The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  I sink back into my car, pull the door closed, and let out a sob. I hold my phone in my hand, my thumb ready to depress any button.

  And it all comes crashing down. It swells up and crashes down like a tsunami.

  What the fuck am I doing any of this for? What is the point of all of this?

  All day I’d been a little sad, could feel the weight of things slightly pressing down, and all day I’d been fighting it. It’s okay, Claire, I whispered in my head all day. It’s okay. You can do this. You’re already doing it. It’s working. You’re changing. You’re getting better.

  All day I told myself these things, held my head high, took calm, even breaths.

  But suddenly, sitting here in the car, phone in my hand, it all comes crashing down. This thing that I’m fighting every day, all the time.

  In this moment, twenty-eight years old on a cool Los Angeles night, my thumb is ready to press a button, the button that will connect me to that person, the person you call when something like this happens.

  Except I don’t have that person anymore. They’re all gone.

  I’m nobody’s most important person, and I don’t have a most important person. The tears are streaming down my cheeks now.

  This is it. This is the thing of it.

  The thing that leads me to those moments when every part of me is screaming.

  I’m nobody’s most important person.

  Ryan and I have been broken up for months now, and it wasn’t long after he moved out that I realized I’d lost a vital connection. I’d lost that unconditional attachment. The one person you call when something like this happens.

  I fight this all day. It’s okay, I tell myself. It’s okay to feel alone, to feel unattached. It’s okay to want to attach to someone. It’s okay to want to be loved. It doesn’t make me a bad person. It’s okay.

  Except, it’s not okay.

  I hate myself.

  In these moments I hate myself so much. I can’t think of one person I know who is no one’s special person. I can’t think of one friend of mine who isn’t a daughter or a sister or a wife or a girlfriend. I can’t think of one person who wouldn’t have that most important person to call if they got in a car accident, or if they found out that they had cancer or that they won the lottery.

  I feel like there’s something wrong with me because I’m no one’s special person.

  Like I’m damaged.

  Like I’m not worthy of being someone’s most important person.

  After a while my sobs subside and I call my friend Timbre. She arrives within fifteen minutes. A big hug. I don’t even have to tell her why I’m so upset. She knows. And she is wonderful, so loving. She handles the tow-truck guy, makes decisions, even gives me her husband’s car so I can make it to class to hand in a paper on time.

  Anything, sweetie, she says. Anything you need.

  I cry again on my way to school in her husband’s car, feeling so grateful.

  I know I’m going to get through this, that I won’t always be alone, that I will one day be someone’s most important person.

  I know that the work I’m doing right now will make me all the more important.

  ON MY WAY HOME from school in Timbre’s husband’s car I try to tamp down the emotions swelling in me.

  I don’t want to go home. I want to keep driving. Anywhere. Up the coast. Harder, harder, harder—I want to press the accelerator as hard as I can. I can imagine the dark, winding curves of the Pacific Coast Highway. Mountains crashing upward out of the earth on one side of me. The roiling, churning sea on the other. Moonlight glinting in the cresting waves.

  Instead I walk up the stairs to my apartment, pick up a package from Amazon that’s on the deck, turn the key, calmly open the door, greet the cats, prop my yoga bag up against the door, put my purse on a stool under the kitchen counter, and open a piece of mail.

  I walk into the kitchen then, clicking on the light as I enter. I look at a bottle of wine up on a shelf. I imagine removing the cork and just pouring the whole bottle down my throat, can picture the crimson stains, pretty and fading against my skin. Drinking, drinking, filling. I imagine biting down on the glass, consuming the whole bottle, literally eating, crunching, the glass.

  I haven’t had a drink in thirty-one days.

  I lean against the counter, both hands down, cool against the tile. I am screaming inside. I want to drink, to die, to run away.

  I can’t do this.

  I can’t make it through this.

  Breathe, breathe, breathe—yes you can.

  My eyes roam the apartment. I need to find something to do before I cave and open that wine bottle. In the bathroom I turn on the shower, run it hot, hotter. I peel off my clothes and step into the steaming, scalding, water.

  I’m fucked. I’m fucked. I’m fucked.

  I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.

  I turn the shower head off and the tub faucet on, and I let the water fill up and I crawl beneath it, twisting and turning as though the water is a blanket and I am trying to cover myself. I’m pushing hard against the walls of the tub, my arms taut and straight, and I am crying, except I’m not because there are no tears, only breathlessness and an inward wail.

