Starting Over (Treading Water Trilogy)

by Force, Marie

  Sondra reached out to take his hand. “Hi, Brandon.”

  Chapter 4, Day 10

  Brandon lay in his narrow bed, listening to the birds chirping outside his window. After ten nearly sleepless nights, he knew the chirping began about an hour before sunrise. Turning on his side, he watched his small piece of sky turn pink. On the bedside table, the letters from his parents waited for him to work up the nerve to read them after the emotional firestorm created by the others. His parents were coming to visit today, and he figured he should read their letters before they arrived.

  He flipped on the bedside light and sat up. In the four days since his family’s words led him to acknowledge his alcoholism, Brandon had wept more than in the previous thirty-eight years combined. He hadn’t yet shared anything with the group, but their stories had taken on new meaning. One touching, heartbreaking tale followed another as they confessed their utter failure to control their addictions. They’d made him into one of the pathetic bawlers he’d once scorned. He felt raw and unprotected from what he expected to find in his parents’ letters.

  Sure enough, his eyes burned at the sight of his mother’s familiar handwriting. “Hello, my love. I’m sure you’ve gotten an earful from everyone else, and you’re no doubt expecting one from me, too. I’m going to disappoint you there. All I’m going to say is I love you, I hurt for you, and I miss the Brandon I used to know. I want him back. No matter what you do or don’t do, though, I’ll love you until I draw my last breath on this earth. Mum.”

  Brandon brushed a hand across a cheek wet with tears. His fierce, uncompromising mother had given him exactly what he needed, despite the terrible thing he’d done to Aidan’s girlfriend. Knowing he’d caused his mother such heartache hurt him more than almost anything ever had.

  After he absorbed her simple message, he forced himself to read his father’s letter.

  “Son, I want you to know I blame myself. I set a terrible example for you, your brothers, and your sister. You saw me drinking every day of your lives growing up. A few beers after a long day of work, it was just what I did. I showed you how to be this person you’ve grown up to be, and I’m sorry. I feel like I have failed you.

  “You’re a good man, Brandon, a strong man, and until these last couple of years, I always knew I could count on you. When you finished college, you came home with your degree, just like you promised me you would. You knew I was counting on you to bring your education into the business, and you didn’t let me down. That I could’ve let you down haunts me.

  “The proudest thing in my life is having you and your brothers working by my side in the business I built from nothing. We’ve made a hell of a go of it, haven’t we, son? The business means nothing to me, though, when stacked up against your mum and you kids. You’re the world to me, all of you, and the only thing I’ve ever really cared about was keeping my family safe and happy. They say there are times that try a man’s soul. Watching your brother lose his wife and son was one of those times. Watching you struggle with this beast I introduced you to is definitely another.

  “You’re my son, and I love you. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to help you. We’re going to beat this thing, Brand. We’re going to get through this like we’ve gotten through everything else. Together. Love, Da.”

  Brandon rolled his face into his pillow and wept. His poor, sweet father blamed himself. The tsunami of pain paralyzed him, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, available to dull it.

  Brandon showered and shaved in preparation for his parents’ visit. In the mirror, he saw a face he barely recognized. Bags under his eyes and a sallow skin tone made him look ten years older than his thirty-eight years. The facility physician reported that Brandon’s liver was functioning at only 80 percent, and his blood pressure was elevated to the point of concern. The doctor had assured him that both conditions would right themselves if he stayed sober. The athlete in Brandon was disgusted by what he’d let happen to his once finely tuned body. He could tell from his baggy jeans that he’d already lost about ten pounds since he entered treatment, and he’d sent word to his mother to bring running clothes from his house so he could start working out again.

  The intercom buzzed, and he pulled on his shirt as he went to answer it. “Yes?”

  “Brandon, your parents are here.”

  “Thanks, I’ll be right down.” He buttoned his shirt and checked his appearance in the mirror one last time. “Well, here goes,” he said to his reflection. Someday he hoped he would recognize that face again.

  Brandon went down the two flights of stairs to the small lounge off the lobby. Another of the inmates—as they jokingly referred to themselves—visited with his family in the far corner of the room.

  Colleen and Dennis stood when they saw him coming, and his mother held out her arms to him.

  Brandon battled a huge lump in his throat as his mother clung to him. When he finally pulled back from her, she reached up to caress his face.

  “How are you, love? You’ve lost some weight.”

  “I’m okay.” Brandon reached for his father. “You look good, Da. Are you feeling all right?”

  “Much better,” Dennis said as he hugged his son. “The doctor says I’ll live forever.”

  “That’s a relief.” Brandon gestured for them to have a seat on the small sofa and took a chair across from them. “Thanks for bringing my running stuff, Mum. How is everyone?”

