Cathryn looked across the cafeteria at the group and grinned. “You’re right. That is new,” she said, slid her plate over, and looked at me. “Back to you. Bottom line. Visiting time is one hour. I think you can handle sixty minutes. In the rec room. Surrounded by other people. It's not the time for Dr. Phil-style confrontations.”
I jabbed a grape tomato in my salad. Stabbing tiny tomatoes with a salad fork was not conducive to releasing significant feelings of hostility. “What are we supposed to talk about? And please don’t ask me, ‘What do you want to talk about?’”
She glanced out the window, probably wishing she was playing in the fountain. “It's awkward, I know. These first meetings always are. The time will pass faster than you think. Talk about your day, the food, or, in your case, the ice cream.” Cathryn laughed and slid her chair back from the table. “And trust that God's going to help you through this too.”
Enough with this God already. “Why, is He going to be there?”
“Well, He just might be.” Cathryn smiled and walked away.
Everybody but Theresa and me would be checked out for overnights. After the group left, she and I were like two people on a blind date and about as comfortable as if we’d dressed for prom and found ourselves at a football game. Cathryn didn’t even attempt to rescue either one of us. She’d blockaded herself behind the counter with charts, the telephone, and a stack of magazines.
“I know you’re not the playing games kinda girl. You wanna watch TV?” Theresa aimed the remote, ready to fire away at channels.
So, this was my life. Saturday night in rehab. With another woman. A woman who collected bracelets like I collect pens.
We’re both pathetic.
At least we have that in common.
Sunday morning. Two hours and counting.
One day at a time. Sometimes, one hour at a time.
Before that first AA meeting ended, Kevin told us, “This is a twenty-four hour program. Nobody's asking you to stay sober for the rest of your life. Just tell yourself, ‘I won’t take a drink today.’ It's one day, one hour, one minute at a time.” Then he had handed out what he called sobriety chips.
In the bus on the way back, I told Matthew when I first saw the box of chips, I thought Kevin might be tossing them out to the group. They looked like the doubloons that riders threw from parade floats during Mardi Gras.
“It was one of those rites of passage. Picking up a doubloon off the ground before somebody smashed your fingers trying to take it away. I’ve seen grown men lifted off their feet by puny grandma types.”
Matthew looked perplexed. “Any why would anyone want these things?”
“I guess it's like catching money. Only we all knew it wasn’t. But some people said they’d be valuable later. One year, I was standing on a ladder when one of the riders pitched a handful to the crowd. Hundreds of spinning gold coins, then the sound of all that aluminum hitting the street. Like rain on a tin roof. The crowd just folded in on itself, people slapping themselves on the ground to nab one. Watching from above, it was kind of silly and amazing at the same time.”
“That's one problem you won’t have when you get your sobriety chip at the end of a meeting. Alcoholics are actually more civilized than that.” Matthew paused. “Well, at least the recovering ones.”
One of the chips Kevin called the Desire Chip, for people who had the desire or who’d been sober for twenty-four hours. Theresa elbowed me, “Hey, Miss Thing, we can get us one of those.” The thought of walking across that room made me want a drink, which I was sure was not what I would need to be thinking on my way to getting a sobriety chip. Seemed exactly the definition of irony. Alanis Moiresette should’ve written a song about it. I looked at Theresa. “No, thanks. I’ll pass.” She tsk, tsk-ed me, and Miss Bracelet jangled her way to Kevin while I sat on the sofa scratching my hand.
I regretted my dumb hesitation. If I had walked myself to the front that night, I’d at least have something to talk about this afternoon: my own little show and tell for company. I could tell Molly it was my prize for being a model patient for the first week. Carl would snicker and probably say something about how it didn’t take much to make me happy. And he’d be so right, but for all the wrong reasons.
Theresa fell asleep in our room after lunch. I wandered into the hall looking for Jan. Pieces of sunlight jutted through the half-open blinds, a warm yellow pipeline for the dust particles floating lazily through before landing on whatever was in the room. Soft silence screamed and screeched in my brain, a tantrum of loneliness like the ones I used to drown with beer or gin or vodka or scotch.
Those first weeks after Alyssa died, earthquakes of silence shook the house. Rooms would have seizures, and I’d have to fling my arm on a wall to steady myself. Sometimes I collapsed on the floor, pushing the carpet with both hands to keep the ground from breaking.
We have to take her now, Mrs. Thornton. Please. We know how difficult this must be for you. It's time, Mrs. Thornton.
Time was all I had after they took her away from me that morning, carrying her out in her pink crocheted blanket. I refused to let them cover her face. Please don’t, I begged. Please, don’t. She’ll be afraid. She looked like one of the Madame Alexander dolls Carl's mother bought her. Translucent and tranquil. Softly angelic. And still. Tragically still.
“Leah?” Jan's hand rested on my shoulder. She handed me a tissue. “Runny mascara.”
“Thanks,” I whispered.
“Your visitors are downstairs,” she said.