  I wrap my arms around myself. I can do this. I can do this. It doesn’t matter if I’m fucked.

  I’m fucked. I’m fucked. I’m fucked.

  It doesn’t matter. I’m okay. I can do this.

  I’m fucked.

  I can do this.

  I’m fucked.

  Breathe.

  I can do this.

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

  And then I’m standing, and dripping, and lightheaded, and I’m pulling the towel soft and tight around my steaming body.

  I crawl into bed and fall asleep, with wet hair, listening to the gurgle of the drain.

  I WENT TO MY FIRST AA meeting on Christmas Eve. It was the first Christmas I’d ever spent alone, and that night I went to dinner with my Jewish friend Paul and his dad. We ate Oaxacan food and didn’t talk about it being Christmas Eve.

  After dinner Paul was going to drop me off so that he could make his regular AA meeting, but I shook my head and told him I’d go with him. He’d been asking me to go for months.

  You don’t have to do anything, he always said. You don’t even have to quit drinking. Just come. Sit in the back.

  Paul and I met last summer, in yoga class. He’s lean and gentle, with full-arm tattoos and big liquid brown eyes. I was right in the middle of my breakup with Ryan, and, even though we’d never spoken, Paul seemed like the kindest person in the room. I wasn’t necessarily attracted to him, but something about him pulled at me.

  We’d only spoken a few times, in the hallway, when I asked him if he wanted to go on a yoga retreat with me. The studio had been promoting the retreat for a few weeks and the idea seemed appealing, but I didn’t want to go alone.

  Paul looked at me for a moment before answering.

  Sure, he said finally.

  We exchanged numbers, and two weeks later we were in his car, driving north to Ojai to spend an entire weekend doing yoga. We got to know each other during the drive.

  I just broke up with my live-in boyfriend of three years, I said.

  Ohhh, Paul replied. You’re in it, huh?

  Yeah, I guess so.

  And you’re dragging me along for the ride? He laughed when he said this, a twinkle in his eye.

  Hey, you’re the one who agreed.

  We talked for the next two hours. It turned out I was right about him. Paul had been through his own hellish years, so much so, in fact, that there wasn’t much left in him but kindness.

  It was Paul’s kindness that saw me through much of those first months after Ryan moved out. We went to yoga classes together several times a week and sometimes out for dinner at a vegan place.

  But despite my friendship with Paul, and the rest of my friends, I was a mess. I’d never really been alone. My whole adult life up to t
his point had been spent in relationships. First with Colin, then with Ryan.

  I combated my loneliness by alternating excessive yoga with excessive drinking. Not a good combination, but my drinking had reached an all-time high even before I left Ryan, and I was at a loss for how to control it.

  After that first AA meeting I went home and drank half a bottle of wine. And then the next day, Christmas, I drank even more. The next week I bought a case of wine.

  But something about that one meeting had gotten under my skin. The meeting took place in an old house in Santa Monica and, just as Paul suggested, I sat in the very last row and simply listened.

  The stories were incredible. Some were far beyond my scope of addiction. But others were simple, like mine. The simple ones even seemed to have a formula. Something bad happened to someone and they started drinking. Just a little at first. They liked the way it dulled things, the way it loosened something inside. A few years would go by and suddenly they couldn’t remember the last time they went a day without a drink. A few more years and they had a list of things they regretted saying, things they regretted doing.

  My downward spiral was like that too.

  I still remember that first summer after my mom died, leaning my young body up against the bar. The unusual taste of a gin and tonic. The slow warmth that spread through me. The way it dulled the grief and eased the fear.

  At that first meeting one guy talked about his first thirty days, about what it felt like to reach that milestone.

  Thirty days, I thought. I could do thirty days.

  Right?

  QUITTING DRINKING HAS definitely made my life a little easier. I’m working full time at a community mental-health clinic and I’m also in grad school, getting a master’s degree in clinical psychology. I worked at 826LA for over a year, recruiting and training volunteers, falling in love with every kid who walked through the door, and making a whole slew of friends.

  Over the course of that year the feeling I had the very first day grew and grew until finally I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt sad or lonely. I only knew that it was before I started working with those kids, before I started giving myself over to something more important than myself. It was an easy decision to go back to school to be a counselor.