  “Good.” The crossing and uncrossing of her fingers told Brandon she was nervous. “They’re anxious to hear how you’re doing.”

  “I feel bad you’re all so worried about me. Not that I haven’t given you good reason to be.”

  Colleen reached for his hand. “You’ve been sick, and you’re getting better. That’s all that matters.”

  “I’m trying to get better. They’ve helped me see that, well…”

  “What, love?” Colleen asked.

  “I’m an alcoholic, Mum. I can’t drink the way other people do, because I can’t stop myself once I get going. I’m so ashamed of everything I’ve done,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  Colleen’s blinked back tears as she reached for him again. “It’s all in the past now. Let’s concentrate on getting you better and out of here, okay?”

  Brandon pulled back with great reluctance. He would love nothing more than to let his mother try to make it all go away. “It’s not that simple, Mum. I’ve done things that have hurt people. Bad things. I can’t just pretend none of it happened. A big part of my recovery will be making amends to them, even to you.”

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself, son,” Dennis said gruffly. “Everyone’s pulling for you.”

  “The people here talk about the rest of our lives being a journey. I’m just at the very beginning.”

  “Then that’s where we are, too,” Dennis said. “We’re right there with you, Brand, every step of the way.”

  “Thanks, Da.” Brandon appreciated their support but knew he couldn’t rely on it the way he had in the past. He had to do this on his own.

  “Are they treating you all right in here?” Colleen asked, looking around suspiciously. “Is the food okay?”

  “It’s fine. No complaints. Listen, um, have you talked to Aidan?”

  “He called the other night to say they were back in Vermont,” Colleen said. “I guess they went to Clare’s house in Rhode Island for a couple of days after they left Chatham.”

  “Did he say anything? About her? About what happened?”

  “No, love,” Colleen said. “He didn’t mention it.”

  Brandon shook his head. “I just can’t believe what I did to her. He’ll never forgive me.”

  “He will,” Colleen said. “Give it some time.”

  “Do you think it’s the real deal with them?” Brandon asked.

  “I do,” Colleen said with a smile. “I really do. It’s high time your brother had some happiness, don’t you think?”

  Brandon hated the flash of anger tha
t question sent through him, but he hid it from his parents the way he had for most of his life. “Of course.” He checked his watch. “I hate to say it, but I have to go to my group session at three.”

  Colleen and Dennis stood up to hug him. Colleen’s eyes were bright with tears when she pulled back. She reached up to cradle his face. “We love you, Brandon.”

  Brandon felt the burn of tears in his own eyes. “I love you, too, both of you. I appreciate you guys standing by me even though I don’t deserve it.”

  “You’re stuck with us,” Dennis said, putting an arm around his wife to guide her from the room.

  Brandon saw them out the main door and then went back to work.

  “Let’s talk about your brother Aidan,” Sondra said a week after Brandon first acknowledged his alcoholism to her. He’d been unable thus far to speak to the group but knew his day was coming. No one escaped.

  Brandon groaned. “Do we have to?”

  “What’s the objection?”

  He kept his expression neutral. Oh, I have objections, all right. “No objection. What do you want to know?”

  “He’s older than you?”

  “Just over a year.”

  “His letter said you were close growing up but not so much anymore.”

  “He lives in Vermont. I live in Chatham. We don’t see each other very often.”

  “How long has he lived in Vermont?”

  Brandon had to think about that. “About ten years or so. He moved up there after his wife died.”

  “What happened to his wife?”

  Brandon took a deep breath and reminded himself to be careful. “Sarah had breast cancer,” he said softly. “She died when she was twenty-nine, two days after their son was stillborn.”

  “That must’ve been a terrible time for your whole family.”

  “I guess so.” When he noticed her raised eyebrow, he added, “It was.”

  “Did you like her?”

  “Sure. I’d known her since I was eleven. Her family came out to Chatham from Boston every summer. It was really hard on Aidan when she died, especially because she put off treatment to save the baby. Then he died, too.”

  “This gives Aidan’s letter new meaning.”

  “Yeah, he’s seriously pissed with me. He was alone for years until he finally met this new woman, and after what I did to her, he’s probably all set with me. Whatever. As long as Aidan’s happy, everyone else is, too.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “No reason in particular. It’s just true.”

  “Did your parents treat him differently than they treated you?”

  “No. Not really.”

  She sighed. “Brandon, I can’t help you if you don’t level with me. Your whole demeanor changes when you talk about Aidan. Do you realize that? Are you angry with him for some reason?”

  “He’s angry with me, remember?”

  She stood up. “When you’re ready to talk about this, you know where to find me.”

