yesterday by the way.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  She looks me up and down. “Your face is awfully red . . .”

  “A hazard of healthy living.”

  “E. gets all red when he goes running too. Red hair, red face, red all over.”

  “Right. So, where did they take you yesterday?”

  “Just to my room. You?”

  “I got a lecture from Dr. Houston.”

  She smirks. “About how you should stay away from bad influences like yours truly?”

  “He did say something like that, actually.”

  “Figures.” She kicks at the ground with her foot. “Don’t you think Connor looks like shit?”

  Yes. The right answer to this question is yes.

  “I guess. I’ve never met him, though, so I don’t really have anything to compare to.”

  She looks unhappy. “I wish I could say the same.”

  “What was that all about yesterday?”

  “Just telling it like it is.”

  “Well, at least you got over your stage fright.”

  “With a little help from my friends.” She flicks her eyes toward the front gates again.

  “You figure a way out of here yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I know one way.”

  Her head snaps towards me. “What?”

  “Just do your time. They’ll let you out of here eventually.”

  A trace of a smile crosses her lips. “You’re no help at all.”

  “I’d like to come back to something we touched on the other day, Katie,” Saundra says during our session. “About your family.”

  I lean back in my chair and stretch out my legs so they touch the front of Saundra’s desk.

  Isn’t therapy supposed to involve couches? I could really use a lie-down right about now.

  “What about my family?”

  “Are you close to them?”

  “Not particularly.”

  She takes a sip of coffee from her white DOG LOVER! mug. “Why do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know. We used to be, but something changed along the way.”

  “Because of your drinking?”

  A wave of tiredness passes through me. “No, it was . . . before that.”

  “Can you situate it?”

  I think back, past the Christmases and birthdays when I stayed away. Before all of the phone calls from my mother I avoided or half-listened to. Pre whatever it was that made my sister go from worshipping me to blaming me for everything that’s gone wrong in her life.

  “I guess it was when I went away to university, or before that even. I just remember feeling like my parents were something I had to run away from. And whenever I came back, I felt further away from them.”

  She watches me over the rim of her mug. “But yet you chose a facil
ity that was close to them when you decided to get help.”

  Right. But that was Amber’s mistake, not mine.

  “I didn’t think about it like that.”

  “Do you think that maybe, subconsciously, you knew they were part of what you needed to get better?”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible.”

  “You should consider asking them to come to the family therapy program. I think you would really benefit from it.”

  My body tenses. “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Do you want to be close to them again?”

  “Everyone wants a happy ending, right? Complete with loving parents, the perfect man, and a white picket fence.”

  She smiles. “I’ll bet that feels a long way away right now.”

  “Sure. I mean, you can’t get a happy ending if you’ve never been in love.”

  Oh God, why did I say that? My lack of sleep is making me punch-drunk. And everyone knows that drunks do and say stupid things.

  “Do you want to be close to someone?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “So, what’s keeping you from getting there?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I haven’t met anyone I want to spend time with long term.”

  “Well, where do you usually meet men?”

  Somehow I knew it was going to come to this . . . and yet I still brought the subject up. Clever, clever.

  I should give this conversation my full attention before I let something worse loose.

  I sit up straight. “Well . . . in bars mostly . . .”

  “And what kind of men do you meet in bars?”

  “The kind you’d expect.”

  “Meaning?”

  I shrug. “They’re just immature and looking for a good time, for the most part.”

  “Have you ever had a serious boyfriend?”

  “Yes, two.”

  “Did the end of these relationships have anything to do with your issues with alcohol, or was this before?”

  “Not the first one . . .”

  Nope. I was just running away from him and the promise ring I’d heard through the small-town gossip mill that he’d bought me.

  “And the other?” she persists.

  I wish I could deny it, but . . . shit, alcohol was totally the reason Greg and I broke up. Greg was my boyfriend in university, and he was smart, cute, funny, and into me. We dated for two years, but I got drunk at a party one night and fooled around with this guy who I didn’t even like. I thought we could work things out, but Greg couldn’t trust me anymore.

  “Yes, maybe.”

  “Maybe how?”

  I sink down in my chair. “I cheated on him when I was drunk, and he broke up with me.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “I was sad for a while.”

  “But you weren’t in love with him?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  For a million reasons that are way too depressing to say out loud.

  “Because I never noticed how he peeled an apple,” I say instead.

  “What does that mean, Katie?”

  “It’s just how love gets described in the movies. Like in Sleepless in Seattle . . .” This is the movie they showed us last night. “Tom Hanks’s character is musing about why he fell in love with his dead wife, and he says that it was because she could peel an apple in one long strip, or something like that. And I was reading something similar in a book recently, only that was about peeling an orange . . . anyway . . . I’ve just never felt like the way someone peels fruit would be a reason to spend the rest of your life with them.”

  Saundra’s eyes grow serious. “I don’t think your idea of love should be based on what people say in the movies.”

  “I know, but don’t you think the core of what they’re saying is kind of true?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That love should be simple, I guess.”

  “Love isn’t simple, Katie, and neither is life. Things that are worth having are sometimes complicated, and they evoke complicated emotions. You know, one of the reasons people often turn to alcohol or drugs is that they can’t deal with complications.”

  “But everyone here’s life is complicated. I mean, look at what Candice tried to do.”