  My program requires that I be in therapy, and so a few months ago I began seeing a shrink. I like her. She’s older and British and sharp, and I like her office. I like the chairs and the light and the slanted ceiling. I see her on Friday mornings.

  The subject I spent the majority of our first few sessions talking about was my pending twenty-eighth birthday. I couldn’t believe I was going to turn twenty-eight. It had seemingly come out of nowhere, and not in some apathetic, MTV kind of way, but rather I was genuinely shocked that I was about to turn twenty-eight. It seemed impossible, and the more I thought about it, the less I could understand why this seemed so impossible or why it made me cry every time I thought about those numbers.

  Twenty-eight.

  We spent quite a few sessions talking about it, my throat closing up as I tried to describe the feeling associated with those numbers.

  It’s confusing, my therapist remarked, because usually people become anxious before turning thirty. What is it about twenty-eight?

  Finally I realized that twenty-eight marked ten years since my mother died.

  I realized that when I was eighteen, it wasn’t just my mother who died but a part of me as well. Something happened inside me. Something failed to continue. Some part of me just stopped. Stopped growing. Stopped imagining. Stopped becoming.

  It was like, without my mother, I couldn’t possibly go on. I couldn’t grow up, become a woman, do things that she would never know about, go places she’d never been, think things I couldn’t tell her.

  So even right now, there is a part of me that refuses to believe that I am the woman I have become. Except, every so often I catch a glimpse. I see it in a passing glance in the mirror, hear it in an accidental laugh, stifled and throaty, find it in a footstep, an echo in a hallway. Suddenly there are these two parts of me, then and now, staring back at each other, wondering where the other came from.

  I see myself this morning, my body twisted and warm beneath the sheets, the cat curled against my softly rising abdomen. The room is dark from the curtains and the alarm bleeps at 7:20. I watch myself roll over, one hand brushing the hair out of my face.

  I take a deep breath, push the covers back in one heavy go, and get out of bed.

  There I am, twenty-eight years old, walking into my living room, the warm Los Angeles sun already flooding the apartment. I’m opening the blinds, putting on music, making coffee in my little kitchen. It is Wednesday morning and I have to go to work.

  I am in the shower, my head tilted forward, the water as hot as it will go, and then I am getting dressed, opening drawers, pulling on a pencil skirt, slipping on high heels, making the bed.

  All the while there is a part of me that stands back aghast. How can she do these things? How can she just go about her life, putting on makeup, turning on her phone ringer, making lunch?

  Then I am walking out the door, walking down the stairs, and I’m opening the garage and getting in the car. I’m driving to work, listening to NPR, sipping coffee.

  Then I am parking in the garage and walking up the stairs into the clinic. I am unlocking the front door, heels clicking down the hallway, coffee in one hand, purse slung over my shoulder, binder pressed against my chest. Part of me wants to scream when I see this.

  Stop. Stop walking. Just stop.

  But I can’t. I can’t stop her.

  She’s unlocking the door to her office, flicking on the lights, the computer, sitting down, checking messages, hair pushed back over one shoulder, legs crossed under the desk.

  And there’s nothing I can do.

  It’s nine thirty and I’m joining my coworkers, my supervisor, for our weekly staff meeting. I’m still drinking coffee, eating a protein bar, balancing a clipboard on my knees, nodding in agreement about a client.

  Then it’s noon and I’m eating my boring turkey sandwich, responding to e-mail, listening to voice mail, chatting with a coworker, talking with my boss, printing a payroll adjustment form, reading about existential psychotherapy. Then it’s three and I’m getting in the car again, spinning up Sepulveda.

  I’m tired at this point. And I’m sad. I want more than anything to go home, to crawl between the sheets and close my eyes. I want to turn it all off: the phone, the computer, my awful screaming head.

  But I don’t.

  I park and pull my yoga bag from the backseat, and I see myself standing there at the corner of Westwood Boulevard in my high heels and pencil skirt, yoga bag over one shoulder, hair in my eyes. I’m twenty-eight years old.

  And then I’m off again, crossing Westwood, walking into the yoga studio, up the stairs, stopping to check in. “Claire Smith,” I say, pulling off one high heel then the other. In the changing room my bare feet feel good on the tile. There is another woman in there with me at first, and as she leaves, the door swishing shut behind her, I look up at myself in the mirror.

  And I see her.

  Suddenly I see her.