20
I took advantage of Theresa's nap to snag some mirror time. Maybe that face I thought I’d seen all those years ago would finally appear.
When I was little, I’d play a game where I’d look in the mirror, but the face I’d see there wouldn’t be mine. A wicked witch, insanely jealous of my be-yu-tee-full face, had put a spell on all the mirrors in the world. The only face I’d ever be able to see was oh so plain. A brown-eyed, nothing remarkable face.
I dusted powder on my face with the same vengeance I dusted the furniture. I hoped I could mash down the new roundness of my cheeks. Carl would notice the change. Nah. Other parts of my body were much rounder and much more obvious. I was sure he’d notice those first. He always noticed those first. Even when I was full-bellied pregnant with Alyssa, I’d scoop vanilla ice cream over my equally pregnant slice of apple pie, and he’d say, “Do you really think you need that? You know, you’re just making it harder on yourself to lose the weight later.” Of course, he’d never say I was fat. He didn’t have to.
Theresa was snoring when I left our room. At least she’d be doing something constructive during visiting time. At lunch Theresa told me she wouldn’t be seeing her kids or her husband today. “My old man, he's working, so the kids don’t have no way to get here.” She shrugged, tugged on her bra underneath her striped tank top, and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her shorts’ pocket. “Going to find a light. See ya upstairs.” By the time I saw her again, she was already asleep.
I slipped out and closed the door behind me in slow motion to avoid suffering whatever the consequence would be for waking Theresa. Could they be worse than the one I’m about to deal with? I should have worn something else. The denim skirt. Or the khaki pants. I should have looked more L.L. Beanish. The black shorts still didn’t camouflage the food that had made regular deposits on my thighs. The yellow Polo shirt. What was I thinking? Great. I’m going to look like a midget bumblebee.
But there was no turning back. I was Odysseus stuck between two equally disturbing forces. Stuck between the rock of Theresa and the hard place of the elevator doors that just opened.
Carl and Molly arrived at the same time.
Maybe that God of Cathryn's was on special assignment this weekend.
The visit wasn’t so bad in the way that shots aren’t so bad. Once the swift, intense burning jab was over, the dull pain throbs only when you touch the bumpy spot where the needle punctured your skin.
&nb
sp; Carl and I hugged as if someone had wrapped each one of us in cardboard from head to toe. He’d barely stepped back when Molly's long, tanned arms, almost as thin as the tennis racket she swings, wrapped around me. I didn’t care that her silver butterfly pin smashed into my doughy right cheek. I didn’t care that her left foot pressed itself on top of mine. I only cared that she was there.
If Molly was not my best friend, she’d be one of those women I’d wish would drag toilet tissue on her stilettos when she left a bathroom. When she walked into a room, even women noticed her. I used to joke that I was her friend so she’d never be accused of profiling or political incorrectness. I knew, though, what attracted people to Molly was not what they’d seen on her, but what they’d seen in her.
“You look great,” she said after we disengaged. “Carl, don’t you think so?” It sounded less like a question and more like a direct order.
I looked at Carl. He hesitated.
My cue. “Molly, you’d compliment me if I walked in here straight from a mud bath without rinsing off.”
I led them to one of the sofas. “Not exactly Southern Living.” I could see Carl and Molly scanning the room, but trying to look as if they weren’t. “The idea was not to make the place too comfy or else we wouldn’t want to leave,” I said, relieving them of having to lie about the décor.
“Well,” said Molly, reaching for my hand and pulling me next to her as she sat on the sofa. “You’re not exactly here for the furniture. When you leave, we’ll write letters to those Extreme Makeover people. That’d be a hoot.” She grinned.
She was one of the only people I knew who could use the word hoot and not sound like she just arrived here in a time machine.
Before he sat, Carl brushed off the chair seat. He didn’t exactly settle into the chair. He seemed to hover, holding onto the chair arms as if a flight attendant would come along and announce takeoff at any moment. His movements were wooden, but maybe it was the heavy starch in his white and navy plaid button-down collared shirt and solid navy chinos. So, he does know how to pick up clothes from the cleaners.
Carl sat across from me, looking, as my father would have said, “like a lost ball in high weeds.” He stared at his barely scuffed brown deck shoes, then glanced at Annie's stack of outdated People magazines. He leaned back and entertained himself by removing ant-sized lint from his pants. Totally out of his element. A vulnerability had tiptoed out of his soul when he wasn’t looking. It leaped the void between us, tripping the emotional siren I’d installed years ago. No, go back. I can’t trust you yet, but I want to. I really want to.
Before the silence drowned us all, Molly threw out a lifeline. “Carl, tell Leah about your conversation with her dad.” Had the words not been dressed in her party clothes voice, I would have panicked.
He cleared his throat, the noise like a closed mouth cough, and looked, not so much at me, but in the vicinity of my head. “Your dad called. He wanted to visit, so he's flying in on Wednesday. I’m not sure how long he’ll stay in town.”