  “Yes, of course. Because alcohol and drugs don’t actually make things less complicated. You have to make room in your life for a little messiness, Katie, if you want to fall in love. And also if you want to stay sober.”

  We finish up our session, and I wander through the fragrant courtyard, thinking about our conversation. Something Saundra said isn’t sitting right with me. Is messiness really the answer? Hasn’t my life been messy enough up till now? I mean, I’ve slept with twenty-seven men. Isn’t that a little messy?

  My first time was with Zack, of course. We did it in his single boyhood bed on a Sunday afternoon while his parents were visiting his grandmother. It was uncomfortable, he was sweet, we used a condom. By the time I ran away, we’d had sex one hundred and forty-two times. Yes, I counted. No, I didn’t write it down, I just have a good memory. Zack thought it was weird that I counted too.

  It got easier after that to bring sex into a relationship. Sometimes, not a lot of times, but a few times, I went home with someone I met that same night. Once, I didn’t even know the guy’s name. Of course, alcohol was involved. But it wasn’t a big deal to me at the time. In fact, I remember the twenty-two-year-old me being impressed that I did it. And part of me still kind of is.

  But with the exception of Zack and Greg, I didn’t care about any of those guys. They were just a distraction, something to help me pass the time until my real life began.

  So, I know what messy is, and it isn’t love. No, love is supposed to be simple. It’s supposed to be about brushing raindrops off eyelashes, and looks across a crowded room. It’s supposed to be about watching a shooting star, or the way a leaf falls off a tree and floats to the ground.

  It’s supposed to be about apple peels.

  Chapter 12

  Messages Sent and Received

  “I’m a method writer,” Mary says during group a few days later. “I take on the persona of each of my characters so I can write them as real people.” She stops, looking uncertain.

  We’re sitting in our usual folding chairs in a sloppy circle facing Saundra. The coffeepot is bubbling loudly on the sideboard. The sun hasn’t been out in a couple of days, and there’s a persistent fog seeping down from the mountains. Today it’s enveloped the lodge, and the view out the picture window looks like we’re in a tree house in a rain forest.

  “Go on, Mary,” Saundra encourages.

  Mary tucks her hands into her oversized fisherman’s sweater and takes a deep breath. “The book I was writing is about a runaway who’s living on the streets. She keeps her innocence for a while, but then she gives in to the temptations around her. She becomes a heroin addict.”

  I glance around the room. The other patients look bored, staring into their coffee mugs, slumped in their chairs with their eyes on the ceiling, but The Producer perks up when Mary uses the word “heroin.”

  “What did you want to tell us, Mary?” Saundra encourages. Her salt-and-pepper hair has gone wild in the humidity. It’s barely being contained by a wide, black headband that has a line of dogs chasing one another across it.

  Mary looks and sounds miserable. “I was so into getting every detail exactly right that I . . . I started using heroin.”

  “And you became addicted?”

  Mary nods.

  “Say it, Mary. Admit it.”

  Tears start to trickle down her lined face. “I’m addicted to heroin.”

  Mr. Fortune 500 gives an audible snort of disdain, and The Banker snickers next to him.

  Mary wipes her tears away and shoots them a dirty look. “Oh, fuck off, Ted.”

  “Did you want to say something, Ted?” Saundra says.

  He holds up the palm of his right
hand and examines his fingernails. “I would’ve thought her story would be more impressive, that’s all.”

  “What the hell has that got to do with anything?” Mary says, leaning forward angrily. “This isn’t story hour. This is group fucking therapy.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t entertain us at the same time.”

  Mary wipes away her tears angrily. “What? Like Rodney’s stories about bowls of cocaine and big movie stars? Like Amber? Should I sing you a song?”

  I look at Amber. She’s sitting quietly in her chair next to me watching the exchange between Mary and Ted like it’s a tennis match.

  Saundra clucks her tongue in disapproval. “Mary, let’s not personalize.”

  “Just because I’m not a big movie star doesn’t mean I don’t have anything worth talking about.”

  Speaking of big movie stars . . . YJB is sitting across the room wearing dark distressed jeans and a cornflower-blue crewneck. His color is healthier than it was a couple of days ago, and his face is clean-shaven. Except for his shaking hands, he looks only a few minutes out of character. All that’s missing is a tux and a Walther PPK.

  He hasn’t spoken much in group yet, so I haven’t had any news to report to Bob since the singalong in the cafeteria. He loved that shit.

  “Ted, Mary, this kind of exchange is hardly helpful.”

  “It’s not fair. No one else gets mocked when they’re talking.”

  “I think we could all learn a lesson from this,” Saundra says, looking around the room. “Group is supposed to be a safe haven. A place where everyone can speak their mind and learn from one another’s experiences. There are enough people in your lives who’ll stand in the way of your recovery once you leave here. You should be listening to one another, helping one another, accepting one another. This is not a place for judgment. It’s a circle of truth. A circle of trust. Does everyone understand?”

  “Yes, Saundra,” we say as one.

  By the end of the day, the wind has picked up and swirled the fog away. When I get to the cafeteria at our retirement-home dinnertime, I can see the sun setting behind the mountains for the first time in days. The sky is streaked with orange and purple above the bright green trees. It’s breathtaking. Not that anyone here would notice.