  “You’re kicking me out?” Brandon asked, incredulous. She’d been a relentless pain in the ass, getting him to talk about stuff he never talked about. And now she was kicking him out?

  “We’re getting nowhere,” she said with a wave of her hand. “So we’ll try again another day.” She sat down at her desk and busied herself with some paperwork.

  Brandon was stunned by her dismissal. After a long period of quiet, he finally said, “Yes.”

  She didn’t look up from what she was doing. “Yes, what?”

  Brandon gritted his teeth. “I’m angry with him.”

  “Why?”

  “He got to leave.”

  Sondra put down her pen and glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

  “All our lives it was made clear to us that our father expected us to join him in the family business. He wanted us to go to college, but we had to come home after. Sarah’s father was a big doctor in Boston. He convinced Aidan to give medical school a try, and like everything else Aidan did, he was hugely successful at it. He was well on his way to becoming a cardiologist like his father-in-law.”

  Sondra came around her desk and returned to her usual chair. “What happened?”

  “After Sarah and the baby died, he couldn’t stand to be in a hospital anymore, so he quit his residency. He has a restoration and construction business in Vermont now.”

  “So why are you angry with him?”

  “Because!” Brandon exploded. “He got to do what he wanted to do! He was almost a doctor when he quit. He had everything he wanted, and he quit! And then he didn’t even come back home to work with us. He went somewhere else. It must be nice to be him.” Brandon slumped in his chair, exhausted by the outburst.

  “What did you want to do, Brandon?”

  Brandon’s heart began to race, adrenaline cruising through him. These were big confessions. “I wanted to be a Navy SEAL,” he said for the first time. Ever. No one else in the world knew that.

  Sondra waited for him to go on.

  “I was a great swimmer. It was the one thing I was better at than anyone else. When I was a junior in high school, my coach, Mr. Coughlin, told me there was a Navy recruiter coming. He told me about the SEALs, but I didn’t even know what it was. I went to the library and looked it up. And then I was hooked. It was all I thought about.”

  “What did you do about it?”

  “Nothing. When Aidan went to Yale as a pre-med major, I realized he’d been given the one and only pass. He wouldn’t be coming back to the business. There was no pass left for me.”

  “You couldn’t have known that for sure.”

  “I knew it. The only reason my father let Aidan go was because he had three other sons coming up behind him. The ‘Sons’ portion of O’Malley & Sons Construction was going to be me, Colin, and Declan.”

  “Brandon, you had two other brothers. Why didn’t you ever say anything to your father? Why didn’t you tell him what you wanted?”

  “Because,” he said softly, “as proud as my father was to have a son who was a doctor, I could always see a hint of disappointment that his son had chosen to follow in his father-in-law’s footsteps rather than his own father’s. I didn’t want to let him down, too.”

  “So you let yourself down. How long ago was all of this?”

  “Oh, jeez, I don’t know. If Aidan’s almost forty, he went to college twenty-two years ago, I guess.”

  “Twenty-two years. That’s an awful long time to carry around that kind of anger.” She paused, tapping her pen on her chin. “I’m curious, though.”

  “About what?”

  “Why was your anger directed at Aidan rather than your father? He’s the one who had all these supposed expectations for you, not Aidan.”

  “Aidan always got whatever he wanted.” Brandon knew he sounded like a petulant child, but he didn’t care.

  “What else did he get? Besides this?”

  Brandon shook his head. He couldn’t say it.

  “Before our next session, I want you to read about resentment in the Big Book,” she said, referring to the Alcoholics Anonymous program bible. “More than almost anything else, resentment is the enemy of the alcoholic.” She picked up her dog-eared copy of the book and flipped it open to a marked page. “With the alcoholic, whose hope is the maintenance and growth of a spiritual experience, this business of resentment is infinitely grave,” she read. “We found that it is fatal. For when harboring such feelings we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit. The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again. And with us, to drink is to die.” She put down the book. “Chapter Five.”

  Brandon got up, moved to the door, and stood there for a moment with his forehead resting against the cool, dark wood. He was tired—so tired of holding on to the secrets and the pain that he dragged around with him like a cement block attached to his ankle. “Sarah,” Brandon said softly. “He got Sarah.” With that, he opened the door and walked out.

  Chapter 5, Day 18

/>   Once his heart and lungs stopped protesting Brandon settled into an easy—albeit rusty—stride along the well-traveled path. “I was glad to hear you’re a runner,” he said between breaths. “But I’m slowing you down.”

  “You’ll probably leave me in your dust when you get back in shape,” Alan replied, adjusting his stride to match Brandon’s.

  “I had to get your number from the office,” Brandon confessed. “I threw your card away.”

  “That’s all right. All we can do is offer help. It’s far more important that you ask for it.”