I straightened and pulled threads from the sofa's cording with my fingernails. My inner child (Cathryn joked with me yesterday that I held mine hostage) bounced on both feet and clapped her hands deliriously, using my stomach as a trampoline. It's going to be okay. It's all going to be okay.
Carl grinned. Had I spoken that out loud? I shivered because what I saw in Carl's eyes was an approaching reprimand for that excited little girl who’d just made her appearance.
“Oh, I almost forgot. He's coming for family group,” he said. He sat back and looked at me.
The clapping stopped. So, this was the new game. Words were the weapons. Information used as stealth destruction.
I scratched the top of my hand. Carl wanted this news to hurt me. Why? Because I had hurt him. This was still about him.
Journal 8
I was the blind date Carl met for dinner. Generally, Carl refused offers of blind dates. A year later he told me that he thought if a woman needed a blind date, then maybe her date needed to be blind. Besides, it wasn’t as if he needed dates. But Nick and his wife, Brea, wouldn’t stop nudging him about meeting one of Brea's teacher friends.
The first few times they asked, he always found a reason to refuse. Dates arranged by married couples were much more suspect than those arranged by single friends. He was suspicious of the hidden agenda—like the date interviewing for a spouse in the house. Brea reassured him I wasn’t searching for happily ever after. So, Carl relented and made dinner reservations at Marsala's. Italian food would compensate for any dating disaster.
If I didn’t have to see Brea every school day for the next four months, I would have refused this setup. And if she and Nick hadn’t already spotted me at the entrance and waved me over to the table, I would have bolted out the leaded glass doors I had just walked through.
“I’m not ready,” I had told Brea when she first suggested this date.
“This is a training wheels date. Nobody expects you to take off on your own yet,” she said.
Fifteen minutes past reservation time. No Carl. Thirty minutes. No Carl. Nick had Carl's cell phone number on speed dial and left dozens of messages on voice mail. A bottle of wine and almost an hour later, Carl arrived.
Brea pointed him out to me. He stood at the bar, shaking hands with the badly toupeed man who had seated them. Carl's relaxed
confidence annoyed and intrigued me as he smiled in our direction and maintained an unhurried conversation with the wildly gesturing gentleman. The Gundlach Bundschu merlot had long since soothed the tenseness that accompanied me to the restaurant. Carl and the man I’d come to know as Emil, the owner, ended their talk. Carl walked to their table—a man with the easy stride of someone comfortable in his own body.
“Leah,” he said my name as if we’d been childhood friends. “I hope you’ll give me a second chance at a first impression.” His grin poured itself out and warmed my bare shoulders.
His ash grey sweater seemed dyed to match his eyes. He sat and looked only at me, as if Nick and Brea had disappeared.
“I would have been here on time but I was in the ER with my mother,” Carl said. He turned to the waiter at his elbow and ordered a dry martini and another bottle of merlot.
Carl held up his hands to quiet the obligatory stirrings of the sympathy choir.
“She fell getting off the sailboat at the Yacht Club. She needs to be careful.” He paused and thanked the waiter for the bottle of wine and the drink he’d just delivered. “I don’t think we can get a handicapped boat slip.” He smiled to let us know laughter would be an appropriate response.
Carl reached for the wine and said to me, “May I refill your glass?”
A sense of humor. Polite. And he cares about his mother. Perhaps he's worth a second chance.
21
The elevator doors closed.
Finally.
Carl and Molly had been transported to the universe beyond the locked doors, beyond the winding entrance, to the life I had plucked myself from, but from which my disappearance seemed only a speed bump. I’d expected more drama. Carl didn’t look like a gaunt victim of emotional terrorism, pleading for my return. Molly's carbonated enthusiasm fizzed as though her energy compensated for Carl's indifference.
After Carl zapped me with the news of my dad arriving for family group night, Molly looked back and forth at us, like a Wimbledon spectator. She watched guilt and anger and disappointment volley between us.
I exited the elevator, clutching the gifts Molly had produced from the bowels of her purse to distract Carl and me from each other.
“Whatcha got there, girlie?” Theresa yawned her way into the rec room. Her zebra-striped slippers were on the wrong feet, but they navigated her to the sofa.
“Unfortunately, not candy.” I handed her the two boxes. I paced.
“A book with nuthin’ in it? What's up with that?” She opened the leather journal, lifted it to her face, and breathed in. “This smells rich.” She
closed it and gently massaged the embossed paisley designs on the cover with her pulpy little fingers. “Soft. What's in this other box?”
She handed me the journal.
“Your friend gave you a Bible?” Theresa eyed it like she was exercising some telekinetic power. She looked at me, the unspoken “Why?” captured in her eyes.
“Molly thinks the Bible's the only self-help book anyone ever needs. She and Jesus have some kind of hotline going on.” I kicked off my white Crocs. Why do comfort and style have to be incompatible? My toenails and cracking heels screamed for a pedicure.
“It's kinda heavy.” Theresa bench pressed it with one arm. “And you sure are stuck with it.”
“Hmmm?” I’d been distracted flipping through the blank pages of the journal, wondering what pen I’d use to write in it